Jason Antrosio has done some really great textbook reviews on his blog, Living Anthropologically. He even reviewed a portion of the textbook I am currently using, Kottak’s Window on Humanity. I highly recommend reading them; he has some great criticisms, particularly in relation to race and human evolution.

This blog post probably won’t be as insightful or helpful. But, my goodness, does it make me feel better.

I really dislike four-field, introductory anthropology textbooks. I have never found one that I really liked or after reading it thought, “yeah, that will work well with my class.” The first time I encountered a four-field, introductory anthropology textbook — going forward referred to as simply textbook — was when I was taking my seminar on teaching anthropology in graduate school. (My undergraduate program required anthropology majors to take four introductory courses in lieu of of one general course.) We were each given a sample textbook and told to review it. This was the beginning of my dislike of these textbooks. Since then I have evaluated many textbooks for my general anthropology course and have yet to find one that works well with my class. I have settled for a textbook that can easily be read out of order and works well as a reference rather than a narrative and I teach my students to read it that way.

These are my biggest gripes:

• “Chronological” Order
• Four-Field?
• Seemingly Random Keywords
• Culture Explanation

But, before I get into that, perhaps an explanation of how I teach is in order.

Taking General Anthropology with Me

My experience of teaching general anthropology has taught me that I am not just teach anthropology, I am unteaching it too. The majority of my students start my class with a lot of misconceptions and biases about what anthropology is and what it is for. There’s the easy stuff, such as anthropologists do not study bugs. However, the more challenging piece are the students who begin class with the idea that anthropological knowledge is suspect and based on liberal talking points and “fluff” research. Generally, at least a third of my classes distrust evolutionary science and think relativism is a way to justify oppression and abuse. As an instructor this is a tough place to be. Not only do I have to teach my subject, but I have to do it amidst adversity.

Some might think I dislike this teaching environment. I don’t. In fact, I love it. I live for those moments in the classroom when through careful and thoughtful discussions, these students come the conclusions of anthropologists before them. My goal isn’t to teach them just the “facts” of anthropology but to get them to think like anthropologists. There are many skills my students gain from taking my class; but, being able to enter a situation and begin to think holistically, relativistically and as objectively as possible to better understand their surroundings is something that I believe anthropology classes do uniquely well.

So with all of that in mind, my class is structured like this. Part one covers the basic ideas of anthropological thinking (e.g. holism, bias, relativism, reactivity), basic methodology, and the complex concepts we work with (i.e. science, knowledge, ethics and culture). In the beginning, we talk very little about what it is that anthropologists know about the world. Instead, we learn how it is that anthropologists see the world and how they go about knowing things. Rather than fighting these battles through – in my student’s view – difficult and controversial subjects like evolution, sexuality, and race, I build a rapport with them. Just like I never start off an interview in the field with the tough, personal questions, neither do I start a class without earning their trust to lead them down this road.

My students may not like the anthropological perspective when we get through this section, but they at least understand it and make the assumption through the rest of the course that what we talk about comes from this perspective. So, they expect to hear relativistic viewpoints, they understand what I mean when I talk about culture or scientific theories, and they assume that knowledge was gained through legitimate research and fieldwork.

Part two of my class covers a range of standard anthropological topics (e.g. gender, kinship, power). In each topic, we discuss the knowledge that anthropologists have gained about the topic and talk about how each sub-discipline has contributed, specifically noting methods used.

Part three covers evolution and race. This is the most difficult section for most of my students. For the students who oppose it, it feels like a javelin to the core of their faith. For the students who do not, it is awkward to discuss. Then there are the students who like to argue and want the section to run like a trolled comments section online. This is why I do it last. By the time I get to evolution and race, I have gained a healthy rapport with my students and I have learned where the trouble spots will be. This allows me to teach the material but also have healthy, fruitful conversations about these topics that are built on an entire semester of learning to think like an anthropologist.

So, what does this have to do with textbooks?

Here is my list of gripes again.

• “Chronological” Order
• Four-Field?
• Seemingly Random Keywords
• Culture

“Chronological” Order

Why do nearly all textbooks start with human evolution and work forward through “history”? First, for reasons already stated, I do not like teaching evolution first. I did it once, it was awful and I won’t do it again. Second, the ordering of subjects in a “chronological” order gives students the mistaken impression that every chapter after human evolution is the natural order in which societies progress through levels of complexity – starting with hunter-gatherers and moving up to industrial societies that are starting to care about the environment and/or business opportunities.

Students are not on the same page as me, they are starting at the beginning and like early anthropologists, they start off thinking along the lines of social evolutionists with contemporary hunter-gatherers and such peoples as something akin to Tylor’s survivals. Having a textbook format that reinforces this is not helpful.

Four Field?

The four sub-disciplines of anthropology are usually mentioned in the first chapter of the textbook and then never spoken of again in any concrete or specific way. And, when they are mentioned it is usually in the pretty pull out boxes with nice narratives about anthropologists on the job, which my students rarely read. Instead the rest of the textbook usually reads like a history book.

