Paper short abstract:

Teaching across cultures can pose unexpected challenges, the same terms may communicate differently in different cultures. A global anthropology needs to both understand cognitive barriers and find teaching methodologies both sensitive to ways of transcending and restructuring contextually.

Paper long abstract:

My personal experiences as a teacher both to a variety of students from my own country and to those based in different countries has given me the realization that there is a significant relation between teaching material and those receiving it. Most students both perceive and absorb information sieved through their own cultural screens of cognition. While it is not impossible or even difficult to negotiate this barrier, it is important to be sensitive to the fact that the same term or the same reading may be comprehended as something quite unlike what it was meant to communicate. I found that while using western texts to teach Indian students I encountered certain problems of understanding and in a similar vein, American students found certain taken for granted social practices or cultural paradigms belonging to South Asia, irrational or plain incomprehensible. While anthropology regularly teaches students material from other cultures, these are presented as belonging to 'those' cultures but not as parameters that the students may use in their context . For a truly global anthropology, students and teachers need to make attempts to transcend these barriers and try to explain 'other' cultural practices and ideas by contextualizing them in their own cognitive maps and then explain the difference not just between specific practices but the philosophy and worldview from where they originate . This would enable the students to re-contextualize these concepts in ways that would make sense to them in ways that they were meant to be understood.