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!

Any recommendations?

• Stand Up While You Read This (NY Times)
• Can Sitting Too Much Kill You? (Scientific American)

The take home point being that “sitting too much is not the same as exercising too little” and while both are bad, we can greatly improve our health by not sitting so much when we work. I myself switched to a standing desk some time ago (for writing – I still sit with my iPad when I’m reading), and former Lifehacker editor Gina Trapani has a good post about her own switch to a standing desk.

But what got me thinking about students was this line from Travis Saunders’s Scientific American post:

a recent study reports that roughly 70% of class time, including physical education class, is completely sedentary (while slightly better than class time, children were also sedentary for the majority of lunch and recess).

Since I became a teacher I spend most of my class time standing, but sometimes I have to sit while students do their presentations and I feel sorry for my students because the chairs my school bought for the classrooms are torture devices. I do give my students frequent breaks (at least one every hour), but if you add up all the classes they take they are spending a good portion of their day just sitting. A lot of teachers reshape their classroom, moving chairs into a circle to make it more democratic, but how many teachers require their students to stand during class?

In many Taiwanese classrooms (and I imagine elsewhere as well), being forced to stand during class is considered a type of punishment. But it seems to me that the collective health of our students (and even faculty at conferences and meetings) could be greatly improved if we weren’t so quick to pull up a seat. I don’t know how we might go about instituting such changes (how would students take notes if they don’t have standing desks?), but it seems worthwhile experimenting with alternative classrooms where students can sit or stand as they please, even switching between the two during class.

A good example of this is Sophie Haroutunian-Gordon’s work on teaching through discussion groups. I love these books and have learned a lot from them despite the fact that they are focused on primary and secondary education. Discussion is the holy grail of college teaching and yet many college teachers don’t know how to make it happen, why exactly its so important, or what specifically it consists in. The SH-G answers all these questions. Check out the first chapter of her most recent book.

The thing is, H-G is a card-carrying Deweyian and as a result she doesn’t think you can learn how to have a discussion by just reading a set of instructions about how to have a discussion, or to quickly scan a few short suggestions. Instead, you have to go through the process of watching (well, reading) someone learn how to hold great discussion classes.

This insistence that you can only learn by going through the process is mirrored in another of my favorite books, Robert Boice’s How Writers Journey to Comfort and Fluency: A Psychological Adventure. I think this is the best and — frankly — most amazing book about writing that I have ever read. In the book Boice, a psychotherapist (but not the weird scary kind) and professor of rhetoric (iirc) leads you through one of his writing workshops as if you were a participant. Like H-G, he makes you go through the process of slowly working through the workshop and your own issues in order to help you journey to comfort and fluency as a writer.

Actually, Boice is slightly cynical about the idea that readers will focus on the journey and not the destination. Apparently the first step many authors in his workshop take is to demand that he simply hypnotize them and remove their writer’s block that way. And then… he does! They run around for a week convinced they no longer have writer’s block but not actually writing anything and then finally return to the fold, convinced that they have to take the long way around.

Similarly, Boice provides the readers a numbered list of Official Insights about how to be a good writer, but it is clear that these are best viewed as signposts along the way, not ‘results’ or ‘conclusions’ about how to write lots comfortably. Read in isolation from the larger journey of the text, they are helpful and insightful but… not the same thing as the real journey.

I completely agree with the idea that the best books engage you in a process or journey, and the reading and learning are about going through that process. However, I also spend a lot of time wishing the world was the kind of place where you could just read bulleted lists of conclusions and be done with it — things would be so much easier and faster!

The time it takes for academics to study, write, and publish something about a current event is about the same amount of time it takes to enroll a cohort of students too young to remember the event.

