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

They do not merely collect texts; they must also gather data about the context and the informant and, above all, write an analysis of the items based upon the course readings and lecture material on folklore theory and method.

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

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

Americans often have trouble enjoying the present moment.

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

There is more to folklore research than fieldwork. This is why in all of my other upper-division courses I require a term paper involving original research.

Americans do believe in progress and there is almost certainly a kernel of truth in the joke.

In my introductory course, Anthropology 160, the Forms of Folklore, I try to show the students what the major and minor genres of folklore are, and how they can be analyzed.

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

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

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

The class has become over the years fairly large, running to three hundred or more, but I always insist upon reading all the student folklore collections myself. Although this is a tall order, I look forward to it because I learn so much from it.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Their term project consists of a fieldwork collection of folklore that they create by interviewing family members, friends, or anyone they can manage to persuade to serve as an informant.

I believe that in a great city, or even in a small city or a village, a great theater is the outward and visible sign of an inward and probable culture.

We should have a State in which we could live and breathe as free men and which we could develop according to our own lights and culture and where principles of Islamic social justice could find free play.

I don't have space to enter into the examples or the history of this, so I'm left with having to make the bold statement that culture is extinct.

We need to have a culture that says 'the less energy you can use to be comfortable, the better off you are and the better you should feel about yourself'.

Concerning culture as a process, one would say that it means learning a great many things and then forgetting them; and the forgetting is as necessary as the learning.

No doubt Western civilization has in the past been full of wars and revolutions, and the national elements in our culture, even when they were ignored, always provided an unconscious driving force of passion and aggressive self-assertion.

The things that I draw on, and the world that I feel part of, aren't particularly youth culture.

I recommend the same therapies for all humans with HIV. There is no reason to believe that physiologic responses to therapy will vary across lines of class, culture, race or nationality.

Towns are suffering from all these things, we should unite until we are all satisfied, man cannot be killing each other as if we were animals, as if we had no culture; that is a lack of culture.

You're a Catholic in Italy when you're born, it's unthinkable to stop being Catholic. You just take the rules a lot more seriously, because it pervades your culture.

Sex and drugs were simply not discussed in our culture at that time.

You have to open your mind. I like the ability to express myself in a deep way. It's the closest music to our humanity - it's like a folk music that rises up out of a culture.

Lives have been altered in fundamental ways, and later, after they acquire a more complete understanding of what goals are actually attainable, many are left facing a lot of pain and frustration. And yet, there's no culture of complaint.

I've always been interested in the relationship between total external surround, culture, the political matrix, technology, etc., and the internal human consciousness.

Writing is about culture and should be about everything. That's what makes it what it is.

And there are so many people in the third world suffering so horribly right now, and we are so focused on ourselves and our culture that a lot of things are showing up in our culture that are making it impossible for us to focus on others. We're so self-focused.

One very important aspect of our contemporary musical culture - some might say the supremely important aspect - is its extension in the historical and geographical senses to a degree unknown in the past.

Mr. Speaker, genocide is the most potent of all crimes against humanity because it is an effort to systematically wipe out a people and a culture as well as individual lives.

When I go to Japan and do shows I play for 1,000 to 1,500 people. I like a lot about Japan. Their popular culture and mass commercialization appeals to me.

The question was heatedly debated of how much Western culture should be brought into China.

The whole drive of western culture, the part of it which is serious, is towards an extreme objectification. It's carried to the point where the human subject is treated almost as if it's dirt in the works of a watch.

I've never understood why artists, who so often condescend to the cliches of their own culture, are so eager to embrace the cliches of cultures they know nothing about.

There's one more thing I want to say. It's a touchy subject. Black beauty. Black sensuality. We live in a culture where the beauty of black people isn't always as celebrated as other types. I'd like to help change that if I can!

Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.

Soft addictions are an alluring, seductive aspect of our culture - they are easy to attain and socially acceptable, they are even encouraged in many cases. Yet they are lethal to the spirit.

This is the culture you're raising your kids in. Don't be surprised if it blows up in your face.

There is something terribly wrong with a culture inebriated by noise and gregariousness.

We're so afraid of death in our culture, but I think if we understand it better, then we'll appreciate the life we have more.

Culture is not made up but something that evolves which is human.