This Anthro Life – Savage Minds Crossover Series, part 1
by Adam Gamwell and Ryan Collins

This Anthro Life has teamed up with Savage Minds to bring you a special 5-part podcast and blog crossover series. While thinking together as two anthropological productions that exist for multiple kinds of audiences and publics, we became inspired to have a series of conversations about why anthropology matters today. In this series we’re sitting down with some of the folks behind Savage Minds, SAPIENS, the American Anthropological Association and the Society for American Archaeology to bring you conversations on anthropological thinking and its relevance through an innovative blend of audio and text.

You can check out the the first episode of the collaboration titled Writing “in my Culture” here.

If you’re interested and anthropologically inclined you may know that the theme of the upcoming annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in November 2017 is “Anthropology Matters!” This theme is stirring conversation among working anthropologists in and out of the academy, professional and in-training. For a seemingly light statement, Anthropology Matters! has strong gravity, and begs the question, to whom does anthropology matter? Who can it matter to? What makes anthropology relevant? Where does anthropology take place? And who is taking it there?

To begin exploring these questions, we were joined by Savage Minds writers Alex Golub and Zoe Wool in our first episode. With Zoe and Alex, we found ourselves digging into what anthropology as critique looks like in the era of blogs and podcasts. Early in the episode several key questions came into focus: what does anthropology, as a discipline, have to offer in terms of critical thinking? Is open access through Academia.edu a good thing? And how does one effectively engage someone who thinks differently from you?

Where do the anthropologists talk?

Today, anthropological conversations can be widely accessed through podcasts and blogs, video series and popular books, or in the more traditional settings of a university classroom, library, and online journals. The latter traditional conversations, accessed from a university setting, take time to produce, must endure a peer-reviewed process and are also restricted to specific audiences, often behind high-priced journal or university paywalls. Despite the flood of more open-access and informal media, this issue still poses a challenge for anthropologically minded audiences in and outside of the academy today.

When Savage Minds was founded in 2005, the issue of access was even more problematic. Blogging was a fresh and exciting form of online discussions. For Anthropologists like Alex Golub, Carole McGranahan, and Kerim Friedman blogging was an opportunity to have ungated conversations on anthropological subjects, theories and theorists, and the discipline. 12 years later, the blog is bigger than ever and one of the longest running anthropology sites on the Internet. In short, they were on to something.

One of the benefits of blogging anthropology is a faster turnaround for written works that are not subject to the traditional peer-review processes for journals. Blog pieces can be reviewed much quicker for style and content. This quicker turnaround means that posts are released at the same time as issues are happening, whether in the field or elsewhere. This can be critical for anthropological interventions to provide context for events. An added benefit is that readers are able to interact with the author’s arguments in the comments section, allowing for critical conversations to take place, almost as quick as the blog is posted. But the digital challenge is it can be all too easy to cut and copy a pithy statement or idea, or grab a nice sounding quote to back up or refute an argument. As Zoe cautioned, “We want to keep knowledge embedded in the context of its production, so we can critically approach it,” highlighting the importance of preserving both the context surrounding a pithy quote and an author’s intended meaning. Without context, critique has little meaning. Or, with great open access comes great responsibility.

What do anthropologists say when they talk?

Anthropology is a critical discipline that constantly analyzes the structures behind cultural norms and places local events in broader geopolitical and historical contexts. Zoe said it best: critique “is not about judging something or assessing something as good or bad. It’s about bringing into relief the structures through which something is evaluated in the first place.” The role of anthropology is to critique, not denunciate – perhaps best illustrated by the image of the Internet troll. Bringing these points together, as Alex articulated, the point of conversation is to change minds, not call something out or judge unduly. We’d further that another point of conversation is to open minds. And critique – through putting context before events – is one of our most effective tools for doing so.

Channeling Ruth Benedict, Alex offered a way of nudging this idea to fruition: add the words in “my culture” to the end of every sentence you say (i.e. this movie is great in my culture, we wear socks in my culture, blogging works like this in my culture, etc.). Doing so helps when trying to understand that an individual view is but one of many.

The process of coming to know one’s social world is inculturation. It takes place consciously and unconsciously, implicitly and explicitly. Acculturation, on the other hand, is coming to learn another social world, a meeting between multiple cultures. This isn’t easy; like learning a second language it takes time, patience, and critical thinking. And learning to think critically involves learning to work across these two social forces.

One of the aims with This Anthro Life’s Conversations series and Design + Applied minisodes is to promote actionable steps to further critical thinking. For example, during the divisive 2016 US election, we produced an episode on Myths of American Democracy, to help foster critical thinking about elections and how people think democracy should work. Likewise, on an episode with Jara Connell on recent protests, we directed our attention away from particular events to critically engage the question of what makes a protest successful? With corporate anthropologist Dr. Andi Simon we took a direct approach to actionable steps in our Applied + Design minisode series. In our first minisode, Dr. Simon shared wisdom on critically considering stagnation and embracing change even though we may resist it, whether in the workplace, the university, or elsewhere.

Yes, it’s a tall order for a 30 minute podcast or a 5-10 minute minisode, but we love the challenge. And this is the challenge present for all critical thinking forums, balancing content, context, and conversation. This challenge is what makes collaboration so important.

With this series one theme we aim to explore more deeply is this deceptively simple sounding, yet complex idea: anthropology matters because it shows us how to have productive critical conversations in times of conflict.

Check out the  first episode Writing “in my Culture” with Zoe Wool and Alex Golub, subscribe to the podcast (iTunes, Stitcher, Android or by email), and please join us for a conversation in the comments below or on thisanthrolife.com. Stay tuned for next week’s conversation with Leslie Walker and Ed Liebow from the American Anthropological Association.

My initial explanation for this was due to the fact that the course was mostly non-majors. Anthropology students were more committed, less likely to cheat, I thought. Non-majors took the course as a novelty, it seemed, thinking it would be interesting but easy. Some were not amused when they found out it was not easy but actually required attending lecture and recitation, and reading, and thinking. Other students loved the class, and over the years, a number have changed their majors to anthropology after taking this class (and other ones my colleagues teach similar to this—“gateway” classes, we sometimes call them). These students, and the overwhelming majority of the students did not cheat, but instead enjoyed a semester devoted to a topic often radically different than that what they usually studied. For some students it was the only time they had written papers in their college career. Others had no idea how to study for the exam. “Its all stories,” they would say. “And do we need to know the theories?” Exactly, and yes. Welcome to anthropology.

Yesterday, a Twitter thread on cheating helped me realize that my non-major explanation for why students cheated in this class was not the only reason. As I pondered cheating on exams, I realized I did not have issues with cheating in the other large lecture class I regularly teach (and none at all in the small, seminar-style classes for junior and senior anthropology majors where all assignments are essays or research papers). This other lecture class is Introduction to Cultural Anthropology, designed specifically for anthropology majors. As titled, the course introduces them to anthropological concepts, theories, and the history of cultural anthropology. On any given semester, this usually means 100-150 students who are eager and excited to be there and to learn. But the difference between the two classes is not just that one class is for non-majors and one is for majors. The other key difference is that I use radically different exam formats in each class. It turns out one style lends itself to cheating, while the other does not.

In my Tibet lecture class, students study for the exam based on their notes and readings. They know the categories of questions that will be on the exam (e.g., multiple choice, Tibetan vocabulary, essays, etc.), and the course material to study (e.g., everything from the mid-term to the last day of class). But they do not know the content of the actual exam until they sit down to take it. This is the sort of exam I regularly took as an undergraduate, and proctored as a graduate student myself. Until, that is, I learned of another exam style, and convinced the professor for whom I was teaching to test it out. My interest in this exam style was pedagogical in that I thought it was a better way to test students’ knowledge. It was a fairer test, and one that asked for learning rather than memorization. I first used this test style as a TA at the University of Michigan in 1995 in a huge (550 student) introductory lecture course. It worked beautifully then, and I have been using it ever since. Here it is:

One week before the exam date, I hand out the exam to the students in the class. It consists of twenty-five multiple-choice questions. I tell the students that they need to determine the correct answer to each of the twenty-five questions, and be able to write an essay explaining why the answer they chose is correct (and the other answers wrong). In essence, they have to “teach” the material back to me and their TAs. They are welcome to study in groups or alone, whatever suits their individual preference, although I recommend working in groups to talk through their ideas and arguments.

On exam day, the students receive the exam but now the twenty-five multiple-choice questions are in scrambled order from the study exam they received the week before. Together with the course TAs, I have also chosen four of the twenty-five multiple-choice questions as essay questions. Of the four possible essays, the students must choose three. They are required to write essays for each of the three questions explaining and defending the answer they chose as correct. The multiple-choice section is worth 25 points, and each essay is worth 25 points for a total of 100.

This exam format requires a rethinking of the multiple-choice question. You need to imagine anew the multiple-choice question as an essay question in disguise. What were the ideas you most wanted students to learn in the class? What questions will give students the best chance to show the real substance of what they have learned? Here are some of the multiple-choice questions I’ve used in the past:

1. Laura Bohannan’s fieldwork story about explaining Hamlet to the Tiv (“Shakespeare in the Bush”) illustrated what anthropological concern?:

          (a) the relevance of grid-group classification

           (b) the difficulties of cultural translation

          (c) the difference between social organization and social structure

          (d) the universal importance of liminality in rites of passage

          (e) the move away from the ethnographic present

If writing an essay on this question, students would have to identify (b) as the correct answer, explain the concept of cultural translation, and why this was Bohannan’s chief concern in “Shakespeare in the Bush.” They would next need to say why the other answers were incorrect. For example, they might explain (d) in relation to the rise of symbolic anthropology and the writings of Victor Turner they had read for class, and thus as key to 1960s anthropology but not the point of the Bohannan article.

