Teaching Anthropology 2013, Vol.3, No.1, pp.

43-54

The Particular Place of Anthropology in an Interdisciplinary Curriculum

Michael Lange
Champlain College, Vermont

Abstract
This article explores the intersection of interdisciplinarity and anthropology within the classroom. Using an
ethnographic analysis of the core curriculum at Champlain College, Vermont, it is argued that anthropology can
play a particularly useful role in an interdisciplinary educational situation.

Introduction
Interdisciplinarity has been a watchword in higher education for over two decades. There are almost as many
approaches to interdisciplinary teaching at the college level as there are college campuses, with examples that
range from a single class or sequence designed to draw on multiple disciplines to a fully interdisciplinary
curriculum. None of these approaches should be understood as paradigmatic, as the conversations on the topic
are fluid and evolving. My purpose here is not to explore variations of interdisciplinarity in theory or practice,
but to explore the role the discipline of anthropology can play within an interdisciplinary framework. Using
ethnographic research conducted in my own department, the Core Division at Champlain College, I will examine
how different disciplinary understandings intersect. Ultimately, I argue that anthropology has a more fluid
intersection with interdisciplinary lines of inquiry.
The research that informs this article comes out of a faculty learning community in Champlain. When the
interdisciplinary Core Curriculum was implemented in 2007, it caused more than a little consternation among
many faculty members. The turmoil seemed out of proportion with a simple curricular change, so I decided to
explore this unease ethnographically. As I developed the research, it became clear that the disciplinary
backgrounds of the various faculty members played a role in their level of comfort with the interdisciplinarity of
the new curriculum. This led me to focus further on the intersection of my own discipline, anthropology, and the
interdisciplinary curriculum in which I worked and taught.

The Ethnographic Field: Champlain Colleges Core Curriculum

Champlain College, in Burlington, Vermont, is a small, private, professionally focused, four-year school, with
majors ranging from accounting and graphic design to social work and digital forensics. There are no majors in
the traditional humanities or social sciences, so the liberal arts/general education requirements for the
undergraduate students are delivered through the Core Division. The Core replaced a more standard, menu-type
general education curriculum with distribution credits, and many of the faculty teaching in the old curriculum
simply transitioned into the new Core when it was put in place. Several new faculty members were hired since
the transition, specifically with the new interdisciplinary curriculum in mind.
The curriculum is a four-year, integrated, explicitly interdisciplinary series of courses. Unlike the standard menu
of distributed requirements (two history courses, two math courses, three English courses, etc.), Champlain
offers a series of courses that every student takes in sequence, and each course is interdisciplinary in some
degree. So, rather than learning history in one classroom and art in another, a Champlain student pulls tools
from both these fields (and more) within the same class, in order to create more synthesized and applicable
knowledge. Courses are built on themes, with each course having a topic around which the readings,
assignments, and discussions are based. The overarching idea guiding the curriculum is a progression from the
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student outward. It starts with a rhetoric series and two courses titled Concepts of the Self and Concepts of
Community in the first year, followed by four courses focusing on the Western world in the sophomore year,
four globally themed courses in the third year, and an integrative capstone course in the senior year. The themes
begin in the first year with the student, then progress in steps conceptually further away from the student as each
semester and year passes. Members of the Champlain faculty express the structure in shorthand as, individualcommunity-West-world. Courses are taught in multiple sections from a master syllabus, requiring each
instructor to use certain texts, as well as common learning outcomes and one large, integrative common
assignment per course. Within that framework, every instructor is expected to shape the course to their own
thematic and disciplinary proclivities, while keeping the common educational experience intact. Courses are not
team-taught, so the interdisciplinarity within each course is dependent on the individual instructors approach to
the material, the assignments, and the classroom. The disciplinary backgrounds of the full-time faculty vary:
history, biology, ecological science, literature, rhetoric, folklore, philosophy, religious studies, media studies, and
anthropology. As might be expected, there can be quite a bit of variety among the faculty in the delivery of the
common experiences called for in the master syllabi.
Courses progress from a more explicitly multidisciplinary approach in the first year to an attempted
adisciplinarity by the third year. The first-year courses have focus disciplines embedded within them. For
Concepts of the Self, the focus disciplines are visual art, literature, psychology, and neuroscience. In Concepts
of Community, the focus disciplines are economics, history, and philosophy.i Each focus discipline in the first
year is represented by a text, such that the philosophy is meant to be delivered by reading Platos Republic, while
the neuroscience is examined by reading David Lindens The Accidental Mind. In the second year, courses have
themes within a larger framework of providing a shadow Western Civilization curriculum by dividing the year
among four courses titled Scientific Revolutions, Aesthetic Expressions, Secular and Sacred, and
Capitalism and Democracy. The approach in the second year is to present four threads that cover foundational
aspects of Western life, namely, the particular forms of artistic, scientific, religious, and political/economic
systems that can define the West.ii Moving away from the overt multidisciplinarity of the first year, the second
year relies more heavily on discipline-specific knowledge and approaches, without making the disciplinary bent
explicit. In some second-year courses, intertextuality has taken the place of interdisciplinarity. For example, a
comparison of two texts, such as Beethovens Eroica and Michelangelos Sistine Chapel, is used to explore
notions of the divine and human expression.iii In the third year of the curriculum, courses are again thematic, but
the attempted shadow curriculum is gone, so that the goal of the courses, exploring global issues, stands alone.
The third-year courses include Technology and Globalization and Human Rights and Responsibilities, along
with two courses with a geographic focus but a range of potential themes. These junior-level courses attempt to
be adisciplinary, with some texts that are rooted in a discipline and others that are broad topical surveys.
However, the master syllabi make clear that the courses are designed to explore the themes, not apply tools from
a particular discipline.iv

