Tag Archives: Pedagogy

Anthropology in the classroom.

Found Mag meets Savage Minds

There seems to be a bit of penchant on Savage Minds for discussing the desire-as-lack that constitutes anthropology as a discipline, which manifests itself in the frequent gnashing of “intro to” syllabi and proposing of essential works. Far be it from me to avoid joining in the fun. In the irony-laden spirit of Found Magazine, my contribution to this comes not from my own vast and enviable experience, but from a not-so-silent partner, Thomas Chivens. Thom and I were undergrads at UCSC when Virginia Dominguez (current editor of American Ethnologist) taught there. For serendipitous and mysterious reasons that cannot be elaborated in the Internets (for reasons of space), Thom recently unearthed this gem of a handout. The Ultimate Virginia Dominguez Reading List The Ultimate Virginia Dominguez Reading List Part 2
What I love almost as much as this hand-scrawled clearly definitive (c. 1989, not clear exactly on the provenance of the Duke letterhead) list of must-read anthropologists, is what Thom has to say about it:

looking at it again this morning i can imagine virginia would have revised it over the years (i recall her passing it out amidst a barrage of caveats on its casually-thrown-together nature for her student heading to graduate school). i can see it moving into some sort of spreadsheet type format, endlessly expanding, etc.. but it’s the sense of completeness arising from apparent spontaneity that gives it a magical aura and suggests contesting or revising it is the wrong way to think about it. hopefully widespread reproduction won’t take that away. in this regard, it carries with it something of what giddens talks about as the formulaic truth of guardians, in contrast to the propositional knowledge of experts. and if we need guardians these days, which anthropology could use, i think virginia’s about as good as they come.

Something about the contrast this handout poses to the technological smorgasbord of information and research tools at our disposal captivates me. Part of it is, as Thom points out, the clear need for certain kind of guardian–not just in anthropology, but in any domain where apprenticeship is an essential component of progress in knowledge. Sometimes it’s better to have a hand-scratched, seat-of-the-pants expression of deep knowledge over a real-time, social software, scale-free, really simple, ajax-enhanced, web 2.0 instant access to scholarship. If you know what I mean. Part of it is the “*Still alive, as far as I know” note, which is useful for the earnest anthropological grad student seeking out mentors and influences. Part of it is the emphatic national, tiered grid–I wish I had the guts, and the knowledge to organize my stories of scholarship with such gusto. In any case, I though our readers might enjoy a little bit of the old school, both in form and in content….

A Place to Talk Anthropology

Dr. Griffin’s Anthro Lounge is a forum dedicated to anthropology. The membership seems to consist of a lot of Dr. Griffin’s students and ex-students, but is open to everyone. I’ve been thinking a lot lately (more than usual, even) about how the Internet can contribute to both the spread of anthropological ideas to non-anthropologsts and the development of new or improved idea within the discipline, both of which are explicit goals of Savage Minds but it would be folly to suggest that the way we’ve gone about it is the only or even the best way. Forums are notoriously hard to launch; Anthro Lounge has a nice long track record and an active membership already, and seems well-primed to become a great resource for anthropologists and the anthropologically-minded — what I think we all wish AnthroCommons would have become.

Four-Fields Again: Finding a Way to Make it Work

Back in the fall, I “questioned the feasability”:/2005/08/23/intro-courses-and-the-viability-of-four-fields/ of the four-field approach in a “Cégep”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CEGEP -level course. My problems were largely based on the fact that I had always imitated what my colleagues were doing: starting with 4 weeks of physical anthropology, including physical evolution, our relationship with other primates and modern human variation, then 2 weeks of archaeology. This left me with very little time to cover a large body of knowledge of cultural anthropology, including one week of linguistics, specifically sociolinguistics.

In my previous post, I said that I would try to start backwards. In other words, instead of ending with globalisation and cutting a lot of it out because I was too tight for time at the end, I was going to start with that topic and work my way back to the past. Well, I didn’t wind up doing that. But I did come up with a way of teaching my intro course that pleases me while still fulfilling the four-field approach.

