MUSEUM FATIGUE

Anthropology is Easy and Other Undergraduate Myths

December 15, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

I’ve just spent a good portion of today grading the final ethnography reports for the semester. It has been quite an experience. Instead of feeling tired and worn out, I have found grading them interesting, insightful and—dare I say it—refreshing. I have actually been enjoying my end of the semester grading. Sometime in the next week I’ll get around to writing more about this semester’s new Introduction to Anthropology class. For now, however, I just had to share a comment made […]

Categories: Assignments, Introduction to Anthropology • Tags: "easy class", first year students, freshmen, undergraduate teaching

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Master “The Double Tap” for Success on Assignments

December 14, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

“In those moments when you’re not sure the undead are really dead dead, don’t get all stingy with your bullets. I mean, one more clean shot to the head and this lady could have avoided becoming a human happy meal. Woulda. Coulda. Shoulda.”—Zombieland (2009) It always seems to be at the end of the semester when a good portion of students finally get around to visiting me during office hours, asking about their scores and inquiring about tactics to be […]

Categories: Assignments, Higher Education, How To, Introduction to Anthropology • Tags: "double tap", assignments, final exam, midterm exam, success, test taking, Zombieland

Shen Yun Performing Arts as Falun Gong’s “Wild East Show”

December 13, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

This past week I went to my mailbox in the social sciences divisional office and was surprised to find every faculty mailbox had been stuffed to overflowing with a 2014 calendar of the Shen Yun dance troupe. It would be treating the “calendars” with too much respect to call them junk mail—much more respect than was shown to our faculty by the person who dumped them there—despite our administrative assistant’s warning that most would end up in the trash. We […]

Categories: "Swords and Silk", China, Mythologies, Random Reflections, Representation • Tags: Buffalo Bill, Chinese Culture, dance, Falun Gong, Orientalism, Shen Yun

Apptivity™ Seat for iPad® for TouchToddlers™ and iChildren®

December 10, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

Remember the round fleshy people stuffed into chairs with sippy cups and video screens hovering just inches from their faces in Pixar’s 2008 film Wall-E? I had always assumed they were intended as critical commentary on an over-mediated consumer society, not as an actual product concept. Evidently the designers over at Fisher-Price either didn’t see the film, or didn’t get the satire. There is no other explanation for the creation of The Newborn-to-Toddler Apptivity™ Seat for iPad® device—the unholy merging of a child […]

Categories: Bodies, Childhood, Consumption, End of Times, iPad • Tags: Aldous Huxley, Apptivity™ Seat, Betas, Brain Plasticity, Brave New World, Fisher-Price, iPad, iPotty, Science Fiction, Wall-E

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Not Playing Ping Pong Playing Ping Pong

November 27, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

“The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth it is the map that precedes the territory—precession of simulacra—it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there…” —Jean Baudrillard (1988: 166). Yesterday a student forwarded an image to me that she found on […]

Categories: Games, Photography, Representation • Tags: analog games, Jean Baudrillard, ping pong, simulacra, simulations, skeuomorph, video games

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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

What Weibo Wipes: A Collection of Censored Images

November 17, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

Sometime this last week a colleague shared a link to a very interesting collection of images erased from the Weibo microblogging website (“China’s Twitter”). The collection is being made by ProPublica and also includes some very interesting related articles about online censorship in China, such as “How to Get Censored on China’s Twitter.” I saved the link and didn’t really get a chance to look through it until last night. What an interesting collection it is—and most of the images have basic […]

Categories: China, Internet, Scripts, Surveillance, Visual Anthropology • Tags: censorship, censorship in China, ProPublica, social web, Weibo

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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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The Undying Chinese

November 4, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

It is an unfortunate title for a reasonably good rebuttal to the recent Jimmy Kimmel episode with the famous “kill everyone in China” comment. I’d love to know more about the person or people who produced it. No time today, however, for commentary or analysis of the clips assumptions about “Chineseness.”

Categories: China, Video clips • Tags: "kill everyone in China", Jimmy Kimmel

Channel C: Cross-Cultural Chinese College Conversations

November 3, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

I’m pretty impressed by a project at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, called Channel C. Apparently the brainchild of some Chinese students at UW, the “channel” is a series of short videos that discuss questions across the differences between Chinese students and mainstream American college life. Some topics include common stereotypes of Chinese students such as “Why Chinese Students Don’t Party?!” while others are more concerned with pointing out the unquestioned assumptions of parochial Americans such as “Why Chinese Students […]

Categories: China, Higher Education • Tags: American Born Chinese, American students, Channel C, Chinese Americans, Chinese Students, College Life, University of Wisconsin

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