A friend of mine (who is not American, but who has lived in the US before) asked the following question on FB: Aside from prayer, what is your specific solution or concrete and actual suggestions to end the racial problem in the US? It is hard to give specific, concrete and actual "anything" on FB …
Category: cultural anthropology
How to Teach Missions Anthropology?
A few weeks ago a friend of mine who teaches at a small missions school asked me what is the most valuable way to teach missions anthropology. I suppose the most valuable way to teach missions anthropology is to do missions anthropology. However, the question was given in the context of a course taught in …
Learning a New Term: “Symbolic Interactionism”
I have recently begun reading the book Participant Observation by James Spradley. I suppose I should have read it years ago... but better late than never. In Chapter One he references Herbert Blumer (1969) and his work Symbolic Interactionism. Three premises of this theory are (in my own wording) People act towards objects (nouns of …
Continue reading Learning a New Term: “Symbolic Interactionism”
Eschewing Power
Okay, so I was watching this guy on TV. He was some sort of talking head type guy on Fox News. (Disclaimer... I have no idea who this guy is. I really don't watch Fox News. I mean, I live in Asia--- so why would I?) He was telling a story about some town in …
How Do You Define Culture?
Culture is "...knowledge that is learned and shared and that people use to generate behavior and interpret experience." That definition is from David W. McCurdy, James P. Spradley, and Dianna J. Shandy in The Cultural Experience: Ethnography in Complex Society (Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 2005). It has been my favorite definition for culture. It …
Reaching the Elders
Joanne Shetler, a Wycliffe Bible Translator, in her book "And the Word Came with Power," says on page 108 "Balangaos had always had village elders, older men informally chosen by group consensus to guide them. I usually sought these older people to work with me on translation; their status and their experience were invaluable. In …
Ministry in Diversity. 2nd Edition
Finally got my book updated. Previously, I was trying to finish the book "Ministry in Diversity" quickly so that it could be used in my Cultural Anthropology class. So I was a bit... sloppy. My son helped me fix a lot of it. We got most of the problems fixed now (HOPEFULLY all of them). …
Knowing One’s Role in the in the Mission Field and at Home
In the first two or three years of our mission work in the Philippines, we would go back to the US for a few weeks to visit friends, families, and churches. And at churches I would be asked to preach. Sometimes, I would choose a Missions topic and sometimes not. When I preached on something …
Continue reading Knowing One’s Role in the in the Mission Field and at Home