2. Using Arjun Appadurai’s outline of global cultural flows, which “scape” provides the main backdrop for the Miss Tibet pageant?

          (a) ethnoscape

          (b) technoscape

          (c) finanscape

         (d) ideoscape

         (e) mediascape

Here students would need to explain the correct “-scape” in the context of globalization and the Miss Tibet beauty pageant, while also explaining each of the other scapes, and why they were not the main issue involved in the pageant.

3. Which of the following statements about gender is true?

          (a) Gender is represented and constructed in the same way across cultures

          (b) A linear relationship exists between sex and gender

          (c) Gender is biologically based

          (d) Gender systems vary across cultures

          (e) Gender can only be analyzed using feminist anthropology

For this question, students would need to identify and explain the correct answer (d), while also successfully explaining why the remaining answers are not true. We would expect them to use ethnographic or theoretical materials from course lectures and readings to illustrate their points.

4. An anthropologist comes to Boulder to study “Hipster Farming: Class and Privilege in Boulder’s Locavore Movement.” Based on the title of her project, what theory is likely to be the main one she is using?

          (a) Feminism

          (b) Poststructuralism

          (c) Cultural ecology

          (d) Marxist anthropology

          (e) Practice Theory

Working with theory is a key learning goal in my Introduction to Cultural Anthropology lecture course. This question requires the students to teach back to us each of these five theories, as well as choosing which one best fits a project on class and privilege. I teach them that contemporary cultural anthropology is theoretically plural. That is, we do not (usually)  use single theoretical models in our research and writing (as we did in earlier eras in the discipline), hence the need to underline the word “main” in the question. In an essay on a question like this, students are often able to give fairly sophisticated takes on how many of these theories could be relevant to the research along with identifying the main theory.

5. Which statement best matches what a Structuralist would say?

          (a) “Each part of culture matches a universal human need”

           (b) “Performance is part of conforming to normative ideas and behaviors”

          (c) “Myths are evidence that there are universal binary divisions in human thought”

          (d) “Gender is a social construction”

          (e) “A search for meaning rather than law is best done through interpretation”

Another theory question, this time working in the opposite direction: identify the theory from the claim made. They know one is structuralism, but all other theories they must come up with, match, and explain on their own.

Not all of the multiple-choice questions translate to essay questions. Here are three that require knowledge of concepts and texts, but that I would not use as one of the essay options:

6. Among the Awlad ‘Ali, a patron/client relationship gives what to each participant?

           (a) Honor/dignity

           (b) Gender/sexuality

           (c) Wealth/independence

          (d) Land/cattle

          (e) A wife/a daughter

7. Among the Azande, which of the following events would witchcraft explain?

           (a) A balcony collapsing while people were standing on it

          (b) A double rainbow

          (c) Earning a bad grade on a test for which you did not study

         (d) The exchange of cattle between age-mates

         (e) A coconut falling from a tree while you are a safe distance away

 8. Which system of marriage would best describe the system in which a woman can marry more than one husband who must be part of another group?

         (a) Endogamous polygamy

         (b) Endogamous monogamy

         (c) Exogamous polygamy

        (d) Exogamous polyandry

        (e) Exogamous polygyny

Students tell me they are often able to divide the questions into three groups—definitely a candidate for an essay question, definitely not a candidate, and maybe a candidate. This also helps them focus and refine their studying and knowledge.

That is the exam. I’ve used it successfully in my Introduction to Cultural Anthropology lecture course for two decades. Students find it fair, and like having the exam ahead of time. They tell me it gives them a sense of control, and an ability to focus their learning on what matters, and to make sure they know the material. Knowing to teach rather than to regurgitate is a different type of knowing. Pedagogically, I find this exam structure invaluable, but I now realize it also discourages cheating. Students have the exam ahead of time, and by the time the exam date arrives should have determined the correct answer to each of the multiple-choice questions. This, combined with the fact that is a course of motivated students who are mostly anthropology majors, leads to zero instances of (caught) cheating using this exam format in my class.

But, is it cheat proof?

It is as close as I have gotten. In the context of a room full of 100+ students taking an exam with paper and pen at the introductory level, I think this is pretty good. Pedagogically in terms of testing the students on the ideas I most want them to learn and take from the class, it is excellent. And in terms of dissuading cheating, it certainly seems to work.

I want to note that I did not come up with this exam structure. I don’t know who did. I found the original idea for this format in a box of teaching ideas kept in the TA lounge of the University of Michigan anthropology department. Many of us loved to talk about ideas for our classes and assignments and exams, as well as share hard copies of handouts we used. One day I discovered this exam format on a handout in the box. It was so long ago—twenty-two years ago—that I no longer have the original write-up of the exam format, nor do I recall where it was from other than perhaps a university in Ohio. If anyone reading this knows who came up with this exam format, please do let me know. I would love to thank them.

If anyone else out there has a great exam format for a large, lecture class, let’s hear it. Sharing ideas for teaching is always welcome here.

Lots of us who teach in the U.S. (and, doubtless, in other places) have been asking dazed questions about how, and if, we should hold classes, what can we do with and for our students, and what responsibilities we have to teach to this event that so many of us are experiencing (in variously positioned and intersecting ways) as a disaster?

This morning, in my Introduction to Sociocultural Anthropology Class, I devoted the class to reflecting (with some tears) on the climate of permissible violence targeted at those bodies the Trump campaign singled out for hate and disregard during the election, hearing from students about their concerns, and thinking about what resources different students have to safely respond and to enact civic engagement and community care. Then I gave them a mini-teach in about #cripthevote and the way the block granting of Medicaid and repeal of the ACA could literally kill people.

For those of us who teach, #teachingthedisaster will depend on who our students are, what kind of expertise we can bring to lectern/table/office hour/quad, as well as our own institutional, geographical, and sociopolitical location.

Yesterday, I reached out to colleagues to begin soliciting resources that might help each of us figure out our own approach. I’m grateful for the many rapid responses I got, both for their content and also because they manifested a heartening sense of action, which I think we all need right now. Thanks to everyone who emailed and tweeted their contributions. Below is a roughly organized (and by no means complete) collection, one to which I hope you will add.

Please share your own post-Trump teaching resources (how to teach, as well as what to teach) on twitter at #teachingthedisaster or add them to the comments section to this post.

In addition to work in my own classes, I’m also organizing a teach-in for on inauguration day, Friday January 20th. I’d urge those of you in a position to do so to do the same at your intuitions. Let’s make inauguration day a national higher ed day of action. (I know that should have ended with an exclamation point, but it will take me a few more days to muster the energy)

Why to Teach

• Marshall Sahlin’s reflections from the height of the Iraq war on Teach Ins in The Old Stoned Age
• “The Trump Effect” in schools.
• Seth Holmes reflections on Discussing the Suffering Slot with Migrant Farm Workers reminds us that injustice requires for concepts, as well as for action.
• Paul Stoller argues that, in the face of the failure of forms of quantitative knowledge, “Now is the time for ethnographers to step up.”

How to Teach

• There is a world of teaching literature on the subject of “difficult dialogues.” Here is a helpful primer from Vanderbilt University’s Center for Teaching.
• Though it’s geared toward k-12 education, Tolerance.Org offers helpful general classroom strategies on teaching the days after the election.
• The African American Intellectual History Society created as set of assignments to go with the Trump 2.0 Syllabus (see below). Some of the most adaptable to Anthropology include:
  • Ask students to select a Trump property (current or former) and write a paper on its history of labor/client/neighborhood relations, from development to operation/sale [David Huyssen]Ask students to construct an idea/intellectual map using one Trump’s speeches, tracing where ideas come from historically and noting connection to other primary/secondary sources assigned in the course. [Brian Goldstein]Analyzing one of Trump’s interviews, ask students to highlight the overlapping dimensions of racism, sexism, and xenophobia. [Jeff Helgeson]
• Disability activist and organizer Stacey Milbern posted a few tools for Social Justice Groups/Classrooms this week, including:

Pass out pen and paper to everyone. Invite people to write a letter about this moment. Ask people to not personalize the letters or provide identifying information, but write them for anyone who may be hurting in this moment. Invite people to bring the letter to you (or a co-facilitator) if they’d like. Redistribute the letters anonymously and give time for people to read them. Invite people to read the letter they received to the group if they’d like to share.

What to Teach

On Blackness and Anti-Black Racism

•  Trump 2.0 Syllabus. This may be the best single resource I’ve come across. Created by N. D. B. Connolly and Keisha N. Blain and others at PublicBooks.Org, it is a historical, cultural, and political contextualization of the rise of Trump. The 15 units (each with accompanying Trump epitaph) include secondary sources plus a selection of primary and multimedia sources.
• The Black Lives Matter Syllabus, created by Frank Roberts at NYU. This syllabus focuses specifically on the BLM movement. Like the Trump 2.0 syllabus, it includes lots of primary sources as well as assignments.
• #Blacklivesmattersyllabus project from Anthropoliteia, edited by Sameena Mulla. Less specifically about the BLM movement itself, this series offers readings and assignments as well as pedagogical reflections from anthologists working on and teaching about blackness in the contemporary US.
• Ta-Nehisi Cotes. Both his “Case for Reparations” and Between the World and Me have been cropping up on anthro syllabi on a range of topics, including my own, to foster thinking about race and history in the US and the related the workings of embodiment and dispossession.

US-Mexico:

• Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail by Jason De Leon focuses on the way the necroviolence of the US border policy takes hold of the bodies of those who policy compels to come north across the Sonoran desert. It just won the AAA’s Marget Mead Award.
• Seth Holmes‘ Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farm Workers in the United States  also focuses on bodies, but here, they are the bodies of undocumented migrant agricultural workers whose suffering and precarity is essential to the US economic and gustatory status quo.

