Throwing it out to the void

I am engaged in one of the most dangerous fields on the planet. Now, I know many of you would venture an argument here and tell me that Lawyers go up against criminals or divorcing couples. Others would talk about the every day exposure to ill patients as doctors, and many more would talk about the hazards of their jobs. Imagine this though...a profession that is and has shaped the worlds political, social, environmental, healthcare, historical, just to name a few fields. Now imagine that I were to tell you that this same field gets its information from speculation, some hard data, a huge amount of inference, and much more speculation? That is right, Anthropology has been instrumental in everything from the slavery excuses of the 1800's to the rise of equal rights and beyond. It is largely responsible for the development of environmental protections and much more. Anthropologists have programs that can tell if someone is a racist, they have programs for predicting how people will behave in certain situations, and they have other software as well. They know how to tell how advertising will be recieved and much more than that. I have heard people say that it is the biologists or the political science experts who will determine much of the future of this global economy and this nation as a whole, but in reality they are using data that an anthropologist collected and interpreted in doing so. This realization has never hit me before and it is a scary one. There is one very promising and hopeful aspect to this and that is that anthropologists are so divided in nature and have so many differing opinions about things that in many regards their peers are their checks and balances system. I have been asked a great many times what I can do with my degree, but it is the simple fact that this degree no matter how I act on it will have an impact on the world that makes it so exciting of a field to be in. I am keeping company with some of the greatest minds(also some of the worst), and the biggest social reformers in history, it is awe inspiring.