From the clenched fist to the open hand

Anthropologists like symbols, and sometimes approach things in unusual ways. "Analysis" is a word suggesting "detailed examination" to bring something out of darkness and into the light. It is also an act of separation, the parsing of constituent elements apart. For unpacking is a critical endeavor. Not the criticism of negative evaluation, but a judgment, which, somewhat like analysis, means to "separate" and "divide". The hand of unpacking symbolizes acts of analytical excavation, critical thinking about a matter, an "unloosening" of received understandings, the assumed, taken for granted, unsaid, the natural. It is critical thinking about what's hidden inside the closed hand, an unfurling that is an invitation to look again. Genocide's muscular skin is slime green and black, her hair fiery red. She is outfitted with industrial steel, chains, a metallic belt of spikes circles her waist; a band of green thorns covers her eyes

Fist · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Anthropology: Ethics, History, Culture · Medicine · Race, Genetics, and Society · Anatomy