In my teaching I try to convey that anthropological ways of looking at the world askew can be a potent resource to explore our most challenging and urgent social questions.
I teach courses on the anthropology of ethics and liberalism. I teach ethnographic methodologies at the undergraduate and graduate level. In these courses, I focus on the practice of participant observation and commitment to the cultural experience. Hortense Powdermaker wrote in 1966:
To understand a strange society, the anthropologist has traditionally immersed himself in it, learning, as far as possible, to think, see, feel, and sometimes act as a member of its culture and at the same time as a trained anthropologist from another culture. This is the heart of the participant observation method- involvement and detachment. Its practice is both an art and a science. Involvement is necessary to understand the psychological realities of a culture, that is, its meanings for the indigenous members. Detachment is necessary to construct the abstract reality: a network of social relations, including the rules and how they function- not necessarily real to the people studied. Field work is a deeply human as well as a scientific experience and a detailed knowledge of both aspects is an important source of data in itself, and necessary for any comparative study of methodology.
I think this is rather well put.