The Methodology
In attempting to understand the role of anthropology in this curriculum, I conducted ethnographic fieldwork on
my own academic department. Engaging partly in autoethnographyv, partly in insider ethnography, partly in
simple participant observation, I have studied the Core Division for the past four years, at first on my own and
later as an organized field study for a Faculty Learning Community research group organized by the dean of the
division. My research has involved formal interviews with a dozen colleagues (approximately half of the 23 fulltime faculty members employed by the Core Division), as well as countless informal conversations about
educational theory, pedagogy, and interdisciplinarity with my colleagues. The formal interviews provided many
direct explorations of interdisciplinarity and specific disciplinary identities, but because of the nature of the
curriculum, such discussions occur informally on a regular basis, both in organized meetings and in the casual
conversations one has in the hallways with fellow teachers. Champlain has a comparatively collaborative
pedagogical atmosphere, with very little territoriality about syllabi or assignments. This collaborative atmosphere,
combined with the fact that the vast majority of Core courses are taught from common master syllabi, means
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that my research is not prone to some of the problems identified by Lattuca in her research of faculty across
several campuses (2001: 274-275). The relative newness of this particular interdisciplinary curriculum (the Core
was implemented wholesale in 2007) means that interdisciplinarity has been, and continues to be, a constant and
prevalent topic among the faculty members. The perils of auto- and insider ethnography have been discussed at
length (e.g., Chang 2008), but my position as an anthropologist in a non-anthropology curriculum gives me a
useful vantage point as both insider and outsider, a sort of halfie (see Narayan 1993, Abu-Lughod 1991),
making the potential pitfalls of auto- and insider ethnography a risk worth taking.

Exploring the Intersection of Discipline and Interdisciplinarity

The type of interdisciplinarity espoused by Champlains Core curriculum necessitates the faculty members to
take a set of texts, topics, and questions, and interpret them through their own sense of what is good teaching.
Discipline-specific methodologies and theories are subsumed to pedagogical assumptions about best teaching
practices. The inquiry method is a hallmark of the Core, to the point that pedagogy is sometimes put forth as the
real commonality in the curriculum. Students are expected to explore texts and ideas in order to formulate their
own questions, and then engage in interdisciplinary thinking to construct responses to those questions. In this
way, the curriculum necessitates what Lattuca calls synthetic interdisciplinary questions (2001: 112) coming
from both the faculty members and the students. Much of the work of interdisciplinarity at Champlain, then, is
done in the classroom and the individual instructors syllabus, rather than at the theoretical level of
conceptualization, or even the more practical level of master syllabus design. While the Core curriculum itself has
been much-thought-about and much-wrangled-over, the interdisciplinarity within the curriculum has not been
fully examined in a theoretical way. Ellis, drawing on Alan Lius evaluation that interdisciplinarity is the most
seriously underthought critical, pedagogical and institutional concept in the modern academy, explains how
difficult it is to teach interdisciplinarily, just because the very concept of what it might be remains somewhat
underthought (Ellis 2009: 3-4, quoting Liu 1989: 743). Because of this underthinking of interdisciplinarity in
the formation of the current Core curriculum, there is no systematic approach to taking the thematically
constructed texts and assignments and turning them into interdisciplinary classroom experiences. Each professor
is left to enact this transformation on her or his own, using his or her own disciplinary understandings and
pedagogical experience.
The disciplinary backgrounds of the various members of the Core faculty shape the ways in which they enact this
transformation. As part of my interviews with Core faculty members, I asked everyone their definitions of
interdisciplinarity. While no attempt was made to collate definitions to the disciplinary backgrounds of the
respondents, a few examples may highlight the thinking individuals have done to translate their own disciplinary
identities into an interdisciplinary milieu.
One interviewee described interdisciplinarity as question-centered:
I guess what [interdisciplinarity] means to me is that, when you look at any issue or problem or question, you dont
necessarily look at it from one traditional disciplinary perspective, but instead you try to understand the whole
problem and all the pieces, and you maybe dont worry at first about even whether youre thinking like a historian
or thinking like a scientist or thinking like an anthropologist. Its more thinking about what are the facets of this
problem or question that are important and not worrying about which silos those things fall into. [] I think its
almost for me, its become a freeing of worrying about I dont know about that or thats not my area and more
thinking about whats really important in this question and how those pieces fit together (D1).

In this case, the interviewee discusses a transdisciplinary form of interdisciplinarity that transcends her
disciplinary background and identity, to the point that the problem or question gains primacy in creating an
interdisciplinary approach. Another interviewee explains a more multidisciplinary approach to interdisciplinarity:
It can be a number of things. It can be drawing upon [the] thinking and lenses of different disciplines to look at
something. You can do that with a novel, you can do that with a work of art, you can do that with whatever thing

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you want to examine with students. It can also be working with people from other disciplines and together you
devise some common stuff. [] Im thinking of courses that are team-taught in other places. I think its a
buzzword right now and people just use it because it sounds cool, and I also think that people think oh well, Ill
throw a poem in here and there was some philosopher I thought was cool and heres a popular science article and
thatll be interdisciplinary. I think the challenge is to try and really understand some of the issues raised by each of
these disciplines because they each have their strengths that are good to know about, and good to use (D2).

