lecture is over for the term
two days of presentations next week.
teacher is using funny language.
unprofessional cursing, slurs against women, overweight, anorexia, bulimia, christians.
the opposite of culturally sensitive.
agressive tone.  destroying the learning atmosphere.

it makes me uncomfortable.
as the learning curve hits a plateau . . . i realize i find a lot of what gets lumped under the term "anthropology" interesting, especially the attempted non-racist anthropologies.  but the academic bickering tiresome and the exoticizing of other cultures i see to be ethically fraught.  the thin veneer of non-racism to me barely conceals an academic affluent narcissism, which can whitewash the present and the past, and essentialize the other, in a myth of identity.
in the following excerpts, i find interesting the word "disentangle." so telling.  as anthropology seeks to disentangle itself from  . . .
i wonder they could not find a better word.
i think the word anthropology is too poisoned as i read this
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_anthropology

i think of ethnology and ethnography as archaic words, which no longer sound fair.  they sound tyrannical, and eurocentric, exoticizing otherness.
i am terrified if i mention the word anthropology, my truly educated friends might associate me with anthropology's racist past.  i am sorry it has taken me this long (january to may) to figure this out.  how embarrassing!

using any of these ethno-words also makes me uncomfortable.  i do not like the divisiveness, the essentializing.

if my teacher were not so seething with so much hostility, i might get a better impression.  but know i think anthropology needs a new name and a new mission and to divorce itself from its scary past.

why terms anthropology and ethnography creep me out:

from
http://science.jrank.org/pages/7673/Ethnicity-Race-in-Anthropology.html

Such a nuanced view of ethnicity has not always been the norm in anthropology or in

social science. A central story of ethnicity in anthropology is its labored disentanglement from now discredited biological and evolutionary notions of "race," ideas that continue to contribute to the general public's conceptualization of the "ethnic" as a physically distinct type of person.

In the mid-nineteenth century the terms ethnic and racial first came into common use, employed by pre-and post-Darwinian scientists, and later anthropologists, to construct human racial and cultural taxonomies. As the social corollary of race, "ethnic" (ethnicity as a unique term does not emerge in the United States until the 1950s) initially served to reinscribe physical notions of racial, and in some cases national, identity onto groups of people often naively assumed to have a shared cultural, historical, or even evolutionary past. 

Likewise, until ethnicity's emergence in the 1960s and 1970s as a term describing more fluid social processes of identity formation, social scientists used ethnic to describe a natural or fixed category of person. In the United States, especially during the intense debate over Eastern European and Mediterranean immigration in the early portion of the twentieth century, an "ethnic" was a person of a marked, lower, category, opposed to a bourgeois white identity. Ethnics, in this context, became lower-class whites, Jews, and nonwhite, colonized, or indigenous peoples.

Such a nuanced view of ethnicity has not always been the norm in anthropology or insocial science. A central story of ethnicity in anthropology is its labored disentanglement from now discredited biological and evolution

...greater anthropological use of the term ethnic group coincided with a general repudiation of biological determinism and racism within the social sciences as a whole, as well as with a particularly anthropological recognition of the emergence of anticolonial nationalism outside the First World. Specifically, anthropologists replaced tribe or tribalism with ethnic group, especially when describing African migrants to colonial urban centers. Still, all these early uses of the term ethnic in anthropology imply a bounded set of cultural traits, historical commonalities, or mental similarities between people of the same ethnic group, even if they later became delinked from physical or racial characteristics.

Read more: Ethnicity and Race in Anthropology - Franz Boas, Ethnicity, And Contemporary Physical Anthropology: Continuing Tensions, Cultural Fundamentalism And Instrumental Ethnicities http://science.jrank.org/pages/7673/Ethnicity-Race-in-Anthropology.html#ixzz0ol6Q2Ej3