Anthropology

Examines post-Soviet transformation of the distinctive socialist project of social modernity. Beginning from a conceptual basis in the work of Michael Foucault, Alexander Gerschenkron, and Karl Polanyi, examines "transition" anthropologically, both as a secular process of transformation and as an apparatus involved in "transitioning." Investigates the process of transition as one example of what Ulrich Beck has called "reflexive modernization" involving the rationalization and reform of distinctive modern ways of life.

Introduces western philosophers whose writings and ideas have, explicitly or implicitly, had a significant effect on methodology and theory of human sciences. Readings include works by Sextus Empericus, Rene Descartes, David Hume, John Lock, Immanuel Kant, Charles Peirce, G.W.F. Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Martin Heidegger. Philosophical works read in tandem with anthropological writings.

From its beginnings as a discipline, in the late 19th century, the field of anthropology and its practitioners, anthropologists, have played an interesting, often controversial role in colonial projects, racial debates, cultural and economic development, and military campaigns. Explores the connections between funding for research and the topics and the theoretical frames which emerged. Focuses on anthropology as it developed in the US and Britain. The term philanthropy broadly construed, to include both private foundations as well as governmental funding agencies.

The prehistory of the Near East (or the Levant - the geographical area from Lebanon in the north to the Sinai Desert in the south, and from the middle Euphrates in Syria to southern Jordan) has been constructed over the last 80 years by a number of different research traditions. The first professional archaeological research carried out in the region can be traced to the post-First World War British and French Mandates. It was not until the 1960s that indigenous research began to make a substantial contribution to the prehistory of the region, but the colonial legacy remains influential even today. Extensive fieldwork over the last 30 years or so may have supplied a vast and rich database, but the fundamental categories of research have remained virtually unchanged since the establishment of the Levantine prehistoric sequence by archaeologists such as Dorothy Garrod in the 1930s. Our critical approach in this course will show how the richness and quality of the data lend themselves to rigorous theoretical analysis.

                              The concept of the passage of time is a foundational theoretical space which underpins all archaeological work. Over the past thirty years, the discipline of anthropology has absorbed a good deal of continental critique regarding monolithic or objective epistemologies of time, as well as critiques of the inherently teleological or progressive aspect of time. Yet there has been little emphasis on an explicit methodological survey or training for archaeological scholars seeking to orient themselves within these literatures. This has resulted in a disciplinary engagement with the past that frequently omits to chart a clear course or articulate explicitly the sorts of issues at stake in adopting one or another form of historical narrative. This course is intended as an introductory critical survey of different anthropological and philosophical approaches to temporality and will be valuable for all students who seek a more reflexive engagement with their production of the past.

This course examines popular religious practices and beliefs in China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. By focusing on the "popular" rather than on textual traditions such as Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism this course examines how an often common vocabulary of ritual, cosmology, ancestors, and gods is translated into different understandings and enactments in different social and historical milieus. The course considers the historical role of religion and ritual in East Asian states, the consequences of this legacy under different modernizing regimes, and includes topical coverage of contemporary practices.

This course considers the "work" of museums and why museums seem to be essential to cities. Museums preserve particular moments in time and maintain a selective social memory. They bring together heterogeneous urban dwellers, often in school groups but also as adults, and create citizens. Students will do fieldwork in several different museums to elucidate the specific messages presented in each. Particularly suited for those in Museum Anthropology and/or Urban Studies

This seminar in effect deals with issues I have been dreaming about for some time and hopefully I will derive inspiration from student presentations so that I will have a first draft of a book by the end of the semester. Following my ethnographic prejudice we will focus on specific case studies of visionaries wherever possible and elicit theoretical discussions from these studies. The main thrust of the seminar is to deal with forms of thought that by-pass the Cartesian primacy of consciousness as exemplified by his dictum, "I think, I am.

 In this course, we will "think things"-endeavoring to understand objects and the social, historical, and political worlds in which they are embedded. We will consider how anthropologists and historians have made efforts to study the material world, exploring how objects connect people across time and space, and plumbing the varied ways that humans have been and continue to be entangled with objects. Throughout, we will remain attentive to Aimé Césaire's contention that "colonization = thingification," and will discuss how the status of person, for some, has differed little from the status of object. Each student will choose a discrete object for independent study (and "implosion"), with which they will work over the course of the semester.

Explores 40,000 years of the human creation of, entanglement with, enchantment by, and violence toward idols. Case studies roam from the Paleolithic to Petra and from the Hopi to the Taliban, all the while placing the sculpted, painted, or otherwise constructed devotional objects of the past into dialogue with contemporary social theory on the problem of representation, iconoclash, fetishism and the sacred.

As archaeologists living in the present we cannot engage directly with 'the past'; instead we deal with the material traces left by the practices of past people, and use these traces to create narratives about what we believe they represent. If we can know past practices at all, it is only through the signs we perceive inhering in the material evidence before us. This class will consider different semiotic approaches in archaeology to explore how archaeological narratives have emerged as mediating discourses located somewhere between past and the present, and in the relation between signs and objects. We will focus in particular on archaeological approaches to the semiotics of landscape and place.

    The city of Athens has occupied a specific and symbolic space in modern European thought that transcends the place itself to produce a space of deep meaning where different significations of "Westerness" occur. From "the beginning of civilization" to "a backward small village," Athens has been enveloped in the visions of an increasingly decentralized global imaginary about what constitutes modernity and Europeanness. In this course we will look at the parameters that were responsible for the creation of Athens as an imagine space.  

Examines of some of the challenges involved in writing about this diverse and complex region by juxtaposing ethnographies and monographs with novels and autobiographies. 

This class analyzes the role of mediation in religious practice. Reading theories of media and of religion we will examine how transformations in media technology shift the ways in which religion is encoded into semiotic forms, how these forms are realized in performative contexts and how these affect the constitution of religious subjects and religious authority. Topics include word, print, image, and sound in relation to Islam, Pentecostalism, Buddhism and animist religions

                          Understanding how people inhabit and make sense of the physical world is fundamental to any understanding of human society. This class will explore different archaeological perspectives on the creation and inhabitation of place by reading archaeological accounts together with material from anthropology, architecture, art history, geography and social theory.

Intensive study of human skeletal materials using anatomical and anthropological landmarks to assess sex, age, and ethnicity of the bones. Other primate skeletal material and fossil casts are used for comparative study.

Traditional Chinese society during the most recent Imperial period.  Major emphasis on kinship, religion, local organization, stratification, and the relationship between local and national patterns of social organization

Introduction to Korean social structure: family, household, lineage, village, regional linkages, passage rites, and folk religion. The modern transformation of family, marriage, community life, and receptions of the past Yangban and folk ideals. 

