Anthropology in Action

In this second issue of the year, I am pleased to present a group of papers focused on ‘Embodiment and Teaching and Learning in Anthropology’. Inspiration for this volume came from the 25th Anniversary Conference at St Andrews University, Scotland, marking twenty-five years of Social Anthropology at the university. The event was organised by Dr Mark Harris at the start of 2005 and was billed as ‘Ways of Knowing’. Versions of papers given by Greg Downey (Notre Dame) and Cristina Grasseni (Bergamo) are added to, first by Nigel Rapport (Concordia) with Noa Vaisman (Cornell), who were involved in ‘A Cornell–St Andrews Knowledge Exchange’ as part of the activities of the Centre for the Anthropological Study of Knowledge and Ethics (CASKE) at St Andrews; and second, by two articles derived from research at The Queen’s University Belfast (Jonathan Skinner and Kirk Simpson, and Jonathan McIntosh). We are grateful to research and seminar participants and informants at all of these institutions for their input and comments.

How people arrive at their convictions, and how they come to change them, remain immensely difficult questions. This article approaches convictions as manifestations of individuals' embodiment, and as allegories of their lives. As well as a rehearsing of moments of his own embodied learning, the main author engages in an email exchange with the second author, pondering how he might answer her questions about an anthropological methodology which more nearly approaches others' embodied experiences: the convictions represented by informants' words and behaviours. The article ends inconclusively. An individual's knowledge of body and self is part of that body and self, situated amid world-views and life-projects. Alongside the radical otherness of anthropologists' informants is the relative otherness of anthropologists to themselves. Our disciplinary conclusions concerning convictions, own and other, must remain provisional and open.

This article examines gamelan as a community musical tool in Northern Ireland, United Kingdom. In particular, the article demonstrates how traditional pedagogic practices are changed in order to suit the needs of those who learn gamelan. A gamelan is an orchestra that includes metallophones (large glockenspiel-like instruments), gongs and drums. Originating from Southeast Asia, particularly from the Indonesian islands of Java and Bali, gamelan ensembles have long been used in the teaching of ethnomusicology in academic institutions and for purposes of applied ethnomusicology, as a musical tool, in the wider community. In these contexts, a gamelan instructor acts as a 'mediator' (Naughton 1996: 16) in the transmission of gamelan knowledge; mediating not only between the music and the learners, but also between the role of gamelan in its original sociocultural context and its newly adopted milieu. Drawing upon my experiences as a gamelan instructor, in particular, teaching children with visual and hearing impairments, I demonstrate how traditional teaching techniques are adapted to facilitate the learning of gamelan in the Northern Irish context.

This article assesses the experimental teaching and learning of an anthropology module on 'modern dance'. It reviews the teaching and learning of the modern dances (lecture, observation, embodied practice, guest interview), paying attention to the triangulation of investigation methods (learning journal, examination, self-esteem survey, focus group interview). Our findings suggest that—in keeping with contemporary participatory educational approaches—students prefer guest interviews and 'performances of understanding' for teaching and learning, and that focus groups and learning journals were the preferred research methods for illuminating the students' teaching and learning experience.

In this article, skilled vision is presented as a capacity acquired in a community of practice that enables specific ways of knowing and acting in the world. The analysis of skilled vision is obtained through the ethnographic study of the artefacts and the routines that structure certain ecologies of practice. The example chosen is that of the skilled gaze of animal breeders, in particular of the children of dairy cow breeders who, by playing with relevant toys and emulating the adult world of cattle fairs and exhibitions, learn how to value certain criteria of animal beauty and to "discipline" their vision accordingly.

Diverse forms of physical education form in their participants' skills, perceptual abilities and physiological adaptations that distinguish them from practitioners of other activities. These traits, many unconscious, are little studied in sociocultural anthropology in spite of their widespread prevalence. This article specifically explores how practitioners of capoeira, an Afro-Brazilian dance and martial art, learn to do a bananeira, a form of handstand. Its form, practical demands and training techniques make the bananeira a radically different exercise than other forms of handstand, such as that done by gymnasts. Capoeira practitioners develop a distinctive sense of balance—a dynamic assembly of perceptual skills and motor responses—that they use to keep upright while inverted. Across all cultures, forms of physical education and apprenticeship assemble distinctive physical skills, forms of cultural difference that should be defended as ardently as other forms of distinctiveness.

When the participants of this year’s postgraduate reading group at St Andrews University were asked to give an informal group presentation at the ‘Ways of Knowing’ conference held in January 2005 to talk about our own experiences and perceptions of ‘knowledge’ and how they had changed since coming to St Andrews, we decided to divide our papers up and present them in the form of a conversation rather than read them out one at a time. This worked very well, despite us all coming from considerably different backgrounds: there were always points in each one’s personal account the others could somehow relate to and then expand on by contributing their own experiences. What we ended up with was thus a polyphonic (if necessarily incomplete) account of the St Andrews postgraduate experience of knowledge acquisition, whereby the stress on the personal paradoxically functioned both to separate our different voices and as a common denominator on which we could base our conversation.

Stirred by the University of St Andrews’s 25th Anniversary Conference—celebrating twentyfive years of the anthropology department—entitled ‘Ways of Knowing’, my objective is to reflect on some of the works presented as they pertain to my own interests in shamanry and Amerindian perspectivism. As a master’s student, it was imperative to attend this conference, since it served as a forum in which to discuss the foundations on which (I think) anthropology is based: knowledge and what the individual accepts or rejects as being knowledge.

Reproductive Agency, Medicine and the State: Cultural Tranformations in Childbearing. Edited by Maya Unnithan-Kumar. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2004. 256pp. ISBN 1-57181-648-8 (hardback). ISBN 1-84545-044-2 (paperback).

From Homebreakers to Jailbreakers: Southall Black Sisters. Edited by Rahila Gupta. London: Zed Books, 2003. 301pp. ISBN 1842774417.

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