The scope of conventional knowledge

Anthropology - The New School for Social Research

After attending the speech given by Ann Stoler last Friday (the title is: "Secret of a Colonial Heart: the affective tie of colonial archives"), I visited the website of the anthrpology courses from the New School of Social Research. I always feel frustratedly amazed that how "tradition" our program could be after visiting other anthropology department. Somehow the myth of being a "four-field" anthropology department has the ineradicable impact on the courses we have and the mentality of what kind of knowledge could be imagined.

This school as well. I was approached by a student in my recitation last week saying, after attending the course for about two months, he really feels he still didn't learn some concrete stuff from our class (not for the recitation per se, he says). I hope (and I am sure) it is not only about my teaching. He is expecting something tangible, something concrete like mathematics or scientific knowledge. As to my intention to achieve in the recitaion, I think if I can let students know that there are different ways of thinking or some reasons to bear in mind why should we learn things from other cultural patterns (such as hunter-gatherer society or different relationships in gender and marriage), that is good enough.

Sometimes, I need to convince myself that these students can learn more, in order to make myself feel still comfortable and confident of teaching them in the recitations.

This connects to the feeling I have every time in the hillman library. There are lots of signs of here to "teach the literate people": do not use cellphone, or do not play computer game on the public computers, but still. I think for some place, signs are friendly reminders, but for some place, signs become sarcastic necessity for a library where students take as a place for social activities or hanging out.

(Sometimes in this littel pond like our library, you have to wait for the water to become calm again after some lively creature just jumped into the pond for their happy party...)