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 back in February. That’s because I’m officially on a one year leave from my university in Taiwan, while I serve as the “Chair of Taiwan Studies” at Leiden University. Starting so late in the game meant that I was able to ask my friends (most of whom already had one or two semesters of experience teaching online) for advice. Now, as my Taiwanese colleagues start teaching online for the first time, I shared what I had learned on social media. Seeing how popular my post was, I thought I’d clean it up a bit and share it here on the blog as well. Probably most readers have already been doing this for a while, and many may be getting ready to return to in-person classes in the fall, but hopefully this list (and the subsequent comments) will serve as a useful reference guide for anyone who needs it.

1. Do a survey at the start of the semester.

Ask students about their learning situation. Don’t be intrusive, but ask if they want to share anything about their setup or home life that might impact online learning. For instance, do they have a slow wifi? An old computer? A bad camera? Family or pets that might interfere? Etc. This should be an optional question on the survey, but it gives them a chance to tell you early on, so you know what to expect and can help them if you need to. For students who have been doing online classes for a while, you can also ask them what they like or don’t like about online learning. What has worked for them in other classes? What has driven them crazy?

2. Set up a chat room for the class, one that actually works.

The chat features in most video conferencing software as well as those in most “learning management systems” (LMS) are very poorly designed. It helps a lot to use something that is set up from the beginning just for chat. If your students already use something, like WhatsApp, you could go with that, but I used Discord which students liked. Keep it open during class, and set it up to send notifications when you are logged off.

3. Share a document.

There are a number of apps now, such as Google Docs, or Dropbox Paper, Notion, etc. that allow multiple people to edit a document at the same time. Open one up and share it with the class for each lesson. I recommend throwing your lecture notes in there and then having the students comment on that or add their own notes as you go. You can do this in addition to a powerpoint presentation, or instead of one (as I did).

4. Use breakout rooms.

In my own survey I asked students what they hated most about online learning and they said it was the lack of interaction with other students. After each lecture I used breakout rooms and had them discuss amongst each other, writing their thoughts and comments either in the shared document or in the chat room for the class.

5. Make time for one-on-one meetings with students.

Or, in a large class, with small groups. This allows you to get to know students better, despite everything being online. (This was something I hadn’t planned initially, but the students asked for it in the survey.)

6. Have students keep an online journal.

Encourage students to read and comment on each other’s journals. This helps to create a sense of shared experience that is often missing in online learning.

7. Stick around at the end of each class.

This gives people a chance to have a quick meeting with you without having to sign up for office hours.Don’t log out till the last student has logged out.

8. Start each class with a music video.

Play something nice while you are waiting for everyone to login. If you play good music, students will want to log in early so as not to miss it.

Other suggestions? Share in the comments.

Kerim

P. Kerim Friedman is a professor in the Department of Ethnic Relations and Cultures at National Dong Hwa University in Taiwan. His research explores language revitalization efforts among indigenous Taiwanese, looking at the relationship between language ideology, indigeneity, and political economy. An ethnographic filmmaker, he co-produced the Jean Rouch award-winning documentary, ‘Please Don’t Beat Me, Sir!’ about a street theater troupe from one of India’s Denotified and Nomadic Tribes (DNTs).

kerim.oxus.net/

Source

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 short time periods (many of us were asked to have online courses up and running in less than two days once our employers announced the switch to online teaching) and at a time when we are worried for the health of our communities, our families, our friends, our students, our colleagues, and the millions of strangers who are facing this pandemic globally, we may need a little help.

Taking very seriously the clear and compelling calls to resist the fiction that we can become brilliant virtual teachers overnight and the cogently articulated worries that this pandemic and the rapid push for online instruction may have long term consequences for higher education given the many companies, state legislators, and administrators who have been pushing for pedagogy without faculty for decades now, we have created a platform for anthropologists (and those anthropology adjacent) to create and share 10-30 minute videos and accompanying texts and pedagogical resources (slides, film clips, lesson plans/assignments suitable for online submission) as a way to supplement, enliven, and collectivize the work we are all already doing to take our courses online.

we have created a platform for anthropologists (and those anthropology adjacent) to create and share 10-30 minute videos and accompanying texts and pedagogical resources (slides, film clips, lesson plans/assignments suitable for online submission) as a way to supplement, enliven, and collectivize the work we are all already doing to take our courses online.

