If I haven’t seemed like my normally garrulous self lately, it’s because what with teaching 5 classes, editing a book, and writing a dissertation, I’ve been a little low on though-juice. Because one can never have too much to worry about, though, I’ve taken on a new class for the Spring, People and Culture of the World, which is what it sounds like (this is at the community college level, by the way). Since I wasn’t actually told about this until the Spring catalog came out (said my chair, “Oh, didn’t I tell you?”) I’m under a lot of pressure to get book orders in. I’ve got a textbook selected (John Bodley’s Cultural Anthropology: Tribes, States, and the Global System, though I’m also trying to get a review copy of Core Concepts in Cultural Anthropology to use when I teach the class again) but I could use some help selecting a couple of short(-ish?) case studies — 2 or 3 books around 150 pages to supplement the shorter cultural descriptions in Bodley’s book. I’d like one of these to deal with a Muslim culture, especially (though not necessarily) if it deals with gender; then I’m thinking either a foraging people or South Pacific horticultural group, and maybe a minority subculture in a polycultural industrial state. Since I don’t really have time to go through the full process of requesting a dozen or so exam copies to review, waiting for them to arrive, and carefully evaluating them, I’m hoping that the collective wisdom of the Savage Minds collective can point me in the right direction — at least to help me narrow my choices down so I don’t waste time on outdated, unteachable, or poorly written ethnographies.
So how about it — any suggestions? Also, as long as we’re on the topic, what do you think of these kinds of works, you know: those short books clearly intended for introductory-level classes? What other sorts of books do you think might be appropriate for this sort of class? And how do you go about evaluating texts for your classes (if you’re a teacher of some sort, that is)? What are you looking for, and how do you know when you found it?