Sunday, June 5, 2016

Class Review: Anthropology 114

TL;DR 10/10 class content taught by a 6/10 professor assisted by 2/10 grad students, with 1/10 organization and clarity.

Hey, it's another class review! It's only been... almost my entire undergraduate career since the last one. Nailin' it, coach.

There are a few things I should clarify about this class before I write anything in particular on the subject: first, I took this class last semester (Spring 2016), so it's a recent event, and I did indeed get an A in it, so my complaints aren't just vinegar poured out because I'm bitter about bad grades. As far as why I'm taking the class in general, I'm a biologist who's considering picking up a minor in anthropology, for reasons that I would tell you if I knew them.

If you don't want to read the whole review, I'm just going to summarize and say that this is a very good class, and one you absolutely shouldn't take if you're anything like me. That probably sounds like a damn fool opinion, but that is indeed the most concise version of my opinion on the matter.

So, diving into the details, this is an upper-division anthropology class called History of Anthropological Thought, the title implying that it's a sort of greatest-hits approach to the history of anthropology. This isn't totally wrong; the stated purpose of the class, once you get into it, is to understand the various key movements and moments in anthropology's development as a discipline, as well as the important reversals and transition in how people thought in terms of theory. We read some of the classic racist armchair anthropologists of the late 1800s, and then went through the Boasian shift to radical empiricism, then through Radcliffe-Brown and the other morphs of structuralism, and into Geertz, and blah, blah, blah.

This sounds, in this cursory sort of summary, like a simple history class when I describe it, designed to orient the contemporary students of anthropology (who are to be discussed further down and later on) so they know where the "classical" ideas came from, who the big figures are, and so on. Anthropology, in one definition, is the science of comparative common sense, so it stands to reason we'd want to figure out where our own current common sense came from, so to speak.

I'm not convinced I have the vocabulary or the time and space to properly articulate how this worked, but that... simply isn't what happened in the class. We said we were doing that a great deal, and I did absorb a vastly greater knowledge of anthropology than I had before, but I can't honestly say that this exercise in historical understanding was the point of the course. I hear your immediate question, and I can only answer you that I don't truly know what the point was.

Lecture for this class was a damn mess, which annoyed the scientist portions of my brain and didn't really bother the part where I actually live. Professor Joyce simply stood and talked about things for the whole 90-minute lecture, which wasn't nearly as bad as it sounded; she is a vastly experienced expert in her specific field and in anthropology in general, and she's really a rather entertaining public speaker. Additionally, she tells good stories, and good stories from anthropology are usually completely ridiculous, so bonus points for that.

The difficulty is that, in an uncomfortably mercenary, cutthroat kind of way, I'm not necessarily around at lecture just to hear someone's interesting, insightful ideas, interesting and insightful though they may be. There is some degree to which I need to hear "know this" and "this was an aside for the interested members of the audience" for the sake of taking an exam and being engaged with course content, and we simply didn't have any of that, which was more than a little nerve-wracking.

"Nerve-wracking" and exam preparation lead nicely to the next point about this class: no one actually appeared to know precisely what was going on in the class at any given moment. I could belabor this point, but I'll try and keep it short. Organizationally, this class had two separate reading lists (one for lecture and one for section) and two separate pages on bCourses (the same deal). This is only slightly confusing, but allow me to elaborate: there were days when my section met (and I needed to present on things I'd read), but neither reading list was actually pertinent to what my GSI meant to talk with us about that day. Also, my GSI just kind of didn't add me to the bCourses page for the section, where I'm meant to be posting short writing assignments about the aforementioned things, and it took us almost a month to get to the point where she realized what had happened. Not knowing what assignments are due on which day: not so solid.

On the note of the organizational ephemerality of this class, we had a term paper for which we needed to analyze the work of a living member of UC Berkeley's anthropology department. I chose "analyze" specifically, because this is what the prompt said: "the final paper should analytically relate the work of the approved subject to the material covered in the course." For those who don't know or don't care, there are supposedly three levels of writing: descriptive, where you simply realize the facts about something; analysis, where you compare two or more things as abstractions, and synthesis, where you produce your own entirely new material. It's a uselessly muddy model because all the categories draw mutually on one another, but whatever.

