CRN	93276	Distribution	A/C
Course No.	ANTH 101 A
Title	Introduction to Cultural Anthropology
Professor	Yuka Suzuki
Schedule	Mon Wed 11:30 am – 12:50 pm OLIN 310

Cross-listed: CCSRE, Environmental Studies

During the past few decades, ‘culture’ has suddenly become pervasive in popular discourses, with internet, fetish, and corporate cultures automatically conjuring certain sets of images and assumptions. This course explores the intellectual angles through which anthropologists have engaged culture as a central, and yet often elusive, concept in understanding how societies work. The analysis of culture has metamorphosed continuously over the past century, from arguing for the existence of integrated systems of thought and practice among so-called ‘primitives’, to scrutinizing the cultural values of colonial subjects, to attempting to decipher the anatomy of enemy minds during World War II. In recent years, anthropology has become more self-reflexive, questioning the discipline’s authority to represent other societies, and critiquing its participation in the creation of exoticized others. Thus, with our ethnographic gaze turned inward as well as outward, we will combine discussions, lectures, and films to reflect upon the construction of social identity, power, and difference in a world where cultures are undergoing rapid reification. Specific topics we will examine include the transformative roles of ritual and symbol; witchcraft and sorcery in historical and contemporary contexts; cultural constructions of gender and sexuality; and nationalism and the making of majorities/minorities in post-colonial states.

CRN	93271	Distribution	A/C
Course No.	ANTH 101 B
Title	Introduction to Anthropology
Professor	Laura Kunreuther
Schedule	Tu Th 3:00 pm – 4:20 pm OLIN 309

Cross-listed: Asian Studies, CCSRE, Gender Studies

This course presents students with a critical understanding of the problem of cultural difference that lies at the heart of anthropological inquiry. Through a focus on writings, films, and anthropological theories, the course will discuss how anthropology has participated in both creating and critiquing ideas about essential cultural difference, many of which supported colonial rule. We will trace some of the major schools of anthropological thought, ranging from 19^th century theories of cultural evolution and racial types to twentieth century theories of structuralism and post-structuralist critiques that have all been used to describe, analyze, and understand cultural distinctions between the ‘West’ and ‘Others’. In addition to an area focus on South Asia (Tibet, Nepal, India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan), we will devote a key portion of the class to the analysis of gender, both in local understandings of difference and in anthropological theories. We will discuss contemporary understandings of gender and sexuality in India, Southeast Asia, and the U.S. and their relation to modern frames of knowledge. Second, we will explore how gender has influenced the discipline of anthropology itself. We will examine, for example, the way gender was often eliminated from early anthropological studies that aimed to be scientific. Finally, the course will require students to examine contemporary representations of cultural difference in the media and popular culture that draws upon anthropological insights.

CRN	93274	Distribution	C/E
Course No.	ANTH 111
Title	Field Methods in Archaeology
Professor	Chris Lindner
Schedule	Fr 8:45 am – 3:15 pm Grouse Bluff Field Station

Cross-listed: American Studies, CCSRE, Environmental Studies

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.

CRN	93270	Distribution	A/C
Course No.	ANTH 208C
Title	History of Anthropology: Africa and British Anthropology 1920-1990
Professor	Mario Bick
Schedule	Mon Wed 10:00 am – 11:20 am OLIN 306

Cross-listed: AADS

A distinctly British social anthropology formed in the twentieth century, largely shaped by research in Britain’s African colonies. This anthropology contributed to the construction of colonial relations with African peoples, constituted our knowledge of pre-colonial African cultures, and provided critiques of colonialism. Both the colonial system and the nationalist movements that destroyed that system were influenced by this anthropology. The course will examine central texts of this school, especially as they explore politics, broadly understood, from colonial and post-colonial Africa, rural and urban, rule and resistance, modernizing and post-modern.

CRN	93277	Distribution	A/C
Course No.	ANTH 224
Title	Environment, Development and Power
Professor	Yuka Suzuki
Schedule	Tu Th 1:30 pm – 2:50 pm OLIN 203

Cross-listed: Environmental Studies

In an age of apocalyptic narrative, the environment has taken center stage in what is constructed as an unprecedented global ecological crisis. The endemic urgency of these discourses often serves to justify dramatic interventions imposed from the center to the periphery, from ‘developed’ nations to ‘developing’ nations, and from affluent capital cities to the marginalized hinterlands. Taking its cue from political ecology and the principle that all resource struggles are fundamentally political, this course explores the complex, dynamic interplay between conservation, development, and power. The first part of the course traces the historical underpinnings of contemporary inequity by examining the logics of colonial sciences in relation to ‘nature’, as well as the use of exotic species of flora and fauna as tools of imperial conquest. We then turn to the shaping of modern environmental discourses: how environmental ‘problems’ are identified, how interventions are rationalized, and how development ‘failures’ are swept under the rug without delegitimizing the paradigm of development itself. Finally, we examine the politics of displacement, the emergence of ‘environmental refugees’, and the imperative need for the conceptualization and practice of an environmental justice. The course will draw on ethnographic case studies from Brazil, India, Guinea, Indonesia, and Tanzania among other nations, in both historical and contemporary contexts.

CRN	93272	Distribution	A/C
Course No.	ANTH 244
Title	Anthropology of the Body
Professor	Diana Brown
Schedule	Mon Wed 3:00 pm – 4:20 pm OLIN 204

Cross-listed: Gender Studies, HR

Anthropology has long been concerned with bodies as sources of symbolic representations of the social world and as vehicles for expressions of individual and collective identities. More recently, interest has centered on the individual body as a site of situated knowledge. It has become a target for the production of consumer desires, and as a site of commodification and political control. This course will explore a range of different issues raised by these perspectives through readings theorizing the body, supplemented by comparative ethnographic studies of bodily knowledge and practice. Topics to be examined will include the gendering of bodies and other culturally constructed markings of age, social class and race; mind-body relations; the manipulation of bodily surface and form to establish boundaries and identities through techniques such as tattooing, piercing, dieting, sculpting and cosmetic surgery; commodification of the body through the selling and transplantation of body parts; and the blurring of body/non-body boundaries under the impact of new body technologies.

CRN	93275	Distribution	A/C
Course No.	ANTH 259
Title	Ethnographic Film and Visual Anthropology in Africa: Theory and Practice
Professor	Jesse Shipley
Schedule	Tu Th 4:30 pm – 5:50 pm OLIN 203

Cross-listed: AADS

This course addresses the visual aspects of culture and cultural production with a particular focus on postcolonial Africa. How are the arts and the visual aspects of society made meaningful in and for contemporary Africa? We will look at how Africa has been represented through film and the display of African peoples and “primitive” art for Western audiences, showing the ways in which African enters global circuits of representation and mass media through its visual representation. We will examine the artistic and visual aspects of culture as they are made socially meaningful both within African cultural contexts as well as when they are displayed for art worlds and cinema audiences outside of the continent. Through these examinations we will introduce some of the basic concerns and paradigms of anthropology, in particular ideas of racial and cultural difference. This class is for those interested in historical/anthropological examinations of the visual as well as students producing film/videos, installations, and performance pieces especially in relation to the politics of representation. In terms of film production we will examine the political and social messages embedded within aesthetic decisions made by artists from choosing themes, to modes of narration, to editing decisions. For those interested in actually making films/videos previous experience is required.

CRN	93273	Distribution	A
Course No.	ANTH 332
Title	Cultural Technologies of Memory
Professor	Laura Kunreuther
Schedule	Fr 10:30 am – 12:50 pm OLIN 305

Cross-listed: Human Rights

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.