‘Anthropos’ is the Human Being.
(In English we long translated that word as ‘Man’, blurring the boundary with the male human being, as in ‘The Family of Man’.)
There is an irony in how we came to today’s understanding of what it is to be human, of what we all share: that is, we learned a great deal of what we know because some of us set out to dominate and exploit others of us - ironic because it was in discovering our common humanity that we began to question our impulse to indifference, to domination and exploitation - which were what brought us there in the first place.
This body of images is also a body of little stories concerned with those moments when the explorers or colonists realize that ‘anthropos’ is bigger than they had assumed - when, in a sense, they become anthropologists.
The animal tracker was still young when the colonial period began. The culture and economy were newly organized, traditions stressed, the guild system disrupted, and with that the traditional roles, the traditional professions - even the traditional roles for males and females; and the trackers were not spared the loss of the old jobs, while the deans and deacons of their old guilds lost their privileges, slow and reluctant to respond to the new reality of tariffs, of magistrates and police, their passive income fractioned, their traditional authority undermined. A new criminal class arose. Thieves found new employment, and new networks and communities in the rapidly-expanding coastal cities, while bandits watched the new roads that linked the hinterland to port, appropriating their share. - so he simply became a tracker of men. For that, at least, there was unlimited business.
Noiselessly they set off, and were soon invisible in the distance. They moved at a remarkable rate, the leader falling back to the rear of the column every few hundred yards, slowing his pace, so that the rest of the men overtook him, replaced by the next one in the line, the first continually becoming last. I understand that geese and other migratory birds do the same, dividing up the responsibility. They were lined up, single file, but there was a sort of slight zigzag to it, the better to look around as they progressed. The job of the last two was to look behind, but all of them looked all around as they moved rapidly ahead. I mentioned a leader; but that only meant the one who happened to be in front. Our Anglo-Saxon individualism was not disturbed by this; but perhaps it should have been, since our assumption was that only that radical autonomy (the brotherhood of equals before God, you could say - and perhaps that thinking could eventually only lead to - be replaced by - a godless brotherhood...) - that only that autonomy, as I say, could grant real equality, and authentic self-expression. I went back to my tent to drink coffee and sit contemplating for an hour or so. The temperature had risen, but it was still freezing, and a snowstorm was coming, one that would last days. I sat pondering, in the exquisite enjoyment of being sheltered, with no concern beyond wondering at the mystery of being human. I had the thought that this experience, at any rate, was foreign to them - while for me it was one of the cherished modes of my existence. It was only then, after I had that thought, that I was at last disturbed, for the obvious next thought was of their cherished modes, unknown to me; and that line in the Rilke poem came suddenly into my mind, as though someone else were in my tent with me, and had spoken it aloud: ‘You have to change your life.’
L'Uomo Nuovo
Signor Rubio was average in every respect, so much so that he was extraordinary.
Anthropocene
Ectomorph
Suddenly He Was Dancing
The jugglers began to add knives to the objects that they threw between them. The drummers increased the tempo.
The press and the pundits wouldn't call him a demagogue, continued to treat everything as normal, as though his was just another item on the menu of democracy; they wouldn’t call him nothing but a grifter not even a reactionary populist, let alone - God forbid - a fascist… They treated all that occurred as more of the same, uncritically, as an objectively valid alternative politics and way of governing.
In the Crowd
Wrestlers
30,000 BC
