In its struggle to achieve relevancy at the world’s leading STEM university, MIT’s Anthropology department has learned how to feed at the climate hysteria trough to finance boondoggle field trips.
The goal? To teach the Mongolian people, who have been living under harsh steppe conditions for thousands of years, how to stay warm in the winter.
The original idea, proposed by an MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium team, was to heat piles of molten salt bricks to 400 degrees Celsius at a central facility in Ulaanbaatar, then quickly truck the hot bricks off to heat yurts in the hinterlands.
Credit to our intrepid anthropologists for discovering, after two years of field study, that this was a stupid idea.
Instead, they decided it would be better to stick salt bricks in the family coal stove to serve as a heat reservoir, keeping thankful Mongolians a wee bit warmer after the stove goes out at night. They haven’t built any of these miracle machines yet but hope to recruit local blacksmiths to give it a whirl as soon as they raise more funding.
“Our work illustrates the importance of anthropology in responding to the unpredictable and diverse impacts of climate change. This project demonstrates how indispensable anthropology is in moving engineering out of labs and companies and directly into communities,” says professor Manduhai Buyandelger.
Buyandelger is an anthropologist of religion, gender, and politics. She investigated the proliferation of shamanic practices during the first decade of postsocialism and is now studying relations between humans and cats and dogs.
The Beaver swears he didn’t make any of this up.
Story suggested by MIT News