Tag: culture

Summer anthropologies #2: Leslie White goes to a baseball game (Part 1)

Summer anthropologies #2: Leslie White goes to a baseball game (Part 1)

A couple months ago, just after the 2023 baseball season started, I was sitting in the upper deck behind home plate at Oracle Park in San Francisco, California. It is a great view. I was there to watch the Giants play against the Los Angeles Dodgers with about 30,000 or so other people. This was the first MLB game I’d been to in about three decades. It was nice being back after so long. Things that I’d forgotten about all {+}

About those Ancestry dot com commercials

About those Ancestry dot com commercials

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84LnTrQ2us8] In the fall 2017 quarter I kicked off my intro to cultural anthropology course with one of those Ancestry dot com videos. These are all over the place, and many of them carry the same basic theme. They all purport to tell people about their ‘family’ or ‘roots’ or ‘heritage.’ That’s fine, except for some of the troubling, misguided messages they send to the public. The video I showed in class is really short (see above). It’s about {+}