A number of years ago I wrote an
article for the second edition of Strategies in Teaching
Anthropology. The writing focused on seven pedagogical
approaches to teaching anthropology that I have found to be
successful in my many years of teaching the discipline. One of
these is called a /Material Culture Presentation,/ and as I
describe it in my article, it is an effective way to connect
issues of material culture and ideology:
I developed material culture presentations
following an early interest in archaeology. I incorporate
material culture presentations in my cultural anthropology
courses as I feel they effectively stress the significance of
culture and material culture in anthropology and that they
emphasize critical thinking related to everyday objects. Prior
to the assignment our class discusses the significance of
material culture in anthropology. For the assignment my
students are asked to find one object of material culture.
There is no stipulation about the object, other than that it must
be brought into the classroom and that it may not be a picture.
I believe that by having students bring in a three-dimensional
object, the class presentations take on a more engaged, less
class report, style. The students give a five to ten minute
presentation on the object. They speak on a descriptive
level first/highlighting the physical, tactile and other sensory
aspects of the object. Next they consider the production of
the object/this is a very interesting area as some consumer items
are often of ambiguous origins; other times they reflect the
unfortunate sides of the production of mass culture objects.
The final portion of the presentation emphasizes connections
between the object and systems of culture. Students may tie
the object to a cultural institution or to a particular aspect of
everyday life.
The study of cave art and ritual in
archaeology offers many promising pedagogical opportunities in
teaching anthropology, but I have found that students are
sometimes disappointed with the lack of real experience with the
actual art as well as the creative processes that produced it. To
cover this gap I use multimedia sites on the Internet to develop
an appreciation of the aesthetic mastery involved in early art,
followed by an activity that utilizes hand-made tools and
pigments to give students the idea of the difficulty involved in
producing such art and the high cognition associated with the
work. Prior to utilizing the cave art activity in my classes, I
was struck by the assumption that cave art reflected less
cognitive and artistic capacity than the art familiar to many of
my students. With the activity I am able to stress the true
cognitive and spiritual connections that exist across the Homo
sapiens lineage.