“In the light of our culture, these are not unreasonable questions and tactics, but if once again, we try to see the lens through which we look.”

I have a great advantage over many of my colleagues inasmuch as my students bring with them to class their own personal knowledge of national, regional, religious, ethnic, occupational, and family folklore traditions.

If a student takes the whole series of my folklore courses including the graduate seminars.

In my introductory course, Anthropology 160, the Forms of Folklore,

he or she should learn something about fieldwork, something about bibliography, something about how to carry out library research, and something about how to publish that research.

Future orientation is combined with a notion and expectation of progress, and nothing is impossible.

Polls are frequently taken to try to tease out or determine likely directions and trends, but once taken, they belong to the past, requiring that new polls be taken.

We can see that there is far too great an emphasis placed on the future.

Life, it seems, is nothing if not a series of initiations, transitions, and incorporations.

Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.

My academic identity is that of a folklorist, and for many years I have taught only folklore courses.

I mentioned that one of the tripartite formulas in American worldview involves time: past, present, and future.

Americans have a penchant for the future and tend to disregard the past.

Ancestor worship, or filial piety so characteristic of Asian cultures, for example, does not really resonate with Americans who favor children, not grandparents.

I try to show the students what the major and minor genres of folklore are, and how they can be analyzed.

Cities all over the world are getting bigger as more and more people move from rural to urban sites, but that has created enormous problems with respect to environmental pollution and the general quality of life.

Americans often have trouble enjoying the present moment.

It is impossible to remain indifferent to Japanese culture. It is a different civilisation where all you have learnt must be forgotten.

Now with internet culture it seems like everyone is doing music parodies. And they’re not all good!

Haiti or Canada, there must be one set of rules for everybody. We cannot welcome those to come and then try and act as though any culture will not be respected or treated inferior.

I think that nerds, if you want to call them that, have only gotten more hip and assimilated into the culture.

I have not been part of an active counterculture movement, as it is not the approach that I have personally pursued to create a qualitatively beneficial and meaningful impact on society.

The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.

Ultimately we must concern ourselves with pulling out by its roots the decadence that controls our culture, the profit motive that controls our culture.

We even used to rake the hippies over the coals. They were protesting the Vietnam War, but we took aspects of their culture and had fun with it.