Anthropology Times

Letters to My Tutor…

My dearest Simone,

I haven’t had a chance to start my anthropology lectures as of yet. I do hope to be caught up and into a more regular routine with my classes (chemistry, chemistry lab, and precalculus) by the beginning of next week. I continue to learn things about my study habits and abilities such as I can do my math well while more tired than I can do chemistry. I’m making adjustments.

While browsing around for female chemists for a report, I came across a black, female chemist and anthropologist, Eslanda Goode Robeson (1896-1965). She received a B. S. in chemistry from Columbia University, and later a degree in anthropology from the London School of Economics . She engaged in extensive research in Africa and she lived for a long period in the Soviet Union. My local library has a copy of one of her books, African Journey. I will add it to that list of books that hopefully I’ll get around to soon.

Yours truly,

S.

Letters to My Tutor…

My dearest Simone,

I’ve been preparing for a small grouping of exams, and time has been short. I find that I’m still more confident as far as my math studying abilities than my chemistry study skill. I believe the fact that many of my family members were were math positive when I was growing up helps on this front. My mother used to make a game of adding up the checkout cost in the grocery store. If she were off by any noticeable amount, it usually meant there was some checkout mistake. Simple lessons like these in the usefulness of very basic math seems to have cemented a lifelong math positive attitude for me.

With that, I must get back to studying chemistry.

Yours,

S.

Letters to My Tutor…

My dearest Simone,

I don’t know much about the College Confidential website, but while browsing the net for “physics and anthropology” I came across a posting on the site from a freshman considering anthropology and physics as majors and asking for advice. I thought the response from ABC260 was a good one and it spoke to some of my thinking on the matter.

The original poster liked that anthropology is a broad field, as do I, but felt that it wasn’t as analytically challenging as physics. ABC260 pointed out that while at the freshman level physics classes may seem more analytical and anthropology classes more descriptive, later level anthropology classes that delve more into the theoretical side of anthropology may provide the analytical challenge the poster appears to be seeking. ABC260 also cautions that undergraduate study for either major may not give the best idea of the level of thinking required for graduate level study saying, “Sadly, intro courses in math and physics belie the theoretical sophistication required for higher level studies, and most undergraduate anthro courses(not just the intro ones) do the same.”

It seems to me that too many people think that all that’s required to be a good anthropologist is being able to read and write at the college level. The need for dogged analytical skills as applied to both outer environments and the inner environment of one’s own mind is daunting. If I may out myself as a Trekkie… I love Captain Kirk as much as the next Trekkie, but I think many would mistakenly place anthropologists in a camp with Captain Kirk when really anthropologists would be more accurately placed in a camp with Spock. Or perhaps I should say that when I think about the type of anthropologist that I would want to be, I see myself as more Spock than Captain Kirk.

Back to the books,
S.

Letters to My Tutor…

My dearest Simone,

Whatever my experiences with anthropology, good or bad, they have have been very limited. I understand that I need to find ways to engage a wider spectrum as far as the the subject matter of anthropology and anthropologists. I don’t quite feel ready to interview people, but I do want to add something more than reading articles.

I’ve listened to anthropology lectures available online here and there, but I haven’t made a regular effort of it. So, I’m in the process of cobbling together a series of lectures for my weekly dose of anthropology, and I hope to provide short reviews/commentaries on these in the coming weeks. I’ve already found some lectures that I’m excited about, but I didn’t get it together soon enough to start this week.

Until next week,

S.

Letters to My Tutor…

My dearest Simone,

I continue to go through an adjustment phase with being back in school. I hesitate to take the week off completely, so I will give a quick tale about growing up in the the Mississippi Delta:

In elementary school my best friend and I were teacher’s pets. We made very good grades and we scored well on standardized tests. While occasionally we were teased in connection with our pet status, what stands out in my memory is the group of students who said that if my best friend and I were unfairly favored, the blame for it lay with the teachers and not the students, and that any hard feelings should be directed toward the teachers and not us*. One friend with whom I often worked on school projects said to me that we could play normally outside of school, but while we were in school she could not be as friendly because she didn’t want to appear to support unfair favoritism.

I loved the beautiful, brilliant children with whom I went to elementary school.

(Edited to add:  Just to be clear, with a couple of the older teachers in particular there was something other than normal praise for doing well.  Sometimes the language used to say that smart, black people were important in the struggle against racism, implied sentiments about the value of people that were unfortunate and untrue.)

Gotta run,

S.

Letters to My Tutor…

My dearest Simone,

Toward the end of last year, I had a thought about my deceased friend. It flashed momentarily in my mind that “maybe it was his time to go.” I have no special connection with the meaning of those words, but they were often spoken around me growing up. I take the passing thought as some indication that I have accepted his death more fully as those words were often spoken in that light. And though I don’t necessarily feel this way on a conscious level, I wonder whether that flash of words spoke from my subconscious.

Recently, my phone was reset to a much earlier point, a point when my friend was still alive. Looking at my recent calls I was confronted with the record of our daily call routine. I was happy for the reminder. I continue to wonder how recent technologies may affect how we grieve and how we think about the dead. An acquaintance (with two young children) who lost her husband often “speaks” to him using his account on a social networking site. I wonder how children who experience adults in grieving through use of social media may come to view death and/or grieving differently. I’m reminded of the show Caprica, in which one of the characters promoted the view of heaven as a location in cyberspace.

I still feel uncomfortable with the idea of using social media as a grieving medium. Others post to my friend’s social media page on his birthday and at other times, but I feel held back from that. I did take comfort reading some of his last postings after his death though. He had thanked a bunch of people individually for their birthday greetings to him. When an acquaintance committed suicide, it was surreal to read his final and somewhat cryptic words on his social media page particularly during the moments of uncertainty when some were still hoping that things would turn out alright.

