Dear HumanKind (& EarthKin)

First of all, I am endlessly inspired by the depth and breadth of your curiosity, creativity, ingenuity, diversity, complexity, and your work ethic. Since I was a young kid, I've always marveled at the consciousness and experience of being alive and being human. I've also pondered the fact that a seemingly infinite line of ancestors had to successfully survive and procreate to eventually produce me at a particular time and place.

Five Generations of TLC's Family Fan

This spiritual and intellectual fascination has led to some pretty amazing personal journeys, projects, and relationships, but such conscious engagement with you is also bittersweet and often paradoxical. Alongside my childhood wonder for existence developed an awareness that the human capacity for and demonstrations of cruelty, destruction, complacency, and injustice are as far-reaching and powerful as the most beautiful and magnificent of human potential, ideals, and accomplishments. Throughout my life, I have both embraced and railed against different social structures and cultural expectations that I encountered, all in an attempt to understand and mitigate the tensions and constraints of shared identity and belonging. 

I admit that long before I every consciously chose to become an anthropologist, I designed and conducted social experiments and observed you in my everyday life and wondered what types of cultural norms and cues which people responded to. For example, if you went to high school with me and thought I dressed weird, it was sometimes part of a large and ongoing experiment to see who would talk to me depending on how I was dressed on any given day. I played with and performed different identities before I knew that's what I was doing or had the language to describe it. It was not out of disrespect but genuine curiosity, befuddlement, and amazement that I performed and parodied alternate versions of supposedly natural social configurations. 

Manchester Opera House in Manchester, England (August 2013)

Over time, I've developed a little more self-awareness and sophistication in how I participate in and observe the fascinating and infinite array of human qualities, activities, aspirations, and impacts on Planet Earth. Training in the discipline of anthropology (among numerous other learning processes I've engaged in) has helped me situate aspects of daily life into larger understandings of human history and what even constitutes reality. However, I'm still human after all, and I have a particular gift of being a clumsy one in both comedic and tragic ways; so I'm still, and will hopefully always be, very much a student and less of an expert on anything. 

I also have to admit that I am quite often disturbed and disappointed by what I observe about human values, behavior, and consequences in the world. Attempting to understand the range of human experience and expressions from an anthropological lens does not exempt me from feeling frustrated, lonely, and hopeless about humanity. In fact, sometimes this lens magnifies my own pessimistic tendencies rather than alleviating them. So I will occasionally occupy the status of misanthrope as I wrestle with the sadness and sickness that we're capable of inflicting on ourselves and one another. However, my critical stance does not represent antagonism but rather an honest and loyal attempt to challenge humans to imagine and embody their (our) best selves.

Outside el Museo de Arte Indigena 
in Sucre, Bolivia (July 2013)

For a long time, I've been thinking about writing you this letter (and what may result in an ongoing series of letters) because I couldn't think of any other way to say what I need to say. Granted, I'm not always sure what I want to say, much less need to say, so I just want you to know that this is as much about me as it is about you. Again because I'm human, sometimes it will be impossible to talk to or about "you" without implicating myself. I will try to denote this consciously through the use of "(y)our" when my own thoughts and actions are clearly embedded in my reflections about all of us.

Likewise, rather than anthrocentrically limit my appeal to "you" human people, I want to expand my communication with and advocacy for non-human EarthKin who share our terrestrial home and the same life-imbued and life-giving material existence as human beings. Sometimes I will address my letters to "HumanKind" or "EarthKin" individually and sometimes to both collectively, depending on the message and its primary audience. I have a feeling that some of my missives may include urgent calls for HumanKind and EarthKin to get along already, though I'm aware in advance that addressing such disconnects is a much more complicated matter than words alone can resolve.

Early morning view from Pine Mountain on the way down to Whitesburg, Kentucky (June 2015)

Growing up, I had several pen pals in various parts of the country and the world with whom I maintained written snail-mail correspondence based on different kinds of affinities. For example, in middle school I became pen pals with a young woman from Chicago and another from England that I met through a sticker trading exchange. Later through my high school Spanish classes, I became pen pals with a young man from Puerto Rico who I corresponded with in Spanish. I've also maintained many close yet long-distance family relationships and friendships through letter-writing throughout the years, so this form of communication seems natural. The multimedia format and hypertextual capabilities afford some especially interesting variations on an old theme through a new media and broader audience.

I hope this initial letter leads to a more interactive instead of one-sided correspondence, but at the very least, I hope that some of what I think about and learn is useful to others. These letters will have an anthropological emphasis insofar as this is currently the world and worldview that I occupy as a doctoral student in the discipline. Just know that I'm sincere in my desire to understand one another better and that I value both your past and your potential. Also know that every letter will not always be quite so serious and more often than not will likely devolve into plain silliness.

Thanks for being my new pen pal. I look forward to future conversations...

Be Kind, Be Kin,
*AnthroBone

p.s. Both my academic and creative work involve audiovisual art and media, so here is an inaugural audio Jem for the HumanKind & EarthKin soundtrack.