Let’s say I’m going to give a lecture on the anthropology of money. I do this every year and I think I do a decent job of it, but I’d be a fool not to think that David Graeber, Richard Wilk, or Keith Hart couldn’t do it better. The problem is, even if I could find entire lectures by them online, I probably wouldn’t do so. I’ve never liked using class-length lectures by other scholars in my own classes, even something like Reading Marx’s Capital with David Harvey which I think is great. Class-length lectures from someone else’s syllabus don’t easily fit into my own syllabus unless I work the whole syllabus around those lectures. Nor do I think any of us are comfortable giving our entire class over to pre-recorded lectures. Not only is it boring for students to watch, it just feels lazy.

But imagine that Graeber recorded a five minute lecture on the economic myth of the origins of money, and Richard Wilk recorded a five minute lecture on Polanyi, and Keith Hart gave a five minute lecture on money in West Africa, etc. Each lecture could be used by teachers as the focus of class discussion, or the basis for a collaborative interrogation of those ideas. They could also be used entirely on their own for self-study by students. In any case, they would be a valuable resource for students and teachers alike.

So here’s my suggestion: someone (OAC?, HAU?, Living Anthropologically?) creates a site which allows people to post topics they’d like to see covered, has a searchable index and perhaps some kind of a rating system as well. The lectures themselves could be hosted on Archive.org under a CC license, so people could edit and remix the lectures as they see fit. All that shouldn’t be too hard – it’s just a database. The biggest problem would be getting anthropologists to actually make and submit content. Still, it might be fun to try if someone has the energy to do so. Maybe someone could even set up a room at the AAA to help record scholars who would like to participate but aren’t comfortable around a video camera… I’m just throwing this out there, I don’t have the time to follow through, but if anyone would like to get the ball rolling, feel free to use the comment thread to discuss how such a plan might actually work.

[Russell Berman] and five other professors at the university have produced a paper that calls for a major rethinking at Stanford — a reduction in the time taken to graduate by Ph.D. candidates in the humanities, and preparing them for careers within and beyond the academy. The professors at Stanford aren’t just talking about shaving a year or so off doctoral education, but cutting it down to four or five years — roughly half the current time for many humanities students.

This includes getting an MA (they suggest a two year review to decide “which students will advance to candidacy, and which will receive a terminal M.A.”). Now I can’t remember where I read it, but I believe that the average time to Ph.D. in anthropology is roughly what they say it is in the humanities: about nine years. How feasible is it that this time could be cut in half?

Part of their plan involves making better use of the summers: “Unfunded summers impede progress.” I can see how this might have speeded things up for me, maybe shaving off a year or even two, since not only would I not have had to work summers, but funding would have made it possible to start my fieldwork sooner. Lets say students receive full funding and aren’t required to teach (as I was) and I think one could go from an average of 9 years to 7. Of course, the reality is that funding is getting cut these days so I remain skeptical that we’ll see many universities increasing funding even if it means getting students out sooner.

Can we get it below 7? At my four-field program I took three years of courses. The only way I can see that being cut down is if they eliminated the four-field approach. That would be unfortunate. While I resented it at the time, I’ve really come to appreciate my four-field training in subsequent years. Actually five fields because we also had a visual anthropology program with its own requirements. But even if we are talking about a straight cultural anthropology program anthropologists still need pretty broad training. Usually we need additional courses on the language, culture and history of the region we intend to study – often outside of our own department. Language study alone can take at least an extra year (or two). On top of that we might need to brush up on an area of study related to our research topic, such as immunology, second language education, environmental science, etc.

And then there is fieldwork. I’ve seen some recent Ph.D. thesis from universities which have instituted drastically reduced time-to-Ph.D. constraints and you could really see it in the mismatch between the theory and the ethnography. It might be possible to do fieldwork in a few months if you’ve already spent a year or two somewhere during grad school, but I don’t think it works for graduate research. And if you don’t get a chance to really “be there” as a graduate student when will you have that opportunity? As a professor trying to get tenure?

Three years of course work, a year of language study, a year in the field, plus at least a year or two for exam prep, proposal writing, etc. not to mention the dissertation… I just don’t see how anyone could do it in less then seven years unless they were doing the research in their own backyard, already spoke the language, and had already gotten more than enough specialized training in the culture and topics they are studying before starting an Anthropology degree. And remember, seven years is predicated upon 12 months of full funding for each of those seven years. Have to work summers and part-time to make ends meet and we get back up to the current average…

Wunderkit is basically Facebook for Getting Things Done: Like Facebook you log in, create a profile, and friend your friends. But Wunderkit offers a twist as well: your homepage features a ‘dashboard’ where you post status updates like in Facebook, but it also has a to-do list attached, as well as an area where you can create notes (more features are apparently in the works). And — this is the kicker — you can create ‘projects’ which have their own homepage, complete with task lists and notes. Then people working on the project with you can friend the project and you can all collaborate.

In an academic context, projects can range from dissertation proposals under way to articles you are coauthoring to creating comps lists to working on edited volumes. The genius of the system is that once you are on it with your friends, it becomes a cheap and easy way to collaborate on tons of different things without having to start from scratch every time you want to get something up and rolling.

I’ve had very good success so far using Wunderkit with my students to work on class projects and so forth. It takes a bit of habituation, but it is really great to be able to log on once a day and find out that someone has read an article you asked them to read, or has created a to-do item that you have to fulfill — the act of advising stops being nebulous and turns into a concrete series of next-steps and progress updates.

So that is awesome, at least for me. But the really exciting thing for me is the way that Wunderkit allows me to institute my beloved ‘article a day’ philosophy.

You see, I don’t have to fill my status updates with the newest latest about what I ate for lunch of how much it sucks that Maurice Sendak died. I already have Facebook and Twitter for that. Because this social network is for work only, my status updates are what article I read that day and a one sentence summary of that’s article’s main claims. For instance: “read ‘Ontologically Challenged’, James Laidlaw’s review of Morton Pederson’s book. An concise and convcing critcism of the unecessarily baroque VdC-style theory of perspectivism.”

Posting article-a-day status updates is really pretty amazing. First, it forces you to actually read an article a day, a habit that might otherwise be more often honored in the breach than in the observance. Second, because you know you will have to summarize your reading, you really end up focusing on your reading and developing the extremely valuable skill of boiling down an article to its essentials. Third, it makes note taking easy because you can cut and paste your status updates into your notes database. And finally, when everyone in your personal network starts doing this, you feel like your intellectual life is getting rich, exciting, and communal.

There are a number of drawback to the system as I currently use it. First, Wunderkit is still in beta and you really feel that working with the site. Sometimes it stops working altogether. At other times it works but items occasionally disappear from various sidebars where they are supposed to live. Even when Wunderkit does work, the development team is still working on usability issues: it is often confusing where status updates are supposed to be made and where they will appear when they are made. Often I miss important updates from the people in my network because I didn’t drill down to their personal homepage to check the status updates.

