I grew up a Navy brat, bouncing from coast to coast in the U.S. until the 11th grade, when I hunkered down in the South for more than a decade. Although I had visited family in New England, and my grandmother retained her New Hampshire accent through five decades of living in North Carolina, when I moved north after grad school I was unprepared for the radically unique accent, temperament, and driving style that is Boston. After I made the transition north in 2007, the learning curve was steep. Driving successfully required a transition from extreme patience, a trait required in North Carolina (where drivers will stop at a green light for 30 seconds to allow another driver to enter the road), to extreme efficiency in the Boston area (where drivers feel it is a moral imperative to honk … [Read more...]
So What Exactly is ANTHROPOLOGY?
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...]
