THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURE
The anthropological approach to the study of culture and human society. Case studies from ethnography are used in exploring the universality of cultural categories (social organization, economy, law, belief system, art, etc.) and the range of variation among human societies.
- MW 10:10 a.m.-11:25 a.m.
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Instructor:
Juan C Mazariegos
Info - 3 points
THE RISE OF CIVILIZATION
THE RISE OF CIVILIZ-DISC
Corequisites: ANTH V1008 The rise of major civilization in prehistory and protohistory throughout the world, from the initial appearance of sedentism, agriculture, and social stratification through the emergence of the archaic empires. Description and analysis of a range of regions that were centers of significant cultural development: Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus River Valley, China, North America, and Mesoamerica. DO NOT REGISTER FOR A RECITATION SECTION IF YOU ARE NOT OFFICIALLY REGISTERED FOR THE COURSE.
- MW 11:40 a.m.-12:55 p.m.
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Instructor:
Terence N D'Altroy
CULPA: 37 Info - 3 points
INTERPRETATION OF CULTRE-DISC
- M 1:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
- W 1:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
- M 5:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
- W 4:10 p.m.-5 p.m.
- W 5:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
- F 3:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
- M 12:10 p.m.-1 p.m.
- M 2:10 p.m.-3 p.m.
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Instructor:
Phoebe G Whiteside
Info - 0 points
THE RISE OF CIVILIZATION-DISC
- M 10:10 a.m.-11 a.m.
- W 2:10 p.m.-3 p.m.
- W 4:10 p.m.-5 p.m.
- W 3:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
- R 2:10 p.m.-3 p.m.
- R 4:10 p.m.-5 p.m.
- F 10:10 a.m.-11 a.m.
- F 11:10 a.m.-noon
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Instructor:
Asprey J Liu
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Instructor:
Fenfang Dong
Info -
Instructor:
Asprey J Liu
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Instructor:
Fenfang Dong
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Instructor:
Emily Frances Bailey
Info - 0 points
THE ETHNOGRAPHIC IMAGINATION
Introduction to the theory and practice of “ethnography”—the intensive study of peoples’ lives as shaped by social relations, cultural images, and historical forces. Considers through critical reading of various kinds of texts (classic ethnographies, histories, journalism, novels, films) the ways in which understanding, interpreting, and representing the lived words of people—at home or abroad, in one place or transnationally, in the past or the present—can be accomplished. Discussion section required.
- TR 2:40 p.m.-3:55 p.m.
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Instructor:
Maria Jose de Abreu
Info - 3 points
THINK LIKE AN ARCHAEOLOGIST
This course provides a comprehensive introduction to methods and theory in archaeology – by exploring how archaeologists work to create narratives about the past (and the present) on the basis on the material remains of the past. The course begins with a consideration of how archaeologists deal with the remains of the past in the present: What are archaeological sites and how do we ‘discover’ them? How do archaeologists ‘read’ or analyze sites and artifacts? From there, we will turn to the question of how archaeologists interpret these materials traces, in order to create narratives about life in the past. After a review of the historical development of theoretical approaches in archaeological interpretation, the course will consider contemporary approaches to interpreting the past.
- MW 10:10 a.m.-11:25 a.m.
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Instructor:
Hannah Chazin
Info - 4 points
INTRO TO 21ST CENT ARCH-DISC
- M 4:10 p.m.-5 p.m.
- W 1:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
- R 1:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
- R 3:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
- F 11:10 a.m.-noon
- M 1:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
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Instructor:
Alexandra M McDougle
Info - 0 points
THE ETHNOGRAPHIC IMAGINAT-DISC
THE ETHNOGRAPHIC IMAGI-DIS
- T 4:10 p.m.-5 p.m.
- R 4:10 p.m.-5 p.m.
