What do humans have in common with bacteria and cheese?

Culture
The definition of this word has undergone (and is undergoing) so many changes, that some of us want to throw up our hands and proclaim that everything is culture.  Although I don't agree completely, I am regularly startled by how easy it is to identify something as a product or part of a culture.
Too often we get used to seeing only a couple of aspects of culture, such as the traditional clothing, music, and food of X people.  Although it is certainly important to appreciate these things, and much can be learned from in-depth study of them, there is so much more to culture than just these three.
What about beliefs? What about attitudes? "Common sense"? Oral history? Cosmology? Linguistic cognition? Gender roles? Kinesics and proxemics? 
OK - so I'm getting a little ahead of myself.
So here are two questions to ponder:
1. What aspects of culture get rammed down your throat to the point where you wish you'd never have to encounter them again?
2. What are some aspects of culture that you wish people would pay more attention to?

Invitation

Nobody understands what we do.

Fifteen years of my life, hundreds of books and articles, published papers, conference presentations, piles of index cards, stacks of photos, piles of artifacts, taped interviews, and a heap of killer stories - and I still have a hard time explaining to my parents what anthropology is for.

By my own reductive definition, anthropology is the study of the human experience in its entirety. 

Although this definition tidily communicates to friends and dinner guests what I study, I know that ethnographers, paleo-archeologists, and cultural resource management specialists around the world will raise their eyebrows.  But I've been wanting to do this for a long time: bring to life to the non-anth public, in as simple and appealing a way as possible, the oxymoronic marvel that is this discipline, while also inviting professionals anthropologists to do the same.

That's what this blog is for.

Lately I've been talking with some of my students quite a lot about anthropology, and its far-reaching implications.  My heart and mind have been longing for the chance to revisit the basics of cultural anthropology by reflecting on what I learned from my friends and mentors at USU, while also ruminating on what I see happening all around me every day.

It has been over nine years since I left Logan, but to me all the world is still an ethnography waiting to be written...