Anthropologically Correct

Recently, during a conversation with my bestie Eric, he attempted to describe the close friendship between three people I don't know and have never met. Part of how he described the friendship to me was to say that they - the three close friends - had their own language, their own vocabulary.

In the seconds that followed, I did a quick tally in my mind. Yup. My friends and I have our own language. A large, expansive vocabulary of things we've just made up. Sometimes we make up words, and sometimes we attach completely arbitrary meanings to words that already exist. The fact is, if you'd never met the besties and me, and you sat down and listened in on a conversation - you might discover that you have no effing clue what we were talking about.

Learning how we talk, and what we mean when we say the things we say, is part of getting to know us; being briefed on our vocabulary is a good sign - we like you and think you should be able to understand what it is that we're saying.

A long, long time ago while I was a fresh-faced undergraduate, I took a class in cultural anthropology. Now, as is custom for my memory, I remember - vividly - a mere two things from that class. The first is the exact location and appearance of the room in which we met for class. The second is that my professor lived on Nantucket - my school was in Framingham, not at all near Nantucket - and she flew over in a plane every week, stayed in her local apartment, and then flew back to the island from whence she came.

Needless to say, the anthropological value of this trip-taking to the mainland constantly preoccupied me - and, perhaps that's now why I can't remember a single fucking thing about that class except for those two things: The location, and my professor's extensive commute and time spent living amongst the natives (read: mainland college kids).

Do not let my lack of memory take away from the fact that I wholeheartedly enjoyed the class, and was on many occasions struck by a sense of "holy shit the world is so big and so small all at once, and everything is related to long-held cultural standards that we don't even consider anymore."

According to this website, anthropology is "a science of humankind. It studies all facets of society and culture. It studies tools, techniques, traditions, language, beliefs, kinships, values, social institutions, economic mechanisms, cravings for beauty and art, struggles for prestige. It describes the impact of humans on other humans. With the exception of the Physicial Anthropology discipline, Anthropology focuses on human characteristics generated and propogated by humans themselves."

So, let's just break it down really quickly. I'll tell you that the besties and I are all from the same geographical location, we all work in the same business, and we all went to elementary & high school together.

Okay, that being said - let's take it a step further; this website says that a tribe "is, in anthropology, a notional form of human social organization based on a set of smaller groups (known as bands), having temporary or permanent political integration, and defined by traditions of common descent, language, culture, and ideology."

So, basically, we're a tribe.

And, as a tribe of crazies, I think there should be an anthropological investigation that reports on us. I think it would be highly, highly entertaining and amusing.

Anyone with a camera feel like making a hilarious anthropologically-driven documentary about a tribe of best friend waitresses in the wondrous Whaling City?

It could be good. Really good.