Thirtysomethings like me blanche with terror at the realization that our students no longer remember not just the coldwar, but grunge. Even 9/11 is a from a time in their childhood when major events are hazy memories rather than adult realities. For someone who was 8 when we invaded Iraq, how much pulling power can a class really have when the Big Draw is “we’re going to get to the bottom of this WMD claim once and for all”. Even events that occurred four or five years ago — i.e. at just about the speed anthropologists can really write about them — are back in the middle-school range of traditional students.

Call it the relevance gap.

DAVID DUNNING: Here’s a thought. The road to self-insight really runs through other people. So it really depends on what sort of feedback you are getting. Is the world telling you good things? Is the world rewarding you in a way that you would expect a competent person to be rewarded? If you watch other people, you often find there are different ways to do things; there are better ways to do things. I’m not as good as I thought I was, but I have something to work on. Now, the sad part about that is — there’s been a replication of this with medical students — people at the bottom, if you show them what other people do, they don’t get it. They don’t realize that what those other people are doing is superior to what they’re doing. And that’s the troubling thing. So for people at the bottom, that social comparison information is a wonderful piece of information, but they may not be in a position to take advantage of it like other people.

ERROL MORRIS: But wait a second. You’re supposed to benefit from feedback. But the people that you’ve picked are dunderheads. And you lack the ability to discriminate between dunderheads and non-dunderheads, between good advice and bad advice, between that which makes sense and that which makes no sense. So the community does you no damn good!

DAVID DUNNING: You know, I think that is an issue. Those among us who are in the 40th percentile, they’re not the best, but they’re not doing too badly. But people at the bottom, you’re going to have to be open-minded and you’re going to have some special hurdles, internal hurdles you have to get over. If people give you conflicting advice, congratulations, you don’t know how to choose. Yes, it is a tricky part of the problem.

I think this is a central problem for teachers trying to get through to the bottom 40% of a class. Often it seems that these students simply don’t do the work. But I think it isn’t so simple. I believe they don’t see the purpose of doing the work. While they understand that there is some information in the assignments that they are missing, they don’t see this information as adding up to new skills, new ways of thinking about the world which might be of benefit to them. For instance, in a class on documentary film, I had one student who was still, after a whole semester of learning about various approaches to discussing films (structure, form, narrative style, etc.) was unable to compare two films. He kept comparing the events portrayed in the films, but didn’t understand what I wanted when I asked him to focus on the films themselves rather than the events they portrayed. In some important way I failed to convince this student that there was anything of value to learn in my class.

As anthropologists we find ourselves in the opposite situation. We are often in the bottom 40% (or worse) in terms of our understanding of the culture we are trying to study (unless you happen to be working in your own culture). And while we differ from the student in the above example in that we know there is something we don’t know and are very motivated to learn it, we still “don’t get” a lot of what our informants try to tell us. I’ve long felt that there is a certain hubris to anthropological research, in the idea that you can spend ten to eighteen months somewhere and then attempt to speak authoritatively about it. The only thing saving us are our collaborators. As Dunning says: “it really depends on what sort of feedback you are getting.” But also on our ability to listen to that feedback, which I think is much harder than we would like to believe.

And here is a picture of the view (on a more typically cloudy day) looking back, from the balcony near my office.

Most of the people who live on the East Coast of Taiwan reside in a narrow valley between the Coastal Mountain Range (top picture) and the larger Central Mountain Range (bottom picture). The valley starts in Hualien city, and continues down about about a hundred miles, to the next coastal city, Taitung. About thirty miles south is the village where I did my fieldwork. Apart from the great scenery and the chance to improve my Chinese, that is one of the main reasons I took this job. But it is now four years since I came here and I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve made that thirty mile trip. That’s what I’d like to talk about in this post. I think the reasons give some insight into what life is like as an expat professor in Taiwan, what it means to teach near your field site, as well as some of the unique aspects of my current situation.

