Paper short abstract:

Understanding that teaching anthropology and ethnography is central to the discipline, the panel discusses teaching anthropology and ethnography to students whose backgrounds and needs have transformed over the years and from within teams geared towards the expectations of business, government etc.

Paper long abstract:

Increasingly anthropologists teach in cross disciplinary teams, in settings outside the disciplinary purity of anthropology departments and focused on teaching students whose needs are geared towards those of business and government. Moreover our students often come from developing countries with their own needs, expectations and demands for whom ethnography is a means to an end, and a means that can be squashed to fit the time and circumstances available.

We teach anthropological ideas and techniques without necessarily labelling them as such and share our teaching with colleagues from different disciplinary backgrounds. Are we trying to train future anthropologists or are we trying to teach people an approach to the world which takes something from anthropology but which has moved on to follow different career paths and new routes through the world? Are we losing something by teaching ethnography as a technique in this way, where ethnography emerging from long term, engaged contact with people and situations is replaced by the fast moving requirements of business and government? How does it feel to teach ethnography in such contexts - either as an anthropologist taught the benefits of long term participant observation or as someone who comes to ethnography from a different perspective? What do we learn from one another and what do our students learn from us?

Are we in fact staying true to the ethical underpinnings of anthropology by changing what and how we teach to suit the needs of students who hope to manage the machinations of business and government?