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Course Criteria
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1.00 Credits
Theory 1 and Theory 2 are core courses for the major, designed to elucidate historical influences on contemporary anthropological theory. While precise topics may vary from year to year, the overall goal of the courses remains the same: to familiarize students with the main traditions from which the discipline of anthropology emerged and to explore the diverse ways in which contemporary anthropological practice defines itself both with and against them. This semester our topic will be reflexive anthropology. This course provides an introduction to reflexive/reflective anthropology. We chart the historical development of the field from the making of fieldwork memoirs to its current formulations in more creative ethnographies. Particular attention will be paid to the impact of the interpretive turn speared by Clifford Geertz in the 1970s that advocated the blurring of different genres of writing, which became a feature in contemporary cultural anthropology. The reflexive turn that followed over a decade later demanded ethnographers turn their gaze onto the self to answer questions about the making of otherness, power relations, and representation. Researchers began to consider their position vis-Ã -vis their intended subjects in the making of ethnographic projects to reinvent and decolonize anthropology. This emphasis has led ethnographers (especially feminists and minorities in the discipline) to engage in more expository writing that further obscured the boundary between social science and literature, which the discipline has historically occupied and continually struggles with. In so doing, they brought particular attention especially to the contested politics in the discipline. The course explores the fundamental features and various approaches to reflexive/reflective work, its challenges and possibilities, and its fervent critics, as well as its embrace by other disciplines. Our ultimate aim is to deconstruct what is the personal and how has it been used to successfully access the social. In the end, we will put theory into practice and produce a significant piece of reflective writing.
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1.00 Credits
This course examines the industrial and cultural conditions for the development of complex forms of storytelling in commercial U.S. television. Narrative complexity is a cross-generic phenomenon that emerged over the 1980s and has proliferated within an increasingly fragmented media environment. In class discussions and individual research projects, students will analyze particular programs in-depth, with attention to their industrial and social conditions of production, their aesthetic and ideological appeals, and the cultural tastes and practices of their viewers.
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1.00 Credits
A number of pre-Columbian Native American cultures in North America are known for their monumental constructions, including the Poverty Point site and culture in what is now Louisiana, Hopewellian earthworks in Ohio, the Mississippian city of Cahokia in Illinois, and the Chacoan Great Houses in New Mexico. The course will explore the history, means of subsistence, technology, social organization, and ritual practices of these societies, as well as the nature, construction, and meaning of the monuments and their surrounding landscapes.
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1.00 Credits
This seminar explores the ways in which imaginations of nature-culture anchor particular regimes of living and power. Our larger query will concern ontology and cosmology--the worlds and worldviews we inhabit--and what happens when there is basic disagreement as to what "nature" is. For example, do rocks, mountains, and glaciers "listen" as some indigenous peoples claim? Or are these claims a matter of cultural belief? Conversely, how do scientists listen to and relate to their natural objects? What social, historical, and intellectual practices make their visions of nature? And why do some visions appear more "real" than others? What circumstances decide? We will read across histories of science, philosophy, anthropology, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, and feminist science studies to probe the politics, meanings, and materialities of "nature" and the "natural" in a variety of contexts, from natural history in the 18th and 19th centuries to current struggles over the management of natural resources and bioprospecting initiatives.
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1.00 Credits
This seminar is required for all senior sociocultural anthropology majors who intend to write honors theses and is very strongly recommended for those writing senior essays. It is designed to enable students to pursue individual research projects in a group context and with attention to debates on the nature of anthropological interpretation. Each student gives a series of presentations on her/his own research project to the group; equally important is engaging with and offering constructive criticism of the projects presented by others.
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1.50 Credits
This course is a first-year, elementary I course in modern standard Arabic (MSA) that will introduce students to the basic skills of reading, writing, speaking, and listening. In this level, the class will focus on speaking as an effective way of learning (speak it to learn it). Students will learn Arabic letters and their sounds, write and create basic words and sentences, and be able to converse basic dialogues comfortably in the target language. Oral drills and speaking activities will be done in the classroom, and the class will be conducted fully in Arabic.
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1.00 Credits
This course is a second-year, lower intermediate course in modern standard Arabic (MSA) that will continue to focus on the four basic skills of reading, writing, speaking, and listening. In this level, students will be able to speak enough Arabic to communicate at a basic level with a native speaker on a variety of topics. Students should be able to write simple texts on everyday themes and read uncomplicated authentic texts, such as a newspaper article on a familiar topic and storybooks. Students will also be introduced to aspects of contemporary life and culture in the Arab world through films and cultural video clips. The class will focus on speaking as an effective way of learning (speak it to learn it). Oral drills and speaking activities will be done in the classroom, and the class will be conducted fully in Arabic.
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1.00 Credits
This first semester of third-year Arabic will continue to emphasize the four skills in language learning. In addition to the use of AL KITAAB II, students will be reading kids' stories from the Arab world.
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1.00 Credits
An introductory sampling of some of the most significant aspects of the artistic heritage of India, China, and Japan, the course is selective, choosing one distinctive artistic tradition of each society and analyzing it in terms of its peculiar aesthetic, historical, and religious or philosophical context. Topics treated may vary, but likely selections are Indian Buddhist sculpture, Chinese landscape painting of the classic period, and Japanese garden architecture.
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1.00 Credits
Founded in northern India in the early 1500s, the Mughal empire was one of the largest centralized states in the history of the premodern world. During the two centuries of their effective rule over most of the Indian subcontinent, the Mughal emperors and their subordinates were prolific patrons of the arts, overseeing the production of lavishly illustrated books and picture-albums and commissioning such architectural masterpieces as the Taj Mahal. This course offers an introduction not only to the art and culture of Mughal India, but also to the practice of art history itself, through a sequence of six thematic units exploring and applying different methods that are central to the discipline. Each unit begins with critical reading and discussion of one or two key theoretical or methodological statements, then continues through application to case studies drawn from Mughal India. The units include (1) techniques of visual description and formal analysis, (2) the concept of style and stylistic analysis, (3) the analysis of meaning in visual images (iconography and iconology), (4) models of time and the historical explanation of change, (5) architectural and historical analysis of buildings and their sites, and (6) historiographic assessment of debates and changing interpretations within art history. Each unit culminates in a writing exercise designed to provide students with structured experience in some of the various modes of art historical writing. The course is appropriate as an introduction both to art history and to Mughal art.
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