Course:

ANTH 101  Introduction to Cultural Anthropology

Professor:

Duff Morton  

CRN:

15571

Schedule/Location:

 Tue  Thurs    10:10 AM – 11:30 AM Olin 203

Distributional Area:

SA Social Analysis D+J Difference and Justice

Credits: 4

 

Class cap: 23

Crosslists: Global & International 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 ‘non-modern’ 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, and 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 enter debates about anthropologists’ engagement in activism, policy and government. 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.

 

Course:

ANTH 216  The Modern Dinosaur

Professor:

Yuka Suzuki  

CRN:

15572

Schedule/Location:

Mon  Wed     10:10 AM – 11:30 AM Olin 201

Distributional Area:

SA Social Analysis  

Credits: 4

 

Class cap: 22

Crosslists: Environmental & Urban Studies; Science, Technology, Society

Since their ascendancy in global popular culture, dinosaurs have come to constitute a category of charismatic animals unmatched by contemporary living species. Dinosaurs appear everywhere—as plush toys and chicken nuggets, as corporate mascots and public monuments, and as metaphorical critiques of nuclear weapons. In this course, we will explore the figure of the modern dinosaur both as object of scientific inquiry and as popular culture icon. We will focus on competitive exploration for dinosaur fossils at the turn of the 20th century; rivalries between paleontologists such as Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh; and the rise of dinosaur philanthropy in natural history museums. We will also consider how new paleontological discoveries provoked parallel shifts in meaning and representation. How are dinosaurs articulated and brought back to life from a distant geologic past? How are they employed as metaphors for dominance, size, dim-wittedness, and obsolescence? What role do they play in the making of power and nationhood? Through the close examination of scientific and cultural histories, museums, and popular media, this course will address our fascination with dinosaurs, and how the reemergence of these prehistoric creatures helped shape our modern world.

 

Course:

ANTH 228  Economic Anthropology

Professor:

Duff Morton  

CRN:

15574

Schedule/Location:

 Tue   Fri   1:30 PM – 2:50 PM Olin 203

Distributional Area:

SA Social Analysis  

Credits: 4

 

Class cap: 23

Crosslists: Economics

Does money exist in every society? Is there such a thing as an economy with no markets? How do people come to accept income inequality? Why is it considered rude or even dangerous to give away a gift that has been given to you? Each of these questions opens a door onto economic anthropology. By striving to consider economic questions in the broadest possible setting – across the full sweep of human experience – economic anthropology helps us to gain fresh eyes with which to view some basic concepts. This class offers an overview of economic anthropology. It considers exchange theory, money and markets, the debate between the substantivists and the formalists, the analysis of inequality in production, economics as performance, and the new “generating capitalisms” approach. We take a close look at anarchists, South Pacific canoe trading, British shoppers, and the anxieties of entrepreneurialism. As it makes the familiar seem strange, this class aims to open up new possibilities for understanding the circulations that we set into motion every day.

 

Course:

ANTH 239  Action Research: Social Service, Community Organizing, and Anthropology

Professor:

Duff Morton  

CRN:

15575

Schedule/Location:

  Wed     11:50 AM – 1:10 PM Olin 305

     Fri   8:30 AM – 12:30 PM  Internship

Distributional Area:

SA Social Analysis D+J Difference and Justice

Credits: 4

 

Class cap: 10

Crosslists: American Studies; Human Rights; Political Studies

Action research is research that aims to produce locally-based knowledge with practical and immediate importance to someone: for example, to a nonprofit, to a mayor, to a business, or to a union. The course is designed for students who wish to gain practical experience with health, psychological services, youth work, social movements, or related fields. We combine classroom readings with weekly work in a community organization. Students commit to a semester-long internship at a group that carries out community organizing or social service. We strive to make change by participating directly in the labor of mental health, human services, or activism. In class, students will read from traditions that grapple with problems at the intersection of social science and social change, focusing on sources important to anthropology, including texts by Vico, Marx, Scheper-Hughes, and Kesha-Kahn Perry. We will consider influences from constructivism, collaborative anthropology, and militant anthropology. The class will promote an analytic engagement with human services, encouraging us to think in an anthropological vein and emphasizing the practice of participant observation. We will strive to produce research that advances the project of the groups to which we are committed. The class will meet twice each week: (a) once for a classroom session of one hour and twenty minutes and (b) once for an internship session of four to eight hours. At both locations, we aim to put anthropology to work in the world. Interested students must email Duff Morton at gmorton@bard.edu before registration and complete a brief online form. This is an Engaged Liberal Arts & Sciences (ELAS) course. In this course you will be given the opportunity to bridge theory to practice while engaging a community of interest throughout the semester. A significant portion of ELAS learning takes place outside of the classroom: students learn through engagement with different geographies, organizations, and programs in the surrounding communities or in collaboration with partners from Bard's national and international networks. To learn more please click here.

