Cultural Anthropology Week 8: On to Bigger Things

After spring break, we started the second half of the course. The second half brings a change in both the lecture material and the assignments. I have gone over almost every major subdivision of culture (e.g., religion, social organization, gender, subsistence), so the remaining lectures zoom out further to talk about anthropological issues across cultures. For example, the first post-break lecture is on colonialism, which is the historical process by which European countries spread across the other continents, causing drastic cultural change. One of my students asked about colonialism way back in the first lecture, so it was good to make that connection across classes. The remaining lectures are on other broader issues such as race and globalization.

For now I had to concentrate on the current topic. The lecture went as expected. I’ve gotten very comfortable talking about each slide without repeating the bullet points verbatim. My slide notes have gotten more and more lengthy with additional topics that I could mention. The ‘verbal only’ stuff hopefully makes the class worth attending since I have started posting full slides on the Blackboard side instead of the ‘coloring book’ textless slides.

I wrapped up the last slides on religion from before break. My last slides on religion were about the spread of religious belief and how various cultures have adapted to it, so I took those slides and incorporated them in the colonialism lecture itself. Having a little more time this week also allowed me to show the video clips on Kwakitul dancing that I had omitted. The students found the clips interesting, so I was glad I had time to show them after all.

I do have one amusing anecdote from my colonialism lecture. Throughout these lectures I have been making an effort to present information from a neutral perspective. When discussing topics such as polygamy and warfare, I emphasize how the practice fits in with the rest of the culture and not judge it in any way. It’s the anthropological method! Well, in discussing colonialism, I was talking about the major products that were grown and shipped around the world:

“The Europeans took crops such as sugar cane, tobacco, cotton, and coffee around the world to mass grow them in suitable habitats. A large cheap labor force was needed. The solution that the colonizers used… was slavery.”

With that, I finally cracked up trying to keep my lecturer composure. I led the class into a little tension-relieving laugh during this serious lecture.

After the colonialism lecture, it was time to start the team poster project that I have been looking forward to since the planning stages of this course. My original plan was to the have poster projects presented at a class poster session with outside guests, and maybe even a public venue on campus. Since my class has twelve students, or three groups of four, the plans got scaled back to just a classroom affair. Still, I was excited to get started. Over the break, I wrote up the assignment instructions. The goal is to make a three panel poster on an indigenous culture. Since meeting as a group outside of class is difficult for community college students (who don’t live nearby in dormitories), my instructions divided the poster into eight roles. I figure that with four people per team, each student would take two of the roles, at least at first. The roles vary from research-oriented to poster design-oriented. The variety of roles allows students to choose what they are inclined to do. The students can get their roles done on their own time and bring their contribution to class for input and poster construction. It should also be possible for students to crank out their roles during poster work class time, if they were inclined.

As with my other attempts to convey a lot of instructions to the students, class got a bit chaotic. I need to brainstorm on how to hold people’s attention for this type of activity. Maybe I should pass out the instructions and talk about them before I have everyone break into teams. With the instructions in hand and everyone already arranged into teams, they just went through the instructions on their own as I tried going over the points slowly. I suppose that I could just have them go at it without my walkthrough as well.

The three teams told me which cultures they had decided to research, so it was off to the campus library! I led them there as a class to where the anthropology books were located. The library actually has a lot of books on anthropology. However, most students went to the computer banks to use the Internet for research instead. It was another crushing reminder of my age since Internet research was not a thing until my graduate school years. I still remember when my adviser told me about this new site named Google…

Anyway, we spent the rest of the class time at the library and students eventually filtered out. They did get a lot of preliminary work done, so I was pleased. The students will not return to the project for two weeks. Next week is perhaps the most important lecture: race. The next class is also important to me professionally because I will have an observer evaluating me. This is normal new adjunct procedure, or at least that’s what they tell me. I think that if I just do what I usually do, it will go well.

See you after class! (This is now my ending catch phrase).

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