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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“It is these undeniable qualities of human love and compassion and self-sacrifice that give me hope for the future. We are, indeed, often cruel and evil. Nobody can deny this. We gang up on each one another, we torture each other, with words as well as deeds, we fight, we kill. But we are also capable of the most noble, generous, and heroic behavior.”
―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.
This week’s recommendation is a collection, a vital gathering of voices that should be in every poet’s library, in every classroom where we talk poetry: 
Mary Carroll-Hackett: Poetry and Prose 
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