Course

ANTH 101   Introduction to Cultural Anthropology

Professor

Megan Callaghan

CRN

17007

 

Schedule

Mon Wed   3:00 -4:20 pm      OLIN 201

Distribution

OLD: A/C

NEW: Social Science / Rethinking Difference

Related interest: Global & Int’l Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies

During the past few decades, `culture’ has suddenly become pervasive in popular discourses, with phrases such as `internet,’ `fetish,’ and `corporate cultures’ automatically conjuring certain sets of images and assumptions. This course explores the intellectual angles through which anthropologists have engaged culture as a central, and yet often elusive concept in understanding how societies work. The analysis of culture has undergone many transformations over the past century, from arguing for the existence of integrated systems of thought and practice among so-called `primitives’, to scrutinizing the cultural values of colonial subjects, to attempting to decipher the anatomy of enemy minds during World War II. In recent years, anthropology has become more self-reflexive, questioning the discipline’s authority to represent other societies, and critiquing its participation in the creation of exoticized others. Thus, with our ethnographic gaze turned inward as well as outward, we will combine discussions, lectures, and films to reflect upon the construction of social identity, power, and difference in a world where cultures are undergoing rapid reification. Specific topics we will examine include the transformative roles of ritual and symbol; witchcraft and sorcery in historical and contemporary contexts; cultural constructions of gender and sexuality; and nationalism and the making of majorities/minorities in post-colonial states.  On-line registration 

 

Course

ANTH / HIST 2103  Global Core Course: Cultural Politics of Empire: The Case of British India

Professor

Laura Kunreuther / Lia Paradis

CRN

17494

 

Schedule

Tu Th          1:00 -2:20 pm      OLIN 102

Distribution

OLD: C

NEW: History

Cross-listed: History,  Victorian Studies

Related interest: Gender & Sexuality Studies

The focus of this course is the reciprocal impact that Britain and India had on each other as a result of the British imperial presence in India from the mid- 19th Century until decolonization in 1948. No other colony was more prized or the object of more fantasy than India, “The Jewel in the Crown.” It is important, however, to acknowledge that imperialism did not only profoundly change the cultures of the Indian subcontinent but also the British people themselves – both those who were first-hand participants (soldiers, administrators, entrepreneurs, etc.) and those citizens who never left Britain. Domestic politics, science, popular culture and education were all changed irrevocably by the imperial project. In India, sites of resistance to the imperial project were also sites of negotiation, where the rhetorical model of the Enlightenment and the central tenets of British liberal ideology were adopted and recast to give voice to the Indian nationalist movement. On-line registration

 

Course

ANTH 212   Historical Archaeology: Early Inhabitants of the Bard Lands, 1650-1850

Professor

Christopher Lindner

CRN

17181

 

Schedule

Mon Wed   1:30 -2:50 pm      OLIN 306

Distribution

OLD: C/E

NEW: Social Science

Cross-listed:  American Studies

Field trips on campus and in neighboring towns provide first-hand contact with diverse groups who left their vestiges here: Native Americans, African-Americans, German, and British settlers. The class will work with their artifacts  and faunal remains in the lab and visit excavations after reading background  material on their history, culture, and archaeological interpretation. Limited to 15, by permission of instructor. Contact Prof. Lindner  prior to On-line registration registration.   On-line registration

 

Course

ANTH 213   Anthropology of Medicine

Professor

Diana Brown

CRN

17225

 

Schedule

Mon Wed   1:30 -2:50 pm      OLIN 107

Distribution

OLD: C

NEW: Social Science

Cross-listed: Gender 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.

