The Anthropology of Turquoise by Ellen Meloy

Then I pulled the plug to see which way the water would circle the drain, hoping for some sort of momentous turmoil in the physics of deflection. On a flight to Australia once, when the airplane was precisely over the equator, I rushed to the airplane’s lavatory and filled the sink with water. My quest for drain behavior reassures me that we will not be flung off the spinning globe-you can never be too sure.

We are still in the Northern Hemisphere but just barely. This force can act upon the spiraling of water down drains, counterclockwise if you are in the Northern Hemisphere, clockwise if you are south of the equator. Like the ocean currents, airflow also moves in a circular pattern, captive to the earth’s rotation, pulled one way or the other on either side of the equator: the Coriolis effect. The Gulf Stream carries the warm waters farther north. “The gyre that pulls this sunrise ocean moves west from Africa across the equator then caresses this thumb of land on Mexico’s flank. The Anthropology of Turquoise: Reflections on Desert, Sea, Stone, and Sky Your mother or your spouse or your neighbors are too busy to talk to you because they are on the Internet running “heritage quests.” We have climbed so far back into our family trees, we stand inches away from the roots where the primates dominate.” Europe crawls with ancestor-seeking Americans. Family reunions choke the social calendar. So keen is this fascination with ancestry, genealogy has become an industry. And few cultures have been as identity-obsessed as ours. If we know who they were, perhaps we will know who we are. Or, we think, there might be something in their lives, an artist’s or a farmer’s skill, an affection for a certain landscape, that will match or explain something in our own. Through our ancestors we can witness their times. Yet everyone loves stories, and that is one reason we seek knowledge of our own blood kin. Genealogy is a forced march through stories. The actual descendants are far more intrigued with it all than the listeners, who quickly sink into a narcoleptic coma after the second or third great-great-somebody kills a bear or beheads Charles I, invents the safety pin or strip-mines Poland, catalogues slime molds, dances flamenco, or falls in love with a sheep. “ In genealogy you might say that interest lies in the eye of the gene holder.

The Anthropology of Turquoise by Ellen Meloy