Introduction to Cultural Anthropology

 

Professor: Laura Kunreuther  

 

Course Number: ANTH 101

CRN Number: 10181

Class cap: 22

Credits: 4

 

Schedule/Location:

Mon  Wed     10:10 AM - 11:30 AM Olin 201

 

Distributional Area:

SA  Social Analysis  D+J Difference and Justice

 

Crosslists: Global & International Studies

Anthropology is the study of 'culture,' a concept that has been redefined and contested over the discipline's long development. The term 'culture' opens up major questions. What, if anything, does it mean to be human? How does our language shape what we can and can’t see in the world? When does difference create conflict and when does difference inspire gift-giving? This course will trace the history of the culture concept from the nineteenth century to the present. In doing so, it will explore anthropological approaches to human groups, collective rituals, personal symbols, and systems of exchange. It will examine how anthropology came to focus on questions of identity, race, gender, labor, sexuality, nationalism, and (post-)colonial power. Our ethnographic gaze will be turned inward as well as outward. We will therefore consider the reasons behind, and ramifications of, anthropology's self-reflexive turn in and around the 1980s. We will enter debates about anthropologists' engagement in activism and policy. We will then examine the more recent anthropological fascination with the non-human (e.g. other animals, technology, the built environment, 'nature'), looking at how notions of selfhood, materiality, and anthropology's own methodological foundations have been transformed as a result.

 

Divided Cities

 

Professor: Jeff Jurgens  

 

Course Number: ANTH 219

CRN Number: 10339

Class cap: 22

Credits: 4

 

Schedule/Location:

Mon  Wed     11:50 AM - 1:10 PM Olin 102

 

Distributional Area:

SA  Social Analysis  D+J Difference and Justice

 

Crosslists: Environmental & Urban Studies

This class offers an introduction to modern cities and everyday urban life, with a central focus on cities that are both socially and spatially divided. On the one hand, we will examine how political-economic inequalities and collective differences (organized in relation to race, color, gender, sexuality, class, [dis]ability, and other social categories) are expressed in geographic boundaries and other aspects of the built environment. On the other, we will explore how state agencies, real estate developers, activists, residents, and other social actors make and remake city spaces in ways that reinforce, rework, challenge, and refuse the existing terms of inequality and difference. The class will revolve around case studies of cities around the world (e.g., Istanbul, Rio de Janeiro, and Tel Aviv) as well as cities in the US (e.g., Baltimore, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and St. Louis). More broadly, we will trace the history of urban segregation from a perspective that is both transnational and committed to the pursuit of racial justice (as well as other forms of societal transformation). This class builds on assigned reading in anthropology and other disciplines, critical writing and discussion, and focused film viewing. At the same time, it is an Engaged Liberal Arts and Sciences (ELAS) class that provides students with an opportunity to reflect on urban theorizing through collaborations with community partners in Kingston and other cities.

 

Ethnographies of South Asia

 

Professor: Sucharita Kanjilal  

 

Course Number: ANTH 251

CRN Number: 10338

Class cap: 22

Credits: 4

 

Schedule/Location:

 Tue  Thurs    3:30 PM - 4:50 PM Olin 201

 

Distributional Area:

SA  Social Analysis   

 

Crosslists: Asian Studies; Global & International Studies

How would our understanding of the world change if we started our inquiry from South Asia? This course uses anthropological works and theories rooted in South Asia to examine political, economic and social life more broadly, with an eye towards de-westernizing dominant ideas about race, class, caste, gender, sexuality and globalization. South Asia is a complex and contested geopolitical region that spans several countries — such as Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bhutan — as well as countless cultural, linguistic and ethnic peoples and practices that do not adhere to or even live within its national or regional borders. It is a part of the world constituted through and implicated in multiple colonial projects, violent nationalist and communal struggles, intersecting social movements, and global flows of capital, technology and labor. South Asia and its diasporas have also served as a rich source for ethnographic writing and contemporary social theory. In this class, we will draw on several of these ethnographies of South Asia in order to develop new tools and perspectives on topics such as the rise of xenophobic nationalism, third world feminist struggles, the anti-caste and racial justice movements and contemporary global capitalism.