 

Course

ANTH / HR 233  Problems in Human Rights

Professor

John Ryle

CRN

17465

 

Schedule

Mon Wed   9:00 - 10:20 am   OLIN 310

Distribution

OLD: A

NEW: Social Science

Cross-listed: Human Rights (core course), PIE core course

The global expansion of the human rights movement has been accompanied by a high degree of professionalization in research and advocacy and an expanding body of rights doctrine. But the ascendancy of human rights discourse has not gone unchallenged. The course approaches current debates about rights through an examination of the problems faced and techniques developed in specific campaigns - from the nineteenth-century anti-slavery campaign to the landmine ban campaign of the 1990s. The course has a practical bias. How are human rights reports written?  How do human rights organizations measure their success?  What is the difference in approach between different organizations, e.g. Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the International Committee of the Red Cross?  The course considers the challenges to the western discourse of human rights posed by such issues as child soldiers and female genital cutting. When, if ever, are indigenous values more important than universal principles?  It looks at the question of genocide and the failure of international action in Rwanda and Sudan.  And it considers the current embrace of human rights discourse by the evangelical Christian movement and its relation to the original anti-slavery campaign. What is the relation of human rights to religious values?  Has human rights itself become a kind of religion?  Finally, what are the limits of rights? Do animals have rights?  Which animals?  And what rights?  On-line registration 

 

Course

ANTH 250   Reading Baseball as Metaphor

Professor

Mario Bick

CRN

17180

 

Schedule

Mon Wed   9:00 - 10:20 am   OLIN 201

Distribution

OLD: A/C

NEW: Social Science

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.

 

Course

ANTH / HR 261   Anthropology of Violence and Suffering

Professor

Laura Kunreuther

CRN

17013

 

Schedule

Tu Th          4:00 -5:20 pm      OLIN 204

Distribution

OLD: A/C

NEW: Humanities / Rethinking Difference

Cross-listed: Gender and Sexuality Studies, Human Rights (core course)

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.  This course fulfills a core class requirement for the Human Rights program. On-line registration

 

Course

ANTH 270   Gender and  Feminism in Anthropology

Professor

Megan Callaghan

CRN

17010

 

Schedule

Tu Th          2:30 -3:50 pm      OLIN 204

Distribution

OLD: A

NEW: Social Science

Cross-listed: Gender and Sexuality Studies, Human Rights

This course examines the emergence and transformation of gender studies within anthropology since the 1970s.  We will read early texts that challenged anthropologists to recognize women’s lives as valid subjects of study, as well as more recent work that encompasses constructions of both femininities and masculinities.  In doing so, we will explore the division between and interrelation of biological and social factors in determining sex and gender.  How are perceived biological differences accorded social meaning in various contexts?  How are bodies interpreted and shaped within gender discourses?  Additionally, we will focus on the politics of gender, including its relation to ideologies of colonialism, nationalism, and capitalism.  How are broader political and economic forces connected to kinship, reproduction, work, and sexuality?  How do anthropologies of gender relate to political feminism, construed narrowly as advocacy of women’s rights or more broadly as attention to the role of gender in structuring society?  Finally, how might one do feminist anthropology?  This course includes examination of cross-cultural constructions of gender structures and practices.  It also requires critical interpretation of gender and sexuality in contemporary American popular culture.  Prior experience with anthropology is preferable but not necessary. On-line registration

 

Course

ANTH 278   The State in Sub-Saharan Africa

Professor

Mario Bick

CRN

17009

 

Schedule

Tu Th          9:00 - 10:20 am   OLIN 107

Distribution

OLD: A

NEW: Social Science

Cross-listed: Human Rights

An exploration of state formation in Sub-Saharan Africa beginning with pre-colonial states, the colonial settler and administrative states, the course then shifts to contemporary post-colonial nation states, collapsed and vampire states. Case studies will be drawn primarily from Liberia, Uganda and Zimbabwe.

