This weekend I finally got round to producing and finishing the first few copies of a tiny book I'm calling The Birth of Culture. This book is really the first step in an attempt to inject anthropology with illustration - two disparate fields which I think have much to offer yet rarely cross each other's paths (I'll be posting more on 'anthropological illustration' sometime in the next couple of weeks).
The Birth of Culture then is a book about culture in its most generic definition - a mold of some sort that shapes the lives of a group of people through a series of habits, norms and beliefs. The theme here is not just 'birth' but also this constant motion that over time can be seen as a pattern or a cycle through which cultures pass. The various stages of this cycle are represented as different chapters starting from the conception of a culture (as influenced by its geographical environment), evolution over time, cross-cultural exchange etc. I found that the easiest way of representing all this was by using symbols, or visual languages (scripts). Language (verbal and written) can often give a good idea of what a culture is all about, and I've used different invented scripts to demonstrate the myriad different ways which cultures can find themselves evolving into. It is this precisely these impossibly different ways in which human culture manifests itself and learning about what causes them to become this way which I find so compelling in anthropology.
The idea for the book's subject came over time from reading old historians and travellers like Ibn Battutah and Herodotus. As I had remarked in another blog post, it had kind of dawned on me that cultures are in constant motion and that a culture may disappear but it never really dies. As anthropologists around the world are more than aware of, the globalized nature of today's world means that cultures (especially minority ones) have never had existing so hard. On the other hand, international human migration is probably at one of its highest levels ever and while this might be endlessly fascinating to witness from an anthropological point of view, it is also - and i say this cautiously - understandably creating tension which comes along with cultural mixing within integrating societies. Therefore, creating this book is a way for me to humbly console the modern panicked anthropologist and a quiet reminder that the use of culture can often be a double edged sword - a ticket for discrimination or an opportunity to celebrate diversity in all its human forms. Lastly, it is also my first attempt in making anthropology abit more visual and accessible for the curious public.
