Financial Times editor speaks about anthropology
Gillian Tett, assistant editor and columnist at the Financial Times, spoke about the inspirational career of French anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu and about a modern-day lack of respect for anthropology as a field in a talk titled ?Joining Up the Dots: Why An Anthropologist Helps to Make Sense of the World? on Wednesday afternoon. Tett framed anthropology?s capacity to help us understand our own societies through the story of Bourdieu, a 20th-century anthropologist whose military experience in Algeria led him to scientifically examine his own community and larger French society. Drafted in 1955 to fight against the Algerian movement for independence, which sought to break away from the French colonial empire, Bourdieu often got into trouble with his superiors for reading pacifist literature and spreading other subversive ideas, Tett explained. While stationed in Algiers, Bourdieu had an epiphany that led him to study Algerian society.