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Course Criteria
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4.00 Credits
An introduction to the historical study, both topical and methodological, of women in Africa. Students examine themes of slavery, economic participation, prophetic movements, marriage, and circumcision and discuss changes affecting Africa, such as the growth of trade, religious conversion, colonialism, the market economy, and the creation of national cultures. Life histories, songs, films, and novels are studied.
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4.00 Credits
GSS, SRE The postwar development of American popular culture in media, literature, and advertising has been an arena of struggle over what constitutes the popular and its moral, ethical, and political meanings, especially since the advent of televisual media and focused marketing capable of reaching (and presumably influencing) thousands of people simultaneously. This course explores the development of American popular culture industries and phenomena following World War II. It examines how American pop culture has been and continues to be shaped by particular social and political forces, how it is diffused both nationally and internationally, and how it develops and supports particular ideas of what it means to be "American."
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4.00 Credits
GSS, SRE This course focuses on the emergence and development of lesbian and gay identities in the United States from World War II to the present. Reading a variety of textual genres (history, sociology, memoir, literature) and screening documentary visual media, students examine the consolidation of lesbian and gay identities in the years before 1969 (Stonewall), the effect of the Stonewall Rebellion, the divergence of lesbian and gay male subcultures in the 1970s (with their separatist and hedonistic utopian variations), the AIDS crisis and racialized lesbian feminisms of the 1980s, and the new queer activism and subsequent commercialization of gay identity in the 1990s.
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4.00 Credits
GIS, GSS This course explores the intellectual angles through which anthropologists have engaged culture as a central, and yet often elusive concept in understanding how societies work. The analysis of culture has undergone many transformations over the past century, from arguing for the existence of integrated systems of thought and practice among so-called "primitives," to scrutinizing the culturalvalues of colonial subjects, to attempting to decipher the mind-set of the enemy during World War II. In recent years, anthropology has become more self-reflexive, questioning the discipline's authority to represent other societies and critiquing its participation in the creation of exoticized others. The course combines discussions, lectures, and films to reflect upon the construc- tion of social identity, power, and difference in a world where cultures are undergoing rapid reification. Specific topics include the transformative roles of ritual and symbol; nationalism and the making of majorities/minorities in postcolonial states; witchcraft and sorcery in historical and contemporary contexts; and cultural constructions of gender and sexuality.
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4.00 Credits
American Studies, Environmental Studies, SRE The course concentrates on excavation and initial lab procedures used in archaeology through a continuation of the long-term dig at Grouse Bluff, the 7,000-year-old site overlooking the Hudson River adjacent to the Bard campus. Two digging techniques are emphasized: stratigraphy and small-scale cartography. Fieldwork involves painstaking measurements that permit study of the distribution of debris throughout the site, description of deposit formation over time, and comparison with other sites. Such methods increase the strength of inferences about the activities that took place and their roles in the evolution of cultural ecosystems in the area. Prerequisite: permission of the instructor.
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4.00 Credits
GIS, GSS, Human Rights, LAIS Despite recent gains in democratization, contemporary Latin American societies continue to display dramatic inequalities. This course explores inequalities of gender and their interface with hierarchies of social class, ethnicity, and race through examination of ethnographic texts. It looks at historical sources of these inequalities in colonial structures and their expression in contemporary cultural practices, giving attention both to social groups that seek to impose and maintain inequalities, and those who challenge them. Students critically evaluate Latin American gender stereotypes and consider how gender is practiced and how gender identities are formed in particular local and global contexts, such as urban elites andmiddle classes, indigenous groups, and among market women, male factory workers, and transgendered prostitutes. Ritual contexts such as Carnival, soccer, and various religious practices are explored. Texts are drawn from Brazil, Peru, Mexico, and Guatemala.
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4.00 Credits
SRE The relationship of human biology to behavior and the nature of cultures couched in terms of putative biological differences between human groups and subgroups has characterized scientific discourse since the late 18th century. This has been especially true in anthropology, as the discipline has sought to answer questions of race (human variation), gender, sexuality, and some forms of compulsive behavior. This course examines scientific racism, sexism, criminology, and other biological phobias, reductionisms, and rationalizations. It studies the contexts, claims, achievements, and failures of normal science (especially physical anthropology and human biology and genetics) in regard to the significance of the real and assumed variations among individuals and human populations.
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4.00 Credits
Africana Studies, Victorian Studies An examination of how the Victorians sought to know the "other" through ethnographic, missionary,government, and travel encounters; the science of race; the objects of archaeology and museum collections; and photography. How the "other" was then related to the Europeans is studiedwithin the framework of evolutionary and diffusionary theories.
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4.00 Credits
Africana Studies Up until World War II, American anthropology had three central concerns: the description and understanding of Native American peoples based on participant observation through fieldwork; the defeat of scientific racism; and the placement of the concept of culture at the center of anthropological thought. This course examines this history along with the rise of sociological, psychological, and neomarxist evolutionist thought in American anthropology in this period.Works by Franz Boas, Frank Cushing, James Mooney, Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, Robert Lowie, Alfred Kroeber, Paul Radin, Melville Herskovits, Leslie White, and other anthropologists are studied.
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4.00 Credits
American Studies, Environmental Studies This course makes use of field trips on campus and in neighboring towns to provide firsthand contact with the groups who left their vestiges here: Native Americans, African Americans, and German and British settlers. The class works with artifacts and faunal remains in the lab, and visits excavations after reading background material on the history, culture, and archaeological interpretation of the above groups.
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