Unusual Suspects: Teaching Anthropology outside our Comfort Zone
By Lee D. Baker (Duke University)
At Duke University, seniors get the first registration window, and, like clockwork, my senior advisees scramble to make appointments one or two days before their window opens. For me, at least, advising is always a tug-a-war between the transactional and transformational: ensuring that advisees meet requirements, but also inviting each student to make meaning out of their education by looking at the courses they have taken and reflecting upon the experiences with which they have engaged. I want students to select courses that form a coherent pathway. Too often, a student's education entails a jumble of thirty-four courses required to graduate, and an incoherent mix of study-abroad experiences, internships, and volunteer activities. I want students to continue to stoke their curiosity and select courses that build on their volunteer, leadership, and global experiences, as well as develop their interests and passions.
Last fall, Crystal White (a pseudonym) came to my office, and she had a surprisingly coherent education. As an international comparative studies major, she had taken Arabic for four years, studied abroad in Cairo, and took courses on Palestine with anthropologist Rebecca Stein and on premodern Islam with historian Omid Safi. Her transcript depicted a strong theoretical grounding in postcolonial studies, transnationalism, and a critique of neoliberal states.
Crystal carefully placed her iPhone, Starbucks skinny latte, and keys on my desk and confidently flipped open her MacBook Pro. A simple ponytail fell in a cascade down her burnt-orange Patagonia quarter-zip, and a pendant of three identical triangles hung from a delicate gold necklace around her neck.
Crystal had put together an impressive interdisciplinary education focused on understanding the languages and cultures of the Middle East. I was very impressed and congratulated her on the way she crafted a rigorous and robust education inside and outside the classroom. She graciously accepted my praise and explained that it was challenging, but rewarding. "So," I asked, "what are you planning to do after you graduate?" She responded quickly, confidently, and enthusiastically, "I am going to work for Homeland Security and eradicate radical Islamic terrorism from our country." I nearly fell out of my chair. She went on, "I am a patriot, and I love my country. Islam is a beautiful and valuable religion, we just have to be smarter and more creative than the terrorists, we have to stop the process of self-radicalization and prevent people from coming to this country who manipulate the teachings of the Kor'an in a way that promotes terror."
I thought to myself, this is not your typical anthropology student. At Duke, cultural anthropology rarely attracts Republicans or members of Delta Delta Delta, the apex of the so-called core four sororities on campus. Republicans and Tri-Delts, however, are attracted to international comparative studies. Affectionately known as ICS, this interdisciplinary major for undergraduates integrates language learning with global and area studies. With more than one hundred majors, it is the fourth largest major in the social sciences, bested only by economics, public policy, and psychology. An interdisciplinary gateway and senior capstone course bookend the major. In addition, students choose four language courses, four courses focused on a region of the world, and four courses focused on globalization or transnationalism. Good advising and a student's commitment to developing a coherent pathway are the keys to successfully crafting an education with meaning. Done well, it is a robust and rigorous education that explores language, culture, and society from different perspectives and disciplines. Students combine research, civic and global engagement, and interdisciplinary learning to prepare to become global leaders in a complex world. Done poorly, it is an incoherent jumble of classes that have little thematic consistency. Most educational plans students stitch together hew along the lines of the former, rather than the latter.
One of the overall strengths of the program is its diversity. Although it has its share of conservatives, the major attracts students committed to the Antifa and BLM movements, world peace, and interfaith dialogue. Although students are more likely to work for an international NGO or go to graduate or professional school, we do have those who go to work for Bain Capital or the Department of Homeland Security. The vast majority of students are women, more than half of the students are people of color, a large percent are international students, and some are even members of our Reserve Officer Training Corp (ROTC). In a world that is increasingly polarized by race, class, and politics, creating a diverse community of learning constituted from smart students from different parts of the world, different subject positions, and different political orientations seems not just important but vital to the value of institutions of higher education. What role could interested anthropology departments play in fostering and supporting this type of learning community? Are anthropology programs positioned better than other disciplinary departments to facilitate an interdisciplinary program focused on critical global studies? Well, at Duke, in the past, the answer to these questions was maybe and probably yes. Now, the answer is maybe but probably not.
International comparative studies began at Duke forty-five years ago. In 1973, an interdisciplinary committee proposed a new major called comparative area studies with the goal of exploring "the problems of contemporary societies through a study of interactions between traditional societies and the forces of social and political change" (Hasso 2012, 12). I think it is important to note that the origin of this new program did not develop from Cold War area studies programs. Members of the committee, which included anthropologist William "Mac" O'Barr, wanted students to explore how traditional cultures in developing counties were responding to current events that generated rapid globalization. In 1973, those included the OPEC oil crisis, the withdrawal of US troops from Vietnam, Bosque and IRA terrorist bombings, the coup in Chile, and the independence of Belize and the Bahamas. It was the same year that the US Supreme Court made abortion legal in Roe v. Wade, Billie Jean King beat Bobby Riggs, and Stevie Wonder, David Bowie, and Led Zeppelin dominated the rotation of vinyl on the AM dial.
From its beginnings, ICS has always had robust enrollments, and for the past decade, it has been fairly steady, bouncing around one hundred, while anthropology has steadily lost majors, from a high of approximately sixty in 2006 to a low of twenty-five today. The cultural anthropology department has fifteen full-time faculty members, while ICS has two regular-rank faculty and one adjunct (or union faculty, which is what we call them now at Duke). The program also has a director, me. The program partners with other programs for language instruction and the global and area courses, so ICS can survive with only two regular-rank faculty members. It helps that both are extremely committed, enthusiastic, and engaged with their advisees and classes.
Students compose an interdisciplinary education by taking courses in other departments. Like at other universities, history, literature, and cultural anthropology, as well as the language programs, have been hit hard in the wake of the overall decline in majors in the humanities and interpretive social sciences. Simply put, ICS provides increased enrollments for these programs that have seen declines in both enrollments and majors over the last decade.
Although regular rank, the two faculty members are not on the tenure track. They are professors of the practice, as we call them, or PoPs for short. ICS has a program committee that provides advising, mentorship for undergraduate research, and strategic guidance, yet the program is dependent upon volunteer labor of faculty who are appointed in other departments. As one prominent faculty member reported to the student newspaper, "I am deeply committed to the ICS students I advise, but my first obligation, inevitably, is to my principal department. ICS students deserve to have more faculty whose primary commitment is to them" (Ramkumar 2015, 7). Identifying advisors and research mentors is a perpetual challenge, but also challenging is identifying faculty who are willing to chair reappointment review committees for our PoPs, which are only slightly less cumbersome than chairing a tenure-review committee. Finally, finding faculty members to serve as director has been virtually impossible. First, the workload is equivalent to being a department chair; however, it does not have a graduate program, it is not a department, and there are only two faculty members, with the prospects of adding only one more. Although I think it is a tremendous professional growth and development opportunity, faculty just don't think the investment in time is worth it.
Another reason principled faculty members have not been attracted to providing leadership for this distinctive program is that the administration does not want to invest the resources in ICS to make it a full-fledged department. Leaning on a particular vision of the neoliberal university, these faculty members logically argue that a model of education that outsources teaching to other departments makes the program a parasite, not a partner. The model is driven by efficiency—not the pursuit of excellence and knowledge. They are not wrong, but it does assume there is one model for successful education: the traditional department model with a set number of FTEs relative to the size of the major.
For eight years, I served as the dean of academic affairs and three years ago had the privilege to try to solve this challenge of trying to provide stable and sustainable leadership for this program. About fifteen years ago, however, when assessment was just becoming an integral part of the accountability component of the neoliberal university, the ICS director asked me (I was then serving as director of undergraduate studies for the Department of Cultural Anthropology), "What are your learning outcomes, because ours are pretty much like yours, so maybe we could collaborate on this exercise?" Right then and there, however, I thought if were so similar, why are we in different units? Except for ethnographic methods and anthropological theory, the learning outcomes were essentially the same—using critical theory to help students gain a nuanced understanding of different parts of the world, globalization, transnational, and the impact of colonialism and global capitalism.
In 2015, my colleague Linda Burton, then dean of social sciences, and I had to take over the leadership of ICS as deans. One effective approach to solve this problem, I argued, was to integrate ICS within cultural anthropology. I believed that the two units would be stronger together. To make a long story short, a committee agreed but made it clear that "a successful partnership between the Department of Cultural Anthropology and International Comparative Studies programs depends, as so many do, on a balanced combination of collaboration and independence."
I agreed to continue my service as director of ICS and agreed to chair our cultural anthropology department with the explicit provision that I would work toward structuring an enduring and sustainable partnership. But then we got a new dean of social sciences who thought otherwise, and has charged a new committee to explore what it would take to structure an autonomous and independent ICS. On the one hand, the entire exercise was a waste of time and political capital, but on the other hand, the conversations our cultural anthropology department had around pedagogy and the type of students we should be teaching were productive.
I have also learned that we, as anthropologists, are well positioned to foster a learning community and a community of learning grounded upon critical global studies with a diverse group of students—not just the left-leaning students committed to global health, social justice, and anticolonialism. We need to teach students like Crystal who believe Islam is beautiful and want to prevent terrorism.
The committee recommended and the dean agreed to maintain ICS as a stand-alone program. The question remains, however, how best can anthropologists teach and reach students who are not our usual suspects? Therefore, our department is currently thinking both strategically and deliberately about how best to offer courses that would attract a wider swath of students to foster and facilitate diverse communities of learning. Privileging anthropological concepts and perspectives (not necessarily methods and theories), we plan on offering clusters of courses that explore such themes as race and social justice, medicine and global health, finance and development, environment and culture, media and the digital, and performance and sport. The Duke administration does not want our anthropology program to integrate ICS into our department. However, we envision playing a leadership role on campus by offering courses along these specific themes. We want to partner with literature,, African and African America studies, history, education, philosophy, and gender, sexuality, and feminist studies to develop interdisciplinary "clusters" of courses around students' interests. What I learned from our ICS students, and what I have gleaned from the falling enrollments in our department, and cognate departments is that students are not necessarily interested in the theories of philosophy, historiography, or ethnographic methods. They are interested in, for example, global climate change and rainforest deforestation. So they pursue this curiosity by learning Portuguese or Spanish, history and literature of Latin America, international development, and take an anthropology class on the environment and the Anthropocene.
Our department believes that students who want to work for the Department of Homeland Security or the military should also have anthropology as part of their education. We hope these soon-to-be young professionals will learn from our more traditional students who might be viewed as our "core constituency," which will create a vibrant and diverse intellectual community that will help all students prepare to be global leaders for a complex world.
REFERENCES CITED
Hasso, Frances, 2012. "International Comparative Studies, Duke University, Application for Formal Program Status." Duke University: Arts and Sciences Council. https://docslide.com.br/documents/ics-program-status-application-appendices-july-2012.html.
Ramkumar, Amrith, 2015. "ICS Looking for Stability." The Chronicle: The Independent Daily at Duke University. August 21. https://issuu.com/dukechronicle/docs/duke_chronicle_friday__august_21__2.
Teaching and Critiquing Global Health: Or, “I Think I’ll Go into Consulting”
By Ramah McKay (University of Pennsylvania)
In my contribution to this series, I want to reflect on the ambivalent position of both teaching and critiquing global health. As an ethnographer, my work has asked how anthropological tools not only reflect but also construct "global health" concepts and practices. Through fieldwork I have conducted in Maputo, Mozambique, since 2006, I have asked what it means to construct health projects as explicitly "global" and about the modes of medicine, caregiving, and health that such definitions exclude.
These questions also animate my teaching. Like many anthropologists of medicine, I often teach courses on themes related to global health, humanitarianism, and development to undergraduates in anthropology and related fields. Yet global health is a highly contingent and polysemic concept. It describes a shifting set of practices and instantiates a diverse array of subject positions and inequalities for health actors and ethnographers alike. As a result, the work of teaching, writing about, and even critiquing global health can be hard to distinguish from the work of constituting it. For instance, ethnographies of health, medicine, and development in many parts of the world are used to illustrate the urgency of "global" health disparities—even as they also demonstrate how global health actors emerge from the same global inequities that produce suffering and ill health to begin with. While student interest in global health provides an opening for anthropological education, much anthropological work is also oriented toward critiquing and deconstructing the very projects, orientations, and modes of intervention that animate it. What pedagogical and analytical questions emerge from the work of anthropologists in both constituting and unpacking global health?
