PowerPoint is dead? Long live the Lecture!

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Exactly after three years I teach again! Hoooray! I have a small course called Anthropology and the supernatural at the Faculty of Humanities in Prague. The course resembles my old course which I taught back in 2014 during my unsuccessful Ph.D. I reworked my lectures and here I am.

My course basically serves as an introduction for complete beginners in sociocultural anthropology. Instead of focusing on basic stuff like nature-nurture controversy, relativism-universalism issues or "What is anhtropology and how do you explain it to your grandma?" I decided to focus on the inner architecture of essential arguments and theories related to anhtropological theories of witchcraft, religion, magic or ritual. Also, I try to put less stress on biographical anecdotes (Malinowski's troubles on the Trobriand Islands, Leach's lost fieldnotes or Evans-Pritchard's WWII escapades) and hackneyed descriptions of the so-called paradigms in anthropology.

Contrary to my previous course, I decided to put less weight on PowerPoint presentations. My overall impression was that they were not entirely satisfactory. So I am happy that someone summed up my feelings in a recent article about PowerPoint lectures. I would not dare to go as far as to ban PowerPoint altogether. However, if you want to use it, you should learn to handle it with ABSOLUTE care.

I used to have around 50 slides for a lecture, now I scaled it down to circa 10 each. I used to cram lots of text into my slides, now I use them just to make a point or to show pictures. I took inspiration from Martin Buchtík, a fellow sociologist, whose presentation I saw a couple of years ago. Martin used funny slides with Bruno Latour and Erving Goffman engaged in a fictitious dialogue.

Since my course is introductory, I deem it necessary to discuss some philosophical issues:

9/10 Lockes say that knowledge comes from senses
Every Hume knows that our notion of causality is shaky

This is just to show that PowerPoint is not pure evil. And I bet you can make better slides. Besides, PowerPoint also allows you to use gifs, a feature that makes PowerPoint a far superior tool when you compare it to overhead projectors (*wink* *wink* if you know what I mean...).

I am really happy that I can teach. It is challenging, exhausting and it takes lots of time, but in the end it fills me with joy. So...



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