Anthropology department spotlights what makes us human

Alice McGuire
Staff Writer

Christopher Barrett is the chair of the social sciences department at WCC. At one point, he taught all of the anthropology courses that were then offered.

He also said, “Anthropology says you can basically look at any aspect of human behavior, biology, history–any of that. And we can combine it together into a clear understanding of what it is to be human.”

Barrett described anthropology in North America as being divided up into four main fields: cultural anthropology, archaeology, biological anthropology and linguistic anthropology.

When recalling how he first stumbled into studying anthropology, Barrett said, “I was always interested in evolutionary biology, and I was always interested in bone and teeth. And biological anthropology really gives you an opportunity to work with that and to work with prehistoric populations.”

“That was really the most exciting part of it. When you start working with 2,000, 4,000, or 8,000-year-old human remains, you can actually start saying something about the health of these people, how they lived, and how they adapted to their environments. I found that really exciting.”

Barrett said he thinks that a lot of students are surprised that there’s a lot of math involved.

“With biological anthropology, there’s a lot of hypothesis testing, there’s a lot of fieldwork and data collections. When people think of the sciences and they think of something like biology, it’s a lot more like that than it is like socio-cultural anthropology, which is a little bit more like sociology, but with very different goals,” said Barrett.

Julia Joblinski, an archaeologist and part-time faculty member, attributed her current career to a childhood passion.

“I think you’ll find that for a lot of archaeologists. Egypt was kind of their main catalyst, especially at a young age. I was pretty obsessed with ancient Egypt and Egyptology between seven and eight years old, and I kind of never let go of it,” she said.

Joblinski has found anthropological concepts such as cultural relativism to be helpful for learning to navigate human interactions and even retail jobs, and she hopes that students who take a class–even if just for fun–will gain a better appreciation of what archaeology is and what to do to protect “material culture” if they ever encounter an archaeological site.

Adam Flachsmann is a current Liberal Arts Transfer student who wants to transfer to the University of Michigan. He plans to major in anthropology, with a focus on cultural studies and forensics.

Flachsmann said he wanted to know what the world was like outside of his own neighborhood and said that some of his fondest memories were of going to the local library with his mom and picking out “any random book about any different culture” as the complexity of human beings fascinated him.

“The beauty of anthropology is that it really benefits a generalist like myself. You don’t necessarily have to find yourself stuck in a niche because there’s so much under the umbrella that you can kinda bounce back and forth between topics,” said Flachsmann. “There’s so much to it that I find myself more fascinated the deeper I dive into it.”

Flachsmann said he thinks one of the biggest skills that he’s ever learned in a cultural anthropology class was just the ideal of cultural relativism, which is that the only way to really observe another group of people is to try to think within their perspective–and of their day and time instead of thinking like, ‘Oh these people are kind of weird. They don’t do things like me.’ It incredibly skews how you can do proper research or even view another person.

Barrett said that people are not aware as to how much culture affects their day-to-day lives, the kinds of decisions that they make, the kind of biases that they have about the world around them–you are literally swimming in cultural soup and most people are unaware of how it affects their day to day lives.

“If you want to really get a sense of what being a human being is and what the human experience actually is, anthropology is really the only discipline that takes every aspect of that and puts it together into a whole,” said Barrett.

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