Reed College Catalog
Robert Brightman
Social/cultural theory, semiotics and structuralism, sociolinguistics, environmental anthropology, hunter-gatherer societies, functional syntax and language typology, Native North America. On leave spring 2010.
Courtney Handman
Linguistic anthropology, the anthropology of Christianity, translation, religion and media, Melanesia, Oceania.
Dejan Lukic
Violence and visuality, apparitions and affect, cultures of secrecy, politics and aesthetics of ex-Communist States, East Europe, the Balkans.
Charlene E. Makley
Development, globalization, anthropology of capitalism, exchange and value, gender, ethnicity, nationalism, religion and ritual, feminist theory, linguistic anthropology, China, Tibet, East Asia.
Paul A. Silverstein
Race and ethnicity, migration, urbanity, sport, historical anthropology, France, North Africa, Middle East. On sabbatical fall 2009.
Nina Sylvanus
Globalization, consumerism, commodities and material culture, gender, West Africa.
Antina von Schnitzler
Anthropology of the state, science and technology studies, globalization, neoliberalism, political subjectivities, colonialism and postcoloniality, urban anthropology, Southern Africa, South Africa.
Anthropology offers a broadly comparative framework for the study of human life and experience. The discipline is traditionally divided into the subfields of cultural anthropology, linguistic anthropology, biological (or physical) anthropology, and archaeology. Of these, cultural anthropology and linguistic anthropology are emphasized at Reed. Cultural anthropology examines the range and variability of human practices and provides frameworks for their interpretation. Its distinguishing disciplinary features are implicit or explicit comparativism and evidentiary grounding of theoretical interpretations or generalizations in firsthand ethnographic fieldwork. Earlier emphasis was on nonliterate peoples of the past and present. However, anthropological research has increasingly included studies of populations of European heritage and those of literate, complex societies.
Requirements for the Major
1. Reading competence in a foreign language as demonstrated by completion of two units of a second-, third-, or fourth-year foreign language course or by placing out of a second-year course in the examinations administered by the Reed language departments during orientation.
2. A minimum of six units of anthropology coursework including Anthropology 211, at least one area course (but preferably two), and at least one 400-level course. Transfer students should take Anthropology 211 even if they have completed substantial coursework in anthropology at another institution. Anthropology 211 is normally taken in the sophomore year and is not open to first-year students. At least five units of anthropology coursework, and as many units of HSS divisional requirements as possible, must be completed by the end of the junior year.
3. Anthropology 470.
Recommended but not required:
1. Humanities 210, 220, or 230.
2. Sociology 211.
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 first-year students.
Anthropology 212 - Introduction to Language, Culture, and Society
See Linguistics 212 for description.
Anthropology 307 - Power, Subjectivity, and Political Imagination
Full course for one semester. This course explores the diverse ways in which power is constituted, rationalized and contested. What kinds of practices, languages, institutions, and symbolic formations make up the political? How have conceptions and practices of political belonging and political subjectivity varied historically and across different societies? What might be the challenges and possibilities of studying power and political subjectivities ethnographically? We will begin with a reading of classic texts in social theory and political anthropology. Then we will focus more specifically on how the modern state and citizenship, institutions traditionally the domain of political science, have been studied anthropologically. We will examine central analytic concepts, including hegemony, governmentality, ideology, and resistance and the ways in which they have been mobilized in ethnographies of the political. Finally, we will turn to a set of questions that have more recently arisen in relation to citizenship and the state, including multiculturalism, sovereignty, nationalism, and biopolitics.Prerequisite: Anthropology 211. Conference.
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. Not offered 2009-10.
