"I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it is much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong" (Richard Feynman)
Take a moment to look back and ask if you participated fully.
Being a mere listener and reader in class is not enough.
Asking questions, challenging others' views (including the professor), and sharing insights and reflections as well as triumphs and failures without any loss of power, all are VITAL to learning.
You cannot learn simply from listening. Remember the expression in the syllabus?
What I hear, I forget. What I hear and see, I remember a little. What I hear, see, and ask questions about or discuss with someone else, I begin to understand. What I hear, see, discuss and do, I acquire knowledge and skill. What I teach to another, I master. Mel Silberman, Active Learning (1996)
This is based on the following Chinese philosophical expression: "I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand." by Xunzi (340-245 BC), one of the three greatest Confucian scholars of early years.
Pavneet Singh shared about the massacres that took place in India/Pakistan in the late 1940s. He wanted to share this sad and brilliant ethnographic video of a elder Sikh man recalling the massacres from his past. Very emotional. What kind of courage does it take to share this still today and what kind of courage and compassion do ethnographers need to bring?
Please submit your reflections after the SPEAK ebook is complete. (Originally posted for Fall 2009 deadline)
Discover if you popped this semester and what you learned from ANT1001. Before you begin, take a moment to review your own work from start to finish.
After reviewing your own work and reading our final version of SPEAK, reply to 2 (two) of the following questions (of your choice) as a comment below this blog post.
You must indicate what questions you are responding to in your comments. Keep it simple: cut and paste the question into your comment before you answer.
1. Share how readings in the Kottak and/or the Conformity & Conflict reader created a shift in your view of the world? In other words, how did you come to see the world with lenses from another culture (even if momentarily) this semester? Please use etic terms to help explain what happened whenever possible.
2. How might the ebook SPEAK challenge ethnocentric thinking about being a student or about being in college(You can address the collaborative process and/or the collective essays but not exclusively your own essay--THINK BIGGER PICTURE)?
3. Clifford Geertz wrote that it "takes a certain kind of mind to sail out of sight from land in an outrigger canoe" ("Anti Anti-Relativism," 1984). In other words, letting go of what you already know and embracing the unknown is not a normal thing for us humans. What ethnocentric thinking did you learn to let go of in this course? What could you apply that process to that you have been resisting letting go of (i.e., prejudice, bias, ethnocentric thinking about this or that group of people as different)?
4. You were acknowledged as a GREAT ONE every class. You have been a "participant-observer" (revisit Kottak pp. 48-50) all semester in this course experiment. What do you see from an etic point of view about "cultural adaptation" (see Kottak, 3-4), "agency" (see Kottak, 35-36), or the "Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis" (see Kottak, 73-74 or revisit the C&C essay)?
5. You can make a counter-offer for one question if you want to say/write anything else.
There are posts from previous semesters recorded in the comments sections. You can read them if you like.
At 2:18": "What's important here is not technological capital but social capital. These tools don't get socially interesting until they get technologically boring....Now that media is increasingly social, innovation can happen ANYWHERE that people can take for granted that we are in this altogether."
NO CLASS TUE APR 20 - Professor Gaunt is at a Twitter Conference and you should spend this time working on your draft of your essay. In lieu of attendance, please submit your draft by email to kyra.gaunt@baruch.cuny.edu by 5pm Tuesday.
NO QUIZ. Ethnicity and Race chapters and group presentation is postponed. Thu we will begin to edit your essays and launch the survey.
Read at least the cover page, tag cloud of contents, authors page (created by Wordle.net), the intro by Kyra Gaunt, and 8-10 different essays or more.
WRITE A RESPONSE BY EMAIL - Share what was your favorite essay in Audacity of Humanity and why? - Share how these essays exemplify the title of the book AUDACITY OF HUMANITY? In other words, based on a sampling of the essays, what is audacious and what speaks to humanity, in your own words?
Watch two or three videos of your choice from below and write a few comments on each to show you watched it.
Begin to write a 300 word essay that begins "What matters to me is..."
It can be about being a student, being a young adult embarking on life. Anything that makes you happy, that you desire, or that would make being a school more a reflection of what matters in life to you or to people as a whole.
It can be small, simple or mundane. It's more like what matters to you right now.
This might seem audacious. Like this little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine. No one may agree with me, but this thing you write about lights you up. It simply mattters. If the world might take a listen to your thoughts about X or Z, life would be different for people (in my humble opinion).
