MUSEUM FATIGUE

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

Explosion of Images: My Anthropology Senior Seminar Experiment

February 2, 2012 by Museum Fatigue

For the first time since I started at Hamline, our anthropology department is offering a senior seminar and I am the one lucky enough to be teaching it. With no history of offering such seminars, there is no set model to follow. Also, the senior seminar is only a requirement for anthropology majors who declare beginning this year, so the class has only attracted a small number of students—only seven students—the smallest class I have ever taught. Very exciting. Freed from […]

Categories: Teaching, Visual Anthropology, Visual Anthropology Class • Tags: Anthropology, senior seminar, teaching, visual anthropology

Mystery Object #1: Westerner Blowing Bubbles

January 26, 2012 by Museum Fatigue

From time to time in my travels I have come across unusual things that seem to defy interpretation—inscrutable objects that intrigue me because they are so mysterious. In previous generations, perhaps an anthropologist in an unfamiliar place would have been captivated by unusual statues, unfamiliar religions, esoteric cultural habits or exotic totems. The museums of former colonizers are stocked with the collections of such objects of mystery—institutional cabinets of academic curiosity. Today, however, many of those formerly exotic objects are sold […]

Categories: Mystery Objects, Random Reflections • Tags: consumption, mystery object

Remembering Culture at the Terracotta Warrior Museum

January 1, 2012 by Museum Fatigue

In my early twenties, when becoming an anthropology professor was still a far off aspiration, I spent a few years as a tour guide leading groups to China for Pacific Delight Tours. Experience as a guide on the front lines of the culture industry in the early years of China’s Post-Mao development provided me with a wealth of opportunities to see first-hand how tourist itineraries were drawn, sites were narrated and tourists experienced Chinese “Culture.” Here I have to make […]

Categories: Fieldwork, Museums • Tags: memory, museum, Terracotta Warriors, tourism

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Walmart in China

December 29, 2011 by Museum Fatigue

A few weeks ago I was pleasantly surprised to receive my complementary copies of Walmart in China. Many of the papers in the collected volume were presented at a workshop on Walmart organized by Anita Chan held at Beijing University. The conference brought together a wide variety of scholars and activists from Australia, greater China, and North America. For me it was a great opportunity to see the wide variety of work done on Walmart both in Chinese and English. […]

Categories: Fieldwork • Tags: China, corporate culture, Walmart

Walmart and the Significance of $17.00

November 19, 2011 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.] If I were exiled to the proverbial desert isle and could only bring five photos with me to contemplate the human condition—five […]

Categories: Essays • Tags: globalization, Walmart

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Occupy Student Debt

October 10, 2011 by Museum Fatigue

**This is a repost of the original Facebook image and accompanying text. I have been meaning to archive a copy here. A sociology student at Hamline interviewed me about this image for her blog shorty after I posted it. It offers some useful context and explanation. Occupy Wall Street sure seems like a long time ago. Sadly, student debt is as big a problem as ever. I am a college professor increasingly frustrated by the incredible debt I see college students taking […]

Categories: Debt, Education, Photo Essays, Politics • Tags: 99%, Occupy Wall Street, public education, student debt

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Weeding My Thought Garden

September 9, 2011 by Museum Fatigue

Listen to many of the right-wing opponents of national healthcare and they will tell you that it is socialist or totalitatian. The well-read ones might even pull out the literary reference and assert that it is Orwellian–that the governement will take it over your life, tell you what to do with your health, and set up death panels to decide the final day of your mortal coil. I have always found this argument to contradict reality. Nearly every encounter I have […]

Categories: Random Reflections • Tags: biomanagement, healthcare

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