Faculty Fellows 2003

Culture, Power and Social Difference:
Anthropological Perspectives

Dorothy L. Hodgson
Department of Anthropology, FAS

This project will develop creative teaching modules for the new mandatory recitation sections that will be taught as part of Introduction to Cultural Anthropology as of Fall 2003. These modules will: 1) address the needs of students’ different learning styles, 2) incorporate active learning into the curriculum; and 3) promote discussion, questions and critical thinking. They will include exercises that apply course materials, mini-research projects, and weekly discussion guides and questions. Once developed and tested during Fall 2003, they will be shared with other faculty who alternate teaching 101.

Several types of teaching modules will be developed to review, engage, apply and expand the material on culture, power and social difference that is taught in the lectures. These include:

1. Exercises designed to apply course material: These modules will enhance and enable active learning by making students apply and use course material. They might include drafting mock field notes, writing short “thick descriptions” of an event, testing theories about cultural differences in “personal space,” compiling kinship charts, performing a conversational analysis, and writing critical film reviews.

2. Mini-research projects: These projects will help students to understand the relationship between research methods and theory in cultural anthropology. Possibilities include preparing and doing a semi-structured interview, a short project in “participant-observation,” a media analysis project, and a cross-cultural analysis of some social practice such as marriage.

3. Weekly discussion guides and questions for teaching assistants: These guides and questions will be designed to help students review, absorb and synthesize course materials. Some questions will also push students to think about how cross-cultural examples challenge their own attitudes, beliefs and practices.

Dorothy L. Hodgson is currently the Graduate Program Director and an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology, as well as a faculty affiliate in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies and the Center for African Studies. As a historical anthropologist, her research and teaching interests include gender, ethnicity, cultural politics, development, colonialism, ethnicity, missionary encounters, the indigenous rights movement, and women’s collective action. She has conducted research in Africa, primarily Tanzania, since 1985, and published extensively. In addition to her numerous articles in peer-reviewed journals, her books include Once Intrepid Warriors: Gender, Ethnicity and the Cultural Politics of Maasai Development (Indiana, 2001), Gendered Modernities: Ethnographic Perspectives (Palgrave, 2001), Rethinking Pastoralism in Africa: Gender Culture and the Myth of the Patriarchal Pastoralist (James Currey & Ohio, 2000) and “Wicked” Women and the Reconfiguration of Gender in Africa (Heinemann, 2000, with Sheryl McCurdy). Her work has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, National Science Foundation, Social Science Research Council, Fulbright-Hays, Mellon Foundation, Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and American Philosophical Society, among other sources. Most recently, she was awarded a Board of Trustees Research Fellowship for Scholarly Excellence by the Board of Trustees of Rutgers University in 2000-01.