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.

Beside the emergence of experimental ethnography and the approaches of cultural studies, Malinowski's formula for doing fieldwork stands: to acquire concrete statistical documentation through mapping the anatomy of a culture, to focus on the imponderabilia of daily life through minute observation, and to engage the documents of native mentality through ethnographic statements and narrative. This class juxtaposes accounts that focus on the experience of doing fieldwork, with writing ethnographic field notes, and with doing ethnography through participant observation, interviewing, archival work, and visual and textual analysis. Fieldwork exercises contribute to the completion of a field-based research project, while attending to ethical principles and the gathering, recording, and analyzing of data through a variety of techniques, such as the genealogical method, the collection of life narratives, the extended case method, network analysis, ritual and performance analysis, discourse analysis, and ethnosemantics. We attend also to emergent ethnographic forms and methods, such as multisited and critical ethnography, and indigenous methodologies and critiques. Prerequisite: Anthropology 101.

Modernist assumptions about the inevitability, viability and centrality of state formation in the Third World have been challenged by the post-Cold War and post-colonial breakdown of a number of African nation states. This course will examine the histories and cultures of Liberia and Sierra Leone, dramatic examples of recent state collapse, exploring theories of the nation state, and of state collapse though an anthropological lens focused on local cultures and the unique histories of these two states. We will seek to critically and contextually examine assumptions about the nation state, and think about the future of the state in these countries. Material for the course will be drawn from anthropological, political and journalistic sources, as well as films and personal narrative of the civil conflicts in these countries.

Material remains are useful to complement or challenge historical information. Archaeology can also uncover transformations of the environment that were unintentionally irresponsible or planned to create illustrations of power over nature. We will focus on change in the urban and rural landscapes of the Middle Atlantic states and the Northeast, respectively. Colonization and slavery on the southeastern coast will be examined in regard plantations. While it will include several field trips, Historical Archeology will concentrate on laboratory study of artifacts for practical experience. Limited to 15 students, by permission of the instructor.

The course will develop the notion of linguistic typology based on the comparative study of the morphology and syntax of the languages of the world. We will consider how languages vary both with regard to categories of linguistic form and linguistic 'meaning', with a view to exploring both how different languages encode familiar grammatical concepts in unfamiliar ways, as well as how languages use familiar grammatical means to encode unfamiliar grammatical concepts. We will consider linguistic variation in, among other things, parts of speech, word order, case making, grammatical relations (subject, object), grammatical categories of reference (for example, 'animacy'), predication (for example, aspectual categories) and propositionality (for example, coding of categories of time, evidence, attitude), relative clauses, and configurationality, all with reference to both the familiar languages of Europe and less familiar languages of the Americas, Africa and Eurasia.
Prerequisite: previous experience with linguistics (ANTH 115) or permission of the instructor.

This class is intended to cover the basic issues and problems involved in integrating the study of language (understood as a system of signs) with the study of culture and society. The class will introduce approaches including language as signs in themselves, language in interactional context, and language as an aspect of culture and society. We will cover various topics in the relation of language to its social context including analysis of conversation, ritual and poetic language, deference and honorific systems, language and gender, social class and ethnicity (especially language use in multilingual speech communities and modern nation-states), and the relation of variation in linguistic categorization to variation in cultural categorization. Attention will be paid to the various ways that language both is a product of socio-cultural systems at the same time as it produces them.

Since the 1970s, feminists have added to the growing criticisms of development theory and practice their own questions and critiques concerning the ways in which women are conceptualized and targeted in development programs, and the impact of such programs on gender relations at the local and global level. This course will examine formulations and critiques of both gender and development, and will explore their application in settings ranging from agricultural villages to industrial centers. We will consider the impact of global political economic changes and specific development projects on the activities of women and men in the labor force, in the household, and in secular and religious institutions and ideologies that impact on the construction of notions of gender and identity, paying attention to the interface of changing gender hierarchies with those of social class, race and ethnicity. Local level socio-cultural practices and systems of knowledge with which women and men confront "development", and through which they seek their own creative and empowering solutions to the problems and opportunities it poses for them will be highlighted. Focus on Latin America.
Prerequisite: Anthropology 101 or permission of the instructor.