Using Korea shamans as a central case study, this course explores the multiple ways anthropologists and others have researched, written about, and filmed "Shamans" from late 19th century ethnologists and missionaries to late 20th century western "neo-shamans." Students will be introduced to a variety of scholarly approaches to the study of popular religion world-wide. We will examine why the term "shaman" is used as a comparative category and how "shamans" function as healers and performers of popular culture. We will consider histories of persecution and also instances where shamans have come to be regarded as cultural icons.

The course will consider a wide range of rock art from across the world, such as cave paintings from Paleolithic Europe, aboriginal petroglyphs, and graffiti in contemporary urban are­as. Drawing on key articles on distinguished sites, we will work towards discerning and critically examining the epistemological proposals regarding pictorial meaning reproduced in the interpretations. Central questions to be discussed are: What axiomatic views of recognition and perception inform ethnographic or neurological analogies? What assumptions regarding image-making and bodily practices are being reproduced in different methods of dating rock art? Lastly, how is rock art research interrelated with art-theoretical paradigms, such as Pla­ to's theory of mimesis, modernist aestheticism and institutional criticism? After the course, students will be familiar with focal rock art sites, and will also have improved their capacity to distinguish, compare, and contrast different theoretical positions regarding the utilization of imagery in archeology and anthropology.

Prehistory of the native culture from the first peopling of the continent in the period of white settlement, with emphasis on the higher cultures. 

The world of sight is more readily preserved than the world of sound. Visual depictions of landscapes endure more than aural enactments of soundscapes. However, in the past, key social values may have been reproduced as much by filling spaces with sound as by depicting places on cave walls. Noise, sound and music can create and organize space, mark time, define identity, through rituals which assure people of their place in the world and advance a political program for the future. This interdisciplinary (anthropology, ethnomusicology, philosophy, urban studies) graduate seminar looks at the social uses of sound and music technologies.

This course will expand and nuance students’ existing understanding of the burgeoning field of Indigenous studies and “settler colonial studies” -- the examination of the social, political and historical process of dispossession and settler possession through time and its effects, meanings and engagements by Indigenous peoples and politics as well through time. Readings traverse the fields of anthropology, history, women and gender studies, native studies, American, Canadian, Australian and African Studies as well as queer studies. In addition to a reading seminar this is also a writing seminar and student will expect to do both for the entirety of the course.  This advanced, weekly undergraduate/graduate seminar will augment student’s existing knowledge of Indigenous and Settler Colonial studies. These advanced level texts will assist students in the writing of their theses in Indigenous and Settler Colonial studies. The course seeks to complement, not supplant, existing thesis seminars and is offered to those who are writing either theses in these topics or those who seek to produce an original, thesis-like research paper in this subject areas in preparation for graduate study.

Theories dealing with the origin, development, and maintenance of complex societies in prehistory as seen against the background provided by an examination of specific archaeological data. 

This course focuses on life cycle rituals and their complex relations with state institutions in Central Asia, including the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in China. It will be particularly concerned with the celebrations accompanying life cycle rituals and their economic significance, especially in the phase of transformation and renegotiation of Central Asian economies and societies after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the reform eradevelopments in Chinese Central Asia (1979-present). The historical setting shall be introduced in the early sessions. The course then, like a classical thick description, continues by examining the celebrations themselves and their significance for people on the ground to view this from different analytical perspectives as the course proceeds. The red thread remains the actual custom itself which is seen through a range of different perspectives.

Intended for advanced undergraduates and beginning graduate students who are interested in paleoanthropology. Provides a closer look at what comprises the fossil evidence for human evolution from the australopithecines of 4 million years ago to the fully modern human species of 25,000 years ago. Involves hands-on examination of the departmental casts.

This course explores the nature and history of Andean societies from the first human occupation through the earliest cities, states, and empires, to the advent of European contact. The social, political, ideological, economic, and military processes that were central to the emergence of early civilization are examined through archaeological and historical sources.

The last three decades have seen profound changes in the ways in which anthropologists approach the study of past technologies and techniques of material culture production and use. At the heart of these changes is the acknowledgement that technology is a social production, with many researchers now focusing on the social agency of techniques and technologies. With explicit focus on the engendered human body as the agent of historical change, this interdisciplinary course offers a critical history of social technologies. Case studies from prehistoric periods, the Roman Empire, and medieval and modern Europe will draw upon current research in ethnology, sociology, gender studies, queer theory, human-animal relations, ethnomusicology and the history and philosophy of science.

This course focuses on reproductive politics in the global context and in comparative perspectives. Through comparative case studies, we will examine how cultural, moral, and political values give meaning to human reproductive events and inform people's uses of medical technologies' Drawing on case materials from a variety of societies, we will study how competing interests within households, communities, states, and institutions influence reproductive arrangements in society. We focus on how technological mediations of fertility, pregnancy' and birth (e.g., contraception, abortion, in vitro fertilization, prenatal testing, etc.) offer opportunities for the formation ofgender and kinship, the reproduction ofsocial inequalities, and the implementation of national population and intemational development agendas. We will further interrogate how bioethical evaluation ofreproductive technologies might take into account the motivations and experiences of actual users.

This course examines how masculinities are constructed, performed and inhabitied. Key foci include theorization of the masculine subject in both psychodynamic and political terms within colonial and modernizing discursive contexts; the role of scholarship and the media in constituting hegemonic, subaltern, ethnic and stigmatized masculinities; and the issue of genered citizenship. 

Treats the digital and computational mediation of meaning, through the lens of classic texts in linguistic anthropology, critical theory, media studies, and computer science.

Using "The Neanderthals" partly as a metaphorical device, this course considers the anthropological, philosophical and ethical implications of sharing the world with another human species. Beginning from a solid grounding in the archaeological, biological and genetic evidence, we will reflect critically on why Neanderthals are rarely afforded the same reflexive capacities, qualities and attributes - agency- as anatomically modern humans, and why they are often regarded as "lesser" or nonhuman animals despite clear evidence for both sophisticated material and social engagement with the world and its resources. Readings/materials are drawn from anthropology, philosophy, ethics, gender studies, race and genetics studies, literature and film.

Relationship between archaeological data and organization of life on the Zuni Reservation; archaeological techniques to evaluate several farming villages located near the pueblo are used; reading for background, some lectures, and a paper on one aspect of the research. Course lasts four weeks, during July. 

Ethical questions about museum activities are legion, yet they are usually only discussed when they become headlines in newspapers. At the same time, people working in museums make decisions with ethical and legal issues regularly and seldom give these judgments even little thought. In part, this is due to the fact that many of these decisions are based upon values that become second nature. This course will explore ethical issues that arise in all areas of a museum's operations from governance and management to collections acquisition, conservation, and deaccessioning. We will also examine the issues that arise when the ownership of objects in a museum's are questioned and the ethical considerations involved in retention, restitution and repatriation.