Disability: 

• #Cripthevote. If you’re on twitter, this hashtag, created by Alice Wong of the Disability Visibility Project with Andrew Pulrang, and Gregg Beratan,  is an amazing archive of disabled and ally voices.
• #Cripthevote: What’s the Crisis of Liberalism Got to Do with It is Faye Ginsberg and Rayna Rapp’s contribution to the CA Crisis of Liberalism Hotspot (see below), describing the role of disability engagement in the 2016 election.
• Ari Ne’man, co-founder of the Autistic Self-Advocasy Network and member of the National Council on Disability (for as long as it exists…), just wrote a perfect primer about how the repeal of the ACA and proposed block granting of Medicaid will endanger and kill disabled people. This is a must teach.
• Liz Lewis’ blog Disability Fieldnotes is a great resource both for reflective thinking about what an anthropology of disability in the U.S. might do, and also for insight, facts and figures.

How Could This Happen?

• Sarah Kendzior predicted Trump’s triumph last May, giving an account of his exploitation of American pain.
• Paul Stoller offers this on culture as an explanatory force. Though I  bristle at his mobilization of a simplified culture concept in this piece, it might serve one well in the class room with a little deconstruction.
• Lilith Mahmod’s Crisis of Liberalism piece We Have Never Been Liberal, explores the way liberalism contains the conditions of possibility for fascism, both in Europe and the U.S.

The Crisis of Liberalism

• Cultural Anthropology’s Crisis of Liberalism Hotspot  is hot off the press. This collection of short essays from Ulf Hannez, Andrea Mulebach, Doug Holmes and others (including SM’s own Alex Golub), has arrived just in time to help us think critically and comparatively about “our present and recent seasons of political discontent.”
  

The following people contributed resources for this list: Vincanne Adams, Lindsay Bell, Dominic Boyer, Christopher Chan, Seth Holmes, Cymene Howe, Kevin Karpiak, Ashley Lebner, Ken MacLeish, Carol Mcgranahan, Andrea Mulebach, and Jenny Shaw.

What happens to our praxis once we start from a place of acknowledging difference in our persons, our histories, our bodies, and our aesthetics? This text starts from a standpoint of curiosity, consideration, and mindfulness as we explore how, who and what we are, inform structures we create. The moment and place of knowing requires a certain slowness to enter into our thoughts, movements, and research, allowing for nuance and precision, for care and humility, and for an aesthetic of difference to incubate our praxis. Once we allow our work to breathe, to reflect, to sense difference, it transforms structures around it or structures created through it.^[1] The act of research becomes praxis through which critical awareness of one’s own condition and the condition of others comes into high relief. One aspect of this praxis includes bodies co-producing the work. There are intricate processes that situate us between theory and practice as praxis, which must begin to take into account the many ways in which we are identified, the modes of address, our different bodies, and varied epistemologies.

Intersectionality allows us to occupy that praxis and standpoint critically.^[2] It takes into account systems of oppression within the world that hold marginalized people in place (often at an inferior position) in multiple ways. It is not a new idea to acknowledge that our vectors of identity (race, class, ethnicity/gender/body, et cetera) inform how we experience and consider the world, but what is significant in intersectionality is that that place holding happens in different ways at different times and for different reasons. On the flip side, it also means that privilege manifests itself in similarly multifaceted forms. If, due to your body experience, you have never had to question how the world looks at your race/class/ethnicity/gender/body, or if that has never impacted the way the world identifies your research or work, you should know that that is a privileged experience. And that privilege or lack thereof, informs you and your praxis.

Learning Oneself and Others: Intersectional Praxis

The paradox of ‘defining’ something like identity, of course, is that it is not static. Even for someone who is thoughtful and self-reflexive, the ways in which one approaches oneself and others, changes with time and experience. Our ability to understand ourselves in relation to everything else is predicated upon the ability to understand and contextualize the real, tangible, sensory aspect of moving through the world as compared to conceptual, abstract notions of thinking of our bodies in the world. It is important to understand that recognizing systems of power and one’s place in them is a tool that can be utilized. These systems have an impact on our bodies and identities and continue to affect our work. This is the methodology of intersectionality as it relates to praxis. Whereas intersectionality can be defined by levels of access to privilege, a research-based model of intersectionality recognizes that in moving between the lateral and hierarchical modes of being, one must be cognizant and thoughtful about how in each context there may be differences to take into account. And it allows for care to be an intrinsic part of the recognition of difference. All practitioners must first place themselves outside of the system that maintains their work in place. In order to re-conceptualize any practice, the first moments of recognition have to do with recognizing oneself as radically other, not of this system, not of the normalized way of being. That conceptual shift allows one to consider praxis as particular to one’s embodied standpoint, – there is no way for me/you/us to step outside of my/your/our body/bodies to create anything. We may develop tools for all of us to use, methods, codes, programs to help us practice – but what gets coded or institutionalized, what gets marked as knowledge, for what type of normative body, all that should be questioned. If the body that is creating systems of knowledge employs intersectional praxis – the episteme itself knows the diversity of possible bodies it must account for rather than just assuming one norm.

A simple example might be to consider my own childhood: as a person of South Asian heritage, I was often confounded while dealing with crayons that did not have any color to represent my skin tone. I was told by teachers to color in bodies as ‘peach’ because that was the norm in the 1970s, in the United States. But my body was not peach. The disjuncture, cognitive dissonance, and alienation between what I experienced as body and what I represented was unaccounted for: the tools (i.e. crayons) and the representation could not align unless I let go of wanting to see myself represented in that image. I had to make myself into something I was not, and it very quickly became clear to me that I was not the ‘norm’ in the world of crayons. This happens even as I work in archaeology. The normative person in the past is often a body that looks and acts like a contemporary normative body – often not one that looks/feels/could be imagined as mine: normative, and yet othered through time. It is important for us to think through how we might make sense of the many different ways we might imagine past bodies, or othered bodies, or any body that is not a normative privileged body.

Thinking through an intersectional approach to the formation of knowledge then requires some time, some care, and some criticality. Such an approach allows one to look not only at the praxis, but at the pathways and research material to create something: whether that is writing a course syllabus or a book, or reconstructing a history. In effect, such an approach allows for an epistemic critique in the service of decolonization.

[excerpt]

Intersectionality as Decolonizing Research: Integrating Care

Self-recognition, knowledge, and reclamation are at the heart of how one might methodologically approach intersectionality in praxis, and this is really where care is paramount. In our contemporary moment, we have lost the ability to take time out to think, to write, to draw, to wonder, to let our curiosity dictate a research pattern. More and more we are propelled into a system that requires all labor to produce at breakneck speed, suggesting that somehow the survival-of-the-fittest model of labor capitalism is achieved with a lack of all human needs: food, sleep, air, love, et cetera. The late capitalist model has alienated the human body to such a degree that we no longer are allowed to be human to be considered successful.

One of the ways I consider intersectionality to be useful is because it forces the hand of alienation to move. It actually removes the clutches of that form of control over self and control over body and labor. In some measure that is precisely what we want, but it is a privileged position. I have been so disciplined into my subjectivity as an academic, that even when I have slowed down and allowed for care, I have produced an enormous amount of material. Perhaps even because of it: I have produced more work because I am happier working. In some sense, even though I am trying to contest and resist this system, I am actually fulfilling the goal of the late capitalist, neoliberal academic systems agenda.

The reclaiming of a self that is mired in a late capitalist lifestyle is one that requires thoughtfulness, a sense of self-care, and a commitment to time as something to give, not to spend. A radical change in praxis does not always mean a dramatic and drastic change. Sometimes the self-awareness may result in a small material or spatial shift, but it is enough to create a mindful balance: the dramatic quality of the change may be intangible but palpable. In all of my experience, however, the mode of resistance has only ever worked through collaboration, finding allies and solidarity with others. It is through different kinds of practices and alignments that one can contest some of the conditions within which we are working. This can maintain one’s livelihood and sense of self. And so through alliances and creating kin with others (human/nonhuman), we maintain and protect ourselves. And ultimately, that care for and with others is also self-care. Once we recognize ourselves, we begin to recognize our positions, and how our positions may be at the expense of others, be those others human or nonhuman. Once we recognize that we are placed in various systems in ways to keep us moving in place, we stop and then slowly realign our ways of experience, our praxis experiences radical change, one in which we might recognize decolonization as care.

[excerpt]

These are excerpts from a chapter of the same title that is in press for the volume Slow Reader: A Resource for Design Thinking and Practice, edited by Carolyn Stauss and Paula Pais. A Slow Research Lab Collaboration with Valiz. Amsterdam, Valiz Publishers.

This excerpt has been published with the approval of the editors of the volume and the Slow Research Lab.

^[1] I am borrowing the concepts of transformation from Paulo Freire’s 1970, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Continuum International Publishing Group.

^[2] Intersectionality, as I am using it, was first introduced in Kimberle Crenshaw’s 1989, Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics. The University of Chicago Legal Forum. For more on race and architecture see Lesley Naa Norle Lokko’s volume, White Papers Black Marks: Architecture, Race, Culture. University of Minnesota Press (2000).

For about a decade I have been teaching a graduate seminar in anthropology at Columbia University called “Decolonizing Methodology” which takes Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s groundbreaking book Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples as its starting point and also draws on other key texts focused on research methodologies specifically (Denzin et. al. 2008; Kovach 2010). In the course we tend to start with Smith’s work and then use her careful analysis to guide us in taking apart the various traditional methodologies that anthropologists tend to rely on in their research and the various theoretical frames that are of-the-moment within the field. This means that the course moves back and forth between “decolonizing methodology” and “decolonizing theory”.

