Evidence

Analysis of evidence. I suppose that every discipline claims to have a monopoly on the best approach - or maybe the only true approach - to analyzing evidence. For example, my good friend Mike Lange makes a compelling, although obviously flawed and utterly incorrect, argument that Anthropology is the one field that is truly interdisciplinary and correctly analyzes evidence. The correct answer (and here I am channelling Sanford Zale) is History. Anyway, beyond that, I was thinking about how much you can learn from simple observation. This was probably inspired by rereading Marcus Aurelius or my friend Cinse's blog - or maybe just reflecting on how much I love the Sherlock Holmes stories and hate the recent film versions. When you are travelling the hotel rooms themselves provide a wealth of information about the culture of the place you are visiting. For instance, here are some pictures I took in the room where I stayed in Salalah, Oman. They are pictures of the complimentary prayer rug in the closet and the little sign on the ceiling which provided you with the direction of Mecca where you should face during prayer. I have stayed at lots of rooms in Islamic countries that did not provide this material, which speaks to the fact that Oman is a deeply Islamic country, and also has a lot of Islamic visitors and that there is more co-mingling of folks (that is, the hotel where I was staying, despite having many of the amenities of a classic western hotel was not exclusively a western hotel - and in that way I do think it reflected life in Oman, where the distinctions between different social or religious or economic groups seemed more fluid than in other countries).

It also made me think of opening up a bedside table in a hotel New Delhi and finding a copy of the Bible, the Quran and the Bhagavad-Gita, which perfectly expressed the religious diversity of India. Of course, after making that point, I also have to reflect upon opening a bedside table this last summer in New Orleans and finding the following: a map, a flashlight, a bottle opener and condoms. OK, Sherlock, what do we make of that?