I had no idea what anthropology was when I began college, I just knew I loved the course titles.  “Language and Culture”. “Gender, Sex, and Sexuality”. “Religion and Modernity”. The cultural anthropology classes covered everything, everywhere, from race to medicine to law to food, from the Caribbean to Africa to Southeast Asia to Kansas. The archaeology classes covered history around the globe, from the birth of nation states to ancient trade routes to the way people made cloth, and everything in between. The biological anthropology classes examined the biology of humans and our ape cousins, and how we adapted over time to survive in amazingly diverse settings. The linguistic anthropology classes examined how we are physically designed for language to the innumerable forms that language … [Read more...]