Pausing to Reflect…

I was talking with Setuid on IRC when a question he asked prompted me to start remembering things.  He had asked for a name for a Debian virtual system and wanted a famous anthropologist/archeologist’s name.  I skittered around for a second perhaps and came out with Boas.  I don’t know if you fine folks have ever had a completely separate thing suddenly cause a whole flotilla of thoughts and memories cascade around. Maybe its my slowly advancing age; but suddenly I wanted to read about one of Boas’ students; namely Kroeber.  Of course, the amazing wikipedia makes this so easy and the reading summarizes things for you, places emphasis around things, lets you get the fix.  So what is so amazing about Kroeber you may ask.  Well, Kroeber received the very first Phd in Anthropology from Boas out here in Berkeley. He had one of the most famous relationships with a California Native American named Ishi.  It was cataloged and recorded and you can still hear the music by visiting the Hearst museum at Berkeley. 

I remembered as an aspiring student of anthropology getting lectures on these amazing people in our history and what they did.  I grew up in the Mojave Desert in Southern California and learned to appreciate the landscape, the solitary nature of it and early on began reading Edward Abbey because he framed the experience for me, spoke of the desert and its disappearance in eloquent and wondrous terms.  The professor I had at the Junior College, RWR, became my mentor in many ways, friend, family member. He and I had years of friendship and then I went off to Graduate School in New Mexico intending on receiving a MA in Cultural Anthropology with a focus on new world prehistory and archeology.  I did that for the most part and returned.  I worked all over the state doing contract work and finally took a job at Edwards AFB down where the shuttle landed.  Perhaps its most famous landscape are the dry lakebeds. One of the most famous is Rogers Dry Lakebed.  That picture almost does it justice.  I drove over it, recorded parts of it, walked on it.  Wondered at it.  Truly majestic yet almost taken for granted in many ways.

That carried me back for some reason to a comment that Boas made about anthropological analysis that…

considers every phenomena as worthy of being studied for its own sake. Its mere existence entitles it to a full share of our attention; and the knowledge of its existence and evolution in space and time fully satisfies the student.

No matter what phenomena we are discussing, we should look at it because it has value at its level. 

At some point, I left archeology completely for a variety of reasons; trading in my field boots and pack and faithful trowel for a armchair and the life of a devout armchair anthropologist.  The map I once carried that charted my travels transformed somehow into this weblog.  But I am not really what is described as the classic armchair anthropologist.  But I like the definition of the four holistic fields of anthropology.  Anthropology is the chassis, the vehicle, the engine that carries me forward even doing technology these days. I still look at hillsides and forests and deserts as one.  Sometimes when walking with my wife, she sees me looking down at the ground as we walk and she asks me if I am looking for stone and bones still.  I smile gently and my mind twirls back to other days.

Imagine all this called up from a simple question by a friend on IRC.  Its an amazing facility we have to link and correlate and consider each phenomena as worthy…

Thanks Franz.

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