"Where Are the Voices and the Music?"

Here I am copying and pasting an entry I wrote for my class. Each third of the semester we have to chose a concept from a list that is taken from the readings we have to do. I'll probably, in the future elaborate more on what is written below, but I wanted to get this up here now. Hopefully it will make some sense to you, it is a concept I very much adore right now.

I chose to discuss the concept that stems from this quote, “Where are the voices and the music?” This is used in the introduction of Bone Voyage by Stanley Rhine. Rhine discusses this quote which originated from another book, written by Loren Eiseley, The Unexpected Universe. Eiseley is describing his experience in which witnessed a man putting objects into a fire, one being that of a radio. He began to think to himself that at one time voices and music came from that radio, and now it had no life left to it. This is very similar to his experiences with skeletons, including burnt and broken skulls. He thought to this damaged machine, “Now, where were the voices and the music?” Rhine then used that idea and made notice that this probably comes to the minds of every anthropologist in their work. That every bone and skeleton once had a life and is now silenced by death. Each and every bone can speak to you if you know how to listen.
This concept struck me as very poetic, of course, but yet something I had not fully grasped until now in the world of anthropology. The creative way in which it is expressed deeply inspires me and makes me crave to read more poetic descriptions of the lives of those on the job. I create art in my free time and a lot of my inspiration stems from literature, which I also just fully realized. I chose to write about this mostly to express the beauty of it, which I admire very much so. I will most likely create a painting in a tribute to this idea, sometime in the future. That in itself [the desire to make a related painting], reveals the depth of how much this notion affects me. Not only does it affect me on an artistic level but it opens my mind, and allows me to understand just a little bit more what it is like to be in the shoes of an anthropologist. Every time I study anthropology I try to imagine if it is something I could do, I almost find myself just wanting someone to tell me whether I could or not. But they don’t know, and I still don’t know. Finding a career is extremely important to me, in the terms of finding something to be truly happy with. Anyways, this also reveals a sense of sadness but also motivation to continue with the job to help identify all those bones that they, the anthropologists, come into contact with. I really like the outlook that the quote presents, it’s something you cannot push out of your mind once it is there.