"CHANNEL YOUR PASSION" (from the Teachers College web front page in 2019, 2020. In 2022 "Channel your passion" was been changed to "Ignite Courage. Lead Change." In 2023 this page also mentioned "Where true change begins" [current front page])
(apprentice yourself to a discipline and live with and through a construction---system?)
"DO NOT ENTER" (sign on Teachers College's main door, March to May 2020)
(figure out how to deal with constraints, act on these constraints, and perhaps transform them---agency?)

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What is an anthropologist to do next, as an anthropologist,
and particularly as an applied anthropologist of education  

This course is an exploration of theoretical debates about human action with other humans.  Consider the following:

Corona is neither simply juxtaposed to nor simply superposed over COVID-19. In a way, Corona substitutes itself to COVID-19, in another way Corona uses and transforms COVID-19 to realize a synthesis of a higher order. (paraphrase of Lévi-Strauss ([1949] 1969: 4) developed in Varenne's blog post "Corona as culture" (April 8, 2020))

 

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STUDENT INTRODUCTIONS

• current concerns,
• imagined futures,
• hoped for audiences

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From concerns to (social) science (anthropology) and back to policy (personal, local, for a population, global)

Politics of the moment, the social sciences, justification, critique, suggestion for action.

1. imagining ways to participate in the expert debates about what to do next  
   1. Developing research that takes full advantage of more than a century of debates in disciplinary anthropolog about human action in all its form
   2. with the goal of participating in policy debates AS anthropologists

The question to ponder: Who closed the restaurants in March 2020? 

2. The Ivory Tower and the Public Square

   (the University and the Market, the Left bank and the Right bank in Paris, 'pure' and applied anthropologies)

   1. What should we chose?
      1. detachment? involvement?
      2. theory? practice?
   2. As of course, as McDermott said, quoting James Joyce: 'One aneither' (McDermott and McDermott 2010). This statement is an instruction: analyze any dichotomy for its implications. For example:
      1. Note the ambiguity of the 'we' in my rhetorical question:
         1. does it point at (index) you as individual agent?
         2. you as apprentice that will make you, when you receive your degree with all the "rights and privileges thereto appertaining" an agent of anthropology (a state sanctioned expert)?
         3. the collectivity of anthropologists?
      2. Note the paradoxes built into the verb "to choose," particularly when starting with a concern about participation in a collectivity.
3. So, what have those who coopted the word "anthropology" for themselves do
   1. they borrowed a very old concern in Western philosophy (along with epistemology and ontology)
   2. they institutionalized an academic discipline
      1. Discipline is understood here as the concerted activity of (some) people deliberating with each other and reporting their deliberations to the public (or not).
4. So, what have they been deliberating about this past century and a half?
   1. What characterizes humanity? This is very old question that links our current work to Plato, Aristotle, Ibn Khaldün, Kant, Hegel, etc. It has many subquestions including:
      1. Are we (anthropologists, apprentice anthropologists, and interested onlookers) justified in dividing humanity into races given the difficulties it made for the agents and subjects of late 19th century European colonial empires?
         1. This is a question grounded in a time/place/position. It is also a question that remains even as the time/place/position of the question and those who ask/answer the question shift given the unfolding of the conversation about human characteristics, policies and practices, the critique of earlier policies and practices, etc.
      2. Are we justified in dividing humanity into culture(S) given the difficulties it has made for so many in the late 20th century?
      3. How do we deal with human universality and what constrains it ('structure', the ecological, social, psychological)?
      4. How do we deal with human diversity ('culture')?
      5. ???
   2. What can we tell people outside the discipline about our work?
5. The anthropology you are entering is, I would say, the ongoing production of one strand in the conversation produced by answers to the above questions regarding detachment vs. involvement.
   1. Even the most "ivory tower" of anthropologists in Chicago, Harvard, Columbia, etc. end up writing about colonialism, the environment, public policy on abortion, mental health, etc. And yet they often refuse labels like:
      1. applied anthropology
      2. public anthropology
      3. engaged anthropology
      4. action anthropology
      5. etc.
   2. at Teachers College and a quite a few other professional schools and other institutions, we cannot refuse the labels--though we must debate them and the implications of each as they are evolving. And we may be most in the spirit of an activity that started when a physicist, geographer, became fascinated with people he met while doing something else and realized that his interest could be used as a critique of then current understandings of humanity in its apparent multiplicity, but that this critique could only be effective if it was based on systematic research that returned to the public. Thus Franz Boas, and then Margaret Mead and many many others.
      1. Thus research on
         1. drug use
         2. autism and disabilites, difficult motherings
         3. school policies
         4. the uses and abuses of theories of personality (intelligence, drive, etc.) and learning in the implementation of meritocratic ideologies,
         5. etc. (Corona and its aftermaths)
6. Two Postulates that about all those whom we will read might agree with though they argue ferociously which each other on the exact way to deal with these postulates---arguments that continue to this day.
   1. Everything humans have to deal with is constructed out of some material, either human or not
   2. Everything constructed is the product of human agency, and subject to ongoing human agency

Course map

Requirements

On alternate weeks, from week 2 to week 11, all students in one group are required to write a short paper (about 1250 words) on the main assigned reading. One of the student in the group will be asked to read this paper at the beginning of the session. The students in this group will be expected both to discuss the reading and to teach important point to the students in the other group..... (More on the requirements)

The groups

A

B