"The Holocaust is so big, the scale of it is so gigantic, so enormous, that it becomes easy to think of it as something mechanical. Anonymous. But everything that happened, happened because someone made a decision. To pull a trigger, to flip a switch, to close a cattle car door, to hide, to betray."

-- "The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million", The New York Times Book Review

Killing Fields of Choeung Ek, Cambodia, 2005

 

"No social study that does not come back to the problems of biography, of history and of their intersections within a society has completed its intellectual journey. Whatever the specific problems of the classic social analysts, however limited or however broad the features of social reality they have examined, those who have been imaginatively aware of the promise of their work have consistently asked three sorts of questions:

"1) What is the structure of this particular society as a whole? What are its essential components, and how are they related to one another? How does it differ from other varieties of social order? Within it, what is the meaning of any particular feature for its continuance and for its change?

"2) Where does this society stand in human history? What are the mechanics by which it is changing? What is its place within and its meaning for the development of humanity as a whole? How does any particular feature we are examining affect, and how is it affected by, the historical period in which it moves? And this period -- what are its essential features? How does it differ from other periods? What are its characteristics ways of history-making?

"3) What varieties of men and women now prevail in this society and in this period? And what varieties are coming to prevail? In what ways are they selected and formed, liberated and repressed, made sensitive and blunted? What kinds of 'human nature' are revealed in the conduct and character we observe in this society in this period? And what is the meaning for 'human nature' of each and every feature of the society we are examining?"

-- C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination

Hangzhou, China, 2004

 

"Even when people act on the basis of their own 'authentic' experience, when they are being 'themselves', their actions can be observed to be culturally patterned."

-- Jacobus Baerveldt, "The Paradox of Cultural Psychology"

"The critical ontology of ourselves has to be considered not, certainly, as a theory, a doctrine, nor even as a permanent body of knowledge that is accumulating; it has to be conceived as an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them...

"I do not know whether it must be said today that the critical task still entails faith in Enlightenment; I continue to think that this task requires work on our limits, that is, a patient labor giving form to our impatience for liberty."

-- Michel Foucault, "What is Enlightenment?"

"Every established order tends to produce (to different degrees and with very different means) the naturalization of its own arbitrariness."

-- Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice

Luang Prabang, Laos, 2005

 

Hong Kong, 2005

 

"Anthropologists have been the first to insist on a number of things: that the world does not divide into the pious and the superstitious; that there are sculptures in jungles and paintings in deserts; that political order is possible without centralized power and principled justice without codified rules; that the norms of reason were not fixed in Greece, the evolution of morality not consummated in England. Most important, we were the first to insist that we see the lives of others through lenses of our own grinding and that they look back on ours through ones of their own."

-- Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Culture

"Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful. Hence one must choose a master, God being out of style."

-- Albert Camus, The Fall

Laos, 2005