 It is important to me personally to know what it means to be human because I share this planet with people who are very different from me and my own little life is small in comparison to the rest of the world and so I want to enlarge my worldview. Also there are so many different ways of being human. One of the key concepts in anthropology is cultural relativism. Relativism assumes that we want to understand from within to understand another culture's way of life and the ways of being human to them that may be different from our own. There's a saying if you only know one religion you don't know any if you only know one kinship system you don't know any and so by understanding and knowing about the rest of the world and how different it is I think we develop a kind of greater awareness of our own lives in relationship and how some of the choices we have made may not have been constructed for us but have been constructed by culture. So I think ultimately when we expand what it means to be human in our understanding then we come to a better understanding of our own self and it gives us a kind of compassion for our lives and the lives of everyone on the planet that we may not be able to cultivate if we don't seek out that knowledge. It changes how we see ourselves in relationship to the rest of the world and it is humbling but it's also inspiring. Sometimes students come into the class and they're well educated but they get into an anthropology class and they say why didn't anyone ever tell us these things before and they want to know and they feel as if they have a right to know and they don't always want to be protected from knowing the hard things, knowing the suffering that goes on in the world and our own relationship to that suffering and to what humans are capable of and I think that they have a right to know and they don't need to be protected that this also is a part of education to know all that is human and all that humans are capable of even when it's not pleasant even when it's not easy to hear.