 

Course

ANTH 279   Islam and Europe

Professor

Jeffrey Jurgens

CRN

17012

 

Schedule

Tu Th          10:30 - 11:50 am  OLIN 305

Distribution

OLD: C

NEW: Social Science / Rethinking Difference

Cross-listed: Global & International Studies, Human Rights,  Middle Eastern Studies, Studies in Race and Ethnicity

This course examines Islam and its practitioners’ complex relationships with Europe as a geographic territory, sociopolitical entity, and discursive category.  While there has been a great deal of attention recently paid to Muslim immigration and settlement since World War II, the Islamic presence in (what came to be known as) Europe dates back to Arab and Berber incursions into the Iberian Peninsula in the eighth century.  In addition, Islam, Muslims, and Muslim polities have left a significant imprint on Eastern Europe, primarily as a result of the Ottoman Empire’s expansion into the Balkans.  Given this long-standing presence, why is Islam so commonly conceived as a moral and cultural formation external to Europe, European history, and European identities?  Why are Muslims regarded (at best) as in Europe but not of it?  How does this tacit or explicit exclusion shape the everyday practices and perceptions of Muslims who currently live there?  And finally, how does the representation of Muslims as a fundamentally foreign element inform contemporary debates about Islam’s compatibility with secularism and liberal democratic citizenship?  This course will examine these questions through readings, films, and other materials that work comparatively across national contexts and historical eras.  It will include a number of case studies relating, among other themes, to the publication of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, Turkey’s admission to the European Union, the recent depictions of the Prophet Muhammad in cartoon form, and the response to remarks by Pope Benedict XVI.

On-line registration

 

Course

ANTH 280  The Edge of Anthropology

Professor

John Ryle

CRN

17466

 

Schedule

Mon Wed   12:00 - 1:20 pm   OLIN 310

Distribution

OLD: A

NEW: Social Science

Cross-listed:  Human Rights

Anthropological writing is diverse both in style and in subject. The course examines the range of genres and techniques that anthropologists and others have used to convey the lived experience of other cultures. It examines the tension within the discipline between the desire to make these cultures vivid and comprehensible and the need to respect difference and to render the whole in a framework of theory.  It considers the aesthetic problems and ethical controversies that arise from writing at the limits of academic discourse. The genres addressed include classic field-based ethnographic monographs, travel narratives, historically-informed critiques of earlier ethnographies, reflexive accounts of the process of field work, journalistic reportage, visual documentation and works of fiction. The course takes the form of close readings of outstanding examples, drawn mainly from the anthropology of Africa and Latin America, and set in context by accounts from other media. Works considered include Claude Levi-Strauss’ Tristes Tropiques, The Children of Sanchez by Oscar Lewis, City of Women by Ruth Landes, Sharon Hutchinson’s Nuer Dilemmas, Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge by Carlos Castaneda, Madumo by Adam Ashforth, Don Kulick’s Travestí, Michael Taussig’s My Cocaine Museum, The Last of the Nuba by Leni Riefenstahl and Samba by Alma Guillermoprieto.   On-line registration

 

Course

MUS 287   Musical Ethnography

Professor

Mercedes Dujunco

CRN

17341

 

Schedule

Tu Fr           10:30 - 11:50 am BLUM N210

Distribution

OLD: A

NEW: Analysis of Art /

Rethinking Difference

Cross-listed: Anthropology, Studies in race and Ethnicity

This course provides practical instruction in field research and analytical methods in ethnomusicology.  It is intended to assist students who are considering doing a senior project that is ethnomusicological in nature in sorting through critical decisions regarding choice of topic, area interests, research models, etc. by providing a sense of the field, its options, and the real-life practice of ethnomusicology.  Topics will include research design, grantsmanship, fieldwork, participant observation, writing fieldnotes, interviews and oral histories, survey instruments, textual analysis, audio-visual methods, archiving, performance as methodology, historical research, and the poetics, ethics, and politics of cultural representation. Students will conceive, design, and carry out a limited research project over the course of a semester.  To prepare for the experience of applying for research grants in the future, they will also write up a proposal for a project (this may be the same as the semester project) and defend it in a mock review by a small panel that will include faculty and/or scholars from related disciplines. On-line registration

 

