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. Enrollment limited to eight, by permission.

This course will approach the understanding of contemporary Brazilian society and culture through a focus on issues of identity, and by examining the ways in which Brazilian and non-Brazilian anthropologists and other writers have constructed identities for Brazil as a nation, and have shaped and debated the identities of particular segments of its population. We will give close attention to the location and positioning of the authors of these accounts. We will deal with representations of Brazil's national identity at significant moments in its history, and will examine specific identities - of region, class, gender, race, ethnicity and religion. Ethnographies and other texts will examine identity within the context of the struggles of indigenous Amazonian peoples and the rural landless, the experiences of affluent and impoverished urban dwellers in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, Brazil's much debated racial situation, its vital Catholic, Afro-Brazilian and Protestant religious milieu, its national rituals such as soccer and Carnaval, and Brazilians abroad. Ethnographies are selected to provide a variety of theoretical approaches, and will be supplemented by an evening film program.

Why has travel generated so much textual production? This course will consider travel as a cultural practice and will focus on the link between travel writing and ethnography. We will first discuss several genres of travel writing (postcards, letters, journals, guide-books, ethnography) and show how these texts reflect as well as shape the experience of travel. We will then ask how personal, group and national identities have been constructed through the practice of travel by looking at examples of travelers' writings from the 19^th century to the present. How is 'home' configured in relation to the foreign places and people represented in these texts? Using Jamaica Kincaid's A Small World, we will also examine some of the ethical dilemmas that tourism poses: what impact, for example, does the traveler have on the communities they visit? We will then discuss travel as a rite of passage that depends on a person's absence from their home environment and provides a supposedly transformative space, as in ritual pilgrimages, the Victorian Grand Tour, anthropological fieldwork or the post-college backpacking trip. Finally, we will consider the writings from exile and diaspora communities that challenge the master narrative of European travel from 'center' to 'periphery'. From Levi-Strauss' Triste Tropique to Mary Louise Pratt's Imperial Eyes, we will trace the relation of travel to the roots of ethnography. The course will be based on a broad range of sources, including fiction, ethnography, travelogues and anthropological theories about travel and ethnography.

The "problem" of magic is one that has been present in anthropological studies almost from the very beginnings of the discipline. Broadly conceived, magic is the attribution of visible effects to a hidden agency, whether that agency be human, supernatural, or divine. The problem, then, has moved from attempts to account for the seeming universality of magical beliefs to attempts to account for their persistence (and even efflorescence) in the age of globalization and modernity. One of the first issues we will address is the question of how magical thinking came to be associated with irrationality and "the primitive," a process in which anthropology has been intimately implicated, through the work of Frazer, Weber, and Evans-Pritchard. From these early contributions to the discussion of magic we will move to its reappearance as an apparent index of the conditions of modernity through texts such as T.M. Luhrmann's Persuasions of the Witch's Craft, Peter Geschiere's The Modernity of Witchcraft and Michael Taussig's The Magic of the State. From there we will move to considerations of "magical thinking" in its latter 20th century manifestations, such as conspiracy theories, torts litigation, and millenarian movements. Throughout the course we will adopt an anthropological position of contextualization rather than explanation of magical practice and belief. We will also critically engage with the assumption that the revelatory nature of empirical knowledge necessarily dismantles the hidden nature of occult knowledge, which ultimately calls into question the very terms of engagement between anthropology and magic.

Language is one of the fundamental ways of apprehending the world as well as the means for constructing social identities like gender, race, ethnicity, class and nationality. This course begins with the assumption that language and culture are inseparable, and will introduce students to several different theoretical and ethnographic approaches that demonstrate this connection. The course will include close analysis of everyday conversations and broader discourses that create class, gender and national differences in written and oral narratives. We will use Pierre Bourdieu's Language and Symbolic Power and Mikhail Bakhtin's The Dialogic Imagination as two base theoretical texts that demonstrate the way distinct social worlds intersect within a given language. Some of the topics we will discuss include: how authority is established through specific forms of speech, the performative power of language, the relationship between language and social hierarchies, and the study of genre and discourse as historical and social forms. We will also explore the way technology and technological metaphors have shaped present day language and the perception of social worlds in culturally specific ways. Students will be required to do their own cultural analysis of a conversation, a written or oral narrative, and of discourse in contemporary culture using the conceptual tools we develop through the course. Readings will include authors such as Mikhail Bakhtin, Pierre Bourdieu, J.L. Austin, Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, Steven Feld, Susan Harding, E.Valentine Daniel.