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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
Gandhi and his Interlocutors Spring 2009. Three credits. Faisal Devji and Vyjayanthi Rao In 1926, after the failure of his first movement of civil disobedience, Gandhi paused to rethink the meaning of nonviolence. He brought to light many complicated relations, making them available to political thought in productive new ways. Among his conclusions were the following: that violence was a positive phenomenon, and nonviolence a negative phenomenon with no life of its own. Moreover violence could not survive without nonviolence, which gave the former a legitimacy it did not otherwise possess. For Gandhi, these seemingly contradictory statements proved that violence and nonviolence were not opposed phenomena, but intimately related to one another in complex ways. Whatever else the Mahatma accomplished, Gandhi is only the most famous among many who have thought about the relationship of violence and nonviolence in South Asia. While this thinking is distinctive because it emerges from the distinct history of South Asia, it is by no means peculiar to it. The region's history has produced not only distinctive forms of violence and nonviolence, but equally distinct ways of thinking about their relationship, whose relevance is not confined to geography. This course explores some of the theories by focusing on the social life of violence and non-violence in contemporary South Asia.
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3.00 Credits
?he Visible God": Money and Society Spring 2009. Three credits. Gustav Peebles This course introduces students to various theories of money's social power through the centuries. We explore theorists who have considered money as a sociological object-from Aristotle to Marx to Freud. The course provides a broad philosophical backdrop from which to view the debates swirling around the organization and power of money today. We cover historical ground in order to consider, for example, how and why the nation-state has gained the ability and right to represent economic value; we also ask why some of this power that has accrued to nation-states may be losing ground, as attested to by the newborn euro and the global rebirth of local exchange rings. Money does many things in society that are separate from its role in daily exchange; studying typical economic practices such as hoarding, banking, and counterfeiting, we investigate money's impact beyond the economic sphere within which it famously operates.
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3.00 Credits
Anthropology as a History of the Present Spring 2009. Three credits. Ann Stoler In l950, don of British anthropology, Evans Pritchard warned that anthropology would have to choose between being history or being nothing. What did he mean by that statement How prescient was he in charting the direction that anthropology would take in the 21st century This course explores the changing form and content of historical reflection in the making of anthropology as a discipline, a set of practices, and mode of inquiry. It starts at the notion that anthropological knowledge is always grounded in implicit and explicit assumptions about the ways in which the past can be known, how people differently use their pasts, and what different societies count as relevant and debatable history. We will look at how different understandings of the relationship between history, culture and power and the concepts that join them-habitus, structural violence, cultural debris, imagined community, social memory, genealogy, tradition-have given shape to critical currents in ethnographic method and social theory. This course is required for MA and PhD students in Anthropology.
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3.00 Credits
Critical Foundations of Anthropology I Fall 2008. Three credits. Hylton White This seminar introduces students to modern social theory, its historical anchorings, and its relations with the anthropological enterprise. It investigates how the concept of society and culture evolved in relation to humanist thought and political economic circumstances as Europeans explored, missionized, and colonized. In capturing various peripheries of knowledge, we ask how anthropological theory and practice has been modeled within and against other natural and social science disciplines. We inquire into key debates and subjects related to the category of man, the social, and the primitive; social theory and state institutions and practices; human nature and diversity; science and colonial governance; Kultur and civilization; cultural evolution and race; objectivity and subjectivity. In charting how society and culture have been theorized and debated historically, we also reflect on forms of anthropological knowledge and ethnographic sensibilities that are relevant today and their meaning and stakes for a present and future anthropology and its connection to other scientific, political, and humanistic endeavors. This course is required for MA and PhD students in Anthropology.
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3.00 Credits
Sites of Contention in Contemporary Ethnography Fall 2008. Three credits. Janet Roitman This course is dedicated to the discussion of thematic, theoretical, methodological, and formal innovation in contemporary ethnography. The course will proceed by placing in dialogue alternative theoretical and ethnographic strategies on similar questions, and by introducing a range of potentially interlocutive "quasi-ethnographic" texts. Some examplesof foci that may be explored are ethnographic approaches to the cultural construction of difference; ethnographies of globalization; and contemporary approaches to anthropological intervention in the public sphere. Seminar participants will make close readings of at least one text per week, and students will be asked to write brief reaction papers at regular intervals.
