Anthropology
Introduction to Cultural Anthropology |
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Professor:
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Andrew Bush |
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Course
Number: |
ANTH 101 A |
CRN Number: |
90239 |
Class cap: |
18 |
Credits: |
4 |
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Schedule/Location:
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Mon Wed 8:30 AM
- 9:50 AM Olin 204 |
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Distributional Area: |
SA Social Analysis D+J Difference and Justice |
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Crosslists: |
Global & International Studies |
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Other than capitalism, what is there? How do we sense the state
in our everyday lives? What can or can’t we learn from other people by
talking with them? Since when is anthropology anti-racist? Questions like
these inaugurate our investigation of how colonial and anti-colonial
tendencies have shaped the field of anthropology for more than a century. We
study how anthropologists learn about topics like race, climate, witchcraft,
or kindness through the lens of grammar, gossip, lunchboxes, or driving.
Across the semester we return to the ethical and political question at the
heart of the field: How should anthropologists learn, think, or write about
human entanglements with one another, and with the non-human? After studying
different varieties of ethnography, students are equipped to conduct
mini-ethnographies as part of their learning in the course. |
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Introduction to Cultural Anthropology |
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Professor:
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Andrew Bush |
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Course
Number: |
ANTH 101 B |
CRN Number: |
90240 |
Class cap: |
18 |
Credits: |
4 |
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Schedule/Location:
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Mon Wed 10:10 AM
- 11:30 AM Olin 204 |
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Distributional Area: |
SA Social Analysis D+J Difference and Justice |
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Crosslists: |
Global & International Studies |
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Other than capitalism, what is there? How do we sense the
state in our everyday lives? What can or can’t we learn from other people by
talking with them? Since when is anthropology anti-racist? Questions like
these inaugurate our investigation of how colonial and anti-colonial
tendencies have shaped the field of anthropology for more than a century. We
study how anthropologists learn about topics like race, climate, witchcraft,
or kindness through the lens of grammar, gossip, lunchboxes, or driving.
Across the semester we return to the ethical and political question at the
heart of the field: How should anthropologists learn, think, or write about
human entanglements with one another, and with the non-human? After studying
different varieties of ethnography, students are equipped to conduct
mini-ethnographies as part of their learning in the course. |
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Socialist Musical Imaginaries |
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Professor:
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Maria Sonevytsky
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Course
Number: |
ANTH 209 |
CRN Number: |
90317 |
Class cap: |
22 |
Credits: |
4 |
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Schedule/Location:
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Tue Thurs 10:10 AM
- 11:30 AM Olin 101 |
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Distributional Area: |
SA Social Analysis |
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Crosslists: |
Global & International Studies; Human Rights; Music; Russian and
Eurasian Studies |
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What is the relationship between musical culture and
political ideology? Taking examples from China, Cuba, Eastern Europe and the
former Soviet Union, this course surveys the cultural policies of socialist
states and their effects on the lives, listening habits, and creative output
of musicians and music consumers. From the politics of Ukrainian punk, to the
invention of Uzbek opera, to the performance of masculinity in Chinese and
Cuban pop music, we will investigate how political ideologies generated state
support for certain kinds of music while suppressing other forms of
unofficial, underground and protest music. Students will develop an
understanding of how socialist cultural policy models in diverse regions of
the world have understood the uses and the threats posed by musical culture
in daily and symbolic life. Furthermore, we will evaluate what happens when
the ideological imperatives of a regime transform, fade away, or are suddenly
replaced with a new political ideology. Readings include historical,
anthropological, and musicological texts that examine the relationship of
musical sound to publics, counterpublics and states. Students do not need to
read musical notation to take this class. |
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Archaeology at Montgomery Place |
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Professor:
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Christopher Lindner
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Course Number: |
ANTH 210 |
CRN Number: |
90556 |
Class cap: |
12 |
Credits: |
4 |
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Schedule/Location:
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Tue 1:30 PM - 5:20 PM Montgomery Place and Ecology Field Station Teaching Lab |
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Distributional Area: |
LS Laboratory Science |
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Crosslists: |
Africana Studies; Environmental & Urban Studies; Environmental
Studies; Historical Studies |
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This course concentrates on Alexander Gilson’s residence at
the Conservatory, its location confirmed by discovery in 2021 of domestic
pottery in the African American’s yard, along with a gardening tool. The next