- W 1:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
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Instructor:
Saphe Shamoun
Info - 0 points
WOMEN, GENDER POL-MUSLIM WORLD
WOMEN GENDER POL-MUSLIM WORLD
Practices like veiling, gendered forms of segregation, and the honor code that are central to Western images of Muslim women are also contested issues throughout the Muslim world. This course examines debates about gender, sexuality, and morality and explores the interplay of political, social, and economic factors in shaping the lives of men and women across the Muslim world, from the Middle East to Europe. The perspective will be primarily anthropological, although special attention will be paid to historical processes associated with colonialism and nation-building that are crucial to understanding present gender politics. We will focus on the sexual politics of everyday life in specific locales and explore the extent to which these are shaped by these histories and the power of representations mobilized in a global world in the present and international political interventions. In addition to reading ethnographic works about particular communities, we read memoirs and critical analyses of the local and transnational activist movements that have emerged to address various aspects of gender politics and rights.
- MW 1:10 p.m.-2:25 p.m.
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Instructor:
Maria F Malmstrom
Info - 3 points
WOMEN/GENDER-MUSLIM WORLD-DISC
- M 3:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
- W 3:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
- W 4:10 p.m.-5 p.m.
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Instructor:
Lea Coffineau
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Instructor:
Marini Thorne
Info - 0 points
WOMEN/GENDER-MUSLIM WORLD-DISC
- M 4:10 p.m.-5 p.m.
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Instructor:
Lea Coffineau
Info - 0 points
As If: Anthropologies of the Future
This seminar engages--through science fiction and speculative fiction, film, and companion readings in anthropology and beyond—a range of approaches to the notion of the “future” and to the imagination of multiple futures to come. We will work through virtual and fictive constructions of future worlds, ecologies, and social orders “as If” they present alternative possibilites for pragmatic yet utopian thinking and dreaming in the present (and as we’ll also consider dystopian and “heterotopian” possibilities as well).
- M 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
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Instructor:
Marilyn Ivy
CULPA: 11
Wikipedia
Info
- 4 points
Black Death
he term ‘black death’ circulates in scholarship and public discourses often without a clear definition or attribution to a specific thinker. It can do this because the term is commonsensical—naming the unfortunate relationship between Black people and death. This seminar surveys death as an object of inquiry, metaphor, political occasion, and inspiration for aesthetic creation. Reading texts and engaging other materials across disciplines, genres, and media while focusing on Anthropology and African American Studies, the course recognizes that the threads of race and death are inherently global and connected to European colonial imperial expansion, racism, capitalism, and modernity. Throughout the course we ask: What is the relationship between Black people or “blackness” and death? Is “black death” unique? How do we take seriously ubiquitous legacies of antiblack violence while also accounting for socio-historical specificity? What are the attendant practices, creations, and modes of thinking and being responsive to black death? At the end of the course, students will have honed skills in close reading, critical thinking, and thoughtful discussion through the study of race and death. This is an advanced level course; students should have taken at least one course introductory critical race theories course (or similar) prior to enrolling.
- T 10:10 a.m.-noon
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Instructor:
Lashaya Howie
Info - 4 points
NATIVE AMERICA
This is an undergraduate seminar that takes up primary and secondary sources and reflections to: a) provide students with an historical overview of Native American issues and representational practices, b) provide students with an understanding of the ways in which land expropriation and concomitant military and legal struggle have formed the core of Native-State relations and are themselves central to American and Native American history and culture, and c) provide students with an understanding of Native representational practices, political subjectivity, and aspiration.
- W 10:10 a.m.-noon
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Instructor:
Audra Simpson
CULPA: 5
Wikipedia
Info
- 4 points
LISTENINGS: AN ETHNOG OF SOUND
LISTENING: AN ETHNOG OF SOUND
We explore the possibilities of an ethnography of sound through a range of listening encounters: in resonant urban soundscapes of the city and in natural soundscapes of acoustic ecology; from audible pasts and echoes of the present; through repetitive listening in the age of electronic reproduction, and mindful listening that retraces an uncanniness inherent in sound. Silence, noise, voice, chambers, reverberation, sound in its myriad manifestations and transmissions. From the captured souls of Edison’s phonography, to everyday acoustical adventures, the course turns away from the screen and dominant epistemologies of the visual for an extended moment, and does so in pursuit of sonorous objects. How is it that sound so moves us as we move within its world, and who or what then might the listening subject be?
