91313

ANTH 101 Intro to Cultural Anthropology

Jonathan Anjaria

M . W . .

3:10 -4:30 pm

OLIN 204

SSCI/DIFF

Cross-listed: Environmental & Urban Studies, Related interest: Global & Int’l Studies; 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. Class size: 22

Note! Professor Anjaria will also offer an EUS course in January:

EUS 204 Urbanism Unbound

Cross-listed: Anthropology 2 credits This course is an advanced study of the city that will take place in Mumbai, India during the winter break. We will allow Mumbai's unique, vibrant and challenging urban environment to inspire us to think anew about urban processes. Close attention to the lived experiences of the ordinary spaces of the city—the streets, sidewalks, shantytowns, trains and markets--will enable us to get a sense of the vast possibilities for organizing urban life. Moreover, we will explore how urban space is contested and envisioned through a study of topics such as access to water, politics of slum removal, informal waste recycling and sustainability, media and civic engagement, urban environmental activism, the relationship of gender to urban development, popular culture, globalization and consumer culture and the politics of heritage conservation. Student-designed research projects will be aided by meetings with scholars, architects, urban planners, writers and activists who play a central role in the city's public life. Through this intensive study, we will explore how Mumbai's unique urbanism might help us understand some of the pressing issues of the contemporary urban world. Interested students should speak to Prof. Anjaria in the fall.

91319

ANTH 101 Intro to Cultural Anthropology

Laura Kunreuther

. T . Th .

11:50 -1:10 pm

OLIN 204

SSCI/DIFF

Cross-listed: Gender & Sexuality Studies; Global & Int’l Studies; Human Rights Anthropology is the study of ‘culture,’ or the social power of imagination. During the past few decades, ‘culture’ has suddenly become pervasive in popular discourse, with phrases such as ‘internet,’ ‘fetish,’ and ‘corporate culture’ conjuring sets of images and assumptions. This course will trace the historical development of theories of culture from the 19^th century to the present. We will focus on how the concept of culture helps us to critically understand group and personal symbols, and how culture affects understandings of race, gender, sexuality and national identity. We first trace the historical location of the culture concept, beginning with basic readings about cultural interpretation and the relation of language to the cultural construction of reality. We then look at the foundational anthropological methods – fieldwork and participant observation. In this section, we will look critically at the place of culture in relation to colonial rule, and anthropologists’ ambiguous relation to colonialism itself. In the last part of the class, we turn to the political meanings of culture that affects the performance of gender, sexuality, and the body, as well as the power of social institutions (the state, law, science) to shape cultural and national identities. Class size: 22

91321

ANTH 111 Archaeological Field Methods

Christopher Lindner

. . . . F

11:50 -4:30 pm

ROSE 108

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. Class size: 12

91318

ANTH 213 Anthropology of Medicine

Diana Brown

M . W . .

1:30 -2:50 pm

OLIN 203

SSCI/DIFF

Cross-listed: Gender & Sexuality Studies; Global & Int’l Studies; 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. Class size: 22

91320

ANTH 234 Language/Culture/Discourse

Laura Kunreuther

. T . Th .

10:10 - 11:30 am

OLIN 203

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.

Class size: 22

91557

AFR 248 Encountering Africana

Mario Bick

. T . Th .

8:30 -9:50 am

HEG 308

SSCI/DIFF

See Africana Studies section for description.

91316

ANTH 256 Race and Ethnicity in Brazil

Mario Bick

M . W . .

10:10 - 11:30 am

OLIN 306

SSCI/DIFF

Cross-listed: Africana Studies, Global & Int’l Studies, Human Rights, Jewish Studies, LAIS 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. Class size: 15

91322

ANTH 265 Race & Nature in Africa

Yuka Suzuki

M . W . .

3:10 -4:30 pm

OLIN 202

SSCI/DIFF

Cross-listed: Africana Studies; Environmental & Urban Studies; Global & Int’l Studies; Human Rights Western fantasies have historically represented Africa as the embodiment of a mythical, primordial wilderness. Within this imagery, nature is racialized, and Africans are constructed as existing in a state closer to nature. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness perhaps best exemplifies this process, through its exploration of the ‘savage’ dimensions of colonialism in the African interior. Imperial discourses often relied on these tropes of savagery and barbarism to link understandings of natural history with ideas about racial difference. Similarly, by blurring the boundary between the human and the nonhuman, colonial policies created a zone of anxiety around racialized domestic relationships, particularly in the context of employers and their servants. Many of these representations were contradictory, as evidenced by Rousseau’s image of the noble savage: indigenous people who lived as gentle custodians of the environment, while at the same time preying upon resources desired for exclusive colonial use. After investigating the racialization of nature under imperial regimes, we will consider continuing legacies in post-colonial situations. How have certain ethnic identities, for example, been linked to nature? How do these associations reproduce social hierarchies and inequalities? In what ways is race invoked in struggles for land and resource rights? Through an exploration of ethnographic accounts, historical analyses, and works of fiction based in Africa, this course offers a new way of deciphering cultural representations of nature, and the fundamentally political agendas that lie within. Class size: 22

91576

ANTH/HIST 3237 Making Space in the Colonial and Post-Colonial World

Jennifer Derr

M . . . .

4:40 – 7:00 pm

HEG 308

HIST/DIFF

See HIST section for description.

91324

ANTH 344 Revolutions in the Modern Middle East

Nadia Latif

. T . . .

10:10 - 12:30 pm

OLIN 310

SSCI/DIFF

Cross-listed: Global & Int’l Studies; Human Rights; Middle East Studies Theorists of revolution from Karl Marx to Hannah Arendt have argued that revolutions emerge from a collective sense that human existence itself is no longer viable under the existing order. This course explores the conditions under which such a sense has emerged at particular historic moments in the modern Middle East, drawing on case studies including, but not limited to: the Algerian war of independence, the establishment of the nation-state of Israel, the Palestinian struggle for national liberation, the Islamic Revolution in Iran, and the post-colonial revolution in Egypt, the course will examine revolutionary discourses, practices and strategies, as well as the historic contexts within which they emerge. What role have revolutionary discourses, practices, and strategies played in the imagining of a new order? To what extent have these imaginings been realised after the revolution? Class size: 15

91314

ANTH 347 South Asian Modernities

Jonathan Anjaria

. T . . .

1:30 -3:50 pm

ALBEE 106

SSCI/DIFF

Cross-listed: Asian Studies, Global & Int’l Studies Through an emphasis on the lived experience of modernity in India and Pakistan, students will explore the varied, and often contradictory, forms of social life in the region.  The course is structured around three themes: personhood, community and difference, and transnationalism.  We will explore key conceptual problems, such as the ‘modernity of tradition,’ the legacy of the colonial construction of social scientific knowledge, and the politics of representing the Third World' that have relevance beyond South Asia.  Course readings will include historical, ethnographic and literary texts. Class size: 15

91323

ANTH 350 Contemporary Cultural Theory

Yuka Suzuki

. . W . .

10:10 - 12:30 pm

OLIN 307

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. Class size: 15