11627

ANTH 101 Introduction to Cultural Anthropology

Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins

M . W . .

11:50 -1:10 pm

OLIN 201

SSCI/DIFF

Cross-listed: Environmental & Urban Studies; Global & Int’l Studies Anthropology is the study of ‘culture,’ a concept that has been redefined and contested over the discipline’s long development. This course will trace the history of the ‘culture concept’ from the nineteenth century to the present. In doing so, it will explore anthropological approaches to ‘primitive’ societies, group and personal symbols and systems of exchange. It will examine how anthropology came to focus on questions of identity, race, gender, sexuality, nationalism, colonial and post-colonial conditions. Our ethnographic gaze will be turned inward as well as outward. We will therefore consider the reasons behind, and ramifications of, anthropology’s self-reflexive turn in and around the 1980s. We will juxtapose that turn’s questioning of the discipline’s authority to represent other societies with debates about anthropologists’ engagement in activism, policy and government (e.g. the US military’s Human Terrain project). We will then examine the more recent anthropological fascination with the non-human (e.g. other animals, technology, the built environment, ‘nature’), looking at how notions of agency, materiality, and anthropology’s own methodological foundations have been transformed as a result. Class size: 22

11634

ANTH 206 Human Variation: The Anthropology of Race, Scientific Racism, and other Biological Reductionisms

Mario Bick

. T . Th .

10:10 - 11:30 am

OLIN 301

SSCI/DIFF

Cross-listed: Africana Studies, Human Rights The relationship of human biology to behavior and the nature of cultures couched in terms of putative biological differences between human groups and subgroups has characterized scientific discourse since the late eighteenth century. This has been especially true in anthropology as the discipline has sought to answer questions of race (human variation), gender, sexuality, and some forms of compulsive behavior. This course examines scientific racism, sexism, criminology, and other biological phobias, reductionisms, and rationalizations. It does so by studying the contexts, claims, achievements, and failures of normal science (especially physical anthropology and human biology and genetics) in regard to the significance of the real and assumed variations among individuals and among human populations. Central to the discussion are concepts of race and the scientific evidence that is used to support these concepts. By permission of the instructor. Class size: 18

11637

ANTH 215 Bardaeology - the Campus as Material Culture

Christopher Lindner

. . W . . . . . . F

4:40 -6:00 pm 11:50 -4:30 pm

HEG 300 ROSE 306

SCI

Cross-listed: American Studies; Environmental & Urban Studies A scientific approach to artifacts as “things” encompasses their physical conditions, contextual juxtapositions, and circumstantial “entanglements.” Texts to discuss in seminar incorporate current theories of materiality and agency to consider the life histories of items contained in campus deposits and their relation to social activity at the College. Laboratory analysis, stratigraphic evaluation, and exhibit design will focus on historic archaeological sites at Bard. We may compare the garbage dump from early students at St. Stephens College (behind the Library) in contrast to the founder’s family’s stuff (in and around a privy shaft uncovered beneath the Center for Science and Computation), or the buried debris at the house site of John Bard’s landscape caretaker at the Gardener’s Lodge on Blithewood Avenue, the first Gothic Revival cottage in America. The course finishes with excavation of potentially significant locations on campus. Graphic materials and artifacts from the College dump’s initial Cultural Resource Management investigations will form a display at the Library for students to enhance by their special projects. The privy shaft and Gardener’s Lodge projects currently have on-line exhibits started @ inside.bard.edu/archaeology. Class size: 12

11635

ANTH 220 Doing Ethnography: Waste

Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins

. T . Th .

