I have taught our large introductory cultural anthropology course (ANTH 101) on and off since 2014, and every couple of years I redesign it based on conversations with colleagues, research into learning and teaching strategies, and student feedback. In...

I have taught our large introductory cultural anthropology course (ANTH 101) on and off since 2014, and every couple of years I redesign it based on conversations with colleagues, research into learning and teaching strategies, and student feedback. In this post I describe a major change made in 2022: incorporating sessions on ‘how to university’ alongside ‘how to anthropology’.

In 2022 I decided to add an extra weekly lecture to ANTH 101 (moving from two 1-hour lectures per week to three) in order to introduce an academic skills component to the course. This change was inspired by:

the different knowledge and experiences that incoming first years bring to the classroom – as students who had completed their secondary schooling during a global pandemic – gauged by the kinds of questions students asked and how they wrote their assignments; the labour-based grading practices that my colleague Grant Otsuki and I began implementing in 2020 (which you can read about here); a “first year transitions” professional development course I took in 2021, run by my university’s Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, which took us through some of the reasons why students are not well prepared for university (including NCEA, the standards-based assessment system used in secondary schools in Aotearoa) and strategies we can use to facilitate their success.

ANTH 101 had two new goals: (1) to teach students ‘how to anthropology,’ and (2) to teach students ‘how to do well at anthropology at university,’ or ‘how to university’ for short. I also co-taught ANTH 101 for the first time in 2022 with colleague Corinna Howland, who was instrumental in helping enact my vision for the course.

How to anthropology

‘How to anthropology’ introduced students to key concepts in cultural anthropology in two parts. The first six-week block started with the concept of culture and focused on the methods anthropologists use to study culture. We read selected chapters from Mike Wesch’s free online textbook “The Art of Being Human” together with journal articles or book chapters written by members of our Cultural Anthropology Programme, who were invited to join us in the second lecture of each week for a conversation about the piece they wrote. This enabled students to get to know everyone in our Programme as well as key anthropological concepts and methods. During those conversations we asked our colleagues:

Tell us about yourself (who you are, what kind of anthropology you are into) Thinking about your book chapter or article that our ANTH 101 class is reading, what were your aims and overall argument? What methods did you use for that research and why?

I connected this part of the course to the first assignment, which asked students to write a narrative biography of an anthropologist who has conducted ethnographic research in Aotearoa New Zealand, and/or who is currently based in Aotearoa New Zealand. Not all of our colleagues were able to join us in class for a discussion about their research, so I included them and their work on the list of anthropologists students could choose to write about for this assignment.

The second half of the 12-week course changed gears to focus on sugar. We used sugar as a material object to explore a range of other key concepts, such as colonialism, capitalism, and gender and sexuality, and we read work by anthropologists who have theorised these concepts in different ways. This half of the course showed students how to think like an anthropologist about sugar (and hopefully other things as well!). Students were invited to write an essay on what an anthropological study of sugar can tell us about the world for their third and final assignment. (The second assignment, a take-home test, is described below.)

How to university

The ‘How to university’ lectures took place on a Friday, after the two ‘how to anthropology’ lectures on Monday and Tuesday. Corinna and I brainstormed a list of everything we thought students needed to know in order to do well in anthropology at university and designed these lectures to equip students with those skills. We started by taking an anthropological approach to the university, explaining what it means to do that and discussing the university as an institution, what it does, who and what makes up a university, how they are different from schools, their history and what they look like now, and what it means to become a university student. In the first six weeks of the course we moved through a series of skills including how to take notes, how to understand assignment questions, how to write thesis statements, how to do a close reading of an article, how to write introductions and conclusions, and how to structure a narrative biography (their first assignment). In the second half of the course, when we shifted to thinking like anthropologists about sugar, our ‘how to university’ lectures focused on ensuring that students understood the theories and concepts discussed in lectures, readings, and films, and that they felt confident about their upcoming assignments.

Lecture topics

Corinna and I decided upon a list of key concepts we thought our students should know and developed a series of questions about them. We then designed each ‘how to anthropology’ lecture to respond to one of those questions. Our 2022 lecture schedule looked like this:

