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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
Full course for one semester. This course will engage the question of secrecy as it pertains to life in former Communist cultures. The functioning of these societies (and most others around the world) was almost unimaginable without some form of secrecy. We will start by studying the workings of East European secret police, most notably that of UDBA in the former Yugoslavia. This will allow us to examine more general notions such as freedom, interrogation, public secrecy, resistance, revolution, and black humor. We will approach secrecy as a repository of power found in the spheres of politics, aesthetics, and sexuality. Our primary readings will come from memoirs, police files, and ethnographies. The students will be invited to think how these historical and contextual examples travel beyond Communism. What do they tell us about the nature of the State itself, from totalitarian systems to democratic ones What will be the role of secrecy in twenty-first century art, culture, and politics How can we write (about) this anthropology of secrecy Prerequisite: Anthropology 211 or consent of the instructor.
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3.00 Credits
Full course for one semester. Starting with the self-reflective turn that occurred in anthropology during the 1980s, identifying human agency in ethnographic subjects has become a lasting concern within the discipline as ethnographers have attempted to deconstruct differentials in voice and power that often operate to the detriment of anthropology's frequently subaltern informants. Some of the most vexing problems in formulating human agency are those raised in possession, where, according to indigenous models, human agency is understood as displaced or eclipsed. Does possession mark a failure of agency, or is it another means through which it is exercised Through ethnographic and theoretical material, this course will review anthropological models that have posed possession as having its roots in crises of representation, in social conflict, in phenomenological apperception, and in psychodynamic tensions. These various models will be thought through by way of anthropological approaches to other phenomena that are read as being limitations on, or instances of, human agency, such as resistance, the commodity form, fetishism, and moral and ethical restraint; this course will also attempt to identify contemporary secular analogues to possession in which human agency is imagined, by those bearing it, to be interrupted, such as accounts of psychic trauma and paranormal encounters. Prerequisite: Anthropology 211 or consent of instructor. Conference. Not offered 2009-10.
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3.00 Credits
See Linguistics 348 for description. Not offered 2008-09. Linguistics 348 Description
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3.00 Credits
Full course for one semester. Through what manners are religious subjects formed; what, if anything, is particular to religious speech; and in what ways is ethnography as a form of writing and knowledge situated to elucidate the connections between these two issues Drawing on theoretical and ethnographic works from several different world religions, this course will trace out the varying anthropological approaches to the questions of religious language and religious subjectivity, and ask what commonalities there may be between these two problematics. Among the specific issues that will be addressed, this course will cover how text, speech, rhetoric, narrative, and other semiotic systems, in combination with bodily practice, ethical exercise, the reflective monitoring of the sensorium, along with larger sociocultural forces and formations, inform the explicit and implicit understandings that constitute religious subjects. This course will also inquire as to what contingent or structural limits there may be on the project of forming religious subjectivities, and finally this course will investigate to what degree these resulting subjectivities are capable of being represented through ethnographic practice. Prerequisite: Anthropology 211 or consent of instructor. Conference. Not offered 2009-10.
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3.00 Credits
Full course for one semester. This course will address the apparent paradoxes of anthropology of Europe through the lens of a number of ethnographies about problematically European communities-communities in one way or another on the periphery of Europe. More generally, the course will consider the complex theoretical and methodological issues that arise with anthropology's repatriation, the turning of a discipline originally concerned with defining Europe's "Other" onto Europe itself as an object of knowledge. The course readings range across a variety of localities, ethnographic genres, and types of social situations, from traditional community studies (including peasant, traditional proletarian, and urbanized communities) to studies with an area-regional or European purview. Prerequisite: Anthropology 211. Conference. Not offered 2009
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3.00 Credits
Full course for one semester. The course provides a historical anthropological exploration of colonialism. Drawing on case studies from Africa, Asia, and the Americas, it focuses on the colonial construction of categories of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, and how such cultural categories have been transformed or reproduced in the postcolonial present. Particular attention is paid to how processes and institutions of education, domesticity, urban planning, and census-taking contribute to the production of docile subjects and the maintenance of colonial political and economic structures. Resistance, contestation, and decolonization are similarly addressed. Readings are drawn primarily from the field of anthropology. Given its focus on colonialism, the course provides students with a strong theoretical introduction to the burgeoning subfield of historical anthropology. Prerequisite: Anthropology 211 or consent of the instructor. Conference.
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3.00 Credits
Full course for one semester. This course will ask to what degree American Christianity is a religious, social, and cultural phenomenon that, while perhaps not sui generis, has distinctive traits that mark it as a properly bounded anthropological research object in and of itself. In the past, North American Christianity has not been thought through as fully by anthropologists as it possibly could have been; recently, however, in part as a corrective measure to this oversight, in part as a reaction to the increased visibility that religiously informed conservative political movements have enjoyed over the past 30 years, and in part as a realization of the importance that American Christianity has had on Christian practiceworldwide, anthropologists have begun to produce a more thorough documentation of North American Christian life. This anthropological work has been supplemented by sociological ethnographies, as well as by material from historians who have either been influenced by anthropological approaches, or who have taken cultural material as their object. This course will survey this literature, addressing topics that will include language use, the American Apocalyptic Imaginary, conversion narratives, Christian subjectivity, and finally the distinctive relationship between politics and religion in the American public sphere that marked the last quarter of the 20th century, and which promises to be a force in the 21st century as well. Prerequisite: Anthropology 211 or consent of instructor. Conference. Not offered 2009-10.
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3.00 Credits
Full course for one semester. The Middle East has been the focus of increased scrutiny over the past few decades in light of U.S. economic and political interests, and yet the region's internal cultural complexity is poorly understood and often overlooked. This course provides both an anthropological overview of the region's political culture and cultural politics, as well as a critical inquiry into the very anthropo-geographic categories that have historically sustained a sense of unity in the region: including tribalism, honor and shame, religious piety, and poetic practices. In the process, the course explores larger comparative issues of colonialism, nationalism, state formation, sectarianism, urbanism, and globalization. Prerequisite: Anthropology 211 or consent of instructor. Conference. Not offered 2009-10.
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3.00 Credits
Full course for one semester. Chinese and Tibetan peoples have interacted for centuries, but it is only in the last half of the 20th century that the "Tibet question" in China has risen to global attention. This course looks at modern Sino-Tibetan relations through the lens of ethnicity and gender as a way to understand the contentious process through which the Chinese nation-state and national identity have been constructed. Through lectures, readings, films, and discussions, we will explore the diversity of Tibetan and Han Chinese family organization, gender ideologies, and ethnic identities just before, during, and after the Communist revolutionary period. This perspective will shed light on the incorporation of Tibetans as a "minority nationality" in the Chinese "multinational state," the role of such minorities in constructing Han Chinese majority identity, and the differing effects of state policies on men and women. Prerequisite: Anthropology 211. Conference. Not offered 2009
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3.00 Credits
Full course for one semester. Since the Dalai Lama fled to exile in India in 1959, Tibet and Tibetans have garnered emblematic status in global debates on indigenous cultures and human rights. This course draws on anthropological theories of ethnicity, modernity and globalization to understand this phenomenon in its historical and ethnographic contexts. Working with a wide range of theoretical, historical, and ethnographic writings, as well as a variety of other media such as film, popular songs, websites and blogs, we consider the global contexts and causes of changing meanings of Tibetanness before and after Chinese Communist intervention. We focus especially on the historical and contemporary diversity among Tibetans across the Himalayan region and into the diaspora, as well as the changing political economic conditions of Chinese-Tibetan relations. Conference. Prerequisite: Anthropology 211.
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