1:30 -2:50 pm

HEG 106

SSCI

Cross-listed: Environmental & Urban Studies; Science, Technology & Society Taking waste as a quintessentially ethnographic starting point, this course provides an overview of the qualitative methods, and ethical ramifications, of anthropological research. In doing so, it examines, on the one hand, the history and continued use of particular methods with a view to their role in the constitution of the discipline of anthropology. On the other hand, it considers the process of ‘translating’ the experience of fieldwork into text. What ethical, methodological and theoretical choices—and stakes—are involved in producing ethnographic writing? How has that changed during anthropology’s development over the past century? Among the methods we will read about, discuss, and with which we will experiment are participant observation, interviews, archival research, visual and textual analysis, the collection of oral histories and fieldwork in its online manifestation. Fieldwork exercises will contribute to each student’s completion of a field-based research project. To do this students will become familiar with the guidelines of the Institutional Review Board (IRB). They will also be expected to think self-reflexively about their methods in relation to the questions that the course poses. This iteration of the course is organized around the theme of waste. Rejected matter has been central to anthropology since its inception, first as part of taboo and bricolage, and then as ‘matter out of place’ in interpretations of social order and disorder. Reexamined in analyses of modern hygiene and sanitation, waste has most recently found a disciplinary home in environmental anthropology. This course is required for students moderating into anthropology and therefore anthropology students will receive priority. Class size: 22

11630

ANTH 243 African Diaspora Religions

Diana Brown

M . W . .

1:30 -2:50 pm

OLIN 205

SSCI/DIFF

Cross-listed: Africana Studies, Global & Int’l Studies, LAIS The many contemporary religions in Latin American and the Caribbean that draw upon African theology and practice testify to the vitality of the African heritage in the New World. The course examines these religions within their historical context as dimensions of the African diaspora and as they are currently practiced. It is particularly concerned with issues of identity, empowerment, and appropriation, in this light will explore the religious and symbolic dimensions of these religions, from those that claim African orthodoxy to those that have embraced innovation and heterodoxy, and their sociopolitical structures. Issues concerning the race, class, gender, and politics of the leaders who guided these religions and the followers attracted to them will be examined in relation to the degree to which such affiliations may strengthen African identities and foster movements for cultural and racial political empowerment or may represent appropriations of the African heritage serving the interests of dominant groups. Throughout, the class will be attentive to the ways in which these religions are represented in ethnography and film. Religions examined include Candomble, Umbanda, and Batuque in Brazil; Santeria in Cuba and the Dominican Republic; Maria Lionza in Venezuela; Shango in Trinidad; and Vodun in Haiti. Class size: 20

11636

ANTH 253 Anthropological Controversies

John Ryle

M . W . .

3:10 -4:30 pm

OLIN 203

SSCI

Cross-listed: Africana Studies, Human Rights The history of anthropology is punctuated with arguments over the interpretation of data, the ethics of research, theories of social behavior and the nature of the discipline itself. What is to be learned from these disputes? Are they distractions from the real work of anthropology? Or are they constitutive of the discipline? This class will focus on controversies that bring distinctive features of anthropological practice into critical focus. It will examine key disputes in the history of the discipline and more recent arguments between practitioners. Topics will include the many-sided controversy over the Yanomami of the Amazon basin, divergent representations of the Nuba people of Sudan, the involvement of anthropologists in military campaigns and espionage, Derek Freeman’s critique of Margaret Mead, anthropologists’ role in creating and defining ethnic groups, and the work of Carlos Castaneda. Class size: 22

11682

MUS 253 Special Topics in Ethnomusicology: Popular Music and Politics in Africa

Andrew Eisenberg

M . W . .

11:50 -1:10 pm

BLM N210

AART

Cross-listed: Africana Studies, Human RIghts Africa’s vibrant popular musics are intimately interconnected with the formation of publics and projects of nation building. This course examines African popular music genres as resonant spaces where publics are produced and mobilized, where the symbolic girders of the postcolonial state are reinforced and/or attacked, and where cosmopolitanism confronts the conceits of nationhood. In addition to covering essential literature on nationalism, popular culture, globalization, and the postcolony, we will explore the histories and formal characteristics of key African popular music genres, including Nigerian Afrobeat, Tanzanian taarab, Zimbabwean chimurenga, South African mbaqanga, and Kenyan hip-hop. Class size: 20

11633

ANTH 265 Race & Nature in Africa

Yuka Suzuki

. T . Th .

