99411

ANTH 101 A Introduction to Cultural Anthropology

Nadia Latif

M . W . .

3:00 -4:20 pm

OLIN 202

SSCI/DIFF

Related interest: GIS; Gender and Sexuality Studies, Human Rights This course provides an introduction to the ways in which anthropologists have developed the elusive concept of “culture” as a means of examining human societies. We will explore the ways in which anthropology as a discipline emerged from, responded to, and changed the ways in which societies think about: identity and difference; barbarism and civilisation; modernity, pre-modernity, and post-modernity. By focusing on a number of thematics that have organised anthropological enquiry since the late nineteenth century—exchange, kinship, language, magic, science and religion, social roles and heirarchies—we will explore paradigm shifts within the discipline from a earlier focus on non-western societies anachronistic remanants, to a contemporary interest in examining global-local flows, intersections, and conglomerations of peoples, commodities, capital, ideas, practices, and power.

99502

ANTH 101 B Introduction to Cultural Anthropology

Jeff Jurgens

M . W . .

9:00 - 10:20 am

OLIN 202

SSCI/DIFF

Related interest: GIS; Gender and Sexuality Studies, Human Rights 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.

99401

ANTH 111 Archaeological Field Methods on the Bard Lands

Christopher Lindner

. . . . F . . . Th .

12:00 -5:00 pm 2:30 – 3:30 pm

HEG 106 OLIN 107

SSCI

Cross-listed: American Studies, Environmental & Urban Studies The Field Methods course 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. This season we will continue test excavations from last fall that discovered a 900-year-old site, with spearpoints and pottery sherds along the Hudson River shore. Nearby, chipped stone projectile points or knives have come to light in past explorations that indicate foraging activities nine millennia in the past. This year we also hope to find more evidence of the Esopus Indians, who camped not far away during their wars with the Dutch of Kingston around 1660. A few artifacts in our area of focus, the Spicebush site, indicate the presence of the first settlers from the Old World on the Bard lands, ca. 1725, the Van Benthuysen family and their slaves of African ancestry. This is a writing intensive course. Most weeks each student will compose a succinct synopsis of a specific scientific text, to present its scope, methods, and substance, in order to develop periodic cumulative syntheses that contain a rationale to ground interpretations through statement of research perspective, hypothesis formulation, adduction of data, and critical appraisal of inferential clarity and strength. Limited to 12, by permission. Interested students should contact Professor Lindner prior to registration.

99402

AFR / ANTH 148 African Encounters

Mario Bick

. T . Th .

9:00 - 10:20 am

OLIN 308

HIST/DIFF

Cross-listed: Anthropology, EUS The image and idea of Sub-Saharan Africa will be explored from the period of first contact in the 15^th century, through colonialism and into the post colonial present. Explorer and traveler accounts, fiction, memoirs and ethnographies written by Europeans, Arabs and Africans will constitute the core readings for the course. The goal of the course is to understand how outsiders saw Africa, defined Africa and shaped the idea of Africa, and how Africans responded, resisted and reshaped these ideas. A series of films will be shown in conjunction with our readings.

99399

ANTH 234 Language, Culture, Discourse

Laura Kunreuther

. T . Th .

2:30 -3:50 pm

OLIN 204

HUM/DIFF

Language is one of the fundamental ways of understanding the world in culturally specific ways, and helps to create 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 theoretical and ethnographic approaches that demonstrate this in various ways.  The course will include close analysis of everyday conversations as well as social analysis of broader discourses related to class, gender and nationality.  Some of the topics we will discuss include: how authority is established through specific forms of speech, language ideologies, the performative power of language, the relationship between language and social hierarchies, the study of genre and discourse as historical and social forms, cultural analyses of voice.  We will also examine the way technology and media have been fundamental in shaping the way different groups perceive their social worlds.  Students will be required to do their own cultural analysis of a conversation, a written or oral narrative, or of discourse in contemporary culture using the conceptual tools we develop through the course.  Readings will include authors such as Judith Irvine, Erving Goffman, J.L.  Austin, John Searle, Jacques Derrida, Mikhail Bakhtin, Richard Bauman.

