2008–2009 Anthropology Courses
First-Year Studies: The Question of Culture: Anthropology
Level: FYS
Semester: FYS
What is culture, anyway? Is it something we have, or something we do? Can it be located in the way we think or the way we behave? This first-year studies seminar will introduce students to the field of cultural anthropology. It will also teach students to think like anthropologists. It has often been said that the aim of anthropology is to make the apparently strange and exotic seem comprehensible, while at the same time compelling us to ask questions about behaviors we might consider to be “natural” or “commonsensical.” By approaching this course as an anthropological experience, students will come to understand their own ideas about subjects like time, space, family, food, and personhood to be culturally constructed and historically contingent. We will consider patterns of behavior, systems of meaning, and structures of value in different societies and cultures throughout the world, including our own. Looking to ethnographic studies as well as theoretical writing, we will visit a range of perspectives on such topics as race and ethnicity, globalization and capitalism, gender, nationalism, power, representation, subjectivity and reflexivity, structure and agency, history, memory, and identity. By way of this ongoing engagement with cultural analysis and reflection, students will improve their ability to read closely, write effectively, and think critically.
Love™, Ltd.: Charity, Philanthropy, and Humanitarianism
Level: Open
Semester: Fall
Are we entering a new age of philanthropy? Oprah’s Big Give, the Clinton Global Initiative, the Open Society Institute, and other philanthropic institutions provide new models for the redistribution of wealth, political access, and desperately needed social services. The international nongovernmental organization (INGO) has become the most recognizable face of effective humanitarianism across the globe. And church-based charities grow ever more indispensable to poor people of all backgrounds and material conditions. What do these trends have in common? Have democratic processes accentuated the demand for charity, philanthropy, and humanitarianism? Moreover, is the commercialization of kindness impervious to critique? This course will examine what goes without saying when a price is placed on care and vital support for strangers: we will problematize how an ethics of volunteering and contingent mutual aid has come to define questions of international cultural politics. Key problems to be analyzed include attempts to bridge resource limitations; the pragmatic limits of mutualism or cooperation; the local obstacles to providing international aid; the racialization of goodwill; philanthropy as a public relations mechanism; charity as a form of governance; the sacrificial logic of humanitarianism; and the tacit obligation to return gifts. In particular, the seminar will focus on Christian and Islamic charities, the NGO “third sector,” ad hoc mutual aid societies, multinational relief agencies, and church-based welfare programs.
The Anthropology of Sound
Level: Open
Semester: Fall
From birdsongs in the spring to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, from the buzzing of a mosquito to a high-frequency ringtone, from the silence of a museum to the silence of a desert, sounds affect how we make sense of everyday experience. Hearing—an extremely powerful mode of perception—is commonly taken for granted, both in everyday life and in academic studies. This course is an explicit interrogation of sound and the many ways that it is implicated in human culture. In order to examine the “invisible sense” of hearing, we will take many of the fundamental premises of linguistic and cultural anthropology as launching points for a diverse set of cross-disciplinary modes of inquiry. These will include (but not be limited to) aesthetics, ethnomusicology, philosophy, media analysis, physics, and psychology. We will examine how classes of sounds come to be used in (and as) meaning-making systems. Grammars of music are a particularly salient form of this kind of sound-symbolism, and different types of musical “languages” will be considered (including Hindustani classical music and Indonesian gamelan traditions). Further, exploration of soundscapes from cultures across the globe (including equatorial forest sound-worlds) will demonstrate the variety of ways that people can generate “acoustemologies” both in ritual contexts and in everyday life. The crucial role of the body in this process will be examined through a biological and psychological examination of the hearing apparatus, as well as through studies of musical improvisation and embodied performance of folk, blues, and jazz music. Further, we will see that cultural patterns of sound are put into play in exciting and anxiety-inducing ways, as technology allows us to record and deploy (or even cancel) sounds at will, thereby giving them new social lives of their own, separated from their locus of origin. Moral and legal quandaries abound, as we ask who owns—or belongs to—a particular set of sounds.
Engagements with Death and Mourning
Level: Open
Semester: Spring
“My mind turns to thoughts of death,” drones the Seventh Dalai Lama in an eighteenth-century poem of his. In this course, our minds will similarly turn to thoughts of death: to understandings of death and the afterlife and to experiences of aging, dying, and grief among diverse peoples in the world today. By looking closely at burial practices in rural Greece, bereavement in Indonesia, funeral rites in Hindu India, orientations to the afterlife among Tibetan Buddhists, mortuary cannibalism in the Amazonian rain forest, and new technologies of death in Japan and North America, we will develop a critical awareness of the interrelated social, cultural, psychological, and political underpinnings of human engagements with death. Through this inquiry into one of the most fundamental and important aspects of the human condition, students will also give serious thought to how they might best go about understanding and portraying the makings of life in societies other than their own.
