Anthropology

ANTH S1002D The Interpretation of Culture. 3 points.

The anthropological approach to the study of culture and human society. Using ethnographic case studies, the course explores the universality of cultural categories (social organization, economy, law, belief systems, arts, etc.) and the range of variation among human societies.

ANTH S1002Q The Interpretation of Culture. 3 points.

The anthropological approach to the study of culture and human society. Using ethnographic case studies, the course explores the universality of cultural categories (social organization, economy, law, belief systems, arts, etc.) and the range of variation among human societies.

ANTH S3009D The Anthropology of Islam. 3 points.

Instructor contact information: mm4867@columbia.edu

What does it mean to be a pious or secular Muslim in the Middle East today? How is this complex identity inhabited, embodied, expressed, nurtured, redefined, contested and debated in the contemporary Middle East?  What kinds of ongoing debates about shari'a and authority are constitutive of Islam as a discursive tradition?  Through what forms of embodied practices and dispositions do women involved in a mosque movement in Cairo seek to become pious subjects?  What does it mean to be secular in Turkey?  Or a young person born after the revolution in Iran?  How does a Moroccan anthropologists teaching at Princeton University experience and reflect on his pilgrimage to Mecca?  We will think about these and other related questions through a series of recent anthropological texts that deal with questions of piety, secularity, modernity and subjectivity among Muslims in the contemporary Middle East.

ANTH S3722D Anthropology of Violence. 3 points.

This course will explore contemporary anthropological approaches to the issue of violence with an exploration of three particular themes. Our main focus will be on the idea of representation, ethnographically and theoretically, of the concept of violence. First, we will look at how violence has been situated as an object of study within anthropology, as a theoretical concept as well as in practice. We will then look at the issue of terrorism and how anthropology as a discipline contributes to understanding this particular form of violence. Finally, we will consider gender-based violence with close attention to the colonial/post-colonial settings where Islam is a salient factor. Gender based violence is one of the main forces producing and reproducing gender inequality. We will pay particular attention to the concept of the "Muslim woman" in both the colonial and colonized imagination.

ANTH S3921D Anti-Colonialism . 3 points.

The age of colonialism, so it seems, is long over. Decolonization has resulted in the emergence of postcolonial polities and societies that are now, in many instances, two generations old. But is it clear that the problem of colonialism has disappeared? Almost everywhere in the postcolonial world the project of building independent polities, economies and societies have faltered, sometimes run aground. Indeed, one might say that the anti-colonial dream of emancipation has evaporated. Through a careful exploration of the conceptual argument and rhetorical style of five central anti-colonial texts—C.L.R. James’ The Black Jacobins, Mahatma Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj, Aimé Cesairé’s Discourse on Colonialism, Albert Memmi’s Colonizer and Colonized, and Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth—this course aims to inquire into the image of colonialism as a structure of dominant power, and the image of its anticipated aftermaths: What were the perceived ill-effects of colonial power? What did colonialism do to the colonized that required rectification? In what ways did the critique of colonial power (the identification of what was wrong with it) shape the longing for its anti-colonial overcoming?

ANTH S3965Q Anthropology of the Body. 3 points.

The productive unease in critical theory occasioned by the body as the ambivalent ground of both subjugation and emancipatory transformation has resulted in debates over the link between corporeality and symbolic representations, discourse formations and disciplinary practices and ultimately, between nature and its others: culture, history, and society. This course promises to raise discussion to a level where political issues concerning the body can be reevaluated through a rigorous rethinking of the radical shifts in the status of the body as both subject and object of economic, technological, and cultural processes under globalized capital. Approaching ethnographic and historical materials concerning violence and healing, discipline and labor, machinery and embodiment, affects and resistance in terms of the ontological claims they presuppose or make in relation to philosophies of the body, this course has the distinctive aim of demonstrating how histories of the body are co-implicated with histories of gender, race, class, sexuality, (post)coloniality, capital, science and technology, and mass mediation. Contesting the opposition between objectivism and subjectivism, it will pose a broader set of questions concerning power, agency, and language in order to elaborate a politics of corporeality.      

ANTH S4187Q Women and Gender in South Asia. 3 points.

This course is an ethnographic and historical introduction to the construction of gender and feminist theory in the South Asian context. We will focus on textual and visual material, primarily ethnographies and films, to provide a critique of normative representations of the "South Asian woman". These readings will be used to reveal the complex social and historical configurations that institute and obscure gendered experiences and representations within the colonial imagination and their colonized others. A significant motif of this course will be to develop alternative ways of knowing and understanding gender construction, sexual relations, and community formation in South Asia.