November 2006:
Number 511
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A newsletter for the students, faculty and staff of the Collin County Community College District. Published monthly. For information or submissions, call 972.599.3142. Cougar News welcomes student and faculty submissions. Next deadline: Nov. 10 All submissions are due by 5 p.m. on the due date. Photos cannot be returned. Text should be emailed to mrobinson@ccccd.edu or sent on disk. Please submit copy that is proofed, edited and saved in Word format. Cougar News staff: Lisa Vasquez, director; Mark Robinson, editor; Marcy Cadena-Smith, contributor; Sydney Portilla-Diggs, student correspondent; Stephanie Hall, student correspondent; Ana Palmer, special contributor; Ginny Topfer, special contributor; Nick Young, photography and layout
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Anthropology, photography meshed together in Learning Communities
By Stephanie Hall
Student Correspondent
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| Dr. Gerry Sullivan, Prof. Byrd Williams | This coming spring, an exciting new class will give students an opportunity to combine the intriguing subject of cultural anthropology with photography.
“This is a Learning Community which combines an introduction to photography and an introduction to cultural anthropology, said Dr. Gerry Sullivan, an anthropology professor at Collin. “So obviously students can kill two birds with one stone, meeting two sets of requirements.”
The two subjects will be combined in the classroom, just as it naturally combines in the field.
“I am itching to get back to my documentary roots,” said Prof. Byrd Williams, professor of photography at Collin. “My first love is unbiased documentation of cultures through photography,” said Williams. “To make observational photographs in a ‘documentary tradition’ is such a wonderful privilege as well as a welcomed reprieve from the pretensions of the art and advertising world.”
Sullivan agrees that the two subjects naturally mesh together.
“I suppose that most of us know something about photography, even if we don't take photos ourselves, our lives are full of photographs,” said Sullivan. “We search the web and find photos, and we look on folk’s desks and there are photos, and, so too in magazines, books and so on.”
Photography is documenting the world now.
“We will actually be leaving photographic artifacts behind that might inform posterity as to who and what we were in 2006,” said Williams.
So what is anthropology?
Sullivan explains, “most people do not have the same sense of what anthropology might be, so please allow me to trot out a couple of useful clichés: I tell folks anthropology is everything you always wanted to know about human beings but were afraid to ask. Cultural anthropology concerns the very different ways peoples live, what they think about how they should live and the consequences of that thinking for those lives.”
“Second useful cliché: If people can do things differently, some group has,” he said. “For example we'll be reading a book about a group of people, the Na people of Yunnan in Southwest China, who are matrilineal – reckon kinship through connections between women – and are indifferent to who fathers which child; men have responsibilities towards their sister's children but not toward their lover’s children.”
Sullivan explained that this sort of culture may be foreign for people here at home, so anthropology helps people understand the world better.
“It allows us to ask more about (people) and to understand more deeply the relations between people that we call marriage, kinship and the like,” he said. “Cultural anthropology also concerns the pattern of relations between groups. These days, when e-mail connects people across the world in real time, when events far away are live on the television, when air traffic is pretty cheap and very common and so on, such relations between groups simply can not be avoided.
"So we live both locally and in cosmopolitan ways whether we wish to or not. We're all part of the same big world system. We encounter folks whose ways of doing things are not our own; we would have to go to great lengths to avoid such encounters. Anthropology can help us understand the organization of such encounters; how they influence our communities as well as the communities of folks we will not meet ourselves, whether they are nearby or far away. Anthropology can help us understand how and why we're different as well as how and why we're similar to one another.”
And finally, “useful cliché number three: anthropology is the most humanistic of the sciences and the most scientific of the humanities,” said Sullivan. “We're concerned with real people living real lives in real societies.”
Sullivan and Williams are both looking forward to meshing their two subjects together.
“I am chomping at the bit to get at Sullivan’s reading list and to study with him,” said Williams. “It is widely known that the best thing about Learning Communities for teachers is the opportunity to broaden one’s own knowledge in related fields. This enthusiasm between educators always infects the classroom with energy and students benefit in ways that one teacher/one discipline classrooms cannot approach.”
“So in this course we will exploring the significant overlap between photography and anthropology--treating photographs as cultural and culture as a living process which can be seen,” said Sullivan.
Combining anthropology with photography is not new to Sullivan, who wrote a book about a pair of pioneer anthropological photographers: Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson.
“I've been doing this sort of thing for a while,” he said. “In (my) book I was interested in the various ways they used photographs and in the limits of photographic knowledge -- what you can know from a photograph and what you need to know in order to really see what’s going on in a photograph,” he continued. “It turns out you need to know a lot, so I am hoping to learn some more about this, and I am hoping that our students will learn a lot about photographs and their limits as well as their place in not just our culture but in others as well,” said Sullivan.
“I would think that these are two of the most mutually beneficial areas to mix in the learning community program,” said Williams. “Man, there are going to be 12 lucky scholars this spring,” he said about the future students who are quick enough to jump at the opportunity.
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