This can be a "discovery draft" or a "shitty first draft". Just write and ask later whether it's a good idea. If you feel compelled to write (and it REALLY CAN BE ABOUT ANYTHING YOU ARE INTERESTED IN RIGHT NOW). Write on!
SEND A RESPONSE ON EMAIL SHOWING YOU COMPLETED ALL OF THE ABOVE AND ATTACH A DRAFT OF YOUR ESSAY ABOUT WHAT MATTERS RIGHT NOW
What does it mean to be audacious and in this book and what does it say about humanity as a collective of ideas.
Attach your "shitty first draft" of a possible 300 words or less essay. Don't worry about a title yet. But if one comes to mind, share it.
_________________
YOUR COMMENTS BELOW
So you have some ideas about what we should or should not be up to with this project. I love what Bishoy said. This is an opportunity like no other. When do you get to CREATE instead of consume as a student. This book will be launched to students to inspire them to begin to inquire into what matters that represents Baruch College. Get the Bigger Picture of Baruch from our ebook.
Ultimately, I want you to see how simple it is to make a difference in a small but powerful way with an ebook. And I want to apply all the etic principles of ethnography and anthropology to ourselves and our environment. Make a difference RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW.
Add your comments below. BE GREAT. Google anything you are unsure of or if you need help use Google HELP to log on to make a comment. Also see sidebar for instructions on commenting on the blog.
Before spring break I mentioned that I was creating an ebook that inspired our final project The Baruch Big Picture Book. I released it to the world on Friday April 2, 2010 and it's been viewed by over 3000 people since then and counting.
The ebook is called THE AUDACITY OF HUMANITY and it features over 39 authors, ages 10 to 63, from 5 continents, representing multiple ethnicities, sexualities and belief systems with different abilities and limitations. We are ONE people, the human race, courageously up-ending stereotypes and generalizations.
Each contributor offers their story as a radical transformation of what leadership can be. We are not contained by description (check out our bios). We agree to be offended and stay connected. From A to Zed, we are a collective testament to the audacity of humanity. Be the audacity of that!!
One is a former student from ANT1001. Read the page under the tag "LEARNING ENGLISH" by Mei.
This is free. Liberate it. Tweet it, email it, post it on your own site.
I said last week I'd send an email about our conversations last class. The group presenting on gender presented a few videos out-of-cultural-context without any intervention into the generalizing stereotypes that exist in our culture about 1) women in Islam and 2) female circumcision in Africa. These two topics are fraught with stereotypes, "evolutionary" bias (like they are behind the modern way things SHOULD be), and mere misinformation that is worse than the truths are for actual men and women who are Muslims in the majority of cases.
Here's a different view than what we saw last Thu in class.
I insist that everyone take a look at a great website I found on PBS called GLOBAL CONNECTIONS: The Middle East. The first question they delve into is "What factors determine the changing roles of women in Middle East and Islamic societies?
Some Americans believe that Muslim women are oppressed by their religion, forced to cover themselves completely, denied education and other basic rights. It is true that Muslim women, like women all over the world, have struggled against inequality and restrictive practices in education, work force participation, and family roles. Many of these oppressive practices, however, do not come from Islam itself, but are part of local cultural traditions. (To think about the difference between religion and culture, ask yourself if the high rate of domestic violence in the United States is related to Christianity, the predominant religion.)...
The Quran explicitly states that men and women are equal in the eyes of God. Furthermore, the Quran:
forbids female infanticide (practiced in pre-Islamic Arabia and other parts of the world)
instructs Muslims to educate daughters as well as sons
insists that women have the right to refuse a prospective husband
gives women rights if they are divorced by their husband
gives women the right to divorce in certain cases
gives women the right to own and inherit property (though in Sunni Islam they get only half of what men inherit. Men are expected to care for their mothers and any unmarried female relatives, and would, it is reasoned, need greater resources for this purpose.)
While polygyny is permissible, it is discouraged and on the whole practiced less frequently than imagined by Westerners. It is more frequent in the Gulf, including Saudi Arabia. Many Muslims cite the Quranic phrase "But treat them equally... and if you cannot, then one [wife] is better" and argue that monogamy is preferable, or even mandatory.
As the Islamic state and religion expanded, interpretations of the gender roles laid out in the Quran varied with different cultures. For example, some religious scholars in ninth- and 10th-century Iraq were prescribing more restrictive roles for women, while elite women in Islamic Spain were sometimes able to bend these rules and mix quite freely with men (see Walladah bint Mustakfi below).
