For My Introductory Anthropology Students in Saint George, Utah, Who Often Look Bemused, 7 April 2019

Envision a human as a sailboat, with culture for the sails and biology for the rudder and hull. You can’t reduce a sailboat to a rudder and hull, especially not if you want to explain how it sails, but, if you reduce it to its sails, then it’s no longer a boat and the sails go nowhere at all.

There are lots of other sorts of boats afloat that are not sailboats. Think of all the other living creatures without human culture as these sorts of boats without sails. Most of them have rudders and all of them have hulls. Now, a human in full sail, a conquering fleet of humans, is a glorious, exhilarating, awesome, extinguishing, and probably colonizing sight to behold. But any fleet can still be sunk by storms or other fleets with sails. Even canoes can have a go. And every boat sinks once its hull’s breached, no matter how full and fine are the sails.

Cultural differences, of course, would be differences in sails. A whole hull under torn sails drifts sadly and is likely to be abandoned. Unless it’s a Viking longboat, with lots of oars and hordes of hairy homunculi to pull them. Then, although it should avoid the open seas, it will still haul itself up deltas and do serious damage to the locals despite the tattered rags of its one colorful sail.

Hulls are not destiny. Anchors can be lifted. Rudders can split. Never blame poor or fancy sailing on the hull. Of course, some Polynesian sails have double hulls below their platforms and are more stable and can more safely cross open oceans than can sails that pull only one hull. It’s not destiny, never destiny, but still. You have to admire some hulls.

Remember that your parents don’t necessarily sew much of your sails, although they did provide the hull. Hulls—well, and masts, too, let’s be honest—come from the dark forest. But sails can be made of various textiles, and whenever you spot elaborately imbricated sets of sails catching the wind in a yacht race, however strong your aesthetic response, bear in mind the vast network of power relations that produced their significations. Let the horror of the race dawn, staggering your mind.

What? No, not that kind of race. That race concept belongs to the sails, not the hull, by the way. A yacht race here is just part of our conceit. No, not conceited, it's--Someone had a hand up? No? Never mind.

Anyway. Everybody got it? Good. Now let’s consider kinship.