What I’m doing now is integrating the four fields at every step. Instead of spending chunks of the course focusing on one field at a time, I go through the course focussing on topics and, for each topic, I examine the contributions of the various subfields. So I started the semester simply talking about culture. What is it (definitions and descriptions)? What does it do (shape our assumptions)? How do we learn about it in the present and in the past (this is where the subfields come in)?

Now, at week 5 of the semester, I’m moving on to specific aspects of culture such as worldview and religion. Again, we will look at the topic in general while specifying how the different subfields contribute to our understanding of it. And so forth for gender and sexuality, economic systems, political structures, etc. I’m therefore doing things a bit differently than my colleagues, most of whom are more experienced than I am, but I’m quite comfortable with going out on a limb.

I’m pretty sure that there are other people out there who teach their intro courses in a similar fashion and that I didn’t invent this method. I’m curious to hear comments by anyone who uses a similar approach or has taken a course with this approach. Since this is my first time teaching the course this way, I’m anxious to see whether it makes a difference in student comprehension and interest. In my two intro courses this semester, it seems to be working well in terms of catching student interest but I’m not sure if it’s the approach itself or merely the fact that I was able to jump into topics that I’m genuinely passionate about earlier in the semester and therefore win over the students sooner with my own enthusiasm, something that often took much more time when I had to go through the evolution stuff (not that it’s not important, just that I have to fake a lot of my enthusiasm while teaching it). Once I start seeing test results, it will give me a better idea of actual student comprehension.

A Common Core of Undergrad Articles?

One of the colleges that I adjunct at recently had an external reviewer come through to help them get some advice about how to structure (among other things) their intro course. On the one hand, the department wants to attempt to standardize their introduction to cultural anthropology course so students will all be on the same page when they arrive in upper level classes. On the other hand each professor teaches the course differently and is unwilling to change — in particular, no one is willing to adopt a singe textbook. The reviewer suggested that one way to split the difference would be to come up with a core set of articles which all professors could pick and chose from. I find the idea of developing a core set of ‘the articles every intro student should read’ a fascinating project.

I’m having trouble coming up with good answers about what should be on it, however, and have mostly come up with things that are either canonical or just good and deserving of more attention. But this is what I’ve got so far (remember, I live in Polynesia, and this affects my list):

“Haole Girl: Identity and White Privilege in Hawai’i” Judy Rohrter (being white in Hawaii)

“100% American” Ralph Linton (a two page handout on the ubiquity of diffused culture traits in the US)

“Empathy, or, Seeing From Within” Robert Lowie (nice overview of the concept of cultural relativism)

“”Indigenous Knowledge and Academic Imperialism”:http://www.hawaii.edu/cpis/files/IndigKnow.pdf” by Vilsoni Hereniko (the politics of studying Pacific culture)

“Our Sea of Islands” Epeli Hau’ofa (key text about how to envision the Pacific)

“Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women” by Susan Moller Okin and the two responses “My Culture Made Me Do It” (Bonnie Honnig) and “Is Western Feminism Good For Third World Women?” (Azizah Al-Hibri) a good dialogue about the tension between relativism and activism. Also good for teaching arguments.

“Growth and Decay: Bedamini Notions of Sexuality” by Arve Sorum (if you want one article on male homosexual initiation to get the ball rolling on gender issues, this is for you)

“Once a knight is quite enough,” Edmund Leach (a nice informal piece on how ritual works)

“ “Science and Race”:http://personal.uncc.edu/jmarks/pubs/race.pdf ” Jonathan Marks (good potted version of the anthropological critique of race)

“Abominations of Leviticus,” by Mary Douglas (classic paper on taboo and pollution)

What would you put on your list? Please note: we already know about the Nacirema, Shakespeare in the Bush, and Balinese Cockfights.

