Anthropology, Philosophy, and Creativity

So there I was, a physics major in my second semester of German—I had already studied Russian in the military and wanted to get back into foreign languages—when all of a sudden I started to contemplate going to the University of California at Berkeley for linguistics. Why Cal? you ask, because they have, among others, a Russian department and I wanted to regain my once fluent grasp of the Slavic tongue. I had begun to research the avenues available to me and my educational experience when I discovered Anthropology and started to realize a new path was just around the bend.

I changed my major for a third time at the junior college level and began my anthropological journey at the prestigious Santa Rosa Junior College in Northern California. Immediately I found that cultural anthropology was what I had been searching for. Here is a field in which participant observation, historical particularism, cultural relativity, and postmodernism, among others, are all toolsets employed to better understand how people and their institutions work.

I see the Web as being extremely useful in this regard, and would offer as a metaphor the story of the fish being asked to describe it’s environment. A fish would, if at all, describe water lastly as water exists in such abundance for the fish. It is through contrast that we are most able to identify features and patterns which would have otherwise been unnoticed, and this is just one instance in which anthropology can prove to be quite beneficial. Such thinking tends to bleed, for me at least, into a certain philosophical perspective that sees the Web as a lens through which countless features and patterns can be identified, and that’s damn exciting!