Thanks spookyP.
btw, you have a rather anomalous spooky website. Whatz up with that? Tell us about you "students" and curriculum— btw: you can get as many low-cost used copies of the mysterious valley as you need on Amazon. But I do have numbers to crunch if you have any bored statistical mavens w/ skill… (?)
I taught a course at Tulane University right after I graduated from grad school there, in 2007. It had a long title that when I've pitched it elsewhere got boiled down to Anthropology of the Paranormal (another university contracted for the course, but I had to pull out as I got a postdoc elsewhere that conflicted schedule wise). It was in their summer session, where grad students are allowed to submit course concepts. I was concerned that the department would not be pleased (my interest was known, but it wasn't the topic of my study), but they liked it, and in particular, one of the faculty later approached me and mentioned he had been friends with Grover Krantz (I emailed him the recent story on Krantz' bones being put on display at the Smithsonian). I had to really scramble to get the dozen or so students I had, because the administration did a terrible job advertising it (there was no description, and they shortened the title to Monster Hunters, so one of my students was actually a repeat from my world prehistory class, figuring I was giving a class on Pleistocene megafauna. He was pleased when he learned of the actual subjected). So I ended up putting a couple dozen flyers around campus with some iconic images of each of the major subjects. It worked well enough to make the class fly.
The basic point of the class was to examine a couple of different paranormal-oriented virtual (not electronic virtual, but dispersed and linked by interests and identity, and not just by geography or kin or something) communities to examine how they see things (which can be a multiple choice answer, obviously, which we talked about), the historical and cultural context, and how that interacts with knowledge production and science in the larger culture. Along the way, I'd also utilize this information to teach a bit of anthropological theory and concepts. And I'll tell you, I had better luck fitting data to theory with this stuff than I have with a lot of other subjects, on stuff like hegemony, doxa, subcultures, etc.
Anyway, we ended up using five texts. The "core" was A Very Short Introduction to Sociocultural Anthropology (that's the actual name). The meat of the course was Daegling's
Bigfoot Exposed, Denzler's
Lure of the Edge, and a book whose author I forget off the top of my head,
Ghost Hunters of the South. We also looked at a historical example,
Slayers and their Vampires: A Cultural History of Killing the Dead, which isn't exactly the same, but it fit in a key part of the relationship between the paranormal and science (I argued, for example, that the idea of say Bigfoot would have a better chance at being widely accepted in say 1950 than 1750 due to the Enlightenment, colonialism, etc.).
One would consider me a skeptic, but that was not the point of the class. The point was to examine how people changed and changed with the various ideas about these experiences, and how the larger society did the same. Some of the class did indeed change their ideas about some of these topics (in particular, Bigfoot did not fare well, people largely didn't move their opinions much on ghosts or UFOs, nor even really MJ-12 though there I did actually try to show the likelihood of a hoax).
I thought about using
Mysterious Valley largely for the reflexivity, the discussion of methods and practices that you brought to the table. I decided that with it out of print, that it would be better to go with other more general books. Also, while I do like your book and recommend it, as I noted, I was interested for the course in the methods section, I figured assigning the whole book wasn't going to work for that course. I thought about putting that one section on reserve, but I ran out of time (I had a lot on my plate back then).
The students were an interesting mix. A few were typical students, others returning, some were employees who thought the course sounded interesting and used their semester alloted course tuition waiver to take it. One was a former NOPD cop (who had some experiences and stories about ghosts and chupacabras), another had been in the military (and was interested in MJ-12). One was ... odd, and several students complained about them asking some fairly ridiculous questions, including some where he'd incorporate things from science fictional tv shows (which I recognized) as scientific or historical fact. They were frustrated that I gave short shrift to ghost hunting, which was partly due to my inability to muster much enthusiasm on the topic, and partly because they really slowed down my schedule with long drawn out round-table discussions (especially on Bigfoot, there was real fascination there, and like I said, some real disappointment when some of them were, for the first time really sitting down and thinking about the biology involved and some of the evidence, and deciding they didn't believe in the creature anymore). This was good of course, the level of interaction was superb, and the last day of class, I turned it over to them, each giving a conference-style presentation on something we had not covered in class.
Had it been a regular class of only 18-22 year old pre-law and pre-med students, I don't think it would have gone over as well, as there would have been less interest than this group, which sort of self-selected rather than trying to find a class to fill a requirement, there probably would have been more interest in pop culture (and I'm not going to lie, when I have proposed the course in a few job applications, I've noted that angle, even though we studiously stayed away from it in the course), and there would have been less life experience brought to the table, which did improve the class.