But — hopefully! — these things will improve. And in the end the real value of Wunderkit is only partially tied to its affordances. In a world of mandatory enrollment in social networking sites is undertaken just to maintain your Google juice, it’s nice to have a place where you can get down to work with your friends and colleagues in private. I’m hoping that the people at Wunderkit can refine the service to let that happen. But even if they don’t, having a place where you can surveil yourself and feel like you’ve gotten credit for reading something is reward enough. I love Wunderkit and look forward to seeing how it can be further bent to our nefarious anthropological purposes.

This is one of my pet peeves and it drives me batty. Another one is when students (let’s face it, it’s always young women) turn in long-hand exercises written in color ink other than black or blue. Red, pink, gold, silver, purple, glitter and don’t get me started on the one’s that dot their I’s with hearts.

I’ve spent my young career as an adjunct bouncing between a small liberal arts college and a large urban university. While my liberal arts students are uniformly stronger writers than my urban university students (who show a greater range of ability from quite talented to less than competent) both groups do this. Maybe its generational?

In the assignment students record their garbage for five days. I shuffle the lists, which are kept anonymous, and return them. Then they must write an essay in which they interpret their classmates’ garbage as if they were archaeologists.

If the trash data turns up tampons and make-up they will invariably write, “I assume this person is female.” Or if there are beer cans and liquor bottles, “I assume this person is 21.”

No, no, no! You assume that the person is not lying about their trash. You assume that those objects are present because the list-maker, through their own willful actions, put it in the rubbish bin and it didn’t just accidentally fall in. Or someone broke into their place and threw things in the trash. You are actually concluding based on your knowledge and experience that the presence of tampons and make-up indicate that this is a woman’s trash. You are concluding something about this person’s leisure time based on the presence of rolling papers and cigars.

I’ve noticed similar patterns with infer and deduce, which are often taken to be synonymous, and I have had some success in teaching students to tell the difference. Next semester I’ll include some notes on the difference between assume and conclude too.

What are your grading pet peeves?

I am not this guy:

Or this guy:

Then he dived into Russian, Italian, Persian, Swahili, Indonesian, Hindi, Ojibwe, Pashto, Turkish, Hausa, Kurdish, Yiddish, Dutch, Croatian and German, teaching himself mostly from grammar books and flash card applications on his iPhone. This in addition to a more formal study of French, Latin and Mandarin at the Dalton School, where he is a sophomore.

I suspect some people are wired differently, like this RadioLab episode about a ragtime musician who can play four concerts in his head at the same time and keep track of what any instrument in each of the four orchestras is playing at any given time.

This is a post about language learning for the rest of us. But first, a little throat clearing. While I have read a few books summarizing contemporary research on language learning, I don’t claim to be an expert on the subject. That means I make some scientific claims without backing them up. Caveat emptor.

1. If you are having difficulty learning a foreign language, it might not be your fault.

There is significant debate over the concept of “learning styles.” Some researchers argue that different students learn things in different ways, while others argue that this theory is simply an excuse for coddling the lazy and stupid. I personally believe that our education system trains us to learn in certain ways and that after a certain age it is hard to learn in new ways. So, if you are a Taiwanese student you are probably pretty good at memorizing large chunks of information because your schooling has taught you how to do so. But if you are an American, you probably don’t have the same memorization skills.

Being good at memorization (like the folks listed at the top of this post) is useful for learning vocabulary, but it isn’t sufficient, nor is it necessary in the strictest sense. By that I mean that being able to provide the English term for a word is not the same thing as being able to use that word in a conversation. There are lots of words I know and can use in Mandarin conversation which I would not be able to provide upon demand if you asked me how to say the Chinese equivalent of some English word. These are different mental skills. I do believe having a good memory can help, but only in the sense that being a good long distance runner means you probably are in better shape and less likely to get winded when doing sprints. The training for one is very different from the training for the other and they shouldn’t get confused.

I realized this very late in my training. I was doing horribly at my intensive Chinese classes and was beginning to despair of ever having the language skills necessary to do ethnographic fieldwork. Every day we had to memorize nearly a hundred Chinese characters and familiarize ourselves with the new grammar patterns in the book. I just couldn’t do it. Moreover, I was becoming sleep deprived and I now know that sleep deprivation makes it harder to learn a foreign language (or anything else for that matter). Luckily, one of our teachers Ms. Chen, was studying at a program which was teaching new methods in language learning and she asked if I would be a guinea pig in her new class. Despairing of anything else working, I agreed. I will explain why in the next section.

2. Learn a foreign language like you learned your mother tongue.

It is true that children are naturally wired to learn a foreign language. We loose a lot of that when we grow up, so there are good arguments to be made for using a different approach when learning a new language. Above all, we can apply our literacy skills to learning the new language – something we can’t do as infants. Nonetheless, I firmly believe that, like infants, we learn a lot just by sheer exposure to a foreign language. Exposure isn’t enough on its own, but we need a lot more exposure than we realize. Listening to a language for half an hour a day in addition to your classes will make a huge difference. Watch TV, read books, read comic books, listen to the radio, eavesdrop, do whatever it takes to increase your exposure to the target language. Like a baby, I believe you need thousands of hours of exposure to achieve basic competence. But unlike a baby we have to work to get that exposure.

What Ms. Chen did that was so different from my previous teachers was to have us first spend lots of time listening to audio of the new lesson. Doing this before we had studied the vocabulary or the grammar. Just listen. Use our knowledge of the language to try to guess the meaning. Like a baby. Only after we had listened numerous times, tried to write down what we heard, and tried to guess the meaning, did we get to look at the grammar patterns. Then we listened again. Guessed again. Then, and only then, did we get to see the new vocabulary list. This worked for me in a way that my previous classes had not. One of the problems, I believe, is that if you learn the vocabulary first, you “hear” the English word instead of the word in the target language when you study the lesson. This way, you really hear the word in the target language and then when you learn the English it helps you to make sense of that word rather than replacing it with the translation.

3. Become the master of your domain.

One of the hardest things about learning a new language – especially if you don’t have a particularly good memory – is that there is simply so much vocabulary to learn, but you need a minimum amount of vocabulary to learn the language. Without that vocabulary you can’t really learn new words or grammar because you don’t have a framework upon which to hang the new information. The solution is to focus on a few domains that interest you. To this day I am much better at talking about politics and social theory in Chinese than I am at talking about sports. Not surprising as I’m pretty much the same way in English. By playing on your strengths you can quickly reach the minimal threshold necessary to begin learning new words “in the wild” (as opposed to what you see in textbooks).

Similarly, if you want to read fiction in another language, or watch a TV show, pick something with numerous volumes or episodes. It will be hard at first, but soon you will know the characters and the basic vocabulary associated with that world. I read all seven Harry Potter books in the Mandarin translation (see this great website comparing Harry Potter in Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese). Doing so was very hard at first, but by the third volume I was familiar with most of the terms associated with the Harry Potter universe, and I could increasingly guess the meaning of words I didn’t know (or at least the general outline of the plot) without recourse to a dictionary. I have also watched every single episode of Doreamon in Chinese (but not the specials or the films, I prefer the TV show). The musically inclined seem to do very well learning songs in the target language – unfortunately that has never worked well for me.