I started teaching the course after my colleague and friend Jamon Halvaksz pointed out that in my first book I failed to engage enough work by scholars from Papua New Guinea, (PNG) where I have worked since 1997, and the broader Pacific region. Halvaksz’s critique helped me to see the colonial nature of my own anthropological practice in terms of the theoretical texts I drew on to make my arguments and produce new knowledge. From that, I also began thinking about how to teach “methods” in a way that fit with Smith’s work and my own experience of doing ethnographic research with communities in PNG that forced me, from the first day of my research, to think about the politics of asking questions, white privilege, the historic role of anthropology in the mis-representation of Papua New Guineans, and what happens when a scholar learns something that she can never write about. Since my research has always focused on engagements between Papua New Guineans and others (scientists, business people, missionaries, tourists) my colleagues and friends from PNG have always pushed me to think carefully about what these outsiders (myself included) take from PNG, give back to PNG, and how they produce PNG through their rhetoric and practice.

I am a white middle class straight cis-gendered woman from a very poor working class background who is the descendant of settlers who illegally and immorally stole land owned by people of the Coosa Chiefdom who is a full tenured professor at a university that is located on land owned by Lenape people. The students tend to be first and second year Ph.D. students (and a few MA students) who come from a range of departments, with the fields of anthropology, urban planning, history, and sociology almost always represented[i]. In the course, in terms of methods, we always focus on ‘participant observation,’ ‘interviews,’ ‘mapping’, ‘oral history’, and various visual projects like ‘filmmaking’ and ‘photography’ since these are generally the methods that the students in the course imagine that they will use during their doctorial field research. In terms of “theory” over the years we have take on “the production of space,” “ontology”, and “bare life”, among others. In the methods part of the course we tend to take a traditional text describing how to do a method and a traditional ethnographic text written from evidence gathered with that method and ‘read’ them through Smith’s arguments about the kinds of colonial artifacts (dispossession, occlusion, erasure, violence) that are smuggled into traditional social-science epistemic practices. Through this process we get to what should really be the beginning, but rarely is with students who are expected to “have a project” when they apply to Ph.D. programs, where the students start to ask themselves about, in Kim TallBear’s phrasing, “the ethics of accountability in research (whose lives, lands, and bodies are inquired into and what do they get out of it?)” (TallBear 2014:1) and how the methods that they have been imagining may not allow them to approach accountability in ways that they find ethical. The students thus begin to think about the binary that has underpinned most of their research-thinking to date. Again, following TallBear, they begin to see, “the binary between researcher and researched—between knowing inquirer and who or what are considered to be the resources or grounds for knowledge production” (TallBear 2014:1) and they begin to understand that truly decolonial work tries to do away with this binary in various ways.

In the theory part of the course we take the most canonical text for any given social-scientific body of thought, read it, and then read it through texts about the same topic written by non-Euro-American-Australian scholars. For example for “space” we might read Henri Lefebvre’s The production of Space (Lefebvre 1991) paired with work by Okusitino Mãhina, a Tongan philosopher of time-space articulations (Mãhina 1992, 1993, 2002, 2010). In the best of worlds what happens next is a similar self-awaking where the students realize that most of the conceptual frames they are using to think with about their proposed projects come not from in situ relations, conversations, ontological propositions, epistemic processes, or exchanges about what needs to be known and what can’t be known, but rather from their own intellectual genealogy and what texts, arguments, and faculty compelled them during their course work or even their undergraduate training.

We then work together, as a group, in pairs, and with multiple meeting between me and each of the students, to re-think their projects, the ethics of accountability involved in them, and how they will proceed in crafting literature reviews that expand their field of epistemic possibilities. It is a great deal of pedagogical labor on my part and a great deal of intellectual labor on their part. Perhaps more importantly however, it involves a fairly serious commitment to letting go on the part of the students and a willingness to craft a new project idea for their preliminary research (remember that most of the students are first and second year students so they have some time before they actually have to do their dissertation research), that puts the ethics of engagement front and center, and allows for a methodology to emerge in co-production with the communities with which they wish to work.

I’ve also taught a version of this course twice in Papua New Guinea. There, I taught the course on a volunteer basis through The Papua New Guinea Institute for Biological Research (PNG IBR) an NGO that I co-founded in the early 2000s with colleagues from PNG and the United States. One of our founding principals is the proposition that the conservation of biological diversity in PNG can only be achieved if Papua New Guineans have full sovereignty over that biological diversity and that that sovereignty has been slowly stripped away by outsiders conducting research and conservation in the country. In PNG the course was made up of people working as researchers for both governmental and non-governmental organizations, people working as researchers for various extractive industries, people working for national cultural institutions, and faculty from various national universities. There we took the specific methodologies that we have all seen used in an endless barrage of social research components of assessments and used Smith’s work to help us re-craft them in ways that make sense for research with communities in PNG.

Image: Author with participants of the decolonizing methodology course in PNG (2015).

Teaching the course in the contexts of the US and PNG is always quite different. At Columbia the course is about the individual students, their projects, and the project of moving them through the graduate system so that they emerge as scholars who, for the most part, will become university professors. In PNG the course feels more like a shared project. One in which we are all committed to the same goal (decolonizing epistemic practice as it connects to PNG) and where we are able to connect with non scholars who are equally interested in epistemic practice. For example, in one version of the course the students presented their final projects to a group of elders from the communities surrounding the town where we met. These elders were indigenous, expatriate, and other and the students and I all learned from their critiques of our work.

I think of all of this teaching as a collective, on-going, project where my scholarly practice, I hope, becomes less colonial every time I teach the course. I’ve outlined the course here not because I think it is perfect or even that everyone should teach it, but rather because I think it has helped me and my students to do better, more decolonial anthropology.

REFERENCES:

Denzin, Norman K., Yvonna S. Lincoln and Linda Tuhiwai Smith 2008. Handbook of Critical and Indigenous Methodologies. Sage Books.

Kovach, Margaret. 2010. Indigenous Methodologies: Characteristics, Conversations and Contexts. University of Toronto Press.

Lefebvre, Henri 1991. The production of space. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.

Mãhina, ‘Okusitino 1992. The Tongan Traditional Tala-e-fonua: A Vernacular Ecology-centered Historico-Cultural Concept. Unpublished PhD Thesis. ANU, Canberra.

Mãhina, Okusitino,  1993 The poetics of Tongan traditional history, tala–fonua: An ecology-centred concept of culture and history. Journal of Pacific History 28:109–21.

Mãhina, Okusitino, 2002 Atamai, fakakaukau and vale: Mind, thinking and mental illness in Tonga. Pac-Health-Dialog 9 (2): 303–08.

Mãhina, ‘Okusitino. 2010. Ta, Va, and Moana: Temporality, Spatiality, and Indigeneity.

Smith, Linda Tuhiwai 2012. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. New York, NY: Zed Books.

TallBear, Kim. 2014. “Standing With and Speaking as Faith: A Feminist-Indigenous Approach to Inquiry [Research note].” Journal of Research Practice, 10(2), 2014.

NOTES:

[i] For example in a recent year I had twelve students, three of whom identified as Asian-American, one as Chinese (but from Singapore), one as African-American, one as Indian, one as Native American, with the remaining five identifying as white but with one being German and one being Dutch. The previous year there were sixteen students with one identifying as African American, two as Latino, four as white, two as Asian-American, one as Palestinian, one as Native American, one as Peruvian, one as Columbian, one as Pakistani, one as Chinese, and one as Brazilian.

BIO:

Paige West is Professor of Anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University. Her broad scholarly interest is the relationship between societies and their environments.  Since the mid 1990s she has worked with indigenous people in Papua New Guinea. She is the author of three books and the editor of five more.Dr. West is the founder of the journal Environment and Society, the chair of the Ecology and Culture University Seminar at Columbia University, a fellow (and past chair) of the Association of Social Anthropology in Oceania, and is the past president of the Anthropology and Environment Society of the American Anthropological Association. In addition to her academic work, Dr. West is the co-founder, and a board member, of the PNG Institute of Biological Research, a small NGO dedicated to building academic opportunities for research in Papua New Guinea by Papua New Guineans. Dr. West is also the co-founder of the Roviana Solwara Skul, a school in Papua New Guinea dedicated to teaching at the nexus of indigenous knowledge and western scientific knowledge. Her website: https://paige-west.com/, you can also follow her on Twitter: @PaigeWestNYC

Anthro/Zine publishes April, September, and December coinciding with each new issue of Anthropology Now. If you are a student or recent college graduate and would like to make a submission of some sort that is relevant to anthropology then we would like very much to see what you have to offer. We are most interested in seeing work that is creative, personal, and short. Original research is welcome but we do not publish term papers. Do not submit to us what you have given your professor, your peers are your audience here. Reflect on what you have already accomplished and tell us about your experience of encountering anthropology.

A/Z is not a venue for graduate students, however it is appropriate for grads to submit their work directly to Anthropology Now, please see their guidelines here.

Students or faculty with questions can reach me at mthompson@marinersmuseum.org, if you would like your work considered for the September issue than make your submission by August 1.

Click on the cover or the hyperlink below to download a pdf of our latest issue:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Anthro/Zine | April 2016

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

In our most recent issue, Emily Crawford, a student of Environmental Humanities at the University of New South Wales, contributed this wonderfully written piece with original photography about her fieldwork in Bali. She was generous enough to offer additional reflections about the writing process and seeing her work through to publication with Anthro/Zine.

I’ll take my leave here, and, take it away Emily!

