Cultural Anthropology Instructor: Jim Snoke

Spring Semester, 2007

First Communication: Student Learning Outcomes

Welcome to my spring semester class in Cultural Anthropology.  This semester you will be reading about cultures from around the world, and you will have the opportunity to learn not only about individual cultures, but also about the modern countries within which they exist.  The world has become too small and the cultural, social, economic, and political issues have become too immediate and critical to allow the majority of citizens in this country to remain ignorant of global affairs.  This course gives students the chance to cover material about the countries and cultures that will become even more significant in the next few years as the dominant nations of the world position themselves to control and take ownership of the natural resources possessed by the smaller, less-developed, third-world nations.

Anthropology usually studies these cultures in what we call the "ethnographic present"-- the concept that no matter when the culture actually existed or was studied, we learn about it as if it were "today".  The problem with this view is that it ignores real world, aggressive, and often unjust actions on the part of modern nations whose actions cause events to occur and pressures that come to bear that would not have been present at some earlier time.  Therefore, the "ethnographic present" is not the same at all times and for all cultures.  The aids epidemic in Africa in general, the destruction of 10,000 acres of tropical rainforest per day by oil companies and venture capitalists, the CIA tampering with cultures and nations of Central America, South America, and the Middle East since 1950, efforts by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to blackmail countries into devaluing their currencies while enslaving their citizens in sweatshop conditions for $60.00 or less per month and signing away their natural resources to major American oligopolies, and imperialist nations around the world that have colonized countries and subjugated their people since the Age of Exploration, have led anthropologists since the late 19th century to try to study and preserve the non-renewable, utterly perishable cultural resources placed in harm's way by the “modern” world. 

While the very real, destructive, and sometimes outright genocidal actions of the major nations of the world have been recounted by some historians and taught in some history classes, little of the real impact on the cultures that have been destroyed has been presented. Here in this country, and in others like it, our classrooms have given a view of this “manifest destiny” from our point of view, discounting and rejecting entirely the human side of the victims of our aggression. One of our great, modern writers – Susan Sontag – once said that: “this country was founded on a genocide”. While historians have been in a better position to know just how devastating the actions of our country have been on an entire race of people, however, they have been less than forthcoming about it. Further, the actions of state boards of education in each of the 50 states have prevented textbooks from presenting an accurate picture of the destruction.

As a consequence, students from grade school through high school have learned little or nothing of any consequence or accuracy about the activities of our government at home or abroad – and this is no different from similar actions in other countries where populations have been massacred in the name of “progress”. Further, and even worse, the victims of our genocidal actions and racial subjugation have often been blamed for their own condition.

But the most devastating of all issues related to our past actions against Native Americans and African Americans, for example, is the outright denial of such things on the part of our non-Native American and non-African American citizens. Sociologists, to their credit, will tell you that the biggest problem we face here in America – in most problem situations -- is simply admitting that there is a problem at all. The utter, vehement, and irrationally hostile denial of any mention of the role our government, our military, our courts, our businesses, and our citizens have played in the continual mistreatment of more than 40 million of our fellow citizens, and hundreds of millions of humans around the world, is continually surprising to me as an anthropologist, educator, and humanist.

I, and other educators like me, have often been accused of attempting to use the classroom as a “bully pulpit” – a propaganda organ that tries to “poison” the minds of the youth of America. However, the reality is that our government and its apologists – the historians, boards of education, and parents – have had at least 17 years head start on us, because by the time students get to us at the collegiate level they have already been utterly and completely brainwashed by second hand, third hand, fourth hand, and “just plain made up” information about events from the founding of this country to the present. Nation-wide studies show also that 80% of all college students in America vote the politics of their parents. So much for original thinking, and so much for poisoning the minds of the youth of America.

One thing is for certain – you will read about these issues in this course, and you will be able to give an account of them by the end of the course. That is your student learning outcome.

Jim