They wrote about their findings in their 1967 book The Forest of Symbols. Zachary Davis: In the mid-20th century, British anthropologists Victor and Edith Turner studied the Ndembu people of present-day Zambia. I'm a professor of religion at Columbia University where I teach courses in the anthropology of religion as well as on media, ritual, and the body. There is not, you know, an innate disposition to these kinds of things which fuel and underpin a lot of Western social theory but also contemporary social-scientific disciplines and more kind of common understandings, you know, what we might call within anthropology the folkways of the moderns, right? Matthew Engelke: I think one of the central findings of anthropology and one of the big picture takeaways is that we are, by and large, creatures of nurture rather than nature, right? So, we are not hardwired to do X or Y. It was exciting to realize that so many things that seemed “natural” to me as an American were really just a different way of life. It was the first time I’d been in a different country than the United States, and I was amazed at all the ways Spaniards lived differently than me, like taking long naps in the middle of the day and then staying up till midnight eating and drinking in outdoor cafes! Or watching a man with a red cape theatrically kill an angry bull. Zachary Davis: When I was 16, I moved to Madrid, Spain to do a high school semester abroad.
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