The point is that we were meant to write at the level of analysis, meaning we take the contemporary anthropologist's work, hold it up against their predecessors, and go "Oh! These two lines of thought are similar (though not necessarily derived from one another)" and "If we use this author to understand it, this means this!" for 6 to 8 pages, which is what I did. I'm good at that, because... it's easy.

The difficulty came when I submitted an early draft of my paper to see if I was exempt from our final (which is a stupid concept and pissed me off for a whole other set of reasons, but steady on), and received the feedback.

Firstly, this was an A- paper, and I needed an A for the exemption. "I'll take that," I thought. "It's an early draft and I rushed a bit, so let's see what was said." The feedback was, summarizing, "you did too much reading of [your subject] through this course rather than answering the question: what does [your subject] think anthropology is and should be?"

So, as it stands at the authorial moment, I'm one point off getting exempted from an exam I no longer feel any sort of inclination to take (the organizational horrors had gotten me quite tilted by this point), and the feedback is, essentially, "revise your paper so as to answer the prompt less and answer this largely unrelated question that we've never mentioned to you, verbally or in a document, and you're off the hook."

I was more confused and vaguely annoyed than anything else, so I quoted the relevant bits of the email and sent another to my GSI, asking for some help interpreting what it was I should actually do. The GSI is a pro at this, after all, and I'm an amateur who wandered in from the bio buildings.

My interactions with the faculty here are usually nothing but pleasant (they like people who turn in their work, as it turns out), or at the very worst cold and polite, so understand what it means when I say boy I dun fucked up now.

The email I got back, while professionally worded (it always is with these people), was the single most scathing piece of communication I've ever gotten from someone who wasn't actively threatening me with violence. "It's not our job to interpret feedback,"  "it's not our job to ease your anxieties," and various other sentences explaining what an anthropology GSI's job was and was not ensued, informing me in no uncertain terms that I was totally out of line, and also totally out of luck. Apparently my email wasn't professionally worded enough, leading to the famous "I encourage you to use more professional language when addressing your instructors." "We're not doing it, and kindly piss off for asking," in short.

I sat staring at that email for a moment, in the pressure cooker of dead week with all the prior problems of this class stewing around in my head (my poor eyelashes suffered mightily under the fist of nervous trichotillomania this time around), wondering what to do. Having reached a conclusion, I opened Microsoft Word, added a one-sentence disclaimer to my paper that said, basically, "I'm doing analysis," and then went to Asha Tea House (the best) to get something sweet and caffeinated so I wouldn't be quite so inclined to eat the anthropology faculty.

This is, in short, the problem with this course, or at least the version I took. As a student, you have to perform at some unspecified level,understanding and absorbing a large volume of content which may or may not become relevant for the "learning exercise" of the examinations. If you ask Professor Joyce about it, she'll maintain that the exams are for learning, cite some research on learning, and mention a largely unrelated theorist who wrote something interesting on a subject that's entered her mind. If you ask a GSI they'll immediately shit on you, because they did research in South Africa, and they are busy doing important smart people things, which you as a filthy undergrad peasant wouldn't know a thing about. Also, there are three of them, but they don't talk to each other and don't pay attention in lecture, so good luck finding anything out even if they deign to answer you (which they most often didn't).

That having been said, this class wasn't actually difficult, in the end. I got out with an A on my transcript and didn't even have to take that last exam. Was I bewildered by this result? Yes. Was it something I understood how to repeat after I did it? Yes. Did it feel like I'd just been mercy-euthanized when I saw the final email? Also yes, as it turns out.

Humanity at large (and especially members of the more traditional scientific disciplines) look down on anthropology as a field for various reasons, but the main ones I hear are "it's easy because you can just make things up," "it's not quantitative or precise enough to be a real science," "it's pure theory and not materially applicable," and things of that nature. Personality-wise, the most common gripe is, generally, "everyone thinks they're incredibly smart and/or the department is full of snooty academics."

Faculty who taught Anthropology 114 last semester, please stop proving us all so firmly, unpleasantly right.


P.S. Feel free to show this to people as always; it gives me the giggles when people read my blog, and I turn the color of ketchup when they enjoy it. That being said, if you know me personally I would appreciate if you didn't, by some weird mechanism, connect this with me, and then with the faculty members in question. I don't want it to be a strange, tense, or awkward situation, and frankly I don't feel inclined to talk to them any more for the moment, a sentiment which I'm sure they reciprocate.

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