ANTH 201 creates controversy

By Vinny Singh     9/11/08 7:00pm

Last week, plans for an anthropology assignment had college presidents and masters in discussions with the professor about students' privacy issues. In the week since, the professor has dropped the requirement for using photo or video records in the observational study.Assistant anthropology professor Elizabeth Vann, who teaches ANTH 201: Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology, assigned her class a college ethnography project, which requires the students to conduct observational research at a residential college other than their own.

Vann, who conceived the idea for the project with her teaching assistants this summer, said she wanted students to investigate the aspects of each college's sociocultural life. Throughout the semester, small groups of seven to eight students will roam foreign college quads, attending other colleges' social events and imbibe otherwise-alien traditions and quirks of other colleges. Vann said each student group will determine its own research focus, which might incorporate topics like social organization, college myths and rituals, or power structure and government. The project was deliberately assigned to follow the O-Week college indoctrination experience, Vann said.

"What we're interested in having them learn about is the processes of enculturation and socialization at the colleges," Vann said. "So they're trying to learn about the colleges not only as institutions but also as places where students come to be members."

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The project, which did not require Institutional Review Board clearance - a standard method of consent for human studies research - since the research is limited to coursework for a class, initially ruffled some feathers. Last week, Hanszen College students received an e-mail from Master Wesley Morris informing them that they should feel free to decline participation in the study.

"Your Masters and some College Presidents have voiced severe reservations about the project," Morris, an English professor, said in an e-mail last Wednesday. " ... I hope that it will not be disruptive for you or an invasion of your right to privacy. You have every right to refuse to answer questions and refuse access to your private rooms (you are the leaseholders)."

Hanszen president Abbie Ryan said she was concerned about the project at first. She said many students also were originally doubtful about the legitimacy of the assignment, which had included photo and video supplements to document the researchers' observations of social behaviors. After several discussions with college masters and presidents, however, the visual component of the assignment was eliminated.

"In the end, it would have been difficult to control what was being photographed," Vann said. "Colleges might have felt out of control in some sense, and this could have been a potential source of privacy invasion."

Another major concern was about guarding the privacies of colleges' public figures. Colleges in the study would be mentioned by name, though figures and students would be kept anonymous

"You can try and keep as much anonymity as you want [among the subjects of the study] but if you're talking about the government structure or adults such as the masters, you know who they are," Ryan, a senior, said. "So we didn't want people who were empowering the college to be under too much scrutiny."

All nine residential colleges have approved the assignment on the following conditions: Researchers cannot use audio/visual aid; they must acquire subjects' permission before interviews; they cannot identify subjects by name or any other means and they must only release the results of the study to their ANTH 201 class.

The interviewers will introduce themselves formally to the colleges before beginning their case studies to safeguard against any possible mishap due to ignorance of the interviewer's identity.

"Like all social sciences, anthropology is interested in people, and anthropologists conduct ethnographic fieldwork and try as much as possible to be a part of a certain community and understand it from the inside," Vann said. "The idea is to actually visit and interact with people in that community. We're not asking [the researchers] to stand back and just observe, but to be willing participants."

Some students are also a little skeptical as to how the assignment embodies the essence of cultural anthropology.

"Aren't all colleges rooted in the same basic sociopolitical structure?" an ANTH 201 student, who wished to remain anonymous, said. "Aren't they all just a way of giving the students a sense of belonging? How is this study going to represent an in-depth study of 'different' cultures?"

Vann said this question was one the students conducting the research should be asking.

Throughout the semester, ANTH 201 students will share their inter-college experiences in an internal class wiki where they will be allowed to address patterns found by other groups about their own colleges. Vann said this will encourage cross-collegiate discussion where students do not necessarily need to agree, but cannot avoid listening to each other.

"It's less of a debate and more of a conversation," Vann said.

Another ANTH 201 student expressed interest in conducting the research.

"I look forward to it," the ANTH 201 student, who wished to remain anonymous, said. "We're always so tightly bound to our own colleges that it could actually be interesting to realize that Jones might not be the best college, or that Martel might actually be a college.

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