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Course Criteria
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4.00 Credits
Indigenous Australia has been of immense importance in the history of Anthropology as well as in the sociology of religion and psychoanalysis (eg. Durkheim' s Elementary Form , and Freud's Totem and Taboo). Long an icon of radical Otherness in the Western imagination (see the movie Walkabout, for instance), indigenous Australians now contest the moods and tropes of that imagination with alternative modes of memory, film, visual art, and storytelling.
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4.00 Credits
Language is central to political process. While all agree that language is used to symbolize or express political action, the main focus of this course is on how language and other communicative practices contribute to the creation of political stances, events, and forms of order. Topics addressed include political rhetoric and ritual, political communication and publics, discrimination and hierarchy, language and the legitimation of authority, as well as the role of language in nationalism, state formation, and in other sociopolitical movements like feminism and diasporic communities. Since this course has the good fortune of coinciding with the 2012 U.S. Presidential election, we will make significant use of campaign rhetorics as a means of illustrating and exploring various themes.
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4.00 Credits
Prerequisites: the instructor's permission. This course explores the possibilities of an ethnography of sound by attending to a range of listening encounters: in urban soundscapes of the city and in natural soundscapes of acoustic ecology; from histories of audible pasts and resonances of auditory cultural spaces; through repeated listenings in the age of electronic reproduction and at the limits of listening with experimental music. Sound, noise, voice, reverberation, and silence, from von Helmholtz to John Cage and beyond: the course turns away from the screen and dominant epistemologies of the visual, for an extended moment, in pursuit of sonorous objects and cultural sonorities.
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4.00 Credits
This course explores the dynamic interplay between "signs" - as evidence, knowledge, meaning, rationality - and "wonder(s)" - as passion, affect, sensation, but also as object, phenomenon, catalyst, and event - across a plurality of sites and registers: medieval theology, early modern science, the colonial encounter; skepticism, mysticism, demonology, and fascism; psychoanalysis, art, poetry, film; digitality, virtuality, and special effects; Enlightenment Europe, Evangelical America, postcolonial Africa, and beyond. What does wonder look like at the interface of madness, terror, and the sublime? What is this passion, this pathos, that can lead both to tireless critical inquiry and to unquestioning, indeed totalitarian, discipleship? How do signs and wonders become political technologies? At the outer reaches of knowability, how have marvels, wonders, miracles, and monstrosities been constructed, sensed, mastered, and mass-mediatized in different times and places? And finally, if, as Socrates believed, philosophy begins in wonder, can we say the same for anthropology? What exactly is the sensation - the awe, curiosity, fascination, even horror - of anthropology's encounter with its worlds? Along with ethnographic and historical texts, readings will include Lévi-Strauss, Viveiros de Castro, Ingold, Lingis, Daston and Park, Greenblatt, Rubenstein, Benjamin, Freud, Tarde, Deleuze, and Canetti.
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4.00 Credits
This course examines the relationship between different forms of knowledge about Palestinians and the political and social history of the region. It explores the complex interplay of state, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and class at both local and global levels in constructing what Palestine is and who Palestinians are. The course takes up diverse areas, from graphic novels to archaeological sites, from news reporting to hiking trails, to study how Palestine is created and recreated. Students will gain a familiarity with anthropological concepts and methodological approaches to Palestine. They will become familiar with aspects of the social organization, historical developments and political events that have shaped the region over the last century. The course is also intended to develop students' skills in written and oral communication, analysis, ethnographic observation, and critical thinking.
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4.00 Credits
In what sense are crises productive? How is it that destruction, loss, and rupture can serve as the constituent features of a social order? We will approach these questions by revisiting and reclaiming several key texts-from within and beyond anthropology----on the intertwined problems of crisis and social reproduction.
