What Is Anthropology To Me?

Written and recorded by: Bronywn Caswell-Riday

I put on the glasses and I see the world in technicolor, brilliant and rich and deep for what feels like the first time. And somehow every time is the first time; I’m seeing through every possible lens at once and I feel like I’ve known you forever. Like I’ve known the other, like I am the other, I see myself reflected in the other and the glasses become a mirror. It’s intimate, and intimacy exhibits our best features and exposes our darkest attributes and secrets. To see the world so brilliantly is an ethical dilemma, a question with no answer; the glasses are the answer to questions you didn’t even know you had but they are also the question itself, and to look through them is to understand so deeply at the cost of knowing you will never know fully. I wear the glasses and I see millennia in minutia, I see a method by which I can agree to disagree and a means by which we are imprisoned and entrapped and enticed and free and this is what anthropology is to me.

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