A good syllabus (or two)
After some clicking around I ran across Joe Tobin’s website at Occidental College. His syllabi for “Introd Anthro”:http://faculty.oxy.edu/tobin/100/2.html and Occidental’s “Senior Seminar in Anthropology”:http://faculty.oxy.edu/tobin/anth490f03/ are both interesting. The intro course features a lot of LeGuin and Vonnegut (LeGuin bein an anthropological descendant and Vonnegut being a drop-out of my own alma mater’s anthro program). The senior seminar offers a lot of old favorites as well as some other nice pieces that I can tell work artfully with the other bits of the syllabi.
Alex Golub is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He studies mining and petroleum development in Papua New Guinea, as well as American culture in to the online game World of Warcraft. You can contact him at rex@savageminds.org
add some Michael Crichton and some Amitav Ghosh and he’d have my nightmare class of drop-out anthropologists turned novelists… but seriously, minus the Crichton, there is something to the LeGuin, Vonnegut, Ghosh thing. Wasn’t Bellow a dropout of your program too :)
Report this comment
Good guess, Chris, but everyone who got their Ph.D. at a school with a _real_ anthropology department knows that ‘Saul Bellow’ is the pseudonym that Jean Comaroff uses when she writes fiction.
Report this comment
That explains SO MUCH. I was always struck by the parellels between Henderson the Rain King and Body of Power, Spririt of Resistance.
Thanks for clearing that up.
Report this comment
Also, I wanted to point out that one of my personal favorites, Amitav Ghosh, did not drop out–he has a doctorate in anthropology from Oxford. And although he doesn’t hold a tenured professorship anywhere, in reading his books I think it’s pretty clear he practices a more rigorous anthropology than some who do! :)
Report this comment