Militarization/Demilitarization
Level: Open
Semester: Spring
This seminar will focus on processes by which states, cities, and neighborhoods militarize themselves and attempt to defuse problems that arise from community mobilization. In addition to reviewing diverse literatures on military/civilian relations, we will trace the rapid worldwide growth in paramilitaries and problematize what the privatization of military force implies for local and international political orders. At the same time, we will pause to consider how societies effectively demilitarize themselves. Militaries are a fact of modern life, but people relate to military service, military protection, and military force quite differently from one culture, place, and time, to another. Key anthropological, political, and journalistic studies in this seminar will focus on international military training centers; “low-intensity warfare”; the gendered aspects of militarism; the “blowback” or “boomer-ang” effects of armed aggression; the archipelago of U.S. military bases at home and overseas; the current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan; Colombia’s internal war; local arms races in Africa and the Near East; the checkpoint as a paradigm for ground-level security; and the processes by which firepower defines police tactics and national sovereignty.
Latin America Otherwise: The Ethnographer’s Craft
Level: Intermediate
Semester: Year
How do anthropologists write ethnographies and produce ethnographic films about Latin America? What is the ethnographer’s craft? How might the practice of ethnography help aspiring journalists, cinematographers, activists, politicians, NGO workers, and businesspeople to better understand contemporary Latin American issues? This intermediate-level course reviews major trends and prospects for regional anthropological research—past, present, and future. Focusing on ethnographic methods, theories, and ethics, from the early twentieth century forward, we will examine how anthropologists have provided unique contributions to the study of Latin American politics, culture, history, and religion. We will analyze how anthropologists have lodged powerful and/or contrarian arguments about the politics of indigenous identity; colonialism and neocolonialism; nationalism; urban development; NGOs; neoliberalism; paramilitaries; guerrilla movements; the long- and short-term effects of civil war; race; populism; machismo; motherhood; transgender sexuality and identity; social abandonment; urban survival strategies; violence; terror; shamanism; and religious movements.
African Modernities
Level: Intermediate,Advanced
Semester: Fall
“Is an asphalt road modern? If a traditional peddler is walking on a modern road, does the road become more traditional or the peddler more modern? Both, either, neither?”
– Renato Rosaldo
Popular representations of modern Africa in the West often depict a continent that clings to—and is weighed down by—tradition. Such representations generally portray “tradition” not just as the opposite of modernity, but as that which is opposed to and defiant of modernity. But what exactly is modernity, anyway? Does the concept of “modernity” necessarily go hand in hand with Western cultural hubris, imperialistic endeavors, and globalization? Does it imply a state or status that is singular and universal, or conversely, is it possible to speak of competing and contested modernities? Drawing on contemporary ethnographies from various regions of sub-Saharan Africa, this course will introduce you to the complexity of ideas, practices, and struggles that exist throughout the large and diverse continent today. Insisting on (and also problematizing) the existence on African modernities, we will complicate and deconstruct the often taken-for-granted dichotomy between modernity and tradition. We will also consider the production of nostalgia and authenticity in discourses of belonging and “otherness” in postcolonial Africa.
Understanding Experience: Phenomenological Approaches in Anthropology
Level: Advanced
Semester: Year
How does a chronic illness affect a person’s orientation to the everyday? What are the social and political forces that underpin life in a homeless shelter? What is the experiential world of a deaf person, a musician, a refugee, or a child at play?In an effort to answer these and like-minded questions, anthropologists in recent years have become increasingly interested in developing phenomenological accounts of particular lived realities in order to understand, and convey to others, the nuances and underpinnings of such realities in terms that more orthodox social or symbolic analyses cannot achieve. In this context, phenomenology entails an analytic method that works to understand and describe in words phenomena as they appear to the consciousnesses of certain peoples. The phenomena most often in question for anthropologists include the workings of time, perception, selfhood, language, bodies, suffering, and morality as they take form in particular lives within the context of any number of social, linguistic, and political forces. In this course, we will explore phenomenological approaches in anthropology by reading and discussing some of the most significant efforts along these lines. Each student will also try her or his hand at developing a phenomenological account of her or his own of a specific social or subjective reality through a combination of interviewing, participant-observation, and ethnographic writing.
Previous course work in anthropology required.
Spirit Possession and Theatre
Level: Advanced
Semester: Spring
From Greek philosophy to surrealism and contemporary performance studies, from ethnographic descriptions of possession to techniques and theories of acting, the relationship between spirit possession and theatre has been figured in countless different ways. It has been posited, for example, that the figure of “the possessed” stands as a mythical model for the actor and possession itself could be approached as ur-theatre—an archaic image of the theatre. Conversely, it has also been suggested that spirit possession may be read as theatre; the performances given by “the possessed” are congruous with—and nothing more than—performances offered by actors. In this seminar, we will critically engage with ethnographic texts that emphasize the performative and theatrical aspects of spirit possession. We will then turn to look at things from the other side—specifically, we will explore how different performance theories and acting techniques support or contest the idea that the actor should be possessed by (and actually become) his or her character. Looking to such influential figures as Stanislavsky, Vakhtangov, Brecht, Boal, and Artaud, we will also consider how the theatre itself has been described as—or in contrast to—possession itself.