Critical Entanglements “In The Field”
At many universities, student interest in "global health" has accompanied a flourishing of institutional investments in global health centers, programs, initiatives, and interventions. As historical, social, ethnographic, and anthropological approaches have been incorporated into global health training (e.g., Farmer et al. 2013), undergraduate programs in the humanities and social sciences (anthropology, history, and area studies, among them) have made practical and pedagogical use of this expansion of student interest and institutional resources. Many anthropologists have therefore found a generative institutional niche by engaging with and often advocating for global health, even as they have also reflected critically on the political, economic, and health consequences of contemporary global health models of intervention (Pfeiffer and Chapman 2013).
At the same time, anthropological teaching on global health offers a means of responding to broader student desires and concerns, facilitating both broad-based anthropological engagements with classic anthropological concepts while also offering an object of study that seems more directly tied to professional trajectories. Thus, careers in a range of development-oriented and humanitarian fields (including global health) are sometimes offered in response to student concerns about the practicability of studying anthropology (or related qualitative or humanistic fields). Amid student concerns regarding the privileging of STEM disciplines by employers, government agencies, funders, and even family members, anthropologists can bridge humanistic and medical studies through links to global health. Because "global health" is sometimes more familiar to undergraduates in the United States than terms like "development," the phrase also seems well-suited for capturing student interest despite student and disciplinary anxieties regarding postgraduation employment. In both my current job and in my previous experience at a research-intensive public university, I have heard concerns with employability voiced students across many majors. Finally, for some students, medical anthropology—and studies of "global health," in particular— seem to offer a sense of "relevance," that enables not only an imagined career future but also to help them explain their interest in anthropology to family, friends, and peers.
For anthropologists working in the tradition of critical medical anthropology, however, some of the qualities that make the anthropology of global health so compelling to students are also sources of ambivalence (Locke 2014). While many anthropologists have contributed to global health pedagogy (e.g., Farmer et al. 2013), many have also taken a critical stance toward these interventions (e.g., Wendland, Erikson, and Sullivan 2016). Still others have queried the geographical assumptions and racialized representations that animate both humanitarian logics and accounts of them (Benton 2016). Global health ethnographies, for instance, may aim at disentangling the contradictory logics of humanitarian intervention and global health and at distinguishing situated practices of care from private and transnational resource flows. These accounts show how the work of managing projects takes resources, including staff, away from the implementation of health services, while new regimes of evidence-based medicine, rooted in globally circulating metrics, drive the forms of care and intervention that NGOs make available. As a result, undergraduate interest in global health may create an audience for anthropological courses and texts but also exists in tension with some dominant anthropological orientations towards global health.
This tension, however, is not restricted to anthropologists or to anthropology classrooms. In fact, this dual analytical stance often seems to be common to the actors and institutions that medical and political anthropologists working in this field might study: NGOs, doctors, funders and donors, public health workers, government institutions and actors. Critique not only circulates through anthropological texts but is also widely present in the practice and discourse of global health. In fact, over the course of my research, I have been struck by how well versed health practitioners are in these critiques. From national policymakers to NGO administrators, the value of the public health system and the limitations of nongovernmental assistance often seem so widely shared as to be commonsensical. For instance, a World Bank official with many years of experience in the Mozambican public sector impressed upon me the importance of public institutions, and NGO directors have extolled the virtues of a singular public system. Current World Bank head (and anthropologist and physician) Jim Kim, meanwhile, has sought to mainstream such critical perspectives into World Bank agendas and implementation strategies. Critical views of NGOs thus circulate widely, including at and through nongovernmental offices themselves, as well as in anthropological and public health critiques of them.
In both the field and the classroom, then, concerns with the "global" configurations of health and biomedicine bring practices of engagement and intervention together with practices of anthropological and social science critique. As an ethnographer, I have often found that these entangled political stakes are as much a part of my object of study as the health practices and spaces in which they are embedded. Like NGOs that may both instantiate and critique a humanitarian politics of care, my fieldwork has depended on the very practices and actors that I have studied and frequently sought to unpack. And like NGOs that enact global health as a field through the work of implementing projects, so too do ethnographic and anthropological accounts of something called "global health"—whether located in Maputo, rural Mozambique, Washington, DC, or Seattle—shore up the boundaries of global health as a field through the very work of analyzing and, frequently, teaching it. "Global health" thus serves as a boundary object between ethnography, pedagogy, intervention, and critique.
Pedagogy Between Critique and Practice
Learning to teach from, about, and beyond this unstable border has animated much of my recent teaching within an interdisciplinary undergraduate program on Health and Societies at the University of Pennsylvania. A basic precept of the major is that health is fundamentally social—a presupposition shared and articulated by many ethnographers and anthropologists. Students take courses across a wide range of departments and they can submatriculate in a variety of tracks, including "Global Health," "Gender and Health," "Medicine and History," and the most popular, "Health Care Management and Finance." While varying in disciplinary approaches that range from economics to bioethics to anthropology and sociology, the curriculum broadly seeks to demonstrate the social basis of health and healing across a range of time periods, geographical locations, medical traditions, and technological fields. In many courses, including those beyond anthropology, emphasis is placed on familiar anthropological and social science principles such as attentiveness to local context, the need for critical analysis of health data, the importance of equity and access in considering health interventions, and the historical contributions of primary health care. Thus, ethnographic and global health renderings of illness frequently converge in course topics and themes. (One side effect of this approach is a student complaint that the major can be "depressing" and "sad.") As students work through literature that both celebrates and critiques practices of health and development, the ambivalences of teaching and critiquing global health make visible broader tensions in the relationship between ethnographic practice and practices of intervention.
Yet critical convergences between anthropological stakes and nongovernmental practice also have conceptual and pedagogical limits. Shared critical perspectives on NGOs, for instance, not only work to critique and refine nongovernmental practice but often also articulate utopian visions of a future without NGOs or without global health—a future in which global health is both achieved and unnecessary. Ethnographic representations that global health inequities visible may also reanimate a racialized suffering slot (Trouillot 2003). And pedagogical approaches that both encourage and critique undergraduate involvement with global health, health disparities, and health interventions may misunderstand the complex, multifaceted, strategic, and sometimes self-interested ways in which students make use of training in "global" perspectives on health and inequality in the service of medical school applications or career aspirations far afield from anthropology or health. The ambivalences of global health ethnography, in other words, produce their own ambivalences in the classroom.
Students in this major have sometimes been described to me as future or aspiring "Paul Farmers." Yet, in focusing my pedagogy on these aspiring humanitarian actors and future (or current) "do-gooders," I have come to wonder whether I sometimes misread undergraduate desires for global health and, in the process, overlook some of the complexity of global health practice. Thus, in the remainder of this post, I want to reflect on some alternate pedagogical lives of critical anthropological and pedagogical principles—thinking instead of their trajectories through the careers of those (many) students for whom "Health Care Management and Finance" is a more compelling concentration than "Global Health."
My interest in doing so is shaped by two observations. First, students who begin with a commitment to global health nevertheless arrive in my office halfway through their junior year to let me know that they have decided to seek an internship. The first few times I heard this, I recalled my own college internships, stuffing envelopes for tiny NGOs in cramped offices and church basements. I soon realized they meant internships with "Goldman," Bain Capital, Boston Consulting, and a host of consulting firms with acronyms for names. For many students, this is facilitated by a university-sponsored process of on-campus recruiting, or OCR. These internships are the first step toward securing competitive and lucrative postgraduation jobs, for example, as health-care consultants or management consultants. What does critical global health pedagogy have to say to these students?
My second observation has to do with the practice of global health itself. In Mozambique, as in many places, much of the work of global health and development is performed not only by humanitarian actors and public health employees. Rather, global health and development are, and have long been, profit-making landscapes constituted by public-private partnerships, consulting firms, and market actors. Just as medical anthropologists have queried how accounts of transnational governmentality, structural violence, and neoliberal economies travel out of our departments and classes into institutionalized practices and efforts at reform, so too might we try to account for how anthropological education does or does not take root in diverse worlds of practice, including the private sector and financial practice.
Such questions may be more pressing as transnational funding for global health plateaus and even falls. In an imagined future world after global health, often figured as one in which health interventions are ever more securitized, financial models increasingly constitute African health systems as among the few remaining lucrative health markets. Moreover, in many places, private sector and consulting practices are already (and have long been) key sites in which ethnographic knowledge is generated, circulated, and enacted. How to speak, anthropologically, critically, and pedagogically to the students who will populate these fields of market creation and profit generation?
What Could I Say?
The necessity of such questions is evidenced by the many students who describe to me their discomfort with the experience of consulting even as they also struggle to identify or follow alternative paths. One student, for instance, described to me his experience at a "super day"—the highly competitive final interview—hosted by a well-known consulting firm. The interview entailed solving "cases," he mentioned, some easy and others more difficult. The first one I got, he added, was pharmaceuticals: "It was like, you buy a company that has a drug with three years left on the patent. You think the drug is underpriced but if you raise the price, sales will fall. What do you do?" What did you say? I asked. "Well, what could I say? If you raise the price by this much, sales will fall, but you'll still make an additional $80 million dollars over the three years of the patent." After a pause, he added: "I know! It's not what we learn in HSOC [Health and Societies]!"
What could he say? And what could I say to him? It is true that students in my courses do not learn to set drug prices or calculate drug futures. They do, however, learn what happens when markets determine access to medicine. They learn how the financialization of care excludes increasing numbers of patients and how it may lead to drug shortages or drug resistances that put public health and well-being at risk. Sometimes, they learn that the solution to all of this is structural change, the overthrow of global capitalism, or a return to primary health care. In the face of declining aid funding, an expanding private sector, and the constitution of health systems around the world as markets, where services are driven more by the demands of private equity than by any concern for health delivery (even along marketized lines), such critical solutions are often a hard sell. Yet many students remain ill-equipped to transform or intervene in the production of inequality in the more complex array of sites in which many aspire to work. The "future Paul Farmer" is one potential future for students in my courses, but it is only one among many. As I recall our conversation, I no longer hear this student's remark as a comment on the inexorable financialization of medicine, but rather as a challenge. "What could I say?" asks me to rethink not only who my students are and what futures they find desirable but also to embrace an expanded notion of the sites in which global health, development, and inequality are fashioned. Not restricted to the clinic, the family-planning program, the food basket, or the conservation effort, our teaching of "global health" might require or benefit from a more explicit engagement with studies of finance, employment, politics, and ideologies in the sites where policies are made and those in which they are enacted.
In my ongoing work, I am beginning to explore the transnational investment practices through which medical markets are being constituted in Africa. Thus, at a panel on "African health" at the Wharton School of Business, I listened to "angel investors" diagnose the role of NGOs in disrupting primary health-care systems in ways that were almost indistinguishable from anthropological critique. Vice presidents of private equity firms spoke to the irreducibly public and systemic dimensions of health and addressed the social, legal, and political specificities of diverse African locations. Unlike in my classroom, however, here in a conference room on the twenty-first floor of a luxury hotel, the critique of NGOs and the diagnosis of infrastructural failure were recuperated not through a return to primary health care but through new circulations of venture capital. Arriving late to the final session, I took one of the few empty spots only to find myself sitting next to my student. As pedagogies of "critique" and of engagement converge, then, they travel not only through humanitarian efforts but also into a diversity of professional, medical, political, and financial spaces whose aims may be different from or adjacent to my own. They open new audiences, and new objects of analysis and intervention, and in so doing expand the field of critical global health both geographically and conceptually.
Conclusion
Commentators have described global health as an unruly and obscure object. Encompassing a wide variety of technological, medical, epistemological, and political projects, the term elides important distinctions between the variety of political and medical configurations that are enacted under the sign of global health. Overlooking such ambiguity can be dangerous, scholars warn, since "the mere fact of taking global health as an object worthy of academic interest and scientific publications can be seen as concordant with technocratic common sense of even neoliberal ideology" (Fassin 2012, 104). These cautionary notes are salient not only for ethnographic practice but for global health pedagogy as well. As "global health" coheres, in ethnography and pedagogy alike, anthropologists not only risk fashioning a single medical-anthropological story (Mkhwanazi 2016) but also imagining a singular anthropological-pedagogical subject: the future do-gooder whose moral horizons are assumed in advance. Yet, as World Bank directors and private-equity analysts espouse critical stances familiar to and even informed by anthropology, the question of the usefulness of global health pedagogy—the simple question posed by my student—"What could I say?"—seems urgent.
