Anthropology Course Descriptions
Anthropology 211
- Introduction to Anthropology
Full course for one semester. An introduction to the history,
theory, methods, and subject matter of the field of social and
cultural anthropology. Students become familiar with the conceptual
framework of the discipline and with some of its techniques of
research and interpretation. Anthropology is considered in its role
as a social science and as a discipline with ties to the humanities
and natural sciences. Emphasis is on close integration of analytic
abstractions with empirical particulars. Conference. Not open to
freshmen.
Anthropology 311
- General Linguistics
See Linguistics 311 for description.
Linguistics 311 Description
Anthropology 312
- Advanced Linguistics
See Linguistics 312 for description.
Linguistics 312 Description
Anthropology 313
- Language in Society
See Linguistics 313 for description.
Linguistics 313 Description
Anthropology 317
- Cultural Perspectives of the United States
Full course for one semester. In what way does it make sense to
talk about the U.S. as a sociocultural unity? Conflicting claims
about which underlying forces really constitute and shape America
are not merely issues for us as analysts, but rather are a crucial
part of the phenomena we seek to study. As part of our work we will
explore various historically located U.S. perspectives on what
counts as "reality." The aim of the course is to contribute to a
sophisticated cultural anthropology of the United States by
developing analyses that incorporate, without necessarily confining
themselves within, indigenous models of sociocultural process.
Prerequisite: Anthropology 211. Conference.
Anthropology 320
- Communism and After: Ethnography of a Strange World
Full course for one semester. What enabled Czeslaw Milosz to write
The Captive Mind, where he tried to explain "how the human mind
functioned in the people's democracies," was that the "system
invented by Moskow" seemed "infinitely strange" to him. This course
will take the "strangeness" of the social form that molded lives of
hundreds of millions in the twentieth century as an occasion for
engaging in the time-honored anthropological endeavor to make the
strange familiar. Due to the general inaccessibility of Communist
countries to Western anthropologists, most ethnographies covered in
the course will be about post-socialism. However, we will extend
the ethnographic approach to the study of the "real Communism" as
it existed until 1989 by treating available sources (such as film,
literature, essays, and diaries) as grist for anthropological
mills. This attempt to understand "what was Communism and what came
after" would thus mostly focus on the practices of everyday life
and view grand phenomena of state control, socialist economy,
ideology, and cold war dynamics primarily from the standpoint of
the proverbial "little man." Prerequisite: Anthropology 211 or
consent of the instructor. Conference. Not offered 2005-06.
Anthropology 324
- Sport and Society
Full course for one semester. Sports are a central aspect of ritual
form and everyday life in a large number of societies across the
globe. The course approaches sports play as a fundamental practice
of social formation and social reproduction. Through case studies
of situated sports practices (notably football/soccer,
cricket/baseball, and boxing), we will examine key issues in the
anthropology of modernity: gender and sexuality, race and
ethnicity, class and stratification, violence, urban space,
(post-)colonialism, nationalism, and globalization. Prerequisites:
Anthropology 211 and one additional anthropology course, or consent
of the instructor. Conference.
Anthropology 326
- Material Worlds: Skilled Craftsmanship and Symbolic Technologies in Africa and the Near East
See Art 326 for description.
Art 326 Description
Anthropology 328
- Anthropology of the Mediterranean
Full course for one semester. Problematized as both the cradle and
periphery of Europe, and thus of anthropology itself, the
Mediterranean offers a site for anthropology to confront some of
its paradoxes. The course will explore the very idea and unity of
the Mediterranean, and examine a number of classical as well as
more recent anthropological themes strongly associated with the
region such as honor and shame, machismo, vendetta, amoral
familism, patronage, migration, mafia, and the uses of the past.
Special care will be taken to interweave classical statements with
most recent research in the Mediterranean, and to bring to close
regional comparison a number of different societies ranged around
its shores. Prerequisite: Anthropology 211 or consent of the
instructor. Conference. Not offered 2005-06.
