91214

ANTH 101 A Introduction to Cultural Anthropology

Jonathan Anjaria

M . W . .

1:30 -2:50 pm

Olin 203

SSCI/DIFF

Cross-listed: Environmental & Urban Studies, Related interest: GIS; Gender and Sexuality Studies, Human Rights Why is it important to study other cultures?  Why is the concept of  culture important for understanding the world in which we live?  This  course aims to explore these questions, and  to introduce students to  the field of cultural anthropology and anthropological ways of  understanding the world.  Through readings located in Africa, North  America, the Middle East and South and East Asia, students will  confront the vastness and complexity of human experience.  Studying  the diverse ways people order their lives and make sense of the world  around them has the unique advantage of normalizing the exotic while  exoticising the normal.  Through the study of topics such as  colonialism, race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, and  international development, students should have the tools to better  understand not only how other people live, but their own practices,  beliefs and customs as well.

91133

ANTH 101 B Introduction to Cultural Anthropology

Yuka Suzuki

. T . Th .

3:10 -4:30 pm

Olin 202

SSCI/DIFF

Cross-listed: Environmental & Urban Studies, Related interest: GIS; Gender and Sexuality Studies, Human Rights This course explores the intellectual angles through which anthropologists have engaged culture as a central, and yet 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.  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 and minorities in post-colonial states.

91491

EUS 103 Introduction to Environmental & Urban Studies: Urban Worlds

Jonathan Anjaria

M . W . .

10:10 – 11:30 am

Olin 205/Heg 300

SSCI

See EUS section for description.

91220

ANTH 111 Field Methods in Environmental Archaeology: Native Peoples on Bard’s Lands

Christopher Lindner

. . . . F

11:50 -4:30 pm

Heg 300

SCI

Cross-listed: Environmental & Urban Studies This course has 5 hrs of lab each week, mostly in the field at the Spicebush prehistoric site, at the edge of Tivoli South Bay of the Hudson River. The excavation of this 4,000-year-old campsite uses documentation protocols and careful application of digging techniques by each of the students in their test trenches. We draw plans and profiles to scale for each trench, and record its layering in photographs. On-going analysis includes counting and weighing of artifacts, plus calculation and depiction of their frequencies per excavated volume in histograms, to enable contrast of stratigraphic units vertically in a given trench and horizontally across the site area grid. Such analysis also takes place in 2 or 3 sessions indoors, during inclement weather, along with replicative experimentation in the manufacture and function of prehistoric stone tools and microscopic examination of use-wear traces. Students are responsible for written synthesis of their individual excavation results, as partial assessment of the whole site area, and comparison to similar areas of relevant sites in the archaeological record of the northeastern woodlands. Course limit is 12 participants, with enrollment by permission of instructor.

91335

SOC 135 Sociology of Gender

Allison McKim

. . W . F

11:50 -1:10 pm

Olin L. C. 208

SSCI/DIFF

See Sociology section for description.

91215

ANTH / AFR 148 African Encounters

Mario Bick

. T . Th .

8:30 -9:50 am

Olin 301

HIST/DIFF

Cross-listed: Africana Studies, EUS, GIS An Introduction to Western representations of Africa from the pre-colonial period to the present, juxtaposed to representations by Africans. Stereotypes and prejudices will be highlighted. Readings will include early traveler accounts, ethnographic / anthropological studies, novels, and political writings.

91252

ANTH 207 Cultural Politics of Empire: The Case of British India

Laura Kunreuther

M . W . .

10:10 - 11:30 am

RKC 200

SSCI/DIFF

Cross-Listed: Asian Studies, GIS, History, Victorian Studies This course will examine contemporary theories of colonialism and the cultural categories that emerged and changed through the colonial experience. No other colony was more prized or the object of more fantasy than India, “The Jewel in the Crown.” While the course focuses primarily on British rule in India, we will frame this particular case within broader perspectives of colonialism, including Edward Said's analysis of Orientalism, critical responses to it, and the ideology of liberalism that underwrote the colonial project. A central premise of the course is that the experience of colonialism was shared by both colonizer and colonized. Imperialism did not only profoundly change the cultures of the Indian subcontinent but also the British people themselves – both those who were first-hand participants (soldiers, administrators, entrepreneurs, etc.) and those citizens who never left Britain. We will discuss political movements, like nationalism, feminism, and liberalism, not as a discourse that originated in the metropole and was exported to the colonies, but rather a key aspect of the colonial encounter in both places. The focus of our discussion of imperial politics and practices will be on the role of ‘culture’ as a central discourse that emerged at this same time. Thomas Metcalf’s Ideologies of the Raj’ will serve as our base text to examine the dominant social ideologies that were central to the British India. We will discuss, for example, the English ‘gentleman’ and ‘memsab’, as well as the Indian ‘babu’ and ‘fakir’, as key figures in the colonial imagination and symbolic of broader social distinctions like race, gender and sexuality. We will discuss cultural practices, like the Victorian grand tour, the rise of technologies like photography and the railroad, scientific discourses of race, as well as key literary figures like Rudyard Kipling and Rabindranath Tagore, all of which helped shape the categories we use to describe South Asia today.