Our platform is not meant to replace active engagement with students by faculty, nor is it meant to provide the same kind of pedagogical content and experience that out students receive in the classroom, or in online courses that have been developed with due time, resources, and training. We remain concerned that in the neoliberalized university, online teaching is rarely a good way to produce collective knowledge and reciprocal engagement. But for the sake of our students, we are following the dictates of our employers while trying to stay true to the spirit of relationality that many of us find more essential than ever in our work. There are lots of wonderful people creating similar sites of sharing and caring so we’ve kept our ask specific.

What should I do for my mini lecture?

These videos can be based on your research, your synthesis of other people’s research, your reading and analysis of key theoretical texts, your critiques of the discipline of anthropology, and just about anything else that you would use in your own classroom to teach about our field. We welcome any form of creativity that you can come up with and we welcome lectures pitched to different levels. For each video, while we know people will produce their own content, we ask the following:

1. Please keep the videos between 10 and 30 minutes.
2. At the beginning of the video, please say who you are and what you do. (“I’m Paige West and I’m a cultural and environmental anthropologist.”)
3. At the beginning of the video, please tell the students what you are going to tell them about and why. (“This video focuses on the research that resulted in my first book, Conservation Is our Government now. It can help us understand the relationship between European ideas about nature and culture, the ideas about the world that people living in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea have about value, and the power dynamics that exist in international environmental conservation projects.”)
4. At the beginning of the video, please tell the students what kinds of questions you were asking when you did the research or the analysis you are about to present and how you worked to answer those questions or conduct that analysis. This is a kind of ‘methodological’ component for the videos. We include this so that these videos can be used both for topical teaching and for more general introduction to anthropology courses.

For accessibility purposes, we’ll be trying to add transcripts of all videos as quickly as we can. Our plan is to hire work study students (who suddenly have no work) and students participating in the #COLA4all strike at the University of California.

How do I record my mini lecture?

• You can use Zoom (platform of choice for #COVIDcampus) to record your mini lecture, which also allows you to include a slide show on the screen pretty easily. Here are some instructions.
• Most recent model iphones and other smart phones will take good enough video and audio. You can place your phone on a shelf or rig up a make shift tripod, hit record, and you’re off to the races. Here are some tips about filming yourself.
• If you would like to record a conversation with a collaborator, rather than a solo lecture, you can do that in Zoom (see above) or in Skype (instructions here)

Where do I upload my materials?

We have chosen the Open Education Resource Commons (OERCommons.org)as our platform. First, go to OERCommons and create an author account. Then email us at AnthropologyTeaching@gmail.com with your name and the address with which you registered so we can add you as an author to the Anthropology Mini Lectures resource. Once that’s out of the way, here are the steps:

1. Login to https://www.oercommons.org/ and navigate to the “Anthropology Mini Lectures” resource which you’ll find in the “My Items” section of your profile (the profile button is on the top right of the screen)
2. Click the “edit” button.
3. Scroll all the way down to the bottom and click the “Insert new section” button.
4. Give your section the name of your lecture (keep it brief, simple, and informative).
5. In the “Main Content” section, click on the “Insert Video” button and follow the prompts to upload your video (NB: the upload will take a while–please be patient! If the progress bar stalls or the upload really doesn’t work, follow the instructions in #6.)
6. Add any additional files (PDFs, documents describing suggested digital assignments or exercises, slide shows, etc) by clicking on “Attach Additional Resources” and following the prompts. You can attach multiple files but must do so one at a time.
7. Click SAVE (at the top of the screen). We will do our best to update the page with new resources at least once per day.