She recognizes the urge to use intertextuality to carry the load of interdisciplinarity, as well as the dangers of
underdeveloped interdisciplinary approaches. Here too, the real meat of interdisciplinary teaching is explained as
digging into the issues raised by different disciplines, which suggests a deeper understanding of the multiple
disciplines is required. Lastly, another colleague responded by discussing the boundaries between disciplines:
I understand interdisciplinarity as being a way, a place, a contact zone where disciplines come together. It doesnt
have to be two, it can be many. Its where those boundaries get squishy and oogey, and its not this is mine and
this is yours but theres thisand if I had a word for this [makes a gesture of fingers coming together and
intertwining] so that its this interconnectedness not just for the sake of being interconnected but because theres
a real need that something speaks over here, and there are connections being made that are authentic and genuine
and purposeful and help create, then, I guess what Bakhtin would identify as this other kind of voice out here, so
its this third thing happening (D3).

The crossing of disciplinary boundaries and the melding of disciplinary categories into something new is closer
to what many describe as interdisciplinarity, but the boundaries often cause problems. Strober (2011: 60-61) and
Lamont (2009: 88-91) discuss the territoriality of disciplines by examining the work they do to establish and
maintain their boundaries. Each of these interviewees is at least implicitly acknowledging the boundaries, and
each presents a way of overcoming or negotiating those boundaries in order to create interdisciplinarity in their
classrooms. It is worth noting, though, that the breadth of these comments is representative of the lack of a
coherent and consistent understanding of interdisciplinarity in the Core curriculum. Each professor negotiates
the boundaries in their own way, through their own understandings. These understandings are shaped at least in
part by disciplinary backgrounds, and, as Strober points out, the more flexibility there is within a discipline, the
more open practitioners of that discipline are to interdisciplinarity (2011: 37).
Even given the desire for, and individual understandings of, interdisciplinarity in the Core, there is discomfort
among some faculty about how to translate their individual understanding into classroom experience. Without a
systematic approach to interdisciplinarity in the department, individual faculty members are at different comfort
levels about negotiating the intersection of their training and the interdisciplinarity they are required to teach.
The situation is aptly described by one of my interviewees, discussing teaching a course outside the disciplinary
boundaries of her own training:
going into my human rights course now has been much different and a much bigger challenge, and it's been trying
to figure out how to cover the course materials, do what I'm supposed to do, and yet make it meaningful, and what
I'm figuring out is the only way for me to make it meaningful for me and therefore for my students [...]the only
way I can make it work for me is to approach it as a rhetorician and to approach human rights by understanding
the language and everything that's in that (D3).

As Lattuca explains, at least for some faculty, time is needed to reconcile disciplinary training and norms with
interdisciplinary thinking and scholarship. Many of the faculty whom I interviewed described the persistence of
disciplinary perspectives in their thinking (2001: 112). While some of my interviewees express that teaching
across boundaries is really comfortable (D1), most of the people I spoke with claimed at least some level of
discomfort at how to translate their disciplinary understandings into an interdisciplinary curriculum. For many,
maintaining some semblance of the boundaries is important, at least as a transitional stage between the
disciplinary identity they had and the interdisciplinary project in which they are now engaged. The differences in
ability and facility with this transition are doubtless a function, at least in part, of the individuals involved.
However, it can not all be simply a matter of individual proclivity. Klein explains that, while disciplines all form
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and maintain through similar intellectual and methodological processes, such a simplistic understanding of
discipline fails to account for differences that affect the relationship between disciplinarity and
interdisciplinarity. There are, first of all, different degrees of formality and organization. [] In addition to
formality, the scope of a discipline should be taken into account. [] Disciplines also have different degrees of
receptivity, and they definitely have different growth patterns (1990: 104-105). Different disciplines interact with
interdisciplinarity differently, and they do so based in part in the natures of the disciplines themselves. Some
disciplines are more flexible or more open to change and influence. Others are more rigidly organized and lend
themselves less to approaching other ways of knowing.

The Particular Role of Anthropology

Anthropology is a discipline, in almost all important ways, like the other disciplines of traditional academia. To
be sure, there are plenty of ways in which anthropology is different; otherwise, having a separate discipline called
anthropology would be a fruitless enterprise. It is true that Dell Hymes strongly questions whether
anthropology as a discipline is truly unique, asking [i]f anthropology did not exist, would it have to be
invented? (1972: 1). While his answer to his own question is no, he advocates a reinvention of anthropology,
indicating that there is a there there, but perhaps one that has not been explicitly articulated well enough. One
of the hallmarks of anthropology as a discipline is its holism. Anthropology in North America is usually divided
into four fields (archaeology, and social/cultural, linguistic, and biological/physical anthropologies), and often a
fifth category of applied anthropology is delineated as well.vi Many disciplines make a claim of holism based on a
rationale that you can study anything with X, and that is true of anthropology as well. However, anthropology
studies its subject matter in many different ways, drawing on theories and techniques that sit comfortably in the
hard sciences, the humanities, and the social sciences. Conrad Kottak makes a bit of an understatement when he
says in the foreword of Rice and McCurdys educational guide, Anthropologys breadth supports an array of
teaching strategies (xiii). It is too simplistic to say that anthropology is more interdisciplinary than other
disciplines, especially in light of the critical lens the field has turned on itself, pointing out the internal
inconsistencies of understanding within even the sub-fields of anthropology (e.g., Lederman 2005). However,
even taking into account internal disagreements, I suggest that a broad-minded approach to anthropology has a
great potential to support an array of teaching situations, including a particular usefulness to interdisciplinary
higher education.vii
My claim is neither new nor surprising to an audience of anthropologists. Marilyn Strathern has usefully
interrogated interdisciplinary knowledge production, both within anthropology and elsewhere (2004).
Anthropology has been working with interdisciplinarity for decades, with varying levels of comfort, both within
the field and across disciplinary borders. On a theoretical level, anthropology has long contested the roles of
discipline and interdiscipline. On an applied level, Mark Moritz describes the relationship between anthropology
and interdisciplinarity in a recent issue of Anthropology News, in a short piece about funding for interdisciplinary
research:
Collaborating in interdisciplinary teams is nothing new for anthropologists. Anthropology is by nature an
interdisciplinary discipline that encompasses the natural and social sciences as well as the humanities.
Consequently, anthropologists are used to communicating with (departmental) colleagues who have different ideas
about what counts as meaningful research. (2011: 5).

