Boas’s Constructors: The Project to Remove the Stranglehold on ‘Culture’

By John Kendall Hawkins

“‎The struggle of maturity is to recover the seriousness of a child at play.”

– Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

I remember fondly now the early days of my anthropology studies as an undergrad, talking bones in class, smoking bones after. Studying cultures, living it. Talking with my professor about Julian Jaynes’s crazy theory that human consciousness originated in “the breakdown of the bicameral mind.” And philosophy classes. Foucault, Sanity and Madness, the Narrenschiffen seaside asylums. Dancing in a tie-dyed tee after Mandela’s release from the apart-hate system. Reading The Left Hand of Darkness (talk about mind fucks). Global Marley, white blues Dylan, we were changing the world one tune at a time, in our minds.

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