 

Course:

ANTH 257  Gender and Sexuality in the Middle East

Professor:

Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins  

CRN:

15576

Schedule/Location:

Mon   Thurs    1:30 PM – 2:50 PM Hegeman 102

Distributional Area:

SA Social Analysis D+J Difference and Justice

Credits: 4

 

Class cap: 20

Crosslists: Gender and Sexuality Studies; Middle Eastern Studies

Why are U.S. media captivated by “ISIS brides?” Taking its cue from anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod’s recently reposed question— “Do Muslim women need saving?”—this course begins with the premise that it is valuable to question how discourses around gender and sexuality have been central to Western understandings of difference and rights in the Middle East. People in the U.S. are inundated with figures such as “the veiled women” and “the terrorist man,” representations that inform military decisions about who is protected from violence and who is killable as much as they inform the contours of transnational solidarities. The course aims to investigate how gender and sexuality are constructed as categories and are experienced in the Middle East and how these categories/experiences relate to political and economic formations like authoritarianism and capitalism and materialities like infrastructures and war. We will draw on contexts such as Iran, Turkey, Algeria, Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine/Israel and Iraq. We will read anthropologists, queer theorists, and historians to understand what dynamics of space, queerness, gender performance, revolution, garments, bodies and the law, can tell us about colonial, anti-colonial and postcolonial life in this diverse set of geographies.

 

Course:

ANTH 290  Archaeology of African American Farms, Yards, and Gardens

Professor:

Christopher Lindner  

CRN:

15578

Schedule/Location:

   Thurs    3:30 PM – 4:50 PM Hegeman 201

     Fri   1:30 PM – 4:30 PM Hegeman 201

Distributional Area:

LS Laboratory Science  

Credits: 4

 

Class cap: 12

Crosslists: Africana Studies; American Studies; Environmental & Urban Studies

How can we use archaeological methods to identify, analyze, and interpret places where the growing of plants by African Americans flourished, and contextualize our findings on these sites to help counter racism in the present? The laboratory science aspect of this ELAS course will derive from protocols and strategies of exploratory sampling excavations. Our goal will be identification of deposits that remain relatively undisturbed and contain artifacts that represent particularly relevant eras in the past. Thursdays, seminars will take place in person &/or by videoconference. In the winter labs on Friday, we’ll examine artifacts excavated nearby in Germantown, at the Reformed Parsonage, to prepare for the excavation in spring of a front dooryard and/or a garden beside the house. Our focus is the family headed by a free African American farmer, Henry Person. His wife, Mary, was likely born to a bondswoman at the house in 1805. Evidence of African American spiritual practices have been found in its cellar and yard. We have a field site for a safely distanced dig if precautions against the COVID pandemic warrant: Montgomery Place, the ornamental Conservatory where 19th-century African American horticulturist Alexander Gilson lived and worked. We’ll strive to involve community colleagues from the environs of Hudson, Kingston &/or Poughkeepsie, in person and via Zoom. Some students return for another month in summer for 4 more credits; see www.bard.edu/archaeology/fieldschool. The class size limit is 12, with enrollment by permission after a preliminary conversation with each interested student. This is an Engaged Liberal Arts & Sciences (ELAS) course. In this course you will be given the opportunity to bridge theory to practice while engaging a community of interest throughout the semester. A significant portion of ELAS learning takes place outside of the classroom: students learn through engagement with different geographies, organizations, and programs in the surrounding communities or in collaboration with partners from Bard's national and international networks. To learn more please click here.

