Meg's Anthropology Portfolio

   https://megsbaaportfolio.blogspot.com Shared Meal The meal I will be using as an example for this portfolio task was a grazing board. This board consisted of many different components and types of food.    I shared this meal with my friends and this meal allowed us to engage with our senses, in the physical way of creating the food by setting it up, using our hands to pick up the items and tasting each component.  - Images sourced by author (2023).  The concept behind this meal allows us to engage with our emotional senses, due to the togetherness this meal brings about. The purpose behind this grazing board is to share, and for our meal, this meant not only sharing the food but also sharing conversation with each other.  This meal helps remind us of times where we have previously shared food, whether that be with our friends or back at home with our family, making it nostalgic/ memorable.  Certain food items are unique to e...

  https://megsbaaportfolio.blogspot.com Paranthropus boisei Image sourced by myself from the Anthropology lab at Oxford Brookes University.  This image is of a Paranthropus boisei, which lived about 2.3 to 1.2 million years ago Eastern Africa. This shows us the development of human eating and is commonly known for heavy chewing. (Smithsonian. 2022). Due to the different development of the face to previous hominins, this meant that the Paranthropus boisei developed to have larger teeth, four times bigger than humans today, due to their larger cheek bones. It has gained the name "nutcracker man" due to this feature. (Smithsonian. 2022). Image sourced from  Lillyundfreya (2017) The History of Our Tribe '18. Paranthropus boisei'.  This image highlights to modern day humans what our ancestors appeared like and the crucial role they played in our development, such as the fact that they had such a broad range on earth and survived for a million years . They were much ...

 https://megsbaaportfolio.blogspot.com ' E V I L E Y E ' - Pitt Rivers Museum For my chosen item, I envisage this being in a history museum in a historic house/ building as it would not be fitting for an object of such age to be in a "modern" building. This item would fit well in the classification of a museum of human life rather than a museum of the everyday.  The idea of the Evil Eye has been recorded to go back 5,000 years ago to Iraq. For many, wearing this symbol ensures protection from evil and that the evil will come and be deflected away by this symbol. (Pitt Rivers Museum. 1884. Amulets) The Hand Amulet dates back to Persia in 1891 and can often be seen worn today.                                                         Image sourced from a website  Henryka (Henryka.co.uk) <-Image sourced...

https://megsbaaportfolio.blogspot.com WEEK 7- BLOG 6 Ethnographic writing  This ethnography took place in Costa, Oxford. Whilst I was in here, I was aiming to explore how the space is used in this social setting. So for the time I was here, I observed that many used it in the same way. For example, everyone faced each other, people at the back half of the cafe faced the front and vice versa.   This raises an interesting question of why this is? A possible explanation could be that because people naturally wanted to be able to be aware of the others in the shop. This made me aware that I subconsciously did the same. Perhaps it is so we can know we are safe? From further research of this idea, it became apparent that humans have always been innately hardwired to be aware of our surroundings. Nigel Nicholson explored this idea: "You can take the person out of the Stone Age, not the Stone Age out of the person."  - Nicholson (1998)...

  https://megsbaaportfolio.blogspot.com Natural History Museum Portfolio Project  The Blue Morpho- Morpho menelaus (Ecuador) - Authors own picture sourced from Natural History Museum, Oxford .  These butterflies typically are found within South America and in the Amazon rainforest. These beautiful creatures are at threat from factors such as deforestation and habitat fragmentation, which can come from roads being implemented which breaks up the natural areas.  (Lewis. R, 2016) Is this butterfly really the blue colour we can see?  To our eyes, we can see a beautiful shade of aquamarine blue but is this really the case? The answer is no, this butterfly is actually producing something known as structural colour. What this means is that it the colour we are seeing is not actually the colour of the butterfly but rather a structure that reflects wavelengths of light, which allows us to see the blue wings. This is because in nature, blue is a very rare colour to come...

 https://megsbaaportfolio.blogspot.com  Critical Feedback for Essay C: " What are the advantages of the concept of 'relatedness' over that of 'kinship'?" Essay C on the whole was a well-written essay with many references to different approaches to the advantages of the concept of ‘relatedness’ over that of ‘kinship’. However, the essay does lack the detail of critical judgement which could have been achieved. For example, in the main body paragraph 1, line starting “Many anthropologists…”, this paragraph has good ideas but the lacked the depth it could have gone into. This paragraph could have had more detail about why David Schneider (1984) thought that fictive kin carried these negative connotations. In addition, in paragraph 2, there could have been an example given which supports the judgement that conducting fieldwork through the lens of traditional kinship studies lacks certain acknowledgments, as by giving this example it creates a stronger and more con...