Ankara, Happy Meals, and Faith Ringgold

Have you ever thought that a Happy Meal had a place in the classroom? I did not until I saw one in action as a didactical tool. It was in the workshop on how to teach the “Introduction to Anthropology” course at the AAA/CASCA Annual Meeting in November last year.

There, Ken Guest, who is an incredibly engaging and captivating speaker, demonstrated to us how he teaches the first lesson. He picks up a Happy Meal and starts discussing it in terms of societal context in a very interactive way. A Happy Meal turns from something relatively (un)attractive to eat into something excellent to think with. By taking out every single item, including a straw, burger, toy, and even one or two pickles, it becomes obvious that a Happy Meal stands for much more than being happy or having a meal. It is a signature of American fast-food culture, globalization, and tremendous climate impact as well as industrialization, late capitalism, and ideology. As for someone who grew up in the 90s in Slovenia, a European analogy to the Happy Meal would be a Kinder Surprise Egg, which Slavoj Žižek has discussed as a materialization of desire.

Ever since attending the workshop in Toronto, I have wished to use the Happy Meal in an undergraduate class and test whether it can be as powerful a didactic tool of my own. While spending two weeks at the METU (Middle Eastern Technical University) in Ankara, I was given a wonderful opportunity to deliver a guest lecture in Ezgi Altinisik’s course in anthropology. In my lecture on cultural diversity and the issue of race, the Happy Meal did an amazing job. I was surprised to find no pickles inside the hamburger, chose Ayran instead of a fizzy drink, and students did not doubt that the patty consisted of 100% beef as even fast-food meat must be halal in Turkey. Unfortunately, the Happy Meal did not look very happy. I received it in a standard bag instead of a typical red box with a smile and the yellow em.

Delivering a guest lecture was one of the many highlights of my visit to METU’s CompEvo – Comparative & Evolutionary Biology Lab headed by Mehmet Somel. I had a great opportunity to meet the team involved in the NEOGENE ERC Consolidator project and beyond. I was impressed by the intellectual and social comradery of the group, which makes members share the data and learn from each other in the most organic ways. It is wonderful to see and experience how a research group can be much more than the sum of its parts.

CompEvo team members seem to excel in emotional intelligence, which is admirable. They also make the best use of a wonderful METU campus and benefit from Mehmet’s extraordinary ability to bring together wonderful and sociable minds. Together, they are making and simultaneously also being a change. They work in a challenging socio-political environment, in which conducting evolutionary research is not necessarily easy or self-explanatory. Read more about it in Ezgi’s insightful, personal account here.

During my time at METU, I also delivered a talk at the Haceteppe University’s Anthropology department. This was made possible by Yılmaz Selim Erdal, Ezgi, and Mehmet. I was delighted to share with the audience my previous research and speak about the X-KIN project, which involves collaboration between cultural anthropology, paleogenetics, and archaeology on the topic of prehistoric kinship. I was pleased to engage in such interdisciplinary discussions with colleagues at METU/Hacettepe and am looking forward to our future conversations. My visit also overlapped with Nils Anders Götherström from whom I learned much about working styles, co-heading an institute, and the encouragement of having fun.

Another highlight of my stay in Ankara was seeing the well-known material from Çatalhöyük excavation and delivering a talk at the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations. The venue was one of the most picturesque environments I have ever delivered a talk at. This would not have been possible without the initiative of the Slovenian Embassy in Ankara. Tajana Okorn from the Embassy not only coordinated the logistics for the talk at the Museum but also arranged for an extremely talented translator, Gizem Pehlevan, who translated my presentation into Turkish. At the very end, the ambassador Gorazd Renčelj also used this opportunity to celebrate International Women’s Day by gifting a flower to each woman in the audience. It was a mindful and appreciated act.

My research stay at METU, however, started in Gothenburg, where I initially attended a workshop on “Embracing Transdiciplinarity: Equality and Inequality in Prehistory,” organized by Kristian Kristiansen and Bettina Shulz Paulsson. In the company of some brilliant scholars who spoke on the topic, I was intrigued by the wide array of inequalities that have been addressed for the deep past. It was also evident that some inequalities beyond the divide between kings/queens and commoners, which are more challenging to see archaeologically, remain to be addressed. Those topics require methodological innovation, interdisciplinary collaboration, and hopefully, also diversification of scholars who study social inequality in deep past. Importantly, Aris Politopoulos spoke about present-day inequalities in archaeology created by high conference and membership fees in scientific associations, which perpetuates the divide between those who can and cannot afford them.

Back at the Field Museum, March is celebrated for being a month for Women in Science. While I am currently missing out on some wonderful events there, I was fortunate to visit Eva-Maria Geigl, a fierce supporter of Women in Science, in Paris. Together, we visited the Musée de l'Homme, which is featuring a wonderful temporary exhibition on women’s early work in archaeology. As you will see in the vivid example from the photo below, women should unite to support each other on their way into science and appreciate anyone who supports them on the way.

Remember that my guest lecture at Ezgi’s class also dealt with race? I entered the debate through a painting by Faith Ringgold, who was not allowed to enter art school not because she was black but because she was a woman. Later in her career, Faith became a prominent artist and activist, who created many thought-provoking paintings and quilts. I was fortunate to see those masterpieces in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago before my departure to Eurasia. In the painting I showed to students, Faith depicts 100 faces, of which 10% are black, representing the ratio between the black and white population in 1967. She also turns the 10c into 10% in her “US Postage Commemorating the Advent of Black Power.” It is easy to spot the BLACK POWER written in black capital letters. Can you see anything else being written in this art piece?

Less visible yet omnipresent in this painting is the WHITE POWER, which you can read by turning your head right and seeing the “white power” written in capital letters from top to bottom, starting at the right upper corner and finishing at the bottom left corner. Why should this matter to anthropology undergraduates in Ankara or anywhere else? Because it is a good analogy to portray how changing perspective, seeing the seemingly invisible and giving it a voice makes an anthropological thought. No matter what these students will do in the future, the skill of seeing the world with critical eyes, speaking for the marginal, and making kin with difficult subjects is a transferrable skill.

Here is a remarkable example: The Hacettepe anthropology students excelled in thinking critically about the Happy Meal. I asked after the discussion whether we could conclude that Turkish culture and food practices are better than American. A student replies: “I would tend to say 'yes,' but I cannot as I am studying anthropology and am aware of ethnocentrism.” What else can be more appreciated than a critical, honest, and reflective thought from an undergraduate student in their 2nd year of anthropology?