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Accepted Paper:
Teaching anthropology as playful research
Lydia Maria Arantes
(University of Graz)
I will give insights into newly developed playful approaches to teaching anthropology and reflect on their implications for the teacher and the students. I argue that anthropology must not only “move within playfulness” in the realm of research and representation but also on the level of teaching.
Paper long abstract:
I have long tried to move away from teaching as “passing on knowledge” (Ingold 2017) and moved towards practicing teaching as co-creating knowledge. Adopting one of the principles of ethnographic fieldwork – attending to lived realities in an explorative and open way – I had already regarded teaching as a joint act of exploration, also taking into account students’ everyday life experiences. This autumn I went further: Lustvolles Lehren und Lernen (pleasurable teaching and learning) became my new credo. While offering a rough structure I also made sure to leave enough room for anti-structure to emerge. This required openness and vulnerability on behalf of me as the person developing the course as well as a new kind of engagement and involvement on behalf of my students. In doing so, the course opened up space for making visible “epistemological journeys” (Arantes 2021) and “liminal knowledges” (Burgos-Martinez 2018).
In my talk I will give insights into some of the chosen approaches – of which a few involved playing with the idiom ‘business before pleasure’ – and reflect on their implications, both on the side of the teacher and the students. I will argue that anthropology must not only “move within playfulness” in the realm of research and representation but also on the level of teaching. Furthermore, conceptualizing teaching as research, I reflect on what teaching playfully and giving space to Homo Ludens (Huizinga 1950) can teach us about the broader role of play for anthropology.