This seminar introduces students to anthropology's rich tradition of theorizing about spatiality through three themes: “House,” “Home” and “Project.” Each theme represents how anthropologists and anthropological thinkers have approached the spatial dimensions of domestic life, architecture and quotidian experience. By tracing the presence of houses, homes and housing-related projects throughout anthropological thought, students will consider how anthropology contributes to comprehensive theories of spatiality, as well as to varied interrogations of bodily practice, memory, affect and the governance of social well-being.

In a number of academic disciplines the concern with relationships between humans and non-humans has recently resulted in a radical revision of the ways in which we think people and animals construct their social worlds. This course addresses how humans and animals enter into, and interact within, each other’s worlds. It draws upon perspectives from anthropology, geography, (political) philosophy, ethics, literary theory, and the sciences, placing current debates within the context of the deep history of human-animal relations. Topics to be discussed include “wildness”, domestication, classification, animal rights, biotechnology, “nature/culture”, food/cooking, fabulous/mythical animals, the portrayal of animals in popular culture, and human-animal sexualities.

This course is an interdisciplinary survey of the literature and issues that comprise Native American and Indigenous Studies. Readings for this course are organized around the concepts of indigeneity, coloniality, power and "resistance" and concomitantly interrogate these concepts for social and cultural analysis. The syllabus is derived from some of the "classic" and canonical works in Native American Studies such as Custer Died for Your Sins but will also require an engagement with less canonical works such as Red Man's Appeal to Justice in addition to historical, ethnographic and theoretical contributions from scholars that work outside of Native American and Indigenous Studies. This course is open to graduate students and advanced undergraduates. 

This course explores the various ways in which cities are planned, represented and navigated, and interrogates collectively imagined forms of social life and order as they are reflected in urban design. By pairing fiction, film and documentaries with readings from anthropology, sociology, history and literary criticim, we will discuss the role of planning, speculation, technology and nostalgia in defining and conceptualizing the city.

Interrelation of race, gender and nation in the formation of hierarchical social systems and their legitimating ideologies. Situates the process of racialization within the wider problematic of political subjectivity and direct attention to the symbolic and structural organization of modern, hierarchical social systems. 

Ethnographic and philosophic comparison of gift and fetish using Mauss, Marx, Derrida, Benjamin, and Bataille. 

Inquiry into the assumption that (modern) stately power owes much to an aura composed at the intersection of reason and violence. Assumes that authority has mystical foundations. The famous arbitrariness of power (Kafka). How to write/represent such arbitrariness. Genet, Weber, Ben Anderson, Bataille, Foucault, Kafka, Miguel Angel Asturias, Nietzsche, Jean Franco.

The varied and changing circumstances of women's lives in China, Korea, Japan, and Taiwan in light of common traditionalist discourses concerning women as well as the varied social, economic, political, and symbolic structures that inform women's lives in East Asia today. Topics include Asian women perceived, women and modernity, family and state, marriage, work, sexuality, and resistance. 

This course is a contribution for an anthropological study of the historical, social and cultural context of the development of feminism in Brazil since the seventies. At the same time, it is a contribution for a comparative study of feminist movements as women's movements centered on "women's issues" and "gender issues". The focus is on a Brazilian feminist movement that can be considered, depending on the perspective, as a feminism movement in a "Third World" society, a "south" society, a society in development or, as a Western feminist women's movement. We will problematize and challenge this terminology beyond the north/south-gap on economic development and social inequality thus reinforcing the idea of the possible proximity of these movements as effects arising from the same new political values given by the social movements to national cultural, color and ethnic diversity, and as effects derived from the historical constitution of some consensus on the agenda of the international feminist movement in order to fight the "new" conservative (fundamentalist) forces against feminism internationally articulated. From another angle, we will pay attention to all differences on traditional cultures that permit us to see the peculiar and different ways of national feminisms and their forms of struggle and organization strategies. The hegemonic institutionalized traditional culture in Brazil and Hispanic Latin America is the result of Iberian institutional cultures, with effects on judicial and legal institutions.

The relationship between history and anthropology has been both harmonious and conflicted. In anthropology, for example, the rise of structuralist theory and methods was predicated on turning the discipline's back to history. Later, Marxist criticisms of structuralist and interactionist approaches relied entirely on historical analysis to debunk and reframe the significance of distorted conclusions. For their part, historians have appealed to anthropology to frame internal fractures between social history and political, diplomatic and economic history; between the Annales tradition and its mentalitees offshoot; and between cultural history and social history. This course tracks productive combinations of the methods and preoccupations of the two disciplines.

It is virtually impossible to approach Taiwanese society without encountering on this path actions, discourses and representations closely connected to identity issues, whether they be of a national, local, ethnic or cultural order. This course will examine through different aspects of Taiwan's social life, ranging from electoral culture, social networking, cultural policies, ritual and place, history and memories, nature and imagined territories, the fluid expressions and complex stakes of identity.

Development of historical archaeology from the 1940s to the present; covering method and theory; colonial and post-colonial periods; urban, plantation, industrial, and domestic archaeology; and various regions of North America. 

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 (e.g., the "shock and awe" of U.S. bombing campaigns) 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 of anthropology's encounter with its worlds? Along with ethnographic and historical texts, readings will include Lévi-Strauss, Viveiros de Castro, Lingis, Daston and Park, Malabou, Benjamin, Sebald, Tarde, Deleuze, and Canetti.

Designed for graduate students who want to deepen their knowledge of contemporary Japan. Topics may include mass culture and everyday life; the resurgence of neonationalism; World War II in fantasy and memory; education and children; new aesthetic forms in architecture, photography, music and the graphic arts; religion and spirituality; crime and terrorism. Centers on close readings of texts and provides ample time for students to pursue specialized projects developed in consultation with the professor. 

Guest lecturers and pre- and post-doctoral fellows. Seminar investigates different genres and histories of history, to take history as the primary text of modern life, and the foundational basis for state and nation, society and community. From old regime at the time of the French Revolution to the former Soviet Empire, from the postcolonial nations of Africa and India to Japan, from national histories to histories of resistance, from questions concerning the transformation of history in an age of globalization to the enduring, and always troubled, relationship between history and atrocity.

Guest lecturers and pre- and post-doctoral fellows. Seminar investigates different genres and histories of history, to take history as the primary text of modern life, and the foundational basis for state and nation, society and community. From old regime at the time of the French Revolution to the former Soviet Empire, from the postcolonial nations of Africa and India to Japan, from national histories to histories of resistance, from questions concerning the transformation of history in an age of globalization to the enduring, and always troubled, relationship between history and atrocity.

