Courses

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Introduction to Cultural Anthropology
Anthropology 101 GSS
In this course in "culture," or the social power of imagination, students trace the historical development of anthropological theories and visual studies of culture from the 19th century to the present, with special emphasis on how the concept of culture functions critically in understanding group and personal symbolism and different economic systems, and how culture affects understanding of race, gender, and sexuality. Basic analytical readings on the relation of language to the cultural construction of reality set the framework for understanding how culture studies can unsettle certainties and provide a basic method for critical thinking and reflection. Visual anthropology and ethnographic films are explored for additional dimensions in method. Students examine the political meaning of "culture" in relation to the historical encounter between Euro-America and its "others"; the interplay between the representation of selves and cultural others within intercultural spheres of exchange, particularly tourism and representational media, which share certain characteristics with anthropology itself; and the cultural construction of gender and sexuality.

Field Methods in Archaeology
Anthropology 111 American Studies, Environmental Studies, SRE
The course concentrates on excavation and initial lab procedures used in archaeology through a continuation of the long-term dig at Grouse Bluff, the 7,000-year-old site overlooking the Hudson River adjacent to the Bard campus, focusing on hearths and pits—areas that have indications of the use of fire for cooking or some other purpose. Two digging techniques are emphasized: stratigraphy and small-scale cartography. Fieldwork involves painstaking measurements that permit study of the distribution of debris throughout the site, description of deposit formation over time, and comparison with other sites. Such methods increase the strength of inferences about the activities that took place and their roles in the evolution of cultural ecosystems in the area. In addition to the excavation and lab sessions, students participate in an ongoing project in the local schools, in which they train young students in archaeological techniques at the excavation and in their classrooms. Prerequisite: permission of the instructor.

Introduction to Linguistics
Anthropology 115
A broad introduction to linguistics, the study of language, this course provides sufficient background in the various aspects of the discipline to enable students to pursue more specialized courses and to read independently in the field. The course employs readings and empirical problems in a wide range of the world's languages. Topics introduced include the nature of language and the aims of linguistic description; historical linguistics; and phonetics, phonology, morphology, and syntax, among others.

Historical Archaeology
Anthropology 116
Material vestiges of past human activity are useful to complement or challenge historical information. Archaeology can also uncover transformations of the environment that were unintentionally irresponsible or purposefully planned to create illusions of power over nature. This course maintains a particular focus on the archaeology of African Americans and ranges from the Carolinas to New England, with frequent connections made to the Hudson Valley. Students will take field trips to nearby sites, including recent excavations on campus.

Writing, Power, and Resistance in Indigenous Latin America
Anthropology 201 / LAIS 201
See LAIS 201 for description.

Ethnography of Contemporary Brazil
Anthropology 201B LAIS, SRE
An approach to understanding contemporary Brazil through a focus on issues of identity. Students explore how Brazilian and non-Brazilian anthropologists and other writers have constructed identities for Brazil as a nation and have created and debated the identities of particular segments of its population. The course examines representations of Brazil's national identity at significant moments in its history and specific identities—of region, class, gender, race, ethnicity, and religion. Ethnographies and other texts explore identity within the context of the struggles of indigenous Amazonian peoples; experiences of affluent and impoverished urban dwellers in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo; practitioners of its vital Catholic, Afro-Brazilian and Protestant religious milieu; participation in national rituals such as soccer and Carnaval; and within Brazilian immigrant communities. Ethnographies provide a variety of theoretical approaches and are supplemented by an evening film program.

The Collapse of the State in Africa
Anthropology 208 Africana Studies
Modern assumptions about the inevitability, viability, and centrality of state formation in the Third World have been challenged by the post–Cold War and postcolonial breakdown of a number of African nation-states. This course examines the histories and cultures of Liberia and Sierra Leone, dramatic examples of recent state collapse, exploring theories of the nation- state and state collapse though an anthropological lens focused on local cultures. Assumptions about the nation-state are examined critically and contextually. Course materials are drawn from anthropological, political, and journalistic sources; films; and personal narrative.

History of Anthropology: How the Victorians Put the "Others" in Their Place
Anthropology 208A Africana Studies, Victorian Studies
An examination of how the Victorians sought to know the "other" through ethnographic, missionary, government, and travel encounters; the science of race; the objects of archaeology and museum collections; and photography. How the "other" was then related to the Europeans is studied within the framework of evolutionary and diffusionary theories.

