Undergraduate Anthropology

First of all, I don’t have any good excuses for why I have not posted to my blog in so long, but I am hoping to turn that around this semester. The first post in this new effort serves to highlight a column written by my colleagues Beatriz Reyes-Foster and Ty Matejowsky, here at the University of Central Florida in Orlando. In this essay, they highlight the importance of undergraduate education for Anthropology, not just at UCF, but everywhere. I think that anthropologists should point out that the ideas and information we teach and practice can make a difference to everyone, not just professors.

Newspapers and defining what we do

Ty Matejowsky and Beatriz Reyes-Foster, my colleagues at the University of Central Florida, have written a fine column that was picked up by our local newspaper, the Orlando Sentinel [The Sentinel has a paywall, but you can read a few stories a month without having to pay]. Reading this excellent piece makes me think that anthropologists should write for newspapers all the time, on all kinds of topics. Ty and Beatriz are right that anthropologists (especially cultural anthropologists) should get out and help define our own field.

It's a small point, but one of the things I noticed about the Sentinel format was that the paper didn't include links for the sites and topics that were in the column. I didn't know, for example, that the new head of the World Bank was an anthropologist (to be fair, they did link to one of their own stories there), and I haven't read the Living Anthropologically blog, or This is Anthropology. Thanks, Ty and Beatriz!