Last weekend it struck me! I am exactly where I was back in 1981. Then, I was a University of Michigan undergrad seeking an independent study with the esteemed Professor of Anthropology, Michael Whalen, PhD. My pitch was that cultures could be linked by myth as an extension to motifs found on pottery, et cetera et cetera.
My idea sprung from a semester project I undertook to heat treat river chert for flintknapping in Professor Karl Hutter’s class “Technology” and reading Professor Charles Redman’s approach to narrating of cultures of prehistory. The term ‘prehistory’ indicates that these were people without their own written record.
I wanted to hear the voices of those ancient people whose oral records, I posited, did survive in myths. My motivation was that I was full of visceral unease with most of the narrations within academia’s bound books and journal articles.
A month or so later I was getting reamed out by Professor Whalen. The gist of it was that I was not using the scientific method and that the books I had pulled from the stacks of the Graduate Library were old and thus full of the fanciful.
There was a parallel Classical Archaeology department within the University, but they were regarded as a quaint relic and their collections from Egypt and Greece were on the opposite corner of campus—so was the chasm. While Whalen’s decibels collected an audience outside his door, I was thinking I probably applied to the wrong school.
Last weekend I was pulling books from my collection and reading creation stories from a geographical region from east of the Balkans to west of the Aral Sea and from north of the Black Sea to south of Mesopotamia. The nexus of my passion project since 2017 lies on the Anatolian Peninsula.
I got up to answer the door. When I returned, I recognized that I had encircled myself essentially in a return to my undergraduate idea, albeit from different angle. Back in 1981, I cowered and retreated and reframed my independent study to align with the dogma of the day.
Today, however outrageous this journey to piece my ancestry beyond documented records, by pairing DNA trails with my Grandmothers’ particular folk practices and devotion, I am staying the course—and so enjoying it!
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Each one of us has an idea of something that we are to nurture. Do you know what yours is?