stage of subsurface testing aims to identify key architectural features of
his dwelling and the placement of its exterior garden beds. Archival research
about ornamental flora may complement our quest, through fine sifting of
earth, to recover information about the plants Gilson grew for personal
reasons. Reading and brief writing for seminar participation will provide
information on the archaeology of landscapes. We’ll engage with land access
groups in Kingston, as part of the ELAS component of the course. Enrollment
limited to 12, through approval by the professor. |
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Archaeology Laboratory Methods |
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Professor:
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Christopher Lindner
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Course
Number: |
ANTH 213 |
CRN Number: |
90557 |
Class cap: |
12 |
Credits: |
4 |
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Schedule/Location:
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Thurs 1:30 PM - 2:50 PM Hegeman 201 |
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Fri
1:30 PM - 4:30 PM Hegeman 201/ Ecology Field Station Teaching Lab |
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Distributional Area: |
LS Laboratory Science |
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Crosslists: |
Environmental & Urban Studies; Environmental Studies |
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Bringing to fruition 12 past seasons of carefully limited
excavations, lab analysis will seek to identify, among 1,000s of
manufacturing flakes, flint tools that might substantiate a theory: people
from the mound-building cultures of southern Ohio visited the Hudson Valley
around 2,000 years ago. We will further address the hypothesis that some
firepits at the Forest residence (next to the Honey ball field behind
Admissions) formed part of religious-philosophical rituals to maintain
well-being. We will fine-sift earth from these hearths and other pits in
search of culinary &/or medicinal plant vestiges. Our reading for seminar
discussion will focus on comparable evidence of the period in southern Ohio,
as regards the Adena and Hopewell peoples. We’ll engage with herbal education
groups in the local area, as part of the ELAS component of the course.
Enrollment limited to 12, through approval by the professor. |
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The Rift and The Nile: Nature, Culture and
History in Eastern Africa |
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Professor:
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John Ryle |
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Course
Number: |
ANTH 218 |
CRN Number: |
90318 |
Class cap: |
22 |
Credits: |
4 |
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Schedule/Location:
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Mon Wed 10:10 AM
- 11:30 AM Albee 106 |
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Distributional Area: |
SA Social Analysis D+J Difference and Justice |
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Crosslists: |
Africana Studies; Environmental & Urban Studies; Environmental
Studies; Historical Studies; Human Rights |
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The Great Rift Valley runs through Eastern Africa to the
Red Sea, dividing the African continent in two; and the Blue Nile and the
White Nile both flow through the region. Between them, they transect a vast
area of spectacular natural diversity, where modes of existence range from
hunter-gathering and pastoral nomadism to the way of life of modern
city-dwellers. Fossil evidence indicates that the emergence of humanity took
place in the Rift Valley 200,000 years ago. Today, Eastern Africa exemplifies
many of the challenges that confront the continent: the legacy of
colonialism, the unrestrained exploitation of natural resources, accelerating
environmental change, armed conflict and the decay of states. The response of
communities in the region – cultural and political – demonstrates the
inventiveness of human adaptation and the drama of survival. The class offers
an interdisciplinary approach to these layers of natural and human history,
deploying scholarly research, reportage, music and documentary film to examine
the diverse ways of being that endure, and the versions of modernity emerging
from economic and demographic transformation. |
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Captured Voices: Ethnographic Listening |
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Professor: |
Laura Kunreuther |
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Course Number: |
ANTH 223 |
CRN Number: |
90316 |
Class cap: |
18 |
Credits: |
4 |
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Schedule/Location: |
Wed Fri 11:50 AM – 1:10 PM Olin 303 |
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Distributional Area: |
SA Social Analysis D+J Difference
and Justice |
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Crosslists: |
American & Indigenous Studies; Experimental Humanities;
Human Rights |
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This course examines the intersection between ethnographic
research and the emergence of modern recording technology. Drawing
inspiration from critical indigenous studies, sound and media studies, we
will examine different technologies of voice that have been central to the
ethnographic recording and circulation of indigenous folktales, language, and
songs in anthropology. How have such technologies shaped ethnographic
listening? At the center of these technologies and ethnographic
practices lie modern ideologies of voice - deployed in politics, social
movements and cultural productions – that tend to naturalize the relationship
between voice and the self, agency, or empowerment. But as we will see,
the immediacy of the voice often depends upon specific technologies (eg.
sound recording, amplification, broadcasting) and human labor (eg.
interpreters/translators or stenographers) through which particular voices
are made audible. Throughout the class, we will explore critical and
indigenous approaches to voice and listening, along with the notion of
ethnographic refusal, to consider new models for ethnographic practice.
