Prof. Cattelino is an amazing professor! I took this class because it was a pre-req for my major but afterwards, I enjoyed it so much that I decided to pick up an anthropology minor! She is extremely understanding of these "unprecedented times" and allowed students who missed quizzes (for whatever reasons) to make them up often, and she even gave everyone a 5% grade boost at the end of the quarter because she knows this was a rough few months for everyone. The readings are a lot of work and very time-consuming, so if you don't want to dedicate a lot of time to this class, maybe don't take it- but I found the readings super interesting. The essays may seem very daunting and vague at first, but my TA was extremely helpful and broke down the prompt/how to write an anthropology paper in section. I think the grade breakdown was 25% for both midterm and final papers, 30% for weekly quizzes (lowest dropped), and 20% for participation during section. Highly recommend this class!

If the goal of this class was to make me never take any Anthropology again, it succeeded. As a whole, Professor Cattelino is not a bad professor. She explained concepts well and did her best to make an otherwise dull subject slightly less dull. The main issue is that Anthropology as a field requires making such massive stretches in justification that it feels absolutely ridiculous, and anyone preparing to take this class as a GE should understand that they will be required to make these very specific assumptions.

What makes or breaks the class, however, is the TA. Your TA grades both of your papers, which are weighted 25% each. For reference, the other categories are quizzes (15%), discussion participation (15%). and the final (20%). If you have TA Sita, run. Drop the class, try to get a different section, just get out. She turned discussions into pedantic lectures, feeding her own inflated ego. Any contention that she disagreed with was shut down without elaboration, just a simple condescending "No" or "Not quite." Her paper grading was all over the place and appeared to be incredibly disconnected from the actual substance of the paper. I got a 73 on the first paper and a 93 on the second. Her comments on both were incredibly vague and frustrating to understand, and when I went to her office hours to see why I got such an abysmal grade on the first paper, her arguments had little to do with my writing and a lot to do with my argument. Essentially, she appears to penalize opinions that she disagreed with, something that is consistent with her grading and her in-discussion attitude. In fact, during a discussion about the false dichotomy between tradition and modernity, when I made the contention that perhaps we can look at the idea of "modern" as simply existing in the present in order to remove any labels of inherent progress associated with modernity, she accused me of being a transphobe, saying "So do you think that trans rights being rolled back in recent years is a form of progress?" This was insulting and completely irrelevant to the discussion at hand.

I would caution against taking this class in general, but if you do, pick your TA very carefully. Good luck!

Don't really recommend this class as a GE; there are many other better options. It's a lot of reading and analyzing. There is a very confusing fieldwork essay, and the professor does not explain much. She does not provide enough preparation for the exam, and there are many terms to memorize and analyze. Overall, I wouldn't really recommend this class.

Love professor Cattelino. Such a sweet woman and incredibly helpful with both in-class questions and department/school questions. The final is cumulative, but not hard at all. There are short reading quizzes at the end of each week that are open note, but timed, so you can’t always find every answer in the readings. Her lectures were super interesting, but I felt like the course was too focused on specific readings. I wish the essays were an opportunity to show our understanding of the field rather than of an author’s work.

attendance isnt mandatory which is pointless because she doesn't record her lectures. so you really cant miss out on not attending a lecture if you want to do well in this class. your enjoyment of this class also depends a lot on your TA. your TA is the person grading both of your two papers for this class which are a lot for the final grade. she goes off on long boring tangents and she will assign "optional" readings only to put that as a question on the weekly quiz. overall I think this class is a waste of time and I wouldn't say take this if you want an easy GE or a fun professor who doesn't suck.

I'm very surprised at how highly this class is rated. I love sociology, and thought an anthro class would be really interesting! However, the class was incredibly boring. Dry, long readings that created way too much of a workload. Lectures were also boring, and poorly designed---very little structure to them, the direction the class was going always felt unclear. The actual topics covered in lecture were very simple and easy to understand, although the professor taught them as if they were confusing and complex. This is likely why this class is highly rated, as it is easy in terms of concepts.

I took this as a hopefully easy GE because it seemed interesting and let's just say I learned my lesson! Professor Cattelino is definitely a kind, funny, passionate, and truly knowledgeable professor, however the course is (in my opinion) not the easiest or best GE out there.

The grading breakdown was:
- Discussion Participation, 15% (you get one absence per quarter)
- Two 5-page Papers, 25% each
- Nine quizzes, 15%
- Final exam, 20%
- Minor extra credit from mid-quarter feedback form

The papers really stressed me out. I felt like the expectations from my TA were far higher than they should have been given our limited ethnographical writing experience, and I got docked for a lot of random things on the rubric (which was also really confusing). I went to my TA for help before the second paper and it was probably the most unhelpful conversation I have ever had in my life!

There are a LOT of readings to do, and I didn't really do them well, though it probably would have helped. They honestly were pretty interesting but this was my GE class and the amount of work was a lot in comparison to the 4 other STEM classes I was taking. The quizzes are mostly just about lecture and the readings though.

Lectures themselves were so long, and honestly most of the content felt like glorified common sense. Professor is really nice and asks questions but I honestly stopped going and started watching them on like 3x speed later on.

The final was difficult to gauge because she didn't give us any topics or study guide with the reasoning that part of good studying is figuring out what we needed to know by ourselves..... but it was not bad, definitely doable with studying key buzzwords (literally all I did) and the readings/specific situations and themes.

Averages for everything (papers and exams) were in the mid 80's. I got mid 90's for the second paper and final which is I think what pushed me into an A, but was fully expecting to not get an A. This was definitely a tough GE with very high expectations from my TA that made me feel really confused and defeated at times. I would take this if you have some sort of interest in the concepts, but then again I did too and here I am... :)

I would never take this class as a GE. Expect 60 pages of reading a week. I don't think the professor does a good job fleshing out concepts. She also provides you with no study guide even though lots of things are briefly talked about so it becomes hard to tell what to focus on. You can't get away with not reading.

First off, this was the course I used to determine on whether I wanted to pursue a minor in anthropology, and needless to say, I'm convinced. Professor Cattelino was great, and every reading was interesting.
I really enjoyed discussing topics in discussion during class, but felt like there was not enough of that. I feel as though it is easier to grasp concepts when people share their own experiences. I thought lectures were pretty engaging and full of great material.
Overall I really enjoyed this class. A lot of people said that there were too many readings, and while I agree that it was a lot (each week's readings took a good chunk of my weekend), they were almost all worth it. I thought that the essay prompts were kind of fun to write almost, and were very thought provoking.

I'm sure a lot of people liked this class, but for me it just wasn't it. I thought that a lot of the topics were very surface level and not explored in sufficient or satisfying amounts of depth.