There are a number of reasons why I spend so little time at my old field site. One of them is that, as they say, “you can’t step in the same river twice.” It’s been a decade since I did my fieldwork, and the people I knew there have mostly moved on. I worked in an elementary school, and few people stay in the same place for more than four years. Some I’m still friends with. A teacher who teaches in the mountains south of Taipei, a baseball coach who is currently staying at my cousin’s house in Ohio has he studies for his Ph.D., and a few others I see now and then. But there are only a few people I know still living back in the village.

The other reason is that I’m busy. Taiwanese teachers typically have a 3-3 teaching load, as well as the usual advising and bureaucratic responsibilities. Since I arrived here I’ve developed over eleven new course syllabi – all of which I teach in Chinese. I mention this because it means I need to spend about four times as long preparing my courses as I would if I taught in English. The knowledge that almost all of my colleagues completed Ph.D.’s in Western Universities keeps me from making too much of my language situation. One get’s a lot more leeway teaching in a foreign language than one gets as a student, and I certainly couldn’t write a dissertation in Chinese, not to mention a term paper. Even now, for academic promotion, my colleagues are expected to publish and present papers in English whereas I can get by without having to write much Chinese at all.

The thing is, when I came they told me that I could teach in English because the government is trying to promote more English language classes. I tried it for a semester, but soon gave up. For one thing, less than a fifth of the students had sufficient English skills to follow me. Another reason is that we need at least ten students to get full credit for an undergraduate class. Although Taiwanese teachers get double credits for teaching in English – the same doesn’t apply to me as a foreigner, even though the problems I face are the same. But, over time, I’ve gotten better at it. The Ph.D. Cultural Theory course, which used to be the one class I did teach in English, I taught in Chinese (or Chinglish) this year. I still depend mostly on English language texts (giving my students translations when possible), but this semester was the first time I used a Chinese-only text in one of my classes, something I hope to slowly increase over time. [See this post I wrote some time back about the lack of texts in translation.]

But the biggest reason that I return to my field site so rarely has little to do with how busy I am teaching, and everything to do with how busy I am when I’m on break. Just at the time I got this job I was embarking on what turned out to be a four year project working on a documentary film in India. This has been one of the most exciting things I’ve ever done in my life, and I don’t regret it for an instant, but it does mean that when I do have a break I’m often jumping on board a plane to India (as, indeed, I’m doing again in about ten days time).

Despite everything I’ve said, I don’t mean to imply I haven’t been doing new research here in Taiwan. I have! About a year ago I started a series of posts on learning an endangered language and after that I interviewed some indigenous language teachers. While that work has been on hold over the past few months, I hope to take it up again as soon as we return from India. There is a paper I want to do on the subject and my New Year’s resolution is to get a first draft done by the end of the summer, and to turn it into a research proposal by the end of the year (when the National Science Council research deadline is).

Speaking of papers. Although it took me about three years to get into a schedule that works for me, I have lately also begun to figure out how to crank out those papers – something I need to do a lot more of if I’m going to pass the six year review required of all Taiwanese academics. Although there are the first inklings of a shift towards book-length manuscripts at some research institutions, here the focus is still on academic papers. A lot of credit is given for journals listed in the Social Science Citation Index which is annoying, since so many great anthropology journals aren’t listed there. My department has been supportive in giving me some credit for my online and multimedia work as well. I’m hopeful that the documentary film will be able to be included in my review.

One thing I’ve had to cut back on is conferences. It is just too costly and too time consuming to attend too many conferences from here. The school and the National Science Council do give faculty some support, but as much as I’d like to go to more conferences, I need to spend that precious time working on getting those papers out. I think, in general, this is true for junior faculty no matter where you are – but the distance (and jet lag) makes it even more true. To the extent possible, I have been trying to attend regional conferences, which can often be an exciting way to explore the region and (of course) network.

So, that’s why I don’t spend much time in my field site. But I’m learning a lot just by living and working here. For one thing, about half the students in our college are Taiwanese Aborigines, which is quite remarkable when you think that less than two percent of Taiwanese are Aborigines. Being a good teacher and advisor means learning from my students, which means being a good ethnographer. (Hopefully I can write some of that down in another blog post sometime.) Whether it is student term papers on indigenous issues, or problems advisees are facing at home, I’m picking up a lot about indigenous life by osmosis.

