Bias is inherent to existence. Every aspect of our worldview distorts and warps our interpretation of information, like facets in a sheet of glass. In anthropology — the study of humanity through culture, society, and human behaviour — minimizing bias is important. When analyzing a culture other than our own, it’s important not to jump to conclusions that may seem clear within our worldview; those conclusions often fall apart with more context.

Out for Launch

Our launch activity made the importance of reducing bias very clear. It showed how we could use only the context of a single image to deduce something about the society that made it. For example, my group was given this image to analyze¹:

My immediate first impression was that this was a knife evidenced, as our teachers pointed out, by the shape of the handle and the presence of serrations. The manufacturing of the knife itself also posed a clue, as it showed that whatever “society” it was from could work with metal and wood in a fairly precise manner. The last clue we picked apart was the large circular cutouts, which showed that it was likely meant for some sort of heavy duty cutting, where the holes could catch offshoots. What this whole activity showed is that taking something at face value usually isn’t enough ( other groups got much harder objects than us ), but that even while thinking about an object in complete isolation you can glean a lot of useful information from it.

The future

In this project, we’ll be learning about how we can adopt an anthropological perspective in our thinking, specifically within the context of learning about the indigenous peoples of Canada. My goal as an anthropological thinker is to be able to analyze and understand new information in ways that minimize the impact of my own biases. In the last project my intentions were largely set around learning about the role of western systems in the oppression of indigenous peoples, which I feel was reflected in the rest of the project, and in most of history of indigenous peoples we’ve studied since grade 8. So much of our knowledge has been affected by the white settler worldview of those who recorded it. Even in this, the learning was largely through a western lens, so the next step is to start to more deeply understand indigenous culture with the aforementioned anthropological perspective. Maybe we’ll be examining our own culture, and the harms we’ve caused to indigenous peoples. Maybe we’ll be trying to clear biases, and make some sort of action towards reconciliation.² To be honest, I haven’t heard much about what the rest of this project will look like, and I feel like my guesses are pretty far off, but I’m exited to learn more!

Since we’re going very day-by day with this, my time blocking, scheduling, and informational front loading goals from my VMV will be very useful to help me stay on top of whatever comes next, and as always, my zettelkasten will be the primary way I digest info.

That’s been my intentions, thanks for reading!

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1. I didn’t save the photo from the activity, but I managed to track down it’s original source to this reddit post ↩︎
2. Fair disclaimer, these are nothing more than educated shots in the dark. ↩︎