Teaching Anthropology

This course worked well in many ways. I used the Thursday lecture slot to do unlectures - getting students to practice things more actively, from kinship charts, to reading and discussing a short article, to learning how to talk to Star Trek aliens.

Social movements are a part of the curriculum of Anthropology and Sociology in higher education institutions in India. Traditionally, these courses are taught via snippets of social movements accompanied by theoretical texts and there is little scope for individual teachers to change course content. While these texts are valuable, I found students struggled to make initial engagement with many of the prescribed texts and often became tense or anxious about the material. Students viewed social movements with antipathy and as a hindrance to stability, influenced by the political narratives and media representation of social movements as a disruption to solidarity. They often struggled to connect to the themes and issues of the Social Movement course, positioned within their own prisms of religion, caste, class, gender, and political sympathies. In this article, I vindicate the use of Animal Farm by George Orwell as a heuristic tool, taught alongside standard texts, to help students gr...

Ορφανίδης, Γ. (2021). Στο: Ε. Κανταρτζή, Γ. Παπαδημητρίου, Χ. Κωσταρής (Επιμ.). Πρακτικά 5ου Πανελλήνιου Συνεδρίου «Εκπαίδευση στον 21ο αιώνα: Ανάπτυξη της κριτικής σκέψης, της δημιουργικότητας και της καινοτομίας» (Τόμος Δ΄) (Αθήνα, 25-27 Σεπτεμβρίου 2020). Αθήνα: ΕΚΕΔΙΣΥ - Υπουργείο Παιδείας και Θρησκευμάτων, 131-136.

http://ekedisyconference.weebly.com.

Digital Cultural Anthropology: An Innovative Educational Practice for Secondary Education.

Course syllabus for a second-year course in psychological anthropology with a general student base (many psychology majors, but also a wide variety). Draws on my own interest in phenomenology, neuroanthropology, anthropology of the senses, and skill acquisition.

What is ethnography and how does one write it? In this seminar, we will focus on ethnographic writing in anthropology as both an historical and contemporary practice. What makes a piece of writing ethnographic? Is it the content, the style, the genre, and/or something else altogether? Together we will explore the anthropological world of ethnographic writing through reading good writing, reading about writing, and also writing ourselves. This seminar, then, will also be a writing workshop in which students draw on their own ethnographic research and experiences to develop their own writing style and voice. Learning how to write involves reading and giving feedback to others on their writing. Writing is something that even when we do it solo is always done in community. This seminar will prepare you to write ethnographically as well as gain a sense of the development of ethnographic writing over the last century. What consistencies exist alongside important changes over the years? We write in the world rather than removed from it, and writing ethnographically, like the research which precedes it, is always in response to the political-historical conditions of the world, specific communities, and the very real people whose stories we have the responsibility and honor of telling. Welcome.

Ethnography is becoming an increasingly popular research methodology used across a number of disciplines. Typically, teaching students how to write an ethnography, much less how to undertake “fieldwork” (or the ethnographic research upon which ethnographies are based), is reserved for senioror MA-level research methods courses. This article examines the pedagogical strategy of engaging first-year students in ethnographic field methods and the art of ethnographic writing and suggests how the use of a short ethnographic exercise (the fifty minute mini-ethnography) can enable students who are at the beginning of their undergraduate degrees to better understand the relationships between theory and empirical data.

This article examines the potential and limitations of Megan Boler's ‘pedagogy of discomfort’ in a post-apartheid yet heavily racialised South Africa. Taking an ‘ethnographic sensibility’ to anthropological teaching, this paper sketches the social and historical context of discomfort produced by everyday classroom practices at a historically privileged university. This paper argues that new patterns of thought, if achieved at all in the course of learning through ‘discomfort’, are deeply embedded within uneasy social relationships.

