|
11406 |
ANTH 101
A Introduction to Cultural Anthropology |
Jonathan Anjaria |
M . W . . |
1:30 - 2:50 pm |
OLIN 101 |
SSCI/DIFF |
Cross-listed:
Environmental & Urban Studies, Related interest: Global & Int’l Studies; Gender and Sexuality Studies, Human Rights Why is it important to
study other cultures? Why is the concept of culture important for
understanding the world in which we live? This course aims to
explore these questions, and to introduce students to the field of
cultural anthropology and anthropological ways of understanding the
world. Through readings located in Africa, North America, the
Middle East and South and East Asia, students will confront the vastness
and complexity of human experience. Studying the diverse ways
people order their lives and make sense of the world around them has the
unique advantage of normalizing the exotic while exoticising the
normal. Through the study of topics such as colonialism, race and
ethnicity, gender and sexuality, and international development, students
should have the tools to better understand not only how other people
live, but their own practices, beliefs and customs as well. Class size: 22
|
11193 |
ANTH 101
B Introduction to Cultural
Anthropology |
Laura Kunreuther |
M . W . . |
11:50 - 1:10 pm |
OLIN 205 |
SSCI/DIFF |
See above. Class size: 22
|
11192 |
ANTH 201 Gender and Inequalty in Latin America |
Diana Brown |
M . W . . |
1:30 - 2:50 pm |
OLIN 204 |
SSCI/DIFF |
Cross-listed:
Gender & Sexuality Studies, Human Rights, LAIS Recent achievements in
democratization notwithstanding, contemporary Latin American societies continue
to display dramatic inequalities. This class
will explore inequalities of gender, and their interface with hierarchies of
social class, ethnicity and race through examination of ethnographic
texts. We will examine historical
sources of these inequalities in colonial structures and their expression in
contemporary cultural practices, giving attention both to social groups that
seek to impose and maintain inequalities, and those who challenge them. After critically evaluating Latin American
gender stereotypes, we will consider how gender is practiced and gender
identities formed in particular local and global contexts. We will investigate urban elites and middle
classes, and a variety of subaltern populations ranging from market women, to
male factory workers, to groups struggling for indigenous rights, to
transgendered prostitutes. Ritual
contexts to be explored will include beauty contests, Carnival, and soccer, and
Catholic, Protestant evangelical and Afro-Brazilian religious practices. Texts will be drawn from Latin American
societies including Brazil, Peru, Mexico, and Guatemala, and will be chosen to
represent a variety of theoretical approaches within anthropology. Class size: 22
|
11191 |
ANTH 208C History of Anthropology: British Anthropology in Africa from the 1920s to
the 1990s |
Mario Bick |
. T . Th . |
8:30 - 9:50 am |
OLIN 301 |
HIST/DIFF |
Cross-listed: Africana Studies
A distinctly British social
anthropology formed in the twentieth century, largely shaped by research in
Britain’s African colonies. This
anthropology contributed to the construction of colonial relations with African
peoples, constituted our knowledge of pre-colonial African cultures, and
provided critiques of colonialism. Both
the colonial system and the nationalist movements that destroyed that system
were influenced by this anthropology.
The course will examine central texts of this school, especially as they
explore politics, broadly understood, from colonial and post-colonial Africa,
rural and urban, rule and resistance, modernizing and post-modern. Class size: 22
|
11407 |
ANTH 210 Kinship, Identity and Difference In the Modern Middle East |
Nadia Latif |
. T . Th . |
3:10 - 4:30 pm |
OLIN 310 |
SSCI/DIFF |
Cross-listed: Middle Eastern Studies The study of kinship within anthropology has
a history as long as the discipline itself. Until recently it served as the
primary lens for analyzing social, political, and economic organization in
non-Western societies. Kinship has also played a central role in the
articulation of nation-ness and the assertion of nationalist claims. The aim of
this course is to examine the relationship between anthropological analyses of
kinship, and nationalist claims of identity and difference with regards to the
modern Middle East. Beginning with kinship analyses produced within the
historical context of Western colonial expansion, we will chart the historic
contribution this body of scholarship has made to colonial, anti-colonial, and
post-colonial constructions of identity and difference in the Middle East. Class size:
20
|
11637 |
ANTH 212 Historical Archaeology |
Christopher Lindner |
. . W . . . . . . F |
4:40 – 6:00 pm 11:50 -4:30 pm |
HEG 300 ROSE 108 |
HIST/DIFF |
Cross-listed: American Studies, Environmental
& Urban Studies The focus of this practicum, or
community service-learning course, will be the 18th-century Palatine German
occupation of the Hudson Valley, people ancestral to the Pennsylvania “Dutch”
[Deutsch]. 5-hr sessions on Friday afternoons include field trips to extant
Palatine buildings near Bard, discussion on written and graphical materials,
laboratory work on artifacts and bones. After spring break comes excavation and
analysis of discoveries at the 1746 Parsonage in Germantown, 10 miles north of
Bard. We aim to learn how the local populations adapted after the 1710 arrival
of Palatines from the Rhineland, the largest mass migration from Europe to New
York in colonial times. Note: when the class is on field trips or digging, we
meet only on Friday, from 11:50 to 4:30. When we're in the lab, there will be a
seminar in Hegeman 300 on Wed, 4:40 to 6 PM [this time may shift], and on
Friday the lab will meet in Rose 108 from 11:50 to 2:50. Limit 12, with
permission granted in preliminary conversation with the professor. Class
size: 12
|
11194 |
ANTH 261 Anthropology of Violence and Suffering |
Laura Kunreuther |
M . W . . |
10:10 - 11:30 am |
OLIN 205 |
HUM/DIFF |
Cross-listed:
Gender & Sexuality Studies, Human Rights, Global & Int’l Studies,
Science, Technology & Society 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. Class
size: 22
|
11383 |
ANTH 276 Anime and Culture in Post-War Japan |
Yuka Suzuki |
. T . Th . |
10:10 - 11:30 am |
OLIN 204 |
SSCI/DIFF |
Cross-listed:
Asian Studies, Global & Int’l Studies, Science, Technology & Society Japanese animation, or anime,
constitutes one of the most dynamic sites of cultural production in contemporary
Japan. Although anime films consistently top the box office charts, the
genre received relatively little academic attention until the 1990s. More
recently, however, the recognition of the centrality of anime in
Japanese cultural worlds has rapidly burgeoned into a theoretically rigorous
and ethnographically rich area of analysis. One of the objectives of this
course will be to trace the history of anime and its relationships to the
nation’s social, political, and economic transformations over the past century.
