As I write this, colleges in Taiwan are switching to online learning for the first time since the pandemic started. This is because, for most of the past year, Taiwan was able to contain the pandemic at the border. This past week, however, marks the first time ever that there has been sustained local transmission and it is currently unclear whether or not the government can get things back under control. I actually started teaching online for the first time {+}
By Paige West and Zoë Wool During the past few months colleges and universities all over the world have shifted our teaching online because of the COVID 19 Pandemic. While many in our community have taught extraordinary online courses for decades, both because of the needs of rural and remote communities and because of the increasing global neoliberalization of higher education, many of us have not. As we scramble to put courses online for the first time ever in extremely {+}
I was first introduced to anthropology at community college. It was…eye opening. Anthropology challenged the insufficient, limited political and historical education I’d received up through high school. It mattered, and it changed how I looked at the world around me. But there were problems. Blind spots. I learned a certain version of anthropological history and theory. My introduction to the field was what I would call “Boasian Triumphalism,” which effectively depicted anthropology as a heroic discipline that corrected the wrongs {+}
The start of the semester is just about upon us, which probably means you are rapidly ditching your best laid plans to lovingly craft your syllabus into a gleaming gem of radical pedagogical genius and coming to terms with the Winnicottian spirit of “good enough.” Welcome back. The good news is that there is one easy addition that can make every syllabus shine a little brighter, something every good enough syllabus needs (and every kick ass syllabus has) that, thanks {+}
We all know we should bike to work, but sometimes the weather is bad, or we are late, or just feeling lazy, and so we take the car. Similarly, we all know that we shouldn’t use use PowerPoint, or if we do use PowerPoint we shouldn’t stuff them full of text and bullet points but instead use illustrative pictures. But sometimes we are running late, or just feeling lazy, or maybe even have a good reason1 for using text-heavy slides, {+}
Anthropology has an unhealthy relationship to its past. Approaches range from highly fetishized, almost ritual reading of sacralized texts like The Gift and The Nuer to intense, context-free denunciations of past practitioners based on their race, gender, and emplacement in nineteenth century. In fact, perhaps the most common relationship anthropologists have to their history is ignorance. Anthropologists often have little sense of what the discipline has achieved (or not achieved) in the past, and famously reinvent the fundamental insights of {+}
This semester I taught ANTH 490, the History of Anthropology. It is a required class for our majors and is sort of a ‘capstone’ for their anthropology experience, despite the fact that we have a three field department and I only cover sociocultural anthropology. This was my first time teaching the course, and I wanted to give the students a sense of the anthropological canon reformed — something that had both classic readings but also presented previously excluded or marginal {+}