In this article, I offer an autobiographical account of teaching musical ethnography in an ethnomusicology classroom. My reflections derive from a variety of modules that are offered as part of undergraduate music programmes and that combine an ethnomusicology fieldwork component with a theoretical introduction to the cultural study of music and, in many cases, with hands-on musical performance. I see the classroom as an ethnographic field and explore its pedagogical potential for affective encounters, for engendering new cultural understandings and an ‘openness to different ways of being, knowing and doing’ (Spencer and Mills 2011). Responding to Wong’s call for education as cultural work (Wong 1998), I am especially interested in a critical pedagogy of ethnography that affords opportunities for transformative learning (Mezirow 1997, McIlwairth 2016) for students and teachers alike.

For many public institutions, ‘doing diversity’ exists as a performative act; a dance choreographed through acts of policy espousing a laudable song based on equality. The reality is somewhat different when it comes to implementation, as lofty ambitions give way to impermanent initiatives that are both strategically and tonally off-key. Today, many universities across the UK express their egalitarian aims based on progressive and sometimes decolonising theories of change, but all fail to deliver the pragmatic praxis demanded by their staff, students and collaborative research partners. This should not be so, especially for British anthropology departments which have sufficient authority to implement the structural changes required to make themselves representative of the worlds they study. Looking at this matter from the perspective of ‘race’, this paper calls for a pedagogical rebalancing of our discipline. It suggests a revaluation of the utility of meritocratic systems of evaluat...

Course Rationale The question of what it means to be human has been at the core of anthropology for over two centuries, and it remains as pressing now as it ever was. This course introduces students to some classic attempts at addressing this question with specific reference to the nature of personhood and social life. By engaging with the writings of Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and De Beauvoir among other great thinkers of the modern age, students will develop deeper knowledge of the major theories guiding anthropological research. We will pay close attention to how arguments are constructed in these texts and focus on the methodologies that these pioneers of social thought developed in their inquiries.

Here we open up the special issue with an introduction to the topic of decolonizing anthropology through the consideration of the emotionality of race, racism, and whiteness within the classroom and the discipline. Focusing on the European Classroom as a construct, we reflect on what the implications of decolonizing anthropology are for teaching the discipline, particularly in regard to the positionality of “European Others” (El Tayeb, 2011) as students and educators. While demands for structural changes in the discipline and the restructuring of canons and curriculums have been widely proposed, the role of affect and emotions in relation to colonialism, race, and whiteness in the decolonizing process have been addressed only marginally. We offer a contribution to the conversation through the focus on emotions, taking these as a form of knowledge and political action. Bringing together literatures on postcolonial studies, decolonial theory with critiques of anthropology, we suggest ...

This paper argues that we should embrace the potential to engage by intentionally exploring our discipline’s controversies, as controversies bring anthropology to life in a way that humanises those anthropologists we study. If we simply provide students with the stark “for” and “against” arguments in controversies we allow our students to engage with these issues critically, exploring the moral complexities themselves in essays, seminars and other forms. As such, it offers the perfect opportunity to facilitate student “unlearning,” taking them away
from expectations of being spoon-fed the knowledge they need to pass exams and instead providing the tools necessary to take their own stance on literatures and ideas. Being given the raw “for” and “against” arguments regarding a controversy forces them to critically engage with the moral and practical complexities that fieldwork and writing pose for ethnographers. While doing this, controversies also allow us to use surrounding debates as platforms from which we can discuss the bigger ideas entwined in the specificities involved in controversies. Once students are engaged, we can then deal with the full complexity of events without trivialising them. As such, controversies open doors to wider subject areas: to theories, to the history of our discipline, and the role of institutions such as the AAA and ASA. In an era when anthropologists routinely avoid polemic (Reyna 2001), this paper argues we ought to unlearn this behaviour in the classroom and lecture theatre, and embrace the ability
to play devil’s advocate in order to force our students to think for themselves.

This article deals with the teaching of medical anthropology and research methodology under the newly reintroduced semester system at Tribhuvan University, Kathmandu, Nepal. It mainly consists of my experience of teaching anthropology under the semester-based education system in its Central Department of Anthropology for postgraduate anthropology students. In addition, it comprises of information acquired from students and colleagues from the Department and other colleges about the very subject. This paper does not provide any guideline for a better course of action for teaching anthropology. Instead, this paper emphasizes the imperativeness of the semester system that facilitates employing student-centred and interactive teaching and encourages elevating their potential through the effective teaching-learning mechanism. It portrays how the typical pedagogical approaches adopted under the semester system can contribute crucially to facilitate students to enhance their skills in crit...

