Tim Ferriss Quotes

The way to do fieldwork is never to come up for air until it is all over.

I've often been accused of making anthropology into literature, but anthropology is also field research. Writing is central to it.

Most anthropologists are doing straightforward ethnography, and should.

The job of an anthropologist is to make the familiar strange and to make the strange familiar,

I love to see what real human behavior looks like. I've always envisioned my job as just observing and noting that and, for the purposes of my work, just cutting out the boring parts.

most people prefer to carry out the kinds of experiments that allow the scientist to feel that he is in full control of the situation rather than surrendering himself to the situation, as one must in studying human beings as they actually live.

The initial research will be very indiscriminate. I do a lot of reading, buy a stack of books and read and digest them, and then I start doing phone interviews and archival research and then the travelling.

I have certainly amassed many historical research gathering skills.

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.

The rest of my work, besides sketching and keeping a diary, which was the most troublesome of all, consisted in making geological and zoological collections.

No longer do companies study consumers' psyches only by asking people what they think about technology and how they use it. Now they conduct observational research, dispatching anthropologists to employ their ethnographic skills by interviewing, watching and videotaping consumers in their natural habitats.

The point of literary criticism in anthropology is not to replace research, but to find out how it is that we are persuasive.

There are so many ways to do research - even watching old Ealing comedies, watching people getting on and off buses in London, looking at household interiors.

Anthropology demands the open-mindedness with which one must look and listen, record in astonishment and wonder that which one would not have been able to guess.

I go to bars and restaurants, and I sit and I eavesdrop on people and I watch people in shopping centers and, you know, I read the newspapers and I talk to the Trenton cops, and I just get a lot of information that comes in that somehow turns into a book.

I grew up certain for a while that I was going to be an anthropologist, until film turned my head.

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.

It's always amusing to look at how something early in the 20th century was written in anthropology and how it's written now. There's been an enormous shift in how it's done, but yet you can't put your finger on someone who actually did it.

I come from a specific tradition of sociology, which is urban ethnography.

It always cracks me up when program directors or music directors or companies will say, 'Well, we did research, and we interviewed 25 people in our focus group, and this is what they said.' And I'm like, 'I've talked to 25 people in two hours! I talk to 50, 60, 70 people a night! Five or six days a week!'

If you're a social scientist worth your salt, you never do a univariate analysis.

Anthropological fieldwork is so much like writing a novel. You don't know what the hell is going on.

The best research you can do is to talk to people.

The research is the most interesting part… That’s how I work. I go some place and I walk it and I talk to people until I find what I’ve come for. Or not. Fortunately, I tend to find what I’m after.

Ritual is to the internal sciences what experiment is to the external sciences.