Toward a Pedagogy for Consumer Anthropology: Method, Theory, Marketing

This paper focuses on teaching the application of anthropology in business to marketing students. It begins with the premise that consumer marketers have long used ethnography as a component of their qualitative market research toolkit to inform their knowledge about and empathy for consumers. A question for market research educators who include ethnography in their curricula is if and how to teach the richness of anthropologically based approaches, especially given a decoupling of ethnographic method from anthropological theory in much consumer research practice. This discussion might also resonate with anthropology educators who are interested in the ways anthropology is applied in commercial settings. As a demonstration of a teaching mode rather than a research report, this paper describes how a consumer anthropology market research project is used experientially in the classroom to help marketing students learn and appreciate the application of both anthropological method and theory for brand-building. Included is a summary of an ethnographic project on Duncan Hines cake mix and an in-class student exercise during which three conceptual ‘jumping off’ points from anthropological theory were used to generate marketing initiatives.

What Makes an Ethnographer? Institutionalized Teaching and Informal Learning of Anthropology in Romania

The processes of disciplinary institutionalization emerged from practices of preserving written and oral documents, establishing local and national museums, and developing university courses. In the last 100 years, archives’ development assured the professionalization of scholars interested in disciplines unrepresented at the university level, such as ethnography and anthropology. After the 1990s, as the South-Eastern European countries could not imagine an alternative path of development, a westernization process emerged as the main strategy for catching-up with Western Europe. My paper discusses the institutionalized anthropological and ethnographic research agenda in Romania, questioning its relationships with other social sciences in the context of national development of ethnography as a distinct branch (e.g., from anthropology). Secondly, I argue that institutionalized ethnographic and anthropological practice in Romania during communism significantly lacked reflective assessments and development of a theoretical corpus.

Teaching Socio-Cultural Anthropology In Albania: Bringing Together Professional Training And Active Citizenship

Anthropology in Albania has been addressed mainly during the last two decades or so. Previously, the most common research agendas focused on the explorations of folklore and ethnography and indeed the venue that carried out research was the Institute of Folk Culture. As a consequence, teaching has been narrowly treated through the perspective of the folkloric and ethnographic studies, mostly the exotic and narrative terms. Currently, various tenets of anthropology are taught in the departments of Humanities and Social Sciences such as in History, Archaeology and Culture Heritage, and Sociology. In this paper, I discuss the benefits of anthropology as a core subject in the curricula of the Bachelor program of Archaeology and Culture Heritage. Three main aspects are considered: first, the extent to which social and cultural anthropology contributes to the understanding of the dynamics of human behaviour in a timeless perspective. Due to the state of preservation, and the nature of the archaeological data, scientific analysis and investigations are often extremely limited. The theoretical and methodological tenets, as well as particular case studies treated from cultural anthropology play an indispensable role in this endeavour. Second, I deal with the impact of social anthropology in the student background and how its concepts and methodological tools can contribute to a better understanding of a society in action and transition. To what extent can we employ anthropology to help understand and analyse how tradition and modernity combine? Third, by drawing a survey completed by a selected group of students, I discuss how studying anthropology facilitated the student involvement in the professional context as well as strengthened their critical thinking skills and fostered active citizenship

When Students Do Not Aspire To Become Professional Anthropologists

Studies in anthropology have been influential in Greece in the recent decades. Anthropological concepts and analysis have prompted a critical assessment of Greek culture and brought this academic discipline close to history and folklore studies. Furthermore, today in Greek universities one finds several courses that teach this subject, plus some whose approaches are influenced by ethnography and the anthropological perspective. Given that only a small percentage of the students learning anthropology in Greek universities will eventually become professional anthropologists, my teaching experience leads me to the position that their acquaintance with anthropology should include a correlation of knowledge received during their studies to aspects of their daily life. Consequently, this article examines how teaching may encourage a fragmentary use of ethnography and a strong reflexive attitude from the students’ side, leading the latter to the exploration and evaluation, in a heuristic way, of their personal worldview and ethos.

University versus the Academy

The article focuses on a conceptual difference between the institutes of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and Bulgarian Universities. University lecturers must be internationally recognizable with their research results and constantly master modern teaching methods and technologies. Scientists in the academy make efforts to follow the scientific tendencies, but have virtually no opportunity to go beyond academic forums and to socialize their scientific results. In the example of research and teaching of Ethnology, the lack of opportunity for young scientists from the academy to be prepared for teaching at different university degrees isconsidered. The positive and negative aspects of the Erasmus academic exchange program (as an opportunity for getting some fractional lecturing experience) is discussed in the terms of teaching experience. We also present the first and only project, held few years ago in Bulgaria, aiming to prepare young scientists from the Academy to teach Ethnology at a university.