Anthropology 330
- Dream in Human Societies
Full course for one semester. Ancient Mediterranean civilizations
used dream incubation for healing, India and China developed
profound metaphysics of existence as a dream, and many traditional
cultures possessed elaborate dream theories, while the modern West
seeks to crack the perennial enigma of dreams with the twin tools
of laboratory dream research and psychoanalytic theories. This
course will examine this multiplicity of dreams through a
multiplicity of approaches ranging from current laboratory dream
research, through Freudian and Jungian theories, to the study of
dream-related practices and "dream theories" in preliterate
societies traditionally studied by anthropologists. While the
course will aim at a comprehensive approach to dreaming and related
phenomena, the focus will be an anthropological perspective on
dreams, as well as the significance of dreams in the history of
anthropology. Prerequisite: Anthropology 211 or consent of the
instructor. Conference. Not offered 2005-06.
Anthropology 333
- The Anthropology of Melanesia
Full course for one semester. This course examines the social and
cultural systems of selected Melanesian groups, with a focus on
those from Papua New Guinea. The course begins with a consideration
of the difficulties anthropologists have faced in their attempts to
apply traditional models of social structure in the region. In the
face of the weakness of traditional approaches, anthropologists
have developed new models of how Melanesians construct their
societies. This course looks at several of these innovative models,
using ethnographic studies to illustrate how exchange practices,
ritual, notions of gender, and conceptions of the body and of the
person serve, in different societies, as the basis of social
organization. Attention is also paid throughout the course to
colonialism, social change, and the millenarian movements these
have often brought in their wake. While the course’s focus is on
Melanesia, consideration is also given to the contributions
Melanesian anthropology has made to anthropological theory more
generally. Prerequisite: Anthropology 211. Conference. Not offered
2005-06.
Anthropology 335
- Fieldwork and the Field Experience
Full course for one semester. This class is intended to provide an
introduction to fieldwork by combining practical exercises in
participant observation and archival research with theoretical and
ethnographic writings that illuminate the field experience.
Practical issues to be discussed in the shaping of classic
ethnographic studies relying on participant observation include the
situatedness of the researcher, relations with informants, analysis
of interviews, the nature of field notes, and the writing of
ethnography. Ethnographies read in conjunction with field exercises
are intended to relate the difficulties of the novice in the field
to the ethical and methodological issues that typically emerge in
the context of fieldwork. The focus will then shift to relatively
recent innovations in the discipline that attempt to either
redefine the nature of the field itself, reconfigure ethnographic
authority, or rethink the political and ethical stakes of fieldwork
itself. The emphasis of the class, however, will be practical, and
students will be expected to base their final papers on first-hand
research and/or primary archival sources. Prerequisite:
Anthropology 211 or consent of the instructor. Conference. Not
offered 2005-06.
Anthropology 339
- Ethnicity and Nation in France and North Africa
Full course for one semester. The course explores different,
overlapping forms of social and political organization in North
Africa and France. It examines the long historical relationship
between France and North Africa from colonial conquest to the
present regimes of immigration and transnational flows. It provides
a basic introduction to North African and French societies, their
histories, and their cultural make-ups, while at the same time
presenting key concepts in social theory, including segmentary
lineage structure, ethnicity, nationalism, and globalization, all
grounded in a common set of ethnographic and literary data.
Prerequisite: Anthropology 211 or consent of the instructor.
Conference. Not offered 2005-06.
Anthropology 342
- Time and Space
Full course for one semester. Introduction to classic and
contemporary anthropological literatures on the sociocultural
production and experience of time and space, supported also by
readings from several allied disciplines. Emphasis is on forming
propositions specific enough to be relevant to interpretation of
concrete ethnographic materials. Topics of major concern include
memory, ritual, narrative, deixis, chronology and time-reckoning,
embodiment, landscape, the turn (or return) to history in
anthropology, and the spatiotemporal organization of contemporary
industrial societies. Narrower subproblems receiving deepest
consideration will vary in different years of offering.
Prerequisite: Anthropology 211. Conference. Not offered 2005-06.
