Is anthropology more important than ever?
New books in 2021 plug Anthro-Vision. But is anthropology more important than ever? After decades of teaching, we need to ask: What happened?
Anthropology – Understanding – Possibility
This index-tag contains chronically-ordered blog-posts related to anthropology textbooks.
Many of the posts are related to Introduction-to-Anthropology. My current favorite textbook is the 5th edition of Anthropology: What Does it Mean to be Human? by Robert Lavenda and Emily Schultz. To follow along with my course, see Intro to Anthro 2021.
The page dedicated to Anthropology Courses and Textbooks is particularly important, as that is the place where the anthropology courses are cataloged.
New books in 2021 plug Anthro-Vision. But is anthropology more important than ever? After decades of teaching, we need to ask: What happened?
Resources for teaching Latin America and Caribbean 2019 themes anthropologically in a one-month intensive undergraduate-level class.
Suggestions for the main subjects to include in an anthropology textbook for teaching introduction to anthropology in Brazil.
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.
What Would Sid Do? Reflections on the Sidney Mintz legacy in anthropology. Teaching Introduction to Anthropology as Global History & Interconnection.
4-5 February 2016 at University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill: “Defending Anthropology 101 and the Mega-Class: Relevant Teaching for the 21st Century.”
With anthropologists saying many things about culture, is it any wonder the students and the public are confused?
Early episodes of European colonialism, plantation slavery in the Caribbean, and Darwin in Tierra del Fuego are crucial to “How Did Anthropology Begin?”
Preview of a 2015 Introduction to Anthropology course using a new 3rd-edition textbook, Anthropology:What Does It Mean to Be Human?
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.
A double review from 2003 of Elizabeth Chin’s Purchasing Power and Steven Kemper’s Buying and Believing. A review that went poof! from American Ethnologist.
Pairing “Advertising Missionaries” with “A Fragmented Globality” to ask “What, if anything, is truly new about our times?” (Trouillot 2003:47)
Fieldwork and the ethnographic monograph invited closure around cultural wholes. Anthropology can defend the concept of culture while jettisoning the word.
Laura Bohannan’s Return to Laughter is a great book to discuss institutionalized fieldwork in anthropology and how kinshipology trumped messier discoveries.
Anthropology saw culture as anti-race, yet descriptions of Dobu in Patterns of Culture, show culture reified–and looking a lot like race.
Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture translated Boasian Anthropology and its concept of culture to a mass audience. Plus problematic cultural wholes.
Thinking about the purpose of anthropology: “Ultimately, anthropology will only matter… if it evokes a purpose outside of itself” (Trouillot 2003, 5)
Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s intriguing ideas on testosterone changes in “Mothers and Others” is answered by longitudinal anthropology on fatherhood testosterone.
“Teaching Theories: The Evolution-Creation Controversy” (1982) has long been part of the Applying Anthropology reader. Time for a Living with Darwin update?
Meredith Small, “Our Babies, Ourselves” introduces many ways to raise babies, the biocultural of neurologically unfinished infants. But does this elide power?
Wonderful recent volume shows how views of human nature as inherently warlike stem not from the facts but from cultural views embedded in Western thinking.
The indigenous allies in Matthew Restall’s Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest point to contingent histories, not the inevitability of guns, germs & steel.
Eric Wolf’s Europe and the People Without History attempts to answer Yali’s Question – Why Europe? It’s time to rediscover the history of Eric Wolf.
Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture wins Jared Diamond for conceptual clarity, writing style, ethnographic example, and impact. Pretty good for 1934.