MUSEUM FATIGUE

MUSEUM FATIGUE

Main menu

Skip to content
  • About Museum Fatigue
  • Mystery Objects
  • Mythologies
  • About me

Category Archives: Anthropology

Show Grid Show List

Post navigation

Newer posts →

(Simple) Mobile Visual Ethnography Equipment

March 13, 2014 by Museum Fatigue

I’m often telling folks that the goal of my visual anthropology class is not to make filmmakers, but to use basic equipment to have my students make films together with others… For the past few years, students in my class have been working with local volunteers from our university neighborhood—The Hamline Midway—to make simple films together. During the first half of the semester they get to know one another, and the students get to learn the equipment, by making a […]

Categories: Anthropology, Fieldwork, Gear, How To, Visual Anthropology • Tags: FlipCam, FurryHead Windscreens, iPhone, visual ethnography, Zoom H1

1

Simulating Victor Turner’s Liminal of Pilgrimage on Campus

February 22, 2014 by Museum Fatigue

Every other year I offer one of my favorite and longest-running classes, Pilgrims, Travelers and Tourists—a class which surveys different genres of travel and voyaging historically and cross-culturally. Since travel and movement—questions of who travels, where, why and how—are central to the experience of being a person these days, I find the interesting theories and cases we examine in class to be easy for students to connect to their everyday experiences. Studying something as interesting and exciting as travel—something that is so […]

Categories: Anthropology, Assignments, Education, Pilgrims, Travelers, Tourists, Space • Tags: assignments, campus space, liminal, pedagogy, Peter Haakon Thompson, pilgrimage, spatial practice, teaching, university, Victor Turner, www.tentservices.org

1

“Keep Your Anthropologist Hat On and Don’t Be a Weirdo”: Comments from my Intro to Anthropology Finals

December 19, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

Since doing field exercises was an important part of this semester’s newly redone Introduction to Anthropology class, on the final I decided to ask a short essay question about fieldwork. The question asked students to comment on the experience of doing the class field exercises, the contradictions of participant-observation and the challenges of the fieldworker-as-data-collector. I had some trepidation asking complex questions of fieldwork to a class of mostly first-years. After a semester of weekly assignments, however, I assumed they […]

Categories: Anthropology, Introduction to Anthropology • Tags: anthropologist, Anthropology, Anthropology class, context, essay question, field assignment, fieldwork, final exam, participant-observation, sociocultural anthropology, student comments, teaching, undergraduate teaching

Leave a comment

The “Culture Wear” Assignment

November 23, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

This semester I have been teaching Introduction to Anthropology using an entirely different approach from previous years—one that puts the curiosity, focus, and experience of learning through “fieldwork” at the center. Rather than introducing the discipline through foundational terms, concepts and histories delivered through the common methods of reading, lecture, discussion and testing—my new class is built around a core of observation, note taking, interviewing and “writing-up” assignments that expect students to come to class every week having collected their own […]

Categories: Anthropology, Assignments, Introduction to Anthropology, Teaching • Tags: alienation, clothing, fashion, field assignment, production

4

Eating Uncrustables®, Eating Dog

November 4, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

A basic methodological assumption of anthropology is cultural relativism—that people in specific cultures have reasons for what they do that are contextually meaningful and that understanding of the things they do should be examined in context. Understanding aspects of what people do and explaining them cross-culturally—say in an undergraduate classroom, for example—is therefore an act of translation. Teaching anthropology can be tricky because it is easy for “far out” behaviors, from the perspective of students in the classroom, to simply be left […]

Categories: Anthropology, Food, Introduction to Anthropology, Teaching • Tags: Anthropology class, cultural relativism, eating dog, food culture, Sidney Mintz, translation, uncrustables®

Leave a comment

The Weight of Creation(ism)

