Dirck van Bekkum – Welcome to an Anthropo-Gazing way of being-in-the-world. (original) (raw)
About this site
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Anthropology, as a cross-cultural comparative science, in a culture-clashing world has the future. Read more..
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Ritual work (shamanism) is to see yourself and others as wholes-in-context and bringing people back therein. Read more..
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This is a hand ax around 60,000 years old. Without creative craf-ting humanity and civilization are gone. The miracle of human arting & crafting finally rises again in status. Read more..
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Rituals are perfectly applicable in Western, medical, therapeutic and everyday contexts. Read more ..
Welcome to an Anthropo-Gazing way of being-in-the-world.
Of all social sciences anthropology provides, through its method of Cross-Cultural Comparison (CCC), unique opportunities to learn more about ourselves, as individuals, as families, as groups and as nations/corporations/banks/religions, by looking at ourselves through eyes of ‘others’. We can enrich our personal/cultural truths with those of other groups, cultures and religions.
By empirical cultural comparison anthropologists are able to take a sharper gaze at ourselves as humanity seen as a complex and fragile web of interdependent social systems. Focussing on collectives/social systems we, with archaeologists and historians, are more equipped for this cultural self-reflection than most philosophers and psychologists.
In 1992, Wim Kayzer coined humanity, from his eponymous television series with famous scientists/thinkers, as: ‘A Glorious Accident’. This title reflects how I, primarily from anthropology, in this site look at myself, at us Dutch/Europeans, and at humanity. Mankind, according to anthropologist Gregory Bateson, is a ‘runaway biological system’ that has forgotten how to think how nature/earth works. In doing so we damage ourselves and our habitats. Read more..