91411

MUS 185 Introduction to Ethnomusicology

Mercedes Dujunco

. . W . F

10:10 - 11:30 am

BLM N210

AART

See Music section for description.

91217

ANTH 213 Anthropology of Medicine

Diana Brown

M . W . .

1:30 -2:50 pm

Olin 202

SSCI/DIFF

Cross-listed: Gender & Sexuality Studies; GIS; Human Rights; Science, Technology & Society From an ethnomedical perspective, all notions of health and illness and forms of treatment are taken as socioculturally constructed, embedded within global 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, non-biomedical illnesses and healing systems including those in contemporary American society, the shaping of epidemic diseases such as malaria, TB and AIDS, colonial and post-colonial constructions of diseased bodies, cosmetic medical interventions, and new medical technologies.

91489

HIST 2318 Pre-Colonial and Colonial Africa

Priya Lal

M . W . .

1:30 -2:50 pm

Heg 300

HIST

See History section for description.

91216

ANTH 250 Reading Baseball as Metaphor

Mario Bick

M . W . .

8:30 -9:50 am

Olin 201

SSCI/DIFF

Cross-listed: American Studies Baseball has often been labeled the quintessential American sport. This course explores that claim while it examines the history and diffusion of the game, its performance and representation, and its connections to the politics of work, ethnicity, race, gender, class, region, and place. Cultural constructions are explored and contrasted in baseball as played in the United States, Japan, and Latin America. Sources in fiction, film, and analytic literature are employed, in conjunction with attendance at amateur (Little League) and professional baseball games. In addition, comparisons with soccer (football), the world’s sport, will be explored.

91784

ANTH 264 Refugees: The Politics of Forced Displacement

Nadia Latif

M . W . .

3:10-4:30 pm

Heg 201

SSCI/DIFF

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.

91134

ANTH 275 Post-Apartheid National Imaginaries

Yuka Suzuki

M . W . .

3:10 -4:30 pm

Olin 204

SSCI/DIFF

Cross-listed: Africana Studies, GIS, Human Rights As one of the few regions on the continent charted for permanent European settlement, southern Africa has been marked by histories of violence that far surpassed normative applications of colonialism. In the wake of such intense turmoil, nations struggled to reinvent themselves at the moment of Independence, scripting new national mythologies and appeals for unity. This course explores these contests over nationhood in the post-apartheid era, focusing primarily on the experiences of Zimbabwe and South Africa. Some of the main themes we will address include the politics of commemoration and the symbolic capital of liberation war veterans, the charismatic authority of individuals such as Nelson Mandela and Robert Mugabe, sexual violence and the trial of Jacob Zuma, the role of sport in reimagining national identity, and the paradox of white African belonging. We will examine memories of ethnic genocide in Matabeleland documented by the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace, and track new anxieties in the media precipitated by the influx of immigrants into South Africa. In the final section of the course, we will turn to recent alliances between Africa and China, and possibilities for the emergence of an alternate global order.

91786

ANTH 338 Global Flows

Nadia Latif

. T . . .

10:10 - 12:30 pm

Olin 301

SSCI/DIFF

Cross-listed: Human Rights Globalization is commonly presented as a recent phenomenon of the late twentieth century, made possible by the spread of  capitalism and new forms of telecommunications technology. Globalization is said to be characterized by the porosity of borders and boundaries, and the rapid movement of peoples, ideas, cultural forms, commodities, and capital. Such a view of globalization is predicated upon a sharp disjuncture between the homogeneity of identity and experience within immobile, national pasts and the multiplicity and plasticity of identity and experience enabled by the ease of mobility in a trans-national present. This course aims to question this dichotomy by examining anthropological scholarship on capitalism, colonialism, nationalism, and diasporas. In doing so, we will critically assess the theoretical and methodological strengths and weaknesses of contemporary anthropological approaches to the study of the historic processes constituting globalization.

91219

ANTH 350 Contemporary Cultural Theory

Laura Kunreuther

. T . . .

10:10 - 12:30 pm

Olin 310

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.