Antennas Up! Laura Nader’s Undergraduate Lecture Courses as Public Anthropology

Abstract

While teaching lecture courses at the University of California, Berkeley, Laura Nader taught generations of students to raise their anthropological antennae. This article uses an autoethnographic approach to describe the author’s exposure to anthropology at Berkeley in the nineteen-nineties, gesturing towards the way undergraduate lecture courses play an important but largely underrecognized role in fostering public anthropology. Nader’s lecture courses were particularly effective at this because their focus on pushing students to question dogma and analyze controlling processes offered students a sense of how anthropology could foster critical public discourse. Nader stressed the importance of asking good questions designed to challenge assumptions, finding the right methods to answer those questions, and paying attention to pathways of power. While always questioning received wisdom, ideological assumptions, and Western categories of knowledge, Nader continued to stress the importance of developing straightforward, highly-accessible concepts that captured the attention of students—like Harmony Ideology, trustanoia, controlling processes, and the vertical slice.