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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®

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Faux Vintage Photos and Profound Academic Labor

September 24, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

Weekly field assignments are making for a very interesting and useful pedagogical experiment in this Fall’s Introduction to Anthropology class. Reviewing and scoring the field journals each Tuesday, however, makes for some intense grading. At least taking a fake Daguerreotype photo of the pile of black Moleskine notebooks, and posting it on Facebook makes it feel like the work of grading is more profound than it might otherwise be.   UPDATE: Last night I finished evaluating the last of the journals, […]

Categories: Introduction to Anthropology, Photography, Representation, Social Class • Tags: assignments, faux vinage, school

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Midway Conversations: A Neighborhood Documentary

October 27, 2012 by Museum Fatigue

Last Wednesday night, Midway Conversations premiered at the Turf Club. The film was the final project of a collaborative neighborhood-based research project done by the Spring 2012 anthropology senior seminar at Hamline University. The premiere wasn’t without a few last-minute snafus—not least of which was a missing segment in the final copy of the film—but by about 5:45 the popcorn popper was full of hot popcorn and we had a high stack of Checkerboard Pizzas ready to serve. Following a brief introduction, the lights […]

Categories: Documentary, Teaching, Video clips, Visual Anthropology Class • Tags: Anthropology, Hamline Midway, Hamline University, Saint Paul, senior seminar, teaching film

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A Scent of Revolution from the Classroom

May 10, 2012 by Museum Fatigue

The past few years have been psychologically difficult ones to be teaching in higher education. Large scale economic doom has affected the average American’s personal wealth. Public disinvestment in civic infrastructure including higher education, combined with skyrocketing costs for things like healthcare, have pushed tuition prices ever higher. Employment worries. Debt. Some articles say the liberal arts are dead, while others say they a even more important than ever in a global economy. Is the university being corporatized? Is it a […]

Categories: Pilgrims, Travelers, Tourists, Teaching • Tags: humor, teaching

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Reimagining Campus Space: Fantasy as Social Practice

May 2, 2012 by Museum Fatigue

There is no place that is not haunted by many different spirits hidden there in silence, spirits one can “invoke” or not. Haunted places are the only ones people can live in—and this inverts the scheme of the Panopticon. — Michel de Certeau,The Practice of Everyday Life “…fantasy is now a social practice.” —Arjun Appadurai, “Global Ethnoscapes” In his book, The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau describes how the tactics of everyday life resist the strategic efforts of […]

Categories: Pilgrims, Travelers, Tourists, Teaching • Tags: Michel de Certeau, pedagogy, sociocultural anthropology, teaching, tourism

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Editing a Homework Film on iMovie for the iPad

March 12, 2012 by Museum Fatigue

This past week in the anthropology senior seminar we looked at narrative documentaries in anthropology and discussed issues of dramatization and aesthetics in John Marshall’s classic, The Hunters, and Robert Gardner’s Dead Birds. Both films were shot without sync sound equipment and feature both the heavy editorial hand of the filmmaker and a strong narrative voice (“Voice of God”) telling the story. In class we spent some time discussing the aspects of social life that cameras are good at capturing—things like movement, color, […]

Categories: How To, iPad, Teaching, Visual Anthropology Class • Tags: Anthropology, imovie, iPad, senior seminar, teaching, The Hunters, visual anthropology

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Teaching Film: Streaming Films and Taking “Visual Notes” on the iPad

February 29, 2012 by Museum Fatigue

Since the day my first iPad arrived nearly two years ago, I have enjoyed experimenting with it in my research and teaching. From the beginning I was impressed with the possibility that a single device could replace my lecture notes, deliver my Keynote presentations in class, store movie clips, file journal articles, keep ebooks, record field notes and just be fun. Initially I had planned to blog about my experiences, sharing things that I learned. I started out strong with […]

Categories: How To, iPad, Teaching, Visual Anthropology Class • Tags: classroom experience, film, iPad, teaching, visual anthropology

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Man With A Flip Video Camera

February 23, 2012 by Museum Fatigue

This week the anthropology senior seminar moved from still images to moving pictures. We began reading Anna Grimshaw’s book, The Ethnographer’s Eye: Ways of Seeing in Modern Anthropology, with her opening chapters on early film and ethnography.  At the same time we waded into David MacDougall’s chapter “The Body in Cinema” in his book, The Corporeal Image: Film, Ethnography and the Senses.  To these written texts, we added early short films by the Lumière Brothers.  The primary film we used to […]

Categories: Teaching, Visual Anthropology Class • Tags: Anthropology, David MacDougall, man with a movie camera, nanook of the north, senior seminar

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University at Snelling 20×20: A Petcha Kutcha Study

February 14, 2012 by Museum Fatigue

How can students in a senior seminar present ideas to the class in a low-stakes way that might enjoyable and, above all, fast enough that we can get through all of them with time for brief discussion at the end of class? After discussing photography for two weeks, I wanted everyone in class to actually take photographs—to do a brief study on a subject or theme—and present it to the class. Ideally the subject or theme would be related in […]

Categories: Teaching, Visual Anthropology, Visual Anthropology Class • Tags: Anthropology, petcha kutcha, Photography, senior seminar

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Reflections on Photography: Seeing and Feeling

February 9, 2012 by Museum Fatigue

Roughly the first two weeks of this semester’s anthropology senior seminar we are taking a brief look at photography, perception and representation. My idea was that before we discuss visual anthropology or ethnographic film we should take some time to examine the human eye and the representational power of photography. Since different parts of anthropology broadly look at humans biologically (biocultural/physical anthropology) and as meaning-making creatures (sociocultural anthropology), I thought it would be interesting to juxtapose a biological/neurological description of […]

Categories: Teaching, Visual Anthropology, Visual Anthropology Class • Tags: camera lucida, Photography, roland barthes, senior seminar, visual anthropology

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