IN THE BEGINNING
In my first memory I am sitting
on a pile of dirt. The sun is golden. I am drawing shapes in the sediment, and watching my father scoop shovelfuls of silt and sand into a cement mixer. The image I have is probably pieced together by my memory from a catalogue of a thousand days watching my father work and feeling dirt slide out of my small hands. The story of how I decided to become an anthropologist feels similar to that. Countless small moments all pieced together into an experience that dropped me off at the Anthropology department of Fort Lewis College.
I was born during the construction of our house. I was formed as my parents molded thousands of adobe bricks by hand. Neither of them had ever built a house before, but they read
books, had conversations with people about how houses should be built, and they experimented. Their experiment produced fantastic results, and by the time I became conscious of my environment, my parents had turned dust into an adobe palace. In the early days the palace had ladders instead of stairs and sheets of plastic instead of windows, but as I developed so did the house and it began to be filled. The library was filled with books, the studio with paints and pencils, the kitchen with pans and vegetables from our garden, and the whole was filled with people.
There were always people in our house: relatives, adventurers, friends, and strangers. Some of them stayed for an afternoon, and some of them stayed for years. Around our kitchen table we
shared food with these people, stories, and ideas. My father implemented a tradition into our family, one that came from his father, that on Sundays we would have people over for dinner. In my lifetime we’ve probably served thousands of people from our kitchen, including: John Goddard, the famous adventurer, Lena, Meow-Meow, and Wang-Lung, Chinese schoolteachers living in the US, Aaron, a convict who almost stabbed my Father with a fork for reaching over his plate, and more. It was from these visitors that I learned that people are
wildly diverse. I listened to their stories, and became interested in the connections between people and the disconnections between them. I became interested in how such vastly different stories, perspectives, and behaviors could grow from one human seed. I was also instilled with an unshakable desire to have wild adventures of my own.
Another factor that heightened my awareness of human diversity was outside the home, in the community of Cedaredge, Colorado. The population of my hometown consists mostly of retired people. It is a place where people who have worked hard their whole lives and eked out a modest living go to die. It is also one of the only places in the United States that is not vulnerable to natural disasters. Neither earthquakes, volcanoes, hurricanes, tsunamis, nor avalanches plague our small town, which has made it a homesteading destination for people who are particularly concerned with the apocalypse (sometimes known as ‘preppers’). Along with the old people and the preppers, there are considerable populations of both very conservative Christians, and hippies. Because these different social groups exist in such a small community, I had the opportunity to interact at length with all of them. In fact, it was from interacting with these different groups that I first became aware of the concept of otherness.
There were kids in our town that as a Mormon I was not allowed to play with. Their parents forbade them from consorting with Mormons (It was as silly as it sounds). I didn’t fully understand the implications of that as a seven-year-old, but later I became acutely aware of the boundaries that people in our small town created around themselves. I was allowed to play with the children of hippies, to share their alfalfa sprouts and run barefoot with them, but my interactions with the children of Christians were only on the soccer field, or while no one was
paying attention.
Similarly in High School, which I attended for one hour a day (I was homeschooled the rest of the time). I noticed that as an outsider I was not welcome into the community. I went to
school for an hour a day and watched people. I observed their clothing, and the people they ignored. As a teenager I was very upset that I couldn’t be in the High School ethnic group, but looking back I notice that I learned much in that time. I learned how people construct their social circles because I was always trying to figure out why I couldn’t get one, and I collected a great many hobbies and skills because I had a lot of free time. I learned to play the piano, hip-hop dance, horseback ride, write poetry, play soccer, cook, sew, lay tile, snowboard, play ping-pong, write music, and I voraciously consumed books.