- T 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
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Instructor:
John Pemberton
CULPA: 15
Wikipedia
Info
- 4 points
THE BOMB
This course investigates the social history of nuclear arms in the context of World War II and the Cold War, exploring their ramifications for subjects and societies. We consider historical, ethnographic, medical and psychiatric accounts of the bomb’s invention and fallout, including the unknowable bodily injuries caused by radiation and the ecological contamination inflicted on indigenous communities where atomic weapons were tested. Throughout the course, we investigate government propaganda designed to produce political subjects who both endorse and fear nuclear imperatives; who support expanding militarization and funding for weapons development; and who abide escalating political rhetorics of nuclear aggression.
- T 10:10 a.m.-noon
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Instructor:
Karen Seeley
CULPA: 9
Info
- 4 points
ANIME EFFECT: JAPANESE MEDIA
Culture, technology, and media in contemporary Japan. Theoretical and ethnographic engagements with forms of mass mediation, including anime, manga, video, and cell-phone novels. Considers larger global economic and political contexts, including post-Fukushima transformations. Prerequisites: the instructor's permission.
- T 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
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Instructor:
Marilyn Ivy
CULPA: 11
Wikipedia
Info
- 4 points
TEXT, MAGIC, PERFORMANCE
TEXT MAGIC PERFORMANCE
Prerequisites: the instructors permission. This course pursues interconnections linking text and performance in light of magic, ritual, possession, narration, and related articulations of power. Readings are drawn from classic theoretical writings, colonial fiction, and ethnographic accounts. Domains of inquiry include: spirit possession, trance states, séance, ritual performance, and related realms of cinematic projection, musical form, shadow theater, performative objects, and (other) things that move on their own, compellingly. Key theoretical concerns are subjectivity - particularly, the conjuring up and displacement of self in the form of the first-person singular I - and the haunting power of repetition. Retraced throughout the course are the uncanny shadows of a fully possessed subject --within ritual contexts and within everyday life.
- M 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
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Instructor:
John Pemberton
CULPA: 15
Wikipedia
Info
- 4 points
SENIOR THESIS SEM IN ANTHROPOL
Prerequisites: The instructors permission. Students must have declared a major in Anthropology prior to registration. Students must have a 3.6 GPA in the major and a preliminary project concept in order to be considered. Interested students must communicate/meet with thesis instructor in the previous spring about the possibility of taking the course during the upcoming academic year. Additionally, expect to discuss with the instructor at the end of the fall term whether your project has progressed far enough to be completed in the spring term. If it has not, you will exit the seminar after one semester, with a grade based on the work completed during the fall term. This two-term course is a combination of a seminar and a workshop that will help you conduct research, write, and present an original senior thesis in anthropology. Students who write theses are eligible to be considered for departmental honors. The first term of this course introduces a variety of approaches used to produce anthropological knowledge and writing; encourages students to think critically about the approaches they take to researching and writing by studying model texts with an eye to the ethics, constraints, and potentials of anthropological research and writing; and gives students practice in the seminar and workshop formats that are key to collegial exchange and refinement of ideas. During the first term, students complete a few short exercises that will culminate in a substantial draft of one discrete section of their senior project (18-20 pages) plus a detailed outline of the expected work that remains to be done (5 pages). The spring sequence of the anthropology thesis seminar is a writing intensive continuation of the fall semester, in which students will have designed the research questions, prepared a full thesis proposal that will serve as a guide for the completion of the thesis and written a draft of one chapter. Only those students who expect to have completed the fall semester portion of the course are allowed to register for the spring; final enrollment is contingent upon successful completion of first semester requirements. In spring semester, weekly meetings will be devoted to the collaborative refinement of drafts, as well as working through issues of writing (evidence, voice, authority etc.). All enrolled students are required to present their project at a symposium in the late spring, and the final grade is based primarily on successful completion of the thesis/ capstone project. Note: The senior thesis seminar is open t
- M 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
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Instructor:
Audra Simpson
CULPA: 5
Wikipedia
Info
- 4 points
Film at Low Temperatures: Cinemas of the
Cinemas of the Arctic
This seminar explores the screen cultures of the Indigenous peoples of the Polar and Circumpolar regions of Canada, The United States, Russia, Scandinavia, and Greenland as they exist at the unstable boundary between cinematic object and creative subject. Viewing work by Indigenous filmmakers, we will draw on from Indigenous Studies, Cultural Anthropology, and Film Studies to examine the complicated role of film in the Arctic.