Transformative ethnography is a method of learning to cross cultures through an embodied, experiential, and reflective practice. I have developed this method over fifteen years of anthropological fieldwork and reflection. This methodology requires the practitioner to embody a foreign practice, generally through art, music, or a specialized skill or technique. She moves through four phases that overlap and intertwine as she goes about the ethnographic process: sensorial observation, embodying practice, emptying and reflecting, and embodying representation. The purpose of Transformative Ethnography is to become explicitly aware of the process of loosening ones own, and adopting to another cultural way of thinking and acting. The overarching research question to this methodology asks How can we re-make ourselves, consciously, in order to fit new (multi-) cultural realities? It is controversial in that it incorporates mindfulness training - something not yet broadly accepted in our disc...

Course Description Through a survey of writings in anthropology, philosophy and social theory this course poses a range of questions concerning self, subjectivity and personhood. For instance, how are persons distinguished from non-persons? Is the person unified, divided, integrated, partible, fractured? What are the possibilities of personhood and self-definition within different social formations and how are these shaped by different regimes of knowledge? What does it mean to talk about " making up " people? Is the self a retrospectively constructed fiction or a real phenomenological experience? In what sense are individuals self-reflective, free agents and sovereign individuals? What kind of person/self/individual is presupposed in acts such as promising, praying or pledging? Is the self " performed " and, if so, what moral and ethical implications follow from this? By what techniques, practices, methods does an individual constitute itself as a subject? The course begins with an overview of some influential accounts of personhood (e.g. Mauss, Geertz), and asks whether and how these approaches might resonate with more recent approaches to "making up people" (Hacking, Rose). We will also consider some of the debates about personhood that emerged through ethnographic description of Melanesia and South Asia. The second half of the course focuses on self and self(hood). Whereas the literature on " person " (hood) focuses attention on the larger social, institutional and cultural matrix in which individuals are positioned, the literature on " self " (hood) foregrounds the methods (practices etc.) by which the individual constitutes itself within that matrix. Within this, latter, broad domain we will distinguish two approaches, the " semiotic " and the " disciplinary ". The former, exemplified most clearly in the work of Erving Goffman but expounded also in the writings of many anthropologists, treats the self as a sign and a ceremonial or ritual object that emerges within contexts of social interaction. The latter, as developed by Michel Foucault, emphasizes ethical self-reflection as well as the practices and techniques through which an individual constitutes itself as a subject. Evaluation Evaluation will be based on two short papers (7-12 pages, double spaced) and one longer, final paper (25 pages, double spaced maximum). In addition each student will present (solely or with others depending on the number of enrolled students) on two of the readings marked with " + ". These presentations will be short (5-10 minutes) and will consist of a distilled summary/précis of the assigned paper along with some discussion of its relation to the themes of the class (in this you can also provide some evaluative commentary).

Course Description Socio-cultural and linguistic anthropology are two of the four major sub-disciplines of American anthropology, which also includes biological anthropology and archeology. The central claims made by these two subdisciplines is that both language and culture play at least as powerful a determining role in peoples' lives as biology. Linguistic anthropologists argue that language lies at the root of culture insofar as culture must always be conveyed – through words, symbols, beliefs, and ideas. All of these depend on language because they are transmitted across generations and within and across social groups. Socio-cultural anthropology explores how these words, symbols, beliefs, and ideas – as well as embodied practices, emotions, and so on – are culturally constituted rather than natural. They are not universally shared by all humans but instead depend on the particularities of time and place. If linguistic anthropology shows that language make us human and that human language differs significantly from other forms of animal communication, socio-cultural anthropology shows that human categories including kinship, gender, the body, race, and love, are not primarily determined by genes, pigmentation, or physiological reflexes. Rather, they are culturally constituted because they mean different things to different people and because people across the world do very different things with and to them. The linguistic anthropological section of the class will ask what role transmission, reference, creativity, and symbolism play in human language. The socio-cultural anthropological section pays special attention to how cultural (including class, racial, gender, and age) differences operate in the world and asks how an anthropological understanding of such differences helps us to understand and help solve contemporary global problems. This class combines the subfields of linguistic and socio-cultural anthropology and invites students to critically interrogate who we are and what we do. Course objectives • The course introduces ideas about " culture " and " language " : what they are and what role they plays in shaping human lives; • Explores some basic methods and modes of analysis characteristic of socio-cultural and linguistic anthropology; • Raises awareness of ethnocentricity and cultural relativism; • Uses anthropological concepts and fine-grained ethnographic examples to understand contemporary global problems.

