teaching – anthro{dendum}

Anthropology, Interrupted: Thank you, Vine Deloria

By Ryan | March 14, 2019

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 {+}

Check Your Syllabus 101: Disability Access Statements

By zoë | August 13, 2018

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 {+}

Lazy PowerPoint (Working With Text 4)

By Kerim | February 22, 2018

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, {+}

Three Styles in the History of Anthropology

By Rex | January 3, 2018

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 {+}

My History of Anthropology Syllabus

By Rex | December 22, 2017

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 {+}