4. Learn like a linguistic anthropologist.

This is even more true for learning an endangered language that might not be as well documented, but I think it is true of all language learning. Ms. Chen’s teaching method taught me the importance of transcription as a teaching method. Trying to transcribe unfamiliar speech makes one a keen observer of the nuances of a language and turns one into a better listener. I know several linguistic anthropologists who have told me that they only really began to get good at a language when they returned home from the field and began to transcribe the tapes they had collected in the field. In essence, this approach combines elements of all the previous rules I’ve mentioned above.

Conclusion: Application of these rules for learning an endangered language.

These rules are not easy to apply to endangered languages. Native speakers are likely to be old and trained in grammar-translation approaches to language teaching, or they might lack any training whatsoever. You have to teach them how to teach you. It is also going to be hard to get lots of exposure to the language if it isn’t being used much anymore. Nor will you find much in the way of TV shows and books in that language. Where there is a lot of material, it may be in an area outside of your domain (in my case: the Bible). You will have to use #4 to create the materials and texts that you need for study. In a later post I will talk more about specific tools one might use to implement such an approach.

There are two things to hate about grading: it’s tedious and it’s unfair. On top of this one might even question whether its an effective way of evaluating student performance in the first place.

On this last note I seem to be in the minority. In high school I was a bright student who didn’t have to try very hard to get by even when my equally bright peers were ultra-competitive. As a result I graduated outside the top 20% of my class. While my peers were headed off to MIT, Caltech, Harvard, and West Point I earned a free ride to a school without grades, New College.

At New College I fell in love with learning and discovered anthropology. In small classes I was nurtured to be an independent and self-motivated student. Everything was graded pass/fail with written evaluations. Fortunately not having a GPA didn’t keep me out of grad school. At UNC my graduate courses were all graded as High Pass, Pass, or Fail. It fit my personality but also worked to my disadvantage. I lost out on a Ford Fellowship when a reviewer noted that my transcript had so many courses marked Pass, and since there were also some High Passes a regular Pass must be equivalent to a B. Therefore I was a B student.

To a certain degree I have had to unlearn this culture of gradeless scholarship in order to teach traditional college students. My students still perceive me as unconventional, but I’ve toned that way down in the years since I first began. If there is one lesson I’ve learned from leading a gradeless life it is this: the vast majority students want to be graded. They crave it. They are satisfied only when you rank them in a coherent order and, for the most part, they aren’t interested in whatever “thoughtful” comments you might make about their essays.

So I’ve stopped holding myself to the standard of my former professors and now think of grading as a task to be dispatched with as quickly and fairly (ie, consistently) as possible. After all, they had the advantage of teaching tiny liberal arts college classes. I can’t afford to commit that level of care with my large classes. Thus I have developed the following technique.

Early in my career I would leave careful notes on all my students’ essays. Grammar and spelling was corrected, assumptions were challenged, tangents were suggested, and then a hand-written paragraph wrapped up my opinion of their work. A lot of this was boiler plate language, but it was a very time consuming process. Maybe 3-4 short papers could be graded in a hour.

Then one day as class was dismissed I observed students throwing away their graded papers on their way out the door. For the majority of them my precious notes were a waste and you know what? That’s fine. They are not going to be anthropologists. In all likelihood they’ll never write another essay outside of college. Instead of teaching them to write like anthropologists I’d rather start them on the journey (and it is an iterative process, for all of us) of trying to think like one. That process is something in the course itself and not necessarily conveyed by evaluating their work.

Yet an anthropology course must have some writing assignments. Therefore adapting to my students’ behavior is a necessity. Here is what I do. I make students opt-in to receiving comments. If you want me to mark up your paper and critique your writing then turn in a hard copy at the start of class. If you just want the grade then you can send it to me as an attachment in an email. The form has no bearing on the grade. The only difference is that one gets comments and a grade, while the other just gets the grade. I’ve been running this system for the past 3 years and it is an effective compromise.

Approximately 20-33% of the class will turn in a hard copy, this tremendously reduces the need to write comments and speeds up the grading process. This self-selected set includes both skilled writers and writers in need of improvement, but usually excludes the weakest writers. These I can grade at a rate of about 4-5 per hour.

The majority of the class just wants the grade. I’m happy to oblige because I can grade the emailed assignments at rate of 10 per hour. The same criteria apply and the same pitfalls must be negotiated so that grading remains consistent. It’s merely quicker.

Why is this statement so hard to write? Well, for one thing, I think it makes us painfully aware of the gap between our teaching ideals and our actual classroom practices. We can talk all we want about various teaching philosophies, but much of what most teachers do in the classroom is essentially the same. Even Mike Wesch, who wrote here about his theory of anti-teaching, has more recently written about “why good classes fail“:

In fact, the few truly fantastic classes I have stumbled into were just as likely to be “sage on the stage” lectures as they were to be based on more participatory methods. And the disheartening reality has been that a really bad lecture doesn’t fail as badly as a really poorly executed participatory class. Many of these professors seem to do everything “right.” They ask their students questions, pause and let them discuss with their neighbors, show YouTube videos that relate to their own experience, and invite discussion. But disinterest and disengagement still reign. Why?

I appreciate Wesch’s thoughts on this, and I strongly recommend reading the whole piece. (And look forward to his forthcoming book on teaching.) There is also an article about his re-think in the Chronicle. I mention it because it gives me comfort in the more modest approach I’ve taken in my own statement of teaching philosophy. I talk, for instance, about making my goals explicit. This may not seem like much, but in practice I’ve found that it is very difficult to do well and also very helpful to students when done properly. It isn’t the kind of thing that gets one written up in the Chronicle, but it is something I’ve thought long and hard about. It isn’t just about writing a good syllabus, but about spending time in class teaching one’s expectations and the reasons behind them. (In my case we actually created a whole new course to accomplish this goal.)

I hope my document is useful for others working on articulating their own teaching philosophy. I also think it highlights some of the unique challenges I face teaching here in Taiwan and might be interesting even for those not planning on writing such a statement anytime soon.

Statement of Teaching Philosophy

Throughout my teaching career, whether as an adjunct professor at Temple University, a visiting professor at Haverford College, or as an assistant professor at Dong Hwa University’s College of Indigenous Studies, I have sought to develop my teaching skills in such a way so as to keep students with divergent backgrounds and skill levels engaged and challenged by the same class. One way I’ve found to do that is to articulate a range of goals I wish students to acquire, and to articulate those goals clearly to students. Not only does this give the less well trained students something to work towards, but because goals are not necessarily acquired sequentially, even the more advanced students are able to discover gaps in their training which they should focus upon. This approach has two advantages. First of all, being explicit about one’s goals helps compensate for the way educational institutions tend to unfairly advantage students from privileged backgrounds. As Bourdieu and Passeron famously noted, educational institutions often indirectly reward practices which the privileged members of society have already inculcated in the home: language, self-presentation, literacy practices, etc. By clearly defining expectations, and by breaking these skills down into their component parts, I believe I am able to create a more equitable classroom environment. Because a single class is insufficient to compensate for the marked differences , I also worked with my colleagues at Dong Hwa to develop a class in “Basic Study Skills” which is now required for all first year students in my department.

