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This essay is intended to inspire educators to find ways to incorporate anthropology
into their curricula. It was the basis for a later essay published Fall 2009 in Independent School Magazine.
Why
Teach Anthropology in High Schools?
Independent
high schools are trying to do it all. While preparation standards demand emphasis on core competencies,
we craft mission statements that speak of building character and promoting
global stewardship. We aspire
to diversity of academic content as well as actual population, yet we
often find a disconnect between our curricula and our ideals. We attend conferences in search of tips
for getting them to merge. How
can we connect compassion to mathematics, integrity to English literature,
or an appreciation of diversity to the study of ancient civilizations? The answer lays so deep as to be fairly
existential: by reconceiving education as a series of lessons in the
human experience, and all scholarship as deriving from it. What better science is there than anthropology
-- the study of humanity -- for helping our students to make connections
between their studies and their lives?
All
categories of knowledge are interdependent, having evolved together
through necessity as well as inspiration. Despite this, we separate them now into academic disciplines
and put up psychological barriers between them which discourage not
only cooperation, but innovation. If we wish to speak to every aspect of our students, we must
address the entirety of their lives, a task for which the fragmentary
approach we now employ seems ill-suited. Anthropology, however, offers us the tools
for reweaving all our various strands into the whole that we once were,
when astronomy and physics met religion and art on high ground and built
temples there together. All-encompassing
by definition, anthropology can reconnect these discrete categories
of knowledge to reveal the framework upon which all our lives are built. In so doing, it can provide a context for understanding everything
from art to war while fostering a sense of personal integrity and an
appreciation of difference.
Take Students
Beyond Tolerance
Anthropology
is both comparative and relative, in that it seeks to understand all
cultures around the world and throughout time on their own terms and
according to their own standards and beliefs. As it exposes us to cultures other than our own, anthropology
does unsettling things -- like pointing out while we may have inherited
our knowledge of geometry from the Greeks, the ancient Maya knew a thing
or two about it, too. It forces us to look outside ourselves
to see other ways of life and different modes of knowledge. It demands that we withhold judgment in
favor of rendering assistance, that we respect rather than simply tolerate
one another, and that we pay due attention to all that makes us human. It asks us to examine our lives not in
the context of recent historic developments, but of the 200,000-year-long
human project known as survival.
Teaching Anthropology is Teaching Multiculturalism
Multiculturalism
is not a new idea, nor is it as progressive as one might think. Looking back through history, it appears
that whenever two discrete peoples have in come into long-term contact
with one another, the result has generally been either conflict or peaceful
coexistence -- what we today refer to as "cultural pluralism"
or multiculturalism. The
most important factor in determining which direction the relationship
will turn is financial: as the economic power of both groups approaches
equality, it grows ever more likely that the two groups will establish
a working relationship to the benefit of both. This helps to explain our current-day penchant for multiculturalism. We are not, after all, celebrating the
diversity of hunter-gatherer lifestyles, but of folks with whom we go
to school and work. In other
words, we honor the differences between people just like ourselves because
we are interested in doing business with them. We all have similar goals, dreams and desires, and we all labor
within the same system -- so how diverse is that really?
The
new multiculturalism should move beyond this comfort zone of capitalist
homogeneity to embrace real diversity as it occurs in our world. That means looking past the school and
the community it serves to see the rest of the globe and the span of
history. It means establishing
interdependent relationships between different communities, not just
across districts but between countries. Anthropology has staked its claim squarely in this territory,
where it has been teaching us about global diversity for over a century. I believe that by providing us with a more
holistic approach to our studies, an anthropological perspective can
give us exactly what seek: a curriculum that builds character while
teaching skills.
Give Students
an Anthropological Context
High
school students are at a crossroads in their lives, when youthful naiveté
begins to clash with life experience. They want answers we have difficulty providing. Why is there injustice in the world? Why is there war? Poverty? The list is endless and discouraging. History lays out the situation while psychology explains the
motivation, still our answers feel woefully inadequate. There is, however, a pre-existing paradigm which actually answers
these questions: the anthropological theory of cultural materialism. I believe it can provide students with
a sensible framework for understanding virtually every aspect of their
lives. Teaching through
it may well revolutionize our approach to education.
