News from Otherwhere
Without relating much to the article&#x27;s particular examples, I&#x27;ll say this about anthropology and sociology: among people who have studied several domains (e.g. the idea of a &quot;major&quot; and a &quot;minor&quot; in most Anglo-cultural countries, or simply people who tried at several things), of which one was anthropo-&#x2F;socio-logy, a striking majority report that these were the studies that helped them the most, generally, in life, whatever their trade.<p>(you can safely remove cases of doctors or lawyers or engineers who cannot do without the major, obviously; consider general studies for most jobs out there that fill 80% of businesses)<p>My anecdotal opinion is that anthropology in particular triggers a formidable widening of your conception of &quot;human&quot;, &quot;society&quot;, &quot;rules&quot;, all these abstract yet incredibly tangible concepts &#x2F; objects.<p>It&#x27;s hard to explain concisely, but the promise is that you get closer to having some sort of &quot;third eye&quot;[1] at a collective level, i.e. regarding your own family, crew, city, country, planet. A typical case of &quot;can&#x27;t <i>un</i>-see&quot; which screams all the relativity of human cultures and behaviors — i.e. outside of biology (and even there), &quot;normal&quot; means very little in natural terms, normalcy is pretty much acquired &#x2F; trained &#x2F; cultural.<p>I&#x27;d recommend anthropology (and some sociology to link it with current &#x2F; modern societies) to anyone wanting to &quot;expand their mind&quot; <i>a lot</i> about what it means to be human, how our rules and ways of life are both relative and potentially <i>very</i> variable, and generally to be able to navigate all the political mumbo-jumbo of human groups and circles (family, office, public, etc).<p>____<p>[1]: in a down-to-earth psychological meaning, the &quot;third eye&quot; is one&#x27;s ability to look at oneself from a third-person perspective, i.e. to remove the camera from subjectivity (&quot;1st person view&quot;), to observe oneself from the outside. I think Freud called it the &quot;it&quot;.<p>It&#x27;s a trained habit that we think biomechanically enabled by the prefrontal cortex, and likely instrumental in making us &quot;sapiens sapiens&quot;, i.e. able to reflect upon ourselves, self-awareness. I am implying that anthropology is one way to acquire this skill from a collective standpoint, i.e. &quot;see how <i>we</i> (the <i>we</i>&#x27;s you belong to: your family, or office, city, country...) are different from <i>others</i>, see how we are and how we <i>could</i> be, have been, or would become.&quot;<p>You&#x27;d think like me that you know it all because you&#x27;ve seen the world (all hemispheres, all continents), you&#x27;re opened to or knowledgeable about other cultures blablaba, and you take 1 class in anthropology with a great teacher and your mind is blown — how limited, little, narrow your ideas were, how much bigger that thing actually is.