History of Anthropology: American Anthropology: The Professionalization of Research and Theory, 1850–1970
Anthropology 208B American Studies
American anthropology up to the time of World War II had three central concerns. The first was the description and understanding of Native American peoples, based on participant observation through residential fieldwork. The second and third central concerns were the defeat of scientific racism and the placement of the concept of culture at the center of anthropological thought. The course examines this history and the rise of sociological, psychological, and neo-Marxist evolutionist thought in American anthropology in this period. Works by such anthropologists as Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict, Frank Cushing, Melville Herskovits, Clyde Kluckhohn, Alfred Kroeber, Robert Lowie, Margaret Mead, James Mooney, Paul Radin, Robert Redfield, Julian Steward, and Leslie White are studied.

History of Anthropology: African and British Anthropology from the 1920s to the 1990s
Anthropology 208C Africana Studies
A study of the history of British anthropology, largely through an examination of the major Africanist ethnographic and theoretical texts of this school, including some texts produced by African scholars. Through these writings much of the current understanding of precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial Africa has been constructed, especially in the areas of political and social structure and organization, ritual and religion, the urban transformation, and belief systems. Classic studies of the Nuer, Azande, Tallensi, Kikuyu, Nyakusa, Bemba, and other cultures lead into the descriptive and analytic richness of the school. Later texts, which explore such issues as resistance to colonialism and the transformation of cultures that has occurred with independence, are also read.

Introduction to Historical Archaeology
Anthropology 212 American Studies,
Environmental Studies
Material remains are useful to complement or challenge historical information. Archaeology can also uncover transformations of the environment that were unintentionally irresponsible or planned to create illustrations of power over nature. This course focuses on change in the urban and rural landscapes of the Middle Atlantic states and New England respectively. Colonization and slavery on the southeastern coast are examined in forts and plantations.

Anthropology of Medicine
Anthropology 213 GSS, HPS
An exploration of medical knowledge and practice in a variety of healing systems, including Western biomedicine, focusing on the human body as the site in which illness is experienced and upon which social meanings and political actions are inscribed. The way political economic systems and the inequalities they engender—poverty, violence, discrimination—affect human well-being is studied. Readings and films represent different ethnographic perspectives on embodied experiences of illness and bodily imagery and treatment within widely differing sociopolitical systems. Topics include biomedical constructs, body imagery, and alternative medical systems such as chiropractic and acupuncture in contemporary American society; epidemic diseases such as malaria and AIDS; colonial constructions of the diseased body in sub-Saharan Africa; cosmetic medical interventions; and new medical technologies.

Environment, Development, and Power
Anthropology 224 Environmental Studies
In an age of apocalyptic narrative, the environment has taken center stage in what is constructed as an unprecedented global ecological crisis.Taking its cue from political ecology and the principle that all resource struggles are fundamentally political, this course explores the complex, dynamic interplay between conservation, development, and power.It traces the historical underpinnings of contemporary inequity by examining the logics of colonial sciences in relation to "nature," as well as the use of exotic species of flora and fauna as tools of imperial conquest. Next, the shaping of modern environmental discourses are considered—e.g., how environmental problems are identified and how interventions are rationalized.Finally, the course examines the politics of displacement, the emergence of "environmental refugees," and the need for the conceptualization and practice of an environmental justice. Readings draw from ethnographic case studies from Brazil, India, Guinea, Indonesia, and Tanzania, among other nations, in both historical and contemporary contexts.

Culture, Colonialism, and Imperial Peripheries
Anthropology 225
Using a mixture of literary, ethnographic, and historical sources, this course explores two very different colonial encounters, British colonialism (especially in India and Egypt) and Tsarist colonialism (in the Caucasus, Siberia, and Central Asia). This comparison of colonialisms will access the significance of important differences between the nature of the colonizers and especially the paradoxical position of the Tsarist empire, which represented "colonized" Asia to a colonizing Europe (Britain) even as it represented "colonizing" Europe to its own colonies in Asia. Differences between the ethnographic and literary depiction of diverse and neglected regions of Asia under Tsarist rule are explored, including the colonial origins of many current ethnic and religious conflicts in regions like Chechnya, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. Particular attention is paid to the varying local cultural and social consequences of differing imperial policies in each region, ranging from the Ottoman slave trade to the rise of colonial and postcolonial elites.