MEETING ANTHROPOLOGY
At seventeen I started to get stressed out about the fact that I hadn’t chosen a direction for my life. I had a vast array of interests, and I knew that I wanted to travel, but I wanted to find a focus in my learning. So one day I made a list of all the things that made me happy: travel, sunshine, dirt, hard work, reading, history, language, conversation, stories (oral traditions), art, architecture, etc… By the time I finished, I knew that anthropology was the direction I needed to go in my life. Like Kent Flannery, in his article, “On the Resiliance of Anthropological Archaeology.” Anthropology, “made sense”. Like Flannery I feel that my choice to study anthropology and the passion I have developed for the discipline is a direct result of my experiences as a child, in a dirt house full of crazy people (Flannery 2006 p2).
When I finally got to College and started studying anthropology officially. I loved learning terms like, “cosmology”, and “kinship” because they helped me articulate thoughts that I had about people, and explain some of the phenomena I experienced and observed as a child and a teenager. But studying anthropology also frustrated me, and parts of it really upset me.
The trouble began in my Intro to Anthropology class, when we started learning about “race” as a social construct rather than a biological fact. I was immediately confused and frustrated by the fact that I had been led to believe my entire life that human differences were such that people are naturally divided into categories. I was upset that everyone didn’t know that. This is a problem that I have encountered many times in my study of anthropology. That anthropologists have spent hundreds of years trying to explain why humans are the way they are, why they do what they do, some of them making beautiful and potentially world changing discoveries and nobody knows about it. Often these discoveries are embedded in horrific writing that takes hours and an oxford English dictionary to decode. Anthropology is a discipline that has the potential to help people, but I think too often that potential is trapped in the halls of academia, or buried in the pages of dense, un-readable, anthropological literature. One of my visions for the future involves making anthropology more accessible to people. Mostly, this is because of the reasons I have mentioned above, but also partially because I am tired of people saying, “what’s that” or “so you dig up dinosaur bones?” when I tell them what my major is (this is anthropology’s fault).
Another qualm I have with the field of anthropology is relevance. Especially in archaeology, I am concerned with the purpose of what I am doing. This summer I read about a site called,
“sacred ridge” that is just west of Durango. This site was the location of a grotesque massacre where people had their faces pecked off, and their bones splintered into tiny pieces. I don’t know if we are better for knowing about things like that. The event occurred so far in the past that there is no justice to be served, and yes, it is bringing the truth the light, but is it always a goodthing to know the past?
THE FUTURE
My worries about the discipline of anthropology are somewhat soothed by Andrea Muehlebach’s review of sociocultural anthropology in The American Anthropologist. Muehlebach discusses the concept of ethical imagination, and the idea that anthropologists having a heightened sense of ethics and morals have the ability to make valuable contributions to the
discussions that are coursing through our society today, important discussions about how we should act. She writes, “Anthropologists are not the only ones committed to an ethical imagination. The world is also speaking to us in a heightened ethical register—in the form of corporate social responsibility, global humanitarian interventions, new forms of development, the proliferation of charismatic religions, and, perhaps most importantly, through the many political protests that anthropologists documented in 2012. (Muehlnbach 2012 pg 305)” Muehlnbach further reviews articles wherein anthropologists are involved in solving problems, and shedding light on situations that are complicated and important.
There is still a lot of anthropology that I don’t know. I am interested in further exploring the connections between language and culture, and the preservation of culture. Cultural geography is field that I find completely fascinating and very relevant to problems in our society today. I find sociocultural anthropology to be both fascinating and taxing. I am also interested in further studying the anthropology of gender. I’m confused about why most gender studies classes focus on women, and are heavily attended by women. I am a woman, so I feel I
know quite a lot about women, but men are strange.
I feel that anthropology is a lifestyle, and that the ways of thinking that I have developed as an anthropology undergraduate student will help me wherever I end up in life. I also feel that
as a lifestyle, it is one I will entertain until the end of my days.
WORKS CITED
Flannery, Kent V.
2006 “On the Resilience of Anthropological Archaeology”. Annual Review of Anthropology 35:1-15
Muehlebach,Andrea
2013 “On Precariousness and the Ethical Imagination: The Year 2012 in Sociocultural Anthropology.” American Anthropologist. American Anthropologist: The Year inReview.
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