In their inaugural volume of the Teaching Anthropology journal, David Mills and Dimitrina Spencer wrote: ‘For teaching to be an act of hope, pedagogy has to be more than one-sided cultural transmission and reproduction’ (Mills and Spencer 2011). Six years later, in his recent book ‘Anthropology and/as Education’, Tim Ingold develops and expands on a similar point. Supported by pragmatist philosopher and educational thinker John Dewey, he argues that education in general and anthropology in particular is not to be understood as ‘transmission of knowledge’ from one generation to the next, but rather should be seen as a process of developing a particular sensibility or ‘attention’, a far more open-ended, uncertain process. Ingold’s book is wonderful. It is compellingly argued, and refreshing in its scope and theoretical ambition. Nevertheless, it contains few examples of particular courses or educational practices to lend support to his aims and claims. The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, I intend to substantiate and support Ingold’s argument by providing two contemporary examples of experiments in teaching anthropology from Denmark that build on students’ fieldwork experiences. Second, and contrary to Ingold, I argue that these examples implicitly put ethnography rather than anthropology at centre stage.
Originalsprog
Engelsk
Antal sider
10
Status
Udgivet - 2021
Forskningsområder
teaching anthropology, teaching activities, research based teacing