Perhaps I should interview people as to the role social media has played in their grieving process. I certainly look forward to reading the studies that I am certain will be done in this area.

Ever yours,

S.

Letters to My Tutor…

My dearest Simone,

It’s becoming clear that I need to take some time away to get used to my new schedule of classes and to get a bit ahead on the homework. So far, my math and chemistry classes have been enjoyable along the lines that I thought they would be. However, I continue to reflect on anthropology and the path that lead me to consider graduate work in anthropology.

I’ve been hesitant to speak of my more recent anthropology classes. In the beginning, I feared that the fact that my mind was fuzzy and that I might not immediately remember something big and obvious would cause my anthropology professors to cringe. I still think that now, but I worry slightly less. I had excellent classes, and some of my classmates were quite exceptional. But for the quality of the instruction that I received, I would never have found myself in the position of considering graduate study in anthropology. My sense of cultural disconnect did not melt away, but still my more recent classes left me with a hopefulness that some of my concerns about study and work in anthropology would be less of a worry in the future.

A particularly unpleasant work-type experience in anthropology outside the academic setting reminded me that I could not depend on the positive local classroom experiences being reproduced in the industry at large or in further academic study. It wasn’t an experience that I would expect to be repeated, but still it felt like a wakeup call to the fact that I needed to give serious consideration to what it would be like to work in anthropology, to work in a field that was overwhelming dominated by middle class white culture. I think some of the difficulties I’ve had moving from the South to California may be very instructive. California is the least black place that I’ve ever lived. I think often people outside the South hear that I grew up in Mississippi and automatically think that it’s a state that is worse in every possible way for a black person. This is not the case. I grew up in a majority black county in Mississippi and there are cultural advantages to that. I hope to write more about this soon.

Until next time,

S.

Letters to My Tutor…

My dearest Simone,

I got great results from my chemistry preparation.  My score on the California Chemistry Diagnostic Test placed me in about the 98th percentile (the percentile rankings I found were from years gone by).  And I will not have to take intro to chemistry. This gave me a boost of confidence as far as my study skills. It’s been twenty years since I’ve taken chemistry, so I made up a lot of ground with my four or so weeks of intensive preparation.

I started to think about how I learned good/effective study skills early from watching family.  My maternal grandmother didn’t finish elementary school, but still she never shied away from reading things, and out loud even, because the passage was difficult for her.  She had good basic math skills and she used them at the grocery store and other everyday situations in which I’ve observed people with higher math education not go through the bother.  My grandmother had a fearlessness and healthful shamelessness in the face of learning and pressing the limits of her abilities.  This behavior was presented as an ideal in black Mississippi Delta culture; an important measure of intelligence was how well a person made use of the skills and abilities she had*.  “Smart” people with inactive mental habits were often called on it.

A study skill that comes out of this tradition is to read from one book and then as a test do the exercises from a sufficiently different book of the same level; and then as a further test, attempt the exercises in a book of a higher level — seek out the limits of your abilities and then push forward from there.  In reading anthropology I tried not to shy away from articles simply because I found the jargon overwhelming.  I tried to stay focused on taking from the reading anything I could.  I sometimes felt like I could say embarrassingly little about an article, but having the weekly deadline helped me work past this uncomfortableness.

I haven’t forgotten about Black Feminist Anthropology: Theory, Politics, Praxis, and Poetics.  So far it’s been a helpful read and I definitely have more to say on that reading.

edited to add *This manner of thinking was also promoted as a way to combat racism and build self-esteem in the black community — the fact that more privileged people had access to better education did not mean that they were smarter.  Being smart had a lot to do with how your mind worked and not with the accumulation of information you did not employ or the regurgitation of information that could be looked up.  Being smart was a matter of honing thinking abilities.  One of the things that attracted me to physics when I was younger was that physicists often talked about intelligence in this way and somehow the words used and/or the manner of speech used resonated more with me than when similar things were said in other disciplines.

Until next time,
S

Letters to My Tutor…

My dearest Simone,

My mind turned again to anthropology during my chemistry review.  In thinking about the importance of writing out simple formulas again and again, I thought that I should be using diagrams for common concepts in anthropology and that there’s a value in seeing key concepts/theories reduced to simple word groups with connective symbols such as lines, arrows, plus signs and the like.  Back in 2009, Greg Downey over at Neuroanthropology wrote a nice post regarding benefits and concerns when using flowcharts in anthropology.  The post seems a good place to start when I look into this more later.

So it seems that I am taking another week to work on my chemistry review.  It has been quite intensive and at the moment I find myself in that curious place where I could do much better on a test that most consider difficult while fairing much worse on a test that others consider easy.  That is to say that I have been neglectful regarding some of the required rote memorization.  I looked for sample chemistry placement test online since I haven’t been able to find out much information regarding the one that I may be taking.  So far, the results have been encouraging.

Yours truly,

S.

Letters to My Tutor…

My dearest Simone,

I’ve been continuing my review of chemistry. The book has a bit of a narrative in which scientific study and discovery are touted as the height of human achievement; it’s the most important and the most glorious of human endeavors. I marveled at the grandiose absolutes used for self-defined values, at the totally straight-faced delivery. I’m reminded of an episode of “The Simpson’s” in which Bart bangs a pot and sings, “I am so great. I am so great. Everybody loves me. I am so great…” His lyrics are said to be a byproduct of the terrible two’s. I love and enjoy scientific pursuits, but I cannot dampen my awareness of its culturally defined importance.

I continue to ponder where to go next with what I write here. I will return to my reading of Black Feminist Anthropology: Theory, Politics, Praxis, and Poetics next week.

Ever yours,

S.