Football Tailgating season is nearly upon us. While many fans will be packing their coolers full of adult beverages and firing up their grills, one Penn State professor and his students will be breaking out their notebooks, pens, and rubber gloves in order to study the tailgating practices (and garbage) of fans around Beaver Stadium. Dr. Kirk French’s course on the Anthropology of Alcohol (aka “Booze and Culture”) gives students an opportunity to engage with a mainstay of college campus culture – anthropology – through the lens of alcohol. Or is it the other way around?
Listed as ANTH140, the Booze and Culture course offers students an introduction to the themes of anthropology, social science research, and the ethics of interviewing and interacting with research subjects.