Adopting a cross-cultural, historical and interpretive perspective, we will explore the idea that anthropology is an attempt "to understand how human beings understand themselves and see their actions and behavior as in some ways the creations of those understandings." We examine the core of the anthropological approach in our conceptualization of the concept of culture as negotiated, dynamic and contested, in our method of ethnographic fieldwork and participant observation, and in our spatially and historically comparativist approach. We pay special attention to the politics of nationalism and cultural identity; the anthropology of place; environmental transformation; gender, sexuality and the body; postcolonialism; and the global commodification of culture.

The relationship of human biology to behavior and the nature of cultures couched in terms of putative biological differences between human groups and subgroups has characterized scientific discourse since the late eighteenth century. This has been especially true in anthropology as the discipline has sought to answer questions of race (human variation), gender, sexuality, and some forms of compulsive behavior. This course examines scientific racism, sexism, criminology, and other biological phobias, reductionisms, and rationalizations. It does so by studying the contexts, claims, achievements, and failures of normal science (especially physical anthropology and human biology and genetics) in regard to the significance of the real and assumed variations among individuals and among human populations. Central to the discussion are concepts of race and the scientific evidence that is used to support these concepts. By permission of the instructor.

From an ethnomedical perspective, all notions of health and illness and forms of treatment are taken as socioculturally constructed, embedded within 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, and alternative medical systems such as chiropractic and acupuncture in contemporary American society, epidemic diseases such as malaria and AIDS, colonial constructions of the diseased body in sub-Saharan Africa, female circumcision, Kuru sorcery, and humoral medicine and susto (fright) in Latin America.

Prerequisites: Anthropology 101 or permission of the instructor.

The music of the Caribbean region has had a profound impact on world music. Cuban son and rumba Jamaican ska and reggae, Trinidadian calypso and soca, Haitian compas and mizik rasin, and French Antillean beguine and zouk are among the Caribbean musical genres that are performed, marketed, and consumed internationally. This course will explore the complex history that produced this rich and enormously diverse regional musical culture, which has roots in Africa, Europe, and several other parts of the world. Special attention will be given to the ways in which Caribbean musical styles, both at home and when exported to new contexts (such as Europe, the U.S., and Africa), have come to express and embody a multiplicity of identities defined by notions of race, ethnicity, gender, class and various kinds of nationalism. The significant related questions of resistance, accommodation, and musical appropriation will also be examined. The course will incorporate perspectives from music history, anthropology, cultural studies, and especially, ethnomusicology ( a field that has produced a growing and increasingly sophisticated literature on the close association between music and identity), using these to shed light on readings and musical examples from across the region. Students will also be expected to attend performances of Caribbean music in the area, and to analyze and interpret these, drawing on the ethnomusicological methodologies discussed in the course.

The shtetls, the small-town Jewish communities of Eastern Europe, were the locus of Jewish life in Eastern Europe prior to the Holocaust. Partially self-contained, shaped both by the surrounding gentile world, and the internal dynamics of Askenazic Judaism, the world of the shtetl imprinted American Jewish imagination through the art and writings of such artists as Sholem Aleichem, Isaac Bashevis Singer and Marc Chagall. The site of Yiddish, the Hassidic movement, dybbuks, Fiddler on the Roof, pogroms and radical political movements, the shtetl has been transformed into both a sentimental and a terrifying site of American Jewish collective memory and fantasy. The course will explore this world through films and photography, literature and art, anthropology and history, folklore and sociology to try to frame and excavate its complex realities and its power to define a unique Jewish identity.

This seminar examines the state of contemporary ethnographic practice, by studying recent innovations in ethnography which explore formal, stylistic, and theoretical experiments in order to represent how some Southeast Asian peoples engage historical processes of global and local cultural production. Seminar discussions will focus on several ethnographies, which may include: Clifford Geertz's Negara, on precolonial Balinese Kingship up to their last act of defiance--a willing, suicidal walk of the royal class into the gunfire of Dutch invaders; Aiwa Ong's Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline, on Malaysian workers who resist capitalist discipline through spontaneous spirit possession on the factory floor; Anna Tsing's In the Realm of the Diamond Queen, about how Meratus Dayaks in an out-of-the-way corner of the Indonesian State retell the politics of marginalization; Mary Steedly's Hanging without a Rope, an ethnography of narrative, historical memory, and communication with spirits in Karoland; Benedict Anderson's controversial Imagined Communities, on the historical construction of the sense of nation; Atkinson and Errington's Power and Difference, on gender and power in New Order island Southeast Asia; Night Markets, on prostitution and the miracle economy of Thailand; and several works on the history of Buddhism, political violence, meditation, spirit mediumship, money, and the creation of modern capitalism in Thailand. The seminar will explore what anthropology and ethnography can illuminate about the local vicissitudes of global powers, but Southeast Asian forms of thought and practice can also reflect critically back upon these cultural-historical processes. The seminar will include a substantial theoretical component in order to read epistemologies of spirit possession into the critique of capital, read Southeast Asian religious practices of gifts and money into the heurism of political economy and history, and read Buddhist theories of culture and consciousness into anthropological ones. In attending to globalization, special attention will be given to moral discourses of new-age capitalism after the Asian currency crisis. Prerequisite: qualification for the seminar to be determined by individual consultation with the instructor.