Enlarging the Raft

Abstract

The central goal [of anthropological humanism] is to explore, foster, and indeed create other possibilities for human thought and activism, to keep alive the habit of humanity's continual reshaping of its own image and, hence its own reality. The overriding goal then is the fostering of human freedom, both cultural and individual . . . If our task as educators is to make ourselves, our students, and our society uneasy, uncertain, and therefore more free we must add to empiricism a whole new range of means, not only of investigating and knowing, but also of understanding and in particular of communicating other ways of being human.-Toni Flores Fratto (1976), "Toward an Anthropological Humanism"

Seeing from Below: Scuba Diving and the Regressive Cyborg

“…In this article, I aim to further expand “the raft” of humanistic anthropology (Syring 2017:161). Rather than adding to it a “few more feet,” however, I propose a collective change in apprehension in how we, as humans, think about the ocean, upon which our raft is floating (Syring 2017:161) 1 . The empirical backbone of this paper is my own set of personal experiences as a scuba diver, which are informed by my background as a photographer and ethnographer.…”