Cultural Anthropology -- A Student's Analysis of the Holidays

One of the most successful students I have taught in my anthropology and sociology courses is Jane. She is a nontraditional student‰a divorced mother, lesbian, political activist, and in her seventies. Jane represents the diversity that makes up our anthropology classrooms. Even though she has scored a 100% in one of my classes in the past, she takes my courses as pass/fail because, as she has told me, she is excited about learning and sharing her life experiences with others. On one remarkable occasion Jane used her Cultural Anthropology class to present her interpretations of the cultural associations of the holidays in the commercial society of the United States. Her work was part performance, part collage, part demonstration, part spoken word. She began her piece with a selection of holiday music and a reflexive narrative bespeaking of her difficulties in being Jewish during the holidays and how her own faith has been commercialized by mass culture in the United States:

                  Mommy, Mommy, I want that Barbie doll for Christmas!

But my child, we are Jewish. We don‰t celebrate Christmas.

Mommy, Mommy, the T.V. said I should have it.

Mommy, Mommy, the store lady said I should have it.

I remember the little wooden dreydl.

I remember the Chanukah story.

I remember the love and the warmth and the peace.

I remember.

I remember the Midnight Mass.

I remember the beautiful Christmas carols.

I remember the tender feelings for Baby Jesus.

I remember the joy and love.

I remember.

Jane‰s reflections on the commercialization of the holidays taught all of us the significance of critical analysis of our own culture. In the end her narrative indicated the desire to escape the holidays‰reflected by her metaphor of the ‰emergency exit‰ in the photo‰but also to reclaim them in a personal sense.

Cultural Anthropology-- Culture and the Household

During one quarter of Cultural Anthropology I had requested that my students focus on the issues of subsistence and ecology as they related to culture and their own lives. One of my students is planning to pursue a degree in architecture, and she has already begun to apprentice in the field. We worked together so that she could produce a project that reflected the cultural anthropological topic in light of her personal interests. She developed a unique project that illustrated the needs of conservation as they relate to new forms of housing and urban development. The final work was a combination of original architectural plans that she drew and fact sheets related to housing, culture and conservation. In this example I would like to demonstrate how anthropology offers all students the opportunity to view the world in a new way. Even though this student does not plan to major in our discipline, she will use her insights about anthropology to be a more creative and resourceful person in her field of architecture.