Antonella's CHALLENGE QUESTION

. Can we teach anthropology through observation and sensorial experience?

My reflection on the future of teaching anthropology comes from my experience of teaching a course in Applied Anthropology last year at John Jay College in the City University of New York. It wasn’t the first time that I was teaching in that particular college and I thought that I was already prepared and well equipped for both course material and that particular audience. This time however, I thought I was even better prepared than previous times, because I was teaching “my daily bread,” that kind of anthropology that it has become almost second nature to me. I could have been able to bring in my experience, examples and anecdotes from my previous projects. I anticipated a good response from the students, because I could see the relation between anthropology and their lives.

Even though I wanted to offer a kind of course that gave the students the opportunity to tie their lives with academia through practice, I was following the usual academic canons. My syllabus was a travelogue of interesting and provoking readings aiming to inform and trigger critical thinking. Since I wanted to make sure that some of the conceptual pillars of our discipline were going to be there, I made sure to rehearse the concept of relativism and of cultural evolution and transformation, to talk about the “founding fathers” of the discipline”, I included sections where race, diversity, and ethics were discussed.

To my surprise, classes did not have the effect that I had anticipated. I couldn’t see many sparkles in the students’ eyes. In fact, their eyes were rolling when I was talking about my testing fieldwork in Latin America. They were not too eager to hear stories about how effective anthropologists can be in the field of human rights, and even not interested in all those “exciting” readings that I assigned. It was a real challenge for me how to get to them.

It wasn’t until the last topic in the syllabus, titled “consumer research,” that I saw that long anticipated sparkle in my students’ eyes. The reason why I put that section at the end, was because I thought that we could venture in this “black sheep” field of anthropology only when all the more intellectual fields had been covered. So, I decided to move that topic to the middle of the course and one evening I met the students at one of the several Whole Foods stores in the City instead of in the classroom. I asked them to observe contents of shopping carts, people’s shopping behaviors, to record conversations in their minds among customers and between customers and shop assistants, to interview shop managers, to pay attention to the location and displays of products within the store.

That was definitely a turning point both for me and for them. A simple un-staged event was what made them curious about anthropology. The observations they gathered at Whole Foods was hands on anthropology and “face-to-face cultural experience. Just by observing the types of food offered at the store and contrasting it with what their neighborhoods’ grocery stores offer had an impact of them. They were able to understand through experience in first person, the concepts of power, inequality, race, and ethnicity and they were able to articulate these concepts in a more powerful way than when absorbed from an article.

The lesson I learned from this episode is that sometime we anthropologists, caught up with definitions and sophisticated thoughts, forget that we dismiss the very notion of culture. There is in fact little to say about culture, but it takes a lot to grasp the basic concept. Students found it at Whole Foods, and I understood it in new ways.