A wide variety of teaching materials for secondary and college audiences may be found in the archive. Miller’s Field Staff reports, academic articles, and book chapters provide primary evidence of major regional events in East Africa. Teaching guides are available in the subject areas of witchcraft and ethnographic film. Instructor materials are available for the 26 films in the “Faces of Change” series, on Afghanistan, Bolivia, China, and Kenya. More course content can be found in the photo galleries, organized to give instructors visual evidence for the classroom. Notes on the theory of visual evidence are forthcoming.
Although much of the material is dated (1960-2010), there is case material for students to understand historic events or the rise of institutions in a “then and now” approach provided by the instructor. Other useful teaching tools are in the bibliographies, glossaries, and concept inventories.
Government and Politics
Teaching topics supported by the archive include East Africa’s transition from colonialism to independence, the role of traditional politics and chieftaincy, local-level leadership, the economics of pedestrian societies, and political awareness and participation in Kenya and Tanzania from 1960 to 1985.
- The Rural African Party: Miller’s article from 1970 providing a detailed examination of the methods the Tanzanian government used to exert influence over (and gain loyalty from) its distant rural villages.
- Witchcraft in the Press: A collection of 520 witchcraft-related news reports written between 1960 and 2010 in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda, a subsection of which is dedicated to political cases.
- Local Government Photo Gallery: A collection of photographs that provide visual evidence of leadership in rural East Africa, including a series documenting a 1965 election in Rungwe, Tanzania.
- Fieldstaff Reports: Field reports from 1969-1985 on social, economic, and political issues in East Africa.
Witchcraft and Human Rights
This section of the archive provides strong support for educational efforts focused on understanding witchcraft, witch-hunting, and witchcraft-related crime. It provides accounts of infanticide, senicide (elder killing), homophobia, and violence against women, covering the economics that drive witchcraft, and the politics that exploit it.
- Encounters With Witchcraft: Miller’s textbook recounting his experiences with witchcraft across four decades of work in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda, complete with a teaching guide.
- Witchcraft in the Press: A collection of 520 witchcraft-related news reports written between 1960 and 2010 in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda.
- Fieldstaff Reports: Field reports from 1969-1985, two of which focus on witchcraft and sorcery in Tanzania.
- Witchcraft Photo Galleries: A collection of photographs that provide visual evidence of witchcraft in Africa, both in its practice and artistic representations.
Health and Medicine
The archive contains a modest amount of material on rural health and traditional medicine suitable for the classroom.
- Health Photo Galleries: A collection of photographs from the 1970s that provides visual evidence of rural medicine and traditional healing in East Africa.
- Fieldstaff Reports: Field reports from 1969-1985, four of which focus on health issues in rural Africa and China, including traditional medical practices.
Wildlife Conservation
The Miller archive contains content useful for teaching on the topics of wildlife conservation, particularly concerning poaching and land management.
- Wildlife Wild Death: Miller’s textbook on wildlife conservation and land use in Kenya and Tanzania from 1980-2012 (full text).
- Wildlife Photo Gallery: A collection of photographs that provide visual evidence of the interaction between humans and wildlife in East Africa.
- Fieldstaff Reports: Field reports from 1969-1985, four of which focus on the human-wildlife relationship, covering poaching, ivory trade, tourism, and land management, among other topics.
Cultures in Transition
Miller recorded materials on several cultures in the 1970s that were in the process of modernization, dispensing with some of their traditional practices in favor of newly distributed technologies.
- Faces of Change: A collection of 26 anthropological films and study essays, each complete with their own teaching guide*, recording the cultures of rural villages in development across the five following countries, shot in 1972-1973.
- Focus on Women: A collection of films pertaining to the life of women in rural villages, shot in 1972-1985.
*An instructor’s guide on visual evidence was followed in the making of these films, and is included with the teaching guides.