Students will be required to focus on a specific technology of voice or
listening practice from within or beyond the course syllabus, and will
produce a paper and a listening project that may be showcased at the EH share
event. |
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Lost Recipes |
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Professor:
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Sucharita Kanjilal
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Course
Number: |
ANTH 232 |
CRN Number: |
90315 |
Class cap: |
18 |
Credits: |
4 |
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Schedule/Location:
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Tue Thurs 11:50 AM
- 1:10 PM Olin 309 |
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Distributional Area: |
SA Social Analysis |
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Crosslists: |
American & Indigenous Studies; Experimental Humanities; Global &
International Studies; Human Rights |
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This course explores how food cultures and histories are
shaped, contested and preserved by examining the recipe as a cultural
artefact. It invites students to ask: What is a recipe, and how does it
relate to questions of place and territory, memory and archive? In the
contemporary food media and restaurant industries, the showcasing of ‘lost
recipes’, as they relate to particular peoples and places, is an enchanting
and lucrative practice that promises both cultural representation and
culinary reclamation. This raises the question: How and why are some recipes
thought to be ‘lost’, and by whom and in what form are they considered to be
found? What happens when the preservation of culinary knowledges becomes
unmoored from the material questions of dispossession and land loss? How does
the growing global interest in food history relate to ongoing struggles for
food sovereignty and food justice? Lost (and found) recipes, then, provide a
unique entry point into questions of land and conquest, representational
politics and cultural contestation, media and memorialization. Throughout
this course, we will draw on scholarly and multimedia resources from across
anthropology, food history, anti-caste and indigenous studies in order to
take a capacious look at the recipe form and its related archives. By
examining recipes embedded in oral histories and narrative-based records,
colonial and community cookbooks, television programming and digital media,
we will consider the kinds of conservation projects and imagined futures to
which recipes contribute. And, by taking a global and feminist perspective,
we will foreground indigenous and Dalit efforts towards culinary revitalization
that confront the colonial-capitalist culinary archive. |
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Introduction to Media |
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Professor:
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Sucharita Kanjilal
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Course
Number: |
ANTH 258 |
CRN Number: |
90314 |
Class cap: |
18 |
Credits: |
4 |
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Schedule/Location:
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Tue Thurs 3:30 PM
- 4:50 PM Olin Languages Center 118 |
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Distributional Area: |
SA Social Analysis |
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Crosslists: |
Experimental Humanities; Global & International Studies |
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(EH Core Course) This course explores the complex ways in
which media animate our social, sensory and political worlds, and enable
particular relationships between people, places, bodies and things. A key
focus of this class will be to de-Westernize our understanding of media
theory and practice, and critically evaluate what media “do” in time and
space. We will tackle questions such as: Under what historical and social
circumstances do people consume, produce and distribute media? How have
people appropriated global, national and local media, especially in the
Global South? How do power relations produced by race, gender, class, caste
and capital shape encounters with media and media industries? Our class will
engage with a range of media forms, from colonial cookbooks to movie
theatres, community radio stations to the YouTube industry. We will read
scholarly works from across the fields of media studies, feminist theory,
anthropology and digital geography, putting key media theorists (such as
Stuart Hall, Marshall McLuhan, Laura Marks, Lila Abu-Lughod, Lev Manovich and
Charles Hirschkind) in conversation with contemporary media practitioners,
artists and organizers. We will also prioritize working on media projects
ourselves, in order to assess our own positions as producers as well as users
and consumers of media. |
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Contemporary Cultural Theory |
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Professor:
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Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins
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Course
Number: |
ANTH 350 |
CRN Number: |
90320 |
Class cap: |
15 |
Credits: |
4 |
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Schedule/Location:
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Wed 3:30 PM
- 5:50 PM Reem Kayden Center 200 |
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Distributional Area: |
SA Social Analysis D+J Difference and Justice |
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Crosslists: |
Human Rights |
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This course is intended as an introduction to advanced
theories of culture in contemporary anthropology. In contrast to early
anthropological focus on seemingly isolated, holistic societies, more recent
studies have turned their attention to the intersection of local systems of
meaning with global processes of politics, economics and history. This course
will be designed around influential theorists, including Michel-Rolph
Trouillot, Donna Haraway, Anna Tsing, Judith Butler, Pierre Bourdieu, Michael
Taussig, Arjun Appadurai, and Eduardo Kohn. The course aims to inspire
critical engagement with an eye towards developing theoretical tools and
questions for the senior project. This course examines how power works in the
production of history, gender, language, global economies, and definitions of
the nonhuman. Required and open only for moderated anthropology students, or
by permission of the instructor. |
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Global Indigenism |
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Professor:
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Maria Sonevytsky
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Course
Number: |
ANTH 366 |
CRN Number: |
90319 |
Class cap: |
15 |
Credits: |
4 |
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Schedule/Location:
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Mon 12:30
PM - 2:50 PM Olin 107 |
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Distributional Area: |
SA Social Analysis D+J Difference and Justice |
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Crosslists: |
American & Indigenous Studies; Global & International
Studies; Human Rights |
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Does the global Indigenous rights movement amount to a
“subtle revolution” that has the potential to reform and improve our world
order, as Prof. Sheryl L. Lightfoot (Anishinaabe/Lake Superior) argues? Or is
it a movement that entraps Indigenous peoples from around the world in
expectations of primitivism, “settler time,” eco- spiritualities, or
performances of authenticity, as others contend? This seminar investigates
the prolific tensions—the pitfalls and potentials—inherent in the global
movement for Indigenous rights. Centering on anthropological accounts of Indigenous
peoples’ movements, the seminar will begin with two books: Indigenous Peoples
and Borders (Lightfoot and Stamatopoulou), and The Origins of Indigenism:
Human Rights and the Politics of Identity (Niezen). We will then move to
situated ethnographic accounts of Indigenous movements in various states,
from intergenerational memory politics in post-Soviet Ukrainian Crimea (Greta
Uehling), to competing visions of Indigenous modernity in Colombia (David D.