We will explore the origins of Japanese animation, which emerged in the 1930s
as a form of government propaganda to educate children about the imperialist
project in Asia. In the post-war decades, animated films depicted the national
trauma of the atomic bombs, while others created a new, utopian vision of a
modern Japan that centered around industry and technology. Since then, the
field has expanded to incorporate many different sub-genres, including ‘Tokyo
cyberpunk,’ the supernatural and occult, romantic shojo ‘cute young
girl’ anime, and post-apocalyptic fantasy. By examining these
categories, we will address larger issues of nationalism, gender, modernity,
crisis, and urban terror in Japanese society. The last section of this course
will consider the globalization of this genre in recent decades. Sensations
such as Pokémon and Spirited Away have radically reconfigured
Japan’s relationship with global popular culture, heightening the prestige and
cachet of Japanese artistic production, even as the nation’s political and
economic influence wanes. This course will therefore provide an in-depth
exploration of historical and contemporary social landscapes in Japan through
the lens of anime. Priority will be
given to students with previous coursework in anthropology. Class
size: 22
|
11662 |
ANTH 332 Cultural Technologies of Memory |
Laura Kunreuther |
. . . . F |
10:10 - 12:30 pm |
OLIN 307 |
SSCI/DIFF |
Cross-listed: History, Human Rights This course is organized
around several practices and technologies that produce collective and personal
memory. The class will explore a
distinction commonly made between 'memory' and 'history', asking on what basis
this distinction is made and how it maps on to our ideas about foreign places
and people. The techniques and
technologies of public memory we will examine may include ancient "memory
palaces," historical writing, oral narrative, ritual, myth, monuments,
museums and archives. We will also
explore how radio and photography are used to produce national and familial
representations of the past. The focus
in each section will be on how the particular medium of remembering shapes the
content of what is remembered. We will
address who has access to memory practices, stressing the link between the
production of particular memories and their political uses. The class will give students a theoretical
base to write a final research paper that situates a contemporary memory practice
in its specific cultural and historical context: the recent proliferation of
family genealogies, Holocaust testimonies and/or museums, the truth
commissions, local histories are among a few possible examples. Class size: 15
|
11133 |
ANTH 337 Cultural Politics of Animals |
Yuka Suzuki |
. . W . . |
10:10 - 12:30 pm |
OLIN 307 |
SSCI/DIFF |
Cross-listed: Africana Studies, Human Rights,
Environmental & Urban Studies Human ideas about animals have changed
throughout history, giving rise to a wide spectrum of attitudes across
cultures. The past century in particular has witnessed a radical
reconceptualization in the nature of human-animal relations, emerging in tandem
with the modern environmentalist movement. Everywhere we turn, animals have
captured the popular imagination, with dinosaurs crowned as the cultural icon
of the 1990s, Shamu representing the fulfillment of our romantic vision of
cetaceans, and Winnie the Pooh constituting a social universe in which children
are taught morality and kindness. Beneath the centrality of animals in our
social, economic, and physical worlds, moreover, lies their deep implication
within human cultural politics. Some of the questions we will consider
throughout the semester include: how, and by whom, is the line between humans
and animal drawn? What are the politics of taxonomy and classification? How do
animal subjectivities contribute to the formation of human identities? Where
are animals positioned on the moral landscapes of cultures? We will explore
these shifting terrains through the angle of ‘animal geography,’ a field that
focuses on how animals have been socially defined, labeled, and ordered in
cultural worldviews. Class size: 15
|
11589 |
MUS 357
C Topics in Ethnomusicology: Music
and Migration |
Mercedes Dujunco |
. T . Th . |
10:10 - 11:30 am |
BLM N210 |
AART/DIFF |
See Music section for description.