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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
Full course for one semester. Since the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, state leaders have struggled to chart a course to a Chinese modernity that would break with the perceived humiliations of European domination in the 19th century and bring China commensurate status in a newly configured world stage of nations. Since Deng Xiaoping's post-Mao reforms in the early 1980s, the PRC has been one of the fastest growing economies in the world. As such, it is poised to have major impacts globally, and especially since the PRC's entrance into the World Trade Organization in 2001, these meteoric socioeconomic changes have complex implications for its diverse 1.2 billion people. This course draws on anthropological theories of modernity, capitalism, globalization, and development emerging in the 1980s and '90s to turn a critical eye on discourses and practices of "development" (ch. fazhan, k aifa) in the PRC. Drawing on theoretical, historical, and ethnographic writings, as well as on other media such as government policy papers, advertising, and documentary films, we consider the contexts and contradictions of various development efforts just before, during, and after the Maoist period, focusing especially on the post-Mao era of economic reforms. The PRC thus will serve as a case study for our broader examination of theories conceptualizing the relationships between global capitalism and local realities. Prerequisite: Anthropology 211. Conference. Not offered 2009
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3.00 Credits
Full course for one semester. China's open-door policies and economic reforms since the death of Mao Zedong and the end of the Cultural Revolution have radically altered the state's ability to control the mass media and popular cultural production. This course examines the implications of this process for national, ethnic, and gender identities among diverse citizens of the Chinese state on one hand, and for CCP efforts to maintain its political hegemony on the other. Through readings, film and video clips, and discussions we will explore different genres of cultural production in contemporary China in their sociohistorical contexts and in relation to recent Marxist and feminist debates about the production, interpretation, and subversion of dominant ideologies in mass media. This perspective will shed light on the actually complex processes through which popular and elite, state, and local contexts are constructed in China, and allow us to interrogate recent assumptions about "globalization," "Westernization," "sinicization," or "modernization" as inevitable homogenizing and leveling forces. Prerequisite: Anthropology 211 or consent of the instructor. Conference. Not offered
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3.00 Credits
Full course for one semester. Subversions, resistances, deviances, and other destabilizations of social order are commonly linked with laughter and with the sacred in societies of diverse morphological kind and condition. Initial readings will focus on multidisciplinary characterizations of humor, sacredness, and assorted subversions, the latter in relation to existing theories of structural, systemic, and normative social order. The course then takes up a range of ethnographic and historical materials to explore the affinities among subversion, laughter, and sacredness; this in cases exemplifying different combinatorial pairings of the three and, especially, in cases where all three coincide. Topics include countercultures of diverse kinds (Cynic primitivism, Greenwich Village in successive phases, devalued subcultures in the Fourth World), clowns and fools, comic blasphemy, inversionary ceremonial occasions (Carnival[s], Feast of Fools, mock-potlatches), and mythological "trickster" characters. Readings will be exceptionally diverse but include Bakhtin, Foucault, Kristeva, Erasmus, Hebdige, Terry Southern, Victor Turner, and James Frazer. The course concludes with critical appraisal of existing theoretical accounts of these linkages and of their imputed conservative or transformative social effects. Prerequisite: Anthropology 211 or consent of the instructor. Not offered 2009-10.
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3.00 Credits
Full course for one semester. The course examines the cultures of the Eskimos/Inuits, Aleuts, and North American Indians in historical perspective, placing emphasis on regional diversity. Readings focus on earlier conditions of culture, Euro-American stereotypes, language, and contemporary contexts in which ideas of "Indian" identity and culture are increasingly contested and objectified. Focus is on interpretation rather than description. Prerequisite: Anthropology 211. Conference. Not offered 2009-10.
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3.00 Credits
Full course for one semester. The course provides an introduction to urban anthropology, with a particular focus on the colonial and postcolonial metropole as an exemplary site for the reciprocal influences of global and local processes. It explores how the city functions simultaneously as a locus for the negotiation of cultural diversity and for utopian ideals of rational communication. Drawing from cases throughout the "developed" and "developing" worlds, the course examines how urban culture is produced and reproduced under regimes of industrialization, colonialism, modernism, and globalization. Prerequisite: Anthropology 211 or consent of the instructor. Conference. Not offered 2009-1
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3.00 Credits
Full course for one semester. Ethnographies are classically centered on a spatially delimited group of persons, bound together by their shared ideational systems, which make human activities meaningful rather than merely instrumental. But as Boasian anthropology long noted, cultural traits don't just bind people together into a holistic entity; they also are diffused across borders and used in different ways in different places. And cultural forms are not just ideas. All symbolic forms have to exist materially in order to have a social life. And human activities aren't just valued for their meaningfulness; they are also experienced as means to ends. Ethnographies of technologies force us to come to grips with these three aspects of culture, too often swept under the rug. Prerequisite: Anthropology 211. Conference.