The second advantage to defining a broad range of goals for student performance is that it allows for students to engage with the material in different ways. While I strongly believe in the central importance of reading and writing in developing critical thinking, I have found that many students who have difficulty engaging with the written word can perform very well in other kinds of exercises: oral presentations, oral exams, group discussions, and even producing short plays or films for class. Inspired by Howard Gardner’s theory of “multiple intelligences,” I try to ensure that students who might otherwise feel shut-out have a chance to engage with the class material in ways best suited to their own style of learning. Many of our students at the College of Indigenous Studies come from rural areas where they lacked access to the cram schools so common in Taiwanese urban environments. Many have spent a lot of time engaged in church activities, where there is often a more performative approach to learning. By valuing orality and performativity within the classroom , these students are at less of a disadvantage. Having a wide-range of goals can be just as important for Ph.D. students as it is for undergrads, albeit for different reasons. Graduate students tend to have strong reading and writing skills, but can often lack the performative skills which make for an effective teacher or communicator. Working on these skills is an essential part of their professional training.

As a foreigner in Taiwan, I’ve faced some unique challenges. The poor English ability of many of our students has meant that I’ve had to become an effective lecturer in Chinese. I’ve long prided myself on my ability to explain complex concept in simple, direct, language, but I’ve had to complement that by working hard at creating visual presentations which help illustrate my ideas so as to avoid any chance of confusion. I’ve also had to become a keen student of popular culture so as to find examples students can relate to. But lecturing has been only part of the challenge. Classroom practices which had been effective in American classrooms did not work as expected with Taiwanese students. Students here are often far more reluctant to express strong views or ask questions in class. I’ve dealt with this in several ways: I assign groups to come up with questions collectively, so no one student is put on the spot, I ask students to talk about the topic in terms of their own experience, so that they don’t feel there is a chance that they will make a mistake in public, and I’ve created online discussion groups for all my classes so that students can say things in writing that they might not feel comfortable saying in the classroom.

Social science requires learning how to see one’s own society as an outsider might see it, and to attempt to think about other societies as a local might think about them. For students who have little experience traveling outside their own country this can be a difficult challenge, but the best ethnographies and documentary films are designed to accomplish just such a task. Unfortunately, much of this work is produced with an American or European audience in mind. I have worked hard over the past five years, constantly revising my syllabi so as to select the materials which accomplish this goal while remaining accessible to my students. I’ve discovered that a well written English text can sometimes be more useful than a poor Chinese translation. And I’ve learned where students need some historical or ethnographic context in order to be able to meaningful engage with the material. Following my emphasis on clearly articulated goals, I also work hard to break down the process of reading an academic text into a series of smaller steps by asking students to identify the main themes of a text, the nature of the data and the methodology used. At the same time, especially when using English texts, I try to move students away from doing word-by-word translations by teaching them how to approach the text as an organic whole. I firmly believe that there is a direct correlation between the skills developed by doing close critical readings of texts, and the ability to think critically about society.

“Political economy?” “Symbolic analyses?” Post-whatism?” Semester after semester, my advanced anthropology students told me they couldn’t remember the theories they had learned in their introductory anthropology course (even, they sheepishly confessed, if I had been their professor for that course). In response, I built a review of general anthropological theory into my classes and developed a theory course for junior and senior anthropology majors.

But re-teaching theory at the advanced level was not enough. I needed a better strategy for teaching theory at the very beginning level of anthropological instruction which, for me now as professor and earlier as graduate student, meant in a large lecture class of anywhere from 100 to 550 students. How could I teach theory so that introductory students could retain and use this knowledge beyond exam day? What new pedagogies would enable students to carry the theoretical messages of Levi-Strauss or Mead or Ortner with them? My strategy was to turn to social media, to teach theory by putting students in dialogue with each other: I created two new course assignments, a student-generated theory wiki and a theory blog.

Inspiration came from online discussions about pedagogy among digital humanists, from folks such as Cathy Davidson at Duke University’s HASTAC collective, Howard Rheingold’s Social Media Classroom project at Berkeley, and here at the University of Colorado, our ASSETT program‘s focus on teaching with technology. In the summer of 2010, grad student Marnie Thomson and I crafted the wiki and blog assignments as complementary and required components of the Introduction to Cultural Anthropology course I taught that fall with an excellent team of graduate student teaching assistants, including Marnie as Head Teaching Assistant (TA).

We had no idea what to expect. Would the students really be able to create a theory wiki as first-year anthropology undergraduates? Would they theoretically engage each other on the theory blog in the ways we hoped for? The answers were ‘sort of’ for the wiki, and ‘yes’ for the blog, where their work went beyond even what we had imagined. Here is what we did:

Food and love. All students wrote two 500-word essays applying two different anthropological theories to a topic of their choice under the rubrics of food and love. Essay due dates were staggered over the semester, with some groups of students writing first about food, then love, or vice versa, and applying the theories they were learning at that particular moment in the course. TAs graded the essays, and selected those to put up on the blog. We posted the essays under gender-neutral pseudonyms, and students were required to submit six “substantive comments” on the blog (three on food essays, three on love essays). Their Theory Blog + Wiki Assignment explained:

What do we mean by substantive blog comments? We are looking to create a truly dialogic space for exchange about anthropology. We ask you to engage with the posted essays—for example, offer your thoughts on the author’s argument, raise questions, make connections to other course topics or cultural phenomenon, in general, participate in such a way that conversation is started, continued, or otherwise enabled.  

All comments were moderated, meaning they were not made public until a TA or myself had read them. Any student who did not want to post under their real name created a pseudonym for their comments. The essays and blog comments were 50% of their recitation grade, which made up 40% of their course grade.

Did it work? Beautifully.

Students had respectful, intellectual conversations not usually possible in a large lecture class. They read, responded to, and benefitted from each other’s writings, rather than just writing for the instructor. Collectively, the students turned the blank blog into a space of intellectual exchange and growth. The TAs and I decided not to participate in the blog but to allow it to be a student space for discussion (except for the time a middle-aged man not in the course commented on the “cougar” essay, and I as professor had to reply; a teaching moment, indeed).

We posted six “food” essays and ten “love” essays (turns out as much as we all love food, we love “love” more). In one essay, a student analyzed the US locavore movement using structural-functionalism and cultural ecology. Another wrote about “bromance” from functionalist and Boasian perspectives. A third student critiqued Facebook profiles using symbolic and feminist anthropology. Following each essay are student comments, which were extensive, thoughtful, and productive. The format was a great success in terms of getting students to think with rather than about theory. Again and again, they asked each other “what would a ______ anthropologist think about this?” and thought through the different theoretical approaches to any one topic.

