Gift Giving Guide 10

Twice a year every year I dedicate a blog post to something a little different and fun: gifts for the anthropologist.  I attempt to highlight handmade and/or fair trade items as these most closely mirror the values of anthropology in cultural understanding and preservation.  If you happen to know an anthropologist, someone with interests in anthropology, or someone who shares these same values feel free to look into one of these amazing gifts this holiday season:

Cultural Anthropology

Do you know an anthropologist who has political interests and/or activism at heart?  If so they may be following in the foot steps of pioneering anthropologist, Zora Neale Hurston, whose work on folklore, African American cultures, and activism are well known within the field.  This pillow might just be the perfect gift for that special anthropologist.  Available through DontSleepInteriors on Etsy.

Archaeology

If you know someone who is either pursuing a career in or has an interest in archaeology this watch might be the perfect gift.  It tells the time while also demonstrating the first step of the excavation process.  Available through SunnyRiverCreations on Etsy.

Linguistic Anthropology
 

Many find attempting to find the perfect gift for the linguistic anthropologist to be quite difficult, but this magnificent find might just be the best idea ever!  This unisex t-shirt plays with language as well as phonetics, making it a versatile gift for linguists in specific languages as well as in anthropology.  Even greater it comes in multiple colors, allowing you to customize this piece for your gift receiver.  Available through StagandPeachCo on Etsy.

Biological Anthropology

I always like to save the best anthropological subfield for last (yes, I might be a tad biased).  As biological anthropology is the most diverse of the four subfields a gift that is applicable to any individual in the field is probably your best bet, but that can be rather difficult to do since there are so many types of biological anthropologists.  This gift, however, might meet the expectations of all (or at least most) of those different anthropologists: a chimpanzee skeleton model.  Chimpanzees are a primate widely studied by primatologists, the skeleton is studied by bioarchaeologists, and paleoanthropologists will get practice putting the model together (much like what they do out in the field).  Therefore this gift may be the safest bet for a biological anthropologist (particularly if you are not sure what they are focusing on).  Available through Tinysaurs.