This was something I wrote many years ago, probably around 2016. It is about how I felt as an anthropologist working among scientists, engineers, and researchers who fundamentally didn't understand what anthropology was, and why eventually I needed to leave to do science - and make a career and a life -the way I thought it should be done.
A while back, one of my supervisors (actually my boss's boss) asked me into her office. She told me that she had had a conversation about me with another colleague, and they were trying to figure out what I, as an anthropologist, could do to help with what they saw as the best directions they could take our team. They wanted to use my expertise and build it into their approach to working with their clients, and they had an idea - a way I could really make an impact. In a quiet but proud way, she told me - as if handing me the key to future success - what she thought I should do.
I should, she said, "Make a map of all the cultures in the world."
I have since told this as a dark punchline to many of my anthropological friends. They all go through a mix of surprise and laughter, and then console me.
But my supervisor was dead serious, and so if you don't get the joke, let me give you a metaphor and a scenario that, I hope, will help you understand.
Suppose for a moment that you were an aspiring artist, and you got a break and got into a good art school. Suppose you got to take a collection of classes. In your first semester, you took a class called "Theory of Color" (or something like that). The class started with a discussion of color as a physical phenomenon - wavelengths of light split through a prism to make a rainbow, that sort of thing. It moved on to how the eye perceives color (how rods and cones and the retina work), but then it moved on to a collection of other things: color as hue, saturation, opacity; color as affected by the play of light and shadow; color theory and 'harmony' of specific color palettes; color as contextual - that is, how a color looks different depending on the other colors around it. It then went further, and looked at color in the natural world, like animals'' signaling and camouflaging systems; then at color as symbolic and meaningful, but with meanings that are situated in history and that differ across space and change through time; and then at the ways that different artists have used color in their work. The last one was a special topic that you were asked to bring to your own work when you sat with your oils and canvasses late into the night.
As your studies went on you had more courses: symbolism in art from the Medieval period through the Renaissance; an entire course on the history and practice of still-life painting; anatomy and physiology and their uses in painting human and animal forms; composition and how to frame stable vs. dynamics scenes; how to depict textiles, draperies, and clothing, and what this can be used to convey; abstract and modern art, from photorealism to splatter painting; sculpture and form in three dimensions; visual art and its connection to other arts like music dance, and theater; and the function of art in society, its uses, and paths to accessibility and inclusion - art for all.
You loved the classes - even the ones you struggled in - and a piece of every one of them went into making you the artist that eventually became. You loved those nights in the studio, and you remember more than a few that turned into mornings. You bonded with your fellow students, all on their own similar journeys, and some of their ideas stirred in with yours and yours with theirs. And at the end, with your brush in your hand and a canvas in front of you, you mix and blend all these experiences into the paints, and glide them on in layers and shapes, and through this you bring forth a thing new and now, a you that you believe - you know - is meaningful and good.
You graduate, and you get a job. At your new job, the people around you say that they value you as an artist, but they're not artists, and you're not quite sure they understand. They don't have your training, and you don't think they can really make sense of it.
And one day at your new job, your boss says, "Make a list of all the colors."
You realize that they really did think up to now that it was all just black and white, and that for them, just listing the colors means they are genuinely learning more than they knew before. They don’t know what you know, and they can't see what you see. Color is just a thing to be inventoried, named, numbered, and controlled. None of the richness that you learned in school, and that made you into who you are, is even visible to them.
And you know that if that's where they're starting, and, what's more, if that's where they think they will end up, then you can't help them very much.