Some contemporary women -- and men as well -- reject the limitations put on women and are reinterpreting the Quran from this perspective.
How do you bring beginner's mind to something that seems so strange, even shocking at first? What tools do you have to have to begin considering how to think like an anthropologist. Think about how Geertz had to learn how to see sculptures in jungles, paintings in deserts, and political order OUTSIDE of state political structures that we recognize as "normal" or "the way is should be."
We will discuss this in class this week and the coming weeks.
A short video summarizing some of the most important characteristics of students today - how they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams, what their lives will be like, and what kinds of changes they will experience in their lifetime. Created by Michael Wesch in collaboration with 200 students at Kansas State University. Made by students in a Cultural Anthropology Class in Spring 2007.
Watch one or all three of the videos. One is an excellent ethnographic short of Cargo cults. The second is on Rastafarianism. The third is a dialogue between a Catholic priest and a Brahmin priest of Hinduism.
Cargo cults are compared to the cult of Jesus in this 6:03" segment:
This features a man from a community of Rastafarians, who have settled in the small southern Ethiopian town of Shashamene (3:01"):
This is a fascinating dialogue between a French Roman Catholic official (it seems) and a Hindu official or Brahmin priest.
POST A COMMENT: Decided to give you a bit more direction for the comment here. PICK ONE QUESTION TO COMMENT ON.
Q#1: After viewing the video on either Cargo Cults, Rastafarianism, or the dialogue between the Catholic Priest and the Brahmin priest, how does the example you chose to watch highlight
the social constructed nature of religion as well as
how our view of others is a manifestation of our own grinding and their reaction one cultural constructed by theirs.
If you are unsure of the culture of Cargo cults, see Kottak Mirror for Humanity, p. 195 again.
Q#2: How has the world capitalist economy of core and periphery stratification of nations perhaps contributed to the spread and formation of religions like Rastafarianism and Cargo cults?
Originally posted 10/13/09 12:40pm: The Illinois Institute of Technology's Gabe Biller and Kristy Scovel created an introductory video on how to conduct an ethnographic interview. It features Dori Tunstall who teaches Design Ethnography at the University of Illinios Chicago and Colleen Murray of Jump Associates along with a host of IIT folks. We will watch this great video in class. I also want you to watch it a second time by Tue Oct 16th. I found this 33 minute video on the blog http://eskar.dk/andreas/blog/?p=313
WE ARE LEARNING ABOUT WHAT IT MEANS TO BE AN ETHNOGRAPHER; TO DO ETHNOGRAPHY
Thought I should compile some notes on your C&C essays that you all can learn from. Want to use crowd-sourcing of feedback more often.
OVERALL: You should think about what these essays are demonstrating that anthropologists need to learn, do, and think that combats ethnocentrism and what actions did this involve to conduct and write a great ethnography.
How does the author use terms (emic explanations) to reveal the native beliefs and core values? How does he use anthropological or etic terms to do the same? What methods did he apply to learn the emic explanations? How effective was he/she?
Rather than writing a book report about how YOU reacted to the reading or what you remember about the "story" write about what's being revealed to you about conducting fieldwork, participant-observation and ethnography.
Don't waste paper putting the biblography on a separate page and strictly follow the format given.
Always refer to authors by their LAST NAME. You will never find a reference to an article by DAVID. No need to add titles like professor or "Dr."
ABOUT SAPIR-WHORF ESSAY BY THOMSON
A student wrote: "Not to take these readings literally but I think we should consider the fact that we do make very instinctual decisions as we speak". Consider that this is NOT instinctual but LEARNED. It is cultural not in any way biological. Notice how we even use language AGAINST language when we evoke "biology" (VERY instinctual). This means we didn't learn it. It's in us - like DNA.
Here is an exemplar model of description and critical thought: "My attention was captured as I tried to disentangle the "whys" in the way the Bushmen treated /ontah and his deeds. ...How can an ox look like a sac of bones to most villagers and, at the same time, be perceived as the largest, fattest game to "whitey". As I read on, I laughed in confusion....Are the !Kung playing a joke on a poor man?..."Insulting the mean" (http://www/slideshare.net/PaulVMcDowell/kung-san-of-the-kalahari-desert) was a way to prevent a young hunter rom becoming arrogant and dominating. My embarrassment ...was being ethnocentric (Kottak, 37).
