Obviously Oblivious

I recently read an analogy from the author David Wallace. It’s about how the most critical realities are often the hardest to see because they are entirely surrounding us. The analogy is: 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 all it's ever known. It's just the world. Just as a fish is unaware of the water it swims in, humans often fail to notice their own pervasive cultural and environmental surroundings.

Culture is our water.

We swim in it constantly. It decides how close we stand to strangers in an elevator, how we talk to our parents, what counts as breakfast food, and how we're supposed to act when someone dies. These rules are like common sense.

Anthropology is trying to jump out of the fishbowl. It's looking at your own life and realizing how weird it actually is.

I used to think anthropology was just the study of other people. Tv shows of guys in pith helmets documenting tribal rituals on some remote island is what encapsulated all of anthropology (at one point in time, in my eyes). It gets way more interesting when you flip it around and study yourself.

Take handshakes. Why do we do that? It's a completely bizarre thing where we grab each other's hands and shake them around. We use it to show trust, to make deals, to say hello. It's this weird behavioral thing we invented to create social order.

How do we find the “why?” ?

I'm most interested in medical anthropology and food anthropology because of how interconnected they are. We have to eat to survive, but biology doesn't tell us to eat cake when we turn a year older. We need medical care when we break a bone, but biology doesn't explain why we trust someone more when they're wearing a white coat instead of a t-shirt.

I think this matters because it makes you less judgmental. Once you realize your own normal is just a random collection of cultural habits, it gets harder to look at someone else's habits and call them weird. They're just in different water.

I'm still learning to see the water myself. I miss it 99% of the time, but sometimes I catch it, and I see the structure underneath everything. The underlying theme? Awareness.