Adrienne Pine was in a jam. The assistant anthropology professor at American University was about to begin teaching “Sex, Gender & Culture,” but her baby daughter woke up in the morning with a fever. The single mother worried that she had no good child-care options.

 

So Pine brought her sick baby to class. The baby, in a blue onesie, crawled on the floor of the lecture hall during part of the 75-minute class two weeks ago, according to the professor’s account. The mother extracted a paper clip from the girl’s mouth at one point and shooed her away from an electrical outlet. A teaching assistant held the baby and rocked her at times, volunteering to help even though Pine stressed that she didn’t have to. When the baby grew restless, Pine breast-fed her while continuing her lecture in front of 40 students.

American University professor breast-feeds sick baby in class, sparking debate

By Nick Anderson, Published: September 11

John W. Hoopes, an anthropologist at the University of Kansas, teaches a course on “Archaeological Myths and Realities” in which he tackles the 2012 myth among other doomsday premonitions:

The United States has always embraced religious freedom. Peculiar religious sects, including occult beliefs, have always been part of America,” Hoopes said. “End-of-the-world and transformative beliefs are found in many ancient cultures but have been a fundamental part of modern times since 1499,” Hoopes said. “They are also fundamentally American.”

In an attempt to distinguish myth from science, Hoopes uses the 2012 myth and other prophecies to teach students to think critically and learn to distinguish between science and myth. He explained that wishful or magical thinking often helps perpetuate myths and beliefs that have no basis in science.

Read more at International Business Times:

Critical Thinkers Demystify Doomsday Prophecies

By Sangeeta Ghosh Dastidar

I have always been a little out of the box when it comes to teaching and learning anthropology. I believe that the best educational experiences occur in an open and participatory environment. I’ve never been comfortable as the “sage on the stage” and feel that seminar is far more effective than lecture, even when I am dealing with freshmen. Co-opting those tendencies to the learning of the discipline, I always retain what I learn best in an atmosphere where I can see it, hear it, get my hands dirty and participate. I love the technology, the interaction, the edupunk possibilities of wired communication and I am bringing that to the Education section of Anthro Now Online.

So, what do I mean by edupunk?

Edupunk is a term coined from the Punk music movement, and there are several basic tenets. It is do-it-yourself, it resists authority, and it combines altruism with self-interest (from Education Innovation). With the advent of, and increase in, technology available to both researchers and educators/students, we no longer have to accept that the information we are spoon-fed or that is packaged carefully for us, is complete, nor do our students. One-size-fits-all learning and teaching models aren’t our only options anymore. We can all learn what we want, anytime or anywhere. Based on the do-it-yourself original punk movement, we weave an environment where we can control our own learning experiences, think and learn for ourselves, and we enable others to do the same. The connectedness that comes from electronic access, open access, and social networking has uncorked the genie’s bottle, and we want to throw the cork away.

Anthropological fieldwork has always been edupunk. Over a century ago, not content to sit in our armchairs and read about the world anymore, anthropology went out and found out. Through a method called participant observation we learned about the world and the people in it by going there, becoming part of the community, watching, asking questions, taking notes, learning languages, by laughing and crying with our contacts. We learned to look at cultures holistically and tried not to make the mistake of equating a small piece of what we could see as representative of the whole of it. As the field matured, we began to include a dialogue with our contacts in our analysis, allowing us to reach deeper understandings of what really was going on. We began to insert ourselves into our ethnographies, those descriptive reports of our research findings, with the understanding that who we are and what we know affects both the people and the environment around us, changing them in ways both subtle and sharp. Edupunk in our theory and practice takes a shape that acknowledges the motion of human existence, the ever-changing world we look at and the myriad of ways we look at her. I suppose you could say that we are anthropunk.

My first foray into edupunk teaching occurred after I found a host of interesting and short videos on youtube with anthropology (and related discipline) themes. My pedagogy grew to include class wikis, blogs, photo sites, hands-on participant-observations of their own, and the use of laptops and Twitter in class. After reading about Michael Wesch’s World Simulation, I decided to try that, too. This last step is not for the faint-hearted, I must advise, but the students loved the opportunity to act out in simulation all the concepts they had learned about during the semester.

Wait, wait, you’re thinking, this is all way beyond your comfort level! You’re just getting used to students sending emails, or using a CMS to track grades, you like taking notes and having someone tell you the information you need, you don’t want to do this, you don’t have the time or expertise! Ah, you see, you don’t have to do it all at once. You don’t have to do it just because it’s there, or expected of you.