Rather than emphasizing humanitarian and nongovernmental framings alone, pedagogical investments in "global" perspectives and "global health" might instead attend to the equally unruly but surprisingly convergent market-health spaces through which medicine is delivered. Students, like the ones I've described here, engaged in and by worlds that encompass but also exceed the anthropological/global health "slot" (Trouillot 2003) make clear that the careers of anthropological critique can be unpredictable, leading to formations of health and capital that I might not anticipate. As a teacher, I hope that some of the insights of global health ethnography—including intellectual humility, accountability to multiple actors (including those with the least capacity to enforce it), and attention to entangled human and more-than-human futures—remain salient no matter what. But these students also remind me not to assume a single way of imagining, constructing, intervening in, or critiquing a moral world of anthropological and global health insight.
REFERENCES CITED
Benton, Adia. 2016. "Risky Business: Race, Nonequivalence, and the Humanitarian Politics of Life." Visual Anthropology 29 (2): 187-203.
Farmer, Paul, Jim Kim, Arthur Kleinman, and Matthew Basilico. 2013. Reimagining Global Health: An Introduction. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Fassin, Didier. 2012. Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Locke, Peter. 2014. "Anthropology and Medical Humanitarianism in the Age of Global Health Education." In Medical Humanitarianism in States of Emergency, edited by Sharon Abramowitz and Catherine Panter-Brick. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Mkhwanazi, Nolwazi. 2016. "Medical Anthropology in Africa: The Trouble with a Single Story." Medical Anthropology 35 (2): 193-202.
Pfeiffer, James, and Rachel Chapman. 2010. "Anthropological Perspectives on Structural Adjustment and Public Health." Annual Review of Anthropology 39:149-65.
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 2003. Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Wendland, C., Erikson, S. L., & Sullivan, N. 2016. "Beneath the Spin: Moral Complexity & Rhetorical Simplicity in ‘Global Health’ Volunteering." In Volunteer Economies: The Politics and Ethics of Voluntary Labour in Africa, edited by Ruth Prince and Hannah Brown. Suffolk, UK: James Currey Publishers.
CITE AS
McKay, Ramah. 2018. “Teaching and Critiquing Global Health: Or, ‘I Think I'll Go into Consulting.’” American Anthropologist website, August 13.
Lessons from the Field: Pragmatism, Design Thinking, and an Existential Reframing of Engagement
By Carolyn Rouse (Princeton University)
The essays in this collection build on a conversation started by Richard Handler in his 2013 Cultural Anthropology article, "Disciplinary Adaptation and Undergraduate Desire: Anthropology and Global Development Studies in the Liberal Arts Curriculum." His article spoke to how we can appeal to student and institutional demands and within that framework change minds. He argues that something like the global development studies (GDS) program he and his students created at the University of Virginia offers anthropologists an opportunity to expose students to classic social science and anthropological theory in order to get them to reflect on the source of those desires in order to trouble them—to defetishize the desire to fix others, if you will. By helping to shape interdisciplinary programs like GDS, anthropologists have an opportunity to, for example, challenge Western theories of progress and value.
I appreciate Handler's intervention, but I am going to take the conversation of what anthropologists can do pedagogically in a slightly different direction. I want to suggest other ways in which taking students to the field and/or having them participate in interdisciplinary conversations can produce more reflexive students in disciplines beyond anthropology.
In the interest of brevity, I am going to presume familiarity on the part of the reader with particular scholars and debates described by Ramah McKay in her essay in this collection. I admire greatly the anthropological critiques of development. I teach the classics, including works by anthropologists like James Ferguson (1994) and Arturo Escobar (1995), economists like William Easterly (2014) and Dambisa Moyo (2009), and even journalists like Nina Munk (2010). At the same time, I appreciate the scholarship of those who believe that anthropologists should intervene when it comes to structural violence, including works by Paul Farmer (2003), Nancy Scheper-Hughes (1992), and Philippe Bourgois (2004).
But I come to the debate from a slightly different position. I am an African American, and many like me in the academy do not consider the stakes of academic knowledge production to be low, as the saying goes. Ideas legitimated by academics continue to haunt the lives of African Americans, from culture of poverty theories to historical erasure to race and IQ debates. We have witnessed the power of scholarship to legitimize socially oppressive policies, and we are therefore inclined to seek socially beneficial applications for our academic knowledge.
Another reason why we often privilege our "how does this relate to social justice?" pragmatic voice has to do with how the work of African American scholars is read. There is a racial politics to theorizing that makes our work illegible to others when we talk about things other than race. I'm thinking of Jenny Slateman's (2001) analysis of how subjectification and embodiment are not simply willful acts on our part. Rather, "reversibility"—or how others see us—is part of the iterative process of subject formation. The question of the racial and gendered politics of theorizing is something I have attempted to grapple with in my written work and my film Listening as a Radical Act: World Anthropologies and the Decentering of Western Though (on Vimeo, https://vimeo.com/125713372). While I would love to discuss this in depth, for this essay I only mention legibility and the stakes of social scientific research for African Americans to provide some explanation for how my positionality shaped my decision to go to Ghana and build a high school as a means of addressing anthropological questions about development.
My positionality meant I was less disposed than other anthropologists to the argument that anthropologists should do nothing, meaning not engage in "anti-politics" work, referring to Ferguson (1994), when it comes to international development. And I felt this even knowing the history of colonialism, imperialism, neocolonialism, and indirect rule, and knowing that Ferguson's analysis is brilliant. The critiques are important interventions and important object lessons for my students. But I treat the work of scholars like Arturo Escobar (1995) and James Ferguson (1994) as excellent histories of development rather than proof that the desire to change the world, and acting on that desire, is necessarily a bad thing.
Development and grappling with social change are human problems. Nostalgia for the future seems to be an aspect of human psychology linked, in part, to our need to push back against inevitable decay, like some taboos that code human action in the present as inviting either good or bad into our future lives (Piot 2010; Valeri 2000). Trying to control good and bad in the world through ritual practices like purification, witchcraft, bureaucracy, or expertise is what has enabled us to build cathedrals, fight cancer, and start wars (Douglas 1984; Evans-Pritchard 1976; Strathern 2000). And I note war because we have monuments, literally and figuratively, to human genius as well as human depravity.
So, while I reject the idea that economic development schemes are by definition imperialist and quixotic, I also reject structural violence as a useful analytic that enables us to identify what needs to be fixed (Farmer 2003). I reject it not because structural violence doesn't exist but rather because part of the human condition requires power—existential violence and physical control of bodies—in order to bend our wills in the service of establishing community. Any attempt to eradicate all forms of power is a fool's errand since we are legible to one another only through power.
I want to pass onto my students what I learned while building the school. One lesson is that anthropologists should not be afraid to put their theories to the test. That requires letting go of the idea that the only good interventions are those that initiate a cascade of uninterrupted, unequivocally positive social change. Development failure of one kind or another is part of any iterative process that leads to social change. The goal is to get students to understand that any good development design requires a plan that allows for multiple voices to shape and reshape the project along the way. A project that takes on a new set of goals should not be read as a failure if it emerges from democratic forms of engagement.
Another lesson my students learn in the field is that a pragmatic approach more in line with Hannah Arendt, a philosopher, is more sustainable than one drawn from Paul Farmer, a physician and anthropologist. What do I mean by that? I consider applied anthropology an oxymoron. Anthropology is, at its best, a reflexive discipline. Applied anthropologists often cannot afford to be too abstractly theoretically given that they have to adapt their findings to institutional power, meaning a policy expert still has to decide at what income a family no longer receives earned-income credit, a drug-court judge still has to decide which addicts must go back to prison, and professors have to decide whether to give a student an A, B, or C even knowing that our students have different backgrounds and some have to work twenty hours per week to pay for their educations.
In her essay in this volume, Kim Fortun uses Gregory Bateson's theory of the double bind to characterize these dilemmas (Bateson et al. 1956). The moment when an anthropologist must apply his or her power by making a decision is when he or she switches from being reflective and theoretical to pragmatic and instrumental. Getting students to understand and analyze how choices are made, how we switch from theory to practice, is one of the values of taking students into the field. And remember, as much as Farmer writes about structural violence, he essentially works for President Paul Kagame. Arendt (1958) recognizes that in order be politically engaged we cannot leave Plato's cave. To theorize from outside the cave is to feign immortality or to mistake that we are not vulnerable to the things that make us human.
In order to learn how to translate theory into practice, the students that I take to Ghana participate in projects from creating curriculum for the high school to building a wind turbine and teaching. What I do with my students when I take them to the field is to slowly disabuse them of the sense that they are as in control as they think they are. Each of their projects is constrained by Ghanaian educational policy, land, law, local aesthetics, history, and available resources. Whatever they imagined they were going to be doing when they signed up to participate in a school project is altered while in the field. Their experiences are altered by what I call the regulatory ecologies extant in Ghana, which are shaped by culture, but also by the social fields adjacent to and running through culture and the environment that are available to strangers, including law, infrastructure, aesthetics, and exchange.
Again, my goal is to get students to objectify or become cognizant of the information they are using to inform decision-making and to trouble that information in ways denoted by Handler (2013). Rather than see this as instrumentalizing anthropology, I consider this an act of translation. And we can't forget that testing our theories provides us an opportunity to sharpen them.
In the late twentieth century, we saw the growth of abstract theorizing not only in anthropology but in adjacent disciplines such as critical theory, media studies, feminism, and postcolonial theory. As anthropologists became more abstract, economists and other social scientists simplified their hypotheses and introduced their readers to their methods; behavioral economics, behavioral psychology, p-hacking, randomized control trials, ecological determinism. From Freakonomics to Scarcity to Thinking Fast and Slow, other social scientists have captured the imaginations of even President Obama, who invited Cass Sunstein to the White House to help explain how to nudge people.
We recognize the folly of that oversimplification, but we also recognize the folly of abstract theorizing untethered to experience. Perhaps now is the time to meet in the middle. Our methods continue to be robust, but our methods have their limits. Reflexivity is important, but for what? How again do we translate our findings? What information matters, and how can we get our students to consider that?
Given this focus, at an institutional level I am now building more interdisciplinary bridges with other departments and programs, but on our terms. And rather than trying to sell students and faculty (particularly those from other disciplines) on anthropological theory, we start with methods. With our program in entrepreneurship, we focus on design thinking and the value of ethnography. With computer science, we are demonstrating how ethnography is necessary for better big-data analyses. And with the introduction of concepts like "fake news," we are introducing our students to media theory and questions about digital evidence. We are doing this through the Ethnographic Data Visualization Lab (VizE Lab) I created, as well as through our methods classes and our new ethnographic studies certificate, which trains students around campus.
So, my goal has been to take students from a generative place of wanting to save the world to getting them to rethink theory through experience, to getting them to challenge evidence and expertise given what they now know. That's the journey I envision for my students. If I leave my students with nothing else, I am happy.
REFERENCES CITED
Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Bateson, Gregory, Don D. Jackson, Jay Haley, and John Weakland. 1956. "Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia." Behavioral Science 1 (4): 251–54.
Douglas, Mary. 1984. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. New York: ARK Paperbacks.
Easterly, William. 2013. The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor. New York: Basic Books.
Escobar, Arturo. 1995. Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Evans-Pritchard, E. E. 1976. Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Farmer, Paul. 2003. Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Ferguson, James. 1994. The Anti-Politics Machine: "Development," Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Handler, Richard. 2013. "Disciplinary Adaptation and Undergraduate Desire: Anthropology and Global Development Studies in the Liberal Arts Curriculum." Cultural Anthropology 28 (2): 181–203.
Moyo, Dambisa. 2009. Dead Aid: Why Aid is Not Working and How There is a Better Way for Africa. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.
Munk, Nina. 2013. The Idealist: Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty. New York: Random House.
Piot, Charles. 2010. Nostalgia for the Future: West Africa after the Cold War. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 1992. Death without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Scheper-Hughes, Nancy, and Philippe Bourgois. 2004. "Introduction: Making Sense of Violence." In Violence in War and Peace: An Anthology, edited by Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Philippe Bourgois. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.
Slateman, Jenny. 2001. "Tele-vision: Between Trust and Perceptual Faith," In Religion and Media, edited by Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.