- M 10:10 a.m.-noon
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Instructor:
Tyler Adkins
Info - 4 points
Sympathy, Librlism, & Conduct of Care
Sympathy & the Conduct of
. This seminar examines the distribution and obligations of care under late liberalism. We work from classical approaches to human sentiment (e.g. Hume, Adam Smith) to explore the relationship of forms of care {management, empathy) to different modes of statecraft. In particular we examine links between imperial colonialism and liberal democracy in terms of different techniques of administering social difference (e.g. race, multiculturalism, class, population, ...). We critically investigate the role of the discipline of anthropology within this rubric and read several ethnographies that dwell on the interrelation of care and vulnerability. Across the course, we scrutinize what types of subjects care, for whom, and to what effect.
- F 10:10 a.m.-noon
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Instructor:
Catherine Fennell
Info - 3 points
Community-Based Archaeology, Heritage, a
Community Arch, Htg & Pub
What is community-based archaeology? What constitutes a community, and what are the stakes of making claims to community? How does a community come into being around archaeological sites or contested heritage? In what ways does community archaeology align with or differ from public archaeology? How has public engagement been imagined in relation to descendant communities? Can collaborative research designs, foundational to community-based research, be developed in public archaeology? This seminar will explore the methodological boundaries of public and community-based archaeology and heritage. Using case studies from New York City and elsewhere, we will consider the ways in which concepts such as dialogue, process, flexibility, collaboration, activism, and sustainability are essential to an engaged and community responsive archaeology. We will also examine a diversity of methodological approaches that facilitate the integration of these ideas in on-the-ground practice.
- F 10:10 a.m.-noon
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Instructor:
Jessica Striebel Maclean
Info - 4 points
Political Human-Animal Studies
In a number of academic disciplines the concern with relationships between humans and non-humans has recently resulted in a radical revision of the ways in which we think people and animals construct their social worlds. This course addresses how humans and animals enter into, and interact within, each other's worlds. It draws upon perspectives from anthropology, geography, (political) philosophy, ethics, literary theory, and the sciences, placing current debates within the context of the deep history of human-animal relations. Topics to be discussed include "wildness", domestication, classification, animal rights, biotechnology, "nature/culture", food/cooking, fabulous/mythical animals, the portrayal of animals in popular culture, and human-animal sexualities.
- T 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
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Instructor:
Brian Boyd
CULPA: 6
Info
- 3 points
CONTESTING THE PAST
- T 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
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Instructor:
Terence N D'Altroy
CULPA: 37 Info - 3 points
SECOND YEAR DOCTORAL PROPOSAL SEMINAR
2ND YR DOCTORAL PROPOSAL
Prerequisites: 2ND YEAR PHD STATUS IN GOOD STANDING Corequisites: ANTH G6205 Within this seminar, one will master the art of research design and proposal writing, with special emphasis on the skills involved in writing a dissertation prospectus and research proposals that target a range of external funding sources. Foci include: bibliography development; how one crafts and defends a research problem; the parameters of human subjects research - certification; and the key components of grant proposal design. Required of, and limited to, all Second Year PHD anthropology students.