Through the comparative study of different cultures, anthropology explores the most fundamental questions about what it means to be human. Drawing upon eHRAF World Cultures and eHRAF Archaeology, this introductory course encourages students to explore cultural similarities and differences to better understand how culture shapes who we are: our societies, our shared meanings, and our everyday lives. Beginning with unpacking the concept of culture in anthropology, each week covers a different anthropological theme, including love, ritual performance, gender, language, food, and kinship. Evaluating cultural universals will allow students to contemplate the rich diversity of the human experience. With remote learning in mind, wholly online sources on timely topics are interwoven with classic ethnographic accounts to inspire lively class discussions. The cross-cultural and database research skills developed throughout the course provide a solid framework for understanding and analyzing anthropological concerns both within and beyond the social sciences.

Ethnography is becoming an increasingly popular research methodology used across a number of disciplines. Typically, teaching students how to write an ethnography, much less how to undertake "fieldwork" (or the ethnographic research upon which ethnogra-phies are based), is reserved for senior-or MA-level research methods courses. This article examines the pedagogical strategy of engaging first-year students in ethnographic field methods and the art of ethnographic writing and suggests how the use of a short eth-nographic exercise (the fifty minute mini-ethnography) can enable students who are at the beginning of their undergraduate degrees to better understand the relationships between theory and empirical data. Long considered the hallmark of social or cultural anthropology, ethnography is becoming an increasingly popular research methodology across a number of disciplines, including not only Arts and Humanities subjects such as sociology or gender studies but also education, the medical sciences and business studies. Undergraduate degrees in anthropology usually require students to read and critique a fair number of ethnographies, often starting in their introductory courses. Students do not, however, tend to go "out into the field" and produce their own ethnographies until they reach at least the senior year of their undergraduate studies, and in some cases, not until they begin their MAs. This article examines the outcomes of a different approach; namely, engaging first-year students in ethnographic field methods and the art of ethnographic writing. In 2010, I began a three-year stint of teaching a broad-ranging introduction to social and cultural anthropology. (I work at a large, public university at which all of the tenured instructors in social-cultural anthropology rotate through the introductory course, teaching it for three or four years at a time). With an average class size of 330 students, it is by far our largest social-cultural anthropology class. In the past, this course's assessments have focused on a close reading of a short ethnographic text, a research paper on a predetermined topic, and a final exam. In my first year of teaching this course, I found that while these assessment tools were useful and students walked away with a range of skills relating to how to structure an essay or use the library more effectively, they did not con-1 Corresponding author's email: s.trnka@auckland.ac.nz

Not only does Mayfield's Quick View Guide to the Internet for Students of Anthropology help Internet researchers effectively find the information they want, but it also describes how to evaluate the information's reliability. The guide points the way to basic resources of interest, including directories of anthropology programs, online discussion groups, aids to library research, and Web sites categorized by subdiscipline.

Se presenta la base de datos, conteniendo información recolectada a través de entrevistas estructuradas, de estudiantes a cargo de proyectos de investigación, en la División de Ciencias Sociales, Economicas y Administrativas de la UQROO en Chetumal.  En un ambiente académico formal que gira sobre el profesor, estas investigaciones, a menudo no reconocidos como tal,  adoptan la forma de trabajos parciales y finales de cursos, tesis, monografías, informes de estancias e informes de servicio social, entre otros.

