91542

ANTH 101 Intro to Cultural Anthropology

Laura Kunreuther

M . W . .

3:10 pm -4:30 pm

OLIN 203

SSCI/DIFF

Cross-listed: Environmental & Urban Studies; Global & Int’l Studies Anthropology is the study of ‘culture,’ a concept that has been redefined and contested over the discipline’s long development. This course will trace the history of the ‘culture concept’ from the nineteenth century to the present. In doing so, it will explore anthropological approaches to ‘primitive’ societies, group and personal symbols and systems of exchange. It will examine how anthropology came to focus on questions of identity, race, gender, sexuality, nationalism, colonial and post-colonial conditions. Our ethnographic gaze will be turned inward as well as outward. We will therefore consider the reasons behind, and ramifications of, anthropology’s self-reflexive turn in and around the 1980s. We will juxtapose that turn’s questioning of the discipline’s authority to represent other societies with debates about anthropologists’ engagement in activism, policy and government (e.g. the US military’s Human Terrain project). We will then examine the more recent anthropological fascination with the non-human (e.g. other animals, technology, the built environment, ‘nature’), looking at how notions of agency, materiality, and anthropology’s own methodological foundations have been transformed as a result. Class size: 22

91461

MUS 185 Intro to Ethnomusicology

Maria Sonevytsky

. T . Th .

10:10 am- 11:30 am

BLM N210

SSCI

See Music section for description.

91559

ANTH 208B American AnthroPOLOGY, 1850-1970

Mario Bick

M . W . .

10:10 am- 11:30 am

OLIN 310

SSCI/DIFF

Cross-listed: American Studies Up until World War II, American anthropology had three central concerns: the description and understanding of Native American peoples based on participant observation through fieldwork; the defeat of scientific racism; and the placement of the concept of culture at the center of anthropological thought. Students examine these concerns along with the rise of sociological, psychological, and neomarxist evolutionist thought in American anthropology after World War II. Class size: 20

91641

ANTH 211 FIELD METHODS IN ARCHAEOLOGY: Ancient Peoples on the Bard Lands

Christopher Lindner

. . W . . . . . . F

4:40 pm -6:00 pm 11:50 am -4:30 pm

HEG 300 Rose 108

SCI

Cross-listed: American Studies; Environmental & Urban Studies  This semester will be the 4th season of excavation at the 6,000-year-old Forest site after its discovery in Spring 2012 and the expansion of testing over the last 2 fall terms. Several hearths or fireplaces were recently found that may contain the oldest pottery in the Northeast. Knowledge of this key millennium in this region is sparse. We will concentrate initially on the location of another activity area for the manufacture and use of stone tools. Their utilization can be identified in the lab by replicative experimentation and microscopic analysis of wear patterns. We will later focus on the known hearth area. The skills, technical and conceptual, that Bardians learn in the course equip them for participation in the field of Cultural Resource Management. The class will meet Wednesdays for discussion of background texts on the Lenape [“People” in their language], CRM, and archaeological sites at Bard and its region. Field and lab work will take place on Fridays or Saturday afternoons dependent upon individual schedules. Enrollment by interview with the professor. Class size: 12

91460

MUS 218 Musical Exoticisms

Maria Sonevytsky

. T . Th .

3:10 pm -4:30 pm

BLM N210

HUM/DIFF

See Music section for description.

91675

HIST 2237 Radio Africa: Broadcasting History

Drew Thompson

M . W . .

1:30 pm -2:50 pm

OLIN 203

HIST

See History section for description.

91642

ANTH 244 Anthropology of the Body

Diana Brown

M . W . .

1:30 pm -2:50 pm

OLIN 202

SSCI

Cross-listed: Gender & Sexuality Studies; Science, Technology & Society 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. Class size: 22

91560

ANTH 245 Travelers AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE IMAGE OF Sub-Saharan Africa

Mario Bick

. T . Th .

10:10 am- 11:30 am

OLIN 107

SSCI/DIFF

Cross-listed: Africana Studies; Global & Int’l Studies The course will read and analyze travel accounts of Sub-Saharan Africa to try to understand how non-African travelers experienced this area, and how their writings contributed to the image of and imagining of Africa by the Western world. Accounts will be drawn from the end of the 18^th century to the present, by explorers, travelers and journalists. Class size: 18

91643

ANTH 261 AnthropOLOgy OF Violence AND Suffering

Laura Kunreuther

M . W . .

