91858

ANTH 101 A IntroDUCTION to Cultural Anthropology

Yuka Suzuki

M . W . .

11:50 am -1:10 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

91859

ANTH 101 B IntroDUCTION to Cultural Anthropology

Yuka Suzuki

M . W . .

1:30 pm -2:50 pm

OLIN 203

SSCI/DIFF

See above. Class size: 22

91833

ANTH / MUS 185 Intro to Ethnomusicology

Maria Sonevytsky

M . W . .

11:50 am -1:10 pm

BLM N210

SSCI/DIFF

Cross-listed: Music This course surveys the discipline of ethnomusicology, the study of music in and around its social and cultural contexts. Through our exploration of the materiality and meaning of music, we will listen to wide-ranging examples of sounds from around the globe. We will consider ways to listen deeply and to write critically about music. We will examine how music has been represented in the past and how it is variously represented today, and will develop ethnographic research and writing skills. We will ask questions about the utility and value of music as a commodity in our everyday lives and in our globalized world. We will debate the ethics of musical appropriations and collaborations. We will examine both the foundational questions of the discipline (addressing debates about musical authenticity, musical origins, universals, comparative frameworks, and the preservationist ethos) as well as recent subjects of ethnomusicological concern. Topics will include: media and technology; post-colonial issues; music and language; hybridity; circulation and consumption; music and labor; music and gender; and the relevance of music to contemporary indigenous politics and human rights. Students are expected to read assigned readings in advance of class, participate in weekly discussions online and in class, take a midterm and final exam, and produce a variety of informal and formal written assignments (ranging from one-paragraph reading responses to two papers that are 5-7 pages in length).

Class size: 20

91860

ANTH 211 Field MEthOds: Environmental Archaeology: ANCIENT PEOPLES ON THE BARD LANDS

Christopher Lindner

. . W . . Su or F

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

HEG 300

SCI

Cross-listed: American Studies; Environmental & Urban Studies  This semester will be the 5th 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 3 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 Sunday afternoons dependent upon individual schedules. Enrollment by interview with the professor. Class size: 12

91861

ANTH 213 Anthropology of Medicine

Diana Brown

M . W . .

1:30 pm -2:50 pm

OLIN 201

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

91868

ANTH 221 Unnatural States: Theories and Ethnographies of Statehood Today

Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins

. T . Th .

3:10 pm -4:30 pm

OLIN 201

SSCI/DIFF

Cross-listed: Environmental & Urban Studies, Global & Int’l Studies, Human Rights, Middle Eastern Studies This course explores the following questions: 1) What is a state? 2) Whose is the state? 3) How are states built? 4) Where is the state? We draw on research from the United States, South Africa, Australia, Sudan, France, Togo, Cameroon, Syria, Germany, Indonesia, Egypt, England, Gaza, and Venezuela. We begin with foundational theories of the state (e.g. Marx, Weber, Arendt, Althusser, Foucault, Bourdieu). We then turn to ethnographic cases to investigate the unlikely relationships between phenomena such as corruption, borders, railroads, the standardization of time, nuclear power, bureaucracies, forest fires and science, on the one hand, and the effects, and meanings, of statehood and state-making in the modern world, on the other. How do institutions, practices and people come to appear like a state in the first place? What networks and what processes of representation allow us to call states “green,” “militarized,” “neoliberal,” “socialist” or “police” states? How do we know when a state has become “post-colonial”? In asking these questions we will assume that environmental conditions, scientific practices and military technologies that help uphold state apparatuses are sociotechnical objects (per Bruno Latour), and can sometimes be manipulated by, forces we usually think of as distinctly political, economic, cultural or social. We will conclude with an examination of a question inspired by the recent political mobilizations in Ferguson, M.O. In what ways does it make sense —and in what ways does it not—to call the U.S. a “police state”? Class size: 22

91835

ANTH / MUS 236 Music, Sexuality & Gender

Maria Sonevytsky

. T . Th .

10:10 am -11:30 am

BLM N217

AART

Cross-listed: Gender & Sexuality Studies, Music This course surveys musicological approaches to the study of sexuality and gender, asking how music informs and reflects cultural constructions of femininity and masculinity. Taking wide-ranging examples that include opera, popular music, folk and indigenous musics, we will investigate how modern gendered subjectivities are negotiated through musical practices such as composition, performance and consumption. Class readings will include musicological, anthropological, feminist, Marxist and queer theory approaches. Students will practice writing skills in a variety of formal and informal formats, culminating in an in-class presentation based on original research. Class size: 20

91863

ANTH 240 Introduction to Media

Laura Kunreuther

. T . Th .