While the course was in session, students gave positive feedback on the blog, and their understanding of theory was evident in the essays they wrote on their final exams as compared to prior semesters. Students from this 2010 class who have since taken more advanced courses with me are comfortable with theory, clearly retaining knowledge from the earlier class, and thus further marking the pedagogical impact of the blog.

The wiki was not as successful and remains unfinished. Each theory (and a handful of topics) were given a page with four sections: main points, key figures, key texts, and critiques. Some sections are competent, while others are incomplete or even convoluted in places. Designed to accompany the course blog as an introductory theory resource, the wiki covered contemporary and classic theory (rather than just classic theory as some sites do). Course students wrote all entries, and frankly, one semester was not enough time to get to a baseline of content for further refining, editing, and developing. Anyone interested in helping out with it—as part of a course, or on their own—is welcome.

Not all of my Digital Anthropology experiments have been a success (cough, cough, Twitter course feed), but the theory blog was successful beyond my expectations. There is no anthropology without theory, and so teaching it well to our newest students is important, giving them a base on which to build as they go forward. I offer our model and experience in the spirit of sharing and would love to hear what has worked for others, as both instructor and student.

Carole McGranahan is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Colorado. She regularly teaches theory classes to undergraduate and graduate students, and just debuted a new course this semester on “Reading Ethnography.”

Some of my mentors, none of which are in anthropology departments, prefer to say “trained as an anthropologist, so and so, investigates…” as opposed to “so and so is an anthropologist.” If you are on the job market this may be hard to do as you are likely to have just become a PhD wielding anthropologist for the first time in your life and quite proud of the moniker and achievement but the shift in self-definition is important for you and your future academic home, I would argue.

I just went through the whole job-hunting process before signing a contract on Monday to become a Lecturer in media and cultural studies in the Sociology Department at Lancaster University. I was able to apply for a silly amount of jobs, get a bunch of interviews and campus visit requests, and have some choices and grounds on which to do some humble negotiating. I think my trick was post-disciplinary research and (a considerable amount of) cross-disciplinary publishing. I could apply to communications, media studies, anthropology, information studies, STS, sociology, television studies, American studies, and internet studies. If I were desperate I could apply for archaeology and film production positions. Postdoctoral positions, particularly those financed by the Mellon, are all about interdisciplinarity as are jobs looking for digital humanities scholars.

So I’d encourage my fellow freshly minted ABDs and PhDs to begin seeing their research and their teaching across at least 4-5 large disciplines. Be able to realistically apply to 4-5 departments. One can put this together variously by publishing in different journals, collaborating with colleagues from different fields, or simply working the boundaries of one’s discipline in necessarily interdisciplinary ways. (All I can say is that I hope this is not my internalization of the precarity of neoliberal governmentality in the education sector.)

And there is something said for responding (in non-trendy and timeless ways!) to emergent patterns in industry, politics, and social movements. The departments recognize that what is in the news is what the students want to study. In my case this amounted to a recursive loop from the hype surrounding new media –Arab Spring, Anonymous, Wikileaks, SOPA, PIPA, and Occupy– to departments requesting applicants with expertise in social media and political movements. Oddly enough, if the academic job thing doesn’t work out this type of preparation in the now prepares oneself better for a post-academic profession. In academia the joy of investigating emergent practices is that there is no syllabus. You get to design your own. And in the classroom you are not pulling teeth, the issues are on students’ minds. It is relevant.

I may sound heretical to some of you by suggesting that post-anthropological disciplinary affiliations are necessary. But one gains much less than one loses by fundamentally aligning oneself with the orthodoxy of a specific discipline. One one hand, the qualitative and critical social sciences are converging. Critical theory and ethnographic or textual methods run across all the disciplines above. On the other hand, replicating the discourses specific to a discipline is important for the survival of that discipline and I am glad some people are monogamously “physical anthropologists” or whatnot. But my argument is that this practice of disciplinary orthodoxy is dangerously myopic for a discipline and puts the job hunter in a situation with few options. I preferred to bring scholarship from other disciplines to anthropology, and though it proved difficult to buck anthropological tradition by studying contemporary technoculture in America, it provided me a wider repertoire of skills that apparently translate into numerous disciplines and a blessed job offer.

Good luck! Tell us how it goes for you.

We don’t need a lot more anthropologists in the state. It’s a great degree if people want to get it, but we don’t need them here. I want to spend our dollars giving people science, technology, engineering, and math degrees. That’s what our kids need to focus all their time and attention on, those types of degrees, so when they get out of school, they can get a job.

Daniel Lende provides a good recap of the situation and some of the reactions with this mega-linked, all inclusive post.  Jason Antrosio has also weighed in on the matter–his post also includes a link to the AAA response, which is here.  Jason sees this as an opportunity to rally anthropologists:

Not only does this give anthropology an opportunity to emphasize our scientific side, it could also be a rallying point for social science and humanities disciplines that were equally dismissed. It seems worth mentioning that while Scott dismisses everyone except math-science-engineering, it is at a time when other countries are seeking the lifelong thinking and creativity developed in a Liberal Arts education.

In another piece, John Hawks discusses some of the possible avenues for responding to this debacle.  How can or should anthropologists make their case?  He writes:

It’s very difficult to come up with a rapid and effective reply from an organization or department, so I understand these aren’t as punchy as they might be. Still, it seems to me a vastly more effective response would describe the economic impact of anthropologists in Florida, the dollar amounts of federal and private grants they bring to Florida universities, their role as custodians of natural and cultural history, and their history of engagement with indigenous and immigrant peoples in the state.

One of Scott’s underlying arguments is that anthropology doesn’t produce JOBS, and this is an argument that seems to get a lot of mileage by certain folks who aren’t exactly fans of social science (Tom Coburn, anyone?).  I am going to leave off with a few questions for all you Savage Minds out there: What do you think about this tactic of using jobs as the sole calculus for measuring the value of a discipline?  Should anthropologists be completely focused on producing jobs, or are there other elements that matter in a valuable and worthwhile education?  What about the value of teaching students how to think critically and holistically about the world around them?  Why say you, readers?

MT: Tell me something of your love for comics. What is the personal history of your tastes and interests?

SG: As a girl growing up in Japan and Hawaii surrounded by early Anime culture and the comics scene on base I was phenomenally *uninterested* in comix/comics and the associated culture. I think a large part of this was that back then (1980s) it was a heavy, heavy masculinist scene that alienated a lot of girls and boys, and maybe I was responding to that. The genre is defined much, MUCH more widely now and I think that’s a lot more welcoming for girls and women as well as subaltern men and people of color, to name a few.

I really wasn’t interested in that as much as I was in drawing — drawing was what I spent my days and nights doing and developing. Don’t get me wrong — I’m not classically trained in ANY respect, but I do remember there was this little Ed Emberly book about learning to draw animals from basic shapes that rocked my 5 year old world.