Below is video of a graduation day ceremony featuring cultural traditions from many of the different indigenous communities represented at our university:

In a way, I feel like I am now, a decade after I finished up my dissertation field work, finally ready to begin the task I started at that time. I feel that my first four years teaching here have given me a very special kind of training. And the learning process has made being a junior faculty member that much more exciting than it might have been otherwise. So even though I rarely go back to my old field site, it has still been a fantastic learning experience for me. Even though there may be limited opportunities for Ph.D.s to get academic appointments within the US, with the increasing globalization of higher education there are more and more opportunities abroad. I hope that this post might help others decide if doing so is right for them.

What we are supposed to do is to think in terms of problems: what is the relationship between individual agency and cultural norms? How does the environment affect culture? In what situations does ethnic conflict become violent? We are supposed to think like this because many people whose opinions we care about believe that scientific inquiry should be carried out in this more nomothetic, or generalizing, mindset: lab scientists, for one, whose experiments on rat livers are more driven by the problem ‘how does the body make proteins’ than the topic of ‘rat livers: so fascinating’. Political scientists and sociologist, the members of disciplines adjacent to ours, are also often motivated by this generalizing urge: what similarities can we discern between the Russian, French, and Chinese (Communist) revolutions? What is the relationship between race and quality of treatment in the medical system?

Our tendency to end our topics with periods rather than question marks has more practical outcomes as well. As teachers, we struggle to get out students to understand why the details of Nuer kinship ought to interest them. AAlthough we yearn to be ‘public’ or ‘applied’ when asked ‘what role does religion play in development’ our answer is often ‘They build the Methodist church in the town square in 1952! I fond pictures in the archives!’. Most importantly, the people who fund our dissertation research are, for the most part, interested in its theoretical relevance (‘intellectual merit’ as the NSF puts it) than in the area we study.

How, then, can graduate students learn to turn their topics into problems? How can professors make their ethnography interesting to those uninterested in their topic?

The obvious answer is to make your work ‘theoretically relevant’. In anthropology, this means making the topic you study the perfect place to explore a Big Question in the literature. Topic: Samoa. Problem: how do people use gender roles? Topic: Eighteenth-century Hawai’i. Problem: what is the relationship between structure and agency? Like that.

The problem with this method, of course, is that when you are fascinated by topics rather than problems you 1) don’t know what the Big Questions are because you’ve been busy digging out old photos of churches in the archives instead of reading Cultural Anthropology and 2) you can’t ‘read theory’ because you find it totally boring and not about your topic.

Let me suggest a way out of this problem.

First generalize your topic. What is that thing that you find so fascinating about your topic, and can you find it in other topics? If what really amazes you that they could build this huge gold mine out in the middle of nowhere Amazonia, then perhaps your problem is ‘resource frontiers’. You might even get interested in copper mines in Mongolia because you’re all like ‘hey that’s JUST LIKE what’s happening in the Amazon’. When they built the Methodist church in your town becomes ‘Methodist missions to Latin America’ or perhaps ‘the worldwide spread of Methodism’ or perhaps even something as general as ‘missionization’ or ‘the anthropology of Christianity’.Do you see what’s happened? You now have a generalized and comparative topic rather than one tied to a particular time and place. You have found ethnographic analogies to your field site.

Second find the differences between the particular cases covered by your generalized, comparative topics. In Amazonia they fought the coming of the mine tooth and nail, while in Mongolia they had a large, primarily mutton, barbeque to welcome the mine executives. Hmmm. It looked similar on the surface but now you see some differences.