Musics of sub-Saharan Africa, along with their offshoots in the Americas, have intrigued (and puzzled) European and American travelers and writers for centuries. Only in the last four or five decades, however, have Western scholars (as well as African scholars trained in Western disciplines) begun the serious study of this vast and tremendously diverse musical terrain. This course traces and probes the ongoing encounter between African musics and those "outside" observers and students who have written about ( or otherwise represented) these musics. While the aim of the course is to achieve a clearer understanding of African musical sounds and contexts themselves, the assumption is that this can best be attained through a close examination of the intercultural encounters through which knowledge of "African music" has been produced and disseminated. Readings will range from early European and American travel reports to the growing ethnomusicological literature based on long-term ethnographic studies of musical life within specific African contexts. Some attention will also be given to African-related musics of the Americas, as well as the new urban musics that have proliferated on the African continent itself in recent years. But the focus will remain on those musical genres and contexts often spoken of as "traditional,'" which remain vital across sub-Saharan Africa. Depending on the interest and preparedness of students, the course might include a performance component as well.

Cross-listed: LAIS
This course proposes a historical, linguistic, and ethnographic survey of pictorial and alphabetical textual genres produced by native authors in the cultural region of Mesoamerica (which encompassed various regions in Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras) from the pre-conquest period to the present. Departing from an examination of pictographic and ideographic writing systems and oral genres in use before the conquest, we will explore the appropriation of alphabetical writing by preexisting historical and ritual genres, trace the emergence of novel colonial genres-legal records, annals, devotional writings, etc.-investigate native rhetoric and poetics, and examine the rapports between native historical consciousness and textual production. Through an inquiry into writing and reading practices, this course will address the intellectual and ethnographic context of production and the dynamics of reception of these texts. This course ends with a brief consideration of current works produced by contemporary indigenous authors. Readings will focus on recent translations of select works in Nahuatl, Yucatec, Quiché, and Zapotec.

Cross-listed: CRES, History, Victorian Studies.

Simultaneously an exploration of European ecological imperialism, an environmental history of settler societies, and an investigation into "future" (postcolonial) landscapes, this course draws on the anthropology of exploration and place, environmental history, natural history, cultural and historical geography, and "spatial science." Topics include agriculture as colonization; the significance of the "hunting cult"; emergent state strategies of resource management in game reserves and national park formation; the political ecology of burning, deforestation, and mining; contemporary discourses of sustainability; and the implications of ecotourism and adventure tours. The course focuses on the colonies, dominions and protectorates of the former British Empire in the Pacific, but comparative readings will draw also on Africa and India. Special attention is given to Australia and New Zealand as sites where particularly distinctive ecologies dramatically highlight processes of ecological colonization and decolonization from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century. Prerequisite: one course in anthropology, history, CRES, or Victorian Studies.

The distinction between journalistic reportage and ethnographic description are often difficult to distinguish. This seminar explores the relationship of journalism to anthropology through a close reading of major journalistic texts whose focus has been sociological and/or cross-cultural. In this reading we will try to understand the significance and nature of the journalistic versus the academic anthropological eye, word, method and theory. Among the journalists whose books we will read are Lincoln Steffens, Jacob Riis, A.J. Liebling, Jane Kramer, and recent writers on Rwanda, Liberia, the Congo, the Sudan and Bosnia.
Prerequisite: courses in Anthropology, Sociology, or Political Studies, or permission of the instructor.

This course examines the practice of ethnography in anthropology, with special emphasis on the role explicit theories of signs can play in the expansion of anthropological techniques. With the goal in mind of how to practice an anthropology of signs, this course will explore theories of signs in the study of power, exchange, myth, ritual, and aspects of everyday life. These theories may contrast with earlier and rather vague approaches to the role of signs in society going under the rubric of 'symbolic anthropology.' Various ethnographic localities will be selected for study in which the goals of anthropology are aided by careful attention to the ways in which aspects of the material world are appropriated as vehicles of signification to mediate social life.