Alternative Economies

Many moons ago, I asked for help with a course I was putting together on Alternative Economies and many SM readers and contributors responded with terrific suggestions. I promised I’d post the syllabus shortly thereafter, but instead it lumped along, half-written, for months. Well, the semester began a few weeks ago, at which point I was obviously done with writing the syllabus, but then I had to learn how to post documents (thanks Kerim and Rex!), and then I had to, ahem, put theory and practice together in re: posting documents. Anyway… “here”:/wp-content/image-upload/AltEcon.doc it is at long last.

Special thanks to Rex for mentioning the Sunstein review of Freakonomics (and for those of you worried about my students’ tender sensibilities, my teaching persona is rather different from my blogter-ego: I don’t have a princessy moniker, for one thing, and I don’t rip apart assigned material, for another) and to Timothy Burke for recommending Congo/Paris which became a suggested text. The Keith Hart was already on my syllabus before Rex mentioned it here, but anything else you see on here that came up in the discussion (or that might have been on syllabi SMers shared with me) is almost certainly courtesy of the Savage Minds reading and writing public. Many thanks.

As a bonus for interested folks, I also append “here”:/wp-content/image-upload/Anthr230toSM.doc the syllabus for the Anthro of Science, Technology, and the Environment mega-course I’m leading at the same time. Happy winter semester, everybody.

An old warhorse revisited

Today and tomorrow, I’m taking part in a workshop which aims to get the basic masonwork and scaffolding in place for a new book about culture. Don’t we have too many of those books already? Yes. Well then, do we need another one? Afraid so.

My colleague Øivind Fuglerud, who has written – among other things – Life on the Outside, a study of Somali refugees and long-distance nationalism, took the initiative for the book some time ago, invited an assortment of social scientists he trusted and respected, and wrote a fairly comprehensive outline. More recently, having changed jobs (he no longer directs research on minority issues), he generously invited me to co-edit the book with him.

Specifically, the book is going to deal critically with the uses of the culture term in the debate (academic and non-academic) about refugees and immigrants in Norway. Virtually every West European country has its debates about immigration and minorities, and they sometimes ricochet between countries. A topic raised in France may turn up in Sweden a month or two later, resurfacing in Germany after half a year. In recent years, the public attention in many countries has typically focused on hijabs, enforced marriages, honour killings, low educational achievements among certain immigrant groups and female circumcision. Not exactly uplifting.

Academic research on immigrants in Europe can, broadly, be divided into three phases. In the 1970s and 1980s, the emphasis was largely sociological, focusing on the labour market, discrimination and the quest for equality. From the late 1980s to around 2000, anthropological perspectives dominated, and there was an enormous interest in cultural dimensions. In the last few years, there has been more open disagreement among researchers than before; for example, researchers unsympathetic to immigration have become outspoken and visible.

What we want to say in the book, which will have around a dozen contributors, is that the culture concept has to be retained in the academic vocabulary. Yes, it is being exploited strategically for ideological or political ends, it is fuzzy, it has dubious origins in nationalism and relativism (as well as having underpinned oppressive power structures like the apartheid regime in South Africa), and it never ceases to produce misleading and dangerous essentialisms.

Yet experience tells us that we live in slightly different worlds and that these worlds sometimes vary along the lines of language, ethnic identity or religion – and that cultural differences can be identified quite easily within a these groups as well. Anthropologists have said much about this, in Norway liike elsewhere. We have also pointed out that culture does not explain class diifferences, and that social problems usually do not have cultural causes. We have spoken about hybridity and creolisation, stressed the cultural discontinuities within the majority (fundamentalist Christians are, in their way, just as exotic as conservative Muslims), and described cultural changes within immigrant groups. (Some Norwegian Pakistanis are so Norwegianised that you have to see them in Pakistan to understand it. In Norway, only their differences are generally seen.) There have been lively controversies over cultural rights, mother-tongue training in schools, the role of religion in Norwegian schools and many other issues.

This has created widespread confusion. As Øivind pointed out at the workshop earlier today, college students no longer have a clue as to what to make of the term culture. It appears to be everything and its opposite. A clarifying book is needed. But how?