Anthropology 321 - Hunting-Gathering Societies
Full course for one semester. Hunting-gathering peoples--those who live by foraging for "non-domesticated" plant and animal resources--are variously conceived as “living fossils” of proto-hominid and Paleolithic culture, exemplars of a “natural” condition of human sociality, subaltern victims of successive Neolithic, colonial, and postcolonial dominations, and masters of environmental noblility. After examining foraging in hominid evolution, the course focuses on similarities between prehistoric hunting societies and those known historically after Western Europe’s 16th Century planetary reconnaissance. Ethnographic studies focus on Australia, India, Borneo, Africa, the Pacific Northwest Coast, and the Canadian Subarctic and attest the variousness of social designs, settlement patterns, foraging strategies, economies, and ontologies. This variousness indexes a certain failure of foraging societies to compose a definable "type" just as ambiguities accruing to the concept of "domesticated resource" problematize forager/farmer dichotomies. The course concludes with consideration of hunters’ relations with non-hunters. Non-hunting societies have subjected hunters to displacement, exploitation, and assimilation; the course examines hunters’ past and present tactics of accommodation and resistance. Prerequisite: Anthropology 211. Conference.
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. Not offered 2009-10.
Anthropology 326 - Clothing, Fashion, and Power
Full course for one semester. How do the ways we dress reflect and shape aspects of our identities? How are these different identities performed, enacted, and subverted in different sociocultural settings? In this course we will look at clothing as more than just what people wear and produce, but rather explore how the fabric of fashion is entangled in broader processes of power and discourse. Looking at fashion and the dressed body provides a lens through which we can understand culture and its materiality. We will analyze the production and circulation of cloth and dress in colonial, postcolonial, and global contexts. Alternating between classical readings in exchange theory and ethnographic case studies, the course follows debates about clothing and fashion from colonial dissemination of the ideas and technologies to local appropriations and self-representations. A final section explores the politics of gender and performance in Muslim fashions and draws on contemporary debates of national identity and secularism. Prerequisite: Anthropology 211. Conference.
Anthropology 331 - Museums and Reality
Full course for one semester. This course will explore how reality is
constructed, particularly through museums, historically related
material forms such as world fairs and department stores, and their
associated linguistic practices. Two senses of "constructed" are
relevant here: firstly, the course will base itself on the social
science insight that reality is construed through cultural categories
and discursive practices; secondly, the course will explore the
specific processes through which exhibits, built environments, and
concrete models are constructed (and inhabited with an awareness of
their constructed nature). Two senses of "reality" are also at play
here: on the one hand, museums and related genres are commonly
understood as factual, as representing what actually exists; on the
other hand, certain actually existing phenomena are often construed as
more "real" or more "authentic" than others: as genuine historic or
exotic artifacts, or as instantiating scientific or industrial
principles, or in other ways connected to a realm believed to be at
once generative of and obscured by our everyday experience. The course
will examine how museum exhibit creators, staff, and visitors draw on
and underwrite such differential attributions of authenticity.
Prerequisite: Anthropology 211. Not offered 2009-10.
Anthropology 332 - Ethnography of the Image
Full course for one semester. The image is both a device and an experience that dominates, seduces, or liberates us. This course will investigate the role and nature of the image in the development of new subjectivities and social relations found in the world today. This course will investigate that contested sensory field we call the “image," and ways in which it has been utilized, constructed, and experienced in diverse cultural settings. We will cover a wide range of social practices that cannot exist without the influence, manipulation, and the power of the image: from healing to sorcery, from mass mediation to ideology, from war to intimacy. Students will be introduced to classical and current readings in the anthropology of sensation. There will also be several screenings of ethnographic and “fictional” material that will complement and inform weekly discussions. Prerequisite: Anthropology 211 or consent of the instructor.
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 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 2009-10.
Anthropology 334 - Language and Politics
See Linguistics 334 for description.Linguistics 334 Description
Anthropology 335 - Fieldwork and the Field Experience
Full course for one semester. This course 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 firsthand research and/or primary archival
sources. Prerequisite: Anthropology 211 or consent of the instructor.
Conference. Not offered 2009-10.
