My name is Anthony Saturno. I am a thesis writing graduate student of Florida Atlantic University in the field of Cultural Anthropology. I also work at the Jupiter campus library for FAU. Pretty much my whole life right now involves books either loaning them to fellow students or researching them for my thesis. However, most of my life has been involved in roaming the world meeting new people, trying new things, and random adventure walking.
I started this blog to share with fellow students three of my passions: Anthropology, History, and Travel. These three pursuits have a lot of commonalities with in them which I will discuss here.
Anthropology is the study of man, many times associated with studying the culture of man however it is actually much more than that. In America, differing from the rest of the world, anthropology is studied within four subfields (Cultural Anthropology, Biological Anthropology, Archaeology and Linguistics). From aaanet, one of the leading web resources for anthropologists the American Anthropological Association website, "anthropology is the study of humans past and present" (aaa.net). Cultural anthropology is used to look at cultures today and talk about the most modern aspects of cultures in a global perspective. Archaeology looks at cultures long past through a keen study of things found through digging in the dirt. Artifacts, and the context in which they are found, are unearthed, cleaned, dated and studied to come up with ideas of what cultures gone from the world may have been like. Biological anthropology looks even farther in the past at what our ancestors may have been like to help create ideas about why we are, morphologically and physically, the way we are. They also look at genetics and cognition to try and understand human behavior on the biological level, instead of looking at culture they intend look at evolutionary biology. Finally Linguistics studies the history of the way we speak, our accents, and our writing to determine how language has evolved throughout human history. They also look sometimes to biology for how our bodies were formed to promote language both in the brain and elsewhere.
History is the written and sometimes spoken record of our endeavors. Without history, anthropology would be a much harder study. We use history to locate possible archaeological sites, to get ideas of what certain peoples were like before we study them, to see the changes in language and usage of words and to determine our origins. History is an amazing thing to study because it tells us so much about ourselves and the people we are surrounded by. History has also become a great source of entertainment in the historical fictions we read and the many historical movies we watch. "Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" (Santayana, 2005).
http://classicwalksparis.com/paris/tours/french-revolution-walk
Travel, travel is the best part of any good study. It means not just reading about the world, not just writing about it but going out there and living it. In my life I have been to every continent but Africa, and have spent a great amount of time living in Asia and in the Caribbean. I think it is very important to set sail to wherever your dreams may take you. You can't say much about the Reign of Terror, if you've never been to Paris. You can't say much about the Maori people if you've never been to New Zealand.
Well I hope you enjoy this little adventure we will go on together. Next post will be about Anthropology and Religion. Two of my favorite topics! Did you know that it is believed that our ancestors as early as neanderthals had some religious custom? We were already possibly burying our dead with items for them to use in the afterlife at this time!
http://www.pasthorizonspr.com/index.php/archives/05/2011/burial-practices-in-neanderthals
References:
American Anthropological Association
2013. "What is Anthropology".http://www.aaanet.org/about/WhatisAnthropology.cfm , accessed February 5th, 2013.
Classic Walks
2013. "The French Revolution Walk". Picture taken from Classic Walks website. http://classicwalksparis.com/paris/tours/french-revolution-walk , accessed February 5th 2013.
Meyers, Kate
2011. "Burial Practices in Neanderthals?" Picture taken from Past Horizons: Adventures in Archaeology website. http://www.pasthorizonspr.com/index.php/archives/05/2011/burial-practices-in-neanderthals, accessed February 5th, 2013.
Santayana, George
2005. The Life of Reason, Vol. 1: Reason in Common Sense. In Project Gutenberg Ebook. Prepared by Fraser-Cunliffe, et al. (284). http://www.gutenberg.lib.md.us/1/5/0/0/15000/15000-h/15000-h.htm, accessed February 5th, 2013.
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