Amateur Anthropologist

I have to admit, the only anthropological observations I've ever made in any formal sense have been about long-dead people who left behind their potsherds. I do often muse to myself about the people around me, though, mostly out of frustration, because in crowded places I have only so much patience for people who keep me from doing what I need/want to do. (I've also been told this translates to grumpiness or judgment...I guess I can't dispute that!)

Living in Brooklyn and commuting to the museum, I get a lot of opportunities both for frustration and for observation, and usually wind up with a firm reminder that there are, in fact, other ways to look at the world and oneself than the way I do that (go figure, right?). For example, thanks to my mother I think, I tend to be hyper-conscious of people around me. This drives some people crazy because I hate creating lots of noise, taking up lots of space, or generally creating a scene, and I unload that onto whomever I'm with. I usually write it off as, "It's better to be overly cautious than inconsiderate," but who really knows. The other down side is that I have zero patience for people who don't show any consideration for others around them. I would have thought that in a city full of people, a good portion of them would have figured out how to happily and relatively unobtrusively coexist with each other. Perhaps this was naive on my part, but I figured given humanity's propensity to adapt its behavior to make the best of its environment, I couldn't be too far off with this one. Clearly I was wrong.

Take, for example, the woman in front of me on the escalator today. A crowded subway station...you can probably figure that the people who got off the train with you and followed you in a crowd to those glorious mechanical stairs that carry you out of the station-oven and into the...well, street-level oven...will be, you know, behind you on said stairs. Even though there was a stair between us, when she swung her arm around in a wide arc to heave her purse back up onto her shoulder, she came so close to clocking me in the nose with her elbow that I felt the breeze. I couldn't decided if this represented an extraordinarily well-honed sense of space--because of which she knew exactly how many spare cm she had of clearance between her arm and my face--or an extraordinarily unsuccessful one.

The other thing I notice on a daily basis is people who are completely oblivious to the fact that they share the sidewalk with others. Now, you are entitled to walk as slowly as you want to from Point A to Point B, but if you're going to do with with your friend(s), significant other, companion, or whoever you happen to have by your side, might it not occur to you to, you know, keep to one side instead of walking down the middle?

Maybe I just sound like a whiner--(although we established over lunch today at the lab that it's definitely okay to be too lazy to fix something and just whine about it instead!)--but I guess when you think about it, there are two outcomes for someone who grew up or spent a lot of time in a busy place. 1) You adapt to living as efficiently and easily as possible for you and the people around you, and you're generally conscientious of how you affect them, or 2) You frankly don't give a damn and expect that everyone is entitled to do whatever they want to do, however they want to do it. Maybe it's personal, but maybe it's cultural? We asked Fumi once at a taiko ta session how to respond to someone's sneeze in Japanese. She thought for a second, laughed at us, and said that, in fact, you just don't. Everyone kind of looks around and thinks "oooooooh you just spread germs". Now, I don't feel guilty about a well-covered sneeze walking down the street, but that's some cultural conscientiousness I could get behind.