I think we should try to be faithful to that old ethnographic virtue of crawling on all fours, our noses touching the ground. (The sociologists, psychologist and geographer in the team may not agree, I haven’t asked them yet.) But one needs to stay close to the cases in order to discover that one cannot generalise about cultural differences between particular groups, or about the role of culture in general as a descriptive or explanatory category.

The Parisian riots provide a good case. Some commentators have tried to link the riots to religious revitalisation and militant Islamism in the Arab-speaking world. Yet, others – including the anthropologist André Iteanu, who has done research in these areas for years – point out that the riots have social causes, not cultural ones: The people living in these parts of Paris have no metro, few buses, hardly any libraries – and the majority have no work. Deprived and poor people have rioted in Paris several times before. It has nothing to do with their being Muslim and everything to do with their being socially excluded. Conclusion: Leave culture out of this matter.

Another case, less familiar to most of the readers and less easy to disentangle, is the murder of Fadime Sahindal in Uppsala, Sweden a few years back. Fadime, the daughter of a Kurdish immigrant, was killed by her father, who saw her insistence to live ‘like any other Swede’ as intolerable and unbearable for the family’s honour. In the Swedish public sphere, it had by now been noticed that the people who invoked cultural explanations tended to be right-wing and bigoted. Thus, the official view, voiced by opinion leaders in Swedish society, was that Fadime was the victim of patriarchy and a deranged man.

After a while, the Uppsala anthropologist Mikael Kurkiala wrote an article where he argued that culture obviously had something to do with this: Although ‘Kurdish culture’ did not in any way determine the actions of Fadime’s father, his Kurdish universe offered cultural scripts, one of which consisted in killing a daughter to restore honour. Unaccustomed to the brutality of public controversy, Kurkiala was taken somewhat aback when respected liberal Swedes literally pounced on him, claiming him as a useful idiot for the extreme right wing. Kurkiala’s conclusion, which has recently been developed in a beautifully written book in Swedish, where he discusses ways of handling difference (he draws extensively on his fieldwork among Lakota here), was that if it is impossible even to mention cultural factors as dimensions of society and as ‘models of and models for’, then we have relinquished any attempt to understand our world. Conclusion: Bring culture back in.

So what is my position? I have considerable sympathy with some of the texts from the last couple of decades that have tried to exorcise the evil spirit of culture from anthropology. The have forced us to reach for higher levels of precision. Yet in spite of all the obvious objections and a few less obvious ones, we can’t do without it. To me, the proposition to use culture as a verb (Brian Street) makes sense. It varies within any group and has no clear boundaries, it is relational, it behaves oddly in an era of transnational communication, and it is more of a fluid than a solid. But at the end of the day, Fadime’s father killed his daughter in a world that was originally created in Kurdistan, not in Sweden. Keeping close to the cases is our only hope if the goal is to prevent further confusion. Maybe even some good writing can come out of it.

The New Humanities Reader

I am always on the lookout for ways to become a better teacher, and in my undergraduate teaching so far I’ve been very focused on developing courses in which in-class discussion and expository writing skills can be linked together through syllabi which encourage students to see learning as a the process of entering into a discussion with authors they encounter and the scholarly tradition out of which those authors emerge (note to potential employers: I am also deeply committed to publication and research. Plus I also love committee work and professional service. Much more than those pesky other applicants).

My background to this comes from “The University of Chicago Writing Center”:http://writing-program.uchicago.edu/index.htm. Now that I am located in Honolulu, though, I keep searching for other inspiration as I continue to work on my classroom teaching. I recently stumbled across “the web site for The New Humanities Reader”:http://www.newhum.com/ and I must say I am really blown away by their approach. I didn’t even know there were new humanities and here they’ve already got a reader! If I was ever teaching a composition class — rather than teaching an intro anthro class with a composition component — I would seriously adopt this as my textbook. I mean this is the first time I’ve ever been tempted to adopt any textbook. In fact I am tempted to see whether I can’t make it fit into my anthro course. The authors, bless their souls, have included lots of great content from their program on the website, including a set of links to authors for their students to explore. But what I find most impressive is the “teacher’s manual”:http://www.newhum.com/2e/for_teachers/resource_manual/index.html. This material is fantastic, and I certainly plan to use it more in my teaching.

