Learning and Teaching (LATISS)

Ethnographers have constructed contradicting assertions, and indeed assumptions,

about the nature of learning, how it is best accomplished, and

how students internalise this learning in order to form both individualised

and collective identities. Are the rites of passage, so often described in analyses

of postgraduate socialisation – the oral examinations, the viva voce, the

departmental seminar, or graduation ceremony – the only routes available

for understanding how anthropological culture is inculcated into students?

Is the role of the supervisor as mentor pivotal in the successful completion

of a Ph.D? Or is this more of a master/apprentice relationship? Does this

proc ess maintain its relevance in a globalised field and with instant virtual

access to experts from other institutions anywhere in the world? Such issues

have been of interest to both students and faculty within the anthropology

discipline, in particular, and the social sciences more generally.

This paper examines the decisions and motivations of graduate students in cultural anthropology when defining the field sites and topics of their final projects. The decisions among students at the Universidad de los Andes in Colombia are contrasted with those at the University of Pittsburgh in the United States. A review of recent final projects in both universities was conducted, along with a survey and some follow-up questions with students in both institutions. A main difference found is that students at los Andes are more willing to do applied fieldwork at 'home', while students at Pittsburgh are far more reluctant to do so and prefer to go to distant fields. This distinction is partly explained by the histories of the anthropologies practised in each locale, and of what have been considered 'proper' field sites in cultural anthropology. In particular, a vision of anthropology as an applied enterprise emerged at different historical moments in these two geo-political locations, and those visions are associated with quite different, opposed values today.

In the tradition of anthropological reflexivity, this article examines how the structure of early doctoral training contributes to the construction of particular kinds of anthropologists. Based on research conducted in an anthropology department in the U.S.A. during the late 1990s, the experience of the transition from undergraduate to doctoral studies is explored as simultaneously a process of culture learning and culture making, with power relations expressed, imposed, and contested through language. The implications for questions animating current anthropological debates, including calls for 'public anthropology', are considered.

In this article I will present a range of experiences of graduate socialisation that have been discussed in past articles in the journal Anthropology Matters. These are the experiences of social anthropology Ph.D. students in the United Kingdom. The overarching theme for the article is 'regulating emotions', and the excerpts presented illustrate how Ph.D. students experience and deal with different emotional states that they encounter during the pre-fieldwork, fieldwork and writing up stages. I argue that the way in which these emotional states are handled may be just as important, in terms of gaining a Ph.D., as the increase in knowledge that is the ostensible marker of a completed Ph.D.

Gina Wisker (2012) The Good Supervisor, 2nd ed.

Review by Ortrun Zuber-Skerritt

Stefan Collini (2012) What Are Universities For?

Review by Antonino Palumbo