 

Anthropology of Violence and Suffering

 

Professor: Laura Kunreuther  

 

Course Number: ANTH 261

CRN Number: 10340

Class cap: 22

Credits: 4

 

Schedule/Location:

Mon  Wed     3:30 PM - 4:50 PM Reem Kayden Center 101

 

Distributional Area:

SA  Social Analysis  D+J Difference and Justice

 

Crosslists: Asian Studies; Gender and Sexuality Studies; Global & International Studies; Human Rights; Science, Technology, Society

(Human Rights Core course) Why do acts of violence continue to grow in the ‘modern’ world?  In what ways has violence become naturalized in the contemporary world?  In this course, we will consider how acts of violence challenge and support modern ideas of humanity, raising important questions about what it means to be human today.  These questions lie at the heart of anthropological thinking and also structure contemporary discussions of human rights.  Anthropology’s commitment to “local culture”  and cultural diversity has meant that anthropologists often position themselves in critical opposition to “universal values,” which have been used to address various forms of violence in the contemporary world. The course will approach different forms of violence, including ethnic and communal conflicts, colonial history, war, torture and its individualizing effects, acts of terror and institutionalized fear, and rituals of bodily pain that mark individuals’ inclusion or exclusion from a social group.  The course is organized around three central concerns.  First, we will discuss violence in its structural and everyday forms that becomes a means of producing and consolidating social and political power.  Second, we will look at forms of violence that have generated questions about “universal rights” of humanity versus culturally specific practices. Finally, we will look at the ways human rights institutions have sought to address the profundity of human suffering and pain, and ask in what ways have they succeeded and/or failed.  Students will be given the opportunity to reflect on how recent events might be thought about through an anthropological perspective on violence and suffering.  In addition to fulfilling one of the 200-level anthropology requirements, this course is a Human Rights core class for the Human Rights major and fulfills one of the requirements for the forthcoming Human Rights certificates.

 

Post-Apartheid Imaginaries

 

Professor: Yuka Suzuki  

 

Course Number: ANTH 275

CRN Number: 10341

Class cap: 22

Credits: 4

 

Schedule/Location:

 Tue  Thurs    10:10 AM - 11:30 AM Olin 203

 

Distributional Area:

SA  Social Analysis  D+J Difference and Justice

 

Crosslists: Africana Studies; Global & International Studies; Human Rights

South Africa and Zimbabwe have been marked by one of the most brutal systems of racial segregation ever seen in the world. Before Independence, the distinction between white and black signaled the stark difference between a life of guaranteed comfort and privilege on the one hand, and a life of limited access to inferior land, education, housing, and employment on the other. Following decades-long struggles for liberation, both countries worked to reinvent themselves, crafting new national narratives of cross-racial, cross-ethnic unity. This course explores what it means to imagine postcolonial nationhood in the context of clearly visible and deep inequality. We consider the politics of land redistribution and resettlement in contexts where the vast majority of arable land remains under white ownership after Independence. We look closely at the charismatic authority of politicians like Jacob Zuma and Robert Mugabe, alongside the intensification of ethnic discourses that culminated in genocide in Zimbabwe. Other topics include intersections between race and gendered violence, the rise of witchcraft and the occult, student protest movements, rooibos tea economies, and paradoxes of white African belonging. This course fulfills the Difference & Justice requirement through its examination of the ongoing effects of apartheid in southern Africa. 

 

Archaeology of African American Farms, Yards, and Gardens

 

Professor: Christopher Lindner  

 

Course Number: ANTH 290

CRN Number: 10342

Class cap: 12

Credits: 4

 

Schedule/Location:

   Thurs    1:30 PM - 2:50 PM Hegeman 201

 

 

    Fri   1:30 PM - 4:30 PM Hegeman 201

 

Distributional Area:

LS  Laboratory Science   

 

Crosslists: Africana Studies; Environmental Studies; Environmental & Urban Studies; Historical Studies

How can we use archaeological methods to identify, analyze, and interpret places where the growing of plants by African Americans flourished. How can we contextualize our findings on these sites to help counter racism in the present? The laboratory science aspect of this ELAS course will derive from protocols and strategies of exploratory sampling excavations. Our goal will be identification of deposits that remain relatively undisturbed and contain artifacts that represent particularly relevant eras in the past. On Thursdays, seminars will take place in person &/or by videoconference. In the winter labs on Friday, we’ll examine artifacts excavated nearby in Germantown, at the Reformed Parsonage, to prepare for excavations there in spring. Our focus is the family headed by a free African American farmer, Henry Person. His wife, Mary, was likely born to a bondswoman at the house in 1805. Their children lived there until 1911. Evidence of African American spiritual practices have been found in the cellar of the house and its yard. We’ll strive to involve community colleagues from the neighboring towns and the city of Hudson. The Bard Archaeology Field School will take place for three weeks in the summer at the Germantown Parsonage, for 4 credits in Anthropology at the 200-level. Scholarships are available to cover tuition charges. For an online application and further information, go to https://www.bard.edu/archaeology/fieldschool/ and/or speak with Prof Lindner during registration.