Anthropology 336 - Anthropology Through Morocco
Full course for one semester. Since the 1920s, Morocco has been a repeated site for ethnographic investigation, a locus classicus for the elaboration of social theory, and a central region in what Bernard Cohn has famously termed “Anthropologyland.” This course explores the conditions underwriting such centrality, examining the history of ethnographic writing on Morocco from Arab socio-geography through European travel narratives to colonial ethnology and American anthropology. Through a close reading of key ethnographies from different time periods, students will not only achieve a nuanced understanding of the culture, social structure, religion, politics, and history of Morocco, but will also review key movements in anthropological thought: structural functionalism, structuralism, symbolic anthropology, political ecology, post-structuralism, reflexive postmodernism, and globalization. Prerequisites: Anthropology 211 or consent of instructor. Full course for one semester. Conference.
Anthropology 337 - Urban Africa
Full course for one semester. In this course, we will explore contemporary anthropological debates about African urban centers and cultural production with a special focus on the postcolonial city. African metropolitan centers have become destinations for large-scale migration, dense and diverse population centers, as well as global economic, cultural, and political intersections. In conjunction with new sources of identity such as nationality, religion, ethnicity, consumption, and migration, we will explore a wide range of cultural forms such as photography, film, and literature (studio photography in Mali, the Nigerian novel, fashion and lifestyle blogs as well as the Ivorian graphic novel). The course will take a cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural approach to the exploration of urban society by exploring themes such as modernity, mimesis, resistance as well as gender and sexuality. Prerequisite: Anthropology 211. Conference.
Anthropology 338 - The African Crisis
Full course for one semester. Recent media and celebrity attention has
focused on the African continent as a locus of endemic humanitarian and
political emergency. This is reflected in Hollywood blockbusters such
as
Blood Diamond or
The Constant Gardener as well as in
Vanity Fair’s
recent "Special Africa Issue." Stereotypical representations of Africa
have thus (re)entered Western popular culture. In the first part of the
course, we will ask questions about these representational issues and
reflect on the ways excess attention to crisis limits our analytical
perspective. In the second part, students will be introduced to the
history of Africa through classical anthropological texts as well as
explore the role of ethnography in the making of colonial Africa. We
will then turn to postcolonial Africa to critically and comparatively
engage with contemporary issues facing African societies including oil
and mineral extraction, extralegal economies, human rights, and
transnational migration. Prerequisite: Anthropology 211. Conference. Not offered 2009-10.
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 makeups, 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 2009-10.
Anthropology 341 - Medical Anthropology
Full course for one semester. This course will consider the ways in
which medical anthropology has historically been influenced by debates
within the discipline of anthropology as well as by broader social and
political movements. We will read texts from the genealogy of theory
and evidence for contemporary medical anthropology, and situate them
within the historic and theoretical contexts in which they
emerged. Particular emphasis will be placed on the importance of
viewing biomedicine as one among many cultural systems of
healing. Some key issues we will explore include: concepts of
health, healing and illness; the political economy of disease; the role
of medicine in the state and citizenship; medicine’s role in the
assignment and mediation of deviance; applied medical anthropology;
medical anthropology as ambassador, translator and adjunct for
biomedicine; and contemporary global health crises including the HIV
and TB pandemics. Prerequisite: Anthropology 211. Conference. Not offered 2009-10.
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. Not offered 2009-10.
Anthropology 345 - Cultures of Secrecy – The Balkan Files
Full course for one semester. This course will engage the question of secrecy as it pertains to life in former Communist cultures. The functioning of these societies (and most others around the world) was almost unimaginable without some form of secrecy. We will start by studying the workings of East European secret police, most notably that of UDBA in the former Yugoslavia. This will allow us to examine more general notions such as freedom, interrogation, public secrecy, resistance, revolution, and black humor. We will approach secrecy as a repository of power found in the spheres of politics, aesthetics, and sexuality. Our primary readings will come from memoirs, police files, and ethnographies. The students will be invited to think how these historical and contextual examples travel beyond Communism. What do they tell us about the nature of the State itself, from totalitarian systems to democratic ones? What will be the role of secrecy in twenty-first century art, culture, and politics? How can we write (about) this anthropology of secrecy? Prerequisite: Anthropology 211 or consent of the instructor.