Disease, Medicine, and Power
Anthropology 228 HPS, Human Rights
This course focuses on how disease and medicine interact with inequalities of social class, gender, ethnicity/race, and age within local, national, and global hierarchies of power. Emphasis is placed on the ways in which cultural knowledge and socially constituted relationships shape understandings of disease and configurations of its treatment.Historical and contemporary examples from Latin America and other areas of the colonial and postcolonial world are discussed. Topics examined include the spread and control of specific diseases, including kuru, syphilis, malaria, cholera, ebola, HIV/AIDS, and smallpox in the recent context of "bio-terrorism"; how concepts of health and disease figure in constructions of local and national identities; "diseases of development" involving unintended consequences of development projects; the politics of health care delivery; and policies involving the production and distribution of pharmaceutical products.

Typology: Variation in Form and Function in Language
Anthropology 232
The course develops the notion of linguistic typology based on the comparative study of the morphology and syntax of the languages of the world. We consider how languages vary both with regard to categories of linguistic form and linguistic "meaning," and explore how different languages encode familiar grammatical concepts in unfamiliar ways, as well as how languages use familiar grammatical means to encode unfamiliar grammatical concepts. We examine linguistic variation in, among other things, parts of speech, word order, case making, grammatical relations (subject, object), grammatical categories of reference, predication (for example, aspectual categories) and propositionality (for example, coding of categories of time, evidence, attitude), all with reference to both the familiar languages of Europe and less familiar languages of the Americas, Africa, and Eurasia. Prerequisite: Anthropology 115 or permission of the instructor.

Language, Culture, and Society
Anthropology 234 GSS, Integrated Arts
This course considers various classical approaches to language, culture, and cognition, such as structuralism, ethnoscience, and the Whorfian hypothesis. It examines discourse-focused approaches including speech act theory, the ethnography of communication, and sociolingusitics, focusing in particular on the use of language in social and cultural contexts. It explores the communicative consequences of cultural difference by concentrating cross-culturally on differences of class, race, ethnicity, and especially gender and sexuality. Topics include linguistic strategies such as code switching, gossip, silence, and interruption and verbal art as performance in oratory, persuasion, spells, and religious language.

Kinship in the Postindustrial World
Anthropology 235 GSS
Over the past decade, the field of kinship anthropology has seen some of its most innovative expansion in work on kinship in postindustrial capitalist societies. This course reviews work on such topics as adoption, divorce, gay families, and new reproductive technologies, and uses these recent studies to reconsider the classic questions in the study of kinship. It also considers the future of the "human family" in an age when clones, cyborgs, and other hybrid beings from science fiction are increasingly becoming realities.

Gender and Development
Anthropology 241 Environmental Studies,GSS, LAIS
An examination of gender and development formulations and their application in settings ranging from agricultural villages to industrial centers, with a focus on the interface between changing gender hierarchies and class, race, and ethnicity. The impact of global political economic changes and specific development projects on the activities of women and men in the labor force, in the household, and in religious and secular institutions and ideologies with which they construct notions of gender and identity, are explored. Equal attention is paid to local-level sociocultural practices and systems of knowledge with which women and men confront "development" and through which they seek their own creative and empowering solutions to the problems and opportunities it poses for them. The focus is on Latin America.

Anthropology of the Body
Anthropology 244 GSS, Human Rights
Anthropology has long been concerned with bodies as sources of symbolic representations of the social world and as vehicles for expressions of individual and collective identities. More recently, interest has centered on the individual body as a locus of situated knowledge. The body has become a target for the production of consumer desires and a site of commodification and political control.This course explores a range of different issues raised by these perspectives through readings that theorize about the body, supplemented by comparative ethnographic studies of bodily knowledge and practice. Topics include the gendering of bodies and other culturally constructed markings of age, social class, and race; mind-body relations; the manipulation of bodily surface and form to establish boundaries and identities through techniques such as tattooing, piercing, dieting, sculpting, and cosmetic surgery; commodification of the body through the selling and transplantation of body parts; and the blurring of body/nonbody boundaries under the impact of new body technologies.