August 31, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

“…it is an inherent characteristic of common-sense thought precisely to deny this and to affirm that its tenets are immediate deliverances of experience, not deliberated reflections upon it…common sense rests its [case] on the assertion that it is not a case at all, just life in a nutshell. The world is its authority.”—Clifford Geertz, “Common Sense as a Cultural System” “Wherever we turn, there is the Face of God…” —Harun Yahya Last week a colleague of mine in the Religion […]

Categories: Anthropology, Books, Education, Mystery Objects, Mythologies, Religion • Tags: adnan oktar, Atlas of Creation, Clifford Geertz, common sense, Creation Museum, Creationism, Global Publishing, Harun Yahya, Richard Dawkins, weight

Leave a comment

On Becoming An Anthropologist (in 1970)

August 26, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

Last month, while doing some deep cleaning in our anthropology lab, I came across a small booklet titled On Becoming and Anthropologist: A Career Pamphlet For Students. Prepared by Walter Goldschmidt at UCLA, it was published by the American Anthropological Association in 1970. Its attractive burnt orange color, retro font, and the unidentified “ethnic symbol” on the cover caught my eye. I set it aside, thinking it might be a nice time capsule—a snapshot of what becoming an anthropologist was […]

Categories: Anthropology, Books, Retro, Scripts, Work • Tags: 1970, American Anthropological Association, career, pamphlet, students

6

Candy Crush Saga and the Hänsel and Gretel Economy

July 7, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

[I was going through some old drafts of posts-never-completed this morning and decided to delete the ones I’ll likely never complete. Others, like this one are parts of ideas or beginnings of drafts that never got finished but don’t deserve to be deleted because there is something there worth keeping. So I’ve decided to just post them as-is.] bout six weeks ago I started playing Candy Crush Saga. A few days ago I stopped playing it at Level 147, because after […]

Categories: Anthropology, Consumption, Games, Play, Social Class • Tags: Candy Crush Saga, casual games, economy, Hänsel and Gretel, iPad, pay-as-you-go

Leave a comment

TARDIS Value: Blue Box as Totem and Fetish

June 10, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

There is a lot of Doctor Who going around these days. My teenage self—the closeted geek who stayed up late on Fridays and Saturdays to catch episodes on my local public TV channel—would be very happy to see the show’s resurgent global popularity. I even found an advertisement that used his image on the streets of Beijing a few months back. Of course there is a big difference between Doctor Who of the 1970s and 1980s and the post-2005 reanimated […]

Categories: Anthropology, China, Consumption, Games, Material Culture, Nostalgia, Science Fiction, TV, Value • Tags: Barnes and Noble, Branding, Doctor Who, Evans-Pritchard, Karl Marx, Monopoly, TARDIS, totems, Yahtzee

Leave a comment

Post navigation

Newer posts →

Recent Posts

  • F*ck E-Learning. Snow Days Teach Us Something More Important.
  • Why Don’t Minnesotans Have a Word For This Thing That Gives Us So Much Joy?
  • Breakout Discussion Groups in Minecraft
  • Student Feedback on Digital Anthropology Class in Three Modalities: Zoom, Minecraft and (Pandemic) In-person
  • A Different Sense of Space in Mineclass

Category Cloud

Anthropology Assignments Bodies Books China Consumption COVID Spring Education End of Times Fieldwork Food Higher Education How To Museums Mystery Objects Mythologies Nostalgia Objects of Power Photo Essays Politics Random Reflections Representation Scripts Surveillance Teaching Tourism Uncategorized Video clips Visual Anthropology Visual Anthropology Class

Archives

Blogroll

  • Anthrodendum
  • China Digital Times
  • Cyborgology
  • io9
  • Living Anthropologically
  • Museum Anthropology
  • Old Dirt, New Thoughts
  • The Ludologist
  • This Sociological Life

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Create a website or blog at WordPress.com
  • Follow Following
    • MUSEUM FATIGUE
    • Join 182 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • MUSEUM FATIGUE
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...