It
was Marvin Harris who, borrowing heavily from Karl Marx, explained that
human societies are challenged first and foremost with the necessity
of making a living (i.e., finding something to eat) in their environments; there can be
no priority that takes precedence over this. As such, whatever method we employ for
meeting this fundamental need comes first, and all of the other institutions
and beliefs in our society flow from it, in support of it. In anthropological terms, the mode of production
determines, to a large extent, the shape of things like kinship and
inheritance, government and religion.
Why
People Do What They Do
Harris
described five major modes of production which emerged sequentially
over the span of human history: foraging (also known as hunting and
gathering), horticulture (simple hand cultivation), pastoralism (herding
animals), agriculture, and industrialism. His theory of cultural materialism holds that human societies,
once they have chosen one of these strategies for survival, must struggle
to keep their populations in balance with their available resources;
this is turn leads to beliefs and practices which support this goal. Foragers, for example, live off the land
very directly; there is nothing standing between a forager and food,
shelter, or clothing. If
she's hungry, she gathers some plants or captures a small animal; if
she's cold, she builds a fire, makes some clothes and builds a shelter. She has no need of government; she owns
nothing, yet has a right to everything. She is concerned, however, not to have too many children, because
there is a fine line between having enough to eat and using up everything
that is available. Her culture,
therefore, prefers monogamy and places extensive taboos on sex, a two-pronged
strategy which helps to keep the population down. This approach worked very well for almost the entire span of
human existence.
Technology Changes
Everything
Around
12,000 years ago, the advent of agriculture brought major changes. While food production in the horticultural
mode is limited by a complete lack of technology, agriculture is characterized
by the use of animal labor, metal tools, and sophisticated techniques
for maximizing crop yields. Agriculturalists
produce a lot of food, which leads to a love of children -- the more,
the better. After all, there
is plenty of food to feed them, and there's plenty of work for them
to do. Children are tremendous
assets to a farming family, contributing mightily to the household economy. They process fibers, grains, milk and meat, they take cattle
to pasture, they plow the fields and they go to market. Children are so valuable, in fact, that many agricultural societies
practice polygamy, since marrying each man to several women ensures
a great flow of offspring. This was a sensible strategy for the early
Mormon Church, concerned to quickly populate the ranks of both their
faith and their state.
Here Comes the
Government
Perhaps
the most significant change that agriculture brings lies in the fact
that not everyone has to be a farmer; not everyone has to be concerned
with obtaining food every day. If you're a forager, you know exactly what you're doing tomorrow:
you're going out looking for food. If you live in a horticultural society, you'll be tending to
your crops or doing your seasonal migration on the way to your other
crops. If you're a pastoralist,
you're going to be taking care of your animals. If you live in an agricultural society, however, you could be
doing any number of things -- you could be a priest, a warrior, a poet,
a shoemaker, or even a teacher. This burst of specialization is both liberating
and discomforting, for while it frees us to be the things we are today,
it puts a series of steps between us and the food we need; suddenly
we must work to earn currency to exchange for it. Now the need for a government arises, and
a strong one at that; how else are we to ensure that food gets from
the growers to the rest of us? How else are we to ensure that our property remains our own? Inequalities become inevitable as some
succeed while others fail and some grow wealthy while others grow thin. A ruling bureaucracy arises which becomes
so essential to the survival of its populace that it often finds justification
in a state religion.
Where Are We
Now?
Today
we live in an industrial mode of production, which may fairly be called
a capitalist system. The
industrial mode of production is unique in that it is the only one whose
primary purpose is not to
produce food, but to make profits. While industrialism would of course
be impossible without an agricultural base, its priorities are utterly
different. This is exemplified perfectly by the crops that were tended
by the enslaved people of
North America
: tobacco and cotton. You can't eat either one of them.
Significant
social changes must occur as agricultural societies move into industrial
modes of production. One
such change is referred to by sociologists as the demographic
transition, which is a toothless way of saying that people have
to stop having so many children. Children are expensive in the industrialist mode of production;
they don't work and they cost a lot of money. This is one reason for the distaste with which the Irish Catholic
immigrants of the late 19th century were met in
America
;
they had no skills, they were illiterate, and to American minds, they
had no business having so many children. An equally large problem is posed by the fact that as foragers,
we humans managed to coexist peacefully with our planet for almost 200
millennia, while as farmers and industrialists, we're utterly destroying
it. These modes of production are not sustainable
in the long term, largely due to their dependence upon the use of non-renewable
resources such as land, water and oil. We tear through all of them at a fearful
rate, and where do we go when we run out of them? Knocking on neighbors' doors, usually with
our tanks in tow.
