11362

ANTH 101 A Intro to Cultural Anthropology

Laura Kunreuther

. T . Th .

11:50 am -1:10 pm

OLIN 201

SSCI/DIFF

Cross-listed: Environmental & Urban Studies; Global & Int’l Studies; Related interest: Gender and Sexuality Studies This course explores the intellectual angles through which anthropologists have engaged culture as a central, and yet 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. 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 and minorities in post-colonial states. Class size: 22

 

11451

ANTH 101 B Intro to Cultural Anthropology

Laura Kunreuther

M . W . .

1:30 pm -2:50 pm

OLIN 201

SSCI/DIFF

See above. Class size: 22

 

11452

AFR 101 Intro to Africana Studies

Yuka Suzuki

. T . Th .

10:10am - 11:30am

OLIN 308

HUM/DIFF

See Africana Studies section for description.

 

11363

ANTH 212 Historical Archaeology:

Colonists near Bard

Christopher Lindner

. . W . .

. . . . F

. . . . F

4:40 pm -6:00 pm

11:50 am -1:00 pm

1:15 pm -2:30 pm

HEG 300

HEG 300

ROSE 108

HUM/DIFF

Cross-listed: American Studies; Environmental & Urban Studies The focus of this practicum, or civic engagement 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 related historical sites at or near Bard, discussion on written and graphical materials, laboratory work on artifacts. After spring break comes excavation and analysis of discoveries 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

 

11364

ANTH 218 Africa: The Great Rift

John Ryle

M . W . .

1:30 pm -2:50 pm

OLIN 305

SSCI/DIFF

Cross-listed: Africana Studies; Global & Int’l Studies; Human Rights Africa’s Rift Valley runs from the Red Sea to Mozambique, dividing the continent in two. The countries bordering it, rich in natural and cultural resources, but deficient in good government, embody many of the challenges that confront Africa as a whole. This course begins with a survey of the human geography and political history of Eastern Africa from the colonial era to the present. This is followed by an examination, through case studies, of some urgent themes in African studies, as represented in the region. The themes include: the nature of the state, revealed by civil wars in Sudan and new states emerging in Eritrea, Somaliland and Southern Sudan; and the effect on the societies they encompass– the passage from pastoral nomadism to the seat at the UN. The course also considers the complex relations between Islam, Christianity and local belief systems in Ethiopia and Sudan; and the role of Western countries in the region, from the colonial era to the age of humanitarian intervention and counter-terrorism. The course will use the tools of history and anthropology, documentary video and reportage to build an understanding of the diverse ways of being that endure in the region and the varieties of modernity that are emerging from war and demographic transformation. Class size: 20

 

11458

ANTH/LAIS/HIST 222 Anthropology and History of Brazil & Mexico

Miles Rodriguez

M . W . .

11:50 am -1:10 pm

OLIN 204

HIST/DIFF

Cross-listed: History, LAIS This is an interdisciplinary course in anthropology and history on the two largest countries in Latin America, Brazil and Mexico. It studies culture, broadly defined, with readings drawn from some of the major anthropological and historical writings on these two countries from the early twentieth century to the present. Each period of twentieth-century Brazil and Mexico will be studied. The French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss played a foundational role in the development of Brazilian anthropology, and students of the German-American anthropologist Franz Boas established anthropology as a discipline in both Brazil and Mexico. The class examines the scholarship of these and later anthropologists and historians, and problematizes the ethnography and textual production of scholars with distinct relationships to the cultures in question as well as from different gendered and ethnic backgrounds. Topics for study and discussion include: the indigenous community, cultural results of slavery and ethnic mixture, the family and the nation, violence and death, and religious ritual and the sacred, such as in the case of Afro-Brazilian Candomblé. Class size: 18

 

11365

ANTH 233 Problems in Human Rights

John Ryle

M . W . .

10:10am - 11:30am

OLIN 201

SSCI/DIFF

Cross-listed: Global & Int’l Studies; Human Rights (core course) This course approaches a set of practical and ethical human rights issues through the study of historical and contemporary campaigns, starting with the British anti-slavery movement of the 18th and 19th centuries. The emphasis is on practical questions of strategy and organization and the problems that arise from these. What were the challenges that early campaigners faced? How did they resolve them? What alliances of interest did they confront? And what coalitions did they form to combat them? The course also considers how human rights campaigners have engaged with - and been part of - wider political, religious and economic changes. It examines the negotiations and compromises that led to a key event in the twentieth-century human rights history: the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Has the subsequent success of the human rights movement - particularly the expansion of international human rights legislation - changed its character? The course examines the landmine ban campaign, the campaign against female genital cutting and the campaign against child soldiers - and considers the ideological challenges these issues present to the international human rights regime. When, if ever, are indigenous values more important than universal principles? What is the relation of human rights to religious values? Is human rights itself a quasi-religious belief system? Finally the course considers some contemporary challenges facing the human rights movement: the return of slavery and slave-like practices and the question of genocide in Darfur, in particular the role of the International Criminal Court. Class size: 22

 

11366

ANTH 234 Language, Culture, Discourse

Laura Kunreuther

. T . Th .