 

Doing Ethnography

 

Professor: Maria Sonevytsky  

 

Course Number: ANTH 324

CRN Number: 10344

Class cap: 15

Credits: 4

 

Schedule/Location:

 Tue      12:30 PM - 2:50 PM Reem Kayden Center 102

 

Distributional Area:

SA  Social Analysis   

 

Crosslists: Environmental Studies; Environmental & Urban Studies; Human Rights

What are the ethical stakes, practical questions, and methodological tools that we use when we practice ethnography? Ethnography is the cornerstone of contemporary cultural anthropology, and includes both fieldwork and representation. This course is a survey of, and practicum in, ethnographic field methods. We will study and critique traditional ethnographic methods such as participant-observation, interviewing, archival research, visual, sonic, textual and spatial analysis, and address the challenges of doing fieldwork in a variety of contexts, including the virtual domain. A series of sequenced intensive research exercises will raise guiding questions about how ethnographic research can be ethically and effectively “translated” into written text. We attend also to emergent ethnographic forms and methods, such as multi-sited ethnography, critical moral anthropology, and indigenous methodologies and critiques. To complement the fieldwork projects, we will also read exemplary, and sometimes controversial, texts of ethnography in practice. Students will develop a community- or environmentally-based ethnographic research project of their own design throughout the course of the semester. Ethical aspects of conducting ethnographic fieldwork, including preparing for Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval, will be addressed. This course satisfies the “field methods” requirement for moderation in anthropology and/or environmental and urban studies. Prerequisites: Introduction to Anthropology 101 and/or EUS 101.

 

Political Ecology

 

Professor: Yuka Suzuki  

 

Course Number: ANTH 349

CRN Number: 10345

Class cap: 15

Credits: 4

 

Schedule/Location:

  Wed     9:10 AM - 11:30 AM Olin 308

 

Distributional Area:

SA  Social Analysis  D+J Difference and Justice

 

Crosslists: Africana Studies; Environmental Studies; Environmental & Urban Studies; Human Rights; Science, Technology, Society

Political ecology emerged in the early 1990s at the intersection of cultural ecology and political economy. Defining itself in opposition to the dominant conception of ecology as apolitical, the field is anchored in the assertion that environmental conditions are the product of political processes. This seminar begins with an examination of some of the early texts that led to the emergence of political ecology, and then moves on to more recent scholarship integrating the work of anthropologists, philosophers, biologists, historians, physicists, and artists. Paying close attention to social, historical, and political contexts, we explore topics such as development and growth, extinction and loss, nuclear waste, slaughterhouses, wildfires, botanical gardens, and life after the Anthropocene and beyond Earth itself. The course is designated as Difference & Justice because it centers race, indigeneity, and the nonhuman as we consider how environmental issues sustain and amplify inequality on local and global scales.

 

Ethnography of Law and Affect

 

Professor: Andrew Bush  

 

Course Number: ANTH 377

CRN Number: 10343

Class cap: 15

Credits: 4

 

Schedule/Location:

 Tue      5:10 PM - 7:30 PM Olin 310

 

Distributional Area:

SA  Social Analysis  D+J Difference and Justice

 

Crosslists: Human Rights; Middle Eastern Studies; Study of Religions

Ethnographic method offers a unique perspective on how ordinary affects in daily life give shape to legal processes in different social contexts. This course moves beyond asking what the law says, or how the law makes us feel, to also ask how we give feelings to law. The course begins with introductory material in legal studies that highlight the role of the forgotten, suppressed, or critical tendencies internal to law. We then study the transformations of love, solidarity, vengeance, forgiveness, and grief that appear in legal processes in civil courts in Iran; LGBT social movements in Myanmar; Islamic legal forums in Morocco; or Peruvian truth and reconciliation processes. Authors to read may include Peter Goodrich, Panu Minkkinen, Arzoo Osanloo, Lynette Chua, Stefania Pandolfo, or Isaias Rojas-Perez.  Combining affect theory, legal studies, and ethnography we seek to challenge common assumptions about what law is and how law works.

 

Cross-listed Courses:

 

Archaeology and Colonial Entanglements

 

Course Number: ARTH 264

CRN Number: 10089

Class cap: 22

Credits: 4

 

Professor:

Anne Chen

 

Schedule/Location:

 Tue  Thurs    11:50 AM - 1:10 PM Olin 102

 

Distributional Area:

AA  Analysis of Art   

 

Crosslists:

Anthropology; Classical Studies; Human Rights; Middle Eastern Studies

 

Ethnography: Music & Sound

 

Course Number: MUS 247

CRN Number: 10565

Class cap: 20

Credits: 4

 

Professor:

Whitney Slaten

 

Schedule/Location:

 Tue  Thurs    11:50 AM - 1:10 PM Blum Music Center N210

 

Distributional Area:

SA  Social Analysis   

 

Crosslists:

Anthropology