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4.00 Credits
Art has been understood and conceptualized in a variety of ways.In Western public culture, art has been commonly regarded in terms of autonomous creativity and individual genius. In former socialist countries, the state emphasized the social obligations of the artist to the collective good. Antlyopologists challenged these understandings of art as an activity separate from the everyday life by providing accounts of contexts where creativity is intrinsically connected to ritual life, and artifacts are an expression of the connection to the land and ancestry. In light of trade, colonialism, and more recently, economic globalization, there has been a lot of traffic in people and commodities between these aesthetic and socioeconomic regimes-also the subject of prolific anthropological inquiry. This course offers an exploration of all these discussions, and proposes an understanding of art as embedded in its surrounding social context rather than existing as a universal self-standing category.
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4.00 Credits
Prerequisites: the instructor's permission. Enrollment limit is 20. The first part of the course focuses on the history of the creation of the atomic bomb and the aftermath of its use during World War II. We look at the socialization of the scientists involved in the birth of the bomb; at the devastation it wrought in Hiroshima and Nagasaki; and at the physical and psychological injuries that afflicted its survivors, especially the immediate and long-term effects of radiation poisoning and trauma. The course then considers the Cold War period, examining civil defense campaigns, the cultural features of weapons laboratories, and the devastating physical and environmental contamination suffered by communities--disproportionately composed of indigenous populations-where such weapons repeatedly have been tested. The second part of the course explores the transformative cultural and psychological consequences of living with the bomb. Readings consider the evidence of spontaneous psychic adaptations to life in the nuclear age. They also examine governments' deliberate attempts to shape citizens' cognitive and emotional lives. How do states produce political subjects who comply with military imperatives? What role does the continual manufacture of foreign threats and enemies play in this process? While acknowledging the powerful forces that seek to control public perceptions of nuclear arms by minimizing their destructive potential, the course concludes by considering organized resistances to increasing nuclear proliferation and to militarism.
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4.00 Credits
This course focuses on how anthropologists theorize and study globalization. We will explore contemporary theories and methods, as well as trace historical trajectories in anthropological engagement with regional trade, production, and labor systems. Many of the questions about globalization revolve around cultural confrontations and social, political and economic transformations. Observers of these processes in multiple disciplines attempt to answer similar questions. How trade systems transformed production and labor in participating areas in other periods of history? How is identity reconfigured and manipulated in contemporary globalization? How are forms of identity commoditized and marketed in global transactions? What forms of resistance to globalization have emerged, where and why? How do issues of race, gender, class, ethnicity and religion intersect in global labor settings? How are sexualities, bodies and body parts implicated in global economies of consumption? The anthropological encounter with these complex issues invokes particular theories and methodologies. Fieldwork, longitudinal engagement with issues and locations, multi-sited studies, and following commodity chains are some of the current methods used to uncover the voices and perspectives various actors bring to encounters. Selected ethnographies, case studies, fiction and other forms of media all explore the lived experience of globalized work, travel, and technological encounters at various sites of interaction.
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4.00 Credits
While historically important, indigenous identity or indigeneity has become an increasingly powerful idiom for reimagining collective action and remaking sociopolitical demands in the Andes. Many scholars, activists, and politicians go so far as to speak of a "return of the ayllu," referring to the traditional unit of social, political and economic organization among highland Aymara and Quechua peoples. With good reason, they point to recent social mobilizations (like the "gas war" in the "indigenous city" of El Alto, Bolivia) and a sea-change in national politics (the ascendancy of Evo Morales and Ollanta Humala to the presidency in Bolivian and Peru, both of whom claim indigenous affiliations, Aymara and Quechua, respectively) as evidence of the crucial role indigeneity now plays, as a structure for making sociopolitical demands, in Andean societies. Through a range of historical and ethnographic readings, this course will explore the past and present of "claiming indigeneity" in the Andes. Special emphasis will be placed upon the Quechua and Aymara peoples of what is now highland Peru and Bolivia, seeing how indigenous cultural practices and understandings of indigeneity emerged and changed, from the Spanish Conquest to the colonial period to the modernization and multiculturalist projects of the nation-state.
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