Because the discipline is situated strongly in several segments of the academic world, and has been so for a very
long time, anthropology as a discipline is used to moving between and among humanists, social scientists, natural
scientists, and more.
Anthropology is not above many of the problems that plague disciplines that try to engage with interdisciplinary
scholarship or teaching. Many disciplines are territorial, policing the topics they claim as their own. Scholars of
teaching and learning call this effect boundary work, and it is not a stranger to anthropology. Boundary work
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is also common in cultural anthropology []. Cultural anthropologists seek to keep others from using their
concepts, suggesting, for example, that the concept of culture belongs to anthropology and that when others
use it, they get it wrong (Strober 2011: 61). Many anthropologists will agree with this sentiment and bristle at
the thought that culture is not a concept we are better equipped to explore than practitioners of other disciplines.
In truth, I agree, at least in part. There are many examples of other disciplines attempting to apply what they
believe to be a cultural understanding, thinking they are engaging in an anthropological process. Indeed, one of
the texts used in the Core, historian David Hackett Fischers Albions Seed, claims to be cultural in an
anthropological rather than an aesthetic sense (vii). The creep of culture as a concept moves in both directions
across disciplinary boundaries, with scholars of other disciplines laying some claim to it, as well as
anthropologists understandings of it being utilized in other disciplines. Lamont reminds us that, [t]he past thirty
years have been characterized by a growing interest in things cultural across the social sciences and the
humanities. [] The influence of cultural anthropology grew considerably during this period, as the work of
Clifford Geertz, Mary Douglas, Victor Turner and others began to feed developments in fields outside
anthropology. Some anthropologists viewed this proliferation as a threat to the disciplines monopoly over the
concept of culture (2009: 87).
However, the breadth and broad influence can be seen as a strength. One of the advantages of anthropology as
a scholarly enterprise is that no one, including its practitioners, quite knows exactly what it is (Geertz 1985: 623,
quoted in Lamont 2009: 88). Within a point of view such as Geertzs, there is an open-mindedness about
anthropology that is rooted in a comparative lack of absolutes. Anthropology in the North American (ultimately,
Boasian) tradition takes as one of its fundamental assumptions that context is a primary shaper of belief, thought,
action, and process, so any human activity needs to be understood relative to its contexts. Indeed, often an
exploration of the contexts of a phenomenon is the goal of anthropological research. This post-structural
relativism makes anthropology more prone to accepting other points of view. Fields such as English literature
and anthropology, where post-structuralism has been influential and the theory wars have been fought, are
more likely to take a relativistic stance toward evaluation [of the paradigms of other disciplines], as well as to
have a weaker consensus on what defines quality (Lamont 2009: 58-59). In short, it is more often an easier leap
from anthropology to another disciplines understandings than is the case in reverse. As Klein puts it, Synoptic
or synthetic identity is rooted in the belief that some disciplines have a looser aggregation of interests, implying
greater openness to ideas from other disciplines. This identity is strong in literary studies, history, philosophy,
anthropology, and geography (1996: 40). Anthropology has been from its inception a strongly synthetic
discipline, with some branches (archaeology, biological anthropology) rooted in the hard sciences and others
rooted in the humanities (linguistic anthropology) and the social sciences (social/cultural anthropology). As such,
it is open to a wide array of disciplinary ideas from outside the field, making the leap across the boundaries
between the natural sciences or engineering, on the one hand, and the social sciences, humanities or arts, on the
other (Barry et al. 2008: 22) comparatively uncomplicated. Three decades ago, Dell Hymes stated that, [t]he
fundamental fact that shapes the future of anthropology is that it deals in knowledge of others (1972: 48).
Hymes is as right today as he was then, on two fronts. Anthropology deals not only in knowledge about others,
but also in the knowledge that others possess. More than any other field, anthropology tries to explore and understand
the knowledge and knowledge-making processes of the subjects of their inquiry. Rather than simply overlay
anthropological epistemologies onto the people we study, anthropology attempts to seek the insider, the emic
understanding, allowing that to inform our own interpretations as well. This fundamental part of the
anthropological project seeking and attempting to understand the understandings of others is usefully applied
to interdisciplinary educational situations in which an anthropologist may find her/himself. We know how to
negotiate cultural boundaries and otherness, and what is academia of not a large set of bounded identities, many
of which view each other as very much Other? Some will argue that boundaries and identities of academia are
fluid, contingent, and amorphous, as if to disqualify anthropology as a useful tool for understanding academics.
However, as anthropology knows, all boundaries and identities are fluid, contingent, and amorphous. In this
respect, academic identities and boundaries are nothing special, and anthropology is a particularly useful way to
negotiate interdisciplinary situations. As Mark Moritz reminds us, one of the tenets of anthropology is that
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people live in different cultural worlds of their own making and have different points of view. [] One of the
roles that anthropologists play on interdisciplinary teams is to facilitate communication across disciplinary
cultures. [] Also, they can bridge gaps between natural and social scientists or qualitative and quantitative
approaches (2011: 5).
The openness of anthropology to other ways of knowing is evident in the training of anthropologists in graduate
schools, especially cultural anthropologists. Any anthropology grad student who has tried to describe their
dissertation research to someone has framed it as I am studying X in Y, where X is a topic, and Y is a cultural
context. I study film and media in Indonesia; I study the police in Thailand; I study historical identity in
Amazonas the form of expression is fairly standard, with incredibly wide variety in the places of X and Y. The
variety and the need to focus on a topic within the ridiculously broad rubric of culture means that
anthropology graduate students often delve into fields outside anthropology. To become an ethnobotanist, one
must have some facility with both the ethno and the botany. Unless one studies anthropology to be a pure
theorist, doing such work outside the traditional cultural theory of anthropology is the norm, and it ought to
make anthropologists open to epistemologies and forms of inquiry beyond their disciplinary own. The
intellectual and epistemological flexibility that is the benchmark of interdisciplinarity is a basic part of much
anthropological research.viii Because anthropology often actively seeks questions and answers within other fields,
or at least at the boundaries between anthropology and other fields, the discipline has a habit of wading (what
Geertz might call waddling) into the spaces in between. Anthropologists often slog into the murky interstitial
spaces between disciplines because they need to draw understandings from places other than straight
anthropological theory. According to Lattuca, synthetic interdisciplinary work could be divided into two types:
it could be based on questions found in the intersections of disciplines as well as on questions found in the gaps
among disciplines (2001: 115). Clearly, much anthropology has quite a bit in common with her understanding
of synthetic interdisciplinary work. The depth of questioning and the exploration of borders are basic to both
anthropology and interdisciplinarity.

