Inhabiting Other Lives
Prof. Bruce Harvey

Field Trip Project Instructions

---8-10 page draft of project due (20% of your grade):                  Nov. 6

---Oral presentation of project (20% of your grade):                      last weeks of class

---Final version due (20% of your grade):                                        Dec. 2

1.  Reread the overview of the project in the syllabus, where I speak of going with a classmate or creating a dialogue paper. 

2.  Radical, intense (but not goofy), non-traditional papers are welcome.  If you want (as I said in class) to create a webpage, with hyperlinks, or photos, that is fine.  If you want to re-create some pygmy music on, say, a clarinet, and comment on it via a written script, that is fine.  If you want to video the cultural site and provide a written script of commentary, that is fine.

3.  If you want to write a traditional paper, that is fine, too.  But keep in mind the next two rules.

4.  Your reader must have a sense that you have made "contact" with a culture (or representative of a culture) that is "other" to you.  The experience should not be second-hand.

5.  I do not expect research, especially for the draft.  If you need to do research to make sense of what you are seeing/analyzing, you must get a thumbs-up from me.

6.  The goal is to look at (or hear) the cultural site, collection of artifacts, piece of music, etc. and analyze its components.  You should reflect upon not only what you might learn about the culture producing/practicing the artifacts, music, ritual, or performance, but also the conditions of display (what I call "meta" reflections).  Cultures do not come pure to us; they are filtered (remember The Forest People) by authors, custodians, or museum owners, with implicit and explicit agendas.  For example, a boutique store owner has a vested interested in convincing you that the African relics and masks on display are authentic--what are the signs of authenticity?  How might an artifact in a store differ from an artifact in a museum?

7.  You must really observe and question and think.   The more critical inquisitiveness you bring with you, the more you will get "out" of the field trip experience, both for yourself and your analysis.  Here is a good rule of critical looking: nothing is just "there".  Everything, potentially, signifies.  For instance:  if you go to the Dania ethnological/archaeological museum, you will be greeted first by a gift store (faux Indian artifacts, plastic dinosaurs for kids, polished stones).  Now, on the one hand, it is just a small store... no big deal.  But on the other hand such stores foreground the "preciousness"/rarity of the objects in the main collection.  You cannot carry out a 10-ton dinosaur skeleton or a 10,000 year-old Brazilian skull, but you can afford to buy some dinosaur excrement in a small plastic box, or some Brazilian glass beads.  The miniature artifact you depart with glorifies, by contrast, the somber massiveness of the skeletons in the museum.  Nobody perhaps intends the latter contrast, but such still, however subtly, affects your museum experience.  Every year I come up with a motto for my Honors class.  Our motto will be: EVERYTHING, POTENTIALLY, SIGNIFIES.  (You may think I'm just being enthusiastic the way professors get; yes, but I am also absolutely sincere ... to be curious is to make the world, in its most mundane trivialities, significant!)

8.  If you hit on an insight such as above, perhaps your paper will be about that insight... your paper will hook around that analytical discovery, and need not be comprehensively about everything you see.  The point is to see intensely, not broadly.  Keep in mind that the purpose of the paper is not to be celebratory of what you see--you are not a Disney-like salesman of the cultural site you look at.

9.  The 8-10 page requirement is a ball-park estimate; depending on the nature of your project and format, there may be considerable variance.

10.  I will help each of you individually with your project; you got a question....come by and chat or email me.

11.  Go to the following site (about anthropological collections); it will help you think critically about your project:

http://curiousuniverse.umontreal.ca/en/classification/moa/index.php