Why Practicing Cultural Anthropology Still Has Value for Any Student

The gist: We live in a world of constant noise. The power of anthropology is that it can help us listen to social silence, and, above all, see what is hidden in plain sight. To listen this way, it helps to embrace tools from ethnography about being an insider-outsider and borrow ideas such as habitus, reciprocity, sense-making, and lateral vision.

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Learning stuff was less important than learning about oneself. Exploration is not just a whimsical luxury of education; it is a central benefit.

You can no longer make students do the reading or the writing. So what’s left? Only this: give them work they want to do. And help them want to do it. What, again, is education? The non-coercive rearranging of desire.

Within five years, it will make little sense for scholars of history to keep producing monographs in the traditional mold—nobody will... See more