Anthropology 531

Guidelines for session presentations

by Professor William Kelly - Yale University

?@

There will be two kinds of formal presentation in the seminar, and students will take turns in preparing and performing both. As I indicate in the seminar statement, I want to use this as an opportunity to give students practice in developing essential professional communication skills. I am planning to record these presentations with a digital camera so that we can later review and discuss the presentations together.

I. Opening presentation (twenty minutes)

The purpose of the opening presentation is to offer a considered assessment of the monograph as research project and as ethnographic form. You may obviously assume that your audience has read the book and thought about it (although perhaps not as intensively as you). You may therefore assume that the audience is receptive to a critical appraisal of the book as a way of reminding them of its key features and as an inspiration to a conversation about it.

A. assessing the monograph as research project

1. objective (that is, the topic of research and the central argument advanced)

2. theoretical context and works on which research is based and/or against which it is set

3. research design: length and conditions of fieldwork; methods employed; timetable;

4. larger significance claimed for work: to what is it viewed as a contribution?

B. assessing the monograph as ethnographic form

What is the expository structure of the book as the presentation of an argument?

What are its distinctive rhetorical features as an ethnography: authorial voice, how evidence is presented, writing style, etc.?

Notes: Twenty minutes is a common time-unit for academic meetings presentations, and thus it is a time-unit of exposition with which you need become comfortable and adept. Your career will depend upon it, as will any chance you have of getting your ideas across to much of your audience (who will not and may never read a word you write). The most common fault of meetings papers is precisely that--that they are papers that are read, often in a special academic drone. Be a speaker, not a reader. It is quite appropriate to have notes, often extensive notes, even a written text. However, engage the audience; do not commune with your notes.

Equally common, academics consistently overestimate how much they can get across in twenty minutes. Too many people assume that if they are given an opportunity to talk, it is a shame to communicate just one big idea when they are bursting with three or four more. The result is a torrent of words, and the only thing worse than an academic drone is an academic drone at double-speed. If you prepare a text for a twenty-minute presentation, it should be no longer than eight double-spaced pages.

?@

II. Discussant commentary (ten minutes)

Following this presentation, we will have a briefer commentary by another student. The purposes of this are:

a. to add anything of importance to an appreciation of the monograph that may have been left out by the presentation; and

b. to evaluate the presentation itself

Notes: Such a commentary that follows a presentation is an equally common and distinctly different challenge. Sometimes the commentator is given a text or notes of the presentation in advance. Sometimes the presentation departs significantly from the advance text. Sometimes a text or written notes are only available as the presentation begins (and the commentator is torn between skimming the written text or following the speaker). And finally, you will have other occasions when you have no text and must follow the speaker's words and then perform quickly and extemporaneously. No matter what the forewarning (or lack thereof), such an immediate response is not expected to be delivered in a fluent prose of well-turned phrases. Outline your points, select a few key illustrations, and don't be afraid to be provocative.

Again, commentators (or "discussants") at academic meetings tend to overprepare and to miscalculate the time available. They sometimes think that this is an opportunity for them to deliver their own paper (perhaps they were sore about not being invited to give a paper by the session organizer, but only to discuss others). Be deft, not deadly. Make your points quickly and shut up.

?@

?@