My first semester of sophomore year at OSU, I took cultural anthropology. The class taught us the traditional vocabulary and history, etc. But the most important take away from that class and the largest emphasis from the professor was how to look at the world through a different lens. One of the concepts taught was on social structure, how most of ‘reality’ is a cultural construction, and is filtered through our expectations of what is possible, right, or true (Wesch). One of the readings we had was about how different cultures view marriage and relationships, and was overall about how the idea of monogamy held in western culture is not universal. Seeing how normal something so different from my own culture is in other’s respective cultures really opened my eyes up to the idea that culture socially defines our own realities. There was also a story we had learned about a blind kid who had no limits to his expectations for himself and was able to use echolocation in a sense to ‘see’. The author focused on the concept that other’s expectations for blind or disabled people limit their realities to what they are actually capable of. This is another story that furthered my changed view on reality and allowed me to really see how my perception is crafted by my culture and society. This way of thinking like an anthropologist helps me break down limits and expectations I hold of the world and people, and allow me to be much more open minded in many different aspects in life.
