Moving Forward

Abstract

The editors make their case for the importance of reinvigorating ethnographic performance for the twenty-first century. Now, more than ever, we need a radical pedagogy that instills in students a real and concrete sense of a shared human bond. At the start of the third decade of the new millennium, universities in the United States are feeling the pressures brought on by a divisive political atmosphere and attacks on the tolerance of cultural diversity. The knowledge that students gain from ethnographic performance will contribute to a deeper, more humanistic experience and knowledge of the world and of Others. This connection to humanistic anthropology is as significant today as it was in the 1980s. The chapter concludes with an essay written by Edith Turner near the end of her life, in which she reviews four decades of teaching that evolved from rote learning to humanistic anthropology. In it, she advocates for “a different kind of classroom” that brings the vitality of communitas—the “positive threads of connectedness”—into the classroom.