 

Course:

ANTH 294  Transnational Asia

Professor:

Naoko Kumada  

CRN:

15656

Schedule/Location:

 Tue  Thurs    3:30 PM – 4:50 PM Olin 204

Distributional Area:

SA Social Analysis D+J Difference and Justice

Credits: 4

 

Class cap: 20

Crosslists: Asian Studies; Global & International Studies

‘Asia,’ like ‘the Orient,’ has been a term defined in opposition to Europe/’the Occident,’ from the perspective of European cultural and material hegemony. Its cultural mapping as a unitary entity permanently peripheral to the West is, in one scholar’s phrase, derived from ‘The Colonizer’s Model of the World,’ based on the belief that moral, social and material progress flows from the West to Asia and must, as an ethical imperative, continue to. This course is an invitation to reimagine our view of the contemporary world and its future as we challenge deeply embedded assumptions about Asia. We will consider whether and how the idea of Asia has functioned in both imperialist and anti-colonial historiographies and politico-theological frameworks from Japan to Afghanistan. We will balance our discussion of the discursive and critical dimensions of this topic by examining specific developments, trends and episodes in inter-Asian and global circulations of travel, investment, labor migration, and marriage. Further, we will look at the transnational implications of forms of practice as disparate as martial arts and video games against an ancient past of cultural flows from the Silk Roads to the maritime trade routes between China, the Red Sea and East Africa.

 

Course:

ANTH 295  Anthropology of Law

Professor:

Naoko Kumada  

CRN:

15657

Schedule/Location:

Mon  Wed     3:30 PM – 4:50 PM Olin 101

Distributional Area:

SA Social Analysis D+J Difference and Justice

Credits: 4

 

Class cap: 20

Crosslists: Asian Studies; Human Rights

Ideals of the “rule of law” and the rights enshrined in the United States Constitution are something one commonly hears in everyday US society. Do other societies around the world have the same ideas of law? Is it possible to offer a universal definition of law? Is law always associated with the state? How do stateless societies maintain social order and resolve conflict? We ask these questions in this introductory course on anthropological approaches to law. We will explore the ways in which anthropologists have worked to offer a cross-cultural understanding of the nature and forms of law, from law in ‘primitive’ societies to the contemporary globalized world. Topics, gathered from examples such as in the UK, Indonesia, Australia, and the US, will include: anthropologists’ role in asylum courts, illegal and legal forms of corruption, and law and the colonial and settler-colonial encounter. No prior experience in legal studiues is presumed.

 

Course:

ANTH 296  The Anthropology of Home

Professor:

Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins  

CRN:

15658

Schedule/Location:

 Tue  Thurs    10:10 AM – 11:30 AM OSUN Course

Distributional Area:

SA Social Analysis D+J Difference and Justice

Credits: 4

 

Class cap: 22

Crosslists: Architecture

What makes a home? Are homes political? This course will examine the meanings, materialities, and effects of homes across cultural contexts and through time. It will seek to understand how homes are unmade and remade, and what the effects of those processes are on human relationships and on relations between humans and the nonhuman world. It will investigate the relationship between homes and wealth in different societies, and what kinds of ownership emerge out of humans’ relationships to the infrastructures of shelter. The course will explore cases when homes appear to operate as extensions of colonial, state and nationalist ideologies. And it will highlight contexts in which homes can become spaces that counter hegemonic ideologies or cultural norms, or that can preserve lifeways that such ideologies and norms seek to eradicate. It will examine the kinds of labor and attention it takes to keep a structure stable enough over time, and against erosion caused by the elements, asking what socialities are formed out of the different kinds of–often gendered–labor that go into maintaining a home? It will investigate the question of whether homes are always spaces of intimacy. And it will explore the relationship between homes and the seemingly natural division between public and private realms. Our readings will draw on works of earlier anthropologists and theorists (e.g. Bourdieu, Hurston, Arendt, Levi-Strauss, Foucault, Laporte, Weiner), as well as on more contemporary ethnographies of places such as Palestine, Greece, Argentina, Vietnam, and the United States. This is an OSUN class and is open to Bard students as well as students from multiple OSUN partner institutions.