Anthropology 346 - Possession and Human Agency
Full course for one semester. Starting with the self-reflective turn
that occurred in anthropology during the 1980s, identifying human
agency in ethnographic subjects has become a lasting concern within the
discipline as ethnographers have attempted to deconstruct differentials
in voice and power that often operate to the detriment of
anthropology’s frequently subaltern informants. Some of the most vexing
problems in formulating human agency are those raised in possession,
where, according to indigenous models, human agency is understood as
displaced or eclipsed. Does possession mark a failure of agency, or is
it another means through which it is exercised? Through ethnographic
and theoretical material, this course will review anthropological
models that have posed possession as having its roots in crises of
representation, in social conflict, in phenomenological apperception,
and in psychodynamic tensions. These various models will be thought
through by way of anthropological approaches to other phenomena that
are read as being limitations on, or instances of, human agency, such
as resistance, the commodity form, fetishism, and moral and ethical
restraint; this course will also attempt to identify contemporary
secular analogues to possession in which human agency is imagined, by
those bearing it, to be interrupted, such as accounts of psychic trauma
and paranormal encounters. Prerequisite: Anthropology 211 or consent of
instructor. Conference. Not offered 2009-10.
Anthropology 348 - Languages of the Americas
See Linguistics 348 for description. Not offered 2008-09.
Linguistics 348 Description
Anthropology 351 - Religious Language and Subjectivity
Full course for one semester. Through what manners are religious
subjects formed; what, if anything, is particular to religious speech;
and in what ways is ethnography as a form of writing and knowledge
situated to elucidate the connections between these two issues? Drawing
on theoretical and ethnographic works from several different world
religions, this course will trace out the varying anthropological
approaches to the questions of religious language and religious
subjectivity, and ask what commonalities there may be between these two
problematics. Among the specific issues that will be addressed, this
course will cover how text, speech, rhetoric, narrative, and other
semiotic systems, in combination with bodily practice, ethical
exercise, the reflective monitoring of the sensorium, along with larger
sociocultural forces and formations, inform the explicit and implicit
understandings that constitute religious subjects. This course will
also inquire as to what contingent or structural limits there may be on
the project of forming religious subjectivities, and finally this
course will investigate to what degree these resulting subjectivities
are capable of being represented through ethnographic practice.
Prerequisite: Anthropology 211 or consent of instructor. Conference. Not offered 2009-10.
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. Not offered 2009-10.
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 decolonization 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 subfield of historical anthropology.
Prerequisite: Anthropology 211 or consent of the instructor.
Conference.
Anthropology 358 - American Christianity: History and Culture
Full course for one semester. This course will ask to what degree
American Christianity is a religious, social, and cultural phenomenon
that, while perhaps not sui generis, has distinctive traits that mark
it as a properly bounded anthropological research object in and of
itself. In the past, North American Christianity has not been thought
through as fully by anthropologists as it possibly could have been;
recently, however, in part as a corrective measure to this oversight,
in part as a reaction to the increased visibility that religiously
informed conservative political movements have enjoyed over the past 30
years, and in part as a realization of the importance that American
Christianity has had on Christian practice worldwide, anthropologists
have begun to produce a more thorough documentation of North American
Christian life. This anthropological work has been supplemented by
sociological ethnographies, as well as by material from historians who
have either been influenced by anthropological approaches, or who have
taken cultural material as their object. This course will survey this
literature, addressing topics that will include language use, the
American Apocalyptic Imaginary, conversion narratives, Christian
subjectivity, and finally the distinctive relationship between politics
and religion in the American public sphere that marked the last quarter
of the 20th century, and which promises to be a force in the 21st
century as well. Prerequisite: Anthropology 211 or consent of
instructor. Conference. Not offered 2009-10.