All of us have different styles, but I warrant that all of us also can include some of the tricks and tips I’ll be talking about without changing who we are. In future columns, I hope to walk you through ways in which, with little steps, we can open both our learning and teaching styles, our ways of “living the world, not just in it”. (EI) After all, we in anthropology did participation first, and I think we still do it best.

Denice Szafran is an adjunct lecturer in anthropology at SUNY College at Buffalo and SUNY University at Buffalo, where she is also a PhD student in Cultural Anthropology.

Sites referenced:

http://www.anthropunk.com
Anthropunk

http://educationinnovation.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/07/pirates-and-edupunks-stick-it-to-big-education.html
Education Innovation

http://mediatedcultures.net/worldsim.htm
Digital Ethnography at Kansas State University

Findings is a new, regular column contribution appearing in the magazine, Anthropology Now. Each column highlight emerging anthropological research through a series of short reviews co-authored and co-edited by a diverse student collective from The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. The website is happy to be able to offer a sample of this column appearing in the new Fall issue #2 of Anthropology Now. If you like what you see, please visit Paradigm Publishers for more information on how to subscribe and get full access to the magazine, Anthropology Now.

Silencing Race
Angelina E. Castagno. 2008. “‘I Don’t Want to Hear That!’: Legitimating Whiteness through Silence in Schools.” Anthropology & Education Quarterly 39(3): 314–333.

Despite the adage “Silence is golden,” stifling and ignoring student discussion about race in schools helps reinforce whiteness as the status quo. Angelina E. Castagno’s one-year ethnographic study of two junior high schools in Utah found that the primary lessons taught about race and racism are often communicated through silence. This remains common even in school districts that embrace “multiculturalism” as school policy, educate racially diverse student populations, and employ racial categories to measure and track gaps in academic achievement. White educators frequently prioritize their own comfort over allowing frank discussions about race in their classroom both by remaining silent about race and racism and by silencing students’ “race talk.” Teachers use racially coded language—such as language ability and reference to social class—to avoid talking about the social significance of race in structuring the school environment and student experience. Further, teachers ignore “race talk” by failing to address students’ informal charges of systematic racial discrimination and by failing to interrupt racist comments by students in class. Such “color-mute” strategies convey to students that systemic racism is either nonexistent or unimportant. Teachers also actively silence student commentary about race as “impolite,” thereby reinforcing the message that race should not be publicly discussed. Engaging in silence and silencing helps to enforce the illusion that race does not matter and reinforces the dominance of whiteness in schools.

Given the ongoing prevalence of de facto racial segregation in public schools in the United States, such a consistent pattern among educators defending the racial status quo through silence is troubling. Castagno’s research illustrates that teachers’ desires to alleviate conflict and fear of broaching discussions about race provide the emotional base for silencing race-talk. However, this commitment to politeness reinforces the status quo and inhibits educators from challenging students’ racial biases. Recognizing that all U.S. youth encounter a social world steeped in racial images and organized by racial hierarchies, adhering to the rule that “silence is golden” does our youth an injustice.

—Sophie Statzel

Waging Tourism
Rebecca Stein. 2008. “Souvenirs of Conquest: Israeli Occupations as Tourist Events.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 40:647–669.

Last March, global media outlets celebrated the resumption of package tours to war-ravaged Iraq as a sign of more settled times and a potential revenue stream in a devastated economy. A more critical look at tourism raises uncomfortable questions about the global distribution of wealth and power. Who has the financial means and political standing to cross borders as consumer and voyeur? What kind of travel is celebrated in tourist accounts, obscuring more painful journeys of economic migrants, refugees, and prisoners? When colonial occupation or military violence facilitates vacationing, another question arises: when does tourism become complicit with violence?

Rebecca Stein addresses this last question with reference to Israel in her article, “Souvenirs of Conquest.” She explores connections between militarism and leisure through a critical reading of media accounts of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and ensuing occupation, as well as the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon.
Israeli tourist activities boomed in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and other occupied Palestinian cities in the days following the 1967 war. Reports of sightseeing excursions, pilgrimages, and bargain-hunting expeditions lauded Israeli tourism while masking the recent violence. Occupied Palestinian territories were redescribed as tourism locales at the same time that they were reconfigured as exploitable sources of cheap labor and natural resources, markets for Israeli commodities, and targets of territorial expansion through the construction of settlements.

