'How To Think Like An Anthropologist' And Why You Should Want To

Civilization originated in the Fertile Crescent region, including parts of modern-day Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel and Egypt. That's the lesson most of us learned in school.

In it, civilization is used in a highly positive way to refer to the rise of city-states and the development of writing around the 4th millennium B.C.

But today, civilization is an idea too often used against people living in that area of the world, sociocultural anthropologist Matthew Engelke explains in his new book How To Think Like An Anthropologist. Engelke quotes, as an example, a U.S. Army colonel who, in conjunction with the war on terror, said this: "In Western Iraq, it's like it was six centuries ago with the Bedouins in their goat hair tents."

We need to see this statement and others like it for what it is, Engelke says: An attempt to relegate the Bedouins to living fossils who are stuck in time and badly in need of being civilized by the West.

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https://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2018/02/13/585373063/how-to-think-like-an-anthropologist-and-why-you-should-want-to