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It is important to me personally to know
what it means to be human because
I share this planet with people who
are very different from me and my own
little life is small in comparison to
the rest of the world and so I want to
enlarge my world view.
Also, there are so many different ways
of being human.
One of the key concepts in anthropology
is cultural relativism.
Cultural relativism assumes that
we want to understand from within,
to understand another culture’s way of life
and the ways of being human to them
that may be different from our own.
There is a saying, ‘if you only know
one religion, you don’t know any.
If you only know one kinship system,
you don’t know any.’
And so, by understanding and knowing about
the rest of the world and how different it is,
I think we develop a kind of greater awareness
of our own lives in relationship and how
some of the choices we have made may not
have been constructed for us but have been
constructed by culture.
So, I think, ultimately, when we expand what
it means to be human in our understanding
then we come to a better understanding
of our own self and it gives us the kind of
compassion for our lives and the lives of
everyone on the planet that we may not
be able to cultivate if we don’t seek out
that knowledge.
It changes how we see ourselves in
relationship to the rest of the world,
and it is humbling, but it’s also inspiring.
Sometimes students come into the class
and they’re well educated, but they get into
an anthropology class and they say ‘why
didn’t anyone ever tell us these things before?’
and they want to know,
and they feel as if they have a right to know,
and they don’t always want to be protected
from knowing the hard things, knowing
the suffering that goes on in the world
and our own relationship to that suffering
and to what humans are capable of.
And I think that they have a right to know,
and they don’t need to be protected,
that this is also a part of education,
to know all that is human and all
that humans are capable of even when it’s
not pleasant, even when it’s not easy to hear.