Finally, thank you. Many of our students are scared and feeling extremely alone. We believe that our classrooms, and the social worlds that they are capable of producing, may be a place of refuge for many of our students in the coming weeks and months. Before they left campus, we saw that a few times a week. We were part of what seemed like, with all the appropriate caveats in place here, a normal, daily, weekly, and monthly routine. We know that all students are different, and that many of them have obligations that take priority over their courses even at the best of times. So we are not assuming that we have any undue power over how okay or safe they feel in the world. However, for many of us, teaching gives us a sense of normalcy and creates both spaces of learning and spaces of collective being and stability. During this next few months, we all may need that.

Paige West is Claire Tow Professor of Anthropology at Barnard College and Colombia University and Director of the Center for the Study of Social Difference at Columbia University. Paige’s broad scholarly interest is the relationship between societies and their environments. Since the mid 1990s she has worked with indigenous people in Papua New Guinea. She is the author of three books and the editor of five more and the founder of the journal Environment and Society. In addition to her academic work, Paige is the co-founder of the PNG Institute of Biological Research, a small NGO dedicated to building academic opportunities for research in Papua New Guinea by Papua New Guineans and the co-founder of the Roviana Solwara Skul, a school in Papua New Guinea dedicated to teaching at the nexus of indigenous knowledge and western scientific knowledge.

zoë

Zoë Wool is assistant professor in the department of anthropology at Rice university. Zoë works at the intersection of (medical) anthropology, critical disability studies, STS, and queer theory. Most of her ethnographic work explores the intimacies, socialities, and materialities of life making among injured US soldiers and veterans. She’s also been thinking about new feminist, queer, and cripistemological histories of neurology…among other things.

anthropology.rice.edu/zoe-wool

Source

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 of 19th century bigotry, ethnocentrism, and racism (which is a pretty tall order). The basic story went something like this:

Things were bad in the 19th century. People spent too much time in armchairs and they came up with problematic evolutionary schemes that were racist, factually incorrect, and downright dangerous. But then came Franz Boas, empirical fieldwork, and 20th century anthropology to the rescue. It was all about Boasian relativism and looking at different cultural groups on their own terms. Understanding. Empathy. Etc. Somewhere in the mix I learned a little about Malinowski and Evans-Pritchard, for good measure, and it all seemed to make sense. It all sounded so good, and right, and enlightened. I was converted.

And I lived happily ever after in my own liberal space of enlightenment for the rest of my days. Except that part didn’t happen.

What happened? Well, I’m not sure who it was, but somebody (one of my classmates, I think) introduced me to this book written in 1969 by someone named Vine Deloria: Custer Died for your sins. I owe that person a huge debt of gratitude. I remember sitting in a classroom reading that book, with its bright red cover. Mind. Blown. Deloria was clearly not having it with this whole anthropology thing.

Something was clearly amiss.

Of course I started with the chapter called “Anthropologists and Other Friends.” How could I not start there? The chapter starts off with that line about the rain that must fall into everyone’s lives. McNamara had the TFX and the Edsel, churches had the “real world” gumming things up for them. And Indians were stuck with anthropologists. It went downhill from there.

Reading what Deloria had to say was a bit shocking for a recent convert to anthropology. I thought anthropology had it all figured out (and, by proxy, me). I had learned such a clean, heroic narrative about the discipline…and here was this sharp, sarcastic, brutal (and funny) critique coming from Vine Deloria. So I realized that all was not well, that anthropology was full of a long list of problems and issues. Reading Vine Deloria was a vital intervention that redirected my relationship with anthropology.

All of this makes me think back to that ‘triumphalist’ version of anthropology that I first learned in college. Is that really necessary? I often wonder if I would have been drawn to the field without that oversimplified, heroically problematic introduction. I like to think that a more complex, nuanced introduction to anthropology–flaws and all–would have grabbed my attention. But I have my doubts. Such questions are important, because they also tell us about some of the problematic expectations that our educational and political system tends to inculcate in youth. What does say about us, our students, and our educational system when we feel the need to teach these triumphalist narratives in order corner our stake in the university market?