In accounts of the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, the Israeli soldier becomes the new tourist-consumer. The violence and suffering of war are hidden amid tales of outings to restaurants and markets, of soldiers dancing the night away in clubs and enjoying the hospitality of their Lebanese hosts at a picnic.
Tourist accounts depict occupation in “positively pleasurable terms, rewriting [incursion and occupation] as experiences of collective sightseeing” (661). Stein argues that tourism is a tactic of “anti-conquest”—a means of cloaking ongoing state violence and occupation in a consumer-friendly shroud. Tourism explicitly avoids recognizing the violence that underwrites it. Reminders of this entanglement of tourism and militarism abound, whether in new package tours to Iraq or in picnicking sightseers in the hills above Gaza, replete with binoculars and portable espresso machines, consuming scenes of destruction in the first days of 2009.

—John Warner

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The mission of Anthropology Now is to make anthropological knowledge accessible to lay readers, and in turn to enrich knowledge and debate in the public sphere. One may wonder why it is that such a mission is necessary, and frankly, I’ve asked myself that same question. The fact is that much of scholarly work is about secrets. Members of nearly all academic disciplines engage in oblique theoretical debates that are so wrapped up in obscure jargon that it is challenging for a layperson to figure out. Why is this so? A few reasons come to mind, and these apply not only to anthropology, but to most academics and scholars across the board. And it will be in these areas that the online education section may be able to help. For the time being, there are two major secrets that come to mind.

First, there is a long history of literature that most people just do not have the time to get to know. There are very real but very fine shades of differences wrapped up in the jargon that point to yet other ideas and persons. Different terms may have almost exactly the same meaning, but each point to a different lineage – and part of any scholar’s work is about laying down claim to portions of that intellectual heritage. Those finer differences (which some of us may be secretly unfamiliar with) are part of how we figure out who we are as scholars. They do make a difference, but as they are not immediately accessible they are a strong part of our training when we go through graduate level education. They are our disciplinary secrets.

Second, scholars are in the work of identity construction, like everyone else: but we do it through our writing. You are what you write. As graduate students we learn to ape the styles of those we admire, and those with convoluted ideas and terminology wear a veneer of intellectual prestige that can seem very shiny. If you want to be a “scholar,” you have to write like one. Secretly however, most of us are terrified that others will see that the emperor wears no clothing: we are not as sophisticated and smart as we pretend to be. According to nearly every graduate student I have ever met (and even a few tenured faculty), that constitutes a major personal secret.

Anthropology Now is here to show that we don’t need to hide behind those secrets. As my colleague Denice Szafran so aptly describes, anthropology is fundamentally about engaging real people in their real lives: ones that are fluid, social and involve even us (we are human beings first and anthropologists second). Participation is what we are all about, and we don’t need to keep secrets.

This online education section will be set up to provide materials, discussions and activities that will give non-anthropologists a better look at some of those secrets. Whether you are an undergraduate college student looking for a major, planning on a career in anthropology or just a curious reader, this education section should help you to (1) get some closer insights into the materials you find in the journal, (2) give you the opportunity to discuss it with others, and (3) point you in a direction for finding out more. Finally, if you happen to be teaching a course in anthropology, we hope that this section can provide you with ideas, resources and activities that you can use with your class. If this is the case, we would also invite you to come back and share your experiences in trying these or your own activities with your classes.

Although Anthropology Now is a space for anthropologists, it is more fundamentally an open space for the general public to engage with anthropology. To better do so, we will maintain the following content in this online education section.

- GO FOR A DIP. Interested in what you read in the current issue? This section will give you some tips on where you can look for more information on this subject: books, films, articles and online resources.
- DIVE IN. Loved what you read? Craving more? This section will point to some more challenging materials that you might want to tangle with – but be ready to get out that highlighter and pocket dictionary.
- WHAT WAS THAT? This glossary will include sets of terms and concepts that are covered in the current issue that could use a little more explanation. We will try to bring lay readers up to speed on some of that long history of the concept, its usage, and point to other resources to help fill in the gaps.
- DISCUSS IT. These forums will provide a setting for the discussion of the content in the current issue. Not only will we try to initiate some interesting discussions, but we will give you the chance to ask questions or bring up whatever is on your mind. Our goal is to bring in the perspective of anthropologists to help clarify the journal and its content.
- TRY IT. With every issue, we will offer suggestions for activities that you (or your class) can try yourselves. Denice’s column describes why it is that anthropology is so concerned with the lived experience, so this section will give you ideas on how you can safely try out some of those techniques. These can range from media analysis to reflecting on participant observation, and that experience can be shared in the DISCUSS IT section described above.

And there it is. I’m excited to see where things will head, and to be a part of it. See you in the forum.

Alex Posecznick is an adjunct lecturer at CUNY’s Borough of Manhattan Community College and Metropolitan College of New York, as well as a Ph.D. candidate in Applied Anthropology at Columbia University.