Beginning with an exploration of the shaman's body in ethnographyand its relation to seeing, to knowing, and to changing the world,this course aims to study Nietzsche with a view to understandingunderstanding and its relation to the body--of the person and ofthe world.

Comparative study of economic formations in prehistory. Topics include hunting and gathering and farming subsistence; non-market exchange systems; markets and money; specialized production; the social economy of consumption; and domestic and political economies in state society.

    Like inoculation, this graduate seminar is meant to use apocalytpic fiction, film, and history, so as to ward off and better understand the temptation to indulge in apocalyptic fantasies at this scary time of global crisis. What truth is there in Fredric Jameson's statement that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism?

This course examines the major theoretical texts on ideology and mythology and attempts to bridge what have otherwise been rather distinct analytic traditions within the field of anthropological analysis, namely symbolic and political anthropology. The readings from the course will be grouped to permit an interrogation of several major problematiques; the relationship between representation and mediation; the relationship between desire and interest in the representation of the social field; the question of symbolic efficacy compared to that of mystification; domination and hegemony in the field of ideas; the status of narrative and its relationship to truth claims; the relationship between poetics and politics. Readings are drawn from the canons of anthropology, political theory and literary criticism.

The politics of representation in ethnographically particular contexts in order to understand how contemporary economic forms are informed by more general logics of visibility. Materials from Southeast Asia on the ways the forms of occulted economies change over time and how the values of transparency have come to dominate the discourses of political value.

This course is intended for advanced doctoral students and is addressed to the question of interdisciplinarity as it relates to anthropology.   How does anthropology -- its discourses, concepts, methods, and theoretical interventions – travel outside of the discipline?  What do other disciplines and interdisciplinary formations, such as history, literary criticism, philosophy and cultural studies, ask of anthropology, and how do their practitioners deploy the questions and the knowledges generated within anthropology for their own purposes?  How does the auto-critical project that has been internal to the discipline function beyond its boundaries?  To what ends and purposes is anthropology asked to produce knowledge of the other-as-object? And how does this demand inflect the conceptual project carried out within the discipline?  These questions animate this course.  At a time in which ‘area studies’ have been reformulated to answer to the real-historical conditions of re-regionalization, and against the backdrop of several decades of institutional and intellectual reform under the name of ‘interdisciplinarity,’ this course provides students with an opportunity to reflect critically and specifically on the itineraries of their discipline and its place in a changed and changing milieu. Our discussions will focus on: the idea of the anthropological type, the question of kinship, the concept of the gift and, especially, the idea of other 'ontologies '.

Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks and selected texts by Foucault including Discipline and Punish; The History of Sexuality; The Archaeology of Knowledge; and the later articles and lectures on governmentality. Representative readings of both Gramacian and Foucauldian analysis of power in societies. The productive oppositions and convergences in their approaches to the question of power.

Through the analytical works of Said, Levin, Heidegger and McClary, looks at some of the ways that opera, in expansionary post-1850s Western Europe, becomes a site imagining others as a signifier of a surrogate self (sexual and cultural). Explore the kinds of looking and the configurations of collectivity and personhood that three operas--Turandot, Aida, Carmen--help elaborate, the fora in which they are presented, and whether back talk is possible within them.

that yielding water in motion, gets the better in the end of granite and porphyry.  Focusing on specific instances of craft as resistance to the speed-up in our work and lives, this seminar explores the possibilities for a new ethic and practical relationship between technology and nature, not as domination but as a continuous unwinding of such domination that I call, following Benjamin and Bataille, “the mastery of non-mastery.” Drawing on an anthropology of mimesis, metamorphosis, and the bodily unconscious,  such unwinding includes perusal of Hegel’s chapter on master and slave, Mauss’ “Techniques of the Body,” and discussion of the trick as in shamanic conjuring and fictocriticism.

This course provides a panoramic, but intensive, inquiry into the ways that archaeology and its methods for understanding the world have been marshaled for debate in issues of public interest, and how alternative approaches or claims to the past are presented. It is designed to examine claims to knowledge of the past through the lenses of alternative epistemes and a series of case-based problems that range from the academic to the political, legal, cultural, romantic, and fraudulent.

Through a close analysis of anthropological works, this seminar examines possible ways of doing ethnography in and of "the nation." Readings include ethnographies of ethnicity and race; cultural production, including media and museums; and nationalist narratives and memory.

Portraits are created to represent the likeness of a chosen subject. The writing of biographies and autobiographies has long been the preferred method through which South African intellectuals have written about their or others' political, intellectual, personal or notorious lives. This course is an examination of how the practice of biographical and autobiographical writing emerged and solidified in South African literature in part to compensate for the paucity of biographical writing but also as a substitute for a nuanced or critical engagement with the chequered and complex history of the country's intellectual and cultural inheritance. In particular, the course will consider the mediatory role of the biographer who, in the case of South Africa, often constructed a biographical subject through an ethnographic method of interviewing, translating and then representing the subject.

This class examines the social production of space, place, and nature. Three discursive and material fields that must be understood if we are to practice a conceptually rigorous and politically engaged contemporary anthropology. In the course we will examine how these fields have recently been studied, described, conceptualized, and theorized.  We will explore these ideas through the reading of works by anthropologists, historians, and geographers, looking at how the changing nature of places affects both the discipline of anthropology and the ways in which anthropologists conduct research in places.

Explores the proposition that space must be apprehended as a social relation in itself, which must therefore, be produced and reproduced, as well as reformulated and transformed. Differences and inequality produced across various spatial scales, e.g., urban, regional, national, and transnational, and heuristic but ideologically burdened oppositions of scale, e.g., rural-urban, center-periphery, and global-local.

Inequality is, arguably, the major research problem of both anthropology and sociology. Whether one is interested in power, complexity, ethnicity, class, caste, gender, colonialism, the state, identity, economics, politics, religion, or some other such phenomenon, the propensity of humans to draw lines of division between groups and assign different moral evaluations to these groups is a fundamental issue with which one must contend. In this seminar, we will explore a variety of socially constructed systems of inequality (economic, moral, political, religious, etc.), and the variable processes by which they were curtailed, constructed, naturalized and/or dismantled. While the state may be viewed as exhibiting the most extreme human manifestations of inequality, our focus will be on non-state and pre-state contexts in an attempt to understand the early genealogies of marginalization and dominance. Particular attention will be paid to the so-called egalitarian societies that have been used by generations of scholars as evidence of a natural default mode that would-be leaders struggled to overcome. In the course of these investigations, we will grapple with core questions such as: Is egalitarianism a natural or original condition for human groups or an evolutionary aberration? How did gender inequalities develop in small-scale societies, and how was their development related to inequalities in the political sphere? Did the institutionalization of religiously based inequities precede or serve as a model for systems of economic dominance? Were some inequalities propelled by the aggrandizing machinations of would-be exploiters? Were others the unanticipated consequences of short-term actions compounded over the long term? Why do subalterns accept their positions, or what, at least, keeps them from open rebellion? How might we understand systems of power and inequality that are not based upon traditional hierarchical models? Readings include a selection of classic and contemporary readings drawn from cultural anthropology, archaeology, sociology, and biological anthropology.

