Teaching Anthropology Speculatively

Abstract

This article is an exploration into what a speculative pedagogy can be. Describing a series of pedagogic experiments at the University of Coimbra with undergraduate students in anthropology who engaged in playful empirical exercises based on a “what if” and ludic ways of learning (and teaching), I argue that these exercises have an eventful, speculative character in the sense that they are not meant to instruct or provide theoretical contents about what ethnography or an- thropology is; neither are they meant to lead students in a process of conceptual and empirical discovery that is known in advance. Rather, they were designed to produce unpredictable effects and surprise both for those learning and those teaching.