10:10am - 11:30am

OLIN 203

HUM/DIFF

Cross-listed: Mind, Brain & Behavior Language is one of the fundamental ways of understanding the world in culturally specific ways, and helps to create social identities like gender, race, ethnicity, class and nationality. This course begins with the assumption that language and culture are inseparable, and will introduce students to theoretical and ethnographic approaches that demonstrate this in various ways. The course will include close analysis of everyday conversations as well as social analysis of broader discourses related to class, gender and nationality. Some of the topics we will discuss include: how authority is established through specific forms of speech, language ideologies, the performative power of language, the relationship between language and social hierarchies, the study of genre and discourse as historical and social forms, cultural analyses of voice. We will also examine the way technology and media have been fundamental in shaping the way different groups perceive their social worlds. Students will be required to do their own cultural analysis of a conversation, a written or oral narrative, or of discourse in contemporary culture using the conceptual tools we develop through the course. Readings will include authors such as Judith Irvine, Erving Goffman, J.L. Austin, John Searle, Jacques Derrida, Mikhail Bakhtin, Richard Bauman.

Class size: 20

 

11459

ANTH 235 Economies of Gift & Sacrifice

Robert Weston

. T . Th .

11:50 am -1:10 pm

OLIN 204

SSCI/DIFF

In his ground-breaking work, The Gift, anthropologist Marcel Mauss characterizes the exchange of gifts as a “total social phenomenon,” an archaic mode of organizing economic life that persists as an alternative model to the prevailing economics of scarcity and self-interest. In this course, students are introduced to a range of theological, anthropological, sociological, and poststructuralist perspectives on the complex economies in which gift and sacrifice operate. Special attention is given to corollary concepts that help to define economies of gift and sacrifice, such as generosity, debt, obligation, reciprocity, and exchange, as well as to the relationship between gift and sacrifice. Students will engage with the classical theories of authors such as Robertson-Smith, Kropotkin, Durkheim, Mauss, Hubert, Bataille, Levi-Strauss, Sahlins, & Benveniste, as well as with more contemporary texts by Derrida, Bourdieu, Marion, Caputo, Webb, Girard, Godelier, Hyde, Guenther, Zemon Davis, Bracken & Hénaff. Class size: 20

 

11454

ANTH 251 Death and Dying in Anthropological Perspective

Abou Farman Farmaian

M . W . .

11:50 am -1:10 pm

OLIN 201

SSCI/DIFF

Cross-listed: Religion Rather than think about death as a universal category or catalog the endless variety of mortuary rituals, this course will examine ‘death’ through a number of categories that construct the end of human life differently, with radically different entailments, rules, perceptions and procedures. The categories examined will include suicide and sacrifice, good and bad death, the soul and the corpse, immortality, and technological death. We will also examine ways in which death is produced and understood in relation to the state, to social structure and to secular sensibilities. Readings and discussions will be cross-cultural, ethnographic and theoretical, forming a concrete enquiry into how different forms of dying are constructed and represented across cultures. Class size: 20

 

11687

LIT 3148 Writing Cultures: Ethnographic Literature in US

Alexandre Benson

. . W . .

1:30 pm -3:50 pm

OLIN 310

ELIT

See Literature section for description.

 

11457

ANTH 326 Urban Guerrillas:

Anthropology of Political Resistance

Neni Panourgia

. T . . .

1:30 pm -3:50 pm

OLIN 306

HUM/DIFF

Started in antiquity, practiced as ideology in the 19th century, but acquiring a discourse in the 1960s, urban guerrilla movements became emblematic of political praxis of the youth. In this course we will address issues that are to do first with the conceptualization of youth as a category, the political and cultural movements that made such a conceptualization possible, the ideologies that inform such political action, and the development of these ideologies as youth become middle-aged. The primary focus of the course, however, will be on the conceptualization of armed violence as political resistance to the transgressions of the state against it citizens. Material will be drawn from literature, political theory, and anthropology and will examine cases from Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and the US. Class size: 15

 

11456

ANTH 342 Post-Secular Aesthetics?

Abou Farman Farmaian

. . . Th .

10:10am - 12:30pm

OLIN LC 206

HUM/DIFF

Cross-listed: Art History This seminar examines the evolving relationship between art and secularism from the modern period to the present. We will begin by examining the emergence of secular discourses regarding art in thinkers such as Nietzsche and Weber, and the separation of art as an autonomous, self-sufficient social domain with its own institutional forms, such as museums and memorials, and its own non-transcendent aesthetic values, such as authenticity. Yet, throughout this period, art and the artist occupied an ambiguous position between the sacred and the profane. Today, in what some call a post-secular period, there is a rise in artistic and scientific practices associated with cosmology, immortality, animism, and transcendence. In the second part of the course, we will explore contemporary practices in the arts and sciences that indicate a post-secular sensibility from an anthropological perspective. We will look at recent international exhibits on animism and fetishism, as well as writings on the notion of re-enchantment. Tackling ideas and practices from neuroaesthetics and bio-art to cryonics, hypnosis and techno-shamanism, we will explore the way these concepts and strategies are changing the secular rules of separation between person and body, object and agency, affect and cognition, matter and the immaterial, this life and an afterlife. (This course does not satisfy the Art History seminar requirement.) Class size: 15