Teaching Anthropology

The Ethnographer’s Ethnicity

Eda Starova — Wed, 20 Apr 2022 03:22:30 -0700

Introductions to ethnographic research for university students in Macedonia are understandably starkly different from the often idealized ‘first encounters’ we read in classical anthropological texts, what Hammersley and Atkinson call “the Western ‘rite of passage’”. Students from Macedonia, during their four-year studies, conduct fieldwork in urban and rural areas of their home country, usually focusing on a different geographic region every year. Through this experience, students are introduced to a ‘foreign’ field that is often very familiar – the language is common and the general cultural context is shared. In such a fieldwork context, the question of ethnicity, as a general category of importance in the self-identification of communities and citizens of the region, as well as a category frequently present in the rhetoric of various political groups, cannot be withheld. As such, the aim of this paper is to highlight the need for including ethnicity in conversations about fieldwork in Southeastern Europe, especially in introductory courses on research methodologies. In this sense, it is not only the ethnic identity of our interlocutors that comes to interest, but that of the researcher as well, for whom it can represent either a barrier or a tool with the ability to aid the research process. The paper will examine introductory reading materials and practices in ethnography, and attempt to synthesize understandings of auto-reflexive examples of fieldwork in multi-ethnic communities or multi-ethnic ethnographic encounters by anthropologists from Macedonia to propose methods that ethnicity can be included as a significant factor and characteristic of the researcher in teaching ethnography in the Southeastern European region.

Teaching, researching and living in the field: the challenges of applied ethnography as education.

Aris Anagnostopoulos, Eleni Stefanou, Evangelos Kyriakidis — Thu, 14 Apr 2022 00:00:00 -0700

Every summer for the past four years, a small group of Greek and foreign students gather at the mountainous village of Gonies Malevyziou in central Crete to participate in the monthly International Field School “Engaging Local Communities in Heritage Management through Archaeological Ethnography”, organized by the Heritage Management Organization and the Cultural Association of Gonies. Teaching ethnography to non-anthropologists in the field is a challenging process as it brings to the fore multiple and interchanging roles for teachers and students alike. In this process of collective ethnographic learning, where the teaching setting is also our living setting and research setting, we often wonder about the entangled roles in the production of knowledge and interpretations articulated through theoretical readings, daily chores and lived experience. The demands of active research running side by side to methodological instruction and teaching create different expectations that shape the learning experience in unpredictable ways. This paper discusses some of the issues involved in this process: What is the position of members of the local community as producers, instigators and transmitters of this knowledge? How are our multiple identities as teachers, researchers, friends, visitors, locals/non-locals articulated within and outside the field? Finally, how is the knowledge produced managed and controlled by the community and the people responsible for the summer school?

Uncomfortable Knowledge: Toward a Pedagogy of Reflexivity

Benedict Singleton, Maris Boyd Gillette, Anders Burman, Ruy Blanes — Thu, 24 Mar 2022 02:11:05 -0700

Reflexivity is a hallmark of good ethnography and many consider it a defining characteristic of anthropology. It is thus surprising that anthropologists have not paid more attention to how we teach students to be reflexive. Many of us learn reflexivity by making mistakes in the field, yet discussions of anthropological faux pas and their potential contributions to reflexive learning are typically limited to informal settings and occluded or heavily curated within our research outputs. In this article we employ analytic tools from the theory of sociocultural viability, in particular the notions of clumsiness, elegance, and uncomfortable knowledge, to contribute to developing a more explicit pedagogy of reflexivity. Since reading ethnographies plays a major role in how we teach anthropology, we argue that anthropologists should do more in their publications to highlight how awkward moments can deepen reflexivity. To advance this agenda, we provide cases of uncomfortable knowledge drawn from our own field experiences, highlighting how the social, emotional and embodied awkwardness of each situation contributed to acquiring reflexive insights. This article is thus a call to initiate prospective researchers earlier into the messy backstage of anthropological research, including by clarifying how the embodied and affective aspects of our interactions offer potential for deepening reflexive knowledge. In the hopes of facilitating the development of our pedagogies of reflexivity, we conclude the text with four recommendations that we feel will encourage reflexive learning from awkward fieldwork encounters.

Encounters in Musical Ethnography as Opportunities for Transformative Learning

Eleni Kallimopoulou — Tue, 22 Mar 2022 00:35:57 -0700

In this article, I offer an autobiographical account of teaching musical ethnography in an ethnomusicology classroom. My reflections derive from a variety of modules that are offered as part of undergraduate music programmes and that combine an ethnomusicology fieldwork component with a theoretical introduction to the cultural study of music and, in many cases, with hands-on musical performance. I see the classroom as an ethnographic field and explore its pedagogical potential for affective encounters, for engendering new cultural understandings and an ‘openness to different ways of being, knowing and doing’ (Spencer and Mills 2011). Responding to Wong’s call for education as cultural work (Wong 1998), I am especially interested in a critical pedagogy of ethnography that affords opportunities for transformative learning (Mezirow 1997, McIlwairth 2016) for students and teachers alike.