HERE IS ONE I EDITING ALONG THE WAY: "In chapter 4 ofMirror of Humanity, Kottakwrites about how Americans simplify the shades of color from teal, blue-green, hunter green and so on into one label “green” (CITATION MISSING: Kottak, p. ??). There isn’t any difference between the way that so called “advanced civilizations” use language and the way extinct (??? Who said anything about extinct dialects? What are these??) and lesser (Whose language is lesser?? Watch it1 Your ethnocentrism is showing!) used dialects use language. Thus, every language has its own ways of distinguishing the same phenomena; therefore each language is effective(WC—word choice--affective refers to feelings and emotion) for the group of people that use it.[GREAT POINT]
Another exemplar model: "Whorf argues that English speakers think in past-present-future (Thomson, 115). Thus, our lives operate accordingly. We hurry to catch the train, the bus or to work. Accurately, we are catching the time that our language teaches us. It can come, pass, or never be back. When we build a building, we measure the progress by designating different stages of being finished on specific days....We think and do any possibilities throught he way we measure time through language (or the way language measures time)....The words we use to describe the world are all we know about it [learned through enculturation and it differs from other cultures--not for better or worse]. Our imagination is also restricted by the lexicon we use (Kottak, 70).
Are these useful and explain why if you can. PLEASE POST A COMMENT for practice.
This panel took place today and was uploaded on USTREAM as part of the Social Media Week that took place all week and ends Sat at the Roger Smith Hotel for a barcamp-style workshop from 7:30 - 5:30pm http://smw-newyork.sched.org/
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August 9th, 2008 · by Warren Whitlock · Filed Under: Twitter · Twitter Videos · Twitter in Education
@mwesch used social media tools to turn what could have been a boring university lecture class into an experience that harnessed the power of students knowledge, connections and imagination.
His views on education are refreshing. The outcome from the class is fascinating.
While watching this video, I kept thinking of more ways that a small group of people can do more than we had imagined.
I look forward to seeing your comments about how you will use this in your network, relationships, groups, business and life.
Please put your @ handle in your comment so we can follow you on Twitter. Professor G's handle @kyraocity Come follow me!
Hey ANT1001-ers. Please read the non-fanatical beginner's guide to Twitter and skim through the two other articles listed below on using social media in the classroom.
Social Media: Twitter Guide and Its Use in College ClassroomsMy dear social media friend Deanna Zandt wrote the definitive must-read guide to Twitter in a blog titled:
(If you're not sure what Twitter is, or why you should consider Twittering, check out "Why Twitter, anyways?")
Edited 1/3/2010 to include updates to Twitter interface over the past few months.
Thanks to a bunch of mainstream media coverage, a lot of folks around me are becoming more interested in participating in the Twitterverse. "All right, all right," they say. "You've convinced me. But how do I get started?" It's almost like walking into a giant party for the first time: You're not sure where your friends are, the bar is on the other side of the room, and the bathrooms are anyone's guess. Allow me to be your party guide.
Sure, sure, you could also just Google "beginner's guide to Twitter" and read a any number of other guides that have been written. Problem is, I feel like most of them focus on two niches: how to be a fanatical Twitterer, and/or how to be a really obnoxiously popular Twitterer. What I'm aiming for here is more for people who want to experiment a little and connect with other folks on a pretty direct level. We'll talk later about different ways you can participate, but for now, let's just get the basics down....click for more.
OTHER ARTICLES ON TWITTER IN COLLEGE CLASSROOM Here are some brief articles that serve as resources for understanding the power of social media in college-level classrooms.
The borough/region of NY metro area where you now live
Then describe the way a person introduces themselves in your native culture/community (in no more than 25-50 words).
What do they say? Is there formal/informal versions of introductions?
How do you physically greet/meet another person or persons?
Does age matter?
Is there a difference in greeting men vs. women vs. children?
And does that introduction represent a particular culture in your mind or a different culture to others?
EXAMPLE: When you greet another person of same age in black culture, you often see people give each other "dap" or a special handshake. "Dap" comes from a brand of hair grease or palmade from the South. Most associate it with men but women do it too. Older folks do not ordinarily do this.
Each student agrees to post a comment at least once a week throughout the semester. Take this seriously. Stay on topic! No flaming, cussing, or advertising. You comments will factor into your participation grade. Be adult and enjoy the freedom to express any communication responsibly. Curious thoughts and questions are often the best conversation starters.
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Being a mere listener and reader in class is not enough. 
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