The Antho/Zine Experience

By Emily Crawford

Ethnographic fieldwork is what keeps me interested in Anthropology and Environmental Humanities where I am completing my Honours. This is the ‘gonzo’ (‘participant observation’ if you must) fieldwork where you get to “deep hangout” (See Clifford Geertz) with informants and collaborators, and get yourself deeply embedded in what you are writing about. At this stage it is careful, but playful. Anything could happen.

It seems to be about allowing yourself to be affected by and interwoven into situations, without bringing heavy theory in at this stage. Doing this consciously allows you to be present and begin to notice things, connections, moments of poetry. For example, I wanted to set this challenge for myself, to write for Anthro/Zine after summer as a way to get back into the rhythm of writing and writing about plants (the subject of my thesis).

The aim was simply to follow the plants and their people around in Bali and write as thickly and colourfully as I could. This meant really paying attention to what Anna Tsing describes as looking around rather than ahead. Igniting the senses, asking (sometimes strange) questions, crouching down, peering closer, taking a photo from a weird angle, turning up again, following subtle leads. Listening.

I find using narrative modes of writing helps to open up and tease out stories. Where critical theory definitely adds depth and richness to ethnography and anthropology, and is necessary in academic writing, this opportunity allowed me to write a story that was personal and connected, observational and perhaps more easily accessible to readers.

Following this fieldwork, my notebook (always essential!) was covered in rambling observations, sketches, and rubbings of various plant materials. Under advice from my teachers, I try to get to the computer quickly to begin typing it up and seeing what deeper narratives emerge from fieldwork, perhaps the antidote to overthinking or writers block. (Easier said than done, but the rhythm of tapping keys seems to help)

I wrote from outdoor balmy cafes and unfamiliar environments, beneath giant tropical leaves, overlooked by curious geckos. Allowing a story to come through is a delicate, sometime uncomfortable art. In fact, there is a lot of contention about how to “do” ethnography correctly (see http://culanth.org/fieldsights/871-ethnography-provocation), and these trepidations are worth paying attention to. We might be careful and remain vulnerable and open to what we are writing about. We might share it around and invite collaboration and creative responses.

This is where Anthro/Zine provides such a wonderful platform to explore ideas and experiences in a more playful and experimental manner. To write freely without overhanging marking criteria’s is a liberating thing. It may as it did for me, help to recalibrate flow in writing, freshening up the senses for the next story to emerge.

I wrote then of the need for ‘peership’ in classrooms: a sense of ‘taking care of our own’ in educational spaces – ‘a crucial support network that enables many of us to get around.’ We called this endeavor, with seriousness and a lot of jest, ‘Peers and Beers.’ We met every couple of weeks, presented our thoughts, spoke of creative ways to write and think through our notes, shared references, helped develop tables-of-content (for a large part!), and of course drink wonderful Belgian beers.

I am hesitant to speak about the successes or failures of this experience because our intention was never to see of it as such. Sure, it helped me and lot of others to find our way; there were things we could have done better (as it is with any endeavor). One thing that did come out of was the first student-led and -organized colloquium in the anthropology faculty here: again, an idea that arose during several conversations (and with the support and encouragement of the faculty). The inspiration for it came from several spaces: other universities, classes on current issues in anthropology, and masterclass seminars that some of us attended at other Belgian universities.

The colloquium was, essentially, ‘Peers and Beers’ in a larger and more formal sense (with a 7 minute time limit for presenters! We also had beers); it was about talking about things that go into making a thesis, but also making interventions beyond the scope of the document. As a friend and co-organizer put it, “We don’t just want our theses to stay on a bookshelf!”

The horizontality of peership is what draws me most to it; that everyone can bring something valuable to the table; that we can all learn from each other; share our ‘internal kitchen’ (to use another term suggested by a friend). It is also a great catalyst for empathy, and questions the individuating logic that comes to dominate academia quite frequently (of course, the experiences of being in an MA program vastly differ from higher positions, as precarity often increases as we move upwards).

I found references to the term “peership” in Don Brenneis’ opening address to the AAA in 2004, and in Amy Levine’s article in Anthropology News (November 2011). Both write on the collaborative nature of peership, but are largely concerned with professional academic tasks, like peer review and writing grants (which are crucial, and tasks with which I haven’t had any experience yet). I find Jason Lind’s blog on mentoring anthropology students to be closer to my usage of peership. He writes about how volunteering in the National Association for the Practice of Anthropology (NAPA) made him an ‘instant mentor,’ using his experiences to guide others in the field. His notion of ‘anthropological flexibility’ – of methods, research topics, and teamwork – I think is something crucial to the peership I am attempting to describe.

Peership, thus, is a term that I think has utility outside of classrooms as well. It was a sort of peership that my front-line colleagues in Dharavi engaged in with each other (where I participated in a few instances), as they developed modules and attempted to creatively engage in a context that is quite hierarchized. It is fraught with challenges, one of which is institutionalization or formalization. This, I suspect, would hamper the creativity, open-endedness and spontaneity that are important in peership.

It is also ideological, of course. It implies reciprocity and mutual respect (perhaps it has a Maussian logic to it!) It is something I hope to carry with me into the future – in both professional and academic spaces. At the same time, I don’t want to romanticize it. As much as we tried for our experience of peership to be inclusive, there were nonetheless exclusions (for instance, it was largely international students who showed up; not to mention, it is also an elite and privileged space. And as encouraging as we tried to be, some people were not comfortable with the concept and wanted to work on their own ways, a point that is completely understandable and inevitable).

Writing for Savage Minds for me, too, was an exercise in peership: first, as a platform for sketching out and expressing ideas; and second, as something we can carry into acts of peership in and outside of classrooms (for instance, the ongoing interventions on BDS and decolonizing anthropology is something we speak about quite often outside of classrooms).

This is my final post on Savage Minds. I would like to thank Carole and Kerim for accepting me as a contributor; to the commenters, for their suggestions and questions that helped me reflect more clearly on my ideas and assumptions; to the other anthropologists, writers and academics on Twitter for the brief but insightful exchanges. I’d also like to thank my peers in Leuven, especially Alex and Lore, for their enthusiasm in reading my posts, and their feedback on my writing(s). And finally, I want to thank Nolina, for patiently reading and commenting on each post, for her encouragement and love, and for being a constant intellectual companion.

I’m happy to announce that there is now a second issue of the zine to go around! Our parent, Anthropology Now, moved to Taylor & Francis which involved a slight delay in publication, but they have kept us on board. We’re excited to once again provide a place for shorter works by college students. The latest issue is themed around “the Body.” Help us help our students express themselves by sharing this over your social networks and email listservs!

click here to download the PDF

Please visit us at http://anthronow.com/anthrozine where you can download our first two issues and view the submission guidelines. While you’re there check out all the amazing stuff Anthropology Now has to offer too.

Submissions

Perhaps you are a college student and would like to submit some of your work. Fantastic! Or maybe you work with college students and know a writer who would be a good fit for us. Well let’s get in touch!

A/Z is interested in publishing short and very short works by undergrads or recent graduates. We are especially interested in personal reflections, art, photography, poetry, really anything inspired by anthropology. We’re less interested in term papers and original research than we are in getting personal reflections about the process of doing anthropology. See our submission guidelines at the URL above or in either of the published issues.

The December issue will be open topic, if you’d like to have your work considered please submit it immediately to me at mthompson@marinersmusem.org. The April issue will be themed around the environment and ecology, writers are welcome to submit but, obviously, the deadline for that is less pressing.

I am frequently asked if Anthro/Zine publishes the work of grad students. The answer is no, however it would be appropriate for grad students to submit their work to Anthropology Now. You can read their submission guidelines here.

Acknowledgements

While we were putting together our second issue it came to our attention that we had inadvertently usurped the title of another publication who had legitimate copyright to that name. The AnthropoZine is doing good work so we really didn’t want to fight them. Besides, they were here first and really cool to us too. Go give ’em some clicks!

We renamed our product Anthro/Zine, or A/Z for short as a kind of homage to Roland Barthes. Its still edited by me by my neighbor in Hilton Village, Andria Timmer, its still written by undergrads, and its still CC-BY.

.
Anthropozine | April 2015

With this nod to the past, let us turn now to the future for I am excited to announce the launch of a new venue for undergraduate authors, Anthropozine, lovingly inspired by the ’90s zines of yore. Sure its a PDF now, but don’t let that stop you from running off a few hard copies on the departmental printer while no one’s looking. The publication carries a Creative Commons license making it easy for you to share with your students by email, over listservs, or social networks. Anthropozine is published jointly with Anthropology Now, a peer reviewed journal from Routledge with a special vision to make available illustrated works from leading scholars that are written for a general audience. Think of it as something like a missing link between scholarly journal and a popular magazine. If you are a member of the AAA’s General Anthropology Division you already have electronic access to the journal, but there is a fair amount of free content available at http://anthronow.com/.

My colleague Andria Timmer and I have signed up to shepherd the first six issues of Anthropozine and we would be grateful for your support in getting this work to students. Our tagline is “Anthropology unleashing creativity” because we are most interested in publishing works that explore the relationship between students’ personal experience and their encounter with anthropology. Take a look inside and you’ll what we mean.

Students, if you are reading this, you do not need to have original research or even be an anthropology major to write for Anthropozine. If anthropology has intersected with things that have happened in your life then tell us your story! If you want to get in on the action check the call for submissions inside the PDF or visit our workspace at http://anthropozine.wordpress.com/.

The September issue will be themed around “The Body,” for best results please submit by June 15. The December issue will open topic and comes with a October 15 submission date. Feel free to direct any questions to matt.anthropozine@gmail.com, we look forward to seeing your work.

Our April issue is all about Food and you can download it by clicking the link above or visit our homepage at http://anthronow.com/anthropozine. Enjoy!

