For the last ten years I’ve been teaching college courses in Anthropology and Geography. But last month I signed on to join Teach for America where I will transition into teaching middle school or high school. Sometimes at the end of the semester I would recite this poem for students, to try and capture everything we’ve learned in the entire term. Also, I wrote this about two years ago, and I realized recently that I never actually posted it even though it’s one of my favorite pieces that I’ve written.

This spoken word poem is inspired by the core message of Anthropology so artfully put by Horace Minor many years ago. he said that anthropology is, “Making the strange familiar and the familiar strange.”
This poem also appears in my book, A Luminous Liminality: A Collection of Poetry and Art

It’s All Relative

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It’s all about relations,

No I don’t mean sexual intercourse,

I mean how people build their foundations

How they relate to causation, or build a nation

And what they consider freedom and liberation

The tracks of humanity don’t just stop at one station

The imagination is filled with endless destinations

Everyone has hopes and dreams, sorrows and frustrations

Everyone wants to experience the sensation of cessation of suffering and damnation

Options

We are a range of cultural options

Our choices are the result of a kind of cultural adoption

Humans are a wonder to be sure

We explore, go on tour, only to identify what we consider pure and impure

We fight wars because we are insecure, but wait there’s so much more.

For every detour we endure, we can also find the cure

For our madness

For every act of hate, there one of love pushing back against the sadness

The thoughts people carry are the result of causes and conditions

A steady diet of enculturation a kind of cultural brain nutrition

Of what’s clean and dirty, right and wrong

How best to gather food or sing a song

How to unify a community and get along

Culture is about adapting and understanding where you belong

So much of it is arbitrary but we claim tradition is important because it has. Gone. On. So. Long.

But tradition is selection of past perceptions

Rooted in imagined past and cultural objections

There’s nothing inevitable about the paths we choose

The things we keep, the things we loose,

Or how we use and abuse one another

When we forget that all beings have once been our mothers

And we yell and scream and blame one other.

For our problems

And so it’s relative, the way we know

Our goals, dreams, aspirations, the places that we go

Flow below the assumptions and you will find a place to grow

But take it slow.

Because if you think you know,

You’re wrong.

Relativism is a practice,

lifelong

And that beginners mind, keeps you from getting too headstrong

Don’t assume right or wrong

Just be curious, instead of furious.

Cultural relativism is poison, a disease?

Oh please, I’ve got no interest to appease

The keyboard warriors whose agenda is to throw feces

Like our primate cousins…

Relativism doesn’t mean you allow ignorance to thrive,

It means you contrive to understand what it means to be human and alive

The things we do to survive and strive for

Opens the doors to more

Possibilities

Because every culture is a library of wonder

They all have lessons and wisdom bright with lightning and thunder

So shut up,

listen,

and put down your hands

You don’t have to like, but you should try to understand