99396

ANTH 244 Anthropology & The Politics of the Body

Diana Brown

M . W . .

1:30 -2:50 pm

OLIN 205

SSCI/DIFF

Cross-listed: Gender and Sexuality Studies Anthropology has been long concerned with bodies as sources of symbolic representations of the social world and as vehicles for expressing individual and collective identities. More recent interests center on mind-body relations and embodiment, and on bodies as targets for the production of consumer desires and sites 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. We will view bodies as sites of negotiation and resistance and contextualize them within local and global political economies and systems of power. Topics will include the gendering of bodies and other culturally constructed markings of social class, race, age; decisions concerning fertility and reproduction; manipulation of bodily surfaces and forms to establish boundaries and identities through techniques such as tattooing, piercing, dieting, sculpting and cosmetic surgery; commodification and fragmentation of the body through the selling and transplantation of body parts; and the blurring of body/non-body and human/non-human boundaries under the impact of new technologies.

99398

ANTH 249 Travel, Tourism & Anthropology

Laura Kunreuther

. T . Th .

10:30 - 11:50 am

OLIN 304

HUM/DIFF

Cross-listed: Asian Studies Why has travel has generated so much textual production? This course will consider travel as a cultural practice and the link between travel writing and ethnography. We will first discuss several genres of travel writing (postcards, letters, journals, guide-books, ethnography) and discuss 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 travelers writings from the 19^th century, noting their connections to ethnographic studies written at the same time. How is ‘home’ configured in relation to foreign places in these texts? Using Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small World, we will also examine some of the ethical dilemmas that tourism in particular poses: what impact 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 space that ostensibly is transformative, as in ritual pilgrimages, the Victorian Grand Tour, anthropological fieldwork or the post-college backpacking trip. Finally, we will consider the writings from exile or diaspora communities that challenge the master narrative of European travel from the ‘center’ to the ‘periphery’. The course will be based on a broad range of sources, including fiction about travel, ethnography, travelogues, letters, as well as anthropological theories about ethnography and travel writing.

99397

ANTH 256 Race and Ethnicity in Brazil

Mario Bick

M . W . .

9:00 - 10:20 am

OLIN 303

SSCI/DIFF

Cross-listed: Africana Studies, GIS, Human Rights, Jewish Studies, LAIS, SRE Brazil, in contrast to the United States, has been portrayed by Brazilians and others, as a “racial democracy’. The course examines the debate over the “problem of race” in its early formulation shaped by scientific racism and eugenics, especially the fear of degeneration. It then turns to the Brazilian policy of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries of branquemento (whitening) which was the basis of large-scale migration to Brazil from all major regions of Europe. These “ethnic” populations settled mainly in southern and south central Brazil leading to significant regional differences in identity politics and racial attitudes. The interplay of “racial” vs. “ethnic” identities is crucial to understanding the allocation of resources and status in Brazilian society. Inequality in contemporary Brazil is explored in terms of the dynamics of racial ideologies, the distribution of national resources and the performance of identity as shaped by “racial” and “ethnic” strategies. The groups to be discussed are: indigenous/native Brazilians, the Luso-Brazilians, Afro-Brazilians, Japanese Brazilians, Euro-ethnic Brazilians, and Brazilians of Arab and Jewish descent.

99842

ANTH 264 Refugees: The Politics of Forced Displacement

Nadia Latif

. T . Th .

