Why care about Anthropology?
For over 99% of my life I have not cared about the field of Anthropology. However I recently read some parts of Introduction to Anthropology 1 on openstax and I have to say it is very fascinating.
So why care about Anthropology? Because it can put the context you are living in into words and thus make the invisible everyday “obviousness” visible!
As a study Anthropology has a very broad focus: humanity everywhere, always and how they interact with everything (and themselves). With such a broad focus Anthropology can put many things into context that might be missed when zooming in too much in a particular area. For example, by zooming out one could start to compare rituals in non-democratic societies with elections in democratic societies and find many similarities. Or put into context how modern capitalism functions and what parts of it are really not that “natural” as we might believe they are.
”Think outside the box” is something that we often hear, but knowing where the boundaries of that box are is very difficult. By comparing and connecting so many distant societies and collecting so much data about so many individuals, Anthropology can be a very powerful tool to make those boundaries visible and give more perspective.
One thing that I want to try in my own life is doing a repeated “How does that fit into the bigger picture?” - just like the Five whys2.