Gow), the rise of “indigenous elites” among Kenya’s Maasai (Serah Shani), the
contradictory imperatives of liberal recognition in Australia (Elizabeth
Povinelli), the class dimensions of indigenous rights activism in India (Alpa
Shah), the politics of Indigenous refusal across the settler Canada/US
borders (Audra Simpson), and more. In addition to weekly reading responses,
students will be asked to conduct a semester-long independent research
project on a course subject to approval by the instructor. |
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Senior Project Colloquium |
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Professor:
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Laura Kunreuther |
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Course
Number: |
ANTH 403 |
CRN Number: |
90321 |
Class cap: |
15 |
Credits: |
0 |
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Schedule/Location:
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Thurs 5:00 PM – 7:30
PM Olin 202 |
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Distributional Area: |
SA Social Analysis |
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The Senior Project Colloquium is required of all
anthropology seniors registered for ANTH 401. This one- semester colloquium
provides a collaborative space for students beginning their senior projects
in the fall. The course guides students through developing their topics and
refining the anthropological questions that inform their research and
writing. We will read anthropological texts, including past senior projects,
to think about the scope of the senior project, and how to synthesize and
integrate relevant scholarship. We will produce short pieces of ethnographic
writing as well as project outlines that will be incorporated into midway
board chapters. Throughout the semester, students will have multiple
opportunities to workshop their ideas and writing in progress, and to support
each other through the challenges of working on a senior project. Please note
that the colloquium does not replace individual meetings with senior project
advisors. Students will be graded P/D/F based on attendance and active
participation in the colloquium. |
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Cross-listed Courses:
After Chinua Achebe: Reading contemporary African Literature |
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Professor: |
John Ryle |
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Course Number: |
LIT 2023 |
CRN Number: |
91095 |
Class cap: |
15 |
Credits: |
4 |
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Schedule/Location: |
Tue Thurs
3:30 PM – 4:50 PM Olin 302 |
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Distributional Area: |
LA Literary Analysis in English |
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Crosslists: |
Africana Studies; Anthropology; Human Rights; Written Arts |
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Introduction to Ethnomusicology |
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Professor:
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Whitney Slaten
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Course
Number: |
MUS 185 |
CRN Number: |
90043 |
Class cap: |
20 |
Credits: |
4 |
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Schedule/Location:
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Wed Fri 10:10 AM
- 11:30 AM Blum Music Center N210 |
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Distributional Area: |
SA Social Analysis D+J Difference and Justice |
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Crosslists: |
Anthropology |
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Improvisation:Social Science |
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Professor:
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Whitney Slaten
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Course
Number: |
MUS 251 |
CRN Number: |
90044 |
Class cap: |
20 |
Credits: |
4 |
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Schedule/Location:
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Wed Fri 11:50 AM
- 1:10 PM Blum Music Center N210 |
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Distributional Area: |
SA Social Analysis |
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Crosslists: |
Africana Studies; American & Indigenous Studies; Anthropology;
Experimental Humanities |
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Field Methods:Ethnomusicology |
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Professor:
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Whitney Slaten
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Course
Number: |
MUS 334 |
CRN Number: |
90045 |
Class cap: |
10 |
Credits: |
4 |
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Schedule/Location:
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Thurs 12:30 PM
- 2:50 PM Blum Music Center N210 |
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Distributional Area: |
SA Social Analysis |
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Crosslists: |
Anthropology; Sociology |
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