Passover is still a few months off, but I wanted to share a bit of wisdom from the Passover Haggadah because it has helped guide me through many an online debate. There is a section which tells the story of the four sons (we always read it as “sons and daughters” at my house): “one who is wise, one who is wicked, one who is simple, and one who does not know to ask” and “recommends answering each son according to his question.” Wikipedia can fill you in on the rest of the story and the traditional responses if you need help understanding the irony of the cartoon at the top of this post, but for my purposes I just want to focus on the central pedagogical insight: that different questions and questioners require different responses. That different questions call for different responses may not seem to be a particularly useful insight, but I think a lot of the pain involved in internet discussions can be avoided if one thinks clearly about this and learns to act accordingly.

For me, engaging in online debate means trying to think seriously about a comment¹ and what work it is doing before I choose how to respond. This avoids the problem suggested by the joke of the cartoon: that one’s ideological stance will shape how one interprets the comment. I’m not saying that one can respond to comments in a way that is completely free of ideology, just that focusing on the comment text itself rather than your assumptions about the person leaving the comment can help a lot. Yes, interpretation of the motivation and character of the commenter is important, but in this approach it only enters into the equation after you have determined what type of comment you are dealing with. What follows then is my adapted typology of the four types of comments one finds on the internet, and how best to respond to each one.

The Wise Comment

The wise comment is one that shares knowledge. In this case the motivation of the commenter is rather unimportant. Sure, they might be showing off, but they also might just be trying to be genuinely helpful. Or perhaps they just want to return the gift of your post with the gift of some random bit of knowledge they possess? Who knows. This knowledge sharing can be relevant or irrelevant, but in either case it is fundamentally in the spirit of the internet.

The key thing about responding to such comments is to avoid being threatened by them. There is no need to be competitive by trying to prove that you know everything said in the comment and more. You might feel compelled to explain that you are already familiar with the various sources mentioned in some comment, but chose not to include them for various complex reasons. Sure, if the reasons for ignoring certain sources or facts help illuminate your discussion, do go ahead and share your thought process, but if you just don’t like the idea that anyone would think that you hadn’t read those sources, or you think the person is an idiot for mentioning certain sources in the first place, it is best to keep silent. A simple thank you will suffice. Otherwise you will do little more than belittle the kind gesture of the commenter who wanted to share some of their knowledge with you.

The Wicked Comment

There is a lot of debate on the internet about how to respond to trolls. Comments which are trollish are those which are deliberately designed to provoke in order to sidetrack the discussion or provoke an angry reaction.

Trolling is a competitive sport, and many of us can often give as well as we can take, but just because you have a really good come-back doesn’t mean you have to use it. (Well, maybe sometimes.) These comments are almost always best simply ignored. Or even deleted, blocked, and/or reported – depending on the platform.

I debated about giving “comments which are basically blog posts” a separate section, but ultimately decided to put it here as well. Although not meant maliciously, these comments often have only tangential relationship to the topic at hand and try to hijack the discussion in much the same way that the troll’s does. The intention may be different, but the effect is often the same. The author mistakenly believes that they will get more readers by posting their writing in the comments sections of other blogs or Facebook posts rather than starting a blog of their own. I say mistakenly, because the tangential and long-winded nature of their posts tends to put most readers off, much like SPAM or pop-up ads which people ignore because of their irrelevance.

On Savage Minds we consider such posts a violation of our comments policy (as are many other unacceptable forms of behavior not mentioned here) and we delete them.

The Ignorant Comment

What looks like ignorance might, in fact, be trolling. But I think it is best to be safe and assume that people genuinely don’t know something and to proceed from there. There are, however, three very different kinds of ignorance that need to be distinguished: The first is “self-aware ignorance” – someone who knows that they don’t know something and genuinely wants help. The second is “ignorant ignorance” where someone is unaware of their own ignorance. And the third is “willful ignorance” where someone has a genuine desire to avoid learning. Each of these needs to be handled differently.

Dealing with self-aware ignorance is the easiest. Simply switch into “teacher mode” and try to be as helpful as you can be. With ignorant ignorance, however, one has to tread carefully, lest you stomp on someone’s ego. In these situations I generally point to some resource with the comment that it has personally been useful for my own understanding of the issue. Another approach comes from the classroom, where I try not to directly contradict students if I can avoid it, waiting instead till there is another opportunity to address the problem in such a way that it does not come across as a direct criticism of an individual. Sure, not everyone will follow you closely enough to get the hint, but it is there for them if they do. The willfully ignorant, unfortunately, poses a more intractable problem. I generally start off assuming that they genuinely want to learn, but then simply drop out of the discussion if that assumption proves mistaken. You are never going to persuade someone who isn’t open to persuasion, and the quality of the discussion usually deteriorates pretty rapidly if you try. As the saying goes: “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.” This sounds obvious, but you’d be surprised how hard it can be for some people to simply let go of a conversation, even when they know it is futile to continue.

The One Who Didn’t Read

People love to join in conversations without having clicked on the link or having read nothing more than the title of a post. Sometimes they just respond directly to the previous comment, ignoring the original post as well as previous discussions. Again, I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing. Like sharing irrelevant knowledge (itself a common symptom of this type of behavior), commenting without having read the post is often just a form of sociality – a desire to be part of the conversation. On Facebook I get a lot of “likes” from people whom I’m pretty sure don’t even read the posts before liking them.

But understanding the motivation doesn’t mean you have to reply. If it is someone I know I might say “Don’t pay any attention to the awful headline, you really should read the article.” But if it is a stranger, I will just ignore them all together.

Coda

I’ve written these thoughts from the point of view of a blogger, or someone who has shared a link on social media (I know some readers balk at the pretentiousness of the word “curator,” but it is actually useful here), but they also pertain to other commenters. One reason for writing this post is to try to cultivate a shared set of norms which I think would make the internet a better place to live. This is not a call for “civility” in the sense of silencing strong opinions, but simply a call for relevancy along with some tips for how to get your ideas across without grief.

Teaching is a choice for me. I have a full-time job, a MORE than full-time job, running the Burlesque Hall of Fame, and much of what little spare time I have left is spent as a caretaker for my father (who suffers from Alzheimer’s) and maintaining some kind of social life, but when I can pick up a class, I do. I enjoy the classroom experience, and if you’ve ever worked at a community college, you know how rewarding it can be.

My classes are typically full of very bright, hopeful young people (along with a scattering of returning students and retirees) who have been terribly served by the educational system. Many of them are minorities and/or from poor families, which means not only has their K-12 education been abysmally bad (on purpose, I’d argue), but so has the rest of their lives during their developmental years.

So much of what I do in my classes is aimed not just at teaching the rudiments of cultural anthropology but helping them develop from the subject material something of a toolkit for contextualizing (and hopefully improving) their own lives. The hope is always that you can help them overcome the deficiencies of their elementary and secondary educations, nudging them towards stronger reading comprehension, better critical thinking skills, and a clearer understanding of the ways the social order in which they are embedded works.

But of course, they also have to learn basic anthropology. Subsistence strategies, kinship charts, political organization, the types of religious practice, and so on. Ironically, this is the stuff that I tended to pay little attention to in grad school, where I was more focused on theories of language and power, state domination and resistance, and historical process. So I’ve spent 11 years deepening my understanding of the basics — to the point, I fear, where I’ve fallen almost completely out of touch with the state of the art.

So I’m asking Savage Minds readers to help me catch up. Here’s the challenge: What should I read that well-represents what’s going on in cultural anthropology today? Bonus points (note: no points will actually be awarded) if it helps me breathe some new life into my classes. I’ll remind you that my time is limited — I figure I can probably pull off two or three extra books over the course of the semester, provided they aren’t Debt: The First 5,000 Years– or Capital In the Twenty-First Century-length. I also read a lot in nonprofit administration, museum practice, and fundraising, so, you know, something with a bit of zing would be welcome. And if its available on Kindle, all the better!

A recent book addresses this phenomenon as it applies to writing in the social sciences and,  by extension,  to anthropology.   Learn to Write Badly . How to Succeed in  the Social Sciences   by Michael Billig is not a ‘How To’ book.  Its  a  `How Not To’ book.  But, as the author makes plain, if you don’t write in the way which has become authoritative in your field, even if it entails writing badly, there could be consequences for your reputation if not your career.

Although Billig’s is a book about writing I think that the author’s claims work pretty well for communication in the social sciences more generally. It certainly made me think about how we as anthropologists in academia tend to speak to our audiences whether they are our students or our peers. The formal style of academic presentations in anthropology based on writing rather than on `findings’ prioritizes engagement with other writing over and above engagement with either our audience or our informants. This is quite different to communication in other fields,  within and outside academia. A how to book which you may find useful for engaging with these other fields is Carmine Gallo’s Talk like TED summarized neatly here by Sam Leith of the Financial Times .

Sure,  it’s a manual in self promotion (but lets not kid ourselves that academia is any different). But it also has lots of useful tips about connecting with the audience, making a few key points and giving them something to remember.  And I learned something wholly new, useful and unexpected. That if you press the B or W keys in powerpoint you can suspend the presentation so your audience is focusing on you not the slide until you are ready to show them the next one. Despite the acknowledged allure of  intellectual  posturing sometimes you just cant beat useful practicality.

LAURA FORLANO. writer and design researcher.

WHAT I DO.

I’m an ethnographic time traveler. For much of the last 10 years, I’ve been studying the ways in which the use of communication technology enables emergent socio-cultural practices around working and living in cities. For example, I’m interested in peer-to-peer networking, bottom-up organizing, co-located online collaboration, user-driven social innovation and open source urbanism, to name just a few. I’ve watched teens use mobile phones in Tokyo, observed activists building Wi-Fi networks on rooftops in Berlin, interviewed freelancers in Starbucks cafes in New York, watched doctors use computers in operating rooms, tested iPhone applications for navigating college campuses, visited design studios in Barcelona, and hung out with hackers in Budapest.

