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Course Criteria
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4.00 Credits
GSS, Human Rights, STS An exploration of medical knowledge and practice in a variety of healing systems, focusing on the human body as the site in which illness is experienced and upon which social meanings and political actions are inscribed. The course examines the way political economic systems and the inequalities they engender-poverty, violence, discrimination-affect human well-being. Readings and films represent different ethnographic perspectives on embodied experiences of illness and bodily imagery and treatment within widely differing sociopolitical systems. Topics include biomedical constructs, body imagery, and alternative medical systems such as chiropractic and acupuncture in contemporary America; epidemic diseases such as malaria and AIDS; colonial constructions of the diseased body in sub-Saharan Africa; cosmetic medical interventions; and new medical technologies.
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4.00 Credits
Human Rights 233 Problems in Human Rights The growth of the worldwide human rights movement has been accompanied by the professionalization of research and advocacy and by an expanding body of human rights doctrine. But the roots of the movement lie in theWest, in the Enlightenment, and in reinterpretations of Christian teaching. Is human rights ideology ethnocentric? When, if ever, are indigenous values more important than universal principles? This course looks at a number of current issues including slavery, genocide, body modification, the rights of children and animals, and the campaign to ban land mines. It examines how human rights researchers deal with the practical difficulties they confront in their work and the ethical challenges posed by other cultures.
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4.00 Credits
Asian Studies, SRE Using texts of anthropology as well as literature, history, and films, this course looks at representations of South Asia made by foreigners and South Asians alike. Employing the most general definition of ethnography, the course focuses on how particular metaphors, tropes, and ways of describing South Asia continue to shape our knowledge about the region. Students trace the development of certain categories-such as village, caste, family, religion, and gender-that have become crucial to many ethnographic portrayals of South Asia; these categories and each ethnographic piece are situated within the broader historical contexts of colonialism, the partition of Pakistan and India, Indian nationalism, and South Asia's postcolonial relation to global development and politics. A final section of the course examines the relation between contemporary politics and media, exploring, for example, the relation between the rise of Hindu fundamentalism and popular TV. Throughout the course, the work of two well-known Indian artists-the novelist Salman Rushdie and the filmmaker Satyajit Ray-is used to complement and challenge the ethnographic texts.
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4.00 Credits
Africana Studies This course examines the British African colonies of the early 20th century and the everyday lives of their colonists. These "outsiders" are studiedthrough history, biography, fiction, and film, as well as through the responses of Africans. Various dichotomies-hypocrisy vs. idealism, brutality vs. bravery, racism vs. humanism-are considered as the course seeks to develop an ethnographic portrayal of the rulers and the cultures they created in these colonies; not British, not African, but something very much "other."
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4.00 Credits
This course considers travel as a cultural practice and focuses on the link between travel writing and ethnography. Examples of travelers' writings from the 19th century to the present are examined to reveal how personal, group, and national identities have been constructed through travel. The course evaluates some of the ethical dilemmas that tourism poses, explores the concept of travel as a rite of passage, and scrutinizes writings from exile and diaspora communities that challenge the master narrative of European travel from "center" to "periphery." Readings incluJamaica Kincaid's A Small Place, Claude Lévi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques, andMary Louise Pratt's Imperial Eyes, as well as fiction, ethnography, travelogues, and theoretical works.
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4.00 Credits
American Studies Baseball has often been labeled the quintessential American sport. This course explores that claim while it examines the history and diffusion of the game, its performance and representation, and its connections to the politics of ethnicity, race, gender, class, region, and place. Cultural constructions are explored and contrasted in baseball as played in the United States, Japan, and Latin America. Sources in fiction, film, and analytic literature are employed, in conjunction with required attendance at amateur (Little League) and professional baseball games.
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4.00 Credits
Africana Studies, Jewish Studies, LAIS, SRE Brazil, in contrast to the United States, has been portrayed by Brazilians and others as a "racial democracy." This course examines the debate over the "problem of race" in its early formulation asshaped by scientific racism and eugenics. It then turns to the Brazilian policy of branqueamento (whitening) in the 19th and early 20th centuries, which was the basis of large-scale migration to Brazil from all major regions of Europe. Inequality in contemporary Brazil is explored in terms of the dynamics of racial ideologies, the distribution of national resources, and the performance of identity as shaped by "racial" and "ethnic" strategieAmong the groups discussed are indigenous Brazilians, the Luso-Brazilians, Afro-Brazilians, Japanese Brazilians, Euro-ethnic Brazilians, and Brazilians of Arab and Jewish descent.
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4.00 Credits
Africana Studies, GIS, GSS, Human Rights This course draws upon material from Brazil to examine constructions and practices of gender and sexuality. It critiques the imagined utopia of Brazilian tropical sensuality best known through popularized global images of Carnival and locates historical sources of this imagery in slavery and colonialism. These images, in turn, are juxtaposed against performances of gender and sexuality in contemporary Brazilian life and their interface with hierarchies of race, age, and social class. Through films and ethnographic texts, students examine gender stereotypes and patterns of heterosexuality, homosexuality, transgenderism, and prostitution. State and church efforts to shape and control ideologies and practices of sexuality and gender are posed against the work of feminists, grass-roots groups, and AIDS activists. All of these issues are considered in relation to the larger global media context, within which Brazilian images and relations of gender and sexuality are shaped and contested.
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4.00 Credits
Africana Studies, SRE This course addresses the visual aspects of culture and cultural production with a particular focus on postcolonial Africa. How are the arts and the visual aspects of society made meaningful in and for contemporary Africa? Students look at how Africa has been represented to the international community through film and other visual mass media. Basic concerns and paradigms of anthropology, in particular ideas of racial and cultural difference, are introduced. This class is for those interested in historical/anthropological examinations of the visual as well as students producing film/videos, installations, and performance pieces, especially in relation to the politics of representation. For those interested in actually making films or videos, previous experience is required.
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4.00 Credits
GSS, Human Rights Why do acts of violence continue to grow in the "modern" world? This course considers how actsof violence challenge and support modern ideas of humanity, raising important questions about what it means to be human today. It approaches different forms of violence, including ethnic and communal conflicts, colonial education, torture and its individualizing effects, acts of terror and institutionalized fear, and rituals of bodily pain that mark individuals' inclusion or exclusion from a social group. Violence is examined as a means of producing and consolidating social and political power, and exerting political control. Forms of violence that have generated questions about "universal rights" of humanity versus culturallyspecific practices are reviewed, as are the ways human rights institutions have sought to address the profundity of human suffering and pain. This course fulfills a core class requirement for the Human Rights Program.
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