Guidelines for Student Projects

Guidelines for Student Seminar Project

Your principal research and writing assignment in this seminar is to develop a web-based project selected from one of the topics below. "Develop a project" is an admittedly vague injunction! What I mean is that I'd like you to take the topic as a starting point and try to treat it in a manner that is appropriate to the historicizing spirit of the seminar. That is, whether you begin with a text or a person or a site, I'd like you to explore and write about it as that--textually, biographically, structurally. But I'd also like you to research the context of the topic--the history of a text over time, for instance, including the circumstances of its making, its reception, its place in continuing debates and controversies. It is, I suppose, an exercise in the social history of a text, a person, a region, or an institution--the ways it has helped to constitute the collective life of the profession over time.

By current convention, the product of this project would be a seminar paper, the shape and scale of which you are familiar and well-practiced. However, what I ask in this seminar is that you adapt your research presentation to a web page format, so that you can learn and exploit some of the possibilities of that medium of communication. I don't assume competence at the outset, and I will incorporate some outside expertise and training if there is sufficient need and demand. There is a real danger of course that you can get bogged down in or enamored of the technology itself. If you can avoid those tendencies, however, this can be a useful opportunity to become more capable of expressing yourself in a medium in which you will have to be professionally conversant. Indeed, most students in previous years of this seminar were unfamiliar with web page construction techniques, but everyone, I believe, found it a manageable and highly instructive experience. The pages are still available for inspection, and I strongly encourage you to view them from the links provided at the seminar site.

1999-2001 student project links

It is essential that you make a choice quickly and get started--and that you produce intermediate products that I/we can see and respond to (reading notes, outlines, preliminary pages, first drafts, etc.). My recommended choices are the following. I would like to avoid duplication, and I am open to other particular topics. Please let me know your initial selection via email before our third session. I realize that many of you will feel that you are simply reaching into a grab bag, that you don't yet know enough to make an informed choice. True, but if you wait that long, the seminar will be too far advanced.

Topic I. a text, from among those we are reading this seminar, that has assumed "classic" standing:

Bronislaw Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922)

Margaret Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa (1928)

E. E. Evans-Pritchard, The Nuer (1940)

Victor Turner, Schism and Continuity in an African Society (1957)

Frederick Barth, Political Leadership Among the Swat Pathans (1959)

Roy Rappaport, Pigs for the Ancestors (1968)

Topic II: an institutional site of some importance to the discipline. The possibilities are quite numerous, but the difficulty of getting relevant materials suggests the following as most likely:

Rhodes-Livingston Institute

Columbia University Department of Anthropology

Yale University Department of Anthropology

Topic III: an individual anthropologist, who features prominently in the materials of the seminar--those whom we will be reading, of course, but also possibly those who also figure in our readings and discussions. Examples of the latter include:

Max Gluckman

Ruth Benedict

Eric Wolf

W H R Rivers

Edward Sapir