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3.00 Credits
Critical Foundations of Anthropology II Spring 2009. Three credits. Vyjayanthi Rao This course, required for incoming anthropology master's students, focuses on contemporary theoretical and philosophical debates on the nature of the social and assesses the impact of these debates on recent ethnographic writing. We focus on core conceptual domains critical to the practice of anthropology: society, language, the market, historicity, and difference. Questions of ontology and temporality are raised in these conceptual domains through reading of the social philosophical work of authors such as Bataille, Derrida, Deleuze, Bakhtin, and Fanon. By situating the work of these post-metaphysical thinkers in relation to the classical canon of social and moral philosophy and its liberal underpinnings, the course will encourage students to speculate about the direction of anthropological practice. A final assignment, in the form of a research exercise, stresses critical reading of contemporary ethnographies new ways of theoretical framing.
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3.00 Credits
Cities and the Culture of Construction Spring 2009. Three credits. Carol Breckenridge This course explores the relationship between mega-cities, design, and construction in the era of globalization. More specifically, students conceptualize the idea of the "construction site" with its technologies,practices and goals, scope, and scale. Conversely, various practices of urban destruction, demolition and reconstruction are explored. Two key organizing texts for the course are Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle (1967) and Comments on The Society of the Spectacle ( 1988). These texts highlight the view of construction sites, in part, as spectacles. This course will unearth the dialectic between construction and destruction in the 21st century's world-wide urban explosion. China, whose urban world could be characterized as one large construction site, is said to be building one hundred cities with populations larger than 10 million each. Osama Bin Laden, whose resources came from one of the world's largest construction families, invested his wealth in the construction of cities in the Sudan before shifting his attention to shaping the landscapes of jihad. Mega-cities like Mumbai are driven by speculation in real estate at various scales, from the gentrification of slums to the "malling" of obsolete textile factories. And,of course, the U.S. interest in Iraq might be described as a war of "mass construction" in which major companies like Bechtel and Halliburton swept in to make millions before the fires of "shock and awe" had even been putout.
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3.00 Credits
Themes in the Anthropology of Religion and Secularism Fall 2008. Three credits. Nathaniel Roberts This seminar examines three interlocking themes: 1) the concept of religion itself as a distinctly human phenomenon within the anthropological tradition, 2) the role of notions of individual and collective autonomy in modern secularism, and 3) religious practices that trouble any moral psychology in which human autonomy is a paramount value.
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3.00 Credits
Anthropology of Technoscience Spring 2009. Three credits Priscilla Song This seminar explores questions of theory, method, and ethics in the anthropology of science and technology. How is biomedicine changing what it is to be human How can science be studied ethnographically How are the politics of difference linked to the production of scientific knowledge Through close reading of ethnographic texts and fieldwork both online and off, we investigate how scientific practice and technological innovation reorganize various aspects of human life on both global and local scales. Topics include the reproduction of racial categories in genomics, the cultures of cyberspace, the commodification of bodies in medical science, the relationship between global markets and local ecologies, and the ways in which various technoscientific projects reshape natural and political orders in diverse locales.
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3.00 Credits
Posthuman/Ethnographic Spring 2009. Three credits. Hugh Raffles In recent years a new Copernican revolution decentering the human subject has swept the social sciences and humanities. Scholars in dialog with feminism, postcolonial studies, queer studies, and emergent work on science, technology, and nature, have begun to explore ways in which the world is created and populated through relations between and among humans, nonhumans, and quasi-humans. In this course, we examine innovative and provocative works in various media concerned with animals, technologies, "natural phenomena," and assorted forms of cross-species/cross-kindsinteraction to consider how anthropologists and others are responding to this challenge.
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