This
is the context we should provide, the honest truth of human choices
made over many millennia. It
speaks not only of where we are today, but of where we have been and
where we are going. More importantly, it speaks not only of
us, but of everyone and everything we are and ever have been.
Changes in Curricular
Philosophy
Teaching
through this paradigm encourages the study of many diverse lifeways
around the globe and throughout time. This leads students to a worldview that encompasses much more
than their own personal experiences; they end up having real respect
for people from whom they differ. They realize that prejudice is a roadblock to learning about
anything other than themselves, and just how limiting that is. They discover a genuine curiosity about the lives of others and
come quickly to see the beauty in us all. They internalize the principle of cultural relativism, which
holds that all cultures are equally moral and right, relative to themselves. Through anthropology, students can come to a genuine appreciation
of difference and diversity and a true understanding of their place
in the world.
How
then are we to incorporate this point of view into our curricula?
1. Teach
anthropology classes. As
the study of humanity, anthropology is a discipline too big for one
office. It's traditionally divided into four fields
in which all anthropologists generally take courses: cultural or social
anthropology, physical or biological anthropology, archaeology, and
linguistics. If you hire
an anthropologist, you're usually getting someone who can teach everything
from comparative religion to sex education and genetics. Besides being a bargain, anthropologists
are diversity specialists whose grasp of the issues has been honed by
the extraordinarily wide scope of their studies.
2. Move
beyond the emphasis on the so-called "classic" civilizations. The ancient Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians
all had societies strikingly like our own in that they were all agriculture-based
hierarchical militarized states. The new multicultural curriculum should
offer courses on the pastoralist Masai, the horticultural Yanomami,
or the hunter-gatherers of the
Kalahari desert
. It should address the Hmong who have relocated
to our cities as well as the Aymara-speaking undocumented migrant laborers
without whom produce prices would soar. It should teach our students about the child immigrants who miss
days from school to translate for their parents or help them in the
fields. This is the current truth of global diversity,
of which we are only a part.
3. Construct
mini-courses around hands-on projects which build bridges between disciplines. Recreate history by building scale-model
pyramids, for example, which offer an opportunity to teach everything
from art and history to geometry, architecture and astronomy. Seed the school grounds with native plants
while studying the uses to which the Native Americans put them. Have students from a social studies class
interview their counterparts from an ESL class about their experiences
in America; invite them to together make a film or website that tells
the story.
4. Create
and maintain genuine working relationships with students and schools
unlike your own. Choose
a sister school with completely different demographics and go out of
your way to put the students in the same room together on a consistent
basis. Teach them to communicate effectively and
respect one another through group projects that require their joint
participation. Co-direct
the same exact play in two different schools and schedule rehearsals
and performances that integrate the two casts, or collaborate on an
original show. Have the students in two schools pair off
to teach each other about their respective communities; ask them to
work together to think of a creative solution to a problem in either
one.
5. Maintain
historical perspective. Teach
your students about the social circumstances under which the texts they
read were written; ask them who gets read and why. When you teach them the facts of science,
remind yourself that facts can change; everything you teach them may
one day be proven incorrect. After
all, it used to be a verifiable fact that the world was flat and the
sun revolved around the earth.
6. Maintain
cultural perspective. Teach
your students that there are still people in the world who do not have
televisions or video games, and that they are none the worse for it. Question the concept of "progress." There is no such thing as homelessness among foragers; it is
possible only in industrial societies like our own. Maintain vigilance around cultural constructions of race and
gender; some people are "black" in
America
and "white" in
Brazil
.
It
is my hope that the context I have presented here will inspire you to
move forward in introducing anthropology into your curriculum. Both we and our students are seeking answers
that anthropology can provide. Using anthropological approaches, we can introduce holism to
academics and provide an overarching context for everything we teach. By locating ourselves historically, culturally,
and globally, we can prepare our students honestly for coping with the
complex world they will inherit.
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