American "energy." . . is the energy of violence, of free-floating resentment and anxiety unleashed by chronic cultural dislocations which must be, for the most part, ferociously sublimated. This energy has mainly been sublimated into crude materialism.

Anthropology has always struggled with an intense, fascinated repulsion towards its subject. . . . [The anthropologist] submits himself to the exotic to confirm his own inner alienation as an urban intellectual.

AIDS occupies such a large part in our awareness because of what it has been taken to represent. It seems the very model of all the catastrophes privileged populations feel await them.

Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance.

Cancer patients are lied to, not just because the disease is (or is thought to be) a death sentence, but because it is felt to be obscene -- in the original meaning of that word: ill-omened, abominable, repugnant to the senses.