This seminar explores several related issues. First, we consider the ways in which “the nation” might have shaped academic social science and anthropology, in particular in the realms of social theory and concepts of culture.  Second we consider some of the ways anthropologists have thought about nation-states as objects of inquiry. Our main focus will be on ways in which anthropologists have attempted to do and write ethnography at the level of the nation, rather than the village or community. Most of the course will be devoted to a close examination of ethnographies that purport to be or can be thought of as about particular nations. These ethnographies, only a few among many that could have been included, have traced the relationship between cultural identities and national (and even transnational) processes; considered forms of national cultural production from mass media to political ideology; sought to examine nations through particular institutions; and attended to the workings of the social imagination using notions of memory, consciousness, and narrative. In the final part of the course, students examine for themselves and analyze the body of ethnographic work done on/in a particular nation.

What do we mean when we talk about nature? How does knowledge about nature get classified, stabilized, and made authoritative? How is nature managed? What happens when such management fails? In this course, we will rely on literature in environmental history, science and technology studies, and anthropology, as well as novels, poetry, nature writing and films to produce theoretically rich and ethnographically grounded understandings of this concept.

This course begins by exploring domains where magic and possession are classically articulated: animistic beliefs, theories of magic, ritual practices, scenes of spirit mediumship, states of trance, and so on. The course then moves to bring into creative conversation these ethnographic texts on magic and possession with accounts of performance (theatrical, musical, dance), works of art (visual, cinematographic, sonic), acts of writing (literary, ethnographic, autobiographical), and, most fundamentally, reflections on the everyday. Pursued are issues of subjectivity--particularly, the conjuring and displacement of self in the form of the first-person singular "I"--and the twin forces of repetition and coincidence. Retraced throughout the course are thus the shadows of a modern subject and its uncanny powers of imagination.

This seminar explores the ways in which Indigenous peoples have theorized, deployed, critiqued notions of 'nationhood', 'citizenship' and 'sovereignty' in order to articulate and claim rights to territory, to jurisdiction and to the past. Our aim is to interrogate what these critical concepts mean in the literature of anthropology, political theory and Native American Studies as well as to examine the ways in which Indigenous peoples understand and critique state practices, maintain and construct their own modes of governance and mobilize politically to achieve their ends. This course is comparative in scope; literature and cases will be drawn from various sites but will dwell largely within Native North America.

Through a reading of texts in anthropology, political theory, and philosophy, this course aims to explore the place of culture in adjudicating ethical claims about the good and political claims about community.

  In the 1960s and 70s, Latin American intellectuals - many of them writing in exile - developed a theory of imperialism that they called "Dependency Theory." The condition of "dependency" was thought to be a particular modality of capitalist development, rather than a lack of development. This theory of dependency was, therefore, written against development theories, a fact that distinguishes it both from early theories of imperialism (Lenin, Luxembourg) and from more recent theories (Hardt and Negri, Retort, Naomi Klein). Dependent countries were thought to be providers of resources and of perennial clients for imperial powers. Analysis of dependency was later rejected, reformed and transformed, both in "World Systems Theory" and, more subtly and with greater ramifications, in Subaltern Studies. Dependency theory is also an indirect object of critique in Achille Mbembe's more Hegelian approach to the post-colony. At the same time, dependency theory was also criticized by political economists who were critical of theories of "unequal exchange," including institutionalist economic historians, who questioned the economic fundamentals invoked in dependency theorists, characterization of the "dependent condition," often with substantial empirical support. This seminar has two aims: first, to inspect theories of imperialism from their inception to the present, and to place dependency theory within that broad interpretative tradition; and, second, to rethink "dependency" as an historical condition, by specifying and differentiating between various post-colonial conditions. The seminar seeks to interrogate the relationship between "dependency" and other approaches to the post-colony.

Examines the formation, character, and fall of ancient empires through an archaeological lens. Among the topics compared are militarism, urbanism, representations of power and state ideology, provincial life, infrastructure, social and ethnic relations and economic interactions. Draws from both Old World and New World empires.

This course examines technological body interventions as framed by sociality and subjectivity. Of special interest are pre- and post-human contexts that generate technological nostalgia, desire, anxiety, or fear. Topics include transformative surgeries; cyborgs and other hybrids; the militarized body and the nation; and body economies.

This course offers a hands-on introduction to key methods of ethnographic fieldwork while exploring both practical and critical questions raised by the production of ethnographic knowledge. Students will become familiar with the diverse techniques collected under the heading of ‘ethnographic research' and will put these into action through a series of mini-research assignments. These assignments-and the successes, failures, surprises, disappointments and dilemmas students encounter in carrying them out-also provide the raw material through which we consider the epistemological and ethical possibilities and limits of ethnographic knowledge. Thus we take up ethnographic fieldwork and writing as situated practices with powerful histories, rather than as neutral methodological tools. Readings include examples of various kinds of ethnographic text (including images) and critical reflections on ethnography itself. Mini research assignments comprise a scaled-down dry run of ethnography making, giving students practice at preparing research proposals, conducting field observation and interviews, and turning these into contextualized ethnographic texts.

Over the past five centuries the ideology and practice of the consumption of things and goods as both a source of well being and as the central organizing metaphor for social life has begun to expand to every place on the planet. This culture of consumption is rife with intrinsic contradictions. This course will explore these contradictions. This course will also ask about the kinds of social relations of exchange that existed before this change and how they have been worked and reworked by capitalist transitions. We will address these issues theoretically and methodologically. Our questions will include: What are the theories of consumption and exchange that will allow us to understand modern consumptive practices? How do things become commodities? What is the social history of the production of "the consumer"? How does consumption make bodies? How is social identity configured through the lenses of commodities and consumption? In what ways do nation states promote consumption? In what ways does consumption promote nation states? How do global businesses make consumers? What does social activism against consumption look like? How is the use of nature in places far from reaches of global capital different than other places? How and why have the social relations of production associated with capitalism become taken-for-granted and seen as natural?

How does one live with sound and move within worlds of sound? How does one think with sound, and through sound? In pursuit of such questions the course explores: soundscapes, acoustic ecology, and soundwalks; historical listening, echoes of audible pasts, and resonances of auditory cultures; uncanny narrative effects of sonic forces in myth and literature; technological effects of repeated listenings in the age of electronic reproduction, ethereal transmissions, and audio-vision; sounds at the edges of listening with experimental music. Sound, chambers, noise, feedback, voice, resonance, silence: from the sirens of the Odyssey, to the captured souls of Edison's phonography, to compositional figures ala John Cage, to everyday acoustical adventures, if one were to really listen, closely, how might one write about sound? What/who might the listening subject be?