11:50 am -1:10 pm

OLIN 204

HUM

Cross-listed: Experimental Humanities (core course), Science, Technology & Society This course offers a foundation in media history and theory, with a focus on how to use aspects of traditional humanistic approaches such as close reading and visual literacy to critically engage with both traditional and new media. As people around the world engage on a daily (and even hourly) basis with a variety of different media and technology, humanities scholars have turned their attention to ways new and old media shape people’s perception of time, space, publicity, knowledge, social and personal identity. Just as culture is being reshaped by everyday media practices, media itself has reshaped our idea of culture and humanity. The premise of this course is that the new-ness of new media can only be approached against the background of humanistic experimentation and imagination with both old and new media. Drawing on key media theorists, such as, Walter Benjamin, Fredrick Kittler, Marshall McLuhen, Donna Haraway, Katherine Hayles, Henry Jenkins, and others, we will examine topics that include “old media” like money and writing/print culture, as well as the rise of electronic media like the motion picture, radio, and digital media - what Jenkins has called the “convergence culture” of today. As part of our ongoing examinations of how material conditions shape discourse, we will assess our own positions as users, consumers, and potential producers of media. This course fulfills a requirement for the Experimental Humanities concentration, and will involve a “practice” component that complements our engagement with media theory.

Class size: 22

91864

ANTH 249 Travel, Tourism & Anthropology

Laura Kunreuther

. T . Th .

1:30 pm -2:50 pm

OLIN 205

HUM

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.

Class size: 22

91865

ANTH 250 Reading Baseball as Metaphor

Mario Bick

. T . Th .

10:10 am -11:30 am

OLIN 107

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. Class size: 20

91866

ANTH 256 Race and Ethnicity in Brazil

Mario Bick

M . W . .

10:10 am -11:30 am

OLIN 305

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 19th and early 20th 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, and recent government policies. The groups to be discussed are: indigenous/native Brazilians, the Luso-Brazilians, Japanese Brazilians, Euro-ethic Brazilians, and Brazilians of Arab and Jewish descent. Class size: 20

92023

ANTH 334 LANGUAGE, MIGRATION & GLOBALIZATION

Andrew Carruthers

. . . . F

1:30 pm – 3:50 pm

OLINLC 208

SSCI/DIFF

How does language shape global phenomena like transnationalism and diasporic populations? How are mobility and migration negotiated through everyday social interaction and language use? This course will use linguistic anthropological approaches to understand how the ‘very big’ is reflected in the ‘very small.’ We will begin by exploring the ideologies inherent in everyday speech, evaluating how language use is linked to social identities like class, race, gender, and to social personae like ‘the migrant,’ ‘the refugee,’ or the diasporic subject more generally. We then explore the political culture of languages in and across nation-states, attending to their uses and values in unprecedented global flows of information, goods, and people. The final part of the course draws upon ethnographic accounts of how these global processes are shaped through various channels of communication: face-to-face talk, the telephone, television, and the internet. Possible texts include Anderson’s Imagined Communities, Appadurai’s Modernity at Large, Mendoza-Denton’s Homegirls, and Eisenlohr’s Little India. Class size: 15

91867

ANTH 349 Political Ecology

Yuka Suzuki

. T . . .

10:10 am -12:30 pm

OLIN 306

SSCI/DIFF

Cross-listed: Africana Studies; Environmental & Urban Studies; Human Rights; Global & Int’l Studies; Science, Technology & Society, Sociology Bridging two prominent schools of thought from the 1960s to the 1980s, political ecology emerged in the early 1990s from the intersection between cultural ecology and political economy. Based on the principle that environmental conditions are the product of political processes, the field is interdisciplinary in orientation, integrating the work of anthropologists, geographers, historians, political scientists, and sociologists. Through close attention to local historical and social contexts, we will explore topics such as the politics of knowledge, state power, sustainable development, mapping, urban ecology, corporations and conservation, and multilateral environmental governance. The majority of the readings will be drawn from case studies in sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Priority will be given to moderated students in Anthropology and Environmental and Urban Studies. Class size: 15

91869

ANTH 350 Contemporary Cultural Theory

Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins

. . . Th .

10:10 am -12:30 pm

OLIN 308

HUM/DIFF

Cross-listed: Environmental & Urban Studies, 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