Anthropology in Champlains Interdisciplinary Core

In Champlains Core, a flexibility of epistemology is implied throughout the curriculum. Professors are given a
set of texts and disciplines with which to teach, and turning that set of understandings into their own
interdisciplinary classroom is left up to them. A background in a discipline with a more flexible understanding of
epistemology (like anthropology) makes for an easier transition from the disciplinary identity to the
interdisciplinary practice. While my research indicates this to be the case at Champlain, it stands to reason that
any interdisciplinary situation that strives for intellectual and epistemological flexibility would be a relatively easy
transition for anthropology.
The overarching interdisciplinarity of the curriculum means that anthropological methods and understandings
can easily be woven throughout. The topics of several Core courses lend themselves especially well to such
weaving. The two first-year courses, Concepts of the Self and Concepts of Community deal with identity,
both individual and group. Anthropology has been theorizing group identity since its birth, and more recently
has delved deeply and meaningfully into individual identity with such theories as the post-human. Across the
second year of the curriculum, which explores Western civilization from about 1400 through about 1800 CE,
explorations of the cultural context of the times and places studied can enlighten the conversation. At the heart
of all four second-year courses, Secular and Sacred, Scientific Revolutions, Aesthetic Expressions, and
Capitalism and Democracy, is a recognition of the fundamental shift toward humanistic understandings that
was crystalized in the Enlightenment. Inherent in these courses is an assumption that the Western world
(represented in the courses primarily by Europe) was made unique by this shift toward humanism, and a humancentered universe. While that point itself is debatable, it is nevertheless a basic assumption of the second-year
courses. It is easy to see how all of these courses can become something more than simply teaching about
Renaissance art or the Scientific Revolution by putting these very human processes into cultural context. Indeed,
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exploring the cultural context(s) of the human processes is a very easy way to make the separate courses connect,
to bring relevance from one course into another.
Because Champlain is a professionally focused school, anthropological methodologies can be quite useful in
connecting a general education to a students major. The complexity of problems that professionals face in
practice creates a sense of interdisciplinary necessity (Klein 1996: 40, emphasis mine). One of Champlains goals
is to prepare students for the real-world situations in which they will find themselves once they have graduated
and entered their professional field. While the professional majors take much of the credit for giving Champlain
students this practical preparation (and rightly so), the use of anthropological methodologies helps the process.
In the second year of the Core curriculum, every student engages in an ethnographic research project in the
Secular and Sacred course. Because the Core is the general education requirement for all four-year students,
every student takes this class, regardless of major. No matter what a student is studying, each gets the experience
of directly encountering someone other than themselves and exploring some aspect of their culture through a
form (albeit limited) of participant observation. This project puts the theoretical understandings the student is
gaining in their general education classroom to a test of seeing people enact those understandings in their real
lives. The students put theory and practice together. While ethnography as a methodology has been taken up by
fields as diverse as education, business, medicine, and more, anthropology can rightly claim to be one of the two
disciplines (along with folklore) that created ethnography as a methodology. Because ethnography can be
employed to explore any theoretical understanding in a real-world context, this anthropological methodology
lends itself quite well to any interdisciplinary inquiry.
Because the third year of the curriculum is globally themed, it is perhaps too obvious to explain here how
anthropological understandings can enlighten the interdisciplinary curriculum of the third-year courses,
Technology and Globalization and Human Rights and Responsibilities. It is interesting to note that
Technology and Globalization is the only course wherein anthropological reading has been structurally
integrated into the master syllabus. As I stated before, the real load of making the courses truly interdisciplinary
is on the individual faculty members, who are provided with a broad description, a set of texts, a required
common assignment, and the learning outcomes for each course. For the first several iterations of this course,
one of the two main texts was Thomas Friedmans The World is Flat, which was used to explain what
globalization is. This semester, Friedmans book was replaced with an anthropological text, Ted Lewellens The
Anthropology of Globalization.ix
Most importantly, and perhaps most broadly, anthropology fits in with the particular flavor of interdisciplinarity
that exists at Champlain because the teaching methodology is inquiry. As discussed before, the goal of many
types of interdisciplinarity is to formulate questions either at the boundaries of disciplinary sets of knowledge or
outside of any explicitly discipline-specific framework. Lattucas synthetic interdisciplinary work (2001: 115)
requires exploring questions at the margins and in the gaps. The inquiry method of teaching requires the exact
same thing. Students encounter texts and then dig within them and among them to formulate their own
questions, proceeding then to explore texts and discussions further, to address those questions. It has already
been demonstrated how anthropology and synthetic interdisciplinary work share many facets, so it follows that
anthropologys comfort with formulating questions on the margins and exploring texts for their own
epistemologies would sit easily within an inquiry-based, interdisciplinary curriculum.

