Daily Prompt Love <3 The Study of Us

17 December 2016

One of my undergrad degrees is in Anthropology, and the gift of that, the ability to view ‘us’ through the detailed and complex lens I learned from my amazing professors in that field still, every day, shapes the way I move through the world.

I first discovered Anthropology in the library as a child, those trips we made to get books every weekend with my mama, and one of the things I first loved about the anthropology books I found was that, in those books, I found women–not as subjects (although that fascinated me too)–but as the authors, as the experts: Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, Jane Goodall. They were who I imagined myself to be as I “excavated’ arrrowheads and shark teeth from the plowed up tobacco field beside the trailer park where I lived as a child.

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―Jane Goodall,  British primatologist, ethologist, anthropologist, and UN Messenger of Peace

“As the traveler who has once been from home is wiser than he who has never left his own doorstep, so a knowledge of one other culture should sharpen our ability to scrutinize more steadily, to appreciate more lovingly, our own.”~Margaret Mead, American cultural anthropologist and author

“I gambled on having the strength to live two lives, one for myself, and one for the world.”~ Ruth Benedict, American anthropologist and folklorist

Make art inspired by anthropology, by an anthropological discovery.

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