Recently my fellow classmates and I took a trip to the American Museum of Natural History for our online OC 21 Anthropology class. This was a perfect place to embrace all the cultures that we have and haven’t been exposed to. Our main areas of focus on the tour were the Hall of African People and the Hall of Origins. If you yourself plan on going there are plenty more exhibits to see but I’ll give you a brief overview of what we experienced.  As you are walking down this hallway you see this showcase of a forest with what we would call midget or pygmy people. Our guide, Dr. Lacey, explained that they are portrayed very accurately.

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They are scarcely dressed and you can see them with bow and arrows along with nets. These people are known as the Mbuti people. In their culture, surprisingly the males play a greater role than the women. They do not know the roles of “father,” “son,” “brother,” because to them the members of the tribe are all just one big family. They each help each other  raise other people’s kids so there is no distinct line as to whose child is whose. They live independently in the forest as hunter-gatherers but they are able to communicate and trade with other more urbanized people who live outside the rainforest. To us, this is completely strange. In society today it is required you wear clothes and we depend on our phones, electronics, all this advanced modified technology. There they have none of that. You can only admire and wonder at the same time how do they live like this? Is it impossible to picture living our life like theirs?