Strathern, Marilyn. 2000. "Introduction: New Accountabilities." In Audit Culture: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy, edited by Marilyn Strathern. New York: Routledge.
Valeri, Valerio. 2000. Forest of Taboos: Morality, Hunting, and Identity among the Huaulu of the Moluccas. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Keeping One Day Ahead: Undergraduate Anthropology in a Regional Public University
By Jennifer Schlegel (Kutztown University)
Sitting in the Marriott conference room, listening to the panelists of "Undergraduate Desire," I wondered if the undergraduates at my publicly funded institution might have heard their experiences and concerns narrated in the papers. I did not hear the voices of students and anthropologists in regional public universities, which is why the organizers of the panel asked me to contribute my perspective to this collection of essays.
The situation at Kutztown is distinct from the other institutions represented in this collection. Kutztown University is one of fourteen universities that comprise Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education (PaSSHE). The system as a whole is stressed. After a yearlong search to replace Chancellor Frank Brogan (who retired and awaits confirmation in President Trump's Department of Education as assistant secretary of the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education), the board of governors has selected Dr. Daniel Greenstein, most recently of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, to be the next chancellor of the system. Among the pressing issues Greenstein will face is the very survival of the system. Within the past year, two reviews of PaSSHE have been released. The first, conducted by the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems, and was commissioned by PaSSHE, while the second, conducted by the RAND Corporation, was commissioned by the Republican-controlled state legislature. While redesign of the system is in order, the RAND report includes the possibility of closing some of the underenrolled and underperforming universities, including Cheyney University, the nation's oldest HBCU. Additionally, State Senator Scott Wagner, the Republican gubernatorial candidate, stated that the system won't be around in four years during a public hearing about the system. Should he be elected governor in November, there is every indication that he will try to make his prediction a reality. The situation is dire.
In an effort to remain competitive, universities within the system are pressed to demonstrate their distinctiveness. In doing so, we risk losing weaker programs and departments in the system to save our own. Stronger anthropology programs may survive; weaker ones may not. Students' undergraduate desires are less likely to be fulfilled, or, perhaps worse, less likely to be imagined under such constraints. While Lee Baker speaks to the potential for parasitic relationships at Duke in his essay in this collection, the situation is ripe for programmatic cannibalism across PaSSHE. Indeed, I hope the model for partnered rather than parasitic relationships exemplified at Duke can be manifest across our system.
Tuition to attend a PaSSHE school is not quite $7,500 per year, and the average annual cost to attend for an in-state student tops $24,000 (Fact Center: Financial Data). Recent enrollment at Kutztown hovered just below 8,000 students. The mean combined SAT score for incoming freshmen for fall 2016 is 986 (old SAT) and for fall 2017 is 1063 (new SAT). The anthropology program averages forty-five to fifty majors a year with six tenured or tenure-track anthropologists who teach 4/4 loads. We are down from ninety majors during the peak of our school's enrollment of 10,700. The vast majority of our students do not pursue graduate degrees. Some attend graduate school in professional programs, and we have the occasional student who gets accepted to a graduate program in anthropology.
The desire and longing for meaningful encounters with others is palpable among the students we see at Kutztown University. As with many anthropology programs, ours attracts Ruth Benedict's "misfits," who sense the relevance of the field to their own states of becoming. This is especially true in the current political climate. Our students came of age in an America that still offered the promise of a time when all might be able to safely live lives of alterity after dismantling white supremacy and heterosexism. Students attracted to our anthropology classes, including first-generation students, took pride in honing their political voices. And then the 2016 election happened. Quickly, the nascent optimism (re)turned to pessimism and fear.
There is a sense of urgency among my students given the increasing injustices they both witness and experience. Students feel a need to be equipped with knowledge and tools NOW. Their urgent calls need a rapid response, but universities and departments operate in longer time frames and therefore struggle to meet their demands. As my colleague Bill Donner puts it, "Students want to apply anthropology, they do not want applied anthropology." Our students' desires to do good in the world is a common theme in this collection of articles. As Rouse and Waterston point out, where this "world" is depends on where our students are coming from; habitus matters. For many of our students, that "world" is the one they inhabit. More similar to the students described by Waterston than Handler and Stoner, Kutztown students bring the emotional, experience-near element to their classes with the need for the critical focus, analysis, and understanding necessary to apply anthropology to the worlds they inhabit.
Two examples of courses that capitalize on our students' experience-near orientations with limited exposure to critical anthropology are Hate across Cultures and The Anthropology of Frauds and Fantastic Claims. "Hate Class," as it is known, investigates practices of dehumanization related primarily to racism, religion, heterosexism, and misogyny globally and locally, ending with an examination of hate and bias activity on our own campus, asking and answering fundamentally ethnographic questions, such as "Why is hate here, and why now?" Students are challenged to make sense of their own experiences with, and exposure to, dehumanization by examining hate as a cultural practice with the goal of challenging it in order to dismantle it. In the "Frauds" class, students learn to apply analytic tools to distinguish pseudoscientific explanations from scientific explanations, again with the goal of challenging fraudulent claims in order to dismantle them. This is a skills-based class with an emphasis on informational literacy preparing students to engage the world they inhabit. Developing and offering courses like "Hate" and "Frauds" are "rapid responses" to meeting the desires and the needs of our students, meeting them where they are.
As is the case with undergraduates throughout the country, a knowledge of anthropology prior to matriculation is the exception, not the rule. Our students, much like the students Handler and Stoner refer to, are interested in making the world a better place. For them, doing anthropology to change the world does not include fieldwork abroad. The world they seek to change is the one they are engaging with every day. Students who cannot afford textbooks cannot afford to study abroad. Students who are experiencing food insecurity and visit our on-campus food pantry are looking for local opportunities.
Our students have limited choices and resources when it comes to experiential learning opportunities, which may become further limited in Pennsylvania's political and economic climate. While possibilities for going abroad for the types of engaged learning described separately by Piot and Middleton have increased, going local is more realistic for our students and our funding models. A local focus provides a way to create an anthropology with an experience-near orientation
Kutztown University is the home to the Pennsylvania German Cultural Heritage Center, an open-air folklife and research center dedicated to the preservation and promotion of Pennsylvania German folk culture. While explicit student interest in the local ethnic and ethno-religious culture and language of the Pennsylvania Dutch is minimal, students are attracted to gaining skills in cultural preservation, museum studies, historical research, food and culture, and cultural representation. In terms of interdisciplinary opportunities, students in biology, history, geography, German, and library science are "doing anthropology" in a unique field setting. For our undergraduate majors, internships are available that provide experience and opportunity for research that can lead to conference presentations and a more competitive résumé for employment following graduation.
A local focus provides a way to create an anthropology-near orientation. If doing anthropology means, at its most basic, applying critical thinking skills and holistic perspectives to the world around us every day, then, we tell our students, the opportunity to "do" anthropology is all around them. Investing in anthropology undergraduate education and addressing students' interests in applying anthropology is also a way to develop the cultural awareness and sensitivity of the residents and citizens of Pennsylvania. The local focus of our curriculum is impactful as our traditionally-aged students become adults since our students overwhelmingly end up remaining in Pennsylvania for their adult lives.
We need to be able to adapt our curriculum to fit our students' emerging interests while also attending to the needs of the institution. I see opportunities for this to occur in interdisciplinary endeavors, in the classroom, and in the field. In the PaSSHE system, the sixth most popular major is "social sciences" (Fact Center: Student Data). Anthropology is lumped in there, though some argue we are not a social science but belong with the biological sciences or the humanities. In the same way that UVA created an interdisciplinary global studies program and Duke an interdisciplinary international studies program, my university is seeking a way to combine the social sciences proactively. If we combined our disciplines, we would advertise and recruit as a unit, provide learning communities as a unit, and develop disciplinary tie-ins through the development of new minors and certificate programs.
While many are on board with the creation of new disciplinary minors for social science majors, there remains the unanswered question of how minors are valued by our institution in terms of receiving budgetary support by generating "butts in seats." And while some fear anthropology programs will be diluted through interdisciplinary collaborations, others suggest that social science students would encounter anthropological perspectives that would have been unavailable to them without the new programs.
We have had success with a local archaeological field school. Students report having been transformed by their field-school experiences in rural Pennsylvania. For some, this is the only opportunity they will have to dig. For others, it becomes the basis for participating in a research project that results in undergraduate conference posters and papers. Currently, 100 percent of the anthropology majors who have participated in the field school graduated within four years. Our students' success has increased the likelihood the field school will continue to receive institutional support. We are also applying anthropology on our campus. For example, we have had some success with a multiyear research project on the use of our university library. It is important for the future of our program that we are able to demonstrate that our students have developed skills and a theoretical orientation to solving problems in their own backyards.
Other examples of applied work performed by Kutztown University anthropology majors include the student with the not-quite-full-time job at a local bank who suggests to her boss that the newly initiated friendliness campaign comes across as too aggressive by male patrons, the student volunteering in a hospital who researches the bilingual needs of patients, and the student attending a country line-dancing club who asks the manager to weigh the social and economic impact of eliminating racist songs from the DJ's playlist. And sometimes our students who never imagined themselves in academia get hooked, like the student who took a cultural anthropology class as a freshman on a whim, knowing that his career as a professional firefighter was set up. He ended up with an anthropology BA, MA, and a career in higher education administration. Does it take an anthropology degree to do any one of those things? Did anthropology ever matter more?
Anthropology programs in underfunded public colleges and universities manage the often-competing interests of state legislatures, the business sector, and university administrators, as well as the interests of students, parents and anthropology professors. All have skin in the game. Remaining relevant to—and one day ahead of—each of these interests is crucial for the survival of our programs and the R1 programs who graduate the next generation of scholars and applied anthropologists.
Beyond the Fieldwork Imaginary: Cultivating Undergraduate Exposure
By Alexandra Middleton (Princeton University)
What draws an undergraduate anthropology student to pursue a graduate degree in anthropology in the twenty-first century? What kind of experiences can expose undergraduate students to the world of professional academic anthropology? How do we, as educators and pedagogues, create an undergraduate climate of doing anthropology, not just studying it? That is, what engenders a more active, agentive engagement with the discipline and its methods, or a means for students to test their interest, capacity, and proclivity in what it means to be a practicing anthropologist? As doing anthropology requires us to travel outside the Ivory Tower to fieldsites—from a three-hundred-person village in northern Togo to the basement of a Silicon Valley startup—what spaces exist beyond the classroom and academy to engender this exposure for undergraduates?
To consider such questions, I decided to turn the lens back on myself. What drew me, once an undergraduate cultural anthropology major, to pursue my PhD in anthropology? One particular engagement stands out as distinctly formative and persuasive, a unique combination of fieldwork and undergraduate publishing led by Charles Piot, my professor and adviser at Duke University. In revisiting this experience, I hope to tap into a larger conversation about how rethinking, reinvesting in, and perhaps even reinventing undergraduate publishing might offer a pathway toward cultivating, at the undergraduate level, a reinvestment in anthropology itself.
In August of 2011, I was part of a group of five undergraduates who had just returned from a summer spent in Kuwdé, Togo, conducting our own independent fieldwork projects. We were just one generation in what is now a lineage of about seventy students who have traveled with Charlie to Togo over nine consecutive summers. As Charlie mentions in his essay in this collection, we carried out a mixture of fieldwork and small-scale development projects. The uniqueness and privilege of this summer fieldwork experience was not lost on me. Indeed, it is rare to accompany an anthropologist such as Charlie to the very fieldsite where he completed his own dissertation research decades ago, meeting and engaging with some of his very same interlocutors. Charlie's long history of engagement with the village of Kuwdé created a unique point of entry that can take many years to build.
When it came to our independent inquiries and projects, each student held full rein. In my cohort, student work ranged from an ethnographic exploration of Kuwdé's traditional medical system to the construction of a solar-powered cyber-internet café. Simultaneously, we observed Charlie conducting ethnographic interviews in parallel for his own research. Slightly distinct from a traditional field-school model, this balance of shadowing a professional anthropologist in their work while also conducting our own blurred the boundaries between studying and doing in an embodied, practiced way.