Week	‘How to anthropology’	‘How to university’
1. Introduction to the course	What is cultural anthropology? What is a concept? What is this course about?	What is a university?
2. Culture	How did anthropologists come to make difference through the concept of culture? What is culture, who has it, and how do we talk about it?	Notetaking, critical reading, and how to approach the first assignment
3. Ritual	How do anthropologists study culture and rituals? What is a ritual? What is liminality?	How to do a close reading of a journal article, and how to write a thesis statement
4. Development and disagreement	What is the relationship between anthropology and development? How do anthropologists study and think about disagreement?	Review of key concepts, tips for writing an introduction, and how to structure a narrative biography
5. Difference	What does it mean to be human? How can we critique cultural practices that are not our own?	Tips for writing a conclusion and time management
6. Storytelling	Why do stories matter to anthropologists? What do anthropologists need to think about when writing about people’s lives?	Screening and discussion of Arnav at Six (as an example of visual ethnographic storytelling)
7. Thinking like an anthropologist about sugar	What does studying sugar anthropologically allow us to look at? What does a historical approach to sugar involve? What are the goals of comparison in cultural anthropology?	(No class)
8. How sugar changed the world	What is the relationship between sugar, slavery, capitalism, and race? What was blackbirding in the South Pacific? How have people theorised race and whiteness?	Screening and discussion of Sugar Slaves
9. Sugar and the world system	How do different theories provide different answers about global inequality? What is political economy in cultural anthropology? How do anthropologists study commodity chains? And how do we put culture into history?	Essay workshop #1: Who to contact about an extension, how to break down the essay question, how to apply theory to your topic, and how to develop a research question
10. Sugar, consumption, and social class	How do anthropologists theorise social class? How did sugar come to be connected with social class? How are race and class connected? How is social inequality reproduced?	Essay workshop #2: Why structure is important, what introductions are for and how to write them, what body paragraphs are for and how to write them, what conclusions do and how to write them
11. Sugar, gender and sexuality	How do anthropologists think about gender and sexuality? What is the relationship between sweetness, gender and sexuality?	(No class)
12. Cultural appropriation and course review	What is cultural appropriation? What have we learnt in this course?	Screening and discussion of Qallunaat! Why White People Are Funny

Readings

Each week had one or two required readings and some recommended readings. As the course progressed, I created weekly review quizzes as a study aid for students with questions about the required readings as well as lectures. These weekly review quizzes also helped students prepare for the take-home test, the second assessment item, which was delivered through Blackboard (the learning management system our university was using at the time) and contained questions similar in content and style to the review quizzes.

Week 1

Wesch, Michael. 2018. ‘Lesson One: Fieldwork.’ In The Art of Being Human: A Textbook for Cultural Anthropology, 9–26. Kansas, USA: New Prairie Press ebooks. (required) Anthes, Emily. 2016, May 12. ‘The Glossary of Happiness.’ The New Yorker, https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-glossary-of-happiness UQx World101x Anthropology of Current World Issues. 2014. ‘Episode 1 – Module 1: Anthropology 101 – Conversation with Anthropologists Part I.’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPS_3aF-w6E UQx World101x Anthropology of Current World Issues. 2014. ‘Episode 1 – Module 1: Anthropology 101 – Conversation with Anthropologists Part II.’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jV3ISkRT4EE&list=PLBvA_xukT8iO-HiikQp25xsGVLzKcuDlk&index=4

Week 2

Wesch, Michael. 2018. ‘Lesson Two Culture: The Art of Seeing.’ In The Art of Being Human: A Textbook for Cultural Anthropology, 28–51. Kansas, USA: New Prairie Press ebooks.

Week 3

Bönisch-Brednich, Brigitte. 2015. ‘Rituals of Encounter: Campus Life, Liminality and Being the Familiar Stranger.’ In Crossing Boundaries and Weaving Intercultural Work, Life, and Scholarship in Globalizing Universities, edited by Adam Komisarof and Zhu Hua, 118–30. New York: Routledge. (required) Treagus, Mandy. 2012. ‘From Whakarewarewa to Oxford: Makereti Papakura and the Politics of Indigenous Self-Representation.’ Australian Humanities Review, 52, 35-56. (We did a close critical reading of this article in the Week 3 ‘how to university’ lecture)

Week 4

Lewis, David. 2012. ‘Anthropology and Development: The Uneasy Relationship.’ In Handbook of Economic Anthropology, 469–84. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing Limited. (required) Eli, Elinoff. 2021. ‘Introduction.’ In Citizen Designs: City-Making and Democracy in Northeastern Thailand, 8–37. Hawai’i: University of Hawai’i Press.

Week 5

Abu-Lughod, Lila. 2002. ‘Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others.’ American Anthropologist, 104 (3), 783-790. (required) Wesch, Michael. 2018. ‘Lesson 7: Superstructure.’ In The Art of Being Human: A Textbook for Cultural Anthropology, 215–69. Kansas: New Prairie Press. Otsuki, Grant Jun. 2021. ‘Frame, Game, and Circuit: Truth and the Human in Japanese Human-Machine Interface Research.’ Ethnos 86 (4): 712–29. Hancock, Tayla. 2015. ‘Reflexivity.’ Anthsisters. 2 September. http://www.anthsisters.com/2015/09/theorythursday.html

Week 6

Wesch, Michael. 2018. ‘The Power of Storytelling.’ In The Art of Being Human: A Textbook for Cultural Anthropology, 320–34. Kansas, USA: New Praire Press ebooks. (required) Bryers-Brown, Tarapuhi. 2015. ‘Te Ara O Te P?keko: Methodology and Methods.’ In “He Reached across the River and Healed the Generations of Hara”: Structural Violence, Historical Trauma, and Healing among Contemporary Whanganui M?ori, 17–26. MA thesis, Cultural Anthropology, Victoria University of Wellington. Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. 2009. ‘The Danger of a Single Story | TED Talk.’ https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_ngozi_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story?langu age=en#t-106653 Case, Emalani. 2020. ‘A Future Built by Stories.’ He Wah? Pa?akai: A Package of Salt. 26 February. https://hewahipaakai.wordpress.com/2020/02/26/a-future-built-by-stories

Week 7 – note the increase in recommended readings here, which were provided as potential resources for student essays

Mintz, Sidney W. 1986. ‘Chapter 1. Food, Sociality, and Sugar.’ In Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History, 3–18. New York: Penguin Books.