Anthropology 361 - The Middle East: Culture and Politics
Full course for one semester. The Middle East has been the focus of
increased scrutiny over the past few decades in light of U.S. economic
and political interests, and yet the region's internal cultural
complexity is poorly understood and often overlooked. This course
provides both an anthropological overview of the region's political
culture and cultural politics, as well as a critical inquiry into the
very anthropo-geographic categories that have historically sustained a
sense of unity in the region: including tribalism, honor and shame,
religious piety, and poetic practices. In the process, the course
explores larger comparative issues of colonialism, nationalism, state
formation, sectarianism, urbanism, and globalization. Prerequisite:
Anthropology 211 or consent of instructor. Conference. Not offered 2009-10.
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 20th
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 effects of state policies on men and women. Prerequisite:
Anthropology 211. Conference. Not offered 2009-10.
Anthropology 364 - The Anthropology of Global Tibet
Full course for one semester. Since the Dalai Lama fled to exile in India in 1959, Tibet and Tibetans have garnered emblematic status in global debates on indigenous cultures and human rights. This course draws on anthropological theories of ethnicity, modernity and globalization to understand this phenomenon in its historical and ethnographic contexts. Working with a wide range of theoretical, historical, and ethnographic writings, as well as a variety of other media such as film, popular songs, websites and blogs, we consider the global contexts and causes of changing meanings of Tibetanness before and after Chinese Communist intervention. We focus especially on the historical and contemporary diversity among Tibetans across the Himalayan region and into the diaspora, as well as the changing political economic conditions of Chinese-Tibetan relations. Conference. Prerequisite: Anthropology 211.
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 its 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.
fazhan,
kaifa)
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. Not offered 2009-10.
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 2009-10.
Anthropology 371 - Transgression and Sacred Laughter
Full course for one semester. Subversions, resistances, deviances, and
other destabilizations of social order are commonly linked with
laughter and with the sacred in societies of diverse morphological kind
and condition. Initial readings will focus on multidisciplinary
characterizations of humor, sacredness, and assorted subversions, the
latter in relation to existing theories of structural, systemic, and
normative social order. The course then takes up a range of
ethnographic and historical materials to explore the affinities among
subversion, laughter, and sacredness; this in cases exemplifying
different combinatorial pairings of the three and, especially, in cases
where all three coincide. Topics include countercultures of diverse
kinds (Cynic primitivism, Greenwich Village in successive phases,
devalued subcultures in the Fourth World), clowns and fools, comic
blasphemy, inversionary ceremonial occasions (Carnival[s], Feast of
Fools, mock-potlatches), and mythological “trickster” characters.
Readings will be exceptionally diverse but include Bakhtin, Foucault,
Kristeva, Erasmus, Hebdige, Terry Southern, Victor Turner, and James
Frazer. The course concludes with critical appraisal of existing
theoretical accounts of these linkages and of their imputed
conservative or transformative social effects. Prerequisite:
Anthropology 211 or consent of the instructor. Not offered 2009-10.
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 2009-10.
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 2009-10.
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.
Anthropology 378 - Nature, Culture, and Environmentalism
Full course for one semester. The course examines earlier and
contemporary theoretical perspectives on the relationships between
sociocultural systems, human biology, and biophysical environments.
Topics include the nature–culture opposition and its non-Western
counterparts, the constraints of nondiscursive 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 2009-10.