Upon our return to the US, we contemplated how best to translate our fieldnotes and summer experiences into written form in a way that might reach broader peer audiences. The usual outlets—for example, a one-page report to the summer funding agency or even a chapter of a forthcoming senior thesis—seemed rather insular and limited. During my time in Togo and after my return, a particular book kept entering my mind. It was titled Health Care in Maya Guatemala: Confronting Medical Pluralism in a Developing Country, edited by John Hawkins and Walter Randolph Adams, and I had read the book in my Indigenous Medicine and Global Health course at Duke. While topically relevant for someone studying indigenous medicine and the ethical-moral challenges of development, the book actually entered my mind for another reason. Save for the introduction and conclusion, which were penned by the editor-professors, the book was written entirely by undergraduates. There was something palpably accessible about reading these chapters and knowing that their writers were in much the same developmental stage as I was. They grappled with some of the same questions I did and wrote in a language I found to be more accessible than most professional writing in anthropology. Their conversations were familiar. Reading them, I felt as though I were dialoguing with some of my peers back in Togo. Struck by the resonance of this book with my own fieldwork experience, I approached Charlie with an idea. "Charlie, do you think we could do something like this?" Charlie, in his characteristically optimistic and eternally can-do spirit, replied, "I don't see why not!"
That spring and the following fall, we assembled a weekly writing group of students from two consecutive summer programs. We began writing up our fieldnotes and interviews into chapter-length essays. Once we had workable drafts, we invited John Hawkins, one of the editors of Health Care in Maya Guatemala, to Duke to hold a workshop on undergraduate writing for publication. Hawkins highlighted the unique challenges his group faced, from writing for an undergraduate audience to communicating the value of undergraduate publishing to academic presses. We also held an editing workshop with Ken Wissoker of Duke University Press, who acquainted us with the intricacies of peer review. One of the most resonant recommendations Ken gave us was to create a space to be honest and reflexive in our work. He emphasized harnessing, rather than downplaying, our unique subject position as emerging scholars. What were the moments when our ideologies and expectations came up against field realities? How did we navigate these moments?
Following the advice of Hawkins and Wissoker, we decided to open the book with five shorter, more personal essays—reflexive exposés of the moments that didn't make it into the second half of the book that houses the more traditional chapters. By detailing, in a conversational tone, how our field experiences informed our analytical work, these exposés were critical in terms of demonstrating the pedagogical value of student engagement. In writing them, we were able to breathe a sigh and let go of the mantle of strained professionalism. In the end, our chapters are legible to broader audiences precisely because we imagined ourselves speaking to fellow undergraduates.
Some students confronted their own preconceptions and stereotypes, as well as reappraised their motivations for going to Togo in the first place. As Ben writes:
I wanted to go to an 'exotic' locale, where I could be of help . . . to Africa. No, not Togo. Africa. . . . My only experience with Africa prior to Togo consisted of reading books such as Heart of Darkness and Things Fall Apart and viewing Hollywood films such as Blood Diamond and The Last King of Scotland. Africa for me was a wilderness . . . rampant with corruption and crises. Africa was thirsty, and this thirst could be quenched by even a freshman college student. . . . I now realize how naive I was in my reasons for going to Togo. The personal relationships I formed . . . tore apart my Western stereotypes of Africa. (Ramsey 2016, 31)
In my aside, I reflected on my own evolution alongside my fieldwork from a self-conscious premedicine undergrad burdened with having to justify my interests in studying nonbiomedical practices to a budding anthropologist questioning the values and assumptions undergirding "medical efficacy" in the first place.
With these passages, the book became less of a detached presentation of research conclusions and findings and more of a transparent, at times even humorous, guide or conversation with other undergraduates about the realities of doing anthropology and development work as a young scholar. It was my hope that they spoke to what George Marcus (2009) has called the "fieldwork imaginary": our temporal anticipations and the negotiation of their consequences in real-life encounters.
Since its release in August 2016, Doing Development in West Africa: A Reader by and for Undergraduates (Piot 2016) is currently being taught in a dozen undergraduate classrooms (of which we are aware) across the country, in anthropology departments as well as interdisciplinary global health, African studies, and development programs. Its appeal, we believe, resonates with part of a broader trend in universities today to offer multidisciplinary global internship programs, many of which emphasize "doing development." Its value, then, lies in the application of an anthropological lens to the oft-depersonalizing and decontextualizing logics of "development" itself. By tending to "the local" and observing the consequences of our interventions firsthand, this anthropological lens offers an invaluable shift in critical consciousness and reflexivity at the undergraduate level. It implores undergraduates to question handed-down notions of "moral good" and "need" and to confront the embedded assumptions within their own "fieldwork imaginaries."
What, then, about my experience may speak to a broader recalibration of undergraduate pedagogy and curriculum? This experience of writing and publishing Doing Development in West Africa highlights an untapped frontier for undergraduates in the realm of publishing, as well as marks a discursive space that our discipline has, I believe, yet to fully harness. While undergraduates may have published prior to arriving to graduate school, often this publishing takes the form of coauthorship with a senior advisor. Several journals specifically exist to publish undergraduate work, including AnthroJournal, Journal of Undergraduate Anthropology, and the e-journal of the National Association of Student Anthropologists, but often this work takes the form of course papers or literature reviews as opposed to ethnographic fieldwork-based writing. An overwhelming majority of these journals are online, as opposed to print. Furthermore, many of these journals have short half-lives and are in seeming decline. Imponderabilia, a journal for undergraduate anthropologists run by the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge with a mission to bridge the gap between undergraduate and postgraduate publishing, retired its website in 2013. The web address for Focus: An Online (peer-reviewed) Publication of Undergraduate Articles and Photography in Anthropology, which once attracted nationwide participation, now results in a "404-not found" message.
Beyond the journal model, one is hard-pressed to find a peer-reviewed publication written entirely by undergraduates. Indeed, Health Care in Maya Guatemala (2007) was the only example we had to work from. As of now, aside from Health Care in Maya Guatemala and our own book, we know of no other exclusively undergraduate-written anthologies in the discipline. Why this paucity? And what does this say about our investment in publishing at the undergraduate level? One might point to the strained political economy of academic publishing. Indeed, a plethora of critique surrounds the digitization of academic journals, as well as the commercialization of public research by private publishers, which stifles and stymies the pipeline of "publishable" work (Pirie 2009). To be sure, the scalability of book projects like Doing Development in West Africa faces certain barriers. As already mentioned, the sustainability of programs like ours in Togo depends heavily on people like Charlie who invest immeasurable time and energy into them. And as one reviewer pointed out, such projects may only ever be feasible for more well-endowed institutions like Duke. At the same time, given the vast profusion and steady growth of undergraduate development and study abroad initiatives across the globe (University of Oxford 2017), it seems equally plausible that Duke University Press could collect enough accounts to constitute volumes 2 through 10 of Doing Development, perhaps each with different genres, including public health, microfinance, and education.
To the question of the import and value of undergraduate publishing, some scholars, particularly from the biological sciences, have staunchly opposed the enterprise as a whole, arguing that undergraduates produce "sub-par" research that would never be published in a "real" journal (Gilbert 2004). But such critiques of undergraduate-only publishing overlook a crucial element of the process: writing by undergraduates for undergraduates produces a different kind of writing, a genre unto itself. Whereas most undergraduate writing endeavors exist under the construct of writing for a teacher and a grade (which itself is embedded in an institutional power dynamic), writing for peers is an entirely different enterprise. Furthermore, most of these controversies and debates over undergraduate publishing are not even happening within anthropology, but are largely relegated to STEM fields. The absence of such conversations is both concerning and telling. Perhaps we need a reorientation of value. If we were to shift our attention from publishing as solely an outlet for senior research to ask what else gets produced, we might open ourselves to new terrain, one in which the not-so-sophisticated but emergent deserves an audience and readership.
REFERENCES CITED
Gilbert, Scott F. 2004. "Points of View: Should Students Be Encouraged to Publish Research in Student-Run Publications? A Case Against Undergraduate-only Journal Publications." Cell Biology Education 3 (1): 22-23.
Hawkins, John Palmer, and Walter Randolph Adams. 2007. Health Care in Maya Guatemala: Confronting Medical Pluralism in a Developing Country. Oklahoma City: University of Oklahoma.
Marcus, George E. 2009. "Traffic in Art and Anthropology: How Fieldwork in Theater Arts Might Inform the Reinvention of Fieldwork in Anthropology." In Aesthetics and Anthropology: Performing Life, Performed Lives, edited by Ina-Maria Greverus and Ute Ritschel. Berlin: Lit Verlag.
Piot, Charles ed. 2016. Doing Development in West Africa: A Reader by and for Undergraduates. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Pirie, Iain. 2009. "The Political Economy of Academic Publishing." Historical Materialism 17 (3): 31-60.
Ramsey, Benjamin. 2016. "Students Reflect." In Doing Development in West Africa: A Reader by and for Undergraduates, edited by Charles Piot. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
University of Oxford. 2017. International Trends in Higher Education 2016-2017. Oxford: University of Oxford International Strategy Office.
Teaching Anthropology in an Age of Unrecognizability
By Charlie Piot (Duke University)
I consider Richard Handler a curricular visionary. Three years ago, I was an external examiner on a committee to review area studies at the University of Virginia—a broad review of units across the university working on things global—and many of those we spoke with were buzzing about Handler's new global studies major. It's the fastest-growing, most popular major at UVA, with over three hundred applications each year for one hundred and twenty-five major slots. What anthropology department in the country today can claim as much?
The secret, according to Handler, is teaching anthropology under another name. He insists that students still enjoy our classes and appreciate our theoretical critiques of culture and politics, but the term "anthropology" remains illegible to them, especially as a potential major. They prefer majors that seem relevant—relevant to students' perceived postgraduation job prospects in fields such as health, finance, and policy studies. Interestingly, Duke's Department of Evolutionary Anthropology has more than one hundred majors—in part, because courses in that major overlap with the needs of students applying to medical school.
Students seem to have no problem taking anthropology classes as long as they fit into their long-term career interests. Thus, when anthropologists teach Global Health or Development Policy courses at UVA, or Development and Africa and Medical Anthropology courses at Duke, enrollments swell. On the other hand, a course like my Culture and Politics of Africa no longer attracts students as before.
Duke's Department of Cultural Anthropology—a stand-alone unit that separated from today's Department of Evolutionary Anthropology in the late 1980s—has eighteen full-time faculty members, half of whom have won teaching awards. But we are now down to nineteen majors (from over thirty majors two years ago). Enrollments in classes remain high, however, especially in those that conform to Handler's formula: Medical Anthropology, Global Health, Development and Africa, Climate Change and the Environment. Following this logic, I recently designed a course, Anthropology of Money, which is cross-listed in economics (a department with five hundred majors) and public policy (four hundred majors). The course oversubscribed with an enrollment of one hundred.
An initiative that my department has also been considering is whether to subsume a popular Duke undergraduate major, international comparative studies (ICS), as a second track within the cultural anthropology major (CA). ICS has five times as many majors as CA (while teaching courses that overlap heavily with the CA curriculum and being run by two faculty members who are anthropologists). But students choose to major in ICS rather than CA because its name is more legible to them and because they feel it better orients them to careers in international studies and global finance. (Lee Baker writes about the CA-ICS merger in his essay in this volume, a merger that has recently become endangered by the hostile takeover attempt of another group of humanities faculty desperately searching for their own majors. The takeover attempt speaks to how critical the issue of institutional legibility is today for anthropology and other humanities disciplines, which are suffering their own crisis.)
Rather than entirely giving up on our disciplinary identity—by changing our name to global studies, for instance, or relocating CA faculty members to other departments—faculty preference is to retain our moniker and remain within our current disciplinary home. Among other reasons, we still have a robust graduate program that goes under the name anthropology. Rather than dissolve or utterly transform our department and identity as a discipline, our goal continues to be to opportunistically take on units like ICS and refigure our classes along the lines envisioned by Handler. This will enable us to attract students to our classes, if not our major, and give us a broader impact on how students think about today's world.
Another strategy our department has been mulling includes creating tracks within the major that conform to Handler's rethinking outside the major. This would internalize Handler's externalizing move in which he created an anthropology department under another name, outside UVA's anthropology department. Thus, we are considering the creation of tracks or concentrations of clustered classes that majors would sign up for, under labels such as "Medicine and Global Health," "Finance and Development," "Environment and Culture," "Media and the Digital," "Race and Diaspora," and "Performance and Sport." Under "Finance and Development," for instance, I would teach my Anthropology of Money and Africa and Development courses, while another faculty member would teach Anthropology of Business and Anthropology of the Corporation courses. Another would offer a class on East Asian Capitalisms. Another would teach Anthropology and Public Policy. And so on.