Coming as I did from a liberal arts background, I have a strong sense of how a ‘discussion’ or ‘seminar’ style class ought to be run, but of course no idea of how my students managed to implant this ideal in me. From what I’ve seen so far, the New Humanities Reader looks like a great way to explicitly explain how ideals like ‘socratic dialogue’ or ‘problem-based discussion’ can actually be achieved in class.

Intelligent Design Syllabus

With new developments in the Pennsylvania Intelligent Design trial I thought SM readers might want to rise above the hue and cry of contemporary debate to a more lofty, philosophical plane. Martin Roth, a philosophy professor at Knox College, has recently “taught a course on Intelligent Design”:http://www.knox.edu/x11236.xml which is remarkably well-balanced and thorough. Of course I may be biased because I went to high school with Martin, but I think this syllabus will be of interest to any academic who is interested in the Intelligent Design debate. Savage Minds has “the syllabus available for free download”:/wp-content/image-upload/RothIntelligentDesignSyllabus.doc. Check it out.

Red Book Bashing

A while ago, Rex posted on Human Events’ list of the “most dangerous books of the 19th & 20th century”. While ideologically frightening, we can be thankful that Human Events doesn’t (yet?) have any sort of enforcement power behind their list-making.

Or do they? A student in Massachusetts was visited by Homeland Security officers after requesting a translation of Chairman Mao’s <a href=http://art-bin.com/art/omaotoc.html”>Little Red Book (#3 on Human Events’ list) through interlibrary loan. The student, who was taking a class on fascism and totalitarianism, requested the book as source material for a term paper on Communism; after filling out the form, he was visited at his parent’s home by two DHS agents, who told him the book was on a “watch list”. The content of their visit is, so far, unreported — but whatever was said, the fact of the visit itself is intimidating enough, and the effect on a developing student’s willingness to grapple with complex issues clear enough to imagine.

Just as worrying, though, is the “chilling effect” this visit is already having. Continue reading →

Awesome London Consortium Courses

I was poking around the internet today looking for a course on underground things that I might reccomend to Anru. After some truly inspired Googling I finally managed to find the school I was looking for: the “London Consortium”:http://www.londonconsortium.com/. Like the “European Graduate School”:http://www.egs.edu/ it appears to be a theory-heavey interdisciplinary MA-granting sort of thingamajig. However, while EGS has always seemed a little too outre to me I must say that I am very impressed with the London Consortium’s program, which seem both interdisciplinary and open-ended, but also rigorous and imaginative (here’s a link on “the consortium’s early years”:http://www.npc.org.uk/page/862441200.)

I am particularly impressed by “their classes”:http://www.londonconsortium.com/courses/coursesmres.htm — I want to take them all! Lest anyone think my long quotations of Robert Lowie and Weber in this blog indicate a sort of stiff-necked obsession with orthodoxy — what Ozma calls the “minor works of Rodney Needhan” approach to scholarship — rest assured I like interdisciplinarity as much as the next person, as long as it is done well. And done well the courses are too — they have a “PDF brochure”:http://www.londonconsortium.com/7071Bro.pdf with more course listings (including readings and a rough schedule) and there is additional information and readings in short pieces in Critical Quarterly 42(2) — a “description”:http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/templates/jsp/_synergy/images/Summary_btn.gif of the logic behind the classes and “a list”:http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1467-8705.00291 (both require authentication — sorry).