Focus on the archaeology and anthropology of societies that have written records, many of which emerge within a framework of the development of capitalism. The availability of documents as well as a material record facilitate interpretations of subjects such as urban life, landscape, enslavement, and colonialism.

This course looks at the global city as a "practiced place": inhabited, represented, translated and traveled. We shall consider how the city--broadly conceived--has been invested with meaning, and how particular cities conjure forth encounters with history. In contemplating the relationships that emerge from urban geographies, between world views, between and across "cultures," and between the text and the subject, we necessarily enter into discussions of the possibilities for community.

Examines debates in the history and sociology of science and their significance for an anthropology of science. It engages methodological questions and theoretical debates concerning the significance of social interests, material agency, laboratory and social practices, and "culture(s)" in the making of scientific knowledge and in shaping social and cultural others.

An intensified concern with thingness and materiality has emerged in the past decade as an explicitly interdisciplinary endeavor involving anthropologists, archaeologists, art historians, literary critics, and philosophers among others. The new material culture studies that has resulted inverts the longstanding study of how people make things by asking also how things make people, how objects mediate social relationships--ultimately how inanimate objects can be read as having a form of agency of their own. Readings will be drawn from foundational texts in this recent work by Daniel Miller, Alfred Gell, Bill Brown, Nicholas Thomas, and others that have situated their work at the boundaries between such things as object and subject, gift and commodity, art and artifact, the alienability and inalienability of things, as well as--at a disciplinary level--the distinction between ethnography, archaeology, and art history.

This course will explore the theme of carcerality – through prisons, internment camps, slave plantations, native reservations, schools, and other predicaments of confinement and control – with three interrelated goals in mind. First and most importantly, we will use the lens of carcerality to revisit major questions in social theory around capital, race, gender, and sovereignty, through a variety of ethnographic, historical, legal, and literary texts. Particular attention will be paid to analytically connecting and contrasting carceral complexes in imperial, post-colonial, and settler-colonial contexts. Second, we will examine intellectual production under conditions of confinement by reference to “prison intellectuals” such as Antonio Gramsci, George Jackson, Fernand Braudel, Maurice Halbwachs, and Muhammad Asad. Third, we will explore the particular methodological and theoretical challenges that carcerality poses for ethnography. In the final weeks of the course, we will revisit the “classic” texts of carcerality most often relied upon by anthropologists, namely the writings of Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben.

Semiotic is the study of the activity of signs. What is the relationship between reality and representation? In what different ways can this relationship be theorized? What are the consequences of holding that reality, including the reality of culture, is a system of representations or of signs? These questions will be explored with reference to several recent anthropological texts as well as the writings of some key "non-anthropological" thinkers drawn from the following list: C.S. Peirce, Ferdinand de Saussure, Mikhail Bakhtin, Roland Barthes, A.J. Greimas, Michel Foucault,Jacques Derrida, Umberto Eco, and Julia Kristeva.

Designed to trace the major theoretical developments in archaeology over the past few decades from a global perspective. The relevance of the numerous strands of social theory that are commonly applied to archaeological materials. Influences from anthropological theory, feminist theory, philosophy, globalism, postmodernism, and poststructuralism.

This course is a survey of explicit and implicit theorizations of violence in a range of contexts: God and man, sovereign and subject, war and peace, master and slave, European and native, gender and sex, language and culture, state and citizen, colonizer and subject, universal reason and particular unreason, action and forgiveness. Throughout and parallelling these violent contexts run the threads of evils. Evils opposites are not presupposed, but analyzed in each of their defining encounters with "evils" in specified relational contexts wherein we will pursue the question of violence, its ontology and epistemology. This we shall do by reading, beginning in the 4th week, portions from a provocative and diligent book, alongside the other assigned readings. The book is Adi Ophar's The Order of Evils: Toward an Ontology of Morals, published by Zone Books. The other readings will be drawn from ethnography, philosophy, poetry, novels, sacred texts and social theory. The overall leading question in the course, however, is: What is it to be human and what is the place of violence in human being?

This course is a seminar on research design in anthropological archaeology. It examines the links among theory, method, and data analysis in project design and interpretation.

This course examines the conjuncture between the materialities of the archive and theories of evidence across a set of disciplinary practices. The course begins with readings that examine the problem of memory and its material capture and consider questions of truth and authority, disciplinarity and evidence. Authors include, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Reinhart Kosselleck, Lawrence Lessig, Ann Stoler, Ranajit Guha and Rolph Trouillot. The class then turns to examine these problems as they are played out in specific disciplines and social domains including the new genetics, digitalization, cultural heritage, and subalternity.

What does defacement tell us about the role of the face in cultural production and the ethics therein, and why is sacrilege, as a form of defacement, a dominant source of the sacred, let alone of critique, in modernity?  Readings include Bataille, Nietzsche, Levinas, ethnography of unmaking and physiognomics.

This course is designed for students in their first-year of the MA program in the Department of Anthropology. In it, we will explore the generative tensions within concepts of ‘the social' that have animated anthropological theory since its earliest days. Combining canonical texts with contemporary ethnography, explore foundational questions about the making and valuing of kinds of humans (and convivial non-humans) and about the production, aggregation, and disaggregation of their collectivities. Ultimately we consider the recent turn to theories of life itself in light of these longstanding questions, and along the way, we will encounter such varied ‘big thinkers' of collective life as Engels, Durkheim, Levi-Strauss, Foucault, and Harraway. We will range over a varied territory of ethnographic topics-from intimacy and personhood, to suicide, to nature/culture-each of which richly illustrates the productive problems of personhood, sociality, commensurability, and history for which anthropological theory strives to account.

This course is intended for advanced students in socio-cultural anthropology, and is addressed to the question of interdisciplinarity as it relates to anthropology.   How does anthropology -- its discourses, concepts, methods, and theoretical interventions – travel outside of the discipline?  What do other disciplines and interdisciplinary formations, such as history, literary criticism, philosophy and cultural studies, ask of anthropology, and how do their practitioners deploy the questions and the knowledges generated within anthropology for their own purposes?  How does the auto-critical project that has been internal to the discipline function beyond its boundaries?  To what ends and purposes is anthropology asked to produce knowledge of the other-as-object? And how does this demand inflect the conceptual project carried out within the discipline?  These questions animate this course.  At a time in which ‘area studies’ have been reformulated to answer to the real-historical conditions of re-regionalization, and against the backdrop of several decades of institutional and intellectual reform under the name of ‘interdisciplinarity,’ this course provides students with an opportunity to reflect critically and specifically on the itineraries of their discipline and its place in a changed and changing milieu.  It will help them to deepen their own understanding of their discipline, but also prepare them for engagement with other disciplinary traditions. Our discussions will focus on: the idea of the anthropological type, the question of kinship, the concept of the gift and the method of ethnography.