Although teaching anthropology in Turkey is not without its challenges, there are also reasons to be hopeful. To explain these adequately, however, we first need to provide background information. Thus, the article presents a brief history of Turkish anthropological research (Section 2) and teaching (Section 3). Section 4 provides background on the city of Bartın, which is the site of our discussion of challenges facing (and hopes for) the teaching of anthropology in the country. Various pedagogies can contribute to teaching-learning outcomes: project-based, problem-based, authentic, blended, and experiential learning approaches are promising. In Section 5, we discuss the future of anthropology in Turkey. Existing departments are in danger of being shut down and merged with sociology. Tensions-and potential solidarity-between anthropology and sociology are discussed.

What are the differences across cultures, social practices and belief systems? Despite all the differences that we learn about people from other parts of the world, what are the similarities that we all share as human beings? This course introduces students to the basic theoretical and methodological principles of sociocultural anthropology, and uses examples from all over the world to explain themes such as identity, religion, kinship, globalization, hierarchy, violence etc. The aim is to encourage students to be critical when thinking about what seems to be “familiar” in their own society and what seems to be “strange” in others. By familiarizing themselves to the rich and broad anthropological work, students will develop the ability to recognize, understand, respect and engage in cultural differences in the fascinating diverse human world.

This paper discusses how students may be involved in a fieldwork learning process through supervised participating in the fieldwork setting of their supervisor. I focus on the issues associated with introducing undergraduate students to the practicalities of ethnographic fieldwork.

This paper focusses on socio-economic class structures, as they relate to the study and practice of anthropology. More specifically, it discusses the ways that working-class or financially precarious anthropologists (students, researchers and teachers) negotiate tensions found within the British university. It is concerned with the current climate of ‘diversity’ in education, and the role that socio-economic inequity plays in these discussions. This paper seeks to make room for class; it asks what we can learn from giving voice to the insidious silence that plagues it, in a context of neoliberal identity politics (Wrenn, 2014), ensuing ethnicist diversity practices (Brah, 1991), and what I would call ‘cursory diversity’ - what Sara Ahmed refers to as a ‘hopeful performative’ (2010, p.200). It is argued that anthropology as a discipline must start attending to the ways that financial precarity and social class impact the subjects that study, not just the subjects of study, by reflect...

On a far distant moon in the far future technological civilization has reached its final limits. A race of hunter gatherers is facing the onslaught of human technology. Who is there to save them from the ghastly destruction of technological warfare? Why, who else but anthropologists. Well, at least they look and act like anthropologists. Perhaps they should be called na'viologists. for the Na'vi race has gone beyond humans to establish a closer contact with the forces of life. for that reason, the film writers could not use the word "anthropologist," or perhaps, it is too dangerous for Hollywood to recognize the actual moral and scientific stance of anthropologists in the real world.

RESUMEN-Movimientos Irreverentes: elementos de Butoh para la enseñanza e investigación antropológicas-En este artículo se explora cómo algunas herramientas del Butoh y técnicas afines pueden constituirse en dispositivos buenos para sentipensar problemáticas abordadas por la antropología. Se destaca primero cómo la atención a la corporalidad y a la presencia de lxs investigadorxs y las comunidades de aprendizaje cuestiona parámetros logocéntricos de producción y transmisión de conocimiento. Luego, a partir de experiencias en docencia, performance y aprendizaje, se proponen algunos dispositivos-entrenamientos inspirados en el Butoh que pueden desplegarse para profundizar en tópicos relacionados a nociones de persona, agencia, tiempo, memoria, naturalezacultura y poshumanismo, entre otros. Palabras clave: Butoh. Antropología del Cuerpo. Enseñanza e Investigación. Ontologías. Performanceinvestigación. ABSTRACT-Irreverent Movements: Butoh tools for anthropological teaching and research-This article explores how certain tools of Butoh and related techniques can become useful devices to sentipensar (think-feel) problematics addressed by anthropology. It first highlights how attention to corporeality and the presence of researchers and learning communities questions logocentric parameters of knowledge production and transmission. Then, based on experiences in teaching, performance and learning, we propose a few Butoh-inspired training devices that can be deployed to further explore topics related to notions of personhood, agency, time, memory, nature-culture and post-humanism, among others.

