Course	ANTH 101A Introduction to Cultural Anthropology
Professor	Yuka Suzuki
CRN	95278
Schedule	Wed Fri 1:30 – 2:50 pm PRE 128
Distribution	OLD: A/C	NEW: SOCIAL SCIENCE / RETHINKING DIFFERENCE

Related interest: Global & Int’l Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies

During the past few decades, ‘culture’ has suddenly become pervasive in popular discourses, with phrases such as ‘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 undergone many transformations 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.

Course	ANTH 101B Introduction to Cultural Anthropology
Professor	Jeff Jurgens
CRN	95279
Schedule	Tu Th 2:30 – 3:50 pm OLIN 204
Distribution	OLD: A/C	NEW: SOCIAL SCIENCE / RETHINKING DIFFERENCE

See description above.

Course	ANTH 101C Introduction to Cultural Anthropology
Professor	Megan Callaghan
CRN	95825
Schedule	Mon Wed 9:00 – 10:20 am OLIN 101
Distribution	OLD: A/C	NEW: SOCIAL SCIENCE / RETHINKING DIFFERENCE

See description above.

Course	ANTH 111 Archaeological Field Methods: Native Americans on the Bard Lands
Professor	Christopher Lindner
CRN	95280
Schedule	Fr 10:00 am -3:00 pm Grouse Bluff / or ROSE 108
Distribution	OLD: C/E	NEW: SOCIAL SCIENCE / RETHINKING DIFFERENCE

Cross-listed: Africana Studies, American Studies, Environmental Studies, Studies in Race and Ethnicity

Field Methods offers an introduction to prehistory by basic hand excavation, using GIS technology (Geographic Information Systems) to situate our discoveries, and through laboratory processing of artifacts. Grouse Bluff provided temporary encampment for people in a series of 10 distinct cultural expressions that end 925 years before present, according to three radiocarbon assays. Sediment analyses of several fireplaces identify fish remains, burnt hickory nuts, and charred huckleberry seeds. Quartz crystals could reflect spiritual practices, while fragments of exotic carved soapstone vessels suggest feasting. Grouse Bluff is the largest and most intensively occupied site, scientifically known in New York and adjacent states, from several centuries approximately 3,000 years ago. Chipped stone projectile points or knives along the Hudson River shore indicate foraging nine millennia in the past. We hope also to find evidence of the Esopus Indians, who camped not far away after their wars with the Dutch of Kingston around 1660. Lunchtime discussion will contextualize our findings with archaeological and ethnohistorical comparisons.

Enrollment limited to 12, by permission.

Course	AFR / ANTH 262 Colonialism, Law, and Human Rights in Africa
Professor	Jesse Shipley
CRN	95281
Schedule	Tu Th 10:30 -11:50 am OLIN 202
Distribution	OLD: A/C	NEW: SOCIAL SCIENCE / RETHINKING DIFFERENCE

Cross-listed: Global & Int’l Studies, Human Rights

This course examines the colonial and missionary legacies of contemporary discourses of human rights and development. We will take a rigorously critical eye to examining how why and to what effect Western donor agencies, states, and individuals unwittingly draw on centuries old tropes of poverty, degradation, and helplessness of non-Western peoples. Specifically we will use historical descriptions of the encounters between Europeans and Africans in West Africa and South Africa to show how Western assumptions about African societies reveal the contradictions at the root of liberal discourses of aid and development. In this way we will interrogate how “aid” implies the idea of a Western individual, rights-bearing economic subject which has implications for the development of global capitalism. We will also look at case studies from Ghana, Nigeria, and post-Apartheid South Africa to examine the real legacies of human rights and development causes for the people involved. We will look at the dual legacy of British colonial law, and the relationship between customary law and state courts as a primary site for understanding conflicts over rights, citizenship, and the role of the individual in society. We will posit complex historical and cultural ways of understanding particular cases.