- M 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
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Instructor:
Zoe Crossland
CULPA: 9 h-index: 17 Info - 4 points
LANGUAGE AND ITS LIMITS
This course examines
language and its limits
from the perspective of practice and theory, drawing on linguistic and sociocultural anthropology, semiotics, and deaf and disability studies. The first weeks focus on foundational texts and frameworks for language, semiotics, and communication, paying attention to the placement, and theorization, of boundaries that separate language from not-language and to the work such boundaries (are intended to) do. The second part of the course explores materials where the subjects and objects of study approach or even cross those boundaries, asking what kinds of ethical, intellectual, and relational demands these materials make in both social and analytic contexts. Focal topics may include linguistic relativity; semiotics; modality (signed, spoken, written languages); disability; trauma and colonialism; human-nonhuman communication; and gender. Please email for instructor permission.
- W 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
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Instructor:
Elizabeth M Green
CULPA: 2 Info - 3 points
PRE-ATLANTIC SLAVERY AFRICA AND SOUT
This seminar on pre-Atlantic Slavery in Africa and Asia will focus on the history of captivity and bondage in modern and the premodern Africa. Conceptually, what is the difference between a captive and a slave? How has captivity been central to the history of social difference and state formation in premodern Africa? By introducing the student to the history of trade in captives within Africa and across the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, the student will be encouraged to rethink premodern Africa as central to premodern world history rather than marginal to it.
- T 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
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Instructor:
Mahmood Mamdani
CULPA: 21
Wikipedia
h-index: 57
Info
- 4 points
EXHIBITION PRAC-GLOBAL CONTEXT
Prerequisites: ANTH G6352 Museum Anthropology: history and theory / ANTH G6353 Politics and Practice of Museum Exhibitions; G9110, G9111 and the instructors permission. Corequisites: ANTH G6353. This course addresses the practical challenges entailed in the process of creating a successful exhibition. Developing an actual curatorial project, students will get an opportunity to apply the museum anthropology theory they are exposed to throughout the program. They will be given a hands-on approach to the different stages involved in the curation of a show, from the in-depth researching of a topic to the writing, editing and design of an exhibition that will be effective for specific audiences.
- T 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
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Instructor:
Cine Ostrow
Info - 3 points
PRIN/APPL-SOC & CULTRL ANTHROP
Prerequisites: ANTH G4201 Principles and Applications of Social and Cultural Anthropology and the instructors permission. Focus on research and writing for the Masters level thesis, including research design, bibliography and background literature development, and writing. Prerequisites: ANTH G4201 Principles and Applications of Social and Cultural Anthropology
- R 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
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Instructor:
Ellen Marakowitz
CULPA: 1 Info - 3 points
Ethnographies at the End of the World
What can we learn from anthropological and ethnographic research in and about a damaged world, a world confronted by the violence and effects of war, climate change, transnational migration, post-industrial abandonment, and the lives and afterlives of colonialism and slavery? What are the ethnographic debates that address the catastrophes produced by capitalism and the lifeforms that emerge out of its ruins? What types of anthropological critique emerge in times enunciated as ‘the end of the world’? And what comes after this end? Ethnographies at the End of the World addresses these questions by paying close attention to some of the most relevant debates in contemporary anthropological theory and anthropological critique. These debates include, among others, discussions on violence and trauma, the politics of life and death, the work of memory and oblivion, and the material entanglements between human and non-human forms of existence. The aim of this seminar is to generate a discussion around the multiple implications of these theoretical arrangements and how anthropologists deploy them in their ethnographic understandings of the world we live in. In doing so, this course provides students with a fundamental understanding and conceptual knowledge about how anthropologists use and produce theory, and how this theoretical production is mobilized as a social critique. This course is reading intensive and operates in the form of a seminar. It is intended, primarily, for MA students in the department of anthropology and graduate students in other departments.