Culture, Politics, and Representations of South Asia
Anthropology 246 Asian Studies, SRE
Using texts of anthropology as well as literature, history, and films, this course looks at representations of South Asia made by foreigners and South Asians alike. Employing the most general definition of ethnography, the course focuses on how particular metaphors, tropes, and ways of describing South Asia continue to shape our knowledge about the region. Students trace the development of certain categories—such as village, caste, family, religion, and gender—that have become crucial to many ethnographic portrayals of South Asia; these categories and each ethnographic piece are situated within the broader historical contexts of colonialism, the Partition of Pakistan and India, Indian nationalism, and South Asia's postcolonial relation to global development and politics. A final section of the course examines the relation between contemporary politics and media, exploring, for example, the relation between the rise of Hindu fundamentalism and popular T.V.Throughout the course, the work of two well-known Indian artists—the novelist Salman Rushdie and the filmmaker Satyagit Ray—is used to complement and challenge the ethnographic texts.

Theories of Personhood in Melanesia
Anthropology 247 GSS
The ethnogeographic region of Melanesia, consisting of New Guinea and neighboring islands in the southwestern Pacific, has long attracted anthropologists to the diversity of its peoples and the complexity of their social lives. This course explores the implications of Melanesian ethnography, which has perennially challenged anthropologists' assumptions about the conception and composition of the person, in both written and filmed media. The continuing magnetism of Melanesia, for anthropologists in search of unique forms of sociality and for tourists in search of the "last primitive," is investigated, as is Melanesian modernity and the special challenges and problems it poses to the islanders as they attempt to engage with the "global village" on their own terms. Prerequisite: Anthropology 101 or permission of the instructor.

Colonials in Africa
Anthropology 248 Africana Studies
This course examines the British African colonies of the early 20th century and the everyday lives of their colonists. These "outsiders" are studied through history, biography, fiction, and film, as well as through the responses of Africans. Various dichotomies—hypocrisy vs. idealism, brutality vs. bravery, racism vs. humanism—will be considered as the course seeks to develop an ethnographic portrayal of the rulers and the cultures they created in these colonies; not British, not African, but something very much "other."

Travel, Tourism, and Anthropology
Anthropology 249
Why has travel generated so much textual production? This course considers travel as a cultural practice and focuses on the link between travel writing and ethnography. Several genres of travel writing (postcards, letters, journals, guide-books, ethnography) are analyzed as to how they shape as well as reflect the experience of travel. Examples of travelers' writings from the 19th century to the present are examined to reveal how personal, group, and national identities have been constructed through travel. The course evaluates some of the ethical dilemmas that tourism poses, explores the concept of travel as a rite of passage, and scrutinizes writings from exile and diaspora communities that challenge the master narrative of European travel from "center" to "periphery." Readings include Jamaica Kincaid's A Small World, Levi-Strauss's Triste Tropique, and Mary Louise Pratt's Imperial Eyes, as well as fiction, ethnography, travelogues, and theoretical works.

Reading Baseball as Metaphor and Praxis
Anthropology 250 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 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 required attendance at amateur (Little League) and professional baseball games. Ethnographic research is also required.

Writing Ethnography
Anthropology 252
Since the 19th century, the ethnographic monograph has been the predominant form for the production and dissemination of anthropological knowledge. Ethnographies seek to establish their authority in readers' minds through persuasive techniques of location, voice, and thorough presentation of data. But the transition from an anthropologist's experience in the field to text is not always a smooth one, and anthropologists have periodically had to answer to charges that their texts were little more than novels overlaid with veneers of science. Students engage in close readings of several ethnographies as well as experiments in "ethnographic fiction," with accompanying criticism of the genre itself. They confront the challenges of transforming field research into text by producing their own ethnographies based on brief fieldwork projects.

Cultural Politics of the Raj
Anthropology 253 SRE,Victorian Studies
An exploration of the policies of the British Raj in India and the cultural categories that emerged and changed over the course of British rule. Using Thomas Metcalf's Ideologies of the Raj as a base text, the class examines the social archetypes that were central to the British colonial project, such as the English memsab and the Indian babu, and discusses British cultural practices that continue to color descriptions of South Asia today.

