The goal of this class is to learn how to think like an anthropologist. In lectures and readings, we present a bunch of ideas and arguments. We don't simply want you to accept this as gospel. We want you to learn how to use these ideas to ask questions, challenge common sense, and figure out new perspectives for yourself. If there was one part of class that was most important, it would be tutorial. Tutorials are weekly meetings of a group of 25 students with a tutor. Each week, you read about another culture or a new idea, then write some thoughts on the readings, then prepare for class discussion, and then meet in class to discuss what we can conclude about the topic of the week.
Specifically, each week, you do the required readings, and then respond to an open question for discussion. Each week you will also have a 'tutorial exercise,' or something you prepare for sharing with your tutorial. Finally, each student will take a turn presenting 'Author X argues…', a statement in which you summarize the main claim or conclusion made by the author of one of the required readings in one sentence. So, for example, if you've been given Week 9, you would say, “Hello. In this week's reading, the author Suzanne Brenner argues….” Your tutor will also have more specific instructions on that. Along with class discussion, 'Author X argues…' also counts toward your participation mark.
Why would tutorial be the most important part of class? Well, for one thing, this is where you get to know your tutor and other students the best. Also this is where you practice the skills you need to write an essay, and to synthesize all the big ideas and theories of anthropology for the final essay exam. We do want you to be familiar with the basics of anthropology, but this class will also go beyond that. By the end, you should be able to explain these big ideas to someone else, in your own words, with your own examples from class readings. That's how you know you really understand something.
Lectures are important too. In lecture, Ryan and Terry will give you a broad overview of big ideas in anthropology which people have been debating for decades. We connect these to one of several themes of the class, so the parts fit together. Overall, we are telling a story. We are describing what makes anthropology different, and how anthropology itself came to question its own core ideas and adapt to new situations no one had considered before. In the end, we suggest that there is no such thing as modernity or progress at all. Cultural differences are enabled and sustained by global interconnections, and global forms of capitalism actually depend on maintaining cultural, social and political boundaries for some, while removing them for a select few.
Yet, just because we have a message does not mean that we are the only voice you'll hear in the lecture hall. What we discuss in this class can be shocking, upsetting, weird and wild. We want you to react. We want you to talk about it with the person sitting next to you. We want you to get up, move around and shake off all the assumptions that you've grown up with. Ryan and Terry both firmly believe that one learns by talking. We often are told that only experts and authorities should speak, and others should listen. But in fact, when you express yourself, even if you are not sure what you think yet, it gets the gears of the brain going. Likewise, when you listen to someone with whom you don't agree, you come to realize what you really think. So in both lecture and tutorial, we give you a chance to react, to comment and to participate. Whatever a lecture is, it ain't boring!