She considered medicine, then politics, but settled on academia while backpacking through Africa following a year working on Capitol Hill. You can pass all the laws you want but if people don't believe in them, don't trust the ideas behind them, you can't effect any change. Now, when students follow her from class to her office, wanting to talk more about her just-finished lecture, or to ask where they can find more reading material about the subject, she realizes she made the right choice. Teaching, Besteman says, allows her to invest her passion in a place where it does the most good and to perhaps move the planet ever so slightly in a positive direction. If I thought I couldn't make some difference .
Anthropology teaches people how to be citizens of the world.
I think everybody should be required to take an anthropology course. An authority on Somalia and a veteran field researcher whose work has produced two books, Besteman says her biggest rewards come from students who come to her courses knowing virtually nothing about anthropology. Those are the people who really need anthropology. If I only get them for one semester, I want the life lessons that anthropology can teach embedded in their hearts.