Comments on: Intro courses and the viability of four-fields

By: Savage Minds: Notes and Queries in Anthropology — A Group Blog » Four-Field Again: Finding a Way to Make it Work

Sun, 19 Feb 2006 17:34:00 +0000

[…] Back in the fall, I questioned the feasability of the four-field approach in a “Cégep”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CEGEP -level course. My problems were largely based on the fact that I had always imitated what my colleagues were doing: starting with 4 weeks of physical anthropology, including physical evolution, our relationship with other primates and modern human variation, then 2 weeks of archaeology. This left me with very little time to cover a large body of knowledge of cultural anthropology, including one week of linguistics, specifically sociolinguistics. […]

By: thanks for not being a zombie

thanks for not being a zombie — Thu, 01 Sep 2005 12:20:56 +0000

teaching carnival #1

Teaching Carnival is devoted to gathering select blog entries related to teaching issues in higher education. Below you will find the first installment. (Be sure to have a look at the common sense words of advice for readers.) Caleb McDaniel…

By: Nancy

Nancy — Mon, 29 Aug 2005 23:34:35 +0000

Thanks Alexandre;

In terms of an overall theme that connects the four fields, I tend to focus on adaptation: it tends to lead to a materialist interpretation of the whole thing, and I’m not completely comfortable with that but for this level, I think it’s fine. The important thing for me is that they leave my course understanding that there are reasons for which people do the things that they do. However I slice it, they will have an incomplete picture and at least this one makes sense to 17 year olds in general. The tiny tiny percentage of them that will go on to study anthro will learn more when they go to uni and the others will at least have learned to be a bit more relative and reflexive.

The students don’t have a problem with the four-field approach: they don’t really know any other approach. After 2 1/2 years of teaching the course, I’ve managed to make it flow pretty well so that the ‘transitions” aren’t so painful. I feel sorry for my first 2 batches of student though; man, that must have been weird.

By: Alexandre

Alexandre — Mon, 29 Aug 2005 22:23:19 +0000

What? No other comment? Ah, well…
Never taught a four-field course. Been trained initially in a four-field department and have done very little if any archeology or biological anthro since then.
Your class must be quite hard to teach since, at this point, there’s very little to connect the four fields in terms of approach or ideas.
IMHO, the neatest way to define anthropology as a whole (after Kottak) is as the study of human diversity. Cultural diversity, biological diversity, linguistic diversity, and historical diversity. It’s something of a leaky model but it’s nonetheless rather neat. Quite useful as a teaching tool. Once students click on the concept of diversity, much of what we teach them is rather easy to understand. It doesn’t mean that it represent anything about the discipline, but it can be useful.
There’s a number of connections between the fields. To use overly simplified examples: issues of language origins and history connect linguistic anthropology with both archeology and biological anthropology. Issues of ethnicity and race may connect cultural and biological approaches. Human paleontology connects archeology with biological anthropology. Oral literature links linguistic to cultural anthropology. And long-term migrations interest both archeologists and cultural anthropologists.
Then, what to make of “applied anthropology?” Some textbooks put it as a fifth subfield. Others (or newer editions of the same) put it as an axis for the discipline as a whole. Of course, applied work easily connects fields together.
We use different ways to classify fields. Some think in terms of two axes: culture/nature, time/space. Others may think of ethnographic vs. experimental methods. Yet others concentrate on one field and forget the others.

As for what to give students, it will always be about helping them finding their own way through anthropology. We can’t be exhaustive but we can help them click on the main issues we might discuss as anthropologists.

Do your students have specific problems with the four-field approach?

This idea of going “backwards” is quite tempting. R. Murray-Schafer apparently does something similar in his music history classes. Report back once you’ve done it!

By: Write Me

Write Me — Mon, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

is devoted to gathering select blog entries related to teaching issues in higher education." anyhow, this link is interesting for example on how much to teach when having to fit too much into an intro level course of some/any kind: clink here there are a lot of links, i've not even finished reading through the first edition of the teaching carnival. part of the good and the bad about the web is this issue of information. i could spend my day reading and linking my life away here