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?
textbooks
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.
Teaching Latin America 2019
Resources for teaching Latin America and Caribbean 2019 themes anthropologically in a one-month intensive undergraduate-level class.
Anthropology in Brazil
Suggestions for the main subjects to include in an anthropology textbook for teaching introduction to anthropology in Brazil.
Nacirema Thinking
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.
Anthropology: Unfinished Revolution
What Would Sid Do? Reflections on the Sidney Mintz legacy in anthropology. Teaching Introduction to Anthropology as Global History & Interconnection.
Relevant Teaching for the 21st Century
4-5 February 2016 at University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill: “Defending Anthropology 101 and the Mega-Class: Relevant Teaching for the 21st Century.”
Culture, Culture, Everywhere
With anthropologists saying many things about culture, is it any wonder the students and the public are confused?
How Did Anthropology Begin?
Early episodes of European colonialism, plantation slavery in the Caribbean, and Darwin in Tierra del Fuego are crucial to “How Did Anthropology Begin?”
Introduction to Anthropology Course 2015
Preview of a 2015 Introduction to Anthropology course using a new 3rd-edition textbook, Anthropology:What Does It Mean to Be Human?
The Other Side of Participant Observation
Resources and thoughts on Teaching Cultural Anthropology for fall 2014: “Teaching is the other side of participant observation” (Tim Ingold, Making 2013:13)
Entangling the Biological
An Introduction to Anthropology course for 2014, with emphasis on “entangling the biological” and the relevance of anthropology for important dialogue.
Purchasing Power / Buying & Believing
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.
Irony, Paradox, Uncertainty
Pairing “Advertising Missionaries” with “A Fragmented Globality” to ask “What, if anything, is truly new about our times?” (Trouillot 2003:47)
Fetishizing Fieldwork on the Road to Essentialism
Fieldwork and the ethnographic monograph invited closure around cultural wholes. Anthropology can defend the concept of culture while jettisoning the word.
Fieldwork & Kinshipology
Laura Bohannan’s Return to Laughter is a great book to discuss institutionalized fieldwork in anthropology and how kinshipology trumped messier discoveries.
When Culture Looks like Race
Anthropology saw culture as anti-race, yet descriptions of Dobu in Patterns of Culture, show culture reified–and looking a lot like race.
The Concept of Culture
Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture translated Boasian Anthropology and its concept of culture to a mass audience. Plus problematic cultural wholes.
anthropology will only matter if it evokes a purpose outside of itself
Thinking about the purpose of anthropology: “Ultimately, anthropology will only matter… if it evokes a purpose outside of itself” (Trouillot 2003, 5)
Testosterone Anthropology
Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s intriguing ideas on testosterone changes in “Mothers and Others” is answered by longitudinal anthropology on fatherhood testosterone.
Living with Darwin & Evolution-Creation Controversy
“Teaching Theories: The Evolution-Creation Controversy” (1982) has long been part of the Applying Anthropology reader. Time for a Living with Darwin update?
Childcare, Culture & Power
Meredith Small, “Our Babies, Ourselves” introduces many ways to raise babies, the biocultural of neurologically unfinished infants. But does this elide power?
War, Peace, & Human Nature
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.
Indigenous Allies & Politics of Empire
The indigenous allies in Matthew Restall’s Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest point to contingent histories, not the inevitability of guns, germs & steel.
Geography, States, Empires
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.
Patterns of Culture (1934) wins Jared Diamond (2012)
Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture wins Jared Diamond for conceptual clarity, writing style, ethnographic example, and impact. Pretty good for 1934.