Vine Deloria’s intervention matters because, at heart, he’s talking about challenging the power relationships between anthropologists and the people they study. He argued forcefully that Native people should not simply be treated as objects of study. As I see it, these are the kinds of conversations–and lessons–that should provide the foundations of our field as we make our way through this fraught 21st century. I understand the concern about drawing students in and making anthropology appealing, but to me it’s far more important to build critical foundations, right from day one. Besides, I see no reason why we can’t frame anthropology as something that is both inspirational and critically aware of its past. So, in closing, here’s to skipping the triumphalism and getting right to building the kind of anthropology that has “the theoretical perspectives and methodological tools to analyze the complex challenges of a rapidly changing world” (Mullings 2015:12). Onward.

References

Deloria, Vine. 1969. Custer died for your sins: An Indian Manifesto. University of Oklahoma Press.

Mullings, Leith. 2015. Anthropology Matters. American Anthropologist Vol. 117(1):4-16.

Ryan

Ryan Anderson is a cultural and environmental anthropologist.

Source

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 to the handy examples below, will take mere minutes to add if it’s missing from yours: An accessibility or disability inclusion statement.

Generally, accessibility statements inform students of university resources and policies for accommodating disabilities, accommodations that are required under the Americans with Disabilities Act. The ADA is why many universities require them. But that is not why you should have one.

You should have one because a thoughtful accessibility statement is an opening to a pedagogical practice that offers a small but powerful push against the ways college and university systems exacerbate rather than rectify social inequalities by calling out the ableism of the academy and creating an experience that is more just and accessible for all students. Granted, if your school has a boilerplate accessibility statement (check the student disability services office or teaching support office to find out) it probably doesn’t do that. It is probably legalistic, perhaps unwelcoming, and almost certainly not informed by principles of disability justice or universal design, both of which see access as an opportunity to address social and structural inequity and marginalization by centering disability while pushing at its presumed edges.

To help you make your accessibility statement the best it can be, I’ve crowdsourced some examples from our wonderful colleagues in the Disability Research Interest Group, the subsection of the Society for Medical Anthropology that brought us such treasures as these guidelines for accessible AAA presentations, and this survey about in/accessibility at the AAA meetings (if you haven’t taken the survey, get to it…ALL of you!). I’ve separated the institutional boilerplates from those customized with critical disability politics in mind. The significance of the difference should be pretty damn apparent.

Finally, the most important thing about the accessibility statement may be what you do with it.

Just as decolonization at the level of the text is not itself decolonization (as Faye Harrison, Lila Abu Lughod, Jafari Allen, and other anthros of color continue to remind us), a great accessibility statement does not sufficiently address ableism in one’s pedagogy, classroom, or institution. Read the statement with students on the first day of class, remind them throughout the semester of your commitment to access, and most importantly, look for ways to practice access throughout the semester in your pedagogy and in your classroom (in any room, really). For more on how to do that, check out this fabulous tip sheet on feminist disability pedagogy (which also includes syllabus statement tips) or look for resources on Universal Design in Education. Though STEM focused, Washington University’s DO-IT Center has great Universal Design resources (like the info graphic on page 14 of this publication).

Boilerplate Accessibility Statements (you can do better)

Case Western Reserve University:

In accordance with federal law, if you have a documented disability, you may be eligible to request accommodations from Disability Resources. In order to be considered for accommodations you must present a memo from disability resources. Please contact their office to register at 216.368.5230 or get more information on how to begin the process. Please keep in mind that accommodations are not retroactive.

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill:

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill facilitates the implementation of reasonable accommodations, including resources and services, for students with disabilities, chronic medical conditions, a temporary disability or pregnancy complications resulting in difficulties with accessing learning opportunities.

All accommodations are coordinated through the Accessibility Resources and Service Office. See the ARS Website for contact information: accessibillity.unc.edu.

Relevant policy documents as they relation to registration and accommodations determinations and the student registration form are available on the ARS website under the About ARS tab.

College of William & Mary:

William & Mary accommodates students with disabilities in accordance with federal laws and university policy. Any student who feels they may need an accommodation based on the impact of a learning, psychiatric, physical, or chronic health diagnosis should contact Student Accessibility Services staff at 757-221-2512 or at sas@wm.edu to determine if accommodations are warranted and to obtain an official letter of accommodation. For more information, please visit /www.wm.edu/sas.