Course	ANTH 266 Anthropology of Youth and Youth Politics
Professor	Jeff Jurgens
CRN	95817
Schedule	Tu Th 9:00 – 10:20 am OLINLC 120
Distribution	OLD: A	NEW: HUMANITIES / RETHINKING DIFFERENCE

This course examines children and young people not only as they are “made” in culture, but also as resourceful and inventive “makers” who both inherit and re-create ways of thinking, acting, and feeling. At the same time, it investigates how young people have not only been the targets of government policies, but have also actively contributed to social and political change. In the process, we will rely on recent literature (including work from Alex Kotlowitz, Lesley Sharp, and Sharon Stephens) as well as “classics of the field” (from the likes of Victor Turner and Margaret Mead) to explore young people’s varying roles at home, in public space, in schools, in various forms of labor, in diaspora, and in politics. A key theme will be the contrast between contemporary young people’s actual experiences and a romantic understanding of youth as a time of innocence and happiness distinct from adulthood.

Course	ANTH 277 Culture and Power in the Middle East
Professor	Jeff Jurgens
CRN	95818
Schedule	Mon Wed 3:00 – 4:20 pm HEG 300
Distribution	OLD: A/C	NEW: HUMANITIES / RETHINKING DIFFERENCE

This course introduces a region that has constituted one of “the West’s” primary Others and pays special attention to its contemporary complexity and heterogeneity. The focus will be on four interrelated themes: 1. practices of kinship, gender, and sexuality, 2. nationalism and state-building, 3. the social consequences of compulsory education, mass literacy, and mass media, and 4. recent efforts to link, negotiate, and/or reconcile religion with “modern,” secular, and liberal life. This last theme will require us to examine Islam and the various ways that it has been interpreted, invoked, and used. Above all, we will treat the Middle East not as a self-contained entity, but as a region that has been formed by centuries of relations with social actors in other parts of the world, including (and especially) Euro-American imperial powers. Course readings include works from Dale Eickelman, Amitav Ghosh, and Rhoda Ann Kanaaneh, among others.

Course	ANTH 327 Ritual, Performance, and Symbolic Practice
Professor	Jesse Shipley
CRN	95283
Schedule	Wed 9:30 -11:50 am OLIN 201
Distribution	OLD: A	NEW: SOCIAL SCIENCE / RETHINKING DIFFERENCE

Cross-listed: Africana Studies, Global & Int’l Studies

This course examines public performance and various types of theatricality. Our goal will be to analyze how lived experience relates to politics, change, and social power. The course addresses the tension between these theories to highlight key philosophical issues within anthropology and social thought more generally: power and its illusory  enactment; the relationship between personal experience and broader social processes; the nature of consciousness; structure versus agency; stasis and change. We begin by examining classic anthropological conceptions of ritual, symbolic meaning, and social transformation. We will then explore various linguistic, sociological,  poststructuralist, and theatrical theories. We will look at different ways to think about space and the social body. The second half of the course draws on particular ethnographic, theatrical, philosophic, and literary examples from West Africa which address the relationships between historical memory, specific kinds of performance, and the local experience of power. We will ask in particular how African theories of performance reflect their social and personal contexts. We will examine the social processes through which certain symbols and practices become central locations for the production and contestation of meaning and identity. Students will be encouraged to consider the tension between "performance" as a theoretical frame and an "object" of analysis.  The course is designed for students with a background in anthropology/sociology, history, performance studies, ethnic studies, or literary and social theory. This course can be taken in conjunction with HIST 3103 as complementary issues will be addressed.

Course	ANTH 350 Contemporary Cultural Theory
Professor	Yuka Suzuki
CRN	95284
Schedule	Th 1:30 -3:50 pm OLIN 101
Distribution	OLD: A/C	NEW: HUMANITIES / RETHINKING DIFFERENCE

(Required class for all moderated Anthropology majors)

Cross-listed: Human Rights

This course is intended as an introduction to advanced theories of culture in contemporary anthropology. Required of all anthropology majors, this course will also be of interest to students wishing to explore critical innovations in the study of local, national, and mass culture around the world. In contrast to early anthropological focus on seemingly isolated, holistic cultures, more recent studies have turned their attention to contest within societies and the intersection of local systems of meaning with global processes of politics, economics and history. The class will be designed around an influential social theorist, such as Bourdieu, Bakhtin, or Marx, and the application of their theories by anthropologists, such as Aihwa Ong, Judith Irvine, or Michael Taussig. The seminar will involve participation from all of the faculty in the anthropology department. It aims to inspire critical engagement with an eye towards developing theoretical tools and questions for a senior project that makes use of contemporary theories of culture.