The course is an introductory survey of the main political ideas, traditions and thinking that have defined South Africa's intellectual and political history. South Africa is currently defined as a post-colonial and a post-apartheid society and both terms suggest a historical moment or event that has been transcended or come to an end and yet the reality is that South Africa's political and intellectual past continues to define contemporary thought. The course's general approach is therefore both historical and thematic since the objective is to understand the historical context of South Africa's political traditions as well as their contemporary relevance. The reading material for the course will consist of both primary and secondary sources.

This course examines structuralist and pragmatic, post-structuralist and metapragmatic approaches to language and culture and their relevance and availability to the critical analysis of social power.

This course is about economy and society, as seen through the lens of two classic works: Marx's Capital (volume 1) and Evans-Pritchard's Nuer (books 1 and 2). It has several overarching goals. First, to give students the opportunity to read, compare, and discuss two classic works in social theory-works that are often read in a piece-meal and rushed fashion, or presupposed as general canon. Second, to introduce students to key categories in British social anthropology, and Marxist and substantivist economics-and to provide a genealogy of these categories. To sketch an alternative metalanguage for examining social relations vis-a-vis the economy-one which is grounded in American Pragmatism and Boasian (Linguistic) Anthropology. And finally, in light of this genealogy and metalanguage, to reconsider a key set of disjunctures in the theoretical imaginary: householding to moneymaking, status to contract, community to society, quality to quantity, use-value to exchange-value, concrete domination to abstract domination, private to public, punishment to discipline, and so forth.

In this class, we will think about the various ways in which philosophers, social theorists, historians and anthropologists have thought about war. More specifically, the course focuses on a set of key themes and questions that have been central to such writings: the nature of violence and the question of responsibility or accountability, shifting technologies of warfare (including, technologies of representation), and the phenomenology and aftermath of warfare, for civilians and for combatants. The questions that drive this seminar are theoretical and historical, as well as ethical and political. For example, how do shifting understandings of the trauma of soldiers shape ethical questions and political conversations regarding "perpetration" and the question of responsibility? Or, when we think warfare through new technologies (cinematic, action at a distance) from whose perspective are we theorizing or trying to understand the "experience of" war? How might we analyze the very different affective responses that different forms of violence-or of "perpetration" -elicit?

The fossil data bearing on human evolution, with a survey of other lines of evidence from archaeology, the neurological sciences, and evolutionary biology.

This course undertakes a dual examination of the cultural history of Taiwan through works of Anthropology and of the ways in which Anthropology has been mobilized in the contentious discourse about culture in Taiwan. It is the latter, the inquiry into the role of Anthropology in cultural and historiographic discourse in and about Taiwan, that will constitute the principal focus of the course. In both domains under examination, we will draw upon a range of texts. In our study of Taiwan's cultural history, we will avail ourselves of works addressing the archaeological record of settlement, and studies of various domains of cultural practice. In the examination of the Anthropology as a highly-charged mode of discursive practice, we will sample ethnographic works from key moments in the on-going discourse about the cultural history of Taiwan. We will begin with works by North Atlantic scholars in the Cold War era, when Anthropologists presented rural Taiwan as an instantiation of authentic Chinese culture of the late-imperial period, proceeding to the emergence of an Anthropology specifically of Taiwan, and, finally, turning our attention to the explosion of interest in ethnography in the Taiwan of the 1990s and early 2000s. In this current period, ethnography has assumed a central position in the construction of distinctive cultural identities for various groups in Taiwan and in the politically-charged debates about Taiwan's future. Ethnography also affords us a critical purchase upon the myriad forms of sociality in present-day Taiwan, which it is the principal objective of this course to explore, through a sampling of recent ethnographic works, in class discussions and through the independent works of students.

This course critically examines some of the moral and historical arguments for the justification of reparations for New World slavery. We explore the state of the debate about such historical injustices -- inquiring into questions of cultural trauma, memory, and generations. Our main concern will be to connect a moral claim about repair to an understanding of the injury of slavery in the Americas.

  This course will seek to raise and think through the following questions: What does it mean to talk today about a black radical tradition? What has it meant in the past to speak in these (or cognate) terms?  And if we take the debate in part at least to inhabit a normative discursive space, an argumentative space in which to make claims on the moral-political present, what ought it to mean to talk about a black radical tradition?

Change and continuity in Chinese society during the 20th century, both before and after the establishment of the People's Republic.

This course examines the social ecology of the state in China, with particular emphasis on the cultural frameworks and behavior patterns of human interaction with the environment and its ecological consequences. It begins with an exploration of environmental histories of the imperial era, then turns to ecological and environmental issues relating to China's modern development.

Examines the production of African urban space as built form and as social experiences. Conceptualizing urban space: the role of speed and technology in producing urban experience; built space of African cities; infrastructural networks that link Africans up into religious and economic networks in and out of Africa; the cultural styles through which the urban is performed and experienced; and the transformations in economy that shape African urban life.

          Designed to be both theoretical and empirical, clarifying concepts such as "identity" and "subjectivity" while also exploring various approaches to questions of political identification and self-understanding. We shall look at authors who approach questions of identity and subjectivity philosophically as well as historically. Some of the readings will be explicitly devoted to conceptual conundrums and theories of the self. Others will engage the question of political identification and analyze the practices of self-fashioning and subject formation as central social and political phenomena in particular contexts.

Explores shifting visions of community and subjectivity that circulate in 1780s-1790s revolutionary moment in western Europe by interviewing readings from Enlightenment scholars and attention to three Mozart operas, public performances, that highlight very particular "Enlightenment" visions of persons and community.

    Research design in anthropology (all subfields), from theoretical conceptualization to problem formation, methods, and grant writing.

At the modern, urban crossroads of Jewish and Christian mysticism, Marxism, Surrealism, and love, stands Walter Benjamin's concept of profane illumination. This seminar explores the ramifications of the paradox entailed by such profanation, especially in relation to writing culture by means of the dialectical image as bodied impulse.

At the modern, urban crossroads of Jewish and Christian mysticism, Marxism, Surrealism, and love, stands Walter Benjamin's concept of profane illumination. This seminar explores the ramifications of the paradox entailed by such profanation, especially in relation to writing culture by means of the dialectical image as bodied impulse.

Focus on research and writing for the Master's level thesis, including research design, bibliography and background literature development, and writing.

