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Class of 2017
As a student of political science, an aspiring law student, and hopeful politico, this trip to the United Kingdom was nothing short of what I believed it could have been. In David Hume and Adam Smith’s Edinburgh, we explored the home of free market capitalism, and what some might consider the epicenter of the Western world. And in Oxford we travelled through the annals of English history and placed ourselves in the same setting as two of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. While recounting how all of these places and people, how everywhere and everyone between Edinburgh and London, some small, some big, some new, and some familiar, piqued my interest and supplemented my knowledge and own political thinking, a couple things not even planned seemed to create the biggest impact.
While I noted that I am aspiring to obtain a degree in political science, I am also working on a minor in Anthropology, a discipline that has captured my interest and complimented my study in politics and philosophy. Dabbling in the discipline I have studied the foundries of it from James Hutton and Charels Lyell’s studies of geology to the cultural studies of E.B. Tylor and E. E. Evans-Pritchard, and of course the works of Charles Darwin and his opus, On the Origin of Species.
While we toured and studied throughout Edinburgh and Oxford, I was aware of that the impact of these greats was centered here on the studies and debates that they performed in their homeland and within their institutions. James Hutton and Charles Lyell, the forerunners of the discipline of anthropology and archaeology, would apply their studies in geology at the Salisbury Crags, jutting natural monuments, which provide a backdrop against Edinburgh’s Eastern boundary. While the climb to the top can be easy or difficult, and while our tour guide may have opted for the more strenuous of the two, he did happen to bring us past the sites of Hutton and Lyell’s study. And although we did finally manage to reach the peak of the crags, a rocky point named Arthur’s Seat, an astonishing view of the city captivated all of us, and the same natural brilliance that attracts tourists to the top, reminded me that it was this same kind of spark that drew both geologists in and fostered their study that helped them to draft what would become the laws of superposition and uniformitarianism while looking into its natural beauty.
Arriving in Oxford, the unofficial birthplace and home of the discipline of anthropology, our guide encouraged me to explore the Pitt Rivers and Oxford Natural History Museum, which I did much to my enjoyment. And while not a large museum, it can only be described as saturated in research, exhibits, and artifacts. Housing collections and items from the greats like E.B. Tylor and E.E. Evans-Pritchard, both founders of the discipline of cultural anthropology and Oxford Fellows, and a step back into the founding of the discipline proved to be as insightful and moving as the crags had been. But most capriciously while in the museum I stumbled upon a simple plaque (which for what it represented deserved more). The plaque affixed to a doorframe adjacent to the museum’s coffee shop, labeled the room where Thomas Huxley defended Charles Darwin’s theory, against Bishop Samuel Wilburforce in one of the most storied debates of the century.
Aaron Vance, of Vine Grove, Ky., is a junior McConnell Scholar majoring in political science.