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3.00 Credits
Full course for one semester. The course examines earlier and contemporary theoretical perspectives on the relationships between sociocultural systems, human biology, and biophysical environments. Topics include the nature-culture opposition and its non-Western counterparts, the constraints of nondiscursive nature on culture, the discursive construction of nature, primitivism, sociobiology, science studies, the "posthuman terrain," Western environmentalism as a cultural system, ecofeminism, premodern subsistence systems, the ecological noble savage, environmental religions, and Third- and Fourth-World peoples' relations with global and local environmental movements. Prerequisite: Anthropology 211. Conference. Not offered 2009-1
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3.00 Credits
Full course for one semester. This course surveys the study of kinship in anthropology, with special attention to the contributions of this study to anthropological theories of culture and society. The cross-cultural analysis of systems of kinship is one of the most distinctive areas of inquiry in anthropology. In its heyday, kinship was defined as a universal feature of so-called primitive societies, and the basis for social structure. In recent years, as anthropologists' theoretical perspectives have changed, scholars have questioned whether the recognition of genealogical relations is necessarily universal, or whether kinship is only a function of local cultural ideas about the body, gender and personhood. More recently, scholars have revisited kinship as a topic of study in the interest of exploring new forms of human life and experience engendered by cultural change, globalization, and new reproductive technologies. In this course, we will examine theories of kinship as social structure, theories that argue that kinship is a cultural phenomenon, and those that argue that kin relations are formed through their enactment in performance and practice. We will be guided in this survey by the question of what the study of kinship tells us about the nature of social relationships themselves. In particular, we will discuss the descent-alliance controversy, marriage systems, semantic analysis of kin terminology, the cultural critique of kinship, its feminist reinterpretation, and the recent revival of kinship studies. Prerequisite Anthropology 211. Conference. Not offered 2009-10.
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3.00 Credits
Full course for one semester. This course will introduce the anthropological study of the economy through cultural theories of the gift, exchange and value. Starting with Mauss's theory of reciprocity in exchange as moral obligation, anthropological studies of economic behavior have sought to explain systems of exchange, transaction and circulation in relation to social forces instead of individual rationality and choice. Through theoretical argument and ethnographic cases, we will investigate how anthropologists interpret economic behavior in the context of cultural norms and values. We will discuss how anthropological theory led to a theory of a "great divide" between premodern and modern societies based on incommensurate, mutually exclusive systems of value. We will explore how this perspective informed the anthropological study of economic change, development and globalization. We will also discuss the various critiques of this theory from different perspectives. We will conclude by considering how anthropological approaches to gifts can shed light on economic activity in the modern marketplace as well. Readings include Marx, Mauss, Malinowski, Polanyi, Gregory, Gudeman, Graeber, Godelier, and Sahlins. Prerequisite: Anthropology 211. Conference. Not offered 2009-10.
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3.00 Credits
Full course for one semester. Since the early 1970s, and in an accelerated form in the aftermath of the Cold War, neoliberalism rose to global hegemony as an economic program promoting the opening and deregulation of markets, the privatization of public services, and the dismantling of the welfare state. Yet the term neoliberalism often lacks conceptual precision referring sometimes simultaneously to an economic doctrine, a set of governmental techniques and a particular configuration of global capitalism. This course begins with a reading of some of the conceptual and philosophical foundations of the neoliberal turn, focusing in particular on neoliberal conceptions of human nature and sociality. We will then explore the ways in which anthropologists have studied neoliberal reforms and the entanglement of their economic, social and cultural effects. We will focus in particular on how, in the aftermath of neoliberal reforms, new logics of sociality and subjectivity are being produced that destabilize received ideas of the public and the private, the formal and the informal, nature and culture, as well as the secular and the sacred. Readings will include ethnographies of financial markets, the privatization of urban space, the rise of occult and spiritual economies, and new forms of intimacy and desire that have been associated with the rise of neoliberalism. Prerequisite: Anthropology 211. Conference.
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