Interdisciplinarity
Before drawing conclusions about anthropology and interdisciplinarity by delving into the results of my
ethnographic work, the term interdisciplinarity must be described. I hesitate to say that the term must be
defined because conversations of interdisciplinarity by their very nature deal with terms that have multiple
definitions across disciplinary boundaries. Because my goal here is to understand how teaching anthropology and
teaching interdisciplinarily can overlap, a brief exploration of interdisciplinarity as it is understood in higher
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education will be useful, both to situate my work within the larger conversations about interdisciplinarity and to
explain some of the particulars of interdisciplinary thought that shape higher education in North America.
Interdisciplinarity is a slippery concept, with descriptions ranging from, presenting a domain of knowledge in
terms of its constituent disciplines and their relations (Bailis 2002: 4), through a synthesis of knowledge from
different fields (Lattuca 2001: 11), to metaphorical descriptions such as a web, a network, and a system of
cooperative knowledge production (Klein 1996: 19). The history and development of interdisciplinarity in
academia from the medieval trivium and quadrivium through the SSRC in the 1920s to today have been traced in
numerous works (e.g., Lattuca 2001, Newell 1998, Klein 1990), and different approaches to interdisciplinarity
have been reviewed by Chandramohan and Fallows (2009), Rotenberg (2011), and Lamont (2009). I do not wish
to present either of these conversations again, when they have been so fully and illuminatingly presented already.
Rather, I wish to situate anthropology into a particular interdisciplinary understanding. In doing so, I hope to
expand on work done by others, examining the intersection of the social sciences in general (Camic, Gross, and
Lamont 2011) and anthropology specifically (Hymes 1972, Rice and McCurdy 2000) with interdisciplinary
conversations and curricula. The meeting of discipline and interdisciplinarity is often understood as a struggle.
However, Strober notes that the presence of interdisciplinarity does not negate or invalidate the presence of
traditional academic disciplines:
The merits of interdisciplinarity may have been oversold in the recent burst of interest in interdisciplinary work
and its alleged ability to solve societal problems and promote the growth of knowledge Both disciplinary
specialization (and subspecialization) and interdisciplinary work are seen as critical to the continued advancement
of knowledge. From a cognitive perspective, by definition, one cannot be interdisciplinary unless and until one has
a thorough grasp of disciplinary knowledge (Strober 2011: 20, emphases in original).

The vast majority of faculty members teaching in interdisciplinary situations were themselves trained in one or
more traditional disciplines. As academia has grown and changed, variants of interdisciplinarity have waxed and
waned, including multidisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity, adisciplinarity, and others. A few brief definitions will be
of service, in helping understand the structure(s) of interdisciplinarity present at Champlain College.
Multidisciplinarity is a form of interdisciplinarity that sets explicitly understood disciplines next to one another,
often by applying them to the same task or question, in order to form greater understandings than either
discipline could by itself. Transdisciplinarity seeks a larger synthesis outside of traditional disciplines, literally
transcending disciplinary boundaries. Adisciplinarity approaches questions directly, without drawing explicitly
on the tools or techniques of a particular discipline or disciplines. The details of the various modes have been
explored by Haynes (2002), Donald (2009), and others, but I will take a fairly ecumenical view, one espoused by
Strober in her important work, Interdisciplinary Conversations:
When I began this research, I made finer distinctions than I do now. At this point, I find the lines between
multidisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity, and transdisciplinarity often hard to draw. As a result, in this book I use the
term interdisciplinarity to refer to situations in which more than one discipline is involved, regardless of the degree of
their integration (Strober 2011: 17, emphasis in original).

Stober, Klein, and others make the point that, regardless of the form or label placed on a single example of
interdisciplinarity, the key points are taking tools from multiple disciplines and integrating them on some way. In
this respect, interdisciplinary and integrative become nearly synonymous. There are fertile questions to be
asked about the different forms of research and teaching that draw upon multiple disciplines, but for the current
article, a broader view should suffice to open a window onto the dark alleys of multiply-disciplined processes
within higher education. I especially want to explore the intersection of disciplinary knowledge with the
interdisciplinary educational situation present in the Core curriculum at Champlain College.