Anthropology 383 - Kinship
Full course for one semester. This course surveys the study of kinship
in anthropology, with special attention to the contributions of this
study to anthropological theories of culture and society. The
cross-cultural analysis of systems of kinship is one of the most
distinctive areas of inquiry in anthropology. In its heyday, kinship
was defined as a universal feature of so-called primitive societies,
and the basis for social structure. In recent years, as
anthropologists' theoretical perspectives have changed, scholars have
questioned whether the recognition of genealogical relations is
necessarily universal, or whether kinship is only a function of local
cultural ideas about the body, gender and personhood. More recently,
scholars have revisited kinship as a topic of study in the interest of
exploring new forms of human life and experience engendered by cultural
change, globalization, and new reproductive technologies. In this
course, we will examine theories of kinship as social structure,
theories that argue that kinship is a cultural phenomenon, and those
that argue that kin relations are formed through their enactment in
performance and practice. We will be guided in this survey by the
question of what the study of kinship tells us about the nature of
social relationships themselves. In particular, we will discuss the
descent-alliance controversy, marriage systems, semantic analysis of
kin terminology, the cultural critique of kinship, its feminist
reinterpretation, and the recent revival of kinship studies.
Prerequisite Anthropology 211. Conference. Not offered 2009-10.
Anthropology 384 - Gifts and Goods
Full course for one semester. This course will introduce the
anthropological study of the economy through cultural theories of the
gift, exchange and value. Starting with Mauss's theory of reciprocity
in exchange as moral obligation, anthropological studies of economic
behavior have sought to explain systems of exchange, transaction and
circulation in relation to social forces instead of individual
rationality and choice. Through theoretical argument and ethnographic
cases, we will investigate how anthropologists interpret economic
behavior in the context of cultural norms and values. We will discuss
how anthropological theory led to a theory of a “great divide” between
premodern and modern societies based on incommensurate, mutually
exclusive systems of value. We will explore how this perspective
informed the anthropological study of economic change, development and
globalization. We will also discuss the various critiques of this
theory from different perspectives. We will conclude by considering how
anthropological approaches to gifts can shed light on economic activity
in the modern marketplace as well. Readings include Marx, Mauss,
Malinowski, Polanyi, Gregory, Gudeman, Graeber, Godelier, and
Sahlins. Prerequisite: Anthropology 211. Conference. Not offered 2009-10.
Anthropology 389 - Anthropology of Neoliberalism
Full course for one semester. Since the early 1970s, and in an accelerated form in the aftermath of the Cold War, neoliberalism rose to global hegemony as an economic program promoting the opening and deregulation of markets, the privatization of public services, and the dismantling of the welfare state. Yet the term neoliberalism often lacks conceptual precision referring sometimes simultaneously to an economic doctrine, a set of governmental techniques and a particular configuration of global capitalism. This course begins with a reading of some of the conceptual and philosophical foundations of the neoliberal turn, focusing in particular on neoliberal conceptions of human nature and sociality. We will then explore the ways in which anthropologists have studied neoliberal reforms and the entanglement of their economic, social and cultural effects. We will focus in particular on how, in the aftermath of neoliberal reforms, new logics of sociality and subjectivity are being produced that destabilize received ideas of the public and the private, the formal and the informal, nature and culture, as well as the secular and the sacred. Readings will include ethnographies of financial markets, the privatization of urban space, the rise of occult and spiritual economies, and new forms of intimacy and desire that have been associated with the rise of neoliberalism. Prerequisite: Anthropology 211. Conference.
Anthropology 393 - Ethnography of Global Christianity(ies)
Full course for one semester. While previously marginalized due to
anthropology's traditional interest in alterity and the non-West,
recently Christianity has become an object of ethnographic interest.
This emerging interest is grounded in the theoretical problems
Christianity poses as an anthropological topic, as well as in
Christianity's rapid growth as a domestic and global social and
political force. Informed by this trend, this course will survey recent
ethnographic work in the emerging field of the anthropology of
Christianity, covering ethnographic material from Africa, Southeast
Asia, Oceania, Europe, and the Americas (including the United States).
Among the topics the course will address are Christian language
ideologies; the role of gifts, exchange, and global capitalism in
Christian practice and imagination; the various modes of forming
Christian subjectivities; the creation and regulation of proper and
improper sexualities; the role of colonialism and postcolonialism in
Christianity; and Christian incorporation, reconfiguration, and
redeployment of local folk ontotheological categories. Prerequisite:
Anthropology 211 or consent of instructor. Conference. Not offered 2009-10.