The point here is to try to capture student drift toward the policy institutes—global health and public policy—and economics. While such a strategy is likely to increase enrollments and enable us to get our message out to those who otherwise would never take an anthropology class, it remains unclear whether it will increase majors as well. However, increasing our number of majors versus size of enrollments may not matter in this era of butts-on-the-bench metrics.
I conclude by describing an entirely different initiative with undergraduates that I have been involved with over the past ten years—of summer research and development projects in the villages of northern Togo where I have conducted anthropological research since the mid-1980s. These summer projects not only give students a taste of fieldwork and anthropology but also hit them in their soft spot, appealing to their desire to do good in the world. (This work has also led to the publication of a book of student essays, which Alexandra Middleton describes in her essay in this section.)
The student development projects in northern Togo are all small—"DIY"—development initiatives, largely cooked up by the students themselves. They have built two cyber cafés in villages without electricity and running water and have taught computer classes to children who have never seen a computer before. They have created a microfinance program for teens, a scheme that has had a 95 percent rate of return. They've designed a health insurance system in one of the village clinics and established a writer's collective whose aim is to publish novellas about everyday life in the village. Finally, they've created an oral history project to archive and publish village histories and folktales/proverbs/naming practices.
These projects are not only appreciated locally—I am urged each year when the students leave to bring another cohort the next year—but also, as indicated above, tap into student desire to do good in the world, by doing something they see as political and having real-world impact. These are millennials who also want to do their bit to change the world, albeit in ways that many in my generation of academics dismiss as apolitical or worse—furthering neoliberal agendas is the worry—a critique I consider wrong-headed.
For both students and anthropology faculty, the value of such small-scale anthropologically guided development work is that its immersive nature makes anthropology real and visceral. Certainly, not all of my students were enchanted, but many of those who were have been forever changed. Several have returned on their own to this Togolese hinterland to engage in research for a senior thesis. One went back for a year of Fulbright study. Another returned for three months during a gap year. A third followed up his summer in the villages with an internship at the US embassy in Lomé, and more than ten of the seventy students who have spent a summer in Togo have gone on to graduate school in related fields, either anthropology or development studies, or they now work for development NGOs. If our mission as teachers is to make anthropology relevant today, this is another way of doing so—one consistent with Handler's "anthropology-under-another-name" agenda.
To be sure, it takes someone willing to give up time each summer—and, indeed, colleagues have asked why I would want to spend more time with students after teaching them all year. The answer to that question is easy for me. These student projects allow me to return to a place that has always captivated me and, once there, enables me to continue my own research. Moreover, closing the circle, I find myself energized by these bright, politically committed millennials. They ask questions and propose projects I have never dreamt of, and, in so doing, further my own engagement with this area and with an anthropology keyed into the times.
I do not think it is overstating things to say that anthropology as an institutionalized curriculum of undergraduate teaching in the US academy is endangered today. Majors are declining in many departments, formerly popular classes are no longer filling, and faculty teaching lines are not being replaced. At the same time, and paradoxically, we are in the odd, perhaps comforting position of having something of significant value to offer students—critical knowledge about today's globalizing world. The challenge, then, is to present and make relevant that knowledge in ways that translate to student need in these anxious times—through, among other strategies, renaming classes and rethinking majors, and through demonstrating the real-world relevance of an anthropological view of the world.
I thus see this uncertain moment as a potentially productive crossroads for the discipline, one that provides an opportunity for us to reinvent ourselves in new ways, yet again. But unlike many of those earlier reinventions—which have always been more about theoretical and paradigmatic reimaginings—this rethinking is more institutional/curricular/pedagogical. And its importance for our long-term survival as a discipline may be far greater than any of those earlier rethinkings.
Between Understanding and Action: Anthropological Pedagogy and the Habitus of Privilege among US Undergraduate Students
By Richard Handler and Anne Nelson Stoner (University of Virginia)
What is the effectiveness of anthropological critique in our classrooms? In our anthropologically oriented global development studies program at the University of Virginia, we attract politically centrist or mildly left-leaning students, mostly from privileged backgrounds, who want to "do service," often by finding "innovative solutions" to the world's ills. Our curriculum develops a critique of student service and of the idea of apolitical solutions to social problems that stem from the global structure of wealth and power. It is not difficult for most of our students to understand such a critique, and many are persuaded by it, intellectually. It is much more difficult, however, for students on the verge of leaving school to imagine themselves working outside the university in spaces of political action and resistance. It is difficult for them, ultimately, to move beyond the kind of understanding that bespeaks an elite education to a politics of struggle that is alien to the habitus of privilege that has shaped most of them (and most of us teachers) as subjects.
This paper grows out of a moment of what anthropologists at the turn of the twentieth century called "independent invention." On the morning of February 14, 2017, Richard Handler had written his abstract for our session. It asked: What effect does anthropological critique, articulated by privileged professors at prestigious universities, have on undergraduate students who come from elite backgrounds and whose "habitus" makes it unlikely they'll turn intellectual understanding into political activism?
That afternoon, Richard met with third-year student Anne Nelson Stoner, who had taken a course with him the prior year on Culture, Gender, and Violence, which he had designed to focus on the issue of sexual violence (rape) on university campuses. Anne Nelson was also a global development studies (GDS) major, a program in which Handler teaches. She was troubled, she said, by the hypocrisy she was experiencing in her GDS and anthropology classes, in which she was being taught to critique the neoliberal social order but not to "feel" the critique in such a way that she'd be inclined to turn understanding into action.
Anne Nelson's discussion of the wall between her and her student colleagues' growing intellectual understanding, on the one hand, and their feelings about their identities, their personhood, their daily activities, and their plans for the future, on the other hand, corresponded to Richard's feeling in the classroom of pushing helplessly against the habitus of his students, even while they showed in their work that they understood and appreciated the arguments he was making.
We began an extended discussion over email and in person as a way to write this paper. As the reader will recognize, our voices in this conversation differ, stemming from differences in age, gender, and experience. But we emphasize that it was a conversation: we listened to each other. Several interrelated dichotomies emerged in our discussion, which we will use to explicate the similar frustrations we articulated, from our differing social locations as teacher and student: the rational and the emotional, the professional and the personal, the experience-distant and the experience-near, and the world of work and world of fun.
Anne Nelson was initially inclined to suspect that a purely rational pedagogy of critique that failed to engage students at an emotional level was incapable of stimulating students to become politically active beyond the classroom. "We are taught that we are ensnared in these systems we criticize," she wrote, "but I'm not sure how much we actually know it, in fact I don't think we really know it at all, or else we would feel it. Sometimes I sit in class and think, if we were all truly absorbing and personalizing what the teacher is telling us, where are the moments of deep personal conflict for us?"
Richard was initially suspicious of the explanatory power of the rational-emotional dichotomy, asking why we should assume that affect is more important than intellect in motivating either teachers or students to take political action. At the same time, he thought that Anne Nelson's account of students who comprehend but do not feel the arguments he makes in the classroom corresponded to his own sense of pushing against a student habitus he was incapable of changing.
As Richard and Anne Nelson discussed experiences they'd shared in the classroom, it became clear that Anne Nelson's use of the term "feeling" implicated a second dichotomy, between the professional and the personal, which manifested in what Clifford Geertz once called experience-distant and experience-near narratives. Classroom discourses, in Anne Nelson's discussion, belonged to the world of the professional self, or, for students, of the self that was socially expected in the classroom. The personal was the world to which students "retreated" after class. As an example, she described interactions with friends who participate in debutante balls and sororities: "I think about conversations that I have with friends, and I can clearly see the divide between when we are talking about theory/knowledge and when we are talking about ourselves. In theory, we can be very critical, grapple with ideas and come to an agreement that some aspect of the system needs to be changed. But if the conversation switches and she starts talking about her debutante ball or her sorority, it is then no longer about the system or the knowledge, it's about me and her and being a 'good, fun, carefree, supportive friend.' If I then criticize either debutante balls or sororities, it is incredibly personal, confrontational, and uncomfortable."
Here, Anne Nelson seemed to be describing two distinct ways that she and her colleagues narrate social experiences. When they are using the language of critical theory, they are talking about a distant world, and although they know, in some sense, that they belong to that world, the narrative voice they are using is that of the detached observer. But "talking about ourselves," about "me and her," requires or enacts a different linguistic register, one in which the pronouns ("I," "you," "me," etc.) refer to the very students who are engaged in discussion. The human beings to whom the language refers are the people who are doing the referring. Thus, as Anne Nelson noted, in such conversations, she has to take her place in the discourse, and if it isn't a place of connection ("us"), things can become oppositional quickly.
Anne Nelson gave another example of the distinction between the professional and the personal, an example that we might describe in terms of a closely related dichotomy: work versus leisure. Describing the party culture at our university, she could see that the apparently private and personal world of "fun" was every bit as socially structured as the world of the classroom:
There is an expectation among college students to be smart and critical and thoughtful during the day (and this is widely respected), but when Friday evening comes around there is an equally, if not stronger, expectation to leave it all behind and be "carefree." If you are not then you are no fun, or stuck up, or lame. I've seen this time and again of friends who are intellectually engaged and I can have wonderful conversations with them during the day about aspects of our culture, but then I watch them disengage from those thoughts for the night and go and be "carefree," literally acting out the system that we had just talked about, because it is necessary for being liked and so deeply ingrained in us. I feel this tension in myself all the time.
As our conversation continued, we came to the uncomfortable realization that just like the role of the fun-loving partier, the public stance of critical questioning that teachers model in GDS and anthropology classes was itself a role that could be taken on and discarded as the social situation required. Richard drew on Jules Henry's critique of mid-twentieth-century US classrooms to illustrate the idea that schools teach students to think in standardized ways:
The first lesson a child has to learn when he comes to school is that lessons are not what they seem. He must then forget this and act as if they were. This is the first step toward "school mental health"; it is also the first step in becoming absurd. . . . The second lesson is to put the teachers' and students' criteria in place of his own. He must learn that the proper way to sing is tunelessly and not the way he hears the music; that the proper way to paint is the way the teacher says, not the way he sees it; that the proper attitude is not pleasure but competitive horror at the success of his classmates, and so on. . . . The early schooling process is not successful unless it has accomplished in the child an acquiescence in its criteria, unless the child wants to think the way school has taught him to think. (Henry 1963, 291)
Anne Nelson responded to this passage with the following remark: "We, as students, are taught the pedagogy of critical thinking in the same way we are taught to sing 'in tune,' to paint the 'correct way,' to behave in 'appropriate' ways. . . . Isn't critical thinking playing the same game?" That question presented a challenge to Richard's assumptions about his pedagogy, one he had confronted before. Teachers in many liberal arts disciplines, but especially in anthropology, like to think they are teaching their students to be "critical." Indeed, the word is a cliché that appears in most professors' and graduate students' statements about their approach to teaching. Worse, "critical thinking" has become a cliché in liberal arts fundraising discourses, in which it is pitched as a "skill" that students learn (and pay for) in college and that they can deploy on the job market.
Yet, if critical thinking has become a skill that corporate employers will buy, we have to ask what its substance is. Critical thinking on a corporate work team might mean figuring out how to solve problems that one's superiors have assigned, but it cannot mean questioning the ultimate goals of the organization or its place in the wider sociopolitical system—meanings that it might have, or might once have had, inside the academy. As Bonnie Urciuoli once remarked, "Actual critical and precise thinking and writing can get people fired pretty damn fast, and is therefore unlikely to count as a skill" (2003, 407).
But for the moment, let's grant that at least in left-leaning disciplines like anthropology, teachers who teach critical thinking are not primarily teaching a skill, but an orientation to reality that is grounded in certain political, epistemological, and methodological principles that we teachers try both to clarify and to make available for questioning. Even granting that much, our original question remains: What effects does such a pedagogy have on students who, as we have shown, have fairly powerful ways to separate professional and personal performances and attitudes? And how can teachers, who probably make similar separations in their own lives between the professional and the personal, bring their critical pedagogy to life?
