Fish Can’t See Water

There is a classic metaphor in anthropology that I think about a lot. If you ask a fish what it knows about water, it won’t have an answer. It doesn't know what water is because water is the only thing it has ever known. It’s just "the world."

Culture is our water.

We swim in it every day. It dictates how close we stand to people in an elevator, how we greet our parents, what we consider "breakfast food" versus "dinner food," and how we deal with grief. We don't really notice these rules because they just feel like "common sense."

To me, anthropology is the art of jumping out of the fishbowl. It’s about looking at your own life and realizing how strange it actually is.

I used to think anthropology was just about studying other people. More of people in pith helmets going to remote islands to document rituals. And sure, that is part of the history, but modern anthropology is way more interesting when you turn the lens on yourself.

Take something simple, like a handshake. Why do we do it? It’s a bizarre ritual where we grab each other's extremities and shake them up and down. If an alien saw that, they’d think we were trying to dislodge something from the other person’s sleeve. But we do it to show trust, or to seal a deal, to say hello. It’s a modification of behavior that creates social order.

I’m interested in the "why."

I’m specifically interested in Medical Anthropology and Food Anthropology because those are the places where our biological needs collide with our cultural rules. We need to eat to survive, but biology doesn't tell us to eat birthday cake to celebrate aging. We need to heal when we break a leg, but biology doesn't tell us that a person in a white coat has more authority than a person in a t-shirt.

I think learning this stuff is important because it stops you from being judgmental. When you realize that your own "normal" is just a random set of cultural habits, it becomes a lot harder to look at someone else’s habits and call them "weird." They’re just swimming in different water.

I’m still learning how to see the water myself. Half the time I miss it. But every once in a while, I catch a glimpse of the structure behind things, and it’s fascinating. That’s what I want to share here.