Practicing Anthropology in Greece: Knowledge, Skills and Rights in the Labour Market

In this paper we explore which kind of knowledge and skills developed by anthropology students through higher education are applied in the Greek labour market and how they are received by different professional sectors, such as central and local administration, private companies or NGOs. We also examine how professional rights of social anthropologists are being established, creating academic qualifications, lobbies and competitive relations among anthropology and other relevant disciplines. Furthermore, we illustrate the birth and establishment of practicing anthropology in Greece as it is being practiced in civil society institutions, local and international governmental and non-governmental organizations, especially since a proportionally big number of anthropologists are being employed in this field due to the recent European refugee crisis and the state of emergency that it brought to Greece and Europe. Through our analysis we wish to show that during the last three decades anthropology is gradually becoming socially and politically relevant in Greece. This process has started with the integration of the country in the core of European Union institutions and through the coexistence with diverse populations of migrant origins. The popularity of anthropology has been accelerated by the economic and refugee crisis of the last decade that multiplied the numbers of anthropologists working in the humanitarian sector. The discipline seems thus to come of age, with academic teaching and practicing anthropology being increasingly intertwined.

The Writer as Anthropologist: Teaching Ethnography Through Literature

Literature and ethnographic writing have at least one thing in common - they are both about ‘putting things to paper’. As observed by Clifford Geertz in his Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author (Geertz, 1988), the concern with how ethnographic texts are constructed has for a long time been considered irrelevant, even ‘unanthropological’. As a consequence, important aspects concerning the style, imagery and metaphor of great anthropological works have not been included in the standard teaching curricula. This paper tries to see things from a reverse Geertz perspective: how can contemporary prose be used to expand ethnographic knowledge, as well as refresh the sometimes stale scientific discourse. The few chosen examples serve as illustrations of the great potential of fiction storytelling to challenge dominant modes of ethnographic writing, and to teach anthropological concepts and ideas.

Virtual Reality as a Proxy for Participant Observation in Introduction to Socio-Cultural Anthropology

This article details the piloting of a virtual reality activity in an introductory anthropology class at Utah Valley University. Anthropologists have only recently started exploring how VR technology can facilitate classroom learning. As Elzen (2018) writes, VR allows “students to immerse themselves much more than passively watching a video.” It is this immersive quality of the medium that makes it particularly useful for anthropological pedagogy.

Notes from Belgrade: Social Anthropology for Archaeology Students in a Post-Conflict Society

Social anthropology courses, some elective and some mandatory, for archaeology students at the Department of Archaeology, University of Belgrade, commenced only after 2003. Since Serbian society opened itself from its isolation, the key challenge has been to teach new generations who have grown up during the civil wars in Former Yugoslavia to recognize broader perspectives on human cultures, universalities, and differences. Anthropology has been consequently utilized as a prominent tool for cultural relativism, multiculturalism, ‘Otherness’, and reflexive thinking. However much these facets have all proved necessary, they seem to have fallen to the wayside in ‘post-truth’ world. It has therefore become unclear in teaching how to address the phenomenon. This paper aims to critically discuss anachronous traditions in social and physical anthropology in combination with new challenges of the biologisation of social identities in archaeology and social anthropology.

Teaching Anthropology to Artists: The Challenges of Trans-disciplinarity and Beyond

In this paper, complex issues of education are discussed in relation to research and activism in the humanities and contemporary art, cultural production and politics. The discussion is based on a re-examination of twenty years of teaching anthropology at Greek universities in light of a strengthening engagement in the practices situated between this discipline and art. The context, the content and the mode of this activity are considered, during an epistemologically composite and politically significant process of interchanging teaching and learning positions. The specificity of the conditions of one’s own education needed to be acknowledged in the introduction to this retrospective survey. Teaching anthropology to professionals and students of different disciplines is also described as a period of learning how to place emphasis on practice, re-evaluate anthropological knowledge, combine diverse perspectives and negotiate power relations. Teaching anthropology to artists, however, particularly when the teacher also happens to be an artist, poses these and other challenges. Transdisciplinarity is sought, but only as something to surpass, eventually considering what it might mean to be 'undisciplined'. In any case, it is by now established that when anthropologists meet with artists, common interests become evident and a great potential for the renewal of research and theory is revealed, but diverging priorities and conflicting relations must also be addressed. Teaching and learning in such a context becomes more than an academic habit. It develops as a demanding, research-cum-art making activity, as shown by a number of collective projects that bring together students and teachers, on the fringes of the academy and social life during the difficult period of the so-called 'Greek crisis'.