field work and the "real world"

Before people were able to communicate verbally, people were communicating by their common interest in doing things that constituted toward their survival. Before words even related collective actions and feelings of diverse backgrounds, people were acting instinctually through the context of their mimed relations.

            Mothers and children are known to have a wordlessly detailed form of communication that the English language has yet to identify. Mothers do not need to study this form of communication because through experience they know. As a student outside this knowing bond, I study people to enrich the perception of growth of others in order to grow myself. I recognize the difference of backgrounds and accept the fact that I cannot change my way of perceiving entirely through experience but only by the way in which others inform me such as the way in which mothers experience motherhood.

 We briefly discussed in class identified art in specific locations where natives would categorize the same objects as objects. In the video, The Darwinian Theory of Beauty spoken by Dennis Dutton professor of aesthetic philosophy, he mentions how “the experience of beauty is one of the ways that evolution has of arousing and sustaining interest, fascination or even obsession in order to encourage us [or human beings] in making the most adaptive decisions towards surviving and reproduction.” If peoples objects are valued at different levels of association within their reflective influences, are peoples relationships susceptible this kind of judgment as well? If objects are simply the outcome of creativity and creativity is the outcome of utilized natural forms, where exactly is this line drawn between our own cultural perception of natural and artistic beauty? Based on instinctive actions and responses to experience, can a line be drawn in all cultures between natural beauty and artistic beauty if we can all identify one landscape as beautiful as Dutton suggested? I do not suggest when drawing this parallel between certain qualities of nature and artistic need to this discussion as attractive in the sense of reproducing but for act simply appreciating their existence for as it is. They are one in the same, they just are, at a distance, selected to be there for the sake of being there. Humans have a knack for giving reason to why something exists and what for. If nature and art is needed by life and sustained by sexual selection, creativity, fitness, collective experiences, and the evolution of similar ties, why must one culture be subjected to study by the studying? Fred Myers, professor and author of “Anthropologies of the Future, Ethnographies of the Past” discusses the role of “modern social reality” (Myers 4) of “field study” and the effects in the “real world.” When he made a reference to another author David Harvey, I thought that time and space was compressed by expansion through globalization and the collective desire of individual growth. Anthropology is not only a study of another culture but it is the study of how two cultural influences coincide and grow together. Like the motherly experiences I mentioned earlier, that relate back to our primordial way of coexisting without words and through living, people grow by taking from the land and giving back through the construction of objects.