Comments on: Courses I will never teach

By: Dave Jacobs

Dave Jacobs — Mon, 17 Oct 2005 16:58:05 +0000

As I sit here (not) writing my fourth consecutive syllabus for our Intro to Anthro course I totally misread the title of this post … courses i will never teach –> any subject that i’m actually a specialist in.

By: Savage Minds: Notes and Queries in Anthropology — A Group Blog » Courses I will never teach

Fri, 14 Oct 2005 16:22:39 +0000

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Fri 7 Oct 2005
Courses I will never […]

By: oneman

oneman — Sat, 08 Oct 2005 20:40:13 +0000

We make these kinds of connections all the time. In my class, I describe baseball caps and concert t-shirts as totems indicating “tribal” affiliations — when you wear a Yankees cap or Megadeth shirt, you provide a channel for others to connect with you: “Dude, did you see Megadeth at GlaxoSmithKline-Dell-ExxonMobil Stadium last weekend? They rocked!” Last names, too, provide a moment of recognition, as does geographical origin, religion, etc. When I first went to college in New York, I would get “You’re from California? My cousin lives in California!” a lot — at the time, I would patiently explain that there were milions and millions of people in CA, over a vast geographical area, and that it was unlikely I would have run into their cousin, but now, older and if not wiser at least wiser-looking, I realize that the most tenuous of claims can be latched onto in a bid for some sort of connection. Perhaps this is the human condition at its most basic — but in disaggregated post-industrial societies like ours, I think it becomes more and more desparate, as more durable connections like kinship and clan erode.

By: Kerim

Kerim — Sat, 08 Oct 2005 20:11:06 +0000

I actually heard accounts of people from various immigrant groups doing just that. I think it was a Hmong who said in an interview that he simply looked up Hmong last names in the phone book when he was looking for a place to stay in a new town.

Somewhat related: A Palestinian friend once told me about trying to find an apartment in Canada. The woman on the phone heard his accent and said: “Oh, you’re Israeli!? Come over and I’ll introduce you to the Rosenbergs…” (He took a pass at meeting “his tribe.”)

By: oneman

oneman — Sat, 08 Oct 2005 18:16:56 +0000

Despite Vonnegut’s rather deep misstatement of what relativism is (I think in the intro to _Slaughterhouse Five_) I find a lot of anthropological echoes in his work. In one of his essays, he writes that we should each be assigned, willy-nilly, to a “tribe” (I think he uses the word “tribe”, though what he describes are more like clans). Tribal affiliation would be listed in the phonebook along with name and address and phone number, and when you landed in a strange town and needed help, you could just look in the phonebook and call up a member of your tribe or show up on their doorstep. They wouldn’t be obligated to help or do anything, but sharing a tribal affiliation would open up the channel of communication, just like being related or belonging to the same organization. Most of Vonnegut’s work in some way stems from his recognition of the need for people to somehow feel connected to other people, in a world that regularly rejects or distorts the possibility of such connection (Bokononism, anyone?).

By: orange.

orange. — Sat, 08 Oct 2005 15:07:43 +0000

I think in the US we think of Schivelbusch as the author of “The Railway Journey”—at least that’s the book by him that I read in my ‘space and time’ class.

That is another of my Schivelbusch favourites.
I anyway dont want to heroize him, as i ve read some very weak stuff by him also (Die Kultur der Niederlage).

By: Kerim

Kerim — Sat, 08 Oct 2005 12:31:07 +0000

We regularly talk about ‘commodified’ relationships or life under capitalism as being less ‘meaningful’ than more supposedly robust and authentic face-to-face subsistence communities.

Funny, Kurt Vonnegut was on PBS' Now last night and, when asked what advice he had for young people in such a depressing world, he told them to go and join gangs. He said that he learned, during his years studying for an anthropology MA at Chicago that people need extended families, that the nuclear family isn't enough in this godforsaken world, so young people should form gangs!

By: Rex

Rex — Sat, 08 Oct 2005 09:11:49 +0000

I think in the US we think of Schivelbusch as the author of “The Railway Journey” — at least that’s the book by him that I read in my ‘space and time’ class.

By: orange.

orange. — Sat, 08 Oct 2005 08:17:04 +0000

“Coffee and Gin: A Historical Anthropology” course " cool. Wonder wether Wolfgang Schivelbusch`s Das Paradies, der Geschmack und die Vernunft. Eine Geschichte der Genußmittel is yet translated into english.

By: oneman

oneman — Sat, 08 Oct 2005 04:12:19 +0000

Of course, once we take the next step from Savage minds and form the Savage Minds Free University, we can teach whatever we want, right?

Right…?