Rice University:

Disability Support Services
If you have a documented disability or other condition that may affect academic performance you should: 1) make sure this documentation is on file with Disability Support Services (Allen Center, Room 111 / adarice@rice.edu / x5841) to determine the accommodations you need; and 2) talk with me to discuss your accommodation needs.

Critical Accessibility Statements (better than ‘good enough’!)

Professor at a large public research university

Class Accessibility and Inclusion
If you need a reasonable (or even unreasonable) accommodation, please let me know and I’ll try make it happen. This goes triply for folks with non-visible disabilities or who pass or mask or compensate. No need to do that here.

Zoë Wool, Rice University

This course is intended for all Rice students, including those with mental, physical, or cognitive disabilities, illness, injuries, impairments, or any other condition that tends to negatively affect one’s equal access to education. If, at any point in the term, you find yourself not able to fully access the space, content, and experience of this course, you are welcome (and not required) to contact me by email, phone, or during office hours to discuss your specific needs. I also encourage you to contact the Office of Disability Support Services (Allen Center, Room 111/ adarice@rice.edu/ x5841/ https://dss.rice.edu)./ If you have a diagnosis, ODSS can help you document your needs and create an accommodation plan. By making a plan through ODSS, you can insure appropriate accommodations without disclosing your condition or diagnosis to course instructors. 

Professor at a mid-sized public research university

If you have a disability or a personal circumstance that will affect your learning in this course, please let me know as soon as possible so that we can discuss the best ways to meet your needs. (Any student who needs accommodation for disabilities should also contact Student Accessibility Services at xxxxx@school.edu to obtain an official letter of accommodation for all their courses.)

[The author of this statement also says: “I emphasize my willingness to help with accommodations aloud on the first day of class. I also give a questionnaire in which I ask about accommodations, allergies, pronouns, planned travel, etc. so that I can be in touch with individual students about their needs in the class”.] 

Universal Design for Learning at McGill University’s Office for Students with Disabilities

As the instructor of this course I endeavor to provide an inclusive learning environment. However, if you experience barriers to learning in this course, do not hesitate to discuss them with me and the Office for Students with Disabilities, 514-398-6009.

Lydia Brown (AKA Autistic Hoya)

Accommodations for Disabilities: 
If you have any kind of disability, whether apparent or non-apparent, learning, emotional, physical, or cognitive, and you need some accommodations or alternatives to lectures, assignments, or exams, please feel free to contact me to discuss reasonable accommodations for your access needs.

[Lydia Brown also notes: “Standard headers for this section generally say, ‘Special Accommodations’ or even avoid the word disability altogether in favor of euphemisms like learning differences or challenges.

Professors, you can make a strong statement for access and inclusion from the beginning of the course. You can, without saying or signing anything at all, make students like me feel immensely safer from the start.”] 

Michele Friedner, University of Chicago

I am committed to meeting the needs of all seminar participants. To arrange class-related accommodations, please see Student Disability Services: http://disabilities.uchicago.edu/accommodations. I am happy to meet with students to discuss ways of expanding access in the classroom that are not only mandated by law. Please feel free to make an appointment with me to discuss. 

Mara Green, Barnard College

Disability accommodations: For disability and other learning-related needs and accommodations, please communicate with me during the first week of class, whether in person or through email. Of course if concerns arise later in the semester, let me know as well. Disability-based services are provided through Barnard’s Office of Disability Services, located in 008 Milbank Hall (ods@barnard.edu) and through Columbia’s Disability Services (https://health.columbia.edu/disability-services). I am committed to working with you, so do not hesitate to come talk with me. 

Cassandra Hartblay, University of Toronto, Scarborough

Accommodations: Please assert requests for accommodations often and early. It is never too late to request accommodations – our bodies and circumstances are continuously changing. You will be asked to make use of formal accessibility services on campus; however, you will not be asked to disclose personal medical information. If there are ways in which the overall structure of the course and general classroom interactions could be adapted to facilitate full participation, please do not hesitate to raise your ideas with the instructor: comments and suggestions about the format of readings, lectures, and class discussions are welcome.