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Conclusion
Giving primacy to the exploration of questions is at the heart of much interdisciplinarity, especially in an inquirybased interdisciplinary curriculum such as that at Champlain. The curriculum is structured as individualcommunity-West-world, beginning a students general education with the individual, and then proceeding to
place that individual into increasingly large and increasingly complex contexts. Anthropology is a discipline that
takes as a primary objective the exploration of contexts. Many disciplines explore context, but often as a means
to understanding whatever is in the middle (a literary work, a historical event, an idea). Anthropology often
focuses on the context itself, as both means and end. Exploring the world through culturally relative eyes is a
paradigm across the anthropological world, and this paradigm aligns strongly with the goals of many
interdisciplinary projects. Most undergraduates begin their college career exhibiting absolute thinking that is
authoritarian and organized in dualistic (true-false, right-wrong) terms. Eventually, many come to see multiple
truths and phenomenological variations. Some go further by perceiving knowledge as relative to and constructed
within a context. This latter, more contextual form of thinking is akin to what Klein claims is essential for
interdisciplinary thinking (Haynes 2002: xiv). Contextual thinking and thinking about contexts thats what
anthropology is; its what we do. Because of this fact, I argue here that anthropology fits particularly well into
interdisciplinary educational settings, both theoretical and pedagogical.
The Core curriculum at Champlain College serves as one example and a useful ethnographic field, but there are
many aspects of Champlains particular interdisciplinarity that are broadly applicable to other forms of
interdisciplinary process. Interdisciplinarity, as it is understood in higher education within North America, is as
much about the synthesis of two or more disciplines, as much as that seems problematic on the level of theory
(Barry et al. 2008: 22). Where Barry et al. (2008), discuss interdisciplinarity as a concept that is employed in the
design of research projects, I discuss here interdisciplinary pedagogy at the undergraduate level. At this simpler,
perhaps more mechanical level, taking two or more disciplines and using them to create some form of synthetic
understanding (following Lattuca 2001) is a useful, possibly necessary, goal. The type of synthetic thinking that
Lattuca and Klein identify is difficult to achieve, and even more difficult to teach to undergraduate students.
What I have demonstrated here is that a purposeful approach to interdisciplinarity is possible, but is dependent
on the disciplines that are brought to bear by the teaching faculty. Because of the potential for anthropology to
engage with questions and methods from outside itself, anthropological theories, methods, and processes work
well with many forms of interdisciplinarity.

References
Abu-Lughod, L. (1991), Writing Against Culture, in R. Fox (ed.) Recapturing Anthropology, Santa Fe: School of
American Research Press, pp. 137-162.
Bailis, S. (2002), Interdisciplinary Curriculum Design and Instructional Innovation, in C. Haynes (ed.)
Innovations in Interdisciplinary Teaching, Westport, CT: American Council on Education/Oryx Press, pp. 315.
Barry, A., Born, G. and Weszkalnys, G. (2008), Logics of interdisciplinarity, Economy and Society, 37 (1): 20 49.
Camic, C., Neil G., and Michle L. (eds), (2011), Social Knowledge in the Making, Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Chandramohan, B., and Stephen F., (eds) (2009), Interdisciplinary Learning and Teaching in Higher Education: Theory
and Practice, New York: Routledge.
Chang, H. (2008), Autoethnography as Method. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.
Core Division Home Page (2010), Introduction to the Core Dimension. Retrieved on 27 December 2011 from
http://www.champlain.edu/Undergraduate-Studies/Your-Education/Core-Dimension.html
Core Division Infographic (2011), [Graphic illustrating the coverage of disciplines and topics throughout the
Core Curriculum]. Core Infographic. Retrieved on 27 December 2011 from
http://www.champlain.edu/Undergraduate-Studies/Majors-and-Programs/Academic-Divisions/CoreDivision/Core-Infographic.html
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Donald, J. G. (2009), The Commons: Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Encounters, in C. Kreber (ed.), The
University and its Disciplines: Teaching and Learning within and beyond Disciplinary Boundaries, New York:
Routledge, pp. 35-49.
Ellis, R. J. (2009), Problems May Cut Right across the Borders: Why We Cannot Do Without
Interdisciplinarity, in B. Chandramohan and S. Fallows (eds), Interdisciplinary Learning and Teaching in
Higher Education: Theory and Practice,. New York: Routledge, pp. 3-17.
Fischer, D. H. (1989), Albions Seed. New York: Oxford University Press.
Geertz, C. (1985) Waddling In, Times Literary Supplement, June 5.
Haynes, C. (ed.) (2002), Innovations in Interdisciplinary Teaching, Westport, CT: American Council on
Education/Oryx Press.
Hymes, D. (ed.) (1972), Reinventing Anthropology, New York: Pantheon.
Klein, J. Th. (1990), Interdisciplinarity: History, Theory, Practice, Detroit: Wayne State University Press.
______ (1996), Crossing Boundaries: Knowledge, Disciplinarities, and Interdisciplinarities, Charlottesville: University Press
of Virginia.
Kreber, C. (ed.) (2009), The University and its Disciplines: Teaching and Learning within and beyond Disciplinary Boundaries,
New York: Routledge.
Lamont, M. (2009), How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Lattuca, L. R. (2001), Creating Interdisciplinarity: Interdisciplinary Research and Teaching among College and University
Faculty, Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press.
Leavy, P. (2011), Essentials of Transdisciplinary Research, Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.
Lederman, R. (2005) Unchosen Grounds in D. Segal, and S. Yanagisako, (eds), Unwrapping the Sacred Bundle:
Reflections on the Disciplining of Anthropology, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 49-77.
Liu, A. (1989) The Power of Formalism: the new historicism, ELH: English Literary History, 56 (4): 721-771.
Moritz, M. (2011), Funding for Interdisciplinary Research, Anthropology News 52 (8) (November 2011):5.
Narayan, K. (1993), How Native Is a Native Anthropologist? American Anthropologist, 95 (3) (September
1993): 671-686.
Newell, W. (ed.) (1998), Interdisciplinarity: Essays from the Literature, New York: College Entrance Examination
Board.
Rice, P. C. and McCurdy, D. (eds.) (2000), Strategies in Teaching Anthropology. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice
Hall.
Rotenberg, R. (2010), The Art and Craft of College Teaching, Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.
Strathern, M. (2004), Commons and Borderlands, Wantage: Sean Kingston.
Strober, M. H. (2011), Interdisciplinary Conversations: Challenging Habits of Thought. Stanford: Stanford University
Press.
Personal Interviews: interviewees are not identified by disciplinary background or demographic information in
connection to their quotations, in order to protect their anonymity. The quotations included in this
article are excerpted from interviews conducted with a folklorist, a rhetorician, and a biologist.

