For this week’s post, I want to discuss more the cartoon that Professor Himpele showed at the beginning of class. We talked about how the anthropologists’ subject were scrambling to hide their technologies like phones, Tvs and lamps. This made me want to touch back on this notion of representation and like Rei said in her post, “accurate” representation.

Let’s say the anthropologists represented in the cartoon come and study this new culture. After some time, they believe they have an accurate representation that is ready to be shared in some form of media. The problem is, they missed a whole side of their subject’s culture (IE the technology in this case). To the anthropologist, they have studied and recorded this new culture to the best of their abilities but will always fail to share everything of that culture. Does it even matter if they didn’t see some aspects of their lives? Will the media they produce be wrong or inaccurate if it is exactly what the anthropologists observed?

Rei’s post reminded me that this is also something I have been struggling with while diving deeper in anthropology over the past two years. If the goal of anthropologists is to study and communicate their findings, how can they be sure they were able to experience every turtle ? And finally, does it even matter if one turtle was left out?