Science & Tech Quote by Nancy Banks Smith

Anthropology gets sold as a grand solvent: travel far enough, study hard enough, and the human puzzle resolves into a single picture. Nancy Banks Smith punctures that pitch with a journalist's needle. Her line flatters the discipline as "science" while quietly mocking the kind of certainty the word promises. The joke lands because the second clause doesn't merely qualify the first; it reverses its swagger. Yes, people are "the same"... until the inconvenient, unignorable mess of difference shows up and refuses to be footnoted away.

The intent is less anti-anthropology than anti-complacency. Smith is pointing at a familiar cycle in cultural commentary: we oscillate between two lazy comforts. One is universalism ("deep down, we're all alike"), which can become a polite way of ignoring power, history, and specificity. The other is exoticism ("they're totally different"), which turns other people into museum exhibits. Anthropology, at its best, tries to thread that needle. Smith's subtext is that audiences often want the discipline to do something easier: deliver a clean moral, a travel-sized truth, a reassuring takeaway.

Context matters here: a journalist writing in the long shadow of postwar social science, when "objective" explanations of culture were both fashionable and politically loaded. The line reads like a warning label for any project that claims to map humanity. It's funny because it's true, and it's sharp because it implies a responsibility: if you want to talk about "people", you have to stay alert to the moment your universal starts erasing someone's particular.