do no harm:


idit dobb-weinstein: "teaching is action and thinking at once. What I try to guard against most when I teach is not speaking as if my answer were conclusive, so as to avoid (to the extent possible) any kind of dogmatic appropriation. It is understandable why students might wish to imitate their teachers, but there are different modes of imitation. I try very hard to avoid the mimetic appropriation that is immediate, passive, and occludes thinking. One other reason is that if I made clear what my views were, and my views appeared as if they were final, it would preclude the possibility of first, students challenging me and second, learning from my students. The relation between the student and teacher is, to me, a dynamic relationship . . . Teaching and learning is a movement that occurs between. In other words, we are at once both agent and patient, both teacher and learner. If we are not very careful, we can do a great deal of harm. And that, too, I have learned from my teachers, Maimonides especially.

I believe my task is to provoke students to think and to engage them in genuine dialogue and questioning. To paraphrase a rabbinic saying, 'I have learned from my teachers, and I have learned from my peers, but I have learned most from my students.' And that is a continuous process of learning."

Thursday 28 October 2010

male anthropo androcentricistic censor

as anthropology and law and many or all things spring forth from the historic domination of women, politically, civically, etc.

i do not think it was wrong of me to ask bartelt of the male bias in anthropology, or his way of making anthropology.

or even the etymology of it.

cleverly he responded or muddled through a distinction between greek anthropos
verses
andros.

which was well taken and is the first thing you find upon etymological dissection of the term.


but the utterance of the historical phoneme entirely belies the total elision into anthropocentric world views in which anthropos is humanity, the general, humanos.

i asked this question to be quizzical, but also due to the tone, which dismissively reduces women to biological functions and the casualness with which he spoke of women humans: another example being, his extensive discussion of estrus, and his presumption of the female humans non-demonstration thereof, an unscientific assumption, on the spectrum.

at any rate, i thought, when i asked of male bias in anthropology, he would respond with knowledge of a serious body of work by women within anthropology who address this bias.

and in pointing at the etymological self-reflexivity of the anthropos as human (male as the general), he might acknowledge the obvious ironies implicit in our victorian vernaculars which sprung from colonial attitudes.

as if anthroplogy, were the opposite of women's studies.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_anthropology

i could not think of their names but had read of their critique.

and then when my very serious work towards the women within islam, was callously sidelined, and i was treated hostiley, and denied my presentation of a perspective regarding islamophobia and american misogyny, so truly did bartelt's personal bias make itself plain.

and so in the discrediting of every statement i made in class as "we don't want to wig anyone out here" or shouting of "t*ts and *ss" no kidding---well . . .

i am not sure what it was he was teaching besides how to lose friends and alienate people . . .
and at that point who is in whose nyongo worker cult?
see thesis
http://digitallibrary.usc.edu/search/controller/view/usctheses-m220.html
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)