Religion and Power in Islamic Societies
Anthropology 255
This course examines theories of religion, discourse, power, gender, and sexuality in their application to Islamic societies of North Africa and the Middle East. Through a close and critical reading of canonical works, students consider such topics as political domination, tribal social organization, honor, shame, and ritual initiations and discuss how each speaks generally to anthropological inquiry. Regionally specific works are read in conjunction with readings from philosophy and literary and social theories. Among the authors included are Lila Abu-Lughod, Talal Asad, Pierre Bourdieu, Clifford Geertz, and Deborah Kapchan.

Race and Ethnicity in Brazil
Anthropology 256 Africana Studies, Jewish Studies, LAIS, SRE
Brazil, in contrast to the United States, has been portrayed by Brazilians and others as a "racial democracy." This course examines the debate over the "problem of race" in its early formulation shaped by scientific racism and eugenics. It then turns to the Brazilian policy of branquemento (whitening) in the 19th and early 20th centuries, which was the basis of large-scale migration to Brazil from all major regions of Europe. These "ethnic" populations settled mainly in southern and south central Brazil, leading to significant regional differences in identity politics and racial attitudes. The interplay of "racial" vs. "ethnic" identities is crucial to understanding the allocation of resources and status in Brazilian society. Inequality in contemporary Brazil is explored in terms of the dynamics of racial ideologies, the distribution of national resources, and the performance of identity as shaped by "racial" and "ethnic" strategies. Among the groups discussed are indigenous/native Brazilians, the Luso-Brazilians, Afro-Brazilians, Japanese Brazilians, Euro-ethnic Brazilians, and Brazilians of Arab and Jewish descent.

Ethnographic Film and Visual Anthropology in Africa
Anthropology 259 Africana Studies, SRE
This course addresses the visual aspects of culture and cultural production with a particular focus on postcolonial Africa.How are the arts and the visual aspects of society made meaningful in and for contemporary Africa?Students look at how Africa has been represented to the international community through film and other visual mass media. The course examines the artistic and visual aspects of culture as they are made socially meaningful both within African cultural contexts and when they are displayed for art and cinema audiences outside of Africa.Basic concerns and paradigms of anthropology, in particular ideas of racial and cultural difference, are introduced. This class is for those interested in historical/anthropological examinations of the visual as well as students producing film/videos, installations, and performance pieces, especially in relation to the politics of representation. For those interested in actually making films or videos, previous experience is required.

Anthropology of Violence and Suffering
Anthropology 261 GSS, Human Rights
Why do acts of violence continue to grow in the "modern" world? This course considers how acts of violence challenge and support modern ideas of humanity, raising important questions about what it means to be human today. It approaches 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.Violence is examined as a means of producing and consolidating social and political power, and exerting political control; forms of violence that have generated questions about "universal rights" of humanity versus culturally specific practices are reviewed, as are the ways human rights institutions have sought to address the profundity of human suffering and pain. Popular representations of violence in the media and films supplement readings from theoretical texts and anthropological ethnographies. This course fulfills a core class requirement for the Human Rights Program.

Anthropology through Film
Anthropology 272 Integrated Arts, SRE
A study of how anthropological knowledge is created and expressed through moving images, in comparison to textual representation, and informed by theories of vision and modernity. Focusing especially on the history of ethnographic film, students explore the possible uses of this medium in gaining knowledge of cultural others and as a discursive document for staging the reality of nature, culture, man, woman, the primitive, and the modern. In discussing specific films, most of which are within the mainly anthropological focus of the course, students examine questions of ethnographic authority alongside questions of aesthetic value. Readings from recent theories of ethnographic representation, classical film theory, and anthropological visual theory accompany the films.

Anthropology of Political Violence
Anthropology 315
This course examines violence as an individual and social experience, as a means of creating social and political power, and as a way of representing the extremes of human experience. Students employ the discipline of cultural anthropology to understand political violence as pain, fear, social construction, technology of power, and collective representation. Readings include theoretical texts such as Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish, anthropological ethnographies, journalism, and popular writing; visual materials will be used as well. Discussion focuses on recent transformations in the nature of political control and cultural conflict, particularly political actions undertaken in a religious context, including "revolution" and "terrorism."