1:00 - 2:20 pm

OLIN 203

SSCI/DIFF

Cross-listed: Human Rights The UNHCR has referred to the twentieth century as the century of the refugee. Is mass forced displacement unique to recent world history? Is there a relationship between the emergence of “human rights” as a hegemonic discursive and political framework, and the increased number of refugee populations around the world? Can the history of the rise of the nation-state also be read as a history of refugee subjectivity? What aspects of refugee experience are obscured by an approach that privileges the claims of the nation-state? This course will explore these questions through an examination of historical, anthropological, and legal scholarship on the nation-state, national identity, human rights, migration, displacement, refugee populations, and refugee subjectivity.

99515

ANTH 267 Middle Eastern Diasporas

Jeff Jurgens

M . W . .

3:00 - 4:20 pm

OLIN 201

SSCI/DIFF

Cross-listed: Human Rights; Jewish Studies; Middle Eastern Studies; SRE This course examines the past and present experiences of Arabs, Iranians, Turks, and Kurds who reside in Europe and North America, as well as of Jews of diverse backgrounds who live in Israel and abroad. At the same time, we will explore how and why these groups are commonly regarded as “diasporas,” a term that is itself closely connected with the displacement and dispersion of Jews from their homeland in the sixth century BCE. Such an investigation demands that we critically investigate not only the history of “diaspora” as a concept, but also the contemporary circumstances that have encouraged its recent prominence in public and scholarly discussions. After all, it was not that long ago that the aforementioned groups often characterized themselves (and were regularly characterized by others) not as “diasporic,” but as “immigrant,” “expatriate,” “refugee,” “exile,” and “ethnic.” What has brought about this shift in terms? What assumptions about geographic territory, human movement, and social connection does “diaspora” imply, and what insights might it allow that other concepts (like “immigration” or “transnationalism”) do not? How do contemporary diasporas differ from past ones, especially those that emerged before the advent of nationalism and the nation-state? And finally, what might specific diasporic experiences reveal about broader cultural processes? To address these and other questions, this course will work comparatively across national contexts and historical eras, relying on readings and films from cultural anthropologists, sociologists, and “diasporans” themselves.

99516

ANTH 270 Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Anthropology

Megan Callaghan

. T . Th . .

9:00 - 10:20 am

OLIN 204

SSCI/DIFF

Cross-listed: Gender and Sexuality Studies, Human Rights This course examines the emergence and transformation of gender studies within anthropology since the 1970s. We will read early texts that challenged anthropologists to recognize women’s lives as valid subjects of study, as well as more recent work that encompasses constructions of both femininities and masculinities. In doing so, we will explore the division between and interrelation of biological and social factors in determining sex and gender. How are perceived biological differences accorded social meaning in various contexts? How are bodies interpreted and shaped within gender discourses? Additionally, we will focus on the politics of gender, including its relation to ideologies of colonialism, nationalism, and capitalism. How are broader political and economic forces connected to kinship, reproduction, work, and sexuality? How do anthropologies of gender relate to political feminism, construed narrowly as advocacy of women’s rights or more broadly as attention to the role of gender in structuring society? Finally, how might one do feminist anthropology? This course includes examination of cross-cultural constructions of gender structures and practices. It also requires critical interpretation of gender and sexuality in contemporary American popular culture. Prior experience with anthropology is preferable but not necessary. This course approaches the social construction of gender and sexuality through cross-cultural variation; it examines the politics of representation of gendered, sexual and cultural difference; and it considers inequalities of class and race as they intertwine with gender and sexuality.

99445

MUS 285 Intro to Ethnomusicology

Tomie Hahn

. . W . . . . . . F

1:30 -2:50 pm 10:30 - 11:50 am

BLM N210 BLM N210

AART

See Music section for description.

99170

HIST 3103 Political Ritual in the Modern World

Robert Culp

. . . Th .

1:00 -3:20 pm

OLIN 310

HIST/DIFF

See History section for description.

99400

ANTH 350 Contemporary Cultural Theory

Laura Kunreuther

M . . . .

10:30 - 12:50 pm

OLIN 303

HUM/DIFF

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. Required for all moderated Anthropology majors.