Anthropology 344
- Sex and Gender
Full course for one semester. What is the difference between sex
and gender? And why is this important in today's world? This course
introduces students to an anthropological perspective on the
relationship between sex (the biological attributes by which a
person is deemed "male" or "female") and gender (the norms and
ideals associating appropriate roles, behaviors, and sexualities
with men or women). In order to understand the various debates and
their stakes, we will read anthropological accounts of cultures in
which sex and gender are construed very differently from our own
and combine these with discussions of documentary and popular
movies and video clips. The course will provide students with ways
to understand how we come to consider and express ourselves as
"men" or "women," the social forces that constrain us to act and
think as gendered persons, and the potential consequences for not
conforming to those norms. Prerequisite: Anthropology 211.
Conference.
Anthropology 348
- Languages of the Americas
See Linguistics 348 for description.
Linguistics 348 Description
Anthropology 350
- Societies through Their Others
Full course for one semester. This course examines the role of
relations of otherness in the constitution of particular cultural
and institutional orders. We consider canonical theoretical
statements alongside empirical studies of such topics as marriage,
hospitality, relations between the human and divine in a
demographically small Amazonian community, tourism, the politics of
indigeneity in nation-states, and third- and fourth-world
Occidentalist discourses on people of Europe or the United States.
Prerequisite: Anthropology 211. Conference.
Anthropology 352
- Anthropology of Europe
Full course for one semester. This course will address the apparent
paradoxes of anthropology of Europe through the lens of a number of
ethnographies about problematically European
communities--communities in one way or another on the periphery of
Europe. More generally, the course will consider the complex
theoretical and methodological issues that arise with
anthropology's repatriation, the turning of a discipline originally
concerned with defining Europe’s "Other" onto Europe itself as an
object of knowledge. The course readings range across a variety of
localities, ethnographic genres, and types of social situations,
from traditional community studies (including peasant, traditional
proletarian, and urbanized communities) to studies with an
area-regional or European purview. Prerequisite: Anthropology 211.
Conference.
Anthropology 353
- Anthropology of Japan
Full course for one semester. This course will explore some of the
major topics in the anthropological studies of Japan carried out
mostly (but not exclusively) by American anthropologists. If the
primary aim is to learn about Japan through anthropological
writing, the secondary aim will be to present a case study in
history of ideas and sociology of knowledge. Starting with the
earliest ethnographies of rural communities, through studies of
Japanese education and corporate culture and ending with works on
mass media and postmodernity, these topics will be presented as
they successively came to claim the attention and resources of
American anthropologists. These changing foci of interest will be
framed as influenced by changing issues and preoccupations of
American society and changing emphases and fads in anthropology as
an academic discipline, and as reflecting changes in the Japanese
society. The underlying theme of the course will be the contrastive
logic of Japanese–American mutual perceptions, images, and
stereotypes both on the popular and scholarly levels. Prerequisite:
Anthropology 211. Conference.
Anthropology 355
- Anthropology of Colonialism
Full course for one semester. The course provides a historical
anthropological exploration of colonialism. Drawing on case studies
from Africa, Asia, and the Americas, it focuses on the colonial
construction of categories of race, ethnicity, gender, and
sexuality, and how such cultural categories have been transformed
or reproduced in the postcolonial present. Particular attention is
paid to how processes and institutions of education, domesticity,
urban planning, and census-taking contribute to the production of
docile subjects and the maintenance of colonial political and
economic structures. Resistance, contestation, and de-colonization
are similarly addressed. Readings are drawn primarily from the
field of anthropology. Given its focus on colonialism, the course
provides students with a strong theoretical introduction to the
burgeoning sub-field of historical anthropology. Prerequisite:
Anthropology 211 or consent of the instructor. Conference.
Anthropology 357
- Problems in Indonesian Ethnography
Full course for one semester. Introduction to the peoples of the
Indonesian archipelago and the history and theory of
anthropological research among them. Emphasis is on close reading
of full-length monographs about particular local communities,
including monographs thematically focused on kinship and ritual.
The diversity of social situations in Indonesia today, and the
region’s complex history at the crossroads of travel, trade,
conversion, and state formation, will lead us to question the
nature of the anthropological unit of study. What is the
relationship between notions of culture, area, or community on the
one hand, and colonial and postcolonial politics on the other? What
is the presence of history in a contemporary society? What is the
potential presence of history in an anthropological monograph? What
is the place of alterity--affines, divinities, foreigners, foreign
objects, broken rules--in local peoples’ most basic
self-understandings? Prerequisite: Anthropology 211.