It’s probably a little pedestrian for the dyed-in-the-wool comics fan but the two artists who turned me on to the possibilities of the graphic novel and the panel or strip-format comic were Gary Larson and Art Spiegelman. The former was so quirky — it gave me the idea that there could be more than just superheroes or Prince Valiant or Cathy. The latter taught me about diversity of style and subject matter. The Maus series changed my world from an artistic and political point of view, considering I first came across it in 6th grade. Again, things are much different now, and as an adult (with the internet!) I have a much better range of stuff to read.

MT: Why did you think it would be a good thing to bring comics and anthropology together? Is there something that comics can do for anthropology?

SG: When I was in high school, in Hawaii, at Punahou School, I started trying out a comic strip that I later developed into Stating the Obvious, my strip that ran at Grinnell College for some years. From there I kept working in small ways until my thesis advisor, Margaret LeCompte, suggested that I should find a way to bring art into my scholarly pursuits. I connected with Mitch Allan at Left Coast Press (at that point he was with Alta Mira Press) and Shane was born.

I’m not even sure where the Shane idea came from, to be honest – I seem to remember my grad school PhD colleagues Andrew Brodsky and Eric Eiteljorg were sitting around in a small group discussion in a class for which we had NOT done the reading trying desperately to answer the discussion questions and got a little punchy with the Wild West theme. Who knows?

The process took a long time. I kind of just sat down and wrote it, thinking through my own understanding of fieldwork and fieldcraft as I went through. I’m working on the sequel now, which is Shane’s homage to data analysis. It’s hard to sit down and get it done because unlike a Word document which is so easy to edit and change (and may be viewed as a more robust form of scholarship and therefore ‘credit’ in the tenure and promotion game) any change in the pen-and-paper drawing game is laborious. Also taking the time to sit down and lose yourself in the story takes time. Even with all the technology out there I am still a pen-and-ink-and-pencil-and-eraser-shavings-everywhere luddite girl.

As for what comics can do for anthropology – or for any field or discipline out there: I think that any time we push the boundaries of what ‘counts’ as a legitimate text, of who can be the voice of scholarship and science, of what that ‘voice’ looks like and of who we purport our readership to be we democratize the profession and make knowledge more accessible to more people. Don’t get me wrong: scholarship, academic work, theory, and knowledge production are all deeply complex work. However, so is visual work and visual representation – just because it is different and some people think it is more accessible (which, as we know, isn’t always the case) doesn’t mean it is simple or a sub-genre. Funny pictures do more than make us laugh.

MT: Shane is different sort of critter from other comics I’ve reviewed on this blog, it’s more like an illustrated textbook. Why did you decide to write the book in the way that you did? What motivated you to use comics to teach ethnographic methodology?

SG: The honest but probably hugely uninteresting answer is that’s just how my brain works. I literally sat down and drew out the frames as they came to me (in pencil), with a vague idea of where I wanted to go. In terms of the ghosts of the ancestors [of anthropology] who guide Shane along her journey, I did make that choice deliberately because I felt like ethnographic methods newbies (in the field of education specifically) don’t draw from the real, live Heroes of Social Science like they should.

In terms of motivating to teach this way, well, I think in pictures and always have. My students will tell you I teach in pictures, so the book was a natural. It was also a great way to use something I can do well, drawing, to improve on something I was and am learning to do well, teaching.

MT: In the writing process did you find that the pitfalls you had to navigate were unique to writing comics or were they similar to the difficulties of writing a conventional text?

SG: Writing this book was much more difficult mechanically from writing a conventional text. But having now written two books and one (and a half) comic books, the comic is easier because I think both pedagogically and pictorially.

MT: Describe taking this to press. Did you have to do some extra work to convince the publisher that this was a worthwhile idea? How was pitching this book different from pitching a more conventional academic work?

SG: I didn’t have to do extra work, actually, beyond putting together a proposal – but since at the time of writing Shane I never had done a standard book prospectus, I didn’t know differently! I was lucky enough to work with an extremely supportive editor, Mitch Allan, now at Left Coast Press, who showed me what to do and was extremely helpful. The press I worked with for the original Shane had to figure out how to work with my style, the size of the pages (I tend to work on huge pieces of vellum that have to be shrunk down to fit) and so on, but everyone was pretty game and it came together beautifully. I did run into a few naysayers who looked down their noses at comic books and had lots of bad energy to spread around, but there are always going to be idiots out there.

The hardest thing, honestly, is mechanic! I am sitting down to write another one, working in the summer heat. My office isn’t air conditioned (this is New England, after all), so even if there was room for a drafting table it would be too sticky and wet. And I mean page-curling wet! Working at home, well, with three children under six years of age, there’s a lot of PB&J on every surface. So I’ve been slowed down until things cool off in the fall.

I really, really need a studio space either at home or elsewhere, but that isn’t in the budget. But, oh, the dream! If any of your readers want to sponsor a studio for me, and thereby help me generate more Shane at a faster rate, I can tell them where to send the check!

MT: You taught a comic course at UMass. How did that go? What do you read in that course?

SG: What I was really blown away by was how much my position as a comix/ comics cultural outsider came into play. Comics is about more than art and text; there’s a vibrant and important culture associated with the genre that’s really spectacular. Think about it – artists and fans coming together across a range of media (visual art, novels and short stories, television and film and more) to create spaces where it is possible to completely subvert the dominant paradigm (or cater to hegemony – there is certainly a lot of that out there too). It’s great.

However, I’ve always existed on the fringe, located much more in the universe of children’s book art such as can be found at our own local Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art right here in Amherst. The course really opened up an entirely new world to me. It is also important to note that the courses were overwhelmingly male. I think I had two female students. I contrast that to the course I am teaching this fall on Childhood as a Cultural Artifact — that one is 100% female.

I tried to balance some ‘classics’ with a concern for getting a group of readings together that covered a range of styles and subject matter; I also tried to include as many women authors as possible. I would have liked to include a much larger reading list but for one credit I didn’t want people to go blind reading. Also, the cost of many graphic novels and comix is downright prohibitive, so economics also prevented a huge reading list.

• Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art by Scott McCloud
• The Complete Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi
• Maus I A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History by Art Spiegelman
• Ghost World by Daniel Clowes
• A Contract with God by Will Eisner
• Blankets by Craig Thompson
• Palestine by Joe Sacco and Edward Said
• Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea by Guy Delisle
• Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
• Y: The Last Man by Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra
• Shortcomings by Adrian Tomine
• One! Hundred! Demons! by Lynda Barry
• Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware
• Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel
• Epileptic by David B.

 
MT: So tell me about sequel. What prompted it and where are you taking Shane next?

SG: The sequel is a book about doing data analysis – something that is, in my experience, very, very difficult to teach. But a *lot* of fun! I’m hoping to get that draft done very soon and maybe pilot a few chapters in my spring qualitative data analysis course.

