#everydayanth

We don’t want to be poor. We are hard working. The myth that poor people are lazy can go die now. 

I just want everyone to know that at 8:18am every day, M-F, the school bus stops at the corner to pick up a herd of elementary kids waiting with their parents. 

I know this because at 8:17am, a loud cheer of baby-children erupts in screams and squeals and clapping cheers as they see the bus crest the hill. 

People like this are the reason Anthropology has stalled.

And I mean that in a good way. 

If academia can’t embrace the internet and converse with the public, what good is it? There can’t be an ivory tower in social science. 

There are hundreds of people discussing cultural differences from their own POVs, cross-cultural couples learning about each other and communicating through a common language, there are wanderers who observe the world as they travel, linguists who communicate with localized communities, people sharing their religion and values and culture all over. Does that make the trained academic study obsolete?

What can anthropology bring when the public is already involved in a non-academic capacity? How do we spread value and interest and does it even matter if people are already willing to connect and share cross culturally? 

I keep struggling with this. There are downfalls of entertainment, there’s the chaos of non-theory and a lack of consensus by individuals of the culture, but at the end of the day, millions of people are given further context of culture through Youtube while anthropology journals circulate much smaller specialist crowds. 

I know we don’t want to talk about it. No one likes to look existential awareness in the face, but other than teaching university students to interact with cultures sensitively and with awareness, what is it that anthropology (of the cultural/linguistic variety) is doing? 

This is not a sassy rhetorical question, I genuinely want to know what future people see for social sciences based on communication between humans. Is it simply awareness? Is it adaption and learning from others? Is it translating, presenting, and packaging information to share more readily with an out-of-context public? Is it something new entirely? Or does it disappear altogether, an answer to a globalizing world without global communication, easily let go with the rise of the internet? 

Are we finally going to understand that anthropology cannot start with a colonizer mentality and begin to study what connects and distances us as people who share so much and so little? To provide better contextual understanding for others or to sensationalize and sell to the curious? Are we finally going to start talking about difficult social problems and engage communities and get back into the field? To unite or fight or become activists around the problems we see? 

Or is this the collapsing of the ivory tower we’re watching? Maybe I am the one out of context and everything is fine, despite the numbers. But it feels much more like a sink or swim time to me, and the sad truth that I’ve been wrestling with is that the anthropology I run into in the world, the studies that I don’t have to go looking for, the stories of average people and their one required college course, of students and PhDs meeting requirements, struggling departments and cut programs, academic media and university agendas, the colonial tokenizer and paternalistic speaker for the Other, that anthropology has a sadness about it, a whimpering finality that I don’t want to see survive. 

The ideal social science, of building authentic vulnerable connections in search of understanding maybe deserves to swim, but not if its purpose in understanding is to take or show or sell. And how can any discipline survive moneyed agendas without promising a profit now or in the future? What’s the point in learning and applying theory of connection if we understand that there is no T-truth and that valid connections are being formed and conversations started by regular people who may or may not be trained in the application or exchange of cultural values, beliefs, and materials? I wrote a thesis on this in school and I don’t think I was wrong then, but I do think I was blinded by my own excitement to be validated in my unique experiences as an individual, and the permission it gave my curiosity to ask and dig, but now I wonder about anthropology’s entitlement to demand answers and dig without permission. 

How has your view changed over time? How have you found value or developed purpose in your studies? Do you think it matters if anthropology is accessible to the public? What about training and schooling, do you think anthropologists need special training to be “good?” What does it mean to be good? How does the internet change the game? And perhaps most importantly of all: is it still worth it? 

Hello beautiful people!

I have been having a problem where switching between analytical anthropology writing / academic-ish blogging and creative writing has become extremely difficult and plagued with frustration and despair and ...I could go on, but it’s not super important. 

Basically, I’m taking a break and I don’t know how long it will be; I hope only a few weeks, but we’ll see. I have a lot of reflecting to do on my relationship with anthropology, especially after that last series where I basically found that if it doesn’t start connecting with the bigger world, it will become basically useless. And when I’m finding so much more cultural connection and openness to discovery through the creative community, when the obsessive focus on linear progression and quantitative data is relieved through media creativity, and connections that build authentic relationships are free with healthy discourse outside of anthropology, not IN it, then I have to stop to question what I want from it, what it can offer me, and if that’s enough for me.

In the meantime, if you’d like to join that side of things, you can follow the other blog I literally just started: https://kristavp.tumblr.com/

It’s sad, but so true… This is exactly how these TV channels operate now days!