Comments on: A Common Core of Undergrad Articles?

By: brandon

brandon — Sat, 01 Apr 2006 03:05:07 +0000

hey you can see an excerpt from ralph linton's article at this page

By: Savage Minds: Notes and Queries in Anthropology — A Group Blog » Found Mag meets Savage Minds

Tue, 28 Mar 2006 02:30:49 +0000

[…] There seems to be a bit of penchant on Savage Minds for discussing the desire-as-lack that constitutes anthropology as a discipline, which manifests itself in the frequent gnashing of “intro to” syllabi and proposing of essential works. Far be it from me to avoid joining in the fun. In the irony-laden spirit of Found Magazine, my contribution to this comes not from my own vast and enviable experience, but from a not-so-silent partner, Thomas Chivens. Thom and I were undergrads at UCSC when Virginia Dominguez (current editor of American Ethnologist) taught there. For serendipitous and mysterious reasons that cannot be elaborated in the Internets (for reasons of space), Thom recently unearthed this gem of a handout. What I love almost as much as this hand-scrawled clearly definitive (c. 1989, not clear exactly on the provenance of the Duke letterhead) list of must-read anthropologists, is what Thom has to say about it: […]

By: DNA Dude

DNA Dude — Fri, 27 Jan 2006 02:36:30 +0000

I would remove Jonathan Marks’ article on race. Marks’ critique is simply outdated in that is assumes human variation is purely clinal. As evidenced by the numerous current studies, the distribution of genetic variation in world populations has structure. Now don’t get me wrong; there are plenty of reasons to critique biological definitions of race, but clinal variation is not one of them. As a suggestion, look up race in Wikipedia. The page is very well done. I think AAA can learn a lot from the Wikipedia page, since it too has a very outdated, almost insultingly simplified statement on race.

By: Ozma

Ozma — Wed, 25 Jan 2006 20:44:09 +0000

Dustin — that seems like maybe one of the damnable aspects of adjuncting; often the quality of teaching is very very good, which creates no impetus from any direction (except basic fairness, which never seems to win out…) to create more full-time positions! So I should clarify that my comments reflected really my own hinkiness as an adjunct — not like it was all hinkiness all the way, nor that my current teaching is hinky-moment-free. I just wanted to make the point that adjuncting is usually taken to be entirely disadvantageous to adjuncts themselves and I don’t think that is the case in all circumstances.

By: orange.

orange. — Wed, 25 Jan 2006 20:32:00 +0000

"I find the idea of developing a core set of ‘the articles every intro student should read’ a fascinating project." Really fascinating it becomes when comparing a variety of different core sets on a certain academic teaching topic like 'anthro intro' in this case.

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Wed, 25 Jan 2006 20:09:09 +0000

Madumo is a never-fail “teachable text” in my experience.

I’ve enjoyed teaching short pieces of Malinowski’s A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term.

But I like the Reed syllabus a lot: I think it’s extremely well-designed for this purpose.

By: Dustin

Dustin — Wed, 25 Jan 2006 19:59:04 +0000

And, of course, there’s the big assumption that adjunct teaching is necessarily inferior to full-time teaching. While I’d like to have a full-time position, and I’d like a system where all our work was valued equally, I utterly reject the thesis that my teachingis necessarily of lower quality than that of my full-time or even tenured colleagues.

By: Ozma

Ozma — Wed, 25 Jan 2006 16:59:48 +0000

If we are allowed to put ethnographies on the list (as opposed to articles), another *very* teachable ethography is Adam Ashforth’s _Madumo: A Man Bewitched_. Judy Farquhar recommended it to me several years ago, in an “advice to a novice teacher of anthro” conversation, but I didn’t actually use it till last year and really regret not having done so sooner!

While I would also decry the elimination of permanent teaching positions, one thing I *will* say for adjuncting/visiting-assistant-professoring previous to getting a permanent position, which happens to a lot of us, is that it lets you work some of the bugs out of your teaching before you start getting evaluated as a teacher for tenure purposes. So it’s not always all bad for the teachers, though I do think the system means that students are sometimes exposed to some hinky teaching for which they don’t get a discount: like, tuition costs are the same whether you are getting someone who just finished being a grad student who has never done it before and hasn’t got a huge investment in performing well *for the institution* or whether you are being taught by a prof who is hugely invested in curricular design at the institutional level and the pedagogical experience of that institution’s students. I don’t think there is any hope that that the “elimination of permanent positions” tendency is going to be stopped at the professional end; I do think there is some hope there might be some demand for change at the student end of things.