The two most interesting courses I found were both by Paul Hirst before his “untimely passing”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,3604,981060,00.html and just look awesome. The one on “what lies beneath the ground” covers monsters undeground (i.e. “the minotaur and crocs in the New York sewer”), “Caverns, Graves, and Wells”, mines, sewers, air raid shelters, and of course The Underground itself. Texts to be read include Murakami’s Hard Boiled Wonderland, Bachelard’s Poetics of Space, and the sixth book of the Aeneid. Hirst’s other seminar — entitled “Shit and Civilization: Our Ambivalent Relationship to Ordure in the City, Culture, and the Psyche” starts with favelas, moves through Mary Douglas, and ends with a week on “shit and art.” Awesome.

Even though Hirst is not around the other classes that they are teaching all seem equally good. I encourage you to check out the catalog.

A Notes and Queries of MMOGs?

Back in the day young anthropologistswent off to the field packing a copy of the Notes and Queries in Anthropology — a checklist of topics About Their People that they had to be sure to cover. The idea was that there were people back in the metropole were creating generalizing theories of society and needed comparative data to do it. You might be studying ritual and myth amongst the Pukapukaese, but someone out there was trying to plot the distribution of outrigger canoes, and they wanted to make sure you added your two bits. Thus the notes and queries included standard questions to ask, and diagrams of bows and so forth with the English names for bits of the bow so that you could describe in English what people were telling you Pukapukian. I can testify that having the Notes and Queries in the field is useful — in a fit of retropique I took one with me to the field, and it did in fact help me keep my eyes open in ways I wouldn’t have otherwise: how people carried babies, how often crops came up and so forth — the kind of thing I might otherwise have not thought about.

Today the Notes and Queries is out of print, but would like to keep it’s tradition alive in another modality — I want to create a Notes and Queries for virtual worlds, and I want to ask you what you think ought to be in it?

Like the Oxford dons who gathered their ethnographic data through correspondence with railroad clerks and bank tellers living in outstations in rural Australia, anthropology professors today who are interested in massively multiplayer video games have a pool of indigenous experts to draw on: their students. Profs all over the place have encountered students whose reflective awareness of the game’s they’ve mastered means that they have in some sense become avocational anthropologists themselves. In my “anthropology of virtual worlds class”:http://alex.golub.name/res/HPUAnthro3830Fall2005.pdf this semester my students will be producing a series of ethnographic papers about the virtual worlds that they have been studying, and several of them are interested in publishing them on the web. What, then, are the categories and comparisons that you think they should highlight in their paper?

Some might object that when ‘the field’ is only a click away, profs are not completely out of the loop. While I don’t have 7 level 60s on three different WOW servers, I play often enough that I understand the differences in the economy and sociology of, say, Guild Wars and Diablo II that is wrought by their differing use of instancing. And in fact my familiarity is part of the problem — so many of the researchers who study virtual worlds sort of ‘already know’ about how these worlds are structured that we often end up assuming that ‘merely’ descriptive pieces are uninteresting. We assume that we already know all about these games because we play them all the time. But what about people who — like the typical anthropological audience — want to know all about these places, but aren’t ever going to end up going there themselves? And surely sometimes we as natives of these spaces need someone to write down what is going on in them — that is why we have historians and journalists and so forth in real life.

So: We need to begin developing a corpus of richly ehtnographic writing about virtual worlds, and we need to structure it in such a way that we can compare the cases with each other. What are the categories we are interest in? What form should they take? What sorts of notes and queries should be made? What is on your radar? The way the architecture of the game mandates cooperation? The way the virtual worlds are becoming ‘third places’ for students? Let me know what you would want out of a comparative study.

Who were you reading now?

I wish I were posting more on this blog, and perhaps my cobloggers feel the same—or maybe my silence is cause for the same celebration it often is amongst my students. In any case, apologies if my posts are missed, and Hello, My Name Is Chris, if you are wondering who the hell I am.

