ANTHROPOLOGY

CRN	90077	Distribution	A/C
Course No.	ANTH 101
Title	Introduction to Cultural Anthropology
Professor	Melissa Demian
Schedule	Mon Wed 10:00 am - 11:20 am OLIN 303

Adopting a cross-cultural, historical and interpretive perspective, we will explore the idea that anthropology is an attempt "to understand how human beings understand themselves and see their actions and behavior as in some ways the creations of those understandings." We examine the core of the anthropological approach in our conceptualization of the concept of culture as negotiated, dynamic and contested, in our method of ethnographic fieldwork and participant observation, and in our spatially and historically comparativist approach. We pay special attention to the politics of nationalism and cultural identity; the anthropology of place; environmental transformation; gender, sexuality and the body; postcolonialism; and the global commodification of culture.

CRN	90078	Distribution	C/E
Course No.	ANTH 111
Title	Field Methods in Archaeology
Professor	Chris Lindner
Schedule	Friday 9:00 am - 3:00 pm Grouse Bluff and Ecology Field Station

Cross-listed: American Studies, CRES

This course concentrates on excavation and initial lab procedures used in archaeology. We continue the long-term dig at Grouse Bluff, the 7,000-year-old site overlooking the Hudson in Bard's woods, focusing on hearths and pits--areas that have indications of the use of fire for cooking or some other purpose. Two digging techniques are emphasized: stratigraphy and small-scale cartography. The fieldwork involves painstaking measurements. These data permit study of the distribution of debris throughout the site, description of deposit formation over time, and comparison with other sites. Such methods increase the strength of inferences about the activities that took place and their roles in the evolution of cultural ecosystems in our area. The excavation and lab sessions take place for six hours on Fridays, with a break for discussion of readings over lunch. Participants will devote additional time to an on-going project in the local schools, training young students in archaeological techniques at the excavation and in their classrooms. Enrollment limited to eight, by permission.

CRN	90080	Distribution	C
Course No.	ANTH 213
Title	Anthropology of Medicine
Professor	Diana Brown
Schedule	Mon Wed 3:00 pm - 4:20 pm OLIN 203

Cross-listed: Gender Studies, History & Phil of Science

From an ethnomedical perspective, all notions of health and illness and forms of treatment are taken as socioculturally constructed, embedded within systems of knowledge and power and hierarchies of gender, class and race. This course will explore medical knowledge and practice in a variety of healing systems including that of western biomedicine, focusing on the human body as the site where illness is experienced, and upon which social meanings and political actions are inscribed. We will be concerned with how political economic systems, and the inequalities they engender--poverty, violence, discrimination--affect human well-being. Readings and films will represent different ethnographic perspectives on embodied experiences of illness and bodily imagery and treatment within widely differing sociopolitical systems. Topics will include biomedical constructs and body imagery, and alternative medical systems such as chiropractic and acupuncture in contemporary American society, epidemic diseases such as malaria and AIDS, colonial constructions of the diseased body in sub-Saharan Africa, female circumcision, Kuru sorcery, and humoral medicine and susto (fright) in Latin America.

Prerequisites: Anthropology 101 or permission of the instructor.

CRN	90540
Course No.	ANTH 231
Title	Ethnographies of the City
Professor	Laura Kunreuther
Schedule	Tu Th 3:00 pm - 4:20 pm PRE 101

Using literary, ethnographic and historical sources, this class will introduce students to writings about the city as a site to pursue modern ethnography. With Raymond Williams' The Country and the City as a base text, the course will focus on the changing distinctions drawn between 'city' and 'country' as reflective of the changing relations of class, and as representing changing conceptions of time. Fustel de Coulange's The Ancient City begins our discussion of the significance of the city to the modern social imagination. Drawing on Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project and Judith Walkowitz's City of Dreadful Delight: London in the Victorian Era, we will explore the city, and its representation, as a complex set of social and economic relations fundamental to modern social life. We will read ethnographies of contemporary cities like Athens, Java, Calcutta, and Kathmandu to gain insight into the political and cultural uses of certain cities, as well as the changing social configuration of these cities over time. Students will do their own research and compose a brief ethnography on the social and historical relationship between 'city' and 'country' in upstate New York.

CRN	90541
Course No.	ANTH 235
Title	Rethinking Kinship and Exchange
Professor	Melissa Demian
Schedule	Mon Wed 1:30 pm - 2:50 pm OLIN 305

Cross-listed: Asian Studies, Gender Studies

The study of kinship is arguably one of the most important contributions of anthropology to the understanding of how human societies reproduce themselves. Anthropology may well claim to have "invented" kinship as an object of analysis, which will be a recurring theme throughout the course. Topics will include the history of kinship theory in anthropology, its articulation with other forms of sociality such as gender and economics, and an examination of how kinship and these other domains interact. Ethnographic material from subsistence and "gift" economies in particular continually renew kinship theory, as anthropologists are required to confront their assumptions about the composition of kin relationships. Finally, the course will consider the effects of optative forms of kinship, such as adoption and gay and lesbian relationships, as well as that of the new reproductive technologies, on how kinship is constituted in "the West."

CRN	90542
Course No.	ANTH 246
Title	South Asia and the Ethnographic Imagination
Professor	Laura Kunreuther
Schedule	Tu 11:30 am - 12:50 pm OLIN 309 Th 11:30 am - 12:50 pm OLIN 305

Cross-listed: Asian Studies

Using texts of anthropology and history as well as literature and film, this course looks broadly at representations of South Asia made by foreigners and South Asians alike. We begin with the colonial representations of South Asia that set the stage for subsequent anthropology: photographs, travelers' accounts, and classics of 19th century social theory. We will then critically examine the development of the categories of colonial thought that were incorporated into the anthropology of South Asia, such as village, caste, religion, family, property and gender. We ask what these categories tell us about South Asia, and also what they say about the West itself. Over the course of the semester we will be reading Salman Rushdie's novel Midnight's Children, as we situate our analysis of South Asian anthropology within the broader historical contexts of colonialism, Indian nationalism, the 1947 Partition, and the Indian diaspora. Students will write short weekly papers on the readings, and a longer final paper that looks critically at one aspect of South Asian life and history.

CRN	90165	Distribution	B/C
Course No.	LAIS / ANTH 310
Title	Mesoamerica I:Mixtec and Zapotec Ethnohistory and Ethnography
Professor	David Tavarez
Schedule	Wed 1:30 pm - 3:50 pm OLIN 304

See LAIS section for description.

CRN	90543
Course No.	ANTH 332
Title	Cultural Technologies of Memory
Professor	Laura Kunreuther
Schedule	Wed 10:30 am - 12:50 pm OLIN 301

This course is organized around several practices and technologies that produce collective and personal memory. The class will explore a distinction commonly made between 'memory' and 'history', asking on what basis this distinction is made and how it maps on to our ideas about foreign places and people. The techniques and technologies of public memory we will examine may include ancient "memory palaces," historical writing, oral narrative, ritual, myth, monuments, museums and archives. We will also explore how radio and photography are used to produce national and familial representations of the past. The focus in each section will be on how the particular medium of remembering shapes the content of what is remembered. We will address who has access to memory practices, stressing the link between the production of particular memories and their political uses. The class will give students a theoretical base to write a final research paper that situates a contemporary memory practice in its specific cultural and historical context: the recent proliferation of family genealogies, Holocaust testimonies and/or museums, the truth commissions, local histories are among a few possible examples.