Just as the summer foliage began to show in all it’s glory, a group of guests descended upon the pond. In a house on a hill, embanked along the waters edge, lived four roommates. That summer was their first together, and they enjoyed the surrounding land encompassed by trees. The sound of the nearby waterfall and the birds singing their songs set a peaceful tone in this special place. One day, the landlord’s daughter came home to visit, having lived in South America for six years. With her, she brought her troupe, a group of Colombians who were both her…
Tag: culture
The Purpose Behind AnthroPerspectives
AnthroPerspectives has been a long time coming. With a lifelong connection to reading and writing, my relationship to the human story has always felt like a part of me. During my childhood, I was an avid reader. Book after book, I delved into the lives of young girls from around the world who were experiencing such different realities, cultures and experiences. I was always infatuated by the individual’s story, and have not gone through a phase in my life where I wasn’t using writing as a tool for reflection, imagination or understanding. The seeds of this blog were planted even…
How Humans Use Language to Create Meaning
Throughout history, humankind has used oral communication as a method for passing on traditions, rules, and inherited knowledge. From its origins, we have been using language to understand our surroundings and to create shared meaning around our experience of life. The ability to tell stories has helped us to define our world, and create ritual, belief, and society. We continue to do so every time we communicate. Through the use of narrative, we determine our perspective, and shape our life’s outcome. What is it about language that makes it such a powerful tool in shaping our experience as human beings?…
Examining Social Justice Part 2: Methods for Engagement
“Unless we engage in these and other conscious acts of reflection and re-education, we easily repeat the process with our children. We teach what we were taught. The unexamined prejudices of the parents are passed on to the children. It is not our fault, but it is our responsibility to interrupt this cycle” -Tatum Social Justice methods are a tool for reflection, to learn about how we are engaging each other, and to consider how our preconceived notions can lead to uninformed or accidental mistreatment of people. Contrary to this purpose, many have begun to see it as an infringement…
Examining Social Justice Part 1: A Road Map to Understanding
Tensions exist around issues of social import. If we are incapable of defining what it is that we are actually fighting for, we will be unable to engage one another constructively on topics that shape our world.” Social justice is a controversial topic whose definition and importance are often contested. There are those who claim social justice as their moral obligation when shaming someone for their behavior, leaving a bad taste in people’s mouths around this cause. When conversations come up that cite social justice or discuss social structures, inequity, race, gender, etc, people often back out of the conversation for fear…
Healing the Wounds of What it Means to Be a Man
In American culture, as well as other cultures around the world, young boys are taught how to be men. They are taught how to think, act, and behave in a particular way that is seen as manly. As norms are taught and passed on to the next generation, do we consider the outcome? For the past few years, I have been attending a regional conference, the New England Fathering Conference. The focus is on fatherhood as a crucial part of building healthy families. At this conference, there is always so much wisdom and spirit to be found and a sincere…
People and Plants: A History of Chamomile
For thousands of years storytelling has been an essential part of humankind. To keep tradition and history alive, information was shared from person to person until we found a way to keep record of our experiences by writing them down. My purpose in being a writer is to tell a story. Not just a story of one person’s life, but narratives of human experience. As individuals, we each hold within us a memory, a life-span of perspectives and experiences, something to share that is our story. In communicating our stories and perspectives, we are participating in this significant tradition of…
Research and Story Telling in Brittany, France
This past May, my undergraduate professor and mentor invited me to join her for an ethnographic research project in Brittany, France. Before we left, I didn’t know what to expect. My professor told me we would be doing research on small dairy farmers in France and that I would help her as a translator. As we got closer to our departure, she gave me a little more information, her goals and some interview questions. I began to read some literature on dairy farming and food systems, and learned a bit about French cheese varieties. Yet, I still had no clue…
Why anthropology?
Why anthropology? It’s just another social science. Why pay attention? The majority of people hear the word anthropology and know that it is somehow synonymous with culture. What is culture? It is a tool that shapes human behavior. It informs and creates our norms, patterns of thought and perceptions of reality. “There is a tendency for us to think that what we know, what we perceive, is solely a function of two things: our cognitive tools–our senses–and the physical reality that provides the stimuli for the senses. What we fail to realize, what we find difficult to admit…
Coming soon…
Hi everyone, It’s been a few months since I’ve posted in here. A lot of stuff has been brewing in my mind, things I really want to write about but am having a hard time articulating. So there are a few articles on the way. I’m going to be writing about social justice and what we should do with that term now that people have taken it to the extreme and made a bad name for it, religion and how its place as behavior modification within individual cultural systems has changed as globalization and our ever changing world allow for…