Teen anthropology?

[Bryllars at concentric.net]

Interesting title - Teen anthropology

   In this country (US) all but a handful of teens can't read anyway.
  Some of the clearest and most direct books end up being among the hardest -
I remember 45 years ago giving a very intelligent young woman Patterns of
Culture
and was amazed at the difficulty she had reading it - and learned how
intricate its
apparently simple surface really was.
  What would a Japanese student make of the artificially British atmosphere
of
Return to Laughter (Laura Bohannon=Eleanore Smith Bowen) and its apparent
acceptance of the British colonial administration in Niigeria of that time .
Still it is a wonderful book and has chapters that make wonderful reading.

  It would seem to me that what you chose would depend in part on  what you
think
anthropology has to teach the students you are working with.
Usually I find that the American attitude to anthropology as a kind of
inquisitiveness
about the mystery of otherness amd a vision of universal human
understanding across
cultures does not transfer well.  Most students in other countries that I
have seen
want antrhopology to enlighten their own experience - buried as it usually
is in the matrix
of some European shell of colonized education or class isolation.  In this
way in Peru
John Murra found anthopology to be an agent of the Enlightenment and
self-awareness
 - something of great power.  Using action rather than reading - in Puerto
Rico, where
tourism was an issue he organized (in the 1940's early 50's) a day in which
the
students went out with cameras and photographed the tourists.
Or you could read the early parts of the declaration of independence.
  But I don't really know Japan. I have seen Japanese people visiting in
Bali -
carefully keeping themselves from too much contamination of their elegance,
yet still curious.
   Mead and Geertz's studies of Bali might be an interesting idea - and
there are pictures.
But in contrast and very relevant now - what of the vision of classical and
modern China
 - they must know that well from also from Japanese sources. And one has
reverse
ethnic standing to play with (I remember when young my favorite Chinese
cookbook
by Bu Wei Chao, wife of the linguist Yuen Ren Chao, who describes how she
was finally
taught to cook only when she was going to Japan in her late teens because
nobody could be expected to eat vulgar Japanese food.

   Or perhaps you would prefer to focus on ecology and farming or hunting.
The Eskimo are a wonderful case. Particularly if you can use of Knud
Rasmussen's
lively descriptions and lengthy passages of Eskimo narration of events.
There used to be a reader in world cultures of some kind which used
Weyer's wonderful study of population distribution in northern Greenland as
related to the available food supply to feed the dogs. If the dogs didn't
find enough
to eat it reduced the range over which they could hunt and so they got less
to eat
and so on, all of which determined the population that the area could support
and its spread on the land.
    Geertz's Agricultural Involution on the population of Java raises
wonderful
ideas about population in Asia that could produce lively discussion.
Homans' study of the English villager in the 13th century presents ideas about
the European feudal agricultural system on champagne land. Marc Bloch's
French Rural History is probably written above any teenager's head but is
one of
the great sources on this kind of thing. Their may be useful bits in
Netting's Jos Hill Farmers
(of the Nigerian plateau) or whatever it's title was - or maybe one of his
articles in the AA
or elsewhere focused on ecology.
    etc etc etc

best

Karl Reisman
Bryllars at concentric.net









At 03:52 PM 11/4/00 +0900, you wrote:
>Listmembers,
>
>I'm wondering whether anyone can suggest books dealing broadly with
>anthropology and/or sociology which would be suitable for a middle
>school/high school reader?  Anything from "intro" style books to case
>studies to fiction would be of interest.
>
>--Don
>
>
>
>
>
>Prof. Donald Carroll
>English Department
>Shikoku Gakuin University
>Bunkyo-cho 3-2-16
>Zentsuji-shi, Kagawa-ken 765-0013
>Japan
>
>Tel/Fax:  +81 (877) 63 4329
>Email:    dcarroll at sg-u.ac.jp
>
>