MT: In anthropology there’s a lot of lip service paid to the notion of breaking out of the mold of prestige publishing, yet our professional culture is not changing. I think, in part, it is because the people with the greatest influence and most social capital in our discipline have the least to gain by a reconfiguration of what counts as ‘real’ anthropology. How has your work been received by other anthropologists? Is there something comics do for anthropology? What can anthropologists learn from comics?

SG: As to your Great Big Huge Giant Question, well, there are lots of complex answers. But for our space here I’ll say that everyone should get to be the ‘knower’ and, just as we all engage in cultural production of one kind or another, we should all be able to participate as ‘real’ anthropologists. Comics have the potential to democratize the academic establishment, or at least question and then expand the boundaries of legitimacy. I also think that the more plentiful and diverse voices that get to contribute to how we understand culture, and speak to culture in ways that are treated with respect can only improve the field. More voices are always better.

There have to be standards, sure — research has rules and I’m not advocating a free-for-all abandonment of method — but we need to challenge it in measured, complex and varied ways. One of the best ways of doing that is to question what “counts” as scholarship. I had lots of people tell me that my “little comic book” wouldn’t sell/publish/count for tenure and so on, that I was wasting my time, that I was silly, that it was “fluffy” — but that’s the same stuff people said about qualitative research during the so-called paradigm wars in educational research and look how *those* critiques are seen in the clear light of day!

I’ve had great responses from my colleagues in the Council on Anthropology and Education (CAE) and loads of support from most of my UMass colleagues. As for those folks out there who are not supportive, who say that my work isn’t anthropology, isn’t “real” or “rigorous” or adequate or legitimate scholarship, I think a lot of them are responding to real and radical changes in academia over the last few years. In terms of the shifting sands of the old knowledge economies writ large, some degree of insecurity is understandable. On one hand I want to encourage them to reflect upon the nature and purpose of their work in light of these changes — but on another hand I want them to just mind my swath. (That, by the way, is a quote from another comic artist and Grinnell College alum, Zander Cannon.)

I think anthropologists can learn a great deal from comics, and comic writers can learn a lot from how academics position themselves and their research participants; anthropologists walk a very fine line when it comes to positionality and comic artists, as constructors of complex, often multi-directional narratives do the same.

Books for children can, on occasion, offer a clarity into underlying issues that belies their apparent simplicity. In the introduction to the revised edition of Enjoy Your Symptom, Lacanian philosopher Slavoj Zizek seizes on this:

Whatever the vicissitudes and deformations of Lacan in cultural studies, one should focus on what happens with children in their early age, following the wise Jesuit motto, “Give me a child till he is seven, and afterward you can do with him whatever you want.” So I am tempted to claim that there is hope for us Lacanians as long as American children are massively exposed to Shel Silverstein’s two classic books, The Missing Piece and The Missing Piece Meets the Big O; one is almost embarrassed by the direct way these two books render in naked form the basic matrix of the Lacanian opposition of desire and drive.

I too have felt the profound touch of picture books like Leo Lionni’s treatise on epistemology and the non-translatability of experience, Fish is Fish, or Jon Muth’s tranquil and enlightening, Zen Shorts. Kids’ books are big business and tenure track positions are getting harder to find. Maybe there are some anthropologists out there who want to get in on this genre?

With the AAA’s push for a more “public anthropology” we might consider too the role our discipline can play in K-12 education. I’m not talking about the anthropology of education or an anthropology of children like the work being done by the good people at the CAE, which is in itself fascinating and, of course, vitally important given the politicization of ed discourse in the public sphere. But, imagine instead an anthropology for children. Maybe there’s a CAE person reading this now who can add to our discussion, are there anthropologists out there right now writing to children?

There are a number of kids’ books that brush up against anthropology or that invite one to interject an anthropological spin on things. At my house we have a slew of these “people around the world” type books (all of them gifts), including ones on bread, shoes, houses, and families. The DK Eyewitness series offers beautiful picture books on archaeology, mythology, Indians, classical ancient societies – Egypt, Greece, Rome, the biggies – even evolution and early humans (or as my kids call them “Monkey People”). The archaeologists already got Indiana Jones and Laura Croft. With cool how-to books like this one they need someone to move into Bill Nye territory.

Granted works like the DK series are commercial productions for the kiddie book market. They’ve no doubt got academics serving as consultants or fact checkers, but most of the creative work is done by graphic designers and copy writers who know how to make books that kids want and that parents will buy. That’s why I find the two works I’d like to discuss today so interesting. They are artistic works of scholarship and experience, creatively rendered and engaging to young people. For any anthros wanting to write for children, here are some role models

Journey to Cahokia: A Boy’s Visit to the Great Mound City by Albert Lorenz with Joy Schleh is a production of The Art Institute of Chicago. The book opens with a map and a note emphasizing the interconnectedness of long distance American Indian trade routes. This sets an academic tone and situates our story around 1300 CE. The story follows the family of a boy named Little Hawk as they journey from their small village by Lake Erie on a trading mission to the great city of Cahokia far to the west along the eastern shore of the Mississippi.

The first scene opens on a tableau, the illustration done in watercolor over ink lines with some colored pencil mixed in. We see a village of wigwams surrounded by a stockade, one hut is shown in cut away so that we can see women tending to children inside. Along the shores of the river men smoke fish, build canoes, and prepare to disembark. In the next page our gaze zooms in closer and we can inspect more carefully the gendered division of labor. The whole process of pot making is shown: one woman crafts the pot, another is ready to paint, a girl carries firewood, a fire is being built with finished pots inside. Men have returned from the hunt carrying rabbits and turkeys.

As Little Hawk embarks on the trading mission to Cahokia a crew of about twenty join his family in five canoes. They row past raised mounds, stop to share a story of Red Horn, survive a raiding party, and are awed at their first sight of Cahokia – a city of 20,000 dominated by a huge mound. Here Little Hawk witnesses a game of stickball. The men notice that the Cahokians dwell in houses made of wattle and daub, and the women see them tilling their gardens with hoes and ask to trade for the tool. In the marketplace there are a great many wares to see from masks and sea shells to woven belts and pottery.

Then the story breaks. Across a two page spread the story yields to photos of artifacts – arrowheads, a ceremonial drinking cup, a dancer’s mask, and a pair of earspools – set beside detailed descriptions and illustrations of people using them. The story resumes on the next page as the villagers join a massive crowd at the base of the principle mound. A “coronation” is taking place, with a religious official bestowing a symbol of authority upon a political official at the top of the pyramid. Finally the travelers bid Cahokia farewell. They load the canoes to depart.

Journey to Cahokia is rather sophisticated for a kids’ book. One can imagine it shelved with non-fiction though it’s entirely narrative in its structure. The sentences are long and the vocabulary is advanced. It has a clear purpose to educate its readership about the people of North American Midwest prior to the arrival of Europeans.

I wasn’t thrilled about the way it represented the political structure of Little Hawk’s village or the “coronation” of the leader of Cahokia, both of which projected a centralized authority where one may not have existed. But these are minor quibbles. The book does a great job of imagining what everyday life was like among the people of the Ohio River valley, even showing a diversity of lifeways from village to city.

