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Index of posts [term_name]
- ChatGPT as educator? (January 12, 2026)
In my earlier post, I attempted to “assess” CG the way I might assess a student. This assessment led me to the uncomfortable conclusion, that, in this case, it was indeed a very good, albeit uninteresting, student. It was the kind who tells me exactly what I just taught them…
- assessing ChatGPT as student (January 7, 2026)
I have started organizing my blog posts in view of a possible publication. This is involving re-reading and re-indexing. In this process I found a series of posts published in 2011 "on assessment" following a small conference at Teachers College that a preparatory gathering that was part of the large…
- Family/Community as network of significance (December 10, 2025)
After the eclipse of “community” in the late 1960s anthropology, culminating with Geertz’ quip that “anthropologists do not villages study in villages, “community” came back when Lave, and particularly Wenger’s, summarized their work on learning in everyday settings as involving “‘community’ of practices.” I have written elsewhere why I thought…
- research as conversation with ancestors and peers (December 1, 2025)
This is a development on a series of blogs on what Ray McDermott once called "reply anthropology" For some years, I have started the required initial course in a doctoral student’s career in the Programs in Anthropology at Teachers College, asking them what is the concern that drives them and…
- Change and order in American modes of address and modes of reference (September 25, 2025)
Once upon a time, during my first two decades at Teachers College (in the department of, at first, Home & Family Life later reconstituted as Family & Community Education), I was addressed as “[FIRST NAME]” by colleagues and students alike. Twenty years, as I entered the programs in anthropology, I…
- “Factions” AND their critique as an American total social fact (May 15, 2025)
I concluded my earlier post (April 28, 2025) with a challenge: Should anthropologists continue to report all evidence of class (what I refer to here as "factions" based on race, genders, orientations, etc.) in the United States as an “American Dilemma” (Myrdal 1944), or as a conflict between “Dream and…
- Class, culture & America (or Culture, class & America, or America: Culture and class): Ethnography and interpretation(s) (April 28, 2025)
The earliest anthropologists were certain that they could use their methods and theories to understand “America.” Some (M. Mead, L. Warner) did, directly, and then soon many more have been certain that they could contribute to some understanding of the United States (its problems, futures, etc.). In this century-old and…
- Teachers College and “Family” (March 15, 2025)
From Arts (practical), to Life (psychological), to Education (social) in the attempts to understand and analyze, in order to educate about, perennial concerns with the settings in which men, women, and children meet most intimately and extensively over the course of their lives—in a word “in families.” For a new…
- about ethnoethnography (February 13, 2025)
I am always viscerally skeptical of fads in anthropology. Often, they disappear after only a few years, or move back into obscurity (“ontology”?) and I can ignore them. Others, like “identity” become mainstream and take over the discipline—as I discovered while playing “session roulette” at the AAA meetings over the…
- powerful representations of a culture (December 6, 2024)
[this was drafted in August 2024 but could not be posted at the time] « Un spectacle extraordinaire, unique au monde et dans l’histoire des Jeux qui, je crois, a rendu nos compatriotes extrêmement fiers. » Emmanuel Macron ne tarit pas d’éloges sur la cérémonie d’ouverture des Jeux olympiques de…