Notes
i

In the original iteration of Concepts of Community, sociology was a fourth focus discipline, complete with a sociological
text. The text and the discipline were removed from the course after the first semester it was taught for various practical and
political reasons. This removal meant that, for several semesters, there was no explicit use of qualitative social science in the
curriculum, until recent revisions made to some courses. Even the quantitative social sciences are under-represented. The
economics used in the curriculum is often approached from a historico-philosophical perspective, as evidenced by the
economics text used in Concepts of Community, Robert Heilbroners Teachings from the Worldly Philosophy.
As would be obvious to an anthropologist, this approach privileges the notion of the West, and defines the West entirely
from its center, which is understood to be rooted in a European context, ultimately back to ancient Greece. The curriculum
ii

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was designed without the input of an anthropologist, such that anthropological understandings of culture and cultural
process were overlooked. As the curriculum undergoes revision, anthropological understandings are becoming more a part
of the conversation. For example, a new course has been proposed exploring colonialism, with an eye toward
problematizing the notion of the West by examining it at its boundaries, rather than from its center. Ultimately, ideas of
West, non-West, center, and periphery all have their problems. In Champlains Core curriculum, the issue was that, from its
inception, many of these problems were not recognized, let alone explored, either in the construction or in the delivery of
the courses.
Intertextuality is, of course, something entirely different from interdisciplinarity. The two processes often work very well
together, but intertextuality is about the subject(s) being studied, while any form of interdisciplinarity is about the theories,
methods, and intellectual frameworks being used to study the subject(s). The blending of method and subject in attempting
to create interdisciplinarity is evident throughout the Core. An examination of the Core Infographic (Core Division
Infographic) shows how disciplines and themes are displayed along the same axis in this visual representation of the
curriculum.
iii

iv The fourth year of the curriculum is not discussed here, as the fourth-year course does not reside within the same
curricular framework. A students senior class is a college capstone, wherein the liberal arts and general education ideas and
habits of mind are integrated with each students professional major. These courses are team-taught by a major faculty
member and a Core Division faculty member, with an eye to synthesizing and integrating understandings from both sides of
their classroom education. Because the fourth year sits in a different place from the first three years of a students general
education, and because the capstone courses are individualized to an exceptional degree by each Core/professional teaching
pair, I have chosen to leave it out of the current discussion.

My own disciplinary background has just as much an effect on my interpretations as anyone elses background does on
their teaching. My undergraduate training included a dual degree in four-fields anthropology and interdisciplinary studies of
folklore and mythology. While my intent was to focus on cultural anthropology, I worked for several years as an
archaeologist before entering grad school. I received an MA in cultural anthropology before switching to Scandinavian
studies, receiving another MA in Scandinavian literature and language. I switched again to a PhD in folklore. My dissertation
committee included my anthropology adviser, Kirin Narayan, and my dissertation research was an ethnographic exploration
of identity in an isolated island community in Scotland. Throughout my grad school, I pursued anthropological training,
theory, and methodology. While my PhD is labeled Folklore, I am much more an anthropologist who studies folklore
than I am a folklorist in the strictest sense.
v

vi The four fields approach to anthropology is much less commonly used outside of North America, where archaeology,
for example, is often understood as a segment of history or geology.
vii I would like to be clear that what I am not trying to do is engage in an argument about which discipline is more
interdisciplinary. That sort of territoriality does not strike me as particularly productive or interesting. What I would like to
present is an argument that anthropology has certain traits that make it particularly useful within an interdisciplinary teaching
milieu.

I do not claim to speak for all anthropologists. To be sure, there are anthropologists out there who rigidly reject the
theories and ideas of other disciplines, and who steadfastly guard the boundaries of their field from what they perceive as
non-anthropological interlopers. Those anthropologists will be judged on their own merits or lack thereof. I want to address
the potential within the discipline of anthropology itself, not the habits of every practicing anthropologist. In that
understanding, I maintain that the field of anthropology has boundless potential to add to any interdisciplinary process.
viii

ix There was considerable resistance to this change of text, despite the fact that Friedman does not theorize at all, merely
presenting his journalistic view of globalization as almost entirely an economic process. The parts of the story he misses are
many and varied.

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