I felt sufficiently moved to withdraw from my Fall Death March of Classes, Conferences and Co-Parenting to add something to Rex’s post about influences. As a member of the Marcus/Fischer/Clifford Cabal (Yes, TINC)—Santa Cruz Undergrad, MIT Grad, Rice Ass’t Prof—I am intimately familiar with the so-called impact of the “writing culture” critiques of the 1980s. As a student of Science Studies, I am also aware of its current cache (in at least a tangible self-interested sense, since it is why I was hired, and I would add Latour’s Science in Action and Haraway’s Cyborgs, Simians, and Women, to the good years of 86-88). However, I admit to being nonplussed — or perhaps simply unmoved—by any sense that the disicipline has no center, or that some things are influential for some people and some aren’t. I never intended to be an anthropologist; indeed—and you heard it here first—I have never taken an anthropology course (!) and the fact that I am granted fellow traveller status here, or at least landed immigrant status, is what makes anthropology the magical and methodologically pluralist blob-disicpline that it is. I’m not sure whether Marcus, Fischer and Clifford had anything to do with that, as one can find all manner of interlopers in anthropology across its history– but I sincerely hope it remains so.

Which is to say, I would much rather be at play in the open fields of anthropology, than sucking it up at the fenced-in margins of economics or sociology, both of which have strong core theoretical commitments that determine little things like who gets which plum jobs and book contracts. I love that I can teach, research and talk about everything from potlatch to nanotechnology with my colleagues, and I can’t imagine any other discipline that would yield equally interesting and in-depth thoughts across this spectrum (sometimes even with the same person).

That being said, here are some things I will have been reading in 2005, when I get to it: Collier and Ong’s volume of Global Assemblages, Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel’s mega-exhibit Making Things Public: Atmosphere’s of Democracy (oh, and Rex, if you hated WHNBM, you will truly despise Latour’s new book, Re-Assembling the Social), Jenny Reardon’ Race to the Finish, lots of truly interesting dissertations by Rice graduates, including one on corruption in poland by Michael Powell, and one on the Inter-American Development Bank’s anti-violence programs by Angela Rivas; an undergraduate thesis on a telemedicine initiative in Cambodia (Cynthia Browne); Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition (which is one of the only ways I can clarify the meanings of public/private/social to my students); Foucault’s lectures on La Naissance de la Biopolitique (especially for his references to Hayek); Dewey’s The Public and its Problems; Bill Maurer’s Mutual Life Limited on Islamic Banking and Alternative currencies; Grace Young’s Breath of a Wok (Popular Anthropology Meets Cookbook!); Deleuze and Guattari’s What is Philosophy? (argh, one of the death march conferences is on D&G); Brian Cantwell Smith’s On the Origin of Objects (a seriously heavy-duty attempt to rethink the practice and metaphysics of computer science); Anna Tsing’s Friction; Stefan Helmreich’s manuscript for a soon-to-be-published book about marine biologists called Alien Ocean; and Clifford Geertz’s “Notes on a Balinese Cockfight” (and yes, it is principally about evocation — but you know what, nothing works magic on naive undergrads like the balinese cockfight… I think maybe it’s principle reason for being is to convert people to anthropology — god knows we could use a few more articles like that one — alleluah).

Social Anthropology Playlist

Michael Herzfeld, at Harvard University, has put his syllabus for Introduction to Social Anthropology online as an H2O Playlist.

What is an H2O playlist? Here is how H2O (a project of the Berkman Center) describes it:

H2O playlists are more than just a cool, sleek technology — they represent a new way of thinking about education online. An H2O Playlist is a series of links to books, articles, and other materials that collectively explore an idea or set the stage for a course, discussion, or current event.

H2O Playlists make it easy to:

  • transform traditional syllabi into interactive, global learning tools
  • share the reading lists of world-renowned scholars, organizations, and cultural leaders
  • let interested people subscribe to playlist updates and stay current on their fields
  • promote an exchange of ideas and expertise among professors, students, and researchers
  • communicate and aggregate knowledge — online and offline.

So, go on … check out existing playlists or create your own. You can also read our philosophy behind building this technology.

Sort of like a wiki or CiteULike, but somehow different. I’ll have to play with it some more before figuring out if it is truly “not suck,” but if it is easier for people to use than CiteULike and wikis it could be a good thing.

