Short Abstract:

Consideration of Anthropology’s relations with other disciplines has tended to focus on research rather than teaching and learning. Yet, these are markedly different milieux. While Anthropology has a long history of engagement in various forms of multidisciplinary, inter-disciplinary and transdisciplinary research, curriculum design in Anthropology usually entails addressing two distinct learning audiences. There is an audience of learners who intend to major in Anthropology, and an often much larger audience of learners who select anthropological subjects as subsidiary options. This studio aims to explore what Anthropology’s relationships with ‘other’ disciplines could and should be, within the milieux of teaching and learning.

Description:

With the exception of Anthropology’s engagement with the discipline of Education, systematic consideration of the relations between Anthropology and other disciplines has focussed predominantly on research rather than teaching and learning. Yet, these are markedly different milieux. Notably, while Anthropology has a long history of engagement in various forms of multidisciplinary, inter-disciplinary and transdisciplinary research, curriculum design in Anthropology usually entails addressing two very distinct learning audiences. On the one hand there is an audience of learners who intend to major in Anthropology. On the other hand, there is an often much larger audience of learners who select Anthropology subjects as ‘outside’ or subsidiary options.

In a political economy of teaching and learning in which income often follows enrolments, and in a context in which Anthropology comes with stereotypical ‘bad baggage’, such as its colonial history, attempts to cater for a larger audience can lead to the downplaying of disciplinary identity and even to a nebulous denial, in extreme cases, that what we are teaching is Anthropology at all. The slippery slope is evident in contemporary practices of nomenclature with de-identifying subject titles, preferring ‘Families and Relatedness’, for example, to canonical titles like ‘The Anthropology of Kinship’.

Rather than seeing the student cohorts of other, especially larger disciplines like History and Political Science merely as fecund markets to which we must appeal in order to survive, this studio aims to explore what Anthropology’s relationships with other disciplines could and should be within the milieux of teaching and learning. Following Michael Oakeshott’s celebrated insistence that sound learning can only come through specialisation, should we resist the draw of the market? If, conversely, we seek to engage with other disciplines, how should we conceptualise these engagements? Acceding to the allure of very specific dimensions of Anthropology for other disciplines, should we think of Anthropology as a service discipline, training other disciplinarians in the art of ethnography for example? Or, should those relations be more equalitarian, rendering the classroom milieu, for example (as David Mills and Mary Tyler Huber would have it), as a ‘trading zone’ of ideational borrowings and domestications? More radically, might we conceptualise Anthropology’s role as much more transformative than this? For example, and in critical contradistinction to many other disciplines’ conceptual sub-divisions of the world, should we subversively be championing the merits of anthropological substantivism and holism for these other disciplines? Further still, and especially via the comparative method, should we be championing a normative role for Anthropology relative to other disciplines – as a discipline that, by rendering the familiar strange (relative, contingent and culturally specific), could potentially lay the groundwork for the formation of modern cosmopolitan citizens?