 

Course:

ANTH 324  Doing Ethnography

Professor:

Maria Sonevytsky  

CRN:

15580

Schedule/Location:

 Tue      12:30 PM – 2:50 PM Olin 302

Distributional Area:

SA Social Analysis  

Credits: 4

 

Class cap: 12

Crosslists: Environmental & Urban Studies; Human Rights

What are the ethical stakes, practical questions, and methodological tools that we use when we practice ethnography? Ethnography is the cornerstone of contemporary cultural anthropology, and includes both fieldwork and representation. This course is a survey of, and practicum in, ethnographic field methods. We will study and critique traditional ethnographic methods such as participant-observation, interviewing, archival research, visual, sonic, textual and spatial analysis, and address the challenges of doing fieldwork in a variety of contexts, including the virtual domain. A series of sequenced intensive research exercises will raise guiding questions about how ethnographic research can be ethically and effectively “translated” into written text. We attend also to emergent ethnographic forms and methods, such as multi-sited ethnography, critical moral anthropology, and indigenous methodologies and critiques. To complement the fieldwork projects, we will also read exemplary, and sometimes controversial, texts of ethnography in practice. Students will develop a community- or environmentally-based ethnographic research project of their own design throughout the course of the semester. Ethical aspects of conducting ethnographic fieldwork, including preparing for Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval, will be addressed. This course satisfies the “field methods” requirement for moderation in anthropology and/or environmental and urban studies. Prerequisites: Introduction to Anthropology 101 and/or EUS 101.

 

Course:

ANTH 349  Political Ecology

Professor:

Yuka Suzuki  

CRN:

15525

Schedule/Location:

 Tue      9:10 AM – 11:30 AM Olin 301

Distributional Area:

SA Social Analysis D+J Difference and Justice

Credits: 4

 

Class cap: 15

Crosslists: Africana Studies; Environmental & Urban Studies; Human Rights; Science, Technology, Society

Defining itself against dominant conceptions of ecology as apolitical, political ecology emerged in the early 1990s at the intersection of two prominent schools of thought: cultural ecology and political economy. Based on the idea 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 historical and social contexts, this course explores topics such as development, endangered species rehabilitation, extinction and loss, wildfires, desertification, slaughterhouses, and life after the Anthropocene and beyond Earth itself. The course is designated as Difference and Justice (D&J) because it centers race, gender, class, and the nonhuman as we examine how environmental issues sustain and amplify inequality on local and global scales.

 

Course:

ANTH 369  Middle Eastern Diasporas

Professor:

Jeff Jurgens  

CRN:

15579

Schedule/Location:

Mon       9:10 AM – 11:30 AM Olin 301

Distributional Area:

SA Social Analysis D+J Difference and Justice

Credits: 4

 

Class cap: 15

Crosslists: Global & International Studies; Human Rights; Middle Eastern Studies

This course examines the past and present experiences of people of Arab, Afghan, Iranian, Kurdish, and Turkish backgrounds who reside in Europe and North America, as well as those of Jews of diverse backgrounds who live in Israel and abroad. At the same time, we will explore how and why these groups are commonly regarded as “diasporas,” a term that is itself closely connected with the displacement and dispersion of Jews beginning in the sixth century BCE. Accordingly, we critically investigate not only the history of “diaspora” as a concept, but also the contemporary circumstances that have encouraged its recent prominence in public and scholarly discussion. After all, it was not that long ago that the aforementioned groups often characterized themselves (and were characterized by others) not as “diasporic,” but as “immigrant,” “expatriate,” “refugee,” “exile,” and “ethnic.” What has brought about this shift in terms? How do contemporary diasporas differ from past ones, especially those that emerged before the advent of nationalism and the nation-state? Finally, how are recent diasporic experiences shaped not only by gendered, sexual, class, and religious differences, but also by ongoing imperial projects and practices of racialization? To address these questions, we will work comparatively across national contexts and historical eras, relying on materials from anthropologists, historians, cultural studies scholars, and “diasporans” themselves.

 

Cross-listed courses:

Course:

HR 263  A Lexicon of Migration

Professor:

Peter Rosenblum  

CRN:

15799

Schedule/Location:

Mon  Wed     10:10 AM – 11:30 AM Olin 101

Distributional Area:

SA Social Analysis D+J Difference and Justice

Credits: 4

 

Class cap 20

Crosslists: Anthropology; Global & International Studies

 

Course:

MUS 247  Ethnography: Music & Sound

Professor:

Whitney Slaten  

CRN:

15441

Schedule/Location:

  Wed  Fri   3:30 PM – 4:50 PM Hegeman 102

Distributional Area:

SA Social Analysis  

Credits: 4

 

Class cap 20

Crosslists: Anthropology; Experimental Humanities