‘Thoughts On Thinking’, 2023: An illustrated look at the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis, along with many diversions, including late-night drunken chats and that one dress from 2015. This comic asks the question that many anthropologists have asked before (but in way fewer words): ‘do we change language or does language change us?’

I started writing and illustrating this comic during the 2020 lockdowns, but sat on it for a while. In 2022, I revisited the project and redrew a number of pages. I hand wrote and drew all the pages using ink and watercolours (including the bibliography - yikes!). 

The story is a mix of my own train of thought, conversations I’ve had with friends, and studies from a course I took at uni on ‘Language and Culture’ that interested me a lot. I’ve felt a bit conflicted about putting out an anthropology comic. Partly because anthropology has had a history of white people studying and misrepresenting other cultures, partly because university is an elitist institution in general, and partly because doing such a short comic on such a big subject means I’m probably going to over-simplify a lot of complicated ideas. Perhaps a lot of the arguments and studies here are outdated now anyway. 

But I went into this hoping I could take some of the jargon out of what is a pretty interesting topic. And I spent a plain silly amount of time drawing this, so fuck it. I’ve decided to release this little comic into the world. And the pictures are pretty, at least.