For my first post, I thought I’d present something I wrote quite a while ago, but still feels like a very current take on my feelings about anthropology. It was originally written (and delivered) as a commencement speech, in the spring of 2000:
I did my fieldwork in Northern Ireland, and I worked mostly with primary school kids. These were working-class kids, who lived in the neighborhoods hardest hit by the violence and poverty engendered by and at least partly responsible for the Troubles, the Protestant/Catholic divide. …