 In all of the classes that I designed, I give students the opportunity to write weekly reflection papers. And in the death and dying class, there are several scenarios that are set up over the course of a quarter. One is that they're working in the medical field, they're a medical anthropologist, an elderly patient is dying. But the family, because of their own cultural traditions, do not want the patient to know that they're dying. They want the patient to be protected. And what is your obligation as both an anthropologist and as another person in relationship to this other person? To tell them or not tell them, what decisions do you make? How do you take account of different situations in a medical setting when there are different ways of being with the person who is dying? The death watch where relatives will stay all night in the hospital with the dying, hold the hand to pray, to bless the room. As anthropologists, it's not just what happens to the body, which is of interest to us, because we're interested in everything that happens to the human, both biologically, psychologically, emotionally, socioculturally, but also within this context of death and dying. And what is done with the body, how different people bury the body? It's very important in this part of the class with death and dying, that I let students know that in many cultures, it's very important for the family to take care of the dead, to know where the dead is buried, to know where their loved one was killed, to be able to take care of the body. And if it's a mass grave, if the individual is just mixed in with many other bodies, if they don't know what happened to the body, then, and if they can't rebury it correctly according to their religious and cultural customs, then they are at disease, they're uneasy, and the spirit of the person who's dead doesn't rest easily. And so they feel an obligation to put this matter to rest correctly and to take care of the spirit of the dead person. So we need to know that in some cases mass graves, or the desecration of the body in that way, is a kind of attempt, an attempt to destroy the culture, an attempt to destroy the individual at the soul level so that they're unable to function. It's those kinds of things that students get to ponder and get to reply to. In the war in human rights class, there are many different scenarios that we address, besides just the issue of mass grave. You know, in many cultures, the idea of raping a woman because she represents a certain ethnicity and raping a woman because of a religious background, or mass rape, Anna, as a form of tactical warfare, mass rapes we saw in Rwanda, as we saw in Bosnia, as we're seeing today in the Sudan, and all over in parts where there is war in this world, that that isn't just an individual rape, that it's a tactical, manipulative form of destroying a culture so that the culture cannot function. In the cross-cultural law class, we consider these issues and how it's so important to understand the cultural ethos of a people if we're to understand their own sense of law. And sometimes the sense of law, as we would perceive it, is not what is functional in their culture. Either there is a different sense of punishment, a different sense of retribution. The individual becomes more important than the law itself and individual relationships and healing and reconciliation. So if we don't understand the cultural defense, if we don't understand the perspective within a culture, then our legal system is simply arbitrary. And in an area where the world is growing smaller and smaller and with this mass communication, then international law, and not just international public law, commerce, but also international criminal law becomes more and more important and we see that in the world today. So in these classes, students are dealing with real issues and they are asked to reflect upon what they would do in these particular situations. It allows them to be an anthropologist in that way, but also to be an anthropologist of their own life because they have to make these decisions or think about what they would do in this situation themselves as an anthropologist and as a human being. Sometimes it's so easy to say that we would be just observers. We wouldn't participate, but there are times as we know when being just an observer is being complicit and contributing to by not making a decision we are in fact allowing for a decision to be made that can be harmful to humans, that can be dangerous to all of us. Also I think students in anthropology and anthropology students themselves particularly need to be aware or should try to be aware of the fact that literally what is done to one affects all of us and if we ignore it then we ourselves are diminished. In that way anthropology is continually challenging because as soon as we think we've got it, we've got an answer. There's always another way of looking at the situation. So it's alive, it's always changing and it's always challenging.