The humanities, rightly understood, are the things that technology cannot take away or substitute for. Of course, I don’t mean ‘humanities’ in the way that they’ve been hijacked as ideological programs of cultural change by many elite universities. I mean humanities broadly understood as the exploration of what it truly means to be human and the... See more

Asya uses anthropology’s tools to regard her own specific life and surroundings with curiosity and distance, allowing her to better understand them and to see their meaning and worth.

The gist: We live in a world of constant noise. The power of anthropology is that it can help us listen to social silence, and, above all, see what is hidden in plain sight. To listen this way, it helps to embrace tools from ethnography about being an insider-outsider and borrow ideas such as habitus, reciprocity, sense-making, and lateral vision.

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