Anthropology 395 - Globalization
Full course for one semester. The notion of globalization, as a
descriptive term for the spatial stretching of lines of economic
production, has become overloaded with multiple and competing
associations in the popular imagination. Academic debates in the social
sciences during the 1990s were concerned with whether globalization was
new or not, and how to define it. Today, social scientific inquiry has
evolved to develop new methods and concepts to critique, analyze, and
theorize the various phenomena associated with globalization. Starting
with a brief introduction of popular discourses on globalization, we
will begin to explore the ways in which sociology, anthropology, and
geography conceptualize and characterize globalization. Through these
theories we will develop a vocabulary with which to think about
capitalism and its interconnections with globalization’s cultural
dimensions. In the second section of the course we will examine the
content and form of gender, racial, and economic inequalities in the
context of globalization. Prerequisite: Anthropology 211. Conference. Not offered 2009-10.
Anthropology 398 - Race and 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 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. Not offered 2009-10.
Anthropology 402 - Semiotics and Structuralism
Full course for one semester. The course begins by examining Peirce’s semiotic and Saussure’s structural linguistics, thereafter taking up the theoretical influences of these on the anthropologies and linguistic anthropologies that came after: the French structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roman Jakobson’s linguistic poetic, the structural histories and agencies of Marshall Sahlins, the pragmatics (and metapragmatics and ethno-metapragmatics) of Michael Silverstein, the ethno-poetics of Dell Hymes, and the (notional) post-structuralism of Michel Foucault. The course addresses the relations that signs and symbols contract with each other, with their meanings, and with their contexts. The course addresses the contemporary status of ideas of cultural and linguistic “structure,” both overt and covert, in the light of assorted “anti-structuralist” turns in recent social theory. Prerequisite: Anthropology 211 or Linguistics 311. 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 2009-10.
Anthropology 414 - Person, Self, and Subject
Full course for one semester. What is the history of the categories of
person, self, and subject in the West? What shape have analogous
classifications taken in other social and cultural milieus, how have
these objects been theorized by anthropologists and other social
thinkers, and to what degree (if any) can we take these indigenous
Western schemes as having a referent apart from that which is created
by their use as cultural constructs? Prerequisite: Anthropology 211 or
consent of instructor. Conference. Not offered 2009-10.
Anthropology 440 - Translation and Boundaries of Difference
Full course for one semester. The metaphor of translation has been used – in positive and negative senses – to describe anthropology’s goals for many years. Even if many anthropologists have given up on a model of culture-as-text that requires translation for outsiders, negotiating problems of difference still remains. How do ethnographers confront spatial, social, linguistic, disciplinary, and temporal dislocations? How do social actors negotiate these differences? What kinds of social and ideological formations control the flow of discourses across boundaries? This course examines theories of translation from a number of different disciplines, including literary studies, linguistics, linguistic anthropology, post-colonial studies and anthropology itself, in which authors have had to grapple with the ethical, methodological, and practical dilemmas of transposition. The goal of the course is to examine translation as a pragmatic process in which indexical formations anchor discourses as they move across boundaries, looking at how those boundaries are made, contested, and reformed through time. Prerequisite: Anthropology 211 or consent of instructor. Conference.
Anthropology 460 - After Structuralism
Full course for one semester. Contemporary issues and debates in
cultural anthropology. Topics include practice theory,
poststructuralism, reflexivism, political economy, power and
resistance, globalization and late capitalism, gender studies,
postcolonial criticism and alternative modernities, cultural
objectifications and "invented traditions," strategic essentialism, the
"new culturalism," and cultural diacritics of collective identity.
Prerequisite: Anthropology 211 and one additional anthropology course
or consent of instructor. Conference. Not offered 2009-10.
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.