A note on basic needs:

Finally, Jessica Waggoner at the University of Houston turned me on to the basic needs statement, something that took on additional importance for their classes in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey (which hit Houston at the start of last year’s fall semester). They learned about it from this post on basic needs in/security in higher education, which suggests this syllabus statement:

Basic Needs: Any student who faces challenges securing their food or housing and believes this may affect their performance in the course is urged to contact the Dean of Students for support. Furthermore, please notify the professor if you are comfortable in doing so. This will enable her to provide any resources that she may possess.

zoë

Zoë Wool is assistant professor in the department of anthropology at Rice university. Zoë works at the intersection of (medical) anthropology, critical disability studies, STS, and queer theory. Most of her ethnographic work explores the intimacies, socialities, and materialities of life making among injured US soldiers and veterans. She’s also been thinking about new feminist, queer, and cripistemological histories of neurology…among other things.

anthropology.rice.edu/zoe-wool

Source

The secret is Markdown. Although Markdown started as a geeky tool for people who wanted a simple way to design webpages, it has since gained popularity for all kinds of writing as more and more text editors and note taking apps make it the default way to style your text. The idea is simple enough: where a rich text editor would show you text in italics or bold using WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get), a Markdown editor will display them like this: *italics* or **bold**. At this point most people look confused. Isn’t that a step backwards? Isn’t the whole point of using computers so I don’t need to see the hidden code that styles my text? But if you’ve ever copied text and lost your formatting, or struggled when your word processing seems to think your text should be in a different style than what you expected, you know that computers don’t always behave the way we want. Making the style information visible solves that problem because if something goes wrong, you can immediately see the problem. What is great about Markdown is that the code is so simple and easy to use that (unlike LaTeX) it barely takes any time to learn.

Another advantage of Markdown is that it makes it easy to move text from one app to another, or to transform text into a web page, Microsoft Word Document, PDF, or PowerPoint presentation without too much fuss. So while this post is about an easy way to make PowerPoint presentations, it is really about the power of having your text formatted with Markdown!

Before proceeding, it is important to point out that there are many different flavors of Markdown. The original version, for instance, didn’t support footnotes, while the one used by the WordPress blogging platform that runs this site does. Similarly, there are a number of different apps that support writing presentations in Markdown, but they each use slightly different code. Some might start each new slide wherever they see a header # Which is any line that starts with a pound sign, while other apps use their own divider code. Deckset, the app I’ll be using in this tutorial, uses three dashes, like this: ---.²

For some sample text let’s take the first few lines of Hamlet’s “To be, or not to be” soliloquy. I’m going to add some basic Markdown formatting so that it has headers (# or ##), lists (*), and block quotations (>), as well as the Deckset slide demarkation code (---). Here’s what it looks like:

# To be, or not to be 
*Hamlet*. Act III, Scene I.
by William Shakespeare

---
# To be, or not to be, that is the question:

* Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
* The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
* Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles,
* And by opposing end them: 

---
# to die, to sleep

> No more; and by a sleep, to say we end
> the heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks
> that Flesh is heir to? 'Tis a consummation
> devoutly to be wished. 

---
> To die, to sleep,
> To sleep, perchance to Dream; aye, there's the rub,

--- 
> for in that sleep of death, what dreams may come,
> when we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
> must give us pause. 

And here is what it looks like after running through Deckset:

You can, of course, choose from many different themes, insert images, links, and even presenter notes if you like. Nor is Deckset the only app that can do this. Slidium is another macOS app, and Marp is simpler but works on multiple platforms. Other options can be found on this list which seems to get updated regularly.