11:50 -1:10 pm

OLIN 202

SSCI/DIFF

Cross-listed: Africana Studies; Environmental & Urban Studies; Global & Int’l Studies; Human Rights Western fantasies have historically represented Africa as the embodiment of a mythical, primordial wilderness. Within this imagery, nature is racialized, and Africans are constructed as existing in a state closer to nature. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness perhaps best exemplifies this process, through its exploration of the ‘savage’ dimensions of colonialism in the African interior. Imperial discourses often relied on these tropes of savagery and barbarism to link understandings of natural history with ideas about racial difference. Similarly, by blurring the boundary between the human and the nonhuman, colonial policies created a zone of anxiety around racialized domestic relationships, particularly in the context of employers and their servants. Many of these representations were contradictory, as evidenced by Rousseau’s image of the noble savage: indigenous people who lived as gentle custodians of the environment, while at the same time preying upon resources desired for exclusive colonial use. After investigating the racialization of nature under imperial regimes, we will consider continuing legacies in post-colonial situations. How have certain ethnic identities, for example, been linked to nature? How do these associations reproduce social hierarchies and inequalities? In what ways is race invoked in struggles for land and resource rights? Through an exploration of ethnographic accounts, historical analyses, and works of fiction based in Africa, this course offers a new way of deciphering cultural representations of nature, and the fundamentally political agendas that lie within. Class size: 22

11683

MUS 287 Musical Ethnography

Andrew Eisenberg

. T . Th .

11:50 -1:10 pm

BLM N210

AART/DIFF

Cross-listed: Anthropology 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. Class size: 20

11541

LIT 3148 Writing Cultures: Literature and Ethnography

Alexandre Benson

. T . . .

3:10 -5:30 pm

OLIN 309

ELIT

Cross-listed: Anthropology; American Studies This course explores the anthropological imagination in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, with an emphasis on works written in North America. We will read novels, folktales, local color stories, dialect poems, and ethnographic narratives. How, we will ask, have authors been influenced by, and in turn helped to shape, theories of cultural difference? What does the literary depiction of race a century ago have to do with how we talk about "multiculturalism" today? We will also consider relationships between texts and other media (film, photography, painting, and popular music), seeking both to understand and to complicate the now-commonplace idea that what unites ethnography and literature is above all their reliance on the written word. Authors likely to include Sherwood Anderson, Franz Boas, Kate Chopin, W. E. B. Du Bois, Clifford Geertz, Zora Neale Hurston, Tim Ingold, Sarah Orne Jewett, Alan Lomax, Herman Melville, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Jean Toomer. Class size: 15

11629

ANTH 335 Local Realities and Global Ideologies in the Sudans

John Ryle

. T . . .

4:40 -7:00 pm

HEG 308

SSCI/DIFF

Cross-listed: Africana Studies, Global & Int’l Studies, Human Rights, Middle Eastern Studies An inter-disciplinary class that will examine indigenous societies and cultures in the lands now comprising Sudan and South Sudan—and their relation to world history. Before the late nineteenth century, Sudan was host to numerous non-states and near-states. Indigenous political organization prior to conquest ranged from acephalous societies in south Sudan to sultanates in the centre and west and, in the 1890s and 1890s, the short-lived Mahdist theocratic revolutionary state. A legacy of this history is a great diversity of cultures, language-worlds and modes of life. The class will focus on encounters between Sudanese social and cultural formations and the moral worlds of the Middle East and the West. It will look at the ways in which successive global belief systems and other incursions from outside the Sudans have been resisted and/or assimilated by Sudanese social forces. It will analyse the many levels of interaction between the local and the global, between fast and slow-track modes of life, between indigenous cultural worlds and incursions from the outside, through a number of case studies drawn from recent history including anti-slavery, female genital cutting, the Darfur campaign, the International Criminal Court and the recent independence of South Sudan. Class size: 15

11628

ANTH 349 Political Ecology

Yuka Suzuki

. . W . .

10:10 - 12:30 pm

OLIN 107

SSCI/DIFF

Cross-listed: Africana Studies; Environmental & Urban Studies; Human Rights; Global & Int’l Studies; Science, Technology & Society Bridging two prominent schools of thought from the 1960s to the 1980s, political ecology emerged in the early 1990s from the intersection between cultural ecology and political economy. Based on the principle that environmental conditions are the product of political processes, the field is interdisciplinary in orientation, integrating the work of anthropologists, geographers, historians, political scientists, and sociologists. Through close attention to local historical and social contexts, we will explore topics such as the politics of knowledge, state power, sustainable development, mapping, urban ecology, corporations and conservation, and multilateral environmental governance. The majority of the readings will be drawn from case studies in sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Priority will be given to moderated students in Anthropology and Environmental and Urban Studies. Class size: 15