I’m also an activist. I’m not satisfied with merely describing the lived experience of socio-technical change through writing. I’m critical of the metaphors that the mainstream media uses to frame discussions about the interplay between technology, culture, and cities. For example, “Smart Cities” are often described as productive, efficient, and innovative, a continuation of neo-liberal discourses around technology and the economy. I’m concerned about the kinds of values that we embed in socio-technical systems, the opportunities that we bring to life, but also the possibilities that we take away by making these choices.

And I’m a maker. Most often, I’m making something that involves people. A workshop, a research salon, a lecture series. I think that part of my learning to work as a design researcher is related to learning how to facilitate face-to-face, hands-on workshops. I’ve run at least seven design workshops in the past year in order to bring together different communities of scholars, practitioners, activists, and makers. For example, in one workshop for a health-focused summer program in Brooklyn, four small groups of teens created stakeholder maps, discussed the values associated with a specific health topic (e.g.,obesity or HIV), and prototyped ideas for new platforms, products, and services. One group wrote the lyrics to a song about future technologies that they might use at the dentist, another wrote the script for a play about HIV, another created a Lego model of community health services and, finally, another created a series of iPad wireframes for a new application.

Luckily, design is a field in which all of these identities–scholar, activist and maker–can coexist. In fact, I believe that all of these are necessary in order to combine a reflective and critical social science perspective with a future-oriented generative process that results in some kind of change in the world. This can sometimes be mistaken for a kind of technological determinism. Yet if you are asking critical questions along the way and have a keen sense of the values trade-offs that you are making, I am hopeful that it is possible to create new ways of knowing things, doing things, and making things that can contribute to the world.

ANTHROPOLOGY + DESIGN.

Anthropology and design have been in dialogue for several decades, but one of the most obvious examples is in the human-centered (or user-centered) design research tradition. This tradition is based on empathy and primary research through field studies and qualitative interviews as a fundamental starting point for a design research project. Design, in this case, is not about the aesthetic qualities of a particular logo, product, service, or system but about its ability to serve user needs and develop solutions.

The shift toward a human-centered approach has been an important one for many companies attempting to innovate through the creation of new products and services. This approach was pioneered by anthropologists and sociologists working in the Bay Area at companies, such as Xerox PARC and IBM, in the 80s and 90s to design computer interfaces. More recently, companies such as Microsoft, Intel, and Yahoo! continue to employ social scientists, designers, as well as people with hybrid skill sets, such as interaction design, in order to conduct user research. Over the past two decades, many design consulting firms that originally focused on industrial design such as IDEO, frog design, and Smart Design have promoted the use of a human-centered approach based on design research. One of the main professional conferences that bring together practitioners and academics working in the field of user research is EPIC, now in its 10th year.

One thing that I think anthropologists might learn from design is the idea of creating a more generative form of critique that makes the project better. In design, a critique is not a peer review, it is a collaboration. I recently got peer review comments back from a design journal and was surprised at the level of engagement with the work in a very deep, helpful, generative and productive manner. Often, in my experience, peer review in the social sciences is more about defining a field by policing insiders and outsiders. A more generative conversation, starting with “Yes, and” rather than “But” could help all of us do better work. Also, in the model of a design critique, it is possible to guide the conversation to focus only on certain aspects of the work such as the style or the content or the process. Adopting and/or developing a design critique model in anthropology might be a productive and interesting direction.

Another thing that I think anthropologists might draw from design is experimentation with more collaborative ways of working in teams, from graduate school though faculty positions and professional practice. In graduate school, I did very few team projects for courses and, at the time, there were not any opportunities to participate in collaborative research projects in my department. In addition, there is a lot of emphasis on doing your own project, collecting your own data and writing it up on your own. Since becoming a faculty member in a design school, I’ve seen the many ways in which student teams collaborate successfully and, sometimes, unsuccessfully. It is always exciting to see students working together to achieve a common goal.

Designers would benefit from a more rigorous incorporation of theories of culture as well as a more in-depth understanding of ethnographic research methods. Finally, while anthropologists are skilled storytellers through text, photography, and film, designers are trained in visual storytelling that includes images, charts, graphs, and artifacts. Greater collaboration across literary and visual traditions would result in better storytelling in both fields.

WHY NOW.

The human-centered design tradition is already built considerably on anthropology through the appropriation of field research and ethnographic methods (to the dismay of many anthropologists!). But a deeper engagement between design and anthropology might allow anthropologists to explore broader implications of their work beyond the academy through exhibits, artifacts, and workshops that engage different communities.

Human “needs” have been the focus of design work for far too long and we are beginning to see the planetary limits of our unevenly distributed needs. It is important to go beyond the human-centered focus and towards a perspective in which it is possible to empathize with and see the world through the lens of other kinds of entities (e.g., objects, artifacts, animals, nature, and the environment). While there are many design frameworks that break up the world into discrete categories for observation, it is time that we consider hybrid categories as new ways of seeing. For example, what of the human-object and the animal-technology? I’ve tried to do this by introducing new terms by which to understand these hybrid categories. For example, in one project, after studying Wi-Fi networks, community activists and mobile workers in a range of settings were struggling with ways to describe socio-technical and spatial phenomenon. I created the term codescapes as a way of referring to technological and spatial things simultaneously.

HOW I SHARE.

I use design to engage with broader and different audiences beyond academic journals. One of the things that I learned from the Breakout! project is how difficult it is to engage the public on the streets of New York in spontaneous collaborative activities. The project was unique in that it was the only project in the The Architecture League of New York’s Towards the Sentient City exhibition that was specifically about people’s behavior and emergent forms of collaboration. The other projects were about the display of specific artifacts in the built or natural environment (e.g., garbage, plants, fish, street furniture).

In the codesign project about urban technology, my collaborator and I, along with the help of several graduate students at the Institute of Design, produced a visual “Designing Policy” toolkit. We introduced participants to the intersection of urban technology, values in design, and co-design methods. The toolkit was a prototype, a visual artifact that contains a theoretical argument and a methodological approach, as my colleague Stan Ruecker and his coauthor Alan Galey have argued here.

Since the social sciences are still primarily focused on the book or the journal article as the primary mode of dissemination, recognition, and publication, I have found that design offers a wide range of more visual modes such as exhibitions, artifacts, and workshops through which to engage communities. Lastly, I have found short articles and blog posts on scholarly blogs like Savage Minds, Culture Digitally, and Ethnography Matters to be an engaging and fast way of disseminating ideas and learning about relevant communities of practice.

METHODOLOGY.

It is difficult to be critical and descriptive as a scholar while at the same time generative and future-oriented as a maker, all along maintaining a strong sense of core values as an activist. Yet this is exactly what is needed in order to develop a methodology that more deeply combines design and anthropology. In many ways, these three different mindsets are at odds with one another: the analytical mind of a social scientist, the exploratory mind of an artist, and the action-oriented mind of an activist.

Our institutions, academic or otherwise, do not allow use to cross these boundaries easily. I think that designers could benefit from a deeper and more rigorous engagement in the context of their projects, but this does not necessarily need to be through conducting fieldwork with ethnographic observations and interviews. What is more important is that designers know how to combine different methodologies in order to answer their research questions. For example, they need to know how to use secondary data, how to understand broader shifts in society, how to derive design principles from a range of sources. That is important.

I draw a lot of inspiration from generative, future-oriented methods such as design fiction, critical design, and speculative design. These methods were pioneered by London-based designers Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby at the Royal College of Art in the 1990s. (For examples, see their new book Speculative Everything). These methods draw on critical traditions from art and architecture over the last century, such as surrealism and situationism, to use design as a means to ask questions, seek out alternative possible futures, and intervene in society through the creation of material artifacts.

While critical design has been criticized as elitist and apolitical, the purpose of these methods is to pose questions about alternative future possibilities, often in the form of dystopias. When you encounter critical design projects, your first reaction might be to laugh but you quickly encounter a sense of wonder, surprise, horror, or fear about the state of the human condition.

PEDAGOGY.

In my teaching, I encourage students to conduct fieldwork but I also believe that they can draw on their own experiences and still create very interesting work. By conducting ethnographic observations, they can become the creators and owners of their own data rather than believe that experts are the only people that can create knowledge.

But, overall, I’m more interested in fostering discussions of theory that allow my students to develop a more critical view of the world around them in order to inform their process of documenting, analyzing, and making. In order to design in and for a world of emerging technologies, it is necessary to be both skeptical and optimistic. By remaining skeptical, designers can be more aware of the ways in which sociopolitical values are embedded in design.

In my teaching, I encourage students to create artifacts that raise important questions around emerging technologies, such as cultured meat and networked objects. Some examples include a dynamic lighting system such as Philips Hue or a thermostat like Nest that is controlled by an iPhone application, commonly referred to as the ‘internet of things’ type projects. For the cultured meat project, my students created an event called “Meat Up: A Cultured Evening” that included a mini-exhibition of a series of artifacts where they asked participants to document their reactions in a small booklet and hosted a dinner party in order to spur conversation about cultured meat.

ME.

