I’m teaching a course on the anthropology of education this semester. Ostensibly it is actually titled “Aboriginal Education” but because the classic educational ethnographies focus on class, race, and gender in the US and England the course ends up being much wider in scope than the title would suggest. Last year I tried using Willis’ Learning to Labor but the British context and colloquialisms were just too difficult for my students who are more familiar with American language and culture, so this semester I switched to Ain’t No Making It which has a lot of cursing, but is actually much easier to read.

In practice, the students here take turns reading the English materials, each group presenting and summarizing that weeks reading for the rest of the class before I lecture on it. It is a strategy that nearly all the teachers here use since less than one percent of all academic texts seem to exist in Chinese translations (anthropology even less) and the English level of most of the students is simply not up to doing the amount of reading one would expect of native speakers. It isn’t an ideal solution, but it works well enough for the higher level classes.

The language barrier is a problem, but with teaching undergraduates an even bigger issue for me is the lack of a shared set of cultural references. Even in the US (where I had once been described as “cool” in multiple student evaluations) I had started to fall behind in the age of video games, never having played WoW (Rex, on the other hand…). Here Manga are a big part of student life. I love classic American graphic novels, but I can’t keep up with the endless amounts of Manga which the students consume on a daily basis. All the restaurants near campus have walls lined with Manga for the students to read during their meals.

Fortunately, when students do their presentations well, they are able to make the connections I can’t make. In presenting MacLeod’s “Hallway Hangers” the students gave each member his own Manga-esqe avatar. I find particularly interesting the trouble the students had in portraying the one African-American member of the group, Booboo, as there are very few blacks in the Mangas they read. You can clearly see that he is drawn in a completely different style (perhaps by a different student? – I forgot to ask) than the rest of the gang. It is interesting because even when Manga characters are meant to be Asian, they are often drawn with Caucasian features, thus any attempt at depicting marked racial features requires deviating from the stylistic norms. Although this is not a problem for the best artists in the tradition, it clearly stumped my students. (UPDATE: I forgot to mention that the other avatar on the bottom left is meant to depict someone of mixed heritage.)

The whole exercise made me wonder if there wasn’t a market in re-writing classic ethnographies as manga? It would certainly do a tremendous amount to popularize anthropology. I’ve always been a big fan of the “Introducing …” and the “… for Beginners” illustrated books, but with the emphasis on storytelling in many modern ethnographies perhaps some of them would be particularly well suited for manga editions?