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Course Criteria
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4.00 Credits
Human Rights This course explores state formation in sub- SaharanAfrica, beginning with precolonial states, the colonial settler, and administrative states, and then moving on to contemporary postcolonial, collapsed, and "vampire" states. Case studiesare drawn primarily from Liberia, Uganda, and Zimbabwe.
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4.00 Credits
GIS, Human Rights, Middle Eastern Studies, SRE This course examines Islam's complex relationships with Europe as a geographic territory, sociopolitical entity, and discursive category. The Islamic presence in Europe dates back to Arab and Berber incursions into the Iberian Peninsula in the 8th century, and the religion and its adherents have left a significant imprint on Eastern Europe as well. Given this longstanding presence, why is Islam so commonly conceived as a moral and cultural formation external to Europe, European history, and European identities? Why are Muslims regarded as in Europe but not of it, and how does this tacit or explicit exclusion shape the everyday practices and perceptions of European Muslims? Finally, how does the representation of Muslims as a fundamentally foreign element inform contemporary debates about Islam's compatibility with secularism and liberal democratic citizenship? These questions are considered through readings, films, and other materials that work comparatively across national contexts and historical eras.
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4.00 Credits
Human Rights This course explores the range of genres and techniques that anthropologists and others have used to convey the lived experience of other cultures. It examines the tension within the discipline between the desire to make these cultures vivid and comprehensible and the need to respect difference and to render the whole in a framework of theory, and considers the aesthetic problems and ethical controversies that arise from writing at the limits of academic discourse. Genres addressed include classic field-based ethnographic monographs, travel narratives, historically informed critiques of earlier ethnographies, reflexive accounts of the process of fieldwork, journalistic reportage, visual documentation, and works of fiction. Among the works considered are Claude Lévi-Strauss' s TristesTropiques; Ruth Landes's The City of Women; Sharon Hutchinson's Nuer Dilemmas; Carlos Castaneda's The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge; and Leni Riefenstahl's The Last of the Nuba.
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4.00 Credits
Human Rights, Jewish Studies, SRE, STS This course examines the history of the persistent biological/racial classification of the Jews since about the 15th century, using it to consider the sciences of race as they have flourished and floundered, including the recent reemergence of scientific justification for the race concept and its application to the Jews. It explores social constructions of race as applied to the Jews, and the critiques of these constructions, as represented in the writings of both Jews and non-Jews. It also reviews some non-Euro-American efforts to account for Jewish difference in Brazil, India, Africa, and elsewhere.
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4.00 Credits
Environmental Studies In an age of apocalyptic narrative, the environment has taken center stage in what is constructed as an unprecedented global ecological crisis. Taking its cue from political ecology and the principle that all resource struggles are fundamentally political, this course explores the complex, dynamic interplay between conservation, development, and power. It traces the historical underpinnings of contemporary inequity by examining the logics of colonial sciences in relation to "nature," as well as the use of exoticspecies of flora and fauna as tools of imperial conquest. Next, the shaping of modern environmental discourses are considered-e.g., how environmental problems are identified and how interventions are rationalized. Finally, the course examines the politics of displacement, the emergence of "environmental refugees," and the needfor the conceptualization and practice of an environmental justice. Readings include ethnographic case studies from Brazil, India, Guinea, Indonesia, and Tanzania, among other nations.
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4.00 Credits
Africana Studies This course examines public performance and various types of theatricality with the aim to analyze how lived experience relates to politics, change, and social power. It considers key philosophical issues within anthropology and social thought more generally: power and its illusory enactment; the relationship between personal experience and broader social processes; the nature of consciousness; structure versus agency; stasis and change. Different ways to think about space and the social body are studied. The second half of the course draws on particular ethnographic, theatrical, philosophic, and literary examples fromWest Africa that address the relationships between historical memory, specific kinds of performance, and the local experience of power. Students are encouraged to consider the tension between "performance" as a theoreticalframe and as an "object" of analysis.
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4.00 Credits
Environmental Studies See Anthropology 337 for description.
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4.00 Credits
GIS, Human Rights, Middle Eastern Studies What does it mean to be "modern" in theMiddle East, in the aftermath of colonialism and in the face of continuing Euro-American efforts to reform the region's social, economic, and political life? Does modernity require the abandonment of tribal affiliations, cousin marriages, and other putatively traditional social forms and practices? Or does it involve more complex, creative negotiations of existing constraints and available resources? This course examines these and other questions through intensive reading of recent anthropological and other social scientific literature, critical analysis of popular cultural artifacts, and focused film viewing.
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4.00 Credits
Africana Studies, GIS, Human Rights This course examines formations of contemporary capitalism and its multiple global manifestations. Drawing on a variety of post-Marxist and new liberal historical and ethnographic works, it focuses on studies of national and transnational identities in relation to the "neoliberal" nation-state in"developing" countries. By contrasting notions ofcitizenship and cultural identifications, the course addresses the analytic gap between institutional forms of power and the ways in which people experience and identify with, and against, these structures. It suggests ways to theorize the changing relationships between the state and global capitalism, and considers identity within the contradictions of the (postcolonial) state. Finally, it addresses how people negotiate institutional forms of power in relation to the structures of the postcolonial state and specific "agents" of capitalism:i.e., free markets, global corporations, and international donor agents. Many examples are drawn from Africa.
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4.00 Credits
Asian Studies, Human Rights This cultural-historical course provides an extended exploration of the Chinese construction of such basic categories as gender, body, family, and belief. Using Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punishment as its point of departure, the course examines historical and ethnographical work from China on discipline, punishment, and systems for the creation of justice; it contrasts Foucault's important but historically specific Eurocentric proposals about human subject formation with some comparative insights generated out of engagement with China. How have Chinese notions of ritual, selfcultivation, institutions of family, and practices of gender distinction formed a sense of personhood, and how has that shifted over time? How have these shifts affected the Chinese sense of discipline and punishment?
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