I will be the first to admit that I often have too many pans in the fire. I have so many interests and passions it is often times hard to buckle down and focus on just one. That is why when I was deciding what to study in college I quickly focused in on anthropology. Literally it is the "study of man," and could you get anymore all-encompassing than that? The great thing about anthropology is it embraces culture, communication, linguistics, art, history, artifacts, behavior, psychology, literature, architecture, archeology, biology, genetics, museum studies, just to name a few. There are physical anthropologists, workplace anthropologists, educational anthropologists, forensic anthropologists, archeologists, museum curators, linguists, ethnologists, ethnographers, Marxist Anthropologists, feminist anthropologists and so on and so forth, all under the larger umbrella of “anthropology”. To steal from one of my favorite sitcoms, Big Bang Theory, What is anthropology? Anthropology is everything (although Sheldon would argue it was physics). If a human being has made it, done it or believed it and you want to study it, you may just be an anthropologist. According to the American Anthropological Association:
Anthropology
is the study of humans, past and present. To understand the full sweep and
complexity of cultures across all of human history, anthropology draws and
builds upon knowledge from the social and biological sciences as well as the
humanities and physical sciences. A central concern of anthropologists is the
application of knowledge to the solution of human problems.
So, while on the surface it may appear that I have a variety of interests, really they all fall under the purview of anthropology. It is through this frame of reference that I approach all things in my life, including my family, my social life, my hobbies and my professional life. In fact, if you were to ask me, I would tell you anthropology holds the key to all the world’s problems, but, then again, I might be a tad bit biased.