The Indian people in it are exquisitely illustrated. I recall a Nez Perce costume designer I interviewed for my dissertation on a major theatrical production staged on an Indian reservation. He vehemently dismissed the primitivist look of buckskin costumes as they are frequently seen in movies. “I refuse to believe that my people couldn’t cut a straight line,” he said. The characters in Journey to Cahokia, by contrast, are well dressed. The women modest, the men fabulously tattooed. They cut a straight line.

I read this to my three year old and, much to my surprise, she was really drawn into the story despite its slow pace. “I see the people!” she exclaimed. The artwork is quite beautiful and each scene is a panorama with a single illustration spread out over two full pages. My seven year-olds were able to read it independently and the more enthusiastic reader of the two went through it three times. She remarked to me, “I didn’t know Indians built pyramids.”

…

Jingle Dancer is by Cynthia Leitich Smith, with illustrations by Cornelius Van Wright and Ying-Hwa Hu. This is much more a conventional story-time type children’s book with the rhythmic repetition of actions and phrases. The language has a gentle, poetic quality. It’s not in verse per se, but rich in metaphor and sensorial description. Our story follows a Muscogee girl named Jenna, maybe ten years of age, who aspires to be a jingle dancer at the next powwow but doesn’t have a dress. She practices her bounce steps, talks to her Grandma, and visits other female relatives and neighbors. From each woman she asks to borrow a row of jingles until she has enough for her dress and can dance Girls at the powwow in their honor.

The art work in Jingle Dancer is stunning. Bold and rich watercolor over the faintest charcoal lines. I have not seen finer watercolor in a children’s book. My guess is that the creative process began with the illustrator working from photographs of actors, a common technique for producing cinematic realism in comics.

What makes Jingle Dancer stand out is its consciously contemporary setting. When Jenna practices her bounce-steps she does so by watching a video in the family living room. When she begins her quest for jingles for her dress, she embarks wearing blue jeans, a t-shirt and sneakers. As she walks down her suburban street the houses are clean and modern. The women she meets along the way are independent, successful and live in fine homes.

By virtue of its contemporary-ness, this is a story you could share with a non-Indian girl who is “into” Indians and have her come away with sense of living Indian people. It is also a story that a modern Indian girl could read and find something relevant and recognizable from her own life reflected back to her. What a lacuna to fill! Kudos to the author and her team for producing such a unique and positive book.

Like the best family-oriented children’s stories, Jingle Dancer has a sweet heart that features loving relationships among children and adults. It’s hard not to get a little weepy reading it. The three year-old liked it okay, but the seven year-olds were totally fascinated by it. I often remind them when they learn about Indians in their social studies class (which always cast tribal people in the past) that they once lived on a reservation. These memories from when they were two and three lie just outside their grasp. Now they’re asking me to take them to powwow and buy them a frybread so they can see the girls dance jingle.

You’ve got several options, 1) write a book review, tearing apart the author for poor research, 2) kindly fold in a gentle critique into your future writing, or 3) contact the author with the goal of establishing a collaboration. Scholars deal with appearances of theoretical mistakes, oversights and overstatements, or malum prohibitum, all the time. It is our engagement with what we perceive as disciplinarily not accurate in generative and creative ways that builds theory and nudges the future of the discipline. This is theory building and this is what we do.

But what is our professional responsibility to malum in se, claims that are factually wrong? I am talking about the very quotidian error when a writer notes the wrong dates for events and misnames a person. I am also talking about the questionable representation of reality in those necessarily interpretive instances, like when a practice first began, or by whom, or what was the dominant influence behind the emergence of that practice. For example, synchronic work from a diachronic perspective is always somewhat limited. Such historiographical debates are generative. My point is that errors run a spectrum from the incontrovertible to malum prohibitum—from my perspective it is not as right as it could be. Again, these debates are what we do.

As anthropologists, we are going to always be able to critique most other even softer sciences for their methodological inadequacies. As I come in contact with more work in cultural, textual, media, and other hermeneutical studies I entrench more into empiricism and pragmatism. The anthropology of emergence, I think, is at its best when it is focused first on description. These other disciplines often skip that part and jump right into theory; making factual errors in the process. For those of us doing the rigorous movement through our data and the lives of our subjects identifying malum in se in this work is easy. But what to do?

I agree with one of my mentors, Tom Boellstorff, who is adamant that budding anthropologists studying related areas be collegial. He chides us to not get into the seductive trap of trying to make a career out of denouncing our colleagues. I’ve taken a look at the anthropologists researching one of my major foci, the internet, and I can count them with one hand. With and not against these colleagues I will attempt to first accurately describe and secondly carefully theorize this emergent culture. Thus I am going with option 3 and contacting the dead wrong scholar and future collaborator.

p.s. I’m officially burned out on The Sambia and don’t have the strength to battle through In Search of Respect. So no recs for those, please.

We spend a lot of time talking about ethnography as a product, and even about the ethical issues involved in “shared anthropology,” but it is almost impossible to teach someone how to gain the trust of their research subjects. There is no one-size-fits-all approach because the obstacles to gaining such consent will vary from project to project. While I can’t offer pre-packaged solutions, I can advise students how to handle such obstacles without giving up. Patience and persistence are skills which many students have yet to learn. There are also techniques they can use in the filmmaking process to work around limitations placed on them by their subjects. There is a tremendous wealth of ethnographic knowledge to be gained from working through these obstacles.

One of my students this semester wants to work with a local hearing impaired community. We were both surprised to learn that the members of this community lack the necessary Chinese literacy to be able to read and understand a consent form. It turns out that this is not too uncommon. A 1997 study of 17-18 year old deaf students in the United States found that median reading comprehension was at a fourth grade level. For someone who communicates in Sign Language, learning to read English involves the added burden of learning English, so it comes as no surprise that gaining English literacy poses serious obstacles. What is surprising, at least to me, is that the education system so miserably fails these students by not providing the tools they need to overcome these obstacles. It is too early for me to say anything definitive, but it sounds like similar problems face the hearing impaired in Taiwan. (Here are links to two recent studies about the subject [both are PDFs]: “A Survey of Sign Language in Taiwan” and “Taiwan Sign Language Research: An Historical Overview“)

In this case, the solution is fairly simple: I will have my student record someone signing the consent form, and he will play it for his subjects. He will then video-tape their consent. In some cases, however, things have gotten much more complicated. One semester a student filmed a class of special-needs students and only had consent to show the backs of their heads. Since the young students moved around quite a bit, it made for some very interesting editing!

It is also something I’ve been thinking about quite a bit, having just submitted a paper for review which discusses how we dealt with consent issues in our film, Please Don’t Beat Me, Sir! I will save a fuller discussion of the issues we faced for later, but the way we solved the problem was to take a page out of Jean Rouch and to film the discussions about consent and include them as an element in the film. It turned out to be a very revealing and powerful scene!