A License to Judge People? :)

A friend of mine once said that I can come and judge a society because I have a degree specifically on that. I can say "Dude, I'm judging you and I can! I have a degree for that!" Haha. Yes, I have a degree on Anthropology, a science which tries to figure out human beings. That's just about it. Human beings. Anthropos.

Spending almost 4 years in college, learning a science of unravelling the nature of human being, seeking pattern in their behaviour and trying to describe and explain "culture", you would think that I, the person who manage to hold a degree on anthropology, would be able to explain human beings and culture a lot easier than those who doesn't. While this may hold true for other anthropologists out there, it is just completely the opposite for me. But maybe I'm just a really crappy anthropologist :)

I have met a lot of people who would talk a lot about what they know and what they think, about people, society and culture. They would speak in a very confident manner, going through various topic about various people and society. Most of the time, I just listen and most of the time, I didn't and couldn't reciprocate. I would have this complicated toughts racing in my head, faster than I could understand it and a lot faster than I could articulate it.

Why? Because the first thing I learned from my anthropology courses is that: I don't know a damn thing about people. People and society are just....complicated.

First of all, do you know that there are more than 400 definitions of culture? So when somebody ask a question that they considered simple question "what is culture?" I would just think "well, shit".

Second, anthropologist spend years, and I mean years, doing research in a society until they are confident enough to write an ethnography (a description) about what they think (what the anthropologist think) about that particular society (only that particular society). In anthropology, we learn about cultural relativism, we learn about ethnographic method, we learn about how careful we must be in drawing a conclusion about a society. Almost the same with how careful a chemist must be in creating a chemistry experiment; taking notes, ensure safety, selecting the right tools, ensure the tools are clean, ensure the measurement is correct, etc. The different is, we cannot measure "people" with a beaker glass or scale and we cannot label them with alphabets and make equation out of them. The only tool an anthropologist has is him/herself; his/her senses and his/her judgement.

I don't actually know what I wanted to say in this post, except that sometimes, people who doesn't take such careful measure before judging something bothers me. A lot. I myself still make this mistake sometimes; too easy in judging something, but I try not to and I am lucky to have a wise person in my life to always remind me :) But some people...doesn't even try, and can't be reminded of it. And that bothers me.