ANTH 3152

Mentore is a great guy with many interesting stories of his time in Amazonia. The course is very conceptual and sometimes difficult to understand exactly what is going on but if you wait till the end it will all come together and make sense. Mentore takes a wonderful approach to looking at the material and keeping perspective on its origins. I highly recommend this class if you have any interest in the social behavior of Amazonian people.

Very intellectual but difficult to follow.

Mentore is an extremely knowledgeable professor but sometimes he has trouble articulating his ideas to students that are not thinking at as high of an anthropological level as he is. The class was a typical lecture class with usually 45 minutes to an hour of reading needed to be able to follow each lecture. The discussion portions done by Giancarlo were super helpful in interpreting some of the deeper readings and more abstract lectures. The first quiz was a bit unfair in that the entire class up to that point had been theoretical and then he asked extremely specific questions about the peoples that we studied. The final is 50% of the course grade, but the course comes together nicely in the end because many of the concepts are able to be associated together, which equipped us to adequately answer the 4 essay questions. This course said first years are welcome, but I would DEFINITELY recommend taking an introductory anthropology course before taking this one. Overall, this class was an intellectual challenge and super interesting at times. I don't regret taking it at all.

Yo, first things first: don't take this class if you aren't majoring in anthropology or have not even the slightest interest in the subject. Don't mess with Mentore. Now, Mentore is a human (and the definition of humanity will be debated based on the readings, so don't relax just yet) — smart, a perfectionist, unapproachable, but still a person. During the first half of the semester, he made me reconsider whether being an anthropologist was truly a service to humanity because the writers we went over seemed to imply they caused more harm than good, but things shake up when you read up on the anthropology of affect, which is the school he currently adheres to. Two 1000-word papers, and a long final that's worth 50% of your grade. Discussion portion, in my opinion, was unnecessary.

GREAT CLASS! Mentore challenges you to think differently. Content is tough, but Mentore is intriguing, so it is well worth the challenge.

Mentore's class in general should not be taken as an Anthro. elective (i.e., a fun course for people not really interested in anthro.). The readings and the lectures can both be tedious, but if you do all the readings and participate in class, then the course can give you a whole new perspective on culture and just about every aspect of life. Mentore is arrogant and confusing sometimes, but he's smart and can be really funny. Overall, I recommend the class mostly for those people who are genuinely interested in anthro. and you should probably have taken at least an introductory anthro. class first.

Mentore is arrogant and never responds to emails. His lectures are extremely vague and usually have no structure meaning that at the end of the class you don't even know what the lecture was about. We had 2 papers which were based on hard topics but the grading wasn't bad. You take daily quizzes that are impossible even if you do all of the reading. Hated the class and strongly disliked Mentore. He comes off very "anti-American".