List of posts in this series

• Free Your Mind, the Text Will Follow (Working With Text 1)
• RegEx 101 (Working With Text 2)
• Text-laundering (Working With Text 3)
• Lazy PowerPoint (Working With Text 4)
• Roll Your Own QDA (Working With Text 5)

Kerim

P. Kerim Friedman is a professor in the Department of Ethnic Relations and Cultures at National Dong Hwa University in Taiwan. His research explores language revitalization efforts among indigenous Taiwanese, looking at the relationship between language ideology, indigeneity, and political economy. An ethnographic filmmaker, he co-produced the Jean Rouch award-winning documentary, ‘Please Don’t Beat Me, Sir!’ about a street theater troupe from one of India’s Denotified and Nomadic Tribes (DNTs).

kerim.oxus.net/

Source

Why is it that anthropology is this way when other disciplines aren’t (aren’t they)? There are many causes, I’m sure, but here I want to focus on one: The disjunction between the curriculum we use to teach the history of our discipline, the informal oral history which we tell ourselves, and the actual research by historians into our discipline. Let me take each of these in turn.

First, there is ‘curricular history of anthropolgy’. These are the textbooks, anthologies, syllabi, and other materials designed to teach the discipline’s history. I’m glad all this material exists, but its challenging to use it for teaching. First, there is not very much of it. Potted histories for students like Anthropology and Anthropologists and The Rise of Anthropological Theory are from 1983 and 1968 respectively. In general, the curricular narrative tends to stop in the 1980s, with a grand battle between idealist/culturalists and the materialists/political economists. In some versions of this story these two sides are synthesized somehow, then globalization starts, and the story peters out…

This isn’t to say that theory readers haven’t been updated since then, but many of the updates seemed tacked-on, and lack a coherent narrative. Or, alternately, the narrative they offer turns to Foucault and other theorists, not actual anthropology. I’ve always felt this might have something to do with a baby boomer aversion to being pinned down. Whatever the case, the 1980s were a long time ago now, and almost half of the discipline’s history is only vaguely covered by much of this material.

Disciplinary histories of anthropology, the second sort of history I’ll talk about here, are much more connected than curricular history. Because they circulate informally and are often salacious, they are not ‘transparent’ and ‘discoverable’. They are also less teachable, since they are somewhat protean and don’t divide the discipline up into discrete, teachable periods and schools. I feel like most anthropologists have a timeline in their head of what happened in the 1980s, which involves postmodernism in 1986, Appadurai in 1991, Gupta and Ferguson in 1997, and so forth. But it lacks the clean boxes and diagrams of teaching materials… which may actually be a good thing now that I think about it…

The big problem with disciplinary history is that it might not actually be true. It is impressionistic and reflects personal experience. Stories too good to be true become true, while the voices of those you didn’t go to gradaute school are excluded. The entire thing just gets very parochial.

Finally, our third group is the scholarly history of anthropology. Admittedly, there’s some overlap here with disciplinary history, since many historians of anthropology are just anthropologists with too much time on their hands. But there is a large body of work published by people who specialize in this area, and do original archival work. I think here of the History of Anthropology series by the University of Nebraska press, for instance, or Wisconin’s older, ground-breaking series on the history of anthropology. This is specialist work that sheds new light on the past.

The problem is that this work is not taken up by disciplinary and curricular histories. People teaching theory courses — or designing curriculum for them — don’t take the time to read the Cora DuBois biography before teaching a class on culture and personality. And the scholarly historians themselves have done little to synthesize the work they’ve undertaken. There is a good why: the history of anthropology is very scantily covered, and so much work remains to be done. Just think of all the anthropologist who lack a full-length biography: We have half biographies of Boas and Malinowski, and no full-length biographies of Evans-Pritchard, Radcliffe-Brown, Victor Turner, Clifford Geertz, and many others. Historians of anthropology are busy just trying to get some coverage of the whole field.

The result of all this is a strange situation: the story that anthropology professors tell themselves about the discipline is not well-informed by the work of actual historians. Nor, strangely, is it what we teach our students, especially undergraduates. There’s got to be a way to connect what experts know to our own self-understanding, and then getting that in the classroom. The solution to all this, I think, is a mid-level history of anthropology which reads the specialist work and attempts to connect it with the current issues in our profession. Ever since George Stocking’s “On The Limits of ‘Presentism’ and ‘Historicism'” essay, ‘presentism’, or building a usable past for the present, has gotten a bad name. But it may be that now, half a century later, we are ready to move beyond this problematic dichotomy. A ‘whig history’ of the discipline, one which is inclusive and self-confident, could be just what we need.

