Thursday, April 6, 2017
Category: Research and scholarship
Artifacts help students understand shared humanity
By Jenell Paris, professor of sociology and anthropology
Our globally interconnected world brings together people and cultures in new ways. In cultural anthropology, a general education course, students study how their lives are connected with seemingly distant others, and how all cultures are changing as globalization intensifies.
I acquired priceless artifacts of the Ju/’hoansi, a group of San people living in the Kalahari regions of Botswana and Namibia—countries in southern Africa. The artifacts are from the 1970s, and show Ju/'hoansi traditional hunter-gatherer lives.
Messiah students appreciate the knowledge necessary to gather water in ostrich egg carriers, make beads from ostrich eggs, and hunt successfully with handmade bows and arrows. The artifacts were from a collection held by the Kalahari Peoples Fund, a nonprofit organization devoted to the well-being of San peoples.
The Ju/'hoansi are surviving in the twenty-first century, adapting to this new context by adopting new subsistence practices such as agriculture and wage labor, developing literacy, and learning multicultural communication skills. Messiah students do the same, developing adaptations for living in a rapidly changing global economy. Our lives are like those of remote desert dwellers of southern Africa in these ways, and we are also linked to them through our consumption of diamonds, cell phones (a necessary mineral used to power smartphones is mined from Ju/'hoansi land), and tourism. 
Seeing and touching sandals, beads and arrows brings students in touch with the common humanity they share with all people. People around the world are both distant and close. Those of other cultures are both very different, and very similar. Anthropology teaches skills for living well, and for serving humanity, in a globalized context. Artifacts such as these transform the teaching of cultural anthropology, a priceless addition to a Messiah education.
To see more artifacts, visit this gallery.
Learn more about Messiah’s major in sociology and anthropology.