reginalalala asked: i think i want to study anthropology when i go to college. what does anthropology mean to you? and in your first couple of yr studying did a lot of douche-bags take anthropology classes?

I love anthropology, and think that anthropology has both upsides and downsides to being a really broad field. one of the obvious downsides is that this makes it hard to pin down exactly what it is and what it is useful for to most people (i honestly don’t have a good explanation for this yet, but i think that anthropology does its best explaining through showing rather than telling).

it has a lot of applicability to a lot of different situations, and i think that the addition of an anthropologist perspective and orientation makes a lot of real world projects (esp public health initiatives and interventions) better. Studying anthropology is really what you want to make of it, though, because after (and while) you study it you have to spend a lot of time ‘selling’ it and the kind of person it has made you to a lot of different people.

Even though anthropology has a very racist/colonial past and a racist/neocolonialist present, i think that the most valuable effect it has had on my life is making me a better person. It teaches you to listen to other people and value the interpretations and explanations that other people have for what they do/think/etc and not always assume that you can necessarily understand or explain other people. And that if you do want to do that, you have to spend a lot of time talking to them first, and that you need to take great care when you are representing other people. I also like the emphasis placed on the problem of disentangling yourself from your interpretations of other people that are not you (Lutz said something like anthropology is always about at least two cultures—wherever you are and whatever you’re from).  

I was an anthro major at a big midwestern state school as an undergrad. there were a lot of kids in the class that spent a lot behaving in ways that i thought were racist/exotifying/colonialist (talking about their study abroad or cruise vacations as though they were now experts on wherever they had gone, making really ethnocentric criticisms of other people’s behavior, assuming that their  culturally determined morality and value structure was superior to all others, or just generally engaging in white supremacist talk like claiming to know ‘welfare queens’ and glorifying their imagined noble savages)

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12. jphasthecapacity said: This is my junior year in anthropology. The classes and students met and presented these past years have all been life changing! I recommend it to any undergrad to open your eyes to the holistic idea of learning. PS You just have to study abroad!
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