- R 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
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Instructor:
Sheng Long
Info - 3 points
POLITICAL CONCEPTS IN WAKE OF GEONTONTOP
POLTICL CNCPTS:GEONTOPOWE
It’s hot and it’s getting hotter. As the machinery of capital extraction, industrialism, and consumption refuses to relinquish its grip, meteorological temperatures continue to rise and chemical hot zones spread. Tipping points threaten regime shifts in which the qualitative nature of the earth’s biosphere will alter. But until then, and even after then, hot zones occur in the aggregate only in abstraction. In reality they form like weather clouds over specific places—toxic smog over Beijing, lead poisoning in drinking water in Flint, Michigan, uranium exposure in Navajo and Hopi lands. Marx thought the social dialectic was leading to the purification of the fundamental opposition of human classes. No little evidence can be mustered to support the claim that we are nearing this moment—the world seems to be splitting into ever more extreme halves—the one percent and the ever-increasing precariate. But what many believe we are witnessing a new form of antagonism and which demands new modes of solidarity. The new swelter seems to them less fundamentally a war of class—although also a class war, although definitely not a clash of civilization—and more a clash of existents. And in this new war of the world everyone must decide with whom (or what) we are making ties of solidarity. With whom or what will we stake our claim?
- T 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
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Instructor:
Elizabeth Povinelli
CULPA: 14
Wikipedia
Info
- 4 points
EXHIBITION CULTURES
Laurel Kendall and Ming Xue (Co-Instructor). This course is a continuation of Museum Anthropology G6352 (not a prerequisite). Through the study of museum exhibitions, this course explores a series of debates about the representation of culture in museums, the politics of identity, and the significance of objects. We will consider the museum as a contemporary and variable form, as a site for the expression of national, group, and individual identity and as a site of performance and consumption. We will consider how exhibits are developed, what they aim to convey, what makes them effective (or not), and how they sometimes become flashpoints of controversy. Because the work of museums is visual, enacted through the display of material forms, we will also consider the transformation of objects into artifacts and as part of exhibitions, addressing questions of meaning, ownership, value, and magic. We will look at this range of issues from the point of view of practitioners, critics, and audiences. G6365 works in tandem with the exhibition project that will be developed in “Exhibition Practice in Global Culture” to produce a small exhibit. This year we will use a Tibetan Thangka painting (AMNH #70.3/8090) as the focal point for an exhibit that explores contemporary Thangkas and those who paint them. The instructor’s permission is required.
- T 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
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Instructor:
Laurel Kendall
Info - 3 points
QUESTIONS IN ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY II:
QUESTIONS-ANTHROP THRY II:HIST
This course surveys the historical relationships between anthropological thought and its generic inscription in the form of ethnography. Readings of key ethnographic texts will be used to chart the evolving paradigms and problematics through which the disciplines practitioners have conceptualized their objects and the discipline itself. The course focuses on several key questions, including: the modernity of anthropology and the value of primitivism; the relationship between history and eventfulness in the representation of social order, and related to this, the question of anti-sociality (in crime, witchcraft, warfare, and other kinds of violence); the idea of a cultural world view; voice, language, and translation; and the relationship between the form and content of a text. Assignments include weekly readings and reviews of texts, and a substantial piece of ethnographic writing. Limited to PhD students in Anthropology only.
- T 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
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Instructor:
Nadia Abu El-Haj
CULPA: 13
Wikipedia
Info
- 3 points
Paperwork, biometrics and power
Moving from documents to biometrics, anthropology to media theory, this course examines the media systems whereby state and imperial power is inscribed and administered.
If additional info is needed, please let me know.
- T 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
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Instructor:
Brian Larkin
CULPA: 16 Info - 3 points
Doing Ethnographic Work
What constitutes ethnographic work and how do we know if we are doing it well? This course considers the many ways that question has been answered within the history of the discipline of anthropology and gives students the tools to answer the question for their own graduate-level work. The course combines close reading of ethnographic texts, methodological interventions, and disciplinary critiques with hands-on practice in a variety of research methods commonly understood as ethnographic. The practical element will at times require a fairly substantial investment of time outside of class.
- F 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
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Instructor:
Kaya N Williams
Info - 4 points
WEDNESDAY SEMINAR
WEEKLY SEMINAR
All anthropology graduate students are required to attend. Reports of ongoing research are presented by staff members, students, and special guests.
- W 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
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Instructor:
Zoe Crossland
CULPA: 9 h-index: 17 Info - 0 points