By: Jim Tzenes

Jim Tzenes — Wed, 25 Jan 2006 16:10:48 +0000

While Krusty may be right in that this encourages a flawed system, we cannot rule out this being the flowers growing from a compost heap. The best undergraduate classes I took (and of course my major was computer science not anthropology) were those centered around papers, instead of textbooks. A textbook will tell you one fact or another, but a paper might tell you why. What I’ve learned from papers has stayed with me much better than anything I learned from a textbook.

By: Krusty

Krusty — Wed, 25 Jan 2006 14:50:04 +0000

Funny how so many scholars think being ironic about establishing a canon of texts makes it OK to do so, especially if the suggested canon is so heavy with postmodern writing.

If you want some real irony consider this: it is sad that this list comes from an adjunct who is part of a college or university economic system that is not hiring fulltime professors and thus has limited academic continuity for the students, and now an adjunct professor being exploited by this system is thinking about building continuity so that this system can continue to not hire fulltime, tenure track professors.

By: Comet Jo

Comet Jo — Wed, 25 Jan 2006 07:30:37 +0000

Here are the articles from my intro class–plus the Basso book, which is so great to teach that I think everyone should know of it. The other ethnographies are more idiosyncratic choices.

Basso, Keith H. 1996 Wisdom sits in places : Landscape and language among the western apache. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

Boddy, Janice 1997 Womb as oasis: the symbolic context of pharaonic circumcision in rural Northern Sudan. In The gender sexuality reader, edited by R. Lancaster and M. di Leonardo. New York: Routledge.

Dubisch, Jill 1981 You are what you eat: Religious aspects of the health food movement. In The American dimension: Culture myths and social realities, edited by S. P. Montague and W. Arens. Palo Alto, CA: Mayfield Publishing Company. 115-127.

Kulick, Don 1997 The gender of Brazilian transgendered prostitutes. American Anthropologist 99 (3):574-585.

Lee, Richard Borshay 2003 [1969] Eating Christmas in the Kalahari. In Applying anthropology: An introductory reader, edited by A. Podolefsky and P. J. Brown. Boston: McGraw Hill. 228-232.

Traube, Elizabeth G. 1992 Redeeming images: The wild man comes home. In Dreaming identities: Class, gender, and generation in 1980s hollywood movies. Boulder: Westview Press. 39-66.

White, Luise 1967 Cars out of place: Vampires, technology, and labor in east and central africa. In Tensions of empire: Colonial cultures in a bourgeois world, edited by F. Cooper and A. L. Stoler. Berkeley: University of California Press.

By: Kerim

Kerim — Wed, 25 Jan 2006 02:56:08 +0000

A few random articles come to mind, a lot on language, some stuff on colonialism and development, and even one visual anthropology classic thrown in for good measure:

Ferguson, James. 1990. The Bovine Mystique: A Study of Power, Property, and Livestock in Rural Lesotho. (Shows the benefits of the anthropological method.)

Frake, Charles O. 1964. How to Ask for a Drink in Subanun. (Classic discourse study. Fun too.)

Michaels, Eric. 1994. For a Cultural Future: Francis Jupurrurla Makes Tv At Yuendumu. (Great article on indigenous media production.)

Stoler, Ann Laura. 1991. Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Gender, Race, and Morality in Colonial Asia. (Anthropologists can do history too!)

Hill, Jane H. 1998. “Today There is No Respect” : Nostalgia, “Respect,” and Oppositional Discourse in Mexicano (Nahuatl) Language Ideology. (Language ideology)

Woolard, Kathryn A. 1985. Language Variation and Cultural Hegemony: Toward an Integration of Sociolinguistic and Social Theory. (More langauge ideology – good integration of theory and data.)

Bailey, Benjamin. 1997. Communication of Respect in Interethnic Service Encounters. (Another classic in discourse analysis. Great for teaching.)

Mamdani, Mahmood. 2001. Beyond Settler and Native as Political Identities: Overcoming the Political Legacy of Colonialism. (Great intro to colonialism and ethnicity.)

That’s just off the top of my head. I was trying hard to avoid mentioning the obvious, or articles I like to use but which are harder to teach with.

By: Anthro Grad Student

Anthro Grad Student — Tue, 24 Jan 2006 22:12:53 +0000

Not necessarily an article but Nanda’s book “Neither Man nor Woman” seems to be a popular choice among anthro professors for intro classes. Most professors at my undergraduate university used it and most professors at my current university use it.

By: Current Student

Current Student — Tue, 24 Jan 2006 21:42:58 +0000

I doubt it gets much better than Reed's intro syllabus.

By: coturnix

coturnix — Tue, 24 Jan 2006 21:05:38 +0000

Only half-joking:

The Motel of the future (forgot teh exact title but you know it)

The paper on the behavior of people in men’s bathrooms.