Course

ANTH 348   Discipline, Punishment,  and the Embodied Self in China

Professor

Angela Zito

CRN

17182

 

Schedule

Mon  3:00 – 5:20 pm  OLIN 101

Distribution

OLD: A

NEW: Social Science / Rethinking Difference

Cross-listed:  Asian Studies, Human Rights

Writing the history of people of  another culture presents problems different from those found in the Euro-american context because we cannot know that categories of experience will be the same. This cultural-historical course provides an extended exploration of the Chinese construction of basic categories like gender, body, family and belief.  Issues of embodiment  and selfhood (two important categories in anthropological thinking) will especially  provide us with a basis for understanding how Chinese conceptualized and practiced discipline and punishment. We will weave together historical and ethnographical work from China with readings on discipline, punishment, and systems for creation of justice.   We will take as our point of departure Michel Foucault’s classic Discipline and Punish, and try to enrich his important but historically specific Euro-centric proposals about human subject formation with some comparative insights generated out of engagement with China.  We will ask of the Chinese work:  How have notions of li/ritual, self-cultivation, institutions of family, practices of gender distinction formed a sense of personhood and how has that shifted over time?  What implications does the different historical experience of China have for its sense of discipline and punishment? And we will also be exploring some questions that haunt not only anthropology, but modernity in general:  How are human beings different, and how the same?  How/can we learn from culturally specific difference as we stand in our own locations?

 

Course

MUS 357   Special Topics in Ethnomusicology: Music & Tourism in South East Asia

Professor

Mercedes Dujunco

CRN

17347

 

Schedule

Wed            1:30 -3:50 pm  BLUM N210

Distribution

OLD: A

NEW: Analysis of Art / Rethinking  Difference

Cross-listed: Anthropology, Asian Studies, Studies in Race & Ethnicity

Each offering in this course series will focus on one of several different topics and its related issues that are presently of interest among scholars in both the humanities and social science disciplines and explore it ethnomusicologically in relation to the music culture(s) of a particular country or region. Through a combination of lectures and discussions based on key readings in the literature and audiovisual materials on the given topic and the music culture(s) being explored, the course will allow students to examine a topic in depth through a musical lens and draw significant insights through the application of relevant theories to specific area case studies. For Spring 2007, we will consider the topic of music and tourism in the context of music cultures in Southeast Asian countries such as the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, and Vietnam. Students will gain an understanding of how tourist settings, events, and artifacts are produced, interpreted, and consumed, and the important role of music and music-related practices in the process. In particular, we will zero in on two specific settings common to many tourists' experiences – festivals and the "cultural show". Among the issues that we would explore are the production of difference and the exotic for the consumption of the "other"; tradition and authenticity; the commodification of music culture and history; and the politics and aesthetics of tourist cultural/musical production. Coursework will include three short response papers and a 12 to 15-page research paper. On-line registration

 

Course

ANTH 370   Anthropology of Time & Space

Professor

Megan Callaghan

CRN

17015

 

Schedule

Mon            9:30 - 11:50 am   OLIN 107

Distribution

OLD: A

NEW: Social Science

This course begins by considering the extent to which time and space are cultural constructions that vary within and across social groups.  As we challenge understandings of these concepts as natural or inevitable, we will also explore different possibilities for measuring, representing, and creating meaning in relation to them.  Time and space are so fundamental that we are often unaware of the ways they are embedded in our lives.  Yet on a daily basis they reflect and reinforce interpersonal and institutional relations of power.  This course therefore also investigates spatio-temporal dynamics and strategies as elements of social hierarchy.  In addition, it examines time and space as organizing concepts with which to understand the world.  For example, why is it problematic to study a contemporary society as if it represented another society’s past?  What are the implications of dividing the world spatially into categories such as East and West or core and periphery?  Finally, we will consider how political economy structures experiences of time and space.  This includes temporal disciplines of commodity production, state seizure of “private” time under socialism, and descriptions of time-space compression in late capitalism. On-line registration