Thick Travel
Finding meaning by going elsewhere
I’ve been reading The Interpretations of Culture, a book of essays by Clifford Geertz.
Geertz was an anthropologist whose goal was refining his craft — which is really that of trying to understand how we humans operate, and why we operate the way we do.
Anthropologists do this by spending lots of time watching people, often those that are very different from themselves, in the hope of understanding them. At one level it’s an odd and creepy thing to do, and if done wrong, as it has been done many times in the past, it can be rather awful. Intellectual voyeurism1.
Done right, which means with nuance and respect, it can be a window into a fuller understanding of what it means to be a human, because what differentiates us from all the other animals is the diversity in how we live. We are not slaves to our animal instincts. There is a greater difference between a resident of Hanoi and a resident of Istanbul than there is between a rat in Hanoi and one in Istanbul.
Rats, and other animals, live rather similar lives, in their daily patterns, regardless of where they are born, driven by their inborn instincts.
While so much of modern discourse is about the universality of humanity, it really is our differences that define us as a big-brained species that uses constructed tools (literally and figuratively), rather than genetically programmed instincts, to survive and thrive.
And those differences are what comprise a place’s culture.