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What is your particular criticism of Anthropology as a whole? The point of the article is to express the idea of 'making the familiar strange' or viewing things 'through the looking glass.' If you propose satire because the description sounds too colorful or too foreign to how you would describe it, you have missed the point of taking another's perspective.



I gather a bathroom might look like a shrine to the unfamiliar anthropologist, but a bathroom is a bathroom, and the activities therein are not rituals. It's an indefensible and incorrect conclusion.

Words like shrine, ritual, etc. have specific meanings which the author skillfully distorts to make the point, and I take it well, but it also casts doubt on anthropology in general when those words can be so easily misused.


> but a bathroom is a bathroom, and the activities therein are not rituals.

Why not? It's only because you bring your own bias of what a ritual is that you don't view bathroom rituals as a ritual. Either that, or you're so steeped in bathroom culture that you fail to understand it as a ritual.

It's as if I said: "A wheel is just a circular object, a shape. It's an indefensible and incorrect conclusion to say that it is a technology."


I think you have to be purposefully not paying attention to not see the variation in bathroom ritual across cultures for it surely exists and in significant ways.




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