Tag Archives: visual anthropology

Teaching Anthropology through Sequential Art (Part II)

By Andrew Gilbert In Part I of this essay, I discussed the design and goals of a new course I had developed on graphic novels in an upper-year anthropology seminar course. In Part II, I consider some of the broader … read more…

  • dateDecember 13, 2019
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  • posted byAnna
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Thinking about and with “Selfies” in the Classroom

I often long for a classroom in which students eschew electronics in favour of pen and paper, a classroom that favours slow reading and reflection, rather than one where laptop, tablet, and phone use mean that note taking and distracted internet surfing often go hand in hand. But knowing that this is easier said than done, I am happy (at least for now) to settle for a learning environment in which students view their various electronic devices with curiosity rather than complacency, as cultural artifacts of a particular time and place, and of their use of these devices, and of social media, as culturally informed practices. read more…

  • dateJune 29, 2015
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  • posted byMaggie Cummings
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“You’ve got to draw it if you want to see it”: Drawing as an Ethnographic Method

My teacher Linda Schele said those words to me years ago when teaching me about the iconography of ancient Maya sculptures. She’d given me an assignment: to make sense of the carved stone monuments from the ancient site Quirigua, in south-east Guatemala. All I had were photocopies of Alfred Maudsley’s 1880s photographs, and I was having trouble distinguishing meaningful elements from the convoluted Baroque tendrils and curls on these elaborate carvings. I brought my photocopies to her house, and the first thing she did was put one on a light-box, taping a sheet of tracing paper on top, saying, “You’ll never see a thing just staring at it on paper! You’ve got to draw it if you want to see it.” read more…

  • dateFebruary 20, 2015
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  • posted byAndrew Causey
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