One way we have tried to do this in our GDS program is by balancing theoretical teachings with a "practice" course we call Development on the Ground. The course is currently taught by David Edmunds, a geographer with extensive experience working in development. When David joined our program in 2013, he realized we were trying to chart a middle way between an undergraduate major that limited itself to critical, liberal arts analysis, and a professionally oriented program that scanted analysis to focus on skills. Teaching various skills—fieldwork, data analysis, community engagement, even grant writing—has its place in our program, but David insists we teach students "to treat the deployment of these skills as the political acts they are, rather than as exercises that produce . . . apolitical outcomes" (Handler et al. 2016, 266).
Our goal, in short, is to produce "critical development professionals" who know "that social change takes time and that it requires transforming subjectivities, building capacities and solidarities and growing new organizations and institutions." We will teach our students, he continues, "that they can clear space for such constructive work by disrupting existing hierarchies . . . even from within privileged social locations—the large contractor or investment firm, a federal agency or large NGO—as well as working with politically astute grassroots movements" (Handler et al. 2016, 266).
Having been exposed to David's pedagogy, Anne Nelson recognized its validity, but she still wondered whether, after all, working in this way in development nonetheless required no change in a person's fundamental political positioning. David, she wrote, is "optimistic in the sense that he thinks ultimately we learn to see ourselves within these structures of power. I, personally, don't think that we do. If we could really see ourselves in that context, wouldn't it spark more radical action/decisions?" Such a question maps perfectly onto a growing critique of development work as an industry that provides good middle-class jobs to an internationally mobile elite who work among, but rarely ever alongside or with, for sustained periods of time, the "target populations" (Cooke 1988).
These questions, and our attempts to answer them, brought us to an impasse. Happily, a liberal arts education leads students in many directions. One direction was suggested to Anne Nelson in a class on Sufi literature, where she had been asked to consider the relationship between what Western scholars call "ritual" and the formation of ethical selves: "We were reading about a female Sufi's (and a larger Islamic) view on the importance and power of ritual and practice to create yourself; you pray five times a day whether or not you 'feel' it or know the significance of it because you are training yourself to see the world in a certain way." From a Western perspective, grounded in the mind-body dichotomy, this makes no sense since there is no connection (we think) between the ways of the body and the rational workings of the mind. Ritual is, as we say (from the position we assign ourselves atop the hierarchy of human civilizations), mechanical, mindless.
Thus it is not surprising that our GDS program can ask students to think about actions in terms of careers but almost never tries to connect the training in critical analysis it offers to the micro-behaviors of daily life. As Anne Nelson put it, in religious traditions like Sufism, "people train themselves to become pious individuals living a life in accordance with God. It is these small actions that I see as nonexistent in GDS. How do we become political in everyday life? How do we constantly negotiate our positionality and change our actions accordingly? How do we wear clothes representative of systems we support? How do we eat in accordance with them? How do we talk in accordance with them?" And can we draw on traditions like Sufism to learn how to bring our daily actions into alignment with our political commitments?
Another direction came from our colleague, anthropologist Arsalan Khan, who, upon reading our paper, pointed out that our sense of being stuck, being unable to act on the ideas we were teaching and learning, might derive from the rather obvious facts of our social positionality: our class and race privilege. As he put it in an email message:
I think many minority students and students of working-class backgrounds do leave the classroom and create "fun" around community building and activism. This is because many minorities, I think, already have something of a "critical habitus" and are looking for the discursive tools to frame it and turn it into a resource. We can see how movements like Black Lives Matter draw directly on critical scholarship. In other words, there are students who are listening to our words differently. (AK/RH May 24, 2017)
Khan's comment suggests that teachers should adjust their pedagogy to their students' needs; some students may lack the kinds of critical perspectives we want to impart, while others may have an even more powerful critical sensibility than privileged professors possess, yet they lack the "discursive tools to frame it," at least in academic contexts. And just as students differ in their critical experiences and sensibilities, so, too, do professors. For example, Carolyn Rouse's paper in this collection shows that African American anthropologists, keenly aware of how social theory can be constructed to legitimize nefarious social policies, are perhaps more inclined than many of their colleagues to look for ways to "apply" theory in socially beneficial ways. And yet, as she points out, the contributions of these anthropologists are often "illegible" in the wider field—which means that we did not seek help where it was available!
Following up on Rouse's paper, we can see that the critical tools we offer our students, when presented as "pure theory," will never answer the questions that Anne Nelson and many of our students have. Nor, in fact, will most forms of "experiential" education that universities are offering with ever-greater enthusiasm. Most experiential education, in the form of internships, study abroad, service work, and research projects, is designed to prepare people for elite careers. It is most decidedly not about teaching them to live off the land or to struggle on the barricades.
And yet, as suggested by the work of our colleague David Edmunds teaching students to look for the spaces where they can "disrupt existing hierarchies," Carolyn Rouse in a Ghanaian high school, and several of the other authors in this collection, models are emerging that can help us do more, and do better.
Acknowledgments. Thanks to Bonnie Urciuoli for helping us formulate this distinction between talking about others and taking one's place within the discourse; see Benveniste (1971, 217-30). And thanks to Arsalan Khan for clarifying the difference between Western educational models that rely on a mind-body distinction and Islamic traditions that do not; see Khan (2016).
REFERENCES CITED
Benveniste, Emile. 1971. Problems in General Linguistics. Translated by Mary Elizabeth Meek. FCoral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press.
Cooke, Bill. 2004. "Rules of Thumb for Participatory Change Agents." In Participation: From Tyranny to Transformation?, edited by Samuel Hickey and Giles Mohan, 42-55. London: Zed.
Handler, Richard, David Edmunds, Daniel Ng, Susan Tewolde, and Marta Woldu. 2016. "Between Engagement and Critique: Development Studies in a Liberal Arts Tradition." Canadian Journal of Development Studies 37 (3): 261-78.
Henry, Jules.1963. Culture against Man. New York: Random House.
Khan, Arsalan. 2016. "Islam and Pious Sociality: The Ethics of Hierarchy in Tablighi Jamaat in Pakistan." Social Analysis 60 (4): 96-113.
Urciuoli, Bonnie. 2003. "Excellence, Leadership, Skills, Diversity: Marketing Liberal Arts Education." Language and Communication 23:385-408.
The Habitus of Privilege and Position
By Alisse Waterston (City University of New York, John Jay College of Criminal Justice)
By Alisse Waterston (City University of New York, John Jay College of Criminal Justice)
Most authors represented in the collection of essays, "Attending to Undergraduate Desire," are professors and/or students from among the most elite and prestigious, if not the wealthiest, institutions of higher education in the United States. This is important to note because some of the especially interesting dilemmas discussed in the essays and, indeed, the core concerns—What do today's undergraduates want and/or need? How do particular pedagogical approaches and the discipline of anthropology fit with those needs, wants, expectations, aspirations?—reflect student as well as faculty social positionalities. In "Lessons from the Field," Carolyn Rouse references her position as an African American to state how and why black people in US institutions are "inclined to seek socially beneficial applications for our academic knowledge production" (emphasis mine). Rouse goes on to write, "There is a racial politics to theorizing that makes our work illegible to others when we talk about things other than race." I think the question of the racialized, gendered, and classed political economy of higher education in this country and of anthropology as a discipline in all its aspects (research, writing, teaching, learning, and in its "applications") is essential. If we are "attending to undergraduate desire," we need to understand where "our" students are coming from, and we need to face up to the privileged seats from which we—the professors—offer critical pedagogy and social critique that may float well in hallowed lecture halls but all too often crumble when they hit the ground (though it doesn't need to).
I appreciate that each contributor is grappling with aspects of these issues, some to great effect. I believe we need more of the kind of confrontation offered in the teacher-student dialogue by Anne Nelson Stoner and Richard Handler. I am grateful to them for their provocative essay, which inspires my response. These dialogues—between professors and students, and between us—provide opportunity for critical reflexivity. It provides a space for all of us to try to come to terms with the most challenging of contradictions inherent in the interplay between our particular social locations, ethical positions, moral commitments, occupational obligations, and the promises and possibilities we offer "our" students.
In "Between Understanding and Action: Anthropological Pedagogy and the Habitus of Privilege among US Undergraduate Students," Stoner and Handler put the social location of UVA students front and center (as "mostly from privileged backgrounds"), but, notably, not that of the professor. Stoner's honesty is refreshing. She notes the disaggregation between students' "growing intellectual understanding" ("anthropological critique") and the way they conduct their own personal lives, a tension she engages thoughtfully.
The student seems to offer these tensions as a challenge to her professor. In an effort to address them, the authors offer a frame comprised of "several interrelated dichotomies: the rational and the emotional, the professional and the personal, the experience-distant and the experience-near, and the world of work and world of fun." The professor "asks why we should assume that affect is more important than intellect in motivating either teachers or students to take political action?" (emphasis mine). Inherent in the question is an either/or-ness and a weighting (more or less important), which isn't necessarily the student's question. I interpreted the student's concern to be with the disconnect between aspects of her (and other students') experience and her (emergent) understanding that the very assumptions underlying the pedagogy to which she was being exposed led only to "growing intellectual understanding" without the development of a fuller understanding that involves intellect, reason, affect, emotion, thinking, action, the personal and the political, and as feminist scholars and activists have long argued, the political in the personal—in other words, all of it at the same time. Stoner's incipient understanding of her need and desire to integrate more fully is reflected in the discussion of her discovery of Sufi literature.
I appreciate that Professor Handler is open to Stoner's challenges, though I get the sense he deflects it a bit. For example, Stoner asks: "Isn't critical thinking playing the same game?" (i.e., "training students to adopt a proper attitude"). Handler responds: "‘critical thinking' has become a cliché in liberal arts fundraising discourses . . . (and has become) a skill that corporate employers will buy . . . but it cannot mean questioning the ultimate goals of the organization or its place in the wider sociopolitical system—meanings that it might have, or might once have had, inside the academy." What is Professor Handler asking his student to do, really? When I say he deflects a bit, I mean he seems to look away from the implications of the kind of critical thinking he imparts.
Critical anthropology has the potential to unleash revolutionary potential. However, are we professors bringing critical anthropology to students for its revolutionary implications? I don't think so. This is why it is so important to face up to all our social locations, especially for those of us who are professors sitting in privileged and relatively safe locations in the academy. However critical we are in theory, in practice we are all liberal subjects working within the logics of neoliberal capitalism. I don't think we can ask more of our students than we ask of ourselves. And Stoner seems to be yearning for something not so split into two, into a this-or-a-that. With the consciousness she has from the knowledge she has gained in her undergraduate studies and through the guidance of Professor Handler, she seems to be asking how to move forward in the real world, to provide for herself and her family, do meaningful work, minimize harm, participate in human-centered social change, and also partake in the pleasures and joys that life can bring.
Where I work (a public, urban university with working-class, working-poor students of color whose median family income is $42,000 as compared with UVA, where two-thirds of the student body is white and median family income is $156,000), the challenges and concerns are quite different (New York Times 2017). Let me explain.
I am a professor in the Department of Anthropology and also serve as cofaculty and codirector of an innovative undergraduate seminar and internship program (open to students from any major) that operates out of the Interdisciplinary Studies Department at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York, one of the dozen CUNY senior colleges. As a college whose mission is "public service," John Jay consistently faces financial shortfalls for several reasons, including that it is a public, not a private, university, and that its graduates tend to work in the public, not the private, sector, and thus its alumni donations cannot match those of Columbia University, located several blocks uptown, or New York University, several blocks downtown, from what I consider our midtown educational jewel. John Jay is designated by the federal government as a Hispanic-serving institution (nearly 40 percent of students are Latinx), and as a minority-serving institution because over half our student population are from underrepresented groups (80 percent; about 20 percent are designated white). It is also lauded as a "military friendly" school and has been named among the top twelve "best colleges for veterans."
Theory in anthropology urges us to appreciate context and contingent history. With this in mind, the kinds of policy and practice changes instituted at John Jay over the past fifteen years are nothing short of remarkable. In 2004, Jeremy Travis became the fourth president of the college. An attorney by training whose field of expertise is prisoner reentry, Travis had previously served in NYC government, in nonprofit social service and research organizations, and as the head of the National Institute of Justice under President Bill Clinton. As a college president, Travis faced the "neoliberal" pressures affecting institutions of higher education we so often talk about. And he was faced with making some critical choices.
