Anthropological Toolkit: Notes for classroom use

David Zeitlyn 2022. An Anthropological Toolkit: Sixty Useful Concepts. Oxford: Berghahn ISBN-13: 9781800735354 

A hypertext showing connections between the 60 different sections is at https://mambila.info/Toolkit_Hypertext

Here are some ways in which the book Anthropological Toolkit can be used in the classroom.

  1. Ask students to pick a few sections from Anthropological Toolkit (no more than three) and use their ideas to frame a redescription of a classic ethnographic account. As an Africanist I immediately think of Manchester School extended case studies such as Max Gluckman’s old analysis of the formal opening of a bridge in South Africa (1940). But there are parallel cases from everywhere. For example, a far more recent case would be Anna Tsing’s The mushroom at the end of the world.

    Gluckman, Max 1940 Analysis of a social situation in modern Zululand. Bantu Studies 14:1-30 and 147-174. 

    Tsing, Anna 2015 The mushroom at the end of the world: on the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

  2. The book Anthropological Toolkit explicitly and deliberately does not include entries for well known, widely used theoretical ideas. This leaves an opportunity for students to fill these gaps! Students can be asked to write their own entries in the style of Toolkit (so no more than 1000 words and only a handful of references, aiming at clarity, comprehensibility and eschewing jargon) about some big ideas such as decoloniality, functionalism, game theory, ontology, postmodernism, wholism, structuralism (to name but a few candidates). 

  3. Some terms are very similar. Can you discuss why there might be different entries for boundary objects, essentially contested  concepts and wicked problems? Or entries for both exemplars and vignettes? Relating to the previous exercise of making entries for the big ideas, which entries for a big idea, in effect includes some others?

  4. There’s a diagram online showing the network of cross-references between the different entries. 

    See https://mambila.info/Toolkit_Hypertext/vizualisations.html

    This was machine generated. Can humans do better? Rather than trying to make a diagram of all sixty entries choose a small number (around ten) of connected sections and try drawing your own diagram to represent how they relate to one another.

    One cluster of such terms would be 

    vignettes exemplars
    cabling ostension
    teleoanalysis catachresis
    sgraffito palimpsest
    epiphany life_writing
    prosopography   hapax

    Another cluster is 

    partiality finitism
    representation /
    nonrepresentation    		 vagueness
    Infirming instauration
    exaptation equivocation
    affordance forbearing

    Or make your own group of entries.

    Students with their own projects (BA/MA dissertations, MPhils or PhDs) could self-reflexively draw their own conceptual maps/Hesse nets, to try and better understand their own theoretical positioning.

Links to reviews of the book

To read an extract or purchase please go to the publishers website:
https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/ZeitlynAnthropological