Yet, my students are still keen enough to associate different chapters with different fields. When asked, one of my classes assigned the chapters from Kottak’s Window on Humanity like this:

• Ch. 1 What Is Anthropology? – Four-Field
• Ch. 2 Culture – Cultural
• Ch. 3 Ethics and Methods – Cultural/Archaeology
• Ch. 4 Evolution, Genetics, and Human Variation – Physical
• Ch. 5 The Primates  – Physical
• Ch. 6 Early Hominins – Physical
• Ch. 7 The Genus Homo – Physical
• Ch. 8 The First Farmers – Archaeology
• Ch. 9 The First Cities and States – Archaeology
• Ch. 10 Language and Communication – Linguistics
• Ch. 11 Making a Living – Cultural
• Ch. 12 Political Systems – Cultural
• Ch. 13 Families, Kinship, and Marriage – Cultural
• Ch. 14 Gender – Cultural
• Ch. 15 Religion – Cultural
• Ch. 16 The World System and Colonialism – Cultural
• Ch. 17 Ethnicity and Race – Cultural
• Ch. 18 Applying Anthropology – Cultural
• Ch. 19 Global Issues Today – Cultural

My first problem with this is that my students then think that only one chapter contains information learned by linguistic anthropologists and only two from archaeologists. However, my second and larger issue with this assessment is that all of the chapters are four-field topics in my mind and in my classroom. By not explicitly talking about how each sub-discipline has contributed to that topic you lose the ties to methodology and research, which, in my experience, has two consequences: (1) students fail to understand where knowledge comes from and thus find it dubious and (2) students leave a four-field general anthropology course without being able to articulate what anthropologists do.

Seemingly Random Keywords

When I wrote my textbook review in graduate school, this was my observation of Anthropology: A Global Perspective, 5^th Ed., by Raymond Scupin and Christopher DeCorse.

Examples of Key Terms from Chapter One
Essential	Arbitrary
Ethnocentrism Holistic Participant Observation	Ethnomusicology Ethnopoetics Middens

The key terms in this text are a mixture of important, essential terminology and arbitrary terminology based on examples.  The essential terms are those that must be understood in order to grasp the larger picture of the material.  Arbitrary terms are those that were defined within the chapter but have little significance to the general goal of understanding anthropology.  The lack of distinction in the chapters could lead to students misunderstanding the material because they spent study time memorizing terms that are arbitrary as if they were essential.  Listing these as one group creates a false sense of equal importance not just to the reader but in how they understand the discipline as well.  The authors could thus do a better job in the summary materials in differentiating material on main concepts from material pertaining to examples.

This critique has held true for nearly every textbook that I have reviewed for my class. My students have been trained from a young age that studying includes making flashcards of bold words in the text. They believe that bold words are the important words. I do not want my students to spend an equal amount of time learning “ethnocentrism” and “middens.” Learning about ethnocentrism, makes my students better anthropology students, better citizens and more critical thinkers. It is an essential concept to the study of anthropology.

Middens, on the other hand just make them look smart when they tell their friends about how their anthropology teacher told them that archaeology  primarily consists of looking at people’s garbage. Yes, talking about middens is something we do. However, it is part of a much larger discussion about archaeological methods and what we learn from them. I would be much happier to have a student say on an exam “that hole-thing filled with garbage helps archaeologists learn about the diets and tools of ancient households” than to have a student memorize that a midden is a pile of household garbage. The emphasis on the vocabulary word in this case is bizarre to me.

Culture

Why do so many textbooks not talk about the complicated subject of culture until half way through the textbook? This gripe of mine was one of the things that helped me choose Window on Humanity, because it addresses culture in chapter two.

Any anthropologist should be able to tell you that culture is not an easy concept and that there are many problems that stem from using it in a flippant offhanded manor. Yet, many textbooks do just that.

• Anthropology: A Global Perspective, by Scupin and DeCorse – Culture discussed in Chapter 10
• Essence of Anthropology, by Haviland, Prins, Walrath, McBride – Culture discussed in Chapter 8
• Anthropology, by Ember, Ember, and Peregrine. – Culture discussed in Chapter 14
• Anthropology: The Human Challenge,  by Haviland, Prins, Walrath, McBride – Culture discussed in Chapter 14
• Introducing Anthropology, by Park – Culture discussed in Chapter 7¹

Some of my colleagues have justified this by stating that the earlier portions of these books deal with human evolution. However, I find it difficult to believe that any anthropology course can go weeks without dropping the word culture. Besides, many of these books use the word culture in ambiguous ways prior to discussing it. Scupin and DeCorse’s Anthropology: A Global Perspective has an entire chapter titled Paleolithic Cultures three chapters before they discuss the concept. When professional anthropologists with graduate degrees still have trouble defining culture in a clear and coherent way, how can we expect our students to understand the concept when we use it in many ways (e.g. a group of people, high culture and art, mysterious thing that anthropologists study) before we really discuss it with them.

/Ranting Over

If you made it this far, I apologize. This discussion was more rant than critique. However, you can’t say I didn’t warn you. 🙂 Hopefully, this post does start a few discussions about teaching introductory anthropology, however. Because, even though this post isn’t as wonderful as Antrosio’s (Seriously, go read them.), there are some items in here that really get at the heart of some of the things I am passionate about when it comes to anthropological education. That is, I believe that a four-field introductory anthropology class is an important course for our students and for our field. For our students, it teaches them essential skills and knowledge that they cannot get elsewhere. For our field it gives us a chance to really educate a mass of people who will likely never be anthropologists but will not go on in their careers to say things like “Florida doesn’t need anymore anthropologists.” If we don’t do it right, then this course fails in both respects and instead creates a hoard of students who can maybe tell you the name of a hominid or two but can’t tell you why relativism is an important analytical tool and really don’t care or understand what anthropology is for.

¹ Update from Michael Park – “An interesting read and some thought-provoking points. One update: The last two editions of my “Introducing Anthropology: An Integrated Approach” have, in fact, corrected what you point out. I have moved the discussion of culture earlier, to Ch. 4: Themes of Anthropology: Culture (after Ch. 3: Themes of Anthropology: Evolution).”