Why You Should Become an Anthro Major: Our Mascot is a Hottie
Classes start up again in sixteen days, which for me include a class on race and another on ethnicity, nationalism, and the state in Europe, two courses that I think will complement each other quite well. (If you’d like to go green with envy, please have a look at my obscenely delightful fall schedule.) In the spirit of academia, I thought I’d devote this post to a very frequently asked question: What exactly is this anthropology thing, anyway?
One of my best friends – like me, an anthro major – likes to joke that in her future office, she’ll put up a huge framed poster of Indiana Jones on her wall. Then, when people visit, she can gesture lazily to the poster and say, “Oh, do you know my colleague, Dr. Jones?”
I think in my future office, I’ll have an illustrated chart explaining the four branches of anthropology and the sub-topics, with a big red round circle under the Cultural heading that says, “I studied this” to minimize confusion.
“So you major in anthropology!” some new acquaintances say, looking slightly lost. And then something clicks, and with a good-natured smile, they add, “You know, I’ve always thought it must be fun to go on archaeological digs.”
I don’t have the heart to tell them that my only experience with archaeology was when I was nine and we purchased a small plaster “I Dig” set from the Museum of Science. I was so irritated with the slow going of brushing away dirt that I got overenthusiastic with the chisel and gouged right into the jawbone of the fake specimen I was supposed to uncover. For the safety of archaeological digs everywhere, I’ve never picked up a trowel since.
Of course, these acquaintances aren’t technically wrong about archaeology and anthropology being related, even if that’s not my specialization. Anthropology, “the study of human diversity,” kind of encompasses, well, everything.
I feel like I could drive a really successful “Become an Anthro Major!” campaign with unsuspecting freshmen. Are you interested in human evolution? Why, hop aboard the biological anthropology train! Know how to speak? Do linguistic anthropology! Ever fancied fleeing from a huge rolling ball in a South American jungle to the tune of a catchy John Williams soundtrack? Archaeology it is, then!
(Of course, then I’d have to follow these recommendations up with an apology and a recommendation to transfer to another school that actually studies these topics; Colby’s department is all cultural anthro, which is great for most of us but quite the letdown for fedora-and-whip-toting wannabes.)
Which leaves the biggie, the subject I study, the umbrella to beat all umbrellas: the aforementioned cultural anthropology. In my classes, we’ve looked at topics as varied as the cultural politics of organ donation to the use of text messaging among adolescents in Seoul. We’ve debated cultural relativism and fallen in love with Paul Farmer. And most of all, we’ve learned to adopt a new way of looking at a very complex and ever-changing world.
It’s an in-joke in the major that none of us can successfully define culture without the spoken equivalent of an asterisk. I found this scary when I started out – what kind of major was this, if I didn’t even know how to properly explain my studies? Now, I take it as a testament of what I’ve learned: that neat categorizations are very nice in theory, but when it comes time to apply them to people and their shared values and practices, organized frameworks tend to go out in a puff of smoke. (Clearly, I am not destined to become an economist.)
Anthropology has taught me to really think outside the box, mainly because I’ve found that there’s no concrete, static, end-all-be-all box in the first place. Actually, when I imagine the box that is anthropology, I picture an amorphous blob creature that was on the cover of one of the Goosebumps books I read as a kid.
Which makes me think back to that chart in my hypothetical office, the one with the four fields and further sub-disciplines of anthropology. It might need a few adjustments; a Venn diagram here, some messily hand-drawn arrows there, some artful gray shading to drive the point home. It could double as a piece of modern artwork.
On second thought, maybe I should just stick with the Indiana Jones poster.