Conference.Â
Anthropology 362
- Gender and Ethnicity in China and Tibet
Full course for one semester. Chinese and Tibetan peoples have
interacted for centuries, but it is only in the last half of the
twentieth century that the "Tibet question" in China has risen to
global attention. This course looks at modern Sino-Tibetan
relations through the lens of ethnicity and gender as a way to
understand the contentious process through which the Chinese
nation-state and national identity have been constructed. Through
lectures, readings, films, and discussions, we will explore the
diversity of Tibetan and Han Chinese family organization, gender
ideologies, and ethnic identities just before, during, and after
the Communist revolutionary period. This perspective will shed
light on the incorporation of Tibetans as a "minority nationality"
in the Chinese "multinational state," the role of such minorities
in constructing Han Chinese majority identity, and the differing
effect of state policies on men and women. Prerequisite:
Anthropology 211. Conference.
Anthropology 365
- The Anthropology of Development in Post-Mao China
Full course for one semester. Since the founding of the People's
Republic of China in 1949, state leaders have struggled to chart a
course to a Chinese modernity that would break with the perceived
humiliations of European domination in the 19th century and bring
China commensurate status in a newly configured world stage of
nations. Since Deng Xiaoping's post-Mao reforms in the early 1980s,
the PRC has been one of the fastest growing economies in the world.
As such, it is poised to have major impacts globally, and
especially since the PRC's entrance into the World Trade
Organization in 2001, these meteoric socioeconomic changes have
complex implications for the it's diverse 1.2 billion people. This
course draws on anthropological theories of modernity, capitalism,
globalization and development emerging in the 1980s and '90s to
turn a critical eye on discourses and practices of "development"
(ch. fada) in the PRC. Drawing on theoretical, historical and
ethnographic writings, as well as on other media such as government
policy papers, advertising and documentary films, we consider the
contexts and contradictions of various development efforts just
before, during and after the Maoist period, focusing especially on
the post-Mao era of economic reforms. The PRC thus will serve as a
case-study for our broader examination of theories conceptualizing
the relationships between global capitalism and local realities.
Prerequisite: Anthropology 211. Conference.
Anthropology 369
- Media and Popular Culture in Post-Mao China
Full course for one semester. China's open door policies and
economic reforms since the death of Mao Zedong and the end of the
Cultural Revolution have radically altered the state’s ability to
control the mass media and popular cultural production. This course
examines the implications of this process for national, ethnic, and
gender identities among diverse citizens of the Chinese state on
one hand, and for CCP efforts to maintain its political hegemony on
the other. Through readings, film and video clips, and discussions
we will explore different genres of cultural production in
contemporary China in their sociohistorical contexts and in
relation to recent Marxist and feminist debates about the
production, interpretation, and subversion of dominant ideologies
in mass media. This perspective will shed light on the actually
complex processes through which popular and elite, state, and local
contexts are constructed in China, and allow us to interrogate
recent assumptions about "globalization," "Westernization,"
"sinicization," or "modernization" as inevitable homogenizing and
leveling forces. Prerequisite: Anthropology 211 or consent of the
instructor. Conference. Not offered 2005-06.
Anthropology 372
- Indians and Northern Native Americans
Full course for one semester. The course examines the cultures of
the Eskimos/Inuits, Aleuts, and North American Indians in
historical perspective, placing emphasis on regional diversity.
Readings focus on earlier conditions of culture, Euro-American
stereotypes, language, and contemporary contexts in which ideas of
"Indian" identity and culture are increasingly contested and
objectified. Focus is on interpretation rather than description.
Prerequisite: Anthropology 211. Conference. Not offered 2005-06.
Anthropology 373
- Gesture
See Linguistics 373 for description. Not offered 2005-06.