Found via Phil Bradley’s amazing “I want to …” list, which I discovered via Ishbaddidle.

UPDATE: Very strange, there doesn’t seem to be any interface to import/export from standard bibliographic formats. So, thumbs down for now. But it is still in beta so hopefully this is on their list of things to add before the final release.

Teaching Methodology

I have to admit, despite having studied Anthropology since I was a teenager (my High School offered anthropology), I never really had much in the way of methodology training. And, except for people in applied anthropology programs, I’m afraid that this is the norm rather than the exception. Even my graduate seminar on methodology ended up being a largely theoretical discussion. Perhaps that’s not a bad thing, but lately I’ve noticed that some of the jobs I’d like to apply for expect you to be able to teach a methods course. I thought of this as a good challenge and have been reading up on methodology and looking at examples of other syllabi (see here, here, here, and here) in order to develop my own course.

I often require students to engage in hands-on ethnographic work in my courses. In the visual anthropology course I taught at Haverford last term, students were expected to produce a visual ethnography. But a general methods course presents its own problems. Many of the books I’ve read on the matter just don’t seem to suit themselves to the structure of such a course. For instance, Habermas’ Knowledge and Human Interests would require a course of its own to teach. I had high hopes for Flyvberg, but was ultimately disappointed. Etc. I just can’t seem to find the books or articles that I’d really like to teach. (Perhaps I’ll eventually have to write one of my own…)

My first efforts are up on my wiki here. Please take a look and either offer feedback here, or edit the wiki directly. I’m not very attached to what I’ve done so far. I’ve put a lot of work into it, but it often takes me years and several times teaching a course before I’m happy with a syllabus. Because this is a first effort, I know it will need work. Please focus on the course outline (i.e. the reading list), I’m fairly happy with the general structure of the course.

Thanks for your help!

Adjuncting like it’s 1955

I recently finished Michael Barber’s scrupulously researched biography of Alfred Schutz, “The Participating Citizen”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0791461416/qid=1130017375/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_1/002-1728795-4172847?v=glance&s=books&n=507846. One of my favorite parts of the books involves Maurice Natanson’s correspondence with Schutz as he attempts to find a job shortly after finishing his dissertation. In the course of a two-year job search Natanson applied for five hundred positions before landing a position at the University of Houston in 1952. Natanson’s anecdotes of teaching ministers in training in Texas after years of immersion in emigre German philosophy in lower Manhattan demonstrates that the ‘liberal academy’ and ‘conservative Christian values’ have been in conflict for more than just the past couple of years:

I mentioned something in one of my classes about the _problem_ of immortality and one of the students said, “Do you mean the _fact_ of immortality?” When I suggested that philosophy does not begin by presupposing the dogmas of religion, a sudden chill spread over the class and people drew back as if I were going to lure them into a life of dishonor.

Natanson also notes that “When the head of the philosophy department mentioned the existence of “higher criticism”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher_Criticism of the Bible, a minister in his class hurled his briefcase at the teacher, rushed to his desk, and screamed ‘You son of a bitch, I’m going to stomp you through the floor.'” and that when he mentioned Darwin in one of his classes “one student became hysterical and screamed again and again, ‘Prove the earth is that old! Prove it! Go ahead and prove it!'”.

I have never had experiences like this in my classes before, but Natanson’s reflection on the financial position of the adjunct is one with which I am all too familiar:

I have entered at long last a euphoric state: I no longer have any financial worries! My situation is by now so clearly disastrous that bills and financial demands make no impression on me at all. In fact, I have entered what might be termed the “aesthetic” of finance: my interest in bills and monetary letters is with respect to the quality of prining, the type of paper, the various systems of book-keeping, the different creditors used, etc. I am like the financier who has been wiped out on the market and then continues to watch the ticker tape machine, losti n fascination of the intricate machinery that announces disaster. As both Father Divine and William Saroyan used to say: “Peace, it’s wonderful.”