Laura Forlano is a writer, design researcher, and founder of Mobile Atelier. She is an Assistant Professor of Design at the Institute of Design at Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT). Previously, she was a Visiting Scholar in the Comparative Media Studies program at Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 2012-2013. Her research is focused on the intersection between emerging technologies, material practices, and the future of cities. She is co-editor with Marcus Foth, Christine Satchell and Martin Gibbs of From Social Butterfly to Engaged Citizen: Urban Informatics, Social Media, Ubiquitous Computing, and Mobile Technology to Support Citizen Engagement (MIT Press 2011). Forlano’s research and writing has been published in peer-reviewed journals including First Monday, The Information Society, Journal of Community Informatics, IEEE Pervasive Computing, Design Issues and Science and Public Policy. She has published chapters for books including editor Mark Shepard’s Sentient City: Ubiquitous Computing, Architecture, and the Future of Urban Space (MIT Press 2011) and The Architecture League of New York’s Situated Technologies pamphlet series and is a regular contributor to their Urban Omnibus blog. She received her Ph.D. in communications from Columbia University.

RESOURCES.

Forlano, Laura. 2013. Digital Fabrication and Hybrid Materialities. Culture Digitally. December.

Forlano, Laura. 2013. Ethnographies from the Future: What can ethnographers learn from science fiction and speculative design? Ethnography Matters. September.

Forlano, Laura. 2013. Making Waves: Wireless Technology and the Coproduction of Place. First Monday, Special Issue on “Media and the City.”

Foth, M. and Laura Forlano, Martin Gibbs and Christine Satchell. 2011. From Social Butterfly to Engaged Citizen: Urban Informatics, Social Media, Ubiquitous Computing, and Mobile Technology to Support Citizen Engagement. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Forlano, Laura. 2009. WiFi Geographies: When Code Meets Place. The Information Society 25:1-9.

Forlano, Laura. 2009. Work and the Open Source City. Urban Omnibus, The Architecture League of New York. New York, NY. June.

This week’s gorgeous guest essay on “Writing Archaeology” by Zoë Crossland brought a new conversation to our Writers’ Workshop series: how does one teach writing? How does one learn to write? As she reflects:

It’s clear that the practice of archaeology is as much about writing as it is about fieldwork. The texts we compose are fundamental to translating artifacts and sediments into stories about the past, and yet we pay relatively little attention to the craft of writing, preferring to train students in techniques of excavation and field survey. 

The craft of writing, indeed. Here is to continuing to think about writing collectively, and to thinking about writing pedagogy.

Most of our writing instruction in the discipline takes place in either direct feedback on one’s writing from peers or professors, or simply from reading good writing. Less common, but growing over time are ethnographic writing workshops–we’ve had three at the University of Colorado over the last five-six years or so, led by Ann Armbrecht, Kirin Narayan, and myself; and there are always such workshops at the AAAs every year, including Renato Rosaldo’s fantastic ethnographic poetry workshop. Even rarer it seems–but much needed–are courses devoted to writing such as Zoë Crossland’s Writing Archaeology course or Ruth Behar’s longstanding Ethnographic Writing course at the University of Michigan. Who else is teaching writing in anthropology? 

Tune in Monday for our next Writers’ Workshop post from Robin Bernstein on grant writing, and some tips we can all use. For now, check-in on your week and your writing, and here’s to the homestretch–two weeks to go!

Like fiction, archaeology allows us to visit other worlds and to come back home again. So, it can be a useful exercise to juxtapose archaeological texts with historical novels, poems and other forms of writing. Just as a novelist does, a writer of archaeology has to attend carefully to the conventions that shape the stories we tell. The written past demands some kind of narrative coherence, a consistency in our compositional form, and in the internal logic of the world we bring into being. Like poets, we have to choose our words carefully. In this comparison we can identify the shared techniques used to evoke other worlds and to draw in the reader. We can also consider the narrative possibilities that are excluded from our archaeological writing, and ask what opportunities might be opened up by allowing different forms of voice and language.

Going further than comparison, how might experimenting with different forms help us find new ways to conjure stories from the material traces of the past? There is an intimacy to archaeological excavation that is rarely captured in our narratives. The rasp of a trowel over granular soil; the vegetative odor of damp roots stripped green and white by a spade thrust; or the cold, polished feel of porcelain, smooth beneath the fingers. Much is gained in the translation from earth to text, but what is lost? How might we find narrative space to include some acknowledgement of affect and emotion, as well as the texture and grain of encounters with the stuff of the past?

We’ve been working through these questions in my Writing Archaeology class this semester, exploring how archaeological evidence evokes a particular response, and how novels and poems work to do the same thing. What enlivening techniques might we learn from fictional accounts, and how might they encourage us to think more critically about the role of the reader in bringing a text to life? It’s clear that the practice of archaeology is as much about writing as it is about fieldwork. The texts we compose are fundamental to translating artifacts and sediments into stories about the past, and yet we pay relatively little attention to the craft of writing, preferring to train students in techniques of excavation and field survey. This is not to say that archaeologists have not thought critically about writing. We began the class by reading some of the many experimental texts in archaeology. These include Rosemary Joyce and colleagues’ dynamic Languages of Archaeology, Janet Spector’s pioneering What this Awl Means and Carmel Schrire’s unflinching and evocative Digging Through Darkness. There are a surprising number of archaeological texts that play with form, positioning and language. Many of those who experiment with fiction also take an autobiographical approach, working to situate their experiments within the context of their own frustrations with the limits of conventional archaeological texts. Poetry is rare however. A beautiful new contribution, Stonework, has recently been published by Mark Edmonds working with the artist Rose Ferraby. Given the doubt that lies at the heart of archaeological endeavor – that moment when one must leap from the material signs that lie within our experience to the projected past that we read from and in them – how is archaeological writing approached? Do we attempt to hide or minimize this doubt, to embrace it, or to elaborate upon it? What is noticeable in many texts is the need for a framing device. Archaeologists rarely let a fictionalized or poetic piece stand on its own terms. In order to think about this more closely we’re also reading novelists who write about the past or material traces, such as Raymond Williams and Orhan Pamuk. We’re reading poets too. Seamus Heaney, of course, but also Peter Riley’s Excavations, and Armand Schwerner’s The Tablets.* Riley and Schwerner both play with the boundaries of fact and fiction in ways that are normally forbidden to us archaeologists.

The Writing Archaeology class is designed for students who are working on substantial writing projects – whether a senior thesis or a doctoral dissertation. It’s a small seminar, with ten participants this year. As part of the class the students undertake weekly writing assignments that work to better understand an author’s aims, his or her successes and failures. So, for example, in reading and discussing Janet Spector’s classic text What this Awl Means, I asked the students to write a similar narrative about their own research. Spector’s text has at its heart an imagined relationship between a bone awl and the adolescent girl who made and owned it. This was one of the first attempts to write an archaeological history as a story, as a biographical account centered on a named and historically documented person. I asked the students to write about their own projects in semi-fictionalized form, using a voice that was as close as possible to the one that Spector deployed.

This is an exercise designed to prompt students to think about language with precision. I asked them to consider the language choices that Spector made. For example, what verb tenses does she use, and how do they shift at different moments in the story? I also asked them to think about how Spector’s word choices affected their response to her story as readers. What kind of narrative mood is evoked by the text, and how is this accomplished? What kind of adjectives and verbs are used? Do they give the effect of a story quickly told, words piled up higgledy-piggledy, or does the narrative seem stretched out, slow and languorous? Or perhaps something else is achieved? Finally, what do they each bring to the text as readers – does the account resonate with other stories they’ve heard, and if so, how?

We workshop everyone’s writing in the second half of each class. I ask students to identify one thing they like or are proud of in the piece they’ve submitted, and one thing that didn’t quite work, or that they struggled with. We discuss our responses, make suggestions and note other points that we enjoyed, or that we think perhaps might need a bit more thought. What has been revelatory for me in this exercise, is the very different tone and topics of discussion that this approach elicits. By starting to take sentences apart, word by word, we’ve been finding out more about our own reading and writing practices. The writing exercise also gives students some insight into the terrain that the author was negotiating. Why did she make particular choices, and how might different styles of writing change how they read the text? To write a short piece that attempts to inhabit someone else’s authorial voice encourages close reading, attention to the exact words chosen and to the difficulties of experimental writing. What comes out of this class on writing is a more generous reading experience.

Let me offer some of the responses that the students gave me when I asked them about their thoughts on the class as I was writing this blog.

Michael suggests that the exercise works as “an excavatory tool” into the texts we read. In emulating a writer’s style, he points out that one has to figure out the boundaries between homage, pastiche and parody. As Courtney puts it, in writing such a response to the text you “have to sit with the author” and face the difficulties and challenges that the author faced. Valerie notes that it is an awkward process to force yourself “out of your narrative comfort zone” and into other voices. When imitating an author’s voice the students must make similar decisions about how to characterize the past people that they inhabit in the text. Courtney and the others noted how uncomfortably transgressive this can feel, enhancing their awareness of the ethical issues around representation and the control over narrative. This was felt especially strongly by those students working on the recent past, or who are telling a story about another nation or people’s histories and cultures. To acknowledge this is to recognize that these writing exercises are steps along a pathway. Not an end in themselves, they are meant to make visible the assumptions that we bring to our writing, as well as to open up new ways of thinking about our archaeological evidence, and to hopefully prompt insights that we might not otherwise have had. What’s important here is to create a safe workshop space to engage with each other’s work, and to acknowledge that failure is always possible, but that it is allowable and productive. To channel Seamus Heaney (with apologies):

Beneath my fingers and my thumbs

The keyboard waits.

I’ll dig with it.

Contributions by

Lindsey Bishop

Valerie Bondura

Charles Garceau

Emma Gilheany

Michael Merriam

Maud Reavill

Maura Schlagel

Dianne Scullin

Courtney Singleton

*With thanks to Severin Fowles for bringing Armand Schwerner’s poetry to my attention.

I am happy to share the syllabus with anyone who would like a copy. My email is: zc2149 [at] columbia [dot] edu