Intro Cultural Ethnographies?

[Liz Coville]

Hi, everyone,

I've used Julie Cruikshank's _Do Glaciers Listen?_  I picked it because it
won the Victor Turner award, so it's well-written, and because it relates
somewhat to climate change, so it's got a bit of a contemporary angle.  It
divides into three sections: ethnographic, via stories told by elderly Yukon
residents; historica, via explorer accounts: and contemporary, via the
discourse of "preserving the wilderness" and making the area into a UNESCO
World Heritage site.

Also try to give students a sense of re-studies of the same place over time,
so students see how anthropology itself has changed.  Lee's _The Ju/hoansi_
and Lansing's _The Balinese_ work from this perspective, although mentioning
them in this thread makes me feel like I need to get up to date on recent
ethnographies!

Liz Coville
Dept Sociology & Anthropology
Carleton College

On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 9:00 PM, Matthew Bernius <mbernius at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 9:40 PM, Bruce Mannheim <mannheim at umich.edu> wrote:
>
> >  The problem I ran into (and one
> > I'll be better prepared for in the future) is that some (?)/many (?) of
> the
> > students were reading their first sustained non-fiction work.  (They've
> all
> > read novels and they've all read textbooks, which break the world into
> > bite-sized chunks.)  So your students might need to be prepared for the
> > reading they do before they actually delve into the first book.
> >
>
> This has been my experience too. The first couple sections/classes often
> end
> up dedicated to teaching them "how to read" and "extract."
>
> Also, their exposure (or lack there of) to texts that take critical
> positions on western stances should be taken into consideration as well.
> During the first few weeks, especially if a student has never encountered a
> critical social science/humanities course, the seemingly tamest of
> statements can lead to the majority of the class shutting down (especially
> Freshmen).
>
> -----------------------------
> Matthew Bernius
> PhD Student | Cultural Anthropology | Cornell University |
> http://anthropology.cornell.edu
> Researcher At Large | Open Publishing Lab @ the Rochester Institute of
> Technology | http://opl.cias.rit.edu
> mBernius at gMail.com | http://www.mattbernius.com | @mattBernius
> My calendar: http://bit.ly/hNWEII
>