AnthroCase Player is a teaching tool for a specific—and often under-taught—threshold skill in anthropology: learning to think with concepts, not merely about them.

Many students first encounter anthropological concepts as vocabulary words to memorize. But in anthropology, a concept is not a fancier synonym for something students already know. A concept is closer to a tool: it re-arranges perception, foregrounds certain relations, makes some questions newly askable, and renders previously “obvious” explanations unstable. In short, concepts are not decorative. They are productive.

AnthroCase Player is designed around that productivity. It asks students to move through a scaffolded sequence that begins with a quick act of reframing, continues into concept-guided analysis, and ends with a deliberate moment of “visibility”—a prompt that asks students to name what their analysis makes newly noticeable, newly sayable, or newly contestable. In the current version of the tool, these stages are implemented as three writing spaces—“Step 1: Reframing,” “Step 2: Analysis,” and “Step 3: Visibility”—that activate once a student selects a case.

The design deliberately positions concepts as a toolkit students must actively pick up and use. Each case comes with a curated set of concepts (with definitions). Students select concepts from the “Toolkit,” and the tool then makes those concepts “live” in two ways:

1. It externalizes conceptual work. Selected concepts appear as a visible commitment: students are not just writing; they are building an analytic apparatus and declaring what tools they are trying to think with.
2. It makes conceptual language observable in practice. As students write in the main analysis editor, the tool highlights occurrences of the selected concept-terms in the text, turning conceptual usage into something students can see and revise rather than assume they have “done.”

This matters because students often “plug in” terminology without actually transforming their explanation. AnthroCase Player tries to interrupt that pattern by making the translation problem explicit: How do you re-describe a situation so that the concept is doing analytic work, rather than simply renaming the obvious?

The tool helps students with the early steps in developing a key analytic skill: what Deleuze calls the creation of concepts, by showing them that thinking becomes rigorous when it becomes inventive: when we learn how concepts carve the world differently. AnthroCase Player treats anthropology in that same spirit: not as a discipline of terminological mastery, but as a practice of conceptual craftsmanship. Students begin by working with concepts that already have names (often with proper genealogies: Douglas, Foucault, Latour, Fanon, etc.). Over time, the deeper pedagogical aim is to cultivate the habits that make concept-creation possible: careful description, attention to classification systems, sensitivity to scale and infrastructure, and the ability to build new explanations by connecting terms into coherent analytic machines.

The tool is also intentionally OER-first. The cases are stored as JSON in a public, remixable library (e.g., each case includes an id/title/difficulty/discipline fields, an HTML content block, and a concepts array with definitions and term-variants). This format is not incidental: it makes cases easy to adapt, fork, translate, localize, and extend—without requiring proprietary platforms. In the interface, instructors (or students) can load the library locally from a file or directly from a GitHub “raw” URL.

At its core, AnthroCase Player is built around a simple wager: if students can practice “conceptual translation” repeatedly—on small, well-scaffolded cases—then they become more capable of doing what anthropologists actually do when faced with the world’s complexity: they learn to assemble analytic tools that can travel, connect, and generate insight.

You can try the tool here:

What you are practicing

• You are not being asked to “get the right answer.”
• You are practicing conceptual translation: using anthropological concepts to produce a new explanation—one that changes what becomes visible and what questions matter.

1. Load the case library

• Option A: Load a file (your instructor may give you a .json file). Use “📂 Load File.”
• Option B: Load remotely (from a public GitHub repo). Either use the default link in the box or paste the “raw” URL your instructor provides and click “🔗 Remote Load.”

2. Filter & select a case

• Use the discipline/difficulty filters to find something appropriate, then click a case title.
• Once you select a case, the writing steps and glossary activate.

3. Read the case like an anthropologist

Before you write, re-read once with these questions:

• What is being treated as “normal,” “natural,” or “just the way things are”?.
• What categories are being used (explicitly or implicitly)?
• What infrastructures, institutions, or routines are doing work in the background?

4. Choose concepts intentionally (Toolkit)

• In the Toolkit, click concepts you want to think with. Concepts are not “tags”; they are commitments.
• Use the Concept Glossary to read definitions while you write.

5. Complete the steps (how to write for each stage)

Step 1. Reframing (a couple of sentences)

• Name the core tension or analytic problem in your own words.
• Avoid retelling the story. Aim for a generalizable formulation: “This case is about how ____ becomes treated as ____ through ____.”

Step 2. Analysis (the main work)

• Write a short analytic piece that uses your selected concepts to re-describe what’s happening.
• As you type, the tool highlights the terms connected to your selected concepts. Use this as a diagnostic: the goal isn’t to “light up” the page; it’s to make sure the terms you use are doing real work.
• A practical test: after you write a paragraph, underline your concept-terms (mentally). For each one, ask: What does this concept allow me to say that I couldn’t say without it?

Step 3. Visibility (1 sentence)

• Write one sentence that begins with something like: “This analysis makes visible…”; “What becomes newly legible is…”; “The key shift in explanation is…”

6. Save, reset, export

• Your work is saved automatically in your browser (per case).
• Use Reset Case Progress only if you truly want to clear your saved work for that case.
• Click Export Assignment to download a text file of your response (case title + selected concepts + your three steps).

Common pitfalls (and how to avoid them)

• Pitfall: concept-as-synonym. If you can replace your concept word with a casual phrase and nothing changes, you haven’t used the concept yet.
• Pitfall: concept-soup. More terms ≠ better analysis. Fewer concepts, used deeply, is usually stronger.
• Pitfall: “proof by definition.” Don’t write “this is naturalization because it is naturalization.” Show the mechanism: how something becomes naturalized (routines, institutions, infrastructure, discourse, etc.).