Rex

Alex Golub is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. His book “Leviathans at the Gold Mine” won the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology book award. He is interested in political anthropology, the anthropology of virtual worlds, the history of anthropology, and public anthropology and open access scholarship.

alex.golub.name/

Source

Without further ado, here is the reading list:

The hisory of anthropology tends to be taught in three ways: First, some teach it stretching back to Herodotus, treating Marco Polo and other Western travel narratives as ‘anthropology’. I’m not a big fan of this framing because it’s an anachronistic attempt to legitimate our discipline with a ‘Western tradition’ which I’m not a big fan of. Second, some start in 1859, with Darwin, Spencer, Morgan, Tyler, etc. I didn’t start here because 1) these people were not anthropologists in a strict sense 2) its 2017, and reaching back this far just doesn’t make sense and 3) Mauss, Malinowski, and Boas all explicitly saw themselves as part of a movement to replace this older work. Of course, they scandolously overplayed their radicallness of their break and they had much in common with earlier thinkers. Still, I prefer the third option, which is starting after WWI. With Argonauts in 1922, Le Don in 1925, and the first wave of Boasian textbooks and popularizations in the 1920s as well, starting in the 20th century just made sense.

Secondly, for students in contemporary Hawai‘i who just barely remember 9/11, midcentury mainland culture seems incredibly exotic, and nineteenth century European social theory is another planet. So to try to get students into the headspace of the anthropologists we were reading, I tried to play the favorite kind of music for the anthropologist in question. Some anthropologists had biographers who could tell me what their favorite music was. For instance, playing a saucy tango for Malinowski helps explain a lot about the guy. Other people had musical tastes that were totally obscure. No one who studied Mauss could tell me what sort of music he enjoyed listening to. I could also just email more recent anthropologists and ask the what sort of music they liked to listen to, although that met with mixed success. Others presented unexpected challenges. Ruth Benedict’s biographer, for instance, pointed out to me that Benedict was not really that into to music due to her being deaf. Sometimes I stretched a bit — playing the Ave Verum Corpus of Byrd for the session on Mary Douglas, or taking 15 minutes out of the lecture on Trouillot to show and discuss Katherine Dunham.

Finally, this syllabus was an experiment for me. I wanted to do a couple of things with it: First, I wanted to model a more usable past for contemporary anthropology. So Hurston was featured prominently, played off of Du Bois. We didn’t learn about Boas, but about Hunt and Boas thanks to the the fantastic new work by them done by Isaiah Wilner. Second, I wanted to point out great stories and personalities in the history of anthropology, as well as unusual juxtapositions. The fathers of Talal Asad and Siegfried Nadel both were from the same area of the Ukraine, and both went on to study the Sudan, but Asad was instrumental in questioning the influences of colonialism in anthropology, while Nadel rounded up informants with the help of a police squad. Also, lecturing on the upper Nile led to a discussion of the upcoming Black Panther movie (Wakanda is not that far from where Nadel worked) and afrofuturism. There’s nothing like exposing students to Sun Ra for the first time to help them when they’re drifting off half way through a lecture. Finally, I wanted to avoid some canonical figures. I did Benedict and not Mead and — gasp! — Gluckman and not Evans-Pritchard.

There were a lot of failures on the syllabus. I’ll never teach Myth and Meaning again. I should put Evans-Pritchard and Mead back in. I need to clean up where some of the background context goes in some of the lectures. But overall I’m pretty happy with how this turns out, and I’m looking forward to honing it as I teach it in the future. That said, I’m sure someone in the Internet thinks I’m wrong so… let me know what you think!

Rex

Alex Golub is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. His book “Leviathans at the Gold Mine” won the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology book award. He is interested in political anthropology, the anthropology of virtual worlds, the history of anthropology, and public anthropology and open access scholarship.

alex.golub.name/

Source