Third put a question mark on it. The simplest way to do this is what accounts for those differences: Why is mining welcomed in the Amazon but not in Mongolia? Maybe its because the mining operations were different — one had a large environmental impact and the other did not. Maybe it is because rural Mongolians are desperate for cash and people in Amazonia want to stick to subsistence farming (both of these examples are totally made up by the way — sorry all Mongolianists out there).

Fourth, remove proper nouns. Now that you have added the question mark, remove all proper nouns. Go from “Why is mining welcomed in Mongolia but not in the Amazon?” to “Why are resource extraction projects welcomed in some communities but not others?” Or even “what is the relationship between global capital and local communities in the post-9/11 world?”. A fifth optional step, which you can only use for the next 18 months or so, is to add the word ‘assemblage’ to your project title. Congratulations: you have a problem which is ‘intellectually meritorious’.

So: develop comparative scope, look for differences, put a question mark on noted differences, and remove proper nouns. This procedure doesn’t get you in touch with Big Topics (that’s the subject of another blog post) not does it help make one less cynical about ‘theory’, but hopefully it will help topicheads see that even the most abstract theoretical discussions articulate with their own interests if you just follow the intellectual thread that connects them for long enough.

As a junior professor I find myself rewriting my syllabi pretty much the moment I begin teaching my courses. I try new readings, do old readings in different orders, juxtapose readings, and modify assignments from previous years. Pretty much immediately I see new connections and begin thinking about the next iteration of the course. The question then becomes: how to track and organize these thoughts? What mechanisms do we have to record thoughts on class planning and make sure those records get accessed the next time we plan a class.

I am sure that there are many people with Ph.D.s in curriculum development who know far more about this than I do (if you have any insights, please leave a comment), but one trick that I’ve found is what I’ve come to call the ‘for-next-time syllabus’. On the first day of class I take the final version of the syllabus and make a duplicate copy in the folder for my class. I then add the words ‘for next time’ to the title. Then, after every class, I open up the next-time syllabus and add thoughts on how the class went, what people needed but didn’t get out of the reading, and what I might teach next time. Then the next time I teach the course, I use the next-time syllabus rather than the previous one I used.

I thought I’d pass this along as a (potentially) useful trick for graduate students and new professors, since it is often the case that new professors don’t receive extensive training in pedagogy, much less course planning. It’s not a very fancy trick, but often when you start teaching (read: adjuncting) you don’t have time for fancy course planning. Fixing future thoughts on teaching in a syllabus means they’re less likely to be forgotten then if they are locked up in some physical pieces or paper or some journal program or blog where things scroll out of existence (and of course a year after you teach the course even the most vivid memories of lessons learned have faded away). And, most importantly, confronting a formatted document can help provide a framework for your thoughts and help organize them — on this day I need to do that. At any rate it’s worked well for me — what tricks do other teachers use to help develop their classes?

Another motivation for doing this is that I hate survey courses. I love teaching theory, but I prefer to do it around a coherent set of questions motivated by a research topic, or by undertaking a semester-long close-reading of a single scholar’s work. However, the syllabus for this class is set by committee and it isn’t easy to make more than superficial changes in the content (i.e. substituting one book for another on a similar topic, or changing the order of the readings). That means that it the class tends to lurch around from week to week as we jump from one scholar to the next. My thought was that a series of debates like this (one at midterm, and another at finals) might help bring together some of the disparate readings into a more focused discussion. That’s the hope anyway. We’ll see how it turns out in practice!

UPDATE: I should add that one reason for using “formal” debating, with rules, as opposed to other forms of debate/discussion, is that, in my experience, Taiwanese students are extremely reluctant to argue strongly in public for views which differ from those from their peers. This may be true of all students, but in my experience it is much more pronounced here in Taiwan than it was among my students in the US. (Although that may just be because of my own ignorance as to the social norms regarding how such discussions should be conducted.) It is my hope that giving them both roles (a specific scholar we have studied), as well as rules will facilitate a more lively discussion than we might have otherwise.