It is often said that to understand another person, you not only have to put yourself in the other person’s shoes but walk around in them. Anthropology, then, might be the biggest intellectual shoe store you can imagine. Today, on World Anthropology Day, anthropologists and anthropology-enthusiasts are inviting everyone into that shoe store to try on a new perspective.
Anthropology, as we often say in the discipline, helps us make “the strange familiar and the familiar strange.” This involves learning about other people so that their actions and their thoughts start making sense to you, and also involves learning about your own people and culture, so that you no longer take them for granted, and might even start to seem strange.
That is what anthropology is (other than a freaky shoe store): a tool to think about the world and to never get too comfortable with what you believe is “right” or “true”. In anthropology, humans are seen as inherently interesting, which allows us to study both our differences and commonalities.
The love that many people in the discipline share, however, is not blind. Acknowledging anthropology’s history has enabled us to learn that with trying to study people and their cultures, comes responsibility and power of the portrayal of things we document. In the past, as in most western academic disciplines, our interest in human differences has been used to scientifically justify injustices against certain cultures and groups of people.
Anthropology, perhaps more than most other disciplines, has worked to come to terms with its dark roots and has actively discredited scholars who have furthered ideas that imply a hierarchy among humans and societies. Today, anthropology says “you do you” and it does so not from a place of ignorance or indifference, but from a deep-rooted belief that what we all have in common is our differences and the many ways we make sense of the world around us.
More importantly, anthropology acknowledges that the world around us is messy, and we can only make sense of it in partial and subjective ways. Rather than trying to seek out what anthropologists deem “the best explanation” or the most experimentally proven theory, anthropology lets the world be as messy as it is. Anthropologists see themselves and the things they study not with certainty, but with a grain of doubt.
Anthropology knows that trying to understand what it feels like to wear someone else’s shoes— by using our major research tool, participant-observation fieldwork—still only gives us part of the picture. World Anthropology Day is an opportunity for all of us who fell in love with the discipline to share why we think everyone needs a little anthropology in their life.
Starting today, dare to try on someone else’s shoes from time to time, perhaps by taking a course in anthropology during your time at St. Lawrence.