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⌈ Secret Post #1140 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Some out of order because LJ's being REALLY slow.

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Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

As someone who has put the last decade of my life into my education as an anthropologist (and still is not finished), I feel comfortable saying she is nothing - either professionally or personally - like any anthropologist I have ever known. I love this field too much to see people base their career decisions on a TV show that presents a completely false depiction of physical and forensic anthropology. If you haven't done research on real anthropology or taken any classes, I strongly recommend you do so before moving ahead.

Agreed. I was dead set on archeology in high school, thanks to Indiana Jones. Which works when you're 14 and need an inspiration to ace the algebra test, but not a good idea when planning the career for the rest of your life. I still love Indy and real life archeology, but my chosen career fits me way better. That said, if Bones inspires you and you know how the field actually runs, I say go for it. After all, I got into my field because of it's crazy portrayal on tv and wanting to know just what really happened in the field, along with more rational reasons like experience and interest in an area of the field.

This, so, so, much this. As an anthropology major and a biology major, I can tell you that we don't:

1) Carry guns and know kung fu and work for the FBI and have massive labs inhabited by adoring interns
2) Not understand common social conventions in our own society
3) Project our own greatness and sexual prowess on a regular basis - that's just ethnocentric

We do:

1) Wait around for stuff to finish in labs (in bio, anyways)
2) Discuss what we think about the reasons that other people think what they think
3) Read
4) Read
5) Read
6) Listen
7) Listen
8) Listen
9) Take a heck of a lot of measurements (again, in bio, although physical anthropology seems to be mostly about measurements and statistics)

Simply put, Bones is the type of woman that an anthropologist would be interested in observing.

Ha! May I also add:
10) Grade undergraduate work
11) Write papers
12) Read

umm.. i'm getting my masters degree in anthropology atm and sure, a lot of my time is spent reading,listening and taking measurements but i've also been working on actual projects which required cleaning bones found at an excavation and then do all sorts of stuff with them like determining height, age and sex, injuries, etc. granted, we don't hang around with the fbi but other than that i wouldn't say that what we do is thaaaaat much different from what brennan does on the show.. *shrugs* (or maybe i'm just extremly lucky and this isn't how it usually goes?)

It depends on what universities you go to, what level you're at (undergrad vs. grad), what kind of funding you can get, being at the right place at the right time (I got my master's at a school fairly well-known for its forensic program, and by chance they just didn't have any cases for almost the entire time I was there - well below their "average" for the preceding years), and even legal technicalities. As I understand it, in some countries, you literally cannot handle human skeletal remains until you have completed the Ph.D.

For me, it's also this notion that there's such a thing as a full-time forensic anthropologist, complete with their own, fully-functioning, high-tech lab (including hologram machine, if they're still using that - stopped watching eons ago). Even the biggest names in forensic anthropology are primarily teaching, researching and/or working in museums. And not ONE of them is actually involved in the investigation, interrogation of suspects, and so on.

So, yeah, what real anthropologists do is THAT much different from what brennan does, IMO. Not to mention, as others have said, the personal characterization such as being completely incapable of understanding the social norms of your own country and even disdainful of many of them. These are not the kinds of attitudes a person should aspire to, let alone an anthropologist.

Do teachers of anthropology routinely announce something like this to students now? It seems like that might be something that happens with different fields once a TV show or movie highlights one of them.

I also don't get how Brennan is on one hand supposed to be extremely incapable of understanding how people act/feel in her own culture and yet she writes novels. I mean, you can be a different type of writer--I think Lovecraft was notoriously bad about people, but he's not known for his characters. But the way Brennan is so confused it's like...why does she even want to write fiction? This is a woman who can't not talk over the heads of a jury on the stand in a way that makes them find her insufferable, but she manages to connect with enough readers in her writing to be a best seller?

THIS CHARACTER MAKES NO SENSE TO ME!

Agreed agreed agreed. I'm not anything professional yet (first year college student) but I hate it when people pick their careers based on what they see in the movies/on TV and not on anything real.
But if the show gets you interested and you research it more and find you really like what the actual field is like too, then hey, who am I to judge?