Cinema can have great impact on how students understand reality, filter, and process information, and how they respond to teaching in class. Finding a way to use film and critically embed it in our teaching methods, can create a more productive engagement in class and foster a deeper comprehension of social anthropology's methods and theoretical premises on the part of students. Furthermore, exploring the use of feature films in teaching area studies, where cultural essentialism can be an innate problem, may sensitize students' imagination in more creative and evocative ways which serves to challenge stereotypes. This article postulates how films can help students comprehend and compare different historical and cultural nuances of the Black Sea region, by showing how much ethnography is a complex ongoing process not bounded to the spatial metaphor of the field. Introduction:

Course Description Socio-cultural and linguistic anthropology are two of the four major sub-disciplines of American anthropology, which also includes biological anthropology and archeology. The central claim made by these two sub-disciplines is that language and culture play at least as powerful a determining role in peoples' lives as biology. Linguistic anthropologists argue that language lies at the root of culture insofar as culture is shared and thus must always be conveyed through words, symbols, beliefs, and ideas. Language is what allows culture to be transmitted across generations and within and across social groups. Socio-cultural anthropology explores how these words, symbols, beliefs, and ideas – as well as embodied practices, emotions, and so on – are culturally constituted rather than natural. They are not universally shared by all humans but instead depend on the particularities of time and place. If linguistic anthropology shows that language makes us human and that human language differs significantly from other forms of animal communication, socio-cultural anthropology shows that human categories and human ways of living are not determined by genes and are not reducible to individual psychology. Rather, they are socially, culturally and historically constituted. The linguistic anthropological section of the class will ask what role transmission, reference, creativity, and symbolism play in human language. The socio-cultural anthropological section pays special attention to how cultural differences operate in the world and asks how an anthropological understanding of such differences helps us to understand and help solve contemporary global problems. This class combines the subfields of linguistic and socio-cultural anthropology and invites students to critically interrogate who we are and what we do. Course objectives • The course introduces ideas about " culture " and " language " : what they are and what role they plays in shaping human lives; • Explores some basic methods and modes of analysis characteristic of socio-cultural and linguistic anthropology; • Raises awareness of ethnocentricity and cultural relativism; • Uses anthropological concepts and fine-grained ethnographic examples to understand contemporary global problems.

Since the 1980s physiotherapy has shifted concerns towards cultural, economic, philosophical, political and social questions, and more flexible ways of speaking about and practicing physiotherapy.  In response to both global shifts and local demands, the Physiotherapy Division at the University of Cape Town (UCT) approached their Social Anthropology colleagues to teach a broader range of perspectives to their physiotherapy students.  The objective of this research was to explore the changes experienced by UCT physiotherapy students exposed to a cross-disciplinary teaching environment, and discuss the possible role of the course in affecting their experience.  A qualitative research design drew data from multiple sources and was analysed using an interpretive content analysis method.  Using an anthropological model of transformation, the changes experienced by students were categorised into three sub-categories of ‘separation’, ‘transition’ and ‘incorporation’. Emotional and cognitive changes were attributable to the course material. By attending to their emotional discomfort, physiotherapy students not only successfully incorporated anthropological concepts to healthcare but also improved their professional identities and personal self-worth.

In this essay, I describe an incident stemming from a field-based ethnographic exercise I utilize in one of the courses which I have designed and which I regularly teach. In my estimation, the contours of the incident I describe here reveal the institutional and ideological parameters of a paradigm that currently dominates contemporary American campuses. I suggest that my experience points to frictions between that seemingly hegemonic academic paradigm and the core values and practices that the discipline of anthropology endeavours to carry into the new millennium. I conclude that this experience, and the institutional practices and ideologies it reveals, portends a difficult future for an anthropologically moored practice of ethnography-one that seeks to systematically and empathically explore the experiences of diverse others in this world.