Teaching Linguistic Anthropology in Anthropology Departments

[Nathaniel Dumas]

Dear Colleagues,

I hope all is well. I’m emailing to ask for some pedagogical insight for doing the upper-division undergraduate courses like “Language, Culture, and Society” (or “Language and Communication” and its other names) within anthropology departments. As many of you know, when this course is taught in anthropology departments, some departments (like the one I currently teach in) have the prerequisite that students must have taken the lower-division requirement of “Introduction to Anthropology” or, at least “Introduction to Sociocultural Anthropology,” for good reason because so much of current linguistic anthropology is in conversation with cultural anthropology. However, courses like undergraduate-level linguistic anthropology often attract students from linguistics departments and related fields who do not have a background in anthropology that such a course often presumes and not all departments are equally effective at enforcing this pre-requisite for various reasons. (Furthermore, if you are a contingent faculty person hired two weeks to one month before the semester begins, your control over this diminishes greatly because you are not officially listed as the instructor until that time and have no control over the enrollment process.) Thus, the linguistics students often enter the course with a popular (and often non-critical) understanding of anthropology, rather than one grounded in past curriculum experience alongside junior and senior anthropology students who have never had any exposure to fundamental linguistics before.

In this vein, I find that many of the linguistics students often struggle through a great deal of the course, despite a strong background in linguistics, because they do not have a grounding in anthropological theories, concepts, methods, and questions like anthropology majors do. Moreover, because the energy of the class is all connected, they often end up influencing the dynamics of the classroom as well, sometimes in counterproductive ways. Thus, I wanted to ask those of you in anthropology departments how you have dealt with this. My usual solution is to meet with linguistics majors in the first week and ask how they plan to catch up with the anthropology background that they don’t have but their fellow classmates do. Another solution that I often do is ask them why they are not taking the linguistics version of the course, as many departments of linguistics do offer a course with a similar title designed for linguistics majors. (What I have found here is that students often think these two courses are the same and interchangeable because they share the word “language” when, in fact, they are not, depending on the training of the instructor.). That said, how have some of you dealt with this issue? I just wanted to get some other solutions for those in anthropology departments so that I can further help the linguistics students who are in the class and know much about language structure but are at a loss in the knowledge and skill sets to succeed in an upper-division anthropology course. This is especially pertinent for us junior scholars, I feel, during a time when many of us know from research and personal experience that younger undergraduates tend to overestimate their skill sets and, as such, may feel like their instructor may be reprimanding them when, in fact, we are trying to help them before things go too far.

Please email me offline at nadumas at ucsc.edu with your responses so we don’t clog up anyone’s mailboxes. In the meanwhile, I hope everyone is having a great weekend!

 

Thanks in advance,

Nate


Nathaniel Dumas, PhD
Research Associate, Department of Anthropology
University of California, Santa Cruz
nadumas at ucsc.edu