Anthropology

The day of performance finally came and we arrived early to firm everything up, get a feel for the space and for the flow of the program. There was a fire glowing in the fire pit and the stage was set off by a square of tarp and about twenty or ...

For me, what bridged the space between mid-August and mid-September was about 200 years of the history of North Minneapolis. I was invited to collaborate on a storytelling event that encouraged the local community to envision conditions experienced by those who had set foot on the banks of the Mississippi at ...

Mnartists.org is an online collective of Minnesota-based artists with a wide range of experience and talents. The works below are featured in the Anthropology in the Arts Tour at mnartists.org that I curated at the site earlier this year. Each piece was selected for its particular engagement in the study of ...

One of the most critical issues in anthropology today is that of cultural representation. If we consider that the role of the anthropologist is (loosely) 1) to do fieldwork in a select culture and 2) convey the texture of what he has learned in the course of that fieldwork to a ...

In the first half of this article, I described my experience of participating in an improvisational sketch with Camden Civic Theatre. This next section will be devoted to assessing that scene with an anthropological lens. What can improvisational comedy reveal about culture? How does improv work to negotiate meanings within a ...

Had you entered my world earlier this week, you would have found me sweating on the warm stage, half-blinded by the lights. Ahead of me, I can barely make out the dim presence of an audience – human shapes dotted throughout the theatre, with no distinctness of feature. My director Jeff ...

Perhaps one of the reasons I decided to study anthropology is the strange sense of culture and ethnicity that occupied my thoughts as a child. It was a sense of divided loyalties and confused traditions, an unusual fusion of cultures that made life seem so complicated and rich. Although I often ...

Thankfully, Fenwick’s attempt to disentangle one experiential learning theory from another has given me some traction on this slippery slope of definition; the eight dimensions of analysis she has tentatively provided allow for rudimentary comparison between the theories. These are elaborated below. While Fenwick apologizes for what she worriedly calls a ...

While reading Tara Fenwick’s (2000) incisive review of five perspectives in the field of experiential learning, I had a troubling sense of déjà vu. I shot back to at least one afternoon in my adolescence when, soaking in the bathtub, I read through my hardcover edition of Linda Goodman’s (1968) Sun ...

When they consent to participate in a particular dance, dancers consent to occupy a particular role, even if only temporarily. They agree to engage in a kinesthetic dialogue with others in an “as-if” capacity, knitting themselves together “as if” part of a cooperative work group, linking arms “as if” part of ...