Traditional Oratory and Practice
Anthropology 317
This course surveys the relationship between the forms and functions of discourse in traditional society. It explores the intimate relationship between poetry and persuasion in many kinds of traditional oratory, especially that found in "segmentary" political systems, but also in gendered poetic genres such as death laments in the Mediterranean region. The course addresses how and why poetic form is associated both with political persuasiveness and issues of power in such societies, and serves as a broad introduction to anthropological approaches to poetics and oratory more generally. Particular ethnographic focus is on the relationship between poetics and persuasion, power, and gender in a number of recent Middle Eastern and Mediterranean ethnographies (with examples drawn from elsewhere as appropriate).

Empire and Ecology
Anthropology 322 Environmental Studies, Victorian Studies
Simultaneously an exploration of European ecological imperialism, an environmental history of settler societies, and an investigation into "future" (postcolonial) landscapes, this course draws on the anthropology of exploration and place, environmental history, natural history, cultural and historical geography, and "spatial science." Topics include agriculture as colonization; the significance of the "hunting cult"; emergent state strategies of resource management in game reserves and national park formation; the political ecology of burning, deforestation, and mining; contemporary discourses of sustainability; and the implications of ecotourism and adventure tours. The course focuses on the colonies, dominions, and protectorates of the former British Empire in the Pacific, but comparative readings will draw also on Africa and India.

Colonial Evangelization and Native Responses in Central Mexico and Peru
Anthropology 323
A forum for the analysis and discussion of recent ethnohistorical and anthropological scholarship about the evangelization of colonial subjects, with a regional emphasis in Central Mexico and the Andes. Using a comparative approach to the study of colonial evangelization projects, this course examines native responses to such projects, ecclesiastical attempts to eliminate what was seen as idolatry, and the dynamics of conversion to Christianity. Theoretically oriented readings will range from Evans-Pritchard and Tambiah to works by the Comaroffs and Rafael.

Journalism and Anthropology
Anthropology 324
An exploration of the relationship of journalism to anthropology through a close reading of major journalistic texts whose focus has been sociological and/or cross-cultural. The goal is to understand the significance and nature of the journalistic versus the academic anthropological eye, word, method, and theory. Among the journalists read are Jane Kramer, A. J. Liebling, Jacob Riis, Lincoln Steffens, and recent writers on Bosnia, the Congo, Liberia, Rwanda, and the Sudan.

Invisible Relations: Magic in Anthropological Perspective
Anthropology 326 Religion
The "problem" of magic has been present in anthropological studies from the beginnings of the discipline. Broadly conceived, magic is the attribution of visible effects to a hidden agency, whether that agency be human, supernatural, or divine. The problem has moved from attempts to account for the seeming universality of magical beliefs to attempts to account for their persistence in the age of globalization. This course addresses the question of how magical thinking came to be associated with irrationality and "the primitive," a process in which anthropology has been intimately implicated. It considers the reappearance of magic as an apparent index of the conditions of modernity, and examines such recent manifestations of "magical thinking" as conspiracy theories and millenarian movements. The course adopts a position of contextualization rather than explanation of magical practice and belief. It challenges the assumption that the revelatory nature of empirical knowledge necessarily dismantles the hidden nature of occult knowledge, which ultimately calls into question the very terms of engagement between anthropology and magic. Readings include Peter Geschiere's The Modernity of Witchcraft, T. M. Luhrmann's Persuasions of the Witch's Craft, and Michael Taussig's The Magic of the State.

Performance, Ritual, and Symbolic Practice
Anthropology 327 Africana Studies
This course examines public performance and various types of theatricality with the aim to analyze how lived experience relates to politics, change, and social power. It considers keyphilosophical issues within anthropology and social thought more generally: power and its illusory enactment; the relationship between personal experience and broader social processes; the nature of consciousness; structure versus agency; stasis and change. The course examines classic anthropological conceptions of ritual, symbolic meaning, and social transformation and explores variouslinguistic, sociological,poststructuralist, and theatrical theories. Different ways to think about space and the social body are studied. The second half of the course draws on particular ethnographic, theatrical, philosophic, and literary examples from West Africa that address the relationships between historical memory, specific kinds of performance, and the local experience of power. Students are encouraged to consider the tension between "performance" as a theoretical frame and as an "object" of analysis.

