Paper short abstract:

This paper reflects on a 4-year experience of teaching visual anthropology as an non-compulsory subject in an undergraduate course of Anthropology at a Portuguese University, stating the structural difficulty presented by the students to switch into a different knowledge/learning relation.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will reflect on a 4-year experience of teaching visual anthropology as an "non-compulsory" subject in an undergraduate course of Anthropology at a Portuguese University. It gives particular attention to a structural difficulty presented by students switching into a different knowledge/learning relation. Basically, not all students are available to agree with forms of knowledge and "evaluation" not exclusively based on texts and the conventional ways of evaluating. Along with this main argument I also want to reflect on the dialoguing borders in which anthropology may (now or ever) relay in order to grasp more complex understandings of its conventional subjects (humans). Haptic forms of knowledge are made possible in an inevitable conjunction of science, art, common sense and other (former) competitive discourses. Is it possible to create a film as a single Phd final product in an anthropological course? Is it possible to have (in anthropology) a full professional artist as a supervisor of a masterpiece of an artistic work that may also be submitted as a "scientific" representation?