Given the facts of John Jay's (very poor) financial state, the pressure on college presidents today to focus almost exclusively on fundraising, and the college's historical reputation as a "cop school," Travis might have focused on (literally) capitalizing on the opportunities of the expanding national-security state in the post-9/11 period. Instead, Travis envisioned the college as a major teaching and research hub for the study of "justice" in all its manifestations. At a time when other universities were shrinking offerings in the liberal arts, during Travis's tenure (2003-2017), John Jay expanded them, developing strong humanities and social science programs to complement its preeminence in the fields of criminal justice, forensic science, and forensic psychology. "Educating for justice" became the college tagline, easily visible on a wall of bold words that grace the college's 59th Street entrance: Educating for criminal—international—moral—racial—academic—real—gender—religious—political—economic—legal—philosophical—cultural—environmental—social and poetic justice.
Where previously there were only majors with a criminal justice bent, now there would be new majors dedicated to the very disciplines within which the professors at the college were trained. Over a six-year period (2008-2014), new majors were launched in anthropology, economics, English, gender studies, sociology, philosophy, and more. This is an amazing accomplishment in the context of an austerity budget and pressures to conform to the demands of the neoliberal university.
Anthropology@johnjaycollege (as we refer to the department) offers students what Jason Antrosio describes in his post-Trump election reflection on Sidney Mintz and "Anthropology's Unfinished Revolution." Antrosio argues about the importance of providing undergraduates "a dose of global history, and especially of the interconnected history of colonialism, capitalism and slavery." Connecting "anthropology matters" with critical anthropology and history, Antrosio quotes Michel-Rolph Trouillot: "the ultimate context of [anthropology's] relevance is the world outside, usually starting with the country within which we publish rather than with those that we write about" (Antrosio 2016; Trouillot 2003, 114).
My students know the content of "critical anthropology" because they live it; my job is to guide them toward deeper knowledge of the causes and consequences of their lived experiences with strong doses of global history (Waterston and Kukaj 2007). As most of my students prepare to enter the real world of the national security state as workers in the criminal justice system or in criminal justice reform, my job is also to provide my underserved, aspiring minority students the tools and skills they need to get opportunities they did not have before. I bring critical anthropology to my students to provide them analytic tools to articulate what they already know (embodied knowledge) and to offer a nudge toward consciousness as they enter the world of work as it currently exists, no matter what they choose to do (see Baker, this collection).
REFERENCES CITED
Antrosio, J. 2016. "The Discovery of Sidney Mintz: Anthropology's Unfinished Revolution." Living Anthropologically, December 16.
New York Times. 2017. "Economic Diversity and Student Outcomes at America's Colleges and Universities: Find Your College." January 18.
Trouillot, M. R. 2003. Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Waterston, Alisse, and Antigona Kukaj. 2007. "Reflections on Teaching Social Violence in an Age of Genocide and a Time of War." American Anthropologist 109 (3): 509-18.
Ends of Undergraduate Anthropology Education?
by Kim Fortun
By Kim Fortun (University of California, Irvine)
What are we after with undergraduate anthropology education, and how do we get there?
What are the discursive contexts of anthropology education today, and where are our students within them?
How can anthropological understanding of contemporary contexts be looped into our educational programs, helping us reach and listen to our students, and creatively imagine where we want to move them?
What moves our students, and how can we stage this?
These are questions addressed by the accounts assembled here, describing undergraduate anthropology programs and projects at Princeton, Duke, the University of Virginia, and the University of Pennsylvania. The initiatives and challenges described are inspiring, suggesting what could be gained from further accounting, deliberation, and experimentation along these lines. Undergraduate anthropology education is at a critical juncture today, which needs to be addressed with the full power of anthropological insight, creativity, and tactics—leavened by insight and examples from other arenas of critical practice.
Carolyn Rouse, writing from her truly extraordinary experience building a high school in Ghana as a method for testing both anthropological theory and her students, points us to the writings of Hannah Arendt and writings on pragmatism and design. 'll point to ways we can leverage Gregory Bateson's understanding of double bind, as well as the thinking of varied other figures that I read as radical educators—Paulo Freire and Gayatri Spivak, Miles Horton and Shoshana Felman, among others—looking forward to more opportunity to weave our different experiences and fields of reference together, and into our pedagogical designs and practice.
In the fraught language of both educational reform and development, this is a call to build capacity—for next-generation undergraduate anthropology education. As 'll describe below, questions about what we call what we do are at the heart of the matter.
Consider the different accounts we have here and the questions they raise: about students who opt for global studies (UVA) or international comparative studies (Duke) instead of anthropology because the first two seem to them more relevant to future careers; about students (at Penn) who learn to critique structural adjustment, NGOs, and "global health" itself on their way to careers with health-care consulting firms or alongside "angel investors" eyeing Africa as a potentially lucrative health-care market; about students who learn anthropology by helping deliver education in Ghana, constrained by limited resources, Ghanaian law and policy, local expectations, and so on, thus learning, as Carolyn Rouse puts it, that "they are not as in control as they think," and that "applied anthropology" is an oxymoron with high promise; about how students can be moved by experiences as fieldworkers and as published authors of anthropological knowledge (as recounted by Princeton PhD student Alexandra Middleton, describing her experience as an undergraduate at Duke, mentored by Charles Piot).
"The secret, according to Handler," writes Charles Piot, "is teaching anthropology under another name," casting anthropological critique in ways that can be carried into the worlds of finance, pharmaceuticals, and corporate media, recognizing that "anthropology" simply "isn't legible to current students, particularly as a major."
Carolyn Rouse points to articulation problems of a different sort, noting how the increasing abstraction of anthropological theory in the late twentieth and into the twenty-first century has, ironically, left the discursive field wide open to more straight-talking social scientists—and their theories of "Freakonomics," "Thinking Fast and Slow," and so on.
These articulation problems are far from straightforward to fix. Recognizing this, we need to move forward aware of the paradox and necessity of naming anthropological knowledge and casting it in public terms. Ironically, anthropological theory can help with this.
In these stories of anthropological teaching, I hear a cascade of double binds that I think we need to collectively recognize and inhabit. First, we want and need to reach students to whom we don't make sense—because they already embody instrumentalist ends to education, often with no patience for (and sometimes shrill hostility toward) more discursive (wandering) ways of thinking and becoming. Second, anthropological education is often powerfully advanced through practice, becoming very embodied knowledge, yet it also needs to be rendered explicit: we want our students to have tacit, everyday habits of the anthropological mind and also want them to be advocates for anthropological knowledge. For the latter, they need explicit expressions of what anthropology is and why it is valuable. We are thus asking them to talk instrumentally while acting hermeneutically: another double bind. Third, many of the critiques that anthropology has articulated and made its signature are now widely voiced in the arenas we study (and critique). As Ramah McKay describes, for example, private, profit-driven actors in the global health mix in Africa today are often fully conversant with (anthropological) critiques of NGOs, the state, and projects that are inattentive to local contexts and stakeholder perspectives. These actors say what anthropology has said should be said and leverage it for economic gain. Another double bind: critique has become hegemony and business strategy.
As with all double binds, these can be paralyzing or become pathological; we could start talking anthropology so straight it loses its critical and creative potential, for example, becoming so sure of ourselves we lose the humility on which ethnographic sensibility so depends. But as Bateson taught us (and we are still figuring out how to practice), double binds can also produce deep creativity and transformation; in anthropological teaching, it can be where we learn to teach in historically, ethnographically attuned ways—in the worlds we study. Anthropological teaching can thus be a place where ethnography loops, gaining audiences and relevance by interlacing into pedagogical practice. Teaching becomes one more place were we "publish" anthropological knowledge, with as much attention to content, form, and subject effects as in our more usual texts.
Like other anthropological projects, teaching, too, can be informed by the anthropological record. Vinh-Kim Nguyen's account of the ways people learned to tell stories about being HIV positive to secure access to life-saving antiretroviral treatments in West Africa in the late 1990s, for example, can shape and sober our efforts to help students speak both within and to power.[1] Elizabeth Povinell's description of the "cunning of recognition" can help us recognize the double bind at the heart of all efforts to extend inclusiveness—reminding us that even as we teach about the problems with category schemes, we also need to listen closely to our students, letting them upset us and our own categories and ideals—at the same time that we guard and work against the instrumentalism and supremacism that inhabits some of them.
Different traditions of radical pedagogy can also inspire and guide us. Gayatri Spivak's pedagogical articulations are extensive, for example—and "double bind" is a recurrent theme, especially in An Aesthetic Education in an Era of Globalization (2012). Thinking in terms of double binds, she explains, one can see how different subject positions can both oppose and construct each other. She argues that we must learn to live with "contradictory instructions." The problem and necessity of naming anthropological subjects is another case in point.[2]
Shoshana Felman's essay on "Psychoanalysis and Education" is also a powerful guide, putting paradox at the heart of pedagogy. The critical teaching of Socrates, Freud, and, in turn, Lacan, she explains, is the radical impossibility of teaching—the way teaching undermines itself if delivered. Instead, like the analyst, a teacher can transpose psychoanalytic dialogue—understood as a new "structure of insight"—into educational encounters, staging (often without naming) recollections and reorderings.[3] Felman is paradoxically clear: pedagogical action "may very well, at times, belie the stated meaning, the didactic thesis, the theoretical assertion."
Naming is a difficulty.
And then there is Miles Horton, who in the 1930s founded the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee to build a southern labor movement, working from the ground up in rural communities. Horton's work extended from friendships and thinking with Reinhold Niebuhr (at Union Theological Seminary in New York City), John Dewey, Robert Parks (Chicago sociologist who taught Horton about group problem solving), and Jane Addams (at Hull House, where university women came together with recent immigrants for entertainment, classes, and radical organizing). Horton also visited radical schools in Denmark to learn from their example. In the 1940s, Horton helped labor leaders organize themselves in democratic terms (though Horton resisted definitively defining "democracy," arguing that it is always out ahead of us).[4] Beginning in 1961, Horton helped train the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)—the first voter-registration training sessions were at Highlander[5]—and helped create the Freedom Schools movement. I learned about the Highlander school in the early 1990s through their work in Appalachian communities living with toxic-chemical contamination. It soon became apparent to me how organizing through Highlander made a difference. Communities came to respect their own knowledge of the problems they faced, as well as the need to partner with other kinds of experts. They also knew the power and potential of collectivity and deliberation.
I think anthropology educators can learn from all these threads of thinking about and practicing pedagogy, and that the Highlander approach and emphasis on collective problem solving is especially apt.[6] The lively discussion following the presentations organized by Middleton and Piot for AAA 2017 was suggestive of what more we could do. A book published in 1990 based on intensive dialogue over six days between Miles Horton and Paulo Freire can be both a model for and subject of another meeting of anthropology educators. Titled We Make the Road By Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change, the book traverses many examples and ideas, discussing the importance of "reknowing" and the "virtues" of educators. We can follow in its stead, looking together out ahead of us, figuring out the contradictory demands of anthropology education today.
REFERENCES CITED
Felman, Shoshan. 1982. "Psychoanalysis and Education: Teaching Terminable and Interminable." Yale French Studies 63:21–44.
Glen, John. 1988. "The CIO Years 1942-1947." In Highlander: No Ordinary School 1932-1962. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.
Horton, Myles, and Paulo Freire. 1990. We Make the Road by Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
Spivak, Gayatri. 1993. Outside in the Teaching Machine. New York: Psychology Press.
Spivak, Gayatri. 2012. An Aesthetic Education in an Era of Globalization. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
NOTES
[1] On the phrase and idea of "speaking truth to power," see http://classroom.synonym.com/origin-phrase-speaking-truth-power-11676.html.
[2] See also "Occupy Education: An Interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak" and Outside in the Teaching Machine (1993).
[3] Felman (1982): "Like the analyst, the teacher, in Lacan's eyes, cannot in turn be, alone, a master of the knowledge which he teaches. Lacan transposes the radicality of analytic dialogue—as a newly understood structure of insight—into the pedagogical situation. This is not simply to say that he encourages ‘exchange ‘and calls for students' interventions—as many other teachers do. Much more profoundly, and radically, he attempts to learn the students his own knowledge."
[4] See Glen (1988).
[5]Â See: https://snccdigital.org/people/myles-horton/.
[6]Â See "An Exploration of Myles Horton's Democratic Praxis: Highlander Folk School" by Barbara J. Thayer.