The Country and the City
Anthropology 329
Using literary, ethnographic, and historical sources, this course provides an introduction to the relationship between the city and the country as a way to pursue modern ethnography. It explores the city, and its representation, as a complex set of social and economic relations fundamental to modern social life. With Raymond Williams's The Country and the City as a base text, the course focuses on the changing distinctions drawn between "city" and "country" as reflective of the relations between social class, as well as a sign of changing perceptions of geography and time. Ethnographies of contemporary cities such as New York, London, the Zambian Copperbelt, Calcutta, and Kathmandu are read, as well as works by Walter Benjamin, Mike Davis, David Henken, Wolfgang Schivelbusch, George Simmel, and Judith Walkowitz. In addition to these readings, students do their own ethnographic research and compose an ethnography on a particular group of people or a practice that demonstrates the cultural, social, and historical relationship between city and country in upstate New York.

Beyond Symbolic Anthropology
Anthropology 331
This course examines the practice of ethnography in anthropology, with special emphasis on the role that explicit theories of signs can play in the expansion of anthropological techniques. Seeking to learn how to practice an anthropology of signs, we explore theories of signs in the study of power, exchange, myth, ritual, and aspects of everyday life. These theories may contrast with earlier and rather vague approaches to the role of signs in society that go under the rubric of "symbolic anthropology." Various ethnographic localities are selected for study, and careful attention is paid to the ways that aspects of the material world are appropriated as vehicles of signification to mediate social life.

Cultural Technologies of Memory
Anthropology 332
This course is organized around several practices and technologies that produce collective and personal memory. The class explores the distinction commonly made between "memory" and "history." The techniques and technologies of public memory that are examined may include ancient "memory palaces," historical writing, oral narrative, ritual, myth, monuments, museums, and archives. The way in which radio and photography are used to produce national and familial representations of the past are explored. The focus is always on how the particular medium of remembering shapes the content of what is remembered, and consideration is given to who has access to memory practices, with the link between the production of particular memories and their political uses stressed.

Language, Culture, and Discourse
Anthropology 334
Language is one of the fundamental ways of apprehending the world as well as the means for constructing social identities like gender, race, ethnicity, class, and nationality. This course begins with the assumption that language and culture are inseparable and considers several different theoretical and ethnographic approaches that demonstrate this connection. It closely analyzes everyday conversations and broader discourses that create class, gender, and national differences in written and oral narratives. Pierre Bourdieu's Language and Symbolic Power and Mikhail Bakhtin's The Dialogic Imagination are studied to reveal the way distinct social worlds intersect within a given language. Topics for discussion include how authority is established through specific forms of speech, the performative power of language, the relationship between language and social hierarchies, and the study of genre and discourse as historical and social forms. Additional readings include works by
J. L. Austin, Judith Butler, E. Valentine Daniel, Jacques Derrida, Steven Feld, and Susan Harding.

Intellectual and Cultural Property Rights
Anthropology 336 Environmental Studies, SRE
This course examines the rapidly expanding concepts of intellectual and cultural property and the claims made in their names, as well as the unique relationship of anthropologists to these claims. It investigates notions of property, the increasing transaction in intangible goods such as information, and issues of creativity and ownership. Readings include anthropological, legal, and other literatures and focus on how the concept of "rights" has come to be the language through which claims to intangible forms of property are expressed.

Cultural Politics of Animals
Anthropology 337 Africana Studies, Environmental Studies, Human Rights
Human ideas about animals have metamorphosed 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 environmental movement. Beneath the centrality of animals in our social, economic, and physical worlds lies their deep implication within human cultural politics. Some of the questions this course raises 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? Do animals exercise agency? Where are they positioned on the moral landscapes of cultures? Students explore these shifting terrains through the angle of "animal geography," a new field that focuses on how animals have been socially defined, labeled, and ordered in cultural worldviews. Prerequisite: background in anthropology.

Multimedia and Social Science Workshop
Anthropology 342 Integrated Arts
An exploration of multimedia methods for enhancing visual literacy in the social sciences, with an emphasis on "reading" and "writing." Composition methods in varied genres of public media are surveyed; with digital editing, and possibly website building, the class practices using and reversing those methods through original recompositions. These skills are then applied to visual ethnographic investigations. Taking a cue from Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project and its precursors, the class articulates what it means to think, investigate, and comment in the medium of imagery and with the ethical and political aspirations of social theory. Readings are drawn from theories of vision and modernity, public culture, and ethnographic film.