Anthropological art (warning: graphic)
Anthropologists are lauded for the bravery of their fieldwork and the nuance of their social theories. Seldom do they get credit for something else -- the sheer coolness of their diagrams.
John Curran, a senior anthro major* at George Washington University is trying to remedy that: This summer he posted some seventy-odd of the most fascinating scholarly graphics that he's come across in his brief, passionate acquaintance with the field. They include:
Claude Levi-Strauss's classic depiction of the relationship between nature and culture:
A 19th-century schematic created by a tribesman on the Tuamotu Islands, depicting the organization of the cosmos, saved by a Western observer and later reproduced in the Journal of the Polynesian Society, in 1919. The drawing was one of the inspirations for Margaret Mead's journey to Samoa:
And, from a 1992 article by Pitzer College's Claudia Strauss, "What Makes Tony Run?", a depiction of the forces driving one man to adopt a hobby that set him apart from other family members:
*I'm not sure if Curran is still a senior, as it says on his blog, or if he's graduated. (Maybe he's on his way to anthropology grad school, aiming to bring new diagrams into the world.) I'll clarify if and when I hear from him.
