Professor: M. Dominy
CRN: 11689
Distribution:
A/C
Time: W F 10:30 am - 12:00 noon OLIN 205
cross-listed: Gender Studies
An examination of the ways in which sex and gender are socially organized, and culturally
interpreted
in a variety of cultural systems, from kin-based nonstratified systems to the nation state. We
examine
what it means to be a gendered person in relation to culturally variable, locally imagined and
transnational systems of power and prestige. For example, in Asia, Africa and the Pacific, we
study
imperial gender politics and their domestic arrangements and encompassing political structures,
the
constitution and coding of racial differences in gendered terms, the effects of development on
indigenous women's lives, and indigenous sovereignty and female agency in postcolonial contexts.
We examine how kinship, economics, politics, belief and ideology are experienced and structured
through gender by asking the following questions: What are universals in the relative position of
women and men and how might they be explained? What factors determine women's status in
particular societies? What specific strategies do women use to achieve power or influence in
different
social systems? We ask what cultures make of sex, how bodies are constructed historically,
medically
and politically, and how new reproductive technologies are reshaping our understandings of
kinship
and family forms, sexualities, and concepts of personhood, especially in Europe and North
America.
Throughout we examine processes of knowledge production in feminist anthropology by tracing
the
evolution of the field to include archaeology, sociolinguistics and primatology. Topics include
Australian Aboriginal gatherer-hunters, the sexual division of labor and the origin of the family,
historical matriarchies, Mediterranean concepts of honor and shame, concepts of purity and
pollution
in highland New Guinea, veiling and seclusion in South and West Asia, West African female
solidarity
groups, and lesbian and gay kinship in the United States.
Professor: M. Bick
CRN: 11691
Distribution:
A/C
Time: M W 10:30 am - 12:20 pm OLIN 308
cross-listed: American Studies
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, Frank 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.
Professor: C. Lindner
CRN: 11692
Distribution:
C
Time: Tu Th 1:20 pm - 2:50 pm LC 208
cross-listed: American Studies, CRES,
History, MES
An interdisciplinary approach to this confederacy that was shattered militarily by the Iroquois of
New
York in 1649. From 1615 French explorers and missionaries had recorded Wendat culture more
fully
than was the case with any other indigenous group in North America this early in the colonial
period.
Archaeology, biocultural and linguistic anthropology, folklore studies, history, and ethnohistory
combine to reveal environmental adaptation and political organization, family and religious life.
The
class will read scholarly texts in each subfield, with concentration on the writings of the
ethnohistorian/archaeologist Bruce Trigger. Seminar presentations and written exams will
enhance
comprehension. Open to first-year students.
Professor: M. Bick
CRN: 11690
Distribution:
C/D
Time: Tu Th 10:30 am - 12:20 pm OLIN 306
cross-listed: LAIS
This course will begin by studying theories of elite and ruling class structure, and how these
sectors
are formed, maintain their boundaries, and are implicated in the political and economic power
distributions of modern nation states. The remainder of the course will examine these sectors in
Latin
America through readings in anthropology, sociology, political science, history and literature.
Emphasis will be on the understanding of the mechanisms by which these sectors are perpetuated,
particularly in regard to social life, marriage, leisure, associational activities, and consumption
patterns (including those related to the arts).
of related interest: MES
Professor: M. Dominy
CRN: 11693
Distribution:
A/C
Time: W F 1:15 pm - 2:45 pm OLIN 205
cross-listed: Religion
A consideration of the theoretical approaches anthropologists use to analyze religious and
symbolic
systems comparatively, this course attempts to understand the function
and meaning of religious practice and belief rather than to examine particular religious traditions.
While focusing primarily on functional, structuralist, and interpretive approaches to the indigenous
cosmologies, myths, rituals and social structures of peoples in small-scale societies, the course
also
considers local variants of world traditions such as Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Topics will
include: rites of passage and death rituals; curing, trance and divination; religious practitioners;
witchcraft beliefs; ritual symbolism, ethnic politics, pilgrimage, religious movements (prophetic
traditions), and sociolinguistic aspects of religious communication and conversion. Readings will
draw from theorists Malinowski, Durkheim, Levi-Strauss, Turner, Douglas, Weber and Geertz
among
others, as well as classic and contemporary ethnographies. Prerequisite: Anthropology 101, or
100-level course in religion.
Professor: D. Brown
CRN: 11695
Distribution:
A/C
Time: M 1:30 pm - 3:30 pm OLIN 304
cross-listed: History of Science
Through a series of readings this seminar will explore sociocultural constructions of health and
illness,
juxtaposing and critiquing western biomedical constructs and those of other societies and healing
traditions. The body will serve as an analytic lens for examining how health, illness and healing
have
been conceptualized and socially patterned crossculturally, and will be used to challenge the
"natural"
facts of our own ways of understanding the construction, classification and maintenance of
bodies.
We will explore how political economic systems and the inequalities they engender--poverty,
violence, discrimination--impact upon human well-being. We will use the readings to consider
how
bridges may be constructed across the present theoretical gap between positions that privilege
material and biomedical approaches to health and the alleviation of human suffering, and those
that
draw on constructions of health and illness primarily for their symbolic meanings. Readings will
include case studies of the sociocultural construction of biomedically recognized conditions,
infectious diseases such as TB and AIDS, depression and schizophrenia, and many illnesses less
amenable to analysis through western disease categories, such as susto (magical fright), and
illnesses
of spirit possession. Limited to upper-college students or permission of instructor.
of related interest: Gender Studies
Professor: M. Bick
CRN: 11694
Distribution:
C/D
Time: Tu 3:40 pm - 5:40 pm OLIN 306
cross-listed: Italian Studies
This seminar will study the portrayals of Italy and Italian communities as they emerged through
the
fieldwork-based research of anthropologists and other social scientists after World War II.
Included
in our reading will be some studies of Italian-American communities. Our goal of this seminar is
to
come to some understanding of how the romantic sense of Italy, and being Italian, relates to
empirically oriented social-science research and theory.