Linguistics 373 Description
Anthropology 374
- Urban Anthropology
Full course for one semester. The course provides an introduction
to urban anthropology, with a particular focus on the colonial and
postcolonial metropole as an exemplary site for the reciprocal
influences of global and local processes. It explores how the city
functions simultaneously as a locus for the negotiation of cultural
diversity and for utopian ideals of rational communication. Drawing
from cases throughout the "developed" and "developing" worlds, the
course examines how urban culture is produced and reproduced under
regimes of industrialization, colonialism, modernism, and
globalization. Prerequisite: Anthropology 211 or consent of the
instructor. Conference. Not offered 2005-06
Anthropology 375
- Ethnographies of Technologies
Full course for one semester. Ethnographies are classically
centered on a spatially delimited group of persons, bound together
by their shared ideational systems, which make human activities
meaningful rather than merely instrumental. But as Boasian
anthropology long noted, cultural traits don't just bind people
together into a holistic entity; they also are diffused across
borders and used in different ways in different places. And
cultural forms are not just ideas. All symbolic forms have to exist
materially in order to have a social life. And human activities
aren’t just valued for their meaningfulness; they are also
experienced as means to ends. Ethnographies of technologies force
us to come to grips with these three aspects of culture, too often
swept under the rug. Prerequisite: Anthropology 211. Conference.
Not offered 2005-06.
Anthropology 378
- Nature, Culture, and Environmentalism
Full course for one semester. The course examines earlier and
contemporary theoretical perspectives on the relationships between
socio-cultural systems, human biology, and biophysical
environments. Topics include the nature–culture opposition and its
non-Western counterparts, the constraints of non-discursive nature
on culture, the discursive construction of nature, primitivism,
sociobiology, science studies, the "posthuman terrain," Western
environmentalism as a cultural system, ecofeminism, premodern
subsistence systems, the ecological noble savage, environmental
religions, and Third- and Fourth-World peoples' relations with
global and local environmental movements. Prerequisite:
Anthropology 211. Conference. Not offered 2005-06.
Anthropology 384
- Gifts and Goods
Full course for one semester. The course reviews the
anthropological discussion of the place of gifts and commodities in
social life from the classic studies of Mauss and Malinowski to the
contemporary sociology of consumption. Students will be expected to
prepare a major research paper based on ethnographic and/or
historical sources and to engage in a small fieldwork project on
the anthropology of consumption. Prerequisite: Anthropology 211 or
Sociology 211. Conference. Not offered 2005-06.
Anthropology 387
- Commodities and Human Agency I
Full course for one semester. In Marx's analysis, commodity
fetishism severs the link between the moral conditions under which
a given commodity is produced, and the image under which that
commodity circulates in the marketplace. Yet many people are
interested in coordinating human productive activity so as to
realize social and environmental values-a project that entails
forms of collective agency. In this course, we examine the
theoretical and ethnographic material necessary for an
anthropological understanding of the problem, including comparative
study of systems of exchange. Students who enroll in the course
have the option of enrolling in a subsequent practicum course on
this subject, with a fieldwork component. Prerequisite:
Anthropology 211. Conference.
Anthropology 388
- Commodities and Human Agency II
Full course for one semester. Historically and currently, various
movements have attempted to link commodities' marketplace images to
their ethics of production, a link which capitalism is notoriously
analyzed as severing. Such efforts include "fair trade" coffee, "no
sweat" clothing, and the marketing of organic products as having
been produced in conditions less damaging to the environment and to
workers. In such projects, producers, marketers, and consumers face
problems of how to establish trust and mobilize coalitions across
socioeconomic divisions and spatial localities. The conference will
seek to determine what semiotic and material practices enable or
constrain these efforts, through our readings and through students’
fieldwork at multiple such sites, exploring how anthropologists can
make ourselves useful. Prerequisite: Anthropology 211 and
Anthropology 387. Conference.
Anthropology 390
- Anthropology of Art
Full course for one semester. The discipline that considers
marginal phenomena powerful sources of insight might itself be
fruitfully examined through one of its own marginalized
sub-fields–the anthropological study of art. Starting from the
problem of what constitutes the realm of art in non-western
cultures (or whether there is such a universal category), we will
review classical anthropological studies of primitive art and the
major types of questions they pose: the function(s) of art, the
social position of art-producers, the politics of artistic
presentation, the sociology of aesthetic judgments, the social
agency of artistic objects, and in particular, the formal analysis
of art objects as diagnostic of larger social/cultural patterns. We
will explore the ambivalence of anthropology toward modern Western
art, and its uneasy but potentially fruitful dialogue with
established disciplines that take various art genres as objects of
historical and theoretical studies (i.e. art history/theory,
musicology, visual studies, film theory/history). Finally, some
boundary-threatening forays of anthropologists into art-making will
be examined. While the course will attempt to press all the
currently recognized art modalities through the anthropological
scrutiny, the paradigmatic cases will be the visual/plastic art and
film. Prerequisite: Anthropology 211. Conference.
