ethnography for all

Excellent questions from my anth class today: “…a question related to Social Anthropology: how do we truly understand another person when we may not share the same way of experiencing and interpreting the world? I have been thinking about the idea that, if there are eight billion people in the world, perhaps there are also eight billion different “languages.” By this, I do not mean spoken languages, but the individual ways in which people experience, think about, and give meaning to the world. Even when people speak the same language, they may still understand and interpret the same words differently. This leads me to my question: As an anthropologist, how do you approach understanding the individual “language” of another person through a shared language? How can we move beyond understanding the words themselves and reach the meaning and perspective behind them?” My answer is not enough, but … I think this is a great question of course – though the idea is somewhat absurd, I would…