These blog-posts concern anthropology courses and the teaching of anthropology. Living Anthropologically began as an attempt to take classroom knowledge and apply it to a more public forum. This attempt especially applies to Introduction-to-Anthropology. My current favorite textbook is the 5th edition of Anthropology: What Does it Mean to be Human? To follow along with this course, see Intro to Anthro 2021.
Although Horace Miner’s “Body Ritual among the Nacirema” has been assigned for thousands of anthropology courses, we need to think before using it uncritically.
A survey marking the 30 year anniversary of Hartwick Anthropology as an independent department and the retirement of acclaimed archaeologist David Anthony.
4-5 February 2016 at University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill: “Defending Anthropology 101 and the Mega-Class: Relevant Teaching for the 21st Century.”
In the Hartwick College J Term 2016 course, “Peoples & Cultures of Latin America and the Caribbean,” students emerged with a rich array of final projects.
Please help a recent high school graduate who desperately wants to be an anthropology major but worries about the anthropology major jobs after graduation.
While “experiential learning” is the rage in Higher Education, worth remembering that one of the best parts about learning is not having to experience it.
Resources and thoughts on Teaching Cultural Anthropology for fall 2014: “Teaching is the other side of participant observation” (Tim Ingold, Making 2013:13)
An Introduction to Anthropology course for 2014, with emphasis on “entangling the biological” and the relevance of anthropology for important dialogue.
Just like a coach urges athletes to “get your head in the game!” a call to “get your body in the writing!” From disembodied writing to the body of writing.
College’s Identity Crisis, Frank Bruni’s October 2013 essay in the New York Times, is a perfect example of not what is wrong with college, but what is wrong with the way people think about college. Bruni’s essay is one more exhibit in what Kevin R. McClure correctly pegs as Higher Education’s Reform-Industrial Complex:
Dominating the higher-education-reform conversation are those whose livelihoods are tied to the idea that the system is failing or in need of some “innovative” solution. Take, for example, the myriad policy centers and think tanks that have popped up recently to give opinions on higher education’s future. It is the job of these organizations to write papers and convene meetings about the problems colleges and universities face, meaning there is work (and employment) only so long as problems can be identified.
Meshing Tim Ingold’s “Against space” with Andrew Delbanco’s “College”: College is a place, not commodified space, of growth and movement, not retention.
How do skills change in a digital age? The degradation of work? Meditations on how to “reincorporate the pieces into their own walks of life” (Tim Ingold).
Taking a class hike to Table Rock, Hartwick College, as a way to illustrate “materials against materiality” and clearing the ground for engaged experiments.
“Teaching Theories: The Evolution-Creation Controversy” (1982) has long been part of the Applying Anthropology reader. Time for a Living with Darwin update?
Within weeks of Jared Diamond’s The World Until Yesterday Napoleon Chagnon splashed in with Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes — the Yanomamo and the Anthropologists. This page offers a selection of anthropology-oriented reviews and responses. Crucial point is one lesson anthropology has learned: contemporary peoples are not pristine windows onto a primitive … Read more
Meredith Small, “Our Babies, Ourselves” introduces many ways to raise babies, the biocultural of neurologically unfinished infants. But does this elide power?
