I have been re-reading Tim Ingold’s Anthropology Is Not Ethnography (pdf), and this time was quite struck by his discussion of teaching and students near the end of his Radcliffe-Brown Lecture in Social Anthropology.

As educators based in university departments, most anthropologists devote much of their lives to working with students. They probably spend considerably more time in the classroom than anywhere they might call the field. Some enjoy this more than others, but they do not, by and large, regard time in the classroom as an integral part of their anthropological practice. Students are told that anthropology is what we do with our colleagues, and with other people in other places, but not with them. Locked out of the power-house of anthropological knowledge construction, all they can do is peer through the windows that our texts and teachings offer them. It took the best part of a century, of course, for the people once known as ‘natives’, and latterly as ‘informants’, to be admitted to the big anthropology house as master-collaborators, that is as people we work with. It is now usual for their contributions to anthropological study to be fulsomely acknowledged.

Yet students remain excluded, and the inspiration and ideas that flow from our dialogue with them unrecognized. I believe this is a scandal, one of the malign consequences of the institutionalized division between research and teaching that has so blighted the practice of scholarship. For indeed, the epistemology that constructs the student as the mere recipient of anthropological knowledge—rather than as a participant in its ongoing creative crafting—is the very same that constructs the native as an informant. And it is no more defensible (89-90).

This description resonated with me because it captures how students are often treated in the university system, where students come to be civilized and taught. They are our natives to be colonized.

Ingold’s words also give voice to some of the alternative ways that I think about teaching – of working with students, of developing their desire to learn and engage, of working on skills that will stay with them long after a class. Hence my efforts at creating community-based work and online reports with them. For me, all of this is anthropological – a way of being, of seeing things, of learning, of comparing. Ingold writes:

Too often, it seems to me, we disappoint our students’ expectations. Rather than awakening their curiosity toward social life, or kindling in them an inquisitive mode of being, we force them into an endless reflection on disciplinary texts which are studied not for the light they throw upon the world but for what they reveal about the practices of anthropologists themselves and the doubts and dilemmas that surround their work. Students soon discover that having doubled up on itself, through its conflation with ethnography, anthropology has become an interrogation of its own ways of working (89).

Continue reading “Students Are Not Natives – So Why Do We Treat Them That Way?”