Week 8

Hall, Catherine. 2020. ‘The Slavery Business and the Making of “Race” in Britain and the Caribbean.’ Current Anthropology 61 (S22): S172–82. (required) Togo-Brisby, Jasmine. 2021. ‘An Umbilical Cord That Was Never Cut – Pantograph Punch.’ The Pantograph Punch. 17 September. https://pantograph-punch.com/posts/An-Umbilical-Cord-that-was-Never-Cut (required) Muhammad, Khalil Gibran . 2019. ‘The Barbaric History of Sugar in America (part of The 1619 Project).’ The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/sugar-slave-trade-slavery.html ‘The Bitter Taste of Sugar Slavery | RNZ.’ 2017, 29 July. https://www.rnz.co.nz/concert/programmes/upbeat/audio/201856488/the-bitter-taste-of-sugar-slavery ‘Before Cotton, Sugar Established American Reliance on Slave Labor | PBS NewsHour.’ https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/before-cotton-sugar-established-american-reliance-on-slave-labor ‘BBC Radio 4 – Sweetness and Desire: A Short History of Sugar, Slaves to Sweetness.’ https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09nvzgc ‘Legacies of British Slave-Ownership Project.’ https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/

Week 9

Errington, Frederick Karl, and Deborah B. Gewertz. 2004. ‘Introduction: On Avoiding a History of the Self-Evident and the Self-Interested.’ In Yali’s Question: Sugar, Culture, and History, 1–20. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (required) Cook*, Ian. 2004. ‘Follow the Thing: Papaya.’ Antipode 36 (4): 642–64. (required) Diamond, Jared M., Tim Lambert, Cassian Harrison, Peter Coyote, Lion Television Ltd, and National Geographic Television & Film. 2005. Guns, Germs, and Steel (documentary). ‘The Story of Stuff.’ https://www.storyofstuff.org/movies/story-of-stuff/

Week 10

Ho, Hang Kei. 2021. ‘Why Has Wine Consumption Become Popular in Hong Kong? Introducing a New Sociocultural Paradigm of Traditional, Aspiring and Creative Drinkers.’ Asian Anthropology 20 (4): 248–68. (required) Kollnig, Sarah. 2020. ‘The “good People” of Cochabamba City: Ethnicity and Race in Bolivian Middle-Class Food Culture’. Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies 15 (1): 23–43. Baglar, Rosslyn. 2013. ‘”Oh God, Save Us from Sugar”: An Ethnographic Exploration of Diabetes Mellitus in the United Arab Emirates.’ Medical Anthropology 32 (2): 109–25. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1987. ‘What Makes a Social Class? On The Theoretical and Practical Existence Of Groups.’ Berkeley Journal of Sociology 32, 1-17. Smith, Raymond T. 1984. ‘Anthropology and the Concept of Social Class.’ Annual Review of Anthropology 13: 467–94.

Week 11

Holtzman, Jon. 2018. ‘The Weakness of Sweetness: Masculinity and Confectionary in Japan.’ Food, Culture & Society 21 (3): 280–95. (required) Kutia, Kahu. 2019. ‘Episode 3: Decolonising Gender & Sexuality In Wellington City – He K?kano Ahau.’ 22 October. https://www.rnz.co.nz/programmes/hekakanoahau/story/2018715687/episode-3-decolonising-gender-and-sexuality-in-wellington-city-he-kakano-ahau Kutia, Kahu. 2020. ‘Re: Decolonising Gender and Sexuality in Wellington City.’ https://www.renews.co.nz/decolonising-gender-and-sexuality-in-wellington-city/

Week 12

No assigned readings.

Reflections

Overall we found this to be a fun way to teach an introductory cultural anthropology course. We learnt a lot about our colleagues’ research by inviting them into the classroom and enjoyed the challenge of using sugar as a framework in the ‘how to anthropology’ lectures. We noticed that the Friday ‘how to university’ lectures attracted fewer students (in-person and online) than the ‘how to anthropology’ lectures earlier in the week. However it is difficult to know whether this was because the lecture was at 9am or whether it was due to the subject of the Friday classes. The feedback we received from students about this component of the course was overwhelmingly positive despite low attendance rates, and we saw an improvement in the quality of work students submitted at the end of the trimester.

Corinna taught this course as the sole course coordinator in 2023, and is co-teaching it with Jacs Forde in 2024. I look forward to seeing what they do with it!

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