Anthropology 398
- Theories of Migration
Full course for one semester. This course explores the major ways
in which social scientists have interpreted migration. Readings are
taken from anthropology, political science, sociology, demography,
and history. Most readings concern recent migration to the United
States. We consider both the politico-economic and ideological
contexts of migration as well the experience of migration and the
relationships that people maintain to the multiple sites in which
they have lived. We also particularly consider identity formation
and the ways in which migrants are influenced by the racial,
ethnic, class, and gender formations of the multiple societies in
which they live. Prerequisite: Anthropology 211. Conference.
Anthropology 411
- Performance and Performativity
Full course for one semester. Anthropologists have long been
interested in the complex dynamism of social life. Yet early
attempts to account for this dynamism in the construction of
cultural and linguistic worlds were obscured in favor of static
representations of "cultures" and dualistic understandings of
sociocultural structures versus individual actions or intentions.
This course considers "performance" and "performativity" to be
recent rubrics that group together a wide variety of social
theorists who have focused instead on the emergent and contested
nature of all meanings as they are communicated in everyday and
ritualized speech and practice. The course will develop from key
foundational texts in the philosophy of language to more recent
theoretical and ethnographic work to explore the implications of
this perspective for understanding language as social action, the
nature of "context" and interpretive politics, the relationships
between formal events or performances and everyday life, and the
social construction of selves and others. By directing analytic
focus to the indeterminacy, ambiguity, and multiplicity inherent to
social life, the course challenges students to reconsider some of
the central issues in anthropological theory, such as agency,
identity, power, and resistance. Prerequisite: Anthropology 211.
Conference. Not offered 2005-06.
Anthropology 418
- Ethnography as Linguistic Practice
Full course for one semester. This course considers ethnography as
a set of linguistic practices, including ethnographic writing,
interviewing, and the potentially infinite number of linguistic
genres entailed in "participant-observation." We will approach
these practices from analytic, critical, and practical
perspectives. Alongside our reading, students will each conduct
field exercises on a topic of their choice (ongoing research
projects are welcome), and reflect on their own and others’
strategies in such situations. Prerequisite: Anthropology 211.
Conference. Not offered 2005-06.
Anthropology 424
- Tropes and Narratives
Full course for one semester. Metaphors, metonyms, and ironies move
and position subjects along culturally conditioned dimensions of
“quality space,†and these tropes, in turn, are embedded in stories
people tell themselves (and others) about themselves. Anthropology
has a long-standing interest in what people do with words, in
verbal art as performance, and in how narratives structure our
experience. This course will explore the relevance of rhetoric (the
art of persuasion) for anthropology, the social life of tropes and
stories, and such issues as orality and literacy, genre and
intertextuality, structural vs. performative approaches to
narrative analysis, and sensitivity to figurative language and
storytelling in ethnographic writing. Prerequisite Anthropology
211. Conference.
Anthropology 430
- Signs
Full course for one semester. This course is a critical
introduction to anthropological analysis of sign systems. We begin
with a close examination of the power and limits of the basic idea
of anthropological structuralism, as fashioned by Lévi-Strauss in
an attempted adaptation of breakthroughs in phonology to the study
of cultural process at large: the idea that the significance of a
sign rests in its positional value within a system of other
elements. We then examine some alternative or complementary
approaches to signs, which are all broadly "pragmatic" in the sense
that they focus more squarely on problems in the relation between
sign systems and sign use. Prerequisite: Anthropology 211 or 311 or
Linguistics 311. Conference.
Anthropology 470
- Thesis
Full course for one year.
Anthropology 481
- Independent Reading
One-half or full course for one semester. Open only to upper-class
students with special permission.
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