Curricular Creativity: Can Anthropology as Critical Practice Trump "the Department" as Institutional Fortress?

Anthropologists as individual teachers are imaginative when it comes to creating new courses, but anthropologists organized into departments, the fundamental administrative unit of liberal arts institutions, are less creative when it comes to thinking about the curriculum as a whole. Often, our desire to protect and promote anthropology as a discipline hinders our willingness to reinvent anthropological wisdom as a practice to sustain liberal-arts perspectives against instrumental approaches to education that are currently so seductive for students, parents, and administrators. Yet our unwillingness to think anthropologically about the total curriculum confines us to an irrelevancy we bemoan. Richard Handler is a cultural anthropologist who has written on nationalism and the politics of culture, museums and the representation of history, anthropology and literature, and the history of Boasian anthropology. He is currently Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Program in Global Studies at the University of Virginia.