11:50 am -1:10 pm

OLIN 203

HUM/DIFF

Cross-listed: Asian Studies, Gender & Sexuality Studies, Global & Int’l Studies, Human Rights (core course), Science, Technology & Society Why do acts of violence continue to grow in the ‘modern’ world? In what ways has violence become naturalized in the contemporary world? In this course, we will consider how acts of violence challenge and support modern ideas of humanity, raising important questions about what it means to be human today. These questions lie at the heart of anthropological thinking and also structure contemporary discussions of human rights. Anthropology’s commitment to “local culture” and cultural diversity has meant that anthropologists often position themselves in critical opposition to “universal values,” which have been used to address various forms of violence in the contemporary world. The course will approach different forms of violence, including ethnic and communal conflicts, colonial education, torture and its individualizing effects, acts of terror and institutionalized fear, and rituals of bodily pain that mark individuals’ inclusion or exclusion from a social group. The course is organized around three central concerns. First, we will discuss violence as a means of producing and consolidating social and political power, and exerting political control. Second, we will look at forms of violence that have generated questions about “universal rights” of humanity versus culturally specific practices, such as widow burning in India and female genital mutilation in postcolonial Africa. In these examples, we explore gendered dimensions in the experience of violence among perpetrators, victims, and survivors. Finally, we will look at the ways human rights institutions have sought to address the profundity of human suffering and pain, and ask in what ways have they succeeded and/or failed. Readings will range from theoretical texts, anthropological ethnographies, as well as popular representations of violence in the media and film. Class size: 22

91640

ANTH 277 IN THE GARDEN OF EMPIRE: Nature & Power in THE MODERN Middle East

Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins

. T . Th .

1:30 pm -2:50 pm

OLIN 202

SSCI/DIFF

Cross-listed: Environmental & Urban Studies; Global & Int’l Studies, Middle East Studies; Science, Technology & Society “Culture” has long been a key explanatory framework for scholars studying the modern Middle East. It has also been critical to the sorting, surveiling, managing and mobilizing techniques used by colonial and post-colonial regimes. Meanwhile nature, culture’s doppleganger, has been quietly at work “purifying” the category of “culture” from the objects and processes assumed to be external to it. This course brings “nature” out of culture’s shadows in order to examine how ideas about nature and the natural have shaped social scientific and historical scholarship on, and political and cultural formations within, the modern Middle East. We will investigate the relationship between nature and power in contexts of empire, decolonization and postcoloniality. Under the broad term “nature” we will consider such diverse topics as kinship, nationalism, violence, technology, war, race, gender, sexuality, environmentalism, fossil fuels and genetics. What role do genetics play in twenty-first century Middle East politics? How have practices of “taming” and managing nature and its resources shaped the parameters within which political authority—and revolution—can emerge? What can the study of the Middle East tell us about the extent to which homosexuality is a biological universal? What are the tensions between the idea of competing “environmental imaginaries” and theories that the nonhuman environment (e.g. rivers, dams, mosquitoes) has helped determine political, social and economic outcomes in the Middle East? Class size: 22

91561

ANTH 331 TOXIC MODERNITIES: AnthroPOLOGY in AND of THE Nuclear Age

Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins

. . . Th .

10:10 am- 12:30 pm

Albee 106

SSCI

Cross-listed: Environmental & Urban Studies; Human Rights; Science, Technology & Society This seminar is an anthropological investigation of nuclear proliferation and its discontents. We will read ethnographic, historical and literary texts in order to trace the effects of this radically new form of toxicity on cultural reproduction. Our view will therefore be both capillary (from below) and global in scale. Our geographical scope will include readings about North America, Europe, the Middle East and East Asia. At the same time we will consider how the nuclear age has evoked the reconceptualization of longstanding ideas about memory, citizenship, psychology, materiality, political boundaries and nature. Readings and discussions will consider questions including: What is nuclear fear and who has it? How has the nuclear age changed perceptions of the underground? What is the relationship between nuclear testing and climate change? How have nuclear disasters changed the meanings of biological risk, biosecurity and governmental uncertainty? Is there an affect particular to the nuclear age? How has citizenship been transformed in proximity to nuclear toxicity? Can nature be nuclear? Is there a sensory politics particular to the nuclear age? Is there such a thing as a “nuclear imagination”? What are the temporalities of environmental governance in the wake of nuclear leaks and explosions? Class size: 15

91805

ANTH / SOC 339 Seminar in Social Performance

Sarah Egan

. . . Th .

3:10 pm -5:30 pm

OLINLC 210

SSCI

See Sociology section for description.

91644

ANTH 350 Contemporary Cultural Theory

Laura Kunreuther

. T . . .

10:10 am- 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