American anthropology to the Second World War had three central concerns: (1) the description and understanding of Native American peoples based on participant observation through residential fieldwork. This concern began in the early nineteenth century, and was mainly directed from the Smithsonian Institution. This research focus was carried on in the twentieth century by the European-influenced Boasian school of anthropology, centered at Columbia University, which was also responsible for the modernization of anthropology, and the efforts of American anthropology to (2) defeat scientific racism, and (3) to place the concept of culture at the center of anthropological thought. This course examines this history, in the Boasian centenary year, as well as the rise of sociological, psychological and neomarxist evolutionist thought in American anthropology in this period. Works by such anthropologists as Frank Cushing, James Mooney, Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, Robert Lowie, Alfred Kroeber, Paul Radin, Melville Herskovits, Robert Redfield, Clyde Kluckhohn, Leslie White and Julian Steward will be read and discussed.

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.

Language provides both the cultural basis for apprehending and categorizing reality and the communicative basis for the production of social identity. We focus initially on various classical approaches to language, culture, and cognition, such as structuralism, ethnoscience, and the Whorfian hypothesis. Then we look at discourse-focused approaches including speech act theory, the ethnography of communication, and sociolingusitics, focusing in particular on the use of language in social and cultural contexts. We examine the communicative consequences of cultural difference by concentrating cross-culturally on differences of class, race, ethnicity and especially gender and sexuality. Topics include linguistic strategies such as code switching, gossip, silence, and interruption and verbal art as performance in oratory, persuasion, spells, and religious language.

Over the past ten years, the field of kinship theory in anthropology has seen some of its most innovative expansion in work on kinship in postindustrial capitalist societies. Work on topics such as adoption, divorce, gay families and the new reproductive technologies have all served to revitalize classic questions in the study of kinship such as what constitutes kin versus non-kin relationships? Can kin relationships be "chosen", altered or dismantled, and through what social or technological mechanisms? Does all kinship come down to questions of consanguinity and affinity, or "blood" and "marriage"? At the same time, new critiques of old models such as the genealogical method are requiring anthropologists to question the most basic assumptions underlying the discipline's engagement with kinship. Ultimately, what we will pursue in the class is an interrogation of the status of relationships in the twenty-first century, and from there work back to question the status of the person. In an age where the anticipation of clones, cyborgs, and animal-human hybrids is emerging out of science fiction and into the realm of science fact, what future is there for "the human family"?

Prerequisite: ANTH 101, or permission of the instructor.

Using classic texts of anthropology as well as literature, history, and films, this course looks broadly at representations of South Asia made by foreigners and South Asians alike. Throughout the course we use the most general definition of ethnography , focusing on how particular ways of describing South Asia shapes our knowledge about South Asia. We trace the development of certain categories which have become crucial to many ethnographic portrayals of India, such as village, caste, family, and gender as they are used in a variety of ethnographies. We begin with many of the colonial representations of South Asia - travelers accounts, photographs, and elaborate classification schemes of the 19th century -- all of which set the stage for anthropological categories. While the first part of the course shows the search for a unified and holistic view of India, the second part of the class looks closely and critically at the moments of conflict, fragmentation of different social groups, and violence, which have become a focus of interest for contemporary scholars and students of South Asia. Through the readings, lectures and class discussion, we situate each ethnographic piece within the larger historical contexts of colonialism, the Partition and Indian nationalism. The final part of the class looks more explicitly at South Asia in the global world-- from the culture of development to ethnography of public culture. Through these, we will discuss the challenges these texts provide and some uncanny similarities in the expression of anthropological categories "village", "caste", and even "culture" itself. Throughout the course, we will be looking at the work of two well-known Indian artists: Salman Rushdie and Satyajit Ray. Both complement and challenge some of the ethnographic texts we read. We will devote a portion of every week towards a discussion of their reflections on their own culture.

This course will focus on the British African colonies of the early 20^th century to explore the social political and ideological everyday lives of colonists. These "outsiders" will be studied through history, biography, fiction and film, as well as through the responses of Africans. Hypocrisy/idealism, brutality/bravery, racism/humanism, asceticism/corruption, repression/sexuality, sobriety/addiction will be among the realities encountered. The course seeks to develop an ethnographic portrayal of the rulers and the cultures they created in these colonial spaces; not British, not African, but something very much "other".

Although ethnographic and historical interpretations have often emerged as the intellectual by-product of colonial encounters, there still remains a methodological (and moral) uneasiness about this genesis, and a professional tendency among some historians and anthropologists to redirect their discipline's genealogy toward a more palatable ancestry. In an attempt to examine and learn from the uneasy unions between historical and ethnographic approaches, this course will examine the common empirical ground, as well as the fundamental theoretical and methodological differences between ethnographic and historical research. Departing from a review of current debates (such as the history of the uneasy unions of historical and ethnographic approaches, the status of ethnohistory, the theoretical foundations of historical ethnography, comparative theories of colonialism, the practice of oral history, and innovative approaches to the study of native sources), this course will feature several case studies-drawn primarily from colonial and post-colonial encounters in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the South Pacific-that will shed light on the often uneasy scholarly and conceptual interaction of these two disciplines. Readings will include works by de Certeau, Chartier, Cohn, J & J Comaroff, Foucault, Ginzburg, Gruzinski, Sahlins, Trouillot, and Vansina. Students will be encouraged to cross disciplinary boundaries as they complete and present their research projects.

Using literary, ethnographic and historical sources, this class will

introduce students to the relationship between the city and the country as a way to pursue modern ethnography. We will explore the city, and its representation, as a complex set of social and economic relations fundamental to modern social life. With Raymond Williams' The Country and the City as a base text, the course will focus on the changing distinctions drawn between 'city' and 'country' as reflective of the relations between social class, as well as a sign of changing perceptions of geography and time. We will situate ethnography in cities as part of a more general pattern in modern life to document distinct populations of people. Hannerz book Exploring the City will give an introduction to doing ethnography in the city and to tracing the powerful meanings that 'country' and 'city' have in different parts of the world. We will read ethnographies of contemporary cities like New York, London, the Zambian Copperbelt, Calcutta, and Kathmandu to gain insight into the political and cultural uses of specific cities. In addition to these readings, students will do their own ethnographic research and compose an ethnography on a particular group of people or practice that demonstrates the cultural, social and historical relationship between 'city' and 'country' in upstate New York. Other authors we will read: Walter Benjamin; Judith Walkowitz; David Henkin; Wolfgang Schivelbusch; George Simmel; Mike Davis.

Intellectual and cultural property and claims made in their name are rapidly expanding concepts, even as "knowledge" is increasingly reduced to "information" which can be transmitted almost instantaneously around the globe. Anthropologists are somewhat uniquely positioned vis-à-vis such claims in a dual capacity: both as authors and owners of intellectual property whose "raw materials" are their relationships in the field, and also as sometime advocates and expert witnesses for property claims made by the peoples with whom they work. In this course we will examine both of these contentious positions as well as a third, namely, the notions of property and transactions in intangibles; multiple ownership; and creativity and authorship, all areas in which anthropology has a long history of theoretical engagement. Our investigations will take us through anthropological, legal and other literatures in an exploration of how "rights" have come to be the language through which claims to intangible forms of property are expressed. Finally, the property regimes of non-European peoples will require us to ask how we distinguish between property in tangibles and intangibles, between cultural and natural resources.