On a recent rainy afternoon, the 18 students in Orin Starn's class gathered under a large tent set up for the coming weekend's alumni parties. Starn whisked his fly-fishing rod above his right shoulder, flinging a dark fuzzy fly forward.

"So you're going ten o'clock," he said, demonstrating the angle for casting described in the class's latest reading assignment, A River Runs Through It.

"Two o'clock," he said, snapping the Royal Coachman fly back from the dark carpet.

Three students gave the technique a try before Starn led the class back inside, where they continued with their discussion about anthropology and sports.

The fly-casting lesson is one example of the teaching techniques used by Starn, who won the Robert B. Cox Award for excellence in teaching undergraduate students. Starn uses memorable sights, sounds and "word pictures" - such as his daughter's Barbie doll collection or an Andean ritual with coca leaves and chants in Quechua - to introduce concepts from cultural anthropology.

Back in the classroom, Starn read a passage on fly casting from A River Runs Through It to open a discussion on themes of sport in the book: taking pleasure in the body's abilities, building bonds within families and disclosing social distinctions (fly fishing is for Presbyterians, the author says, and bait fishing for Episcopalians).

"I actually really remember 'Show and Tell' very well from when I was an elementary school student," Starn said. "Often I got interested in, or learned something about, a famous figure in American history by somebody bringing in an object or a picture and talking about. So I like to try to do the same thing when I'm teaching."

He still gets curious. His new "Anthropology and Sports" course grew out of a desire to explore the role of sports in society as a scholar and "an obsessive sports fan."

"The whole issue of anthropology and sports doesn't really exist, per se, as a field," he said. "So in a way this is a very experimental class." "He's kind of a learner in this situation with us," senior Lindsay Dreilinger said.

Cultural Anthropology colleague Professor Lee Baker said Starn has a knack for presenting everyday events as examples of anthropological concepts (Baker was surprised to learn a bass fishing trip the two took together ended up in such an example).

Before turning to fly-fishing, the class discussed an article from The Washington Post about the evangelical efforts of Redskins football coach Joe Gibbs. Starn contrasted Gibbs' current mixing of sport and Christianity with Muhammad Ali's political activism in the 1970s.

Starn works in the "activist anthropologist" tradition of bringing scholarship to bear on matters of social justice - something he brings to teaching.

He has been the faculty advisor for Duke's Native American Student Coalition for the last five years and helped the group successfully lobby for Native American Studies courses to be created.

Duke alumna Katherine Robinson remembered Starn encouraging her to travel to Argentina and Chile to seek primary sources for her senior honors thesis on post-dictatorial reconciliation in those countries; Starn was her thesis advisor. In Argentina, she was able to interview Nobel Peace Prize winner Adolfo Pez Esquivel.

"It's great that I had Orin as a professor," she said from Tufts University where she is now a graduate student at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. "How else would I have had somebody at [Esquivel's] level speak to me?"

Not every student project Starn oversees is so serious. After reading John Updike's ruminations on golf in "Anthropology and Sports," he challenged his students to a round of 18 holes on the Washington Duke course. Starn lost when senior John Perna scored birdies on the last two holes. But, Starn said, "Please put in that I parred the lasted two holes."