The relationship between anthropology and journalism is perhaps fully as complex as the connection between anthropology and travel writing. Like most social and historical sciences, anthropology felt a certain compunction to distinguish what it did from "mere" journalism, for although both anthropology and journalism involve direct bodily engagement in "the field," journalists generally go to the field in order to accompany or follow an event that is meant to be "newsworthy," and therefore "timely" from the viewpoint of daily readers or listeners, whereas ethnographic field research emerged as a discipline during an era when anthropology was interested in durable structures. For this reason, anthropological fieldwork was organized around the observation of daily life in the course of at least one yearly cycle. Even ethnographic strategies that focused closely on events-Manchester School "Processualists," for instance, or "Symbolic Interactionists"-still presupposed ethnographic observation in the course of a longer cycle, even to single out a relevant event or process for intensive ethnographic focus.

This course examines how different theorists have examined the cultural logics of media technologies. It focuses on the relation between the materiality of technologies and the forms of social relations and political rule they encode and produce.

 It is increasingly being asserted today that the concept of sovereignty no longer constitutes a plausible way of organizing our thinking about power and legitimacy in contemporary global politics. The state, so it is sometimes said, as the pre-eminent source and adjudicator of political identity within territorially bounded nation-states a well as between sovereign states, is being fundamentally challenged. What does this mean for our understanding of the Third World which came into being precisely as part of the project of the universalization of sovereignty? What are the new conceptual and political conditions in which the problem of sovereignty arises in - and for- the Third World? Through a variety of literature this course engages these questions.

Examines the social effects of parks and protected areas in order to understand both the politics of conservation and the politics of academic disciplines speaking for nature and culture.

This class will examine the relationship of film to time and to culture, and trace the ways that ideas of realism come out of that encounter. It explores the relation between film and the archive, the ontology of ethnography, and the social life of images. Andre Bazin famously wrote that "film embalms time" saving it from corruption and disappearance. But it can only do this by storing it on a medium that itself is on its own journey of corruption and degradation. This class will examine the relationship of film to time and to culture, and trace the ways that ideas of realism come out of that encounter. While privileging documentary, the class starts with the assumption that filming is an inherently ethnographic process in both content and form. The aim of the class is to examine the relationship of the film medium to realism, beginning with early cinema and ending with emerging digital media. It does so by considering the poetics of documentary, defined widely. Topics include, film and the archive, the ontology of ethnography, remediation, the social life of images, materiality of film, materiality of culture.

The goals of this graduate seminar are multiple. First, we will critically examine the ways in which research has been conducted and how research methodology has been taught in anthropology. Second, we will, drawing on the work of indigenous scholars and critics of the colonial nature of anthropological practice and discourse, attempt to theorize new forms of social inquiry that do not replicate the historic injustices of anthropological research, representation, and the material consequences of the two. Third, we will critically examine the assumed relationship between European social theory and the lived experiences of indigenous peoples by comparing various theories of space and place. Finally, each student will produce a draft of a dissertation research proposal.

The intellectual and literary lives of women are often written about or thought of as separate from the intellectual lives of their male counterparts. Due to sexist exclusion and/or social, legal and political restrictions women's literary and intellectual production has often emerged and taken shape as a counterforce and vindication against these limitations. The course is an exploration of women as writers and thinkers. It especially looks at the work of those women who wrote from 'outside' the epicenters of Enlightenment civility: women on the road, women in bondage, women on the frontier and women in prison. It examines the myriad ways in which women have used literacy and writing as tools to carve out a place for themselves in the often masculine 'republic of letters'.

In conversation with Walter Benjamin, a consideration of performance in relation and in opposition to the image. The impact of image technologies on performance: Is the modern concept of performativity itself a flight from the mechanically reproduced image?

  This graduate pro-seminar deals with issues in the politics of gender in Muslim societies. Taking an anthropological perspective, it will explore the relationship among women, religion and society, including its political institutions. More specifically, it stresses how actors deploy culture and religion to construct new realities in the political contexts of these societies. Focusing on gender as a system, we will examine how women confirm, contest and/or redefine their participation in society. Apart from the readings, we will occasionally view videos and discuss them in relation to substantive course content.  

This seminar interrogates and challenges assumptions regarding the human/nature divide, drawing on classic and contemporary writings within anthropology, science studies, genetics, laboratory sciences, bioethics, and moral philosophy. Of special concern are the meanings assigned to nature, species integrity, interspecies proximity, and the moral boundaries of science where animals become involved.

Modernity is often imagined as the culmination of the Enlightenment disenchantment of the world, a time in which increasing rationalization led to the decline of magic and the demise of spirits.  Yet students of the modern condition have been obsessed with disclosing and documenting precisely that which modernity claimed to extirpate, the ghostly by other names:  the unconscious, the fetishized, the irrational, the uncanny.  This seminar examines ghostly remainders of the modern through a variety of theoretical approaches  (ranging from anthropology to critical theory to psychoanalysis to deconstruction),  engagements with texts  (from poetry, short stories, and novels, to analytical works), and encounters with media objects (film, photography, video, audio recordings).   The course will be concerned to trace how ghosts appear and disappear,  both as figures of the Real and as figures for that which exceeds modern powers of objectification.

 A central concern of modern theory and philosophy is the place of the aesthetic and its relationship to feelings and politics. How are feelings articulated with aesthetic judgments? How do different aesthetic apprehensions shade into different affective experiences? What are the political implications of these aesthetico-affective complexes, particularly under conditions of advanced capitalism, virtualization, and mass mediation? Starting with Longinus's On the Sublime and Kant's philosophy of the beautiful and the sublime, the course will consider aesthetico-affective experiences left out of formal philosophy but important in everyday life. Minor aesthetic concepts like the uncanny, the grotesque, and the cute will be intermixed with consideration of affects like anxiety, stupefaction, and hopefulness. Examples, cases, and inspiration are drawn from life in the United States (and elsewhere), from fiction, music, art, and film; disciplinary approaches are taken from literary criticism, anthropology, psychoanalysis, and philosophy. Theoretical readings include works by Kant, Hegel, Freud, Lyotard, Gasch, Derrida, Lacan, Deleuze, and others.

The relationship between the two senses, the sense of phenomenal experience and the sense of the meaning in ethnographic representation and knowing. Insofar as representation is an act of remembrance, the course is also concerned with the relationship between sense and memory.

Infrastructures are the material forms that allow for the possibility of exchange over space, invisible conduits that comprise the technical architecture that allow urban spaces to form and creates grounds for the circulation that ties those spaces to larger grids. But bodies of recent scholarship have come to interrogate the ways in which infrastructures comprise the conditions of existence for social experience, political action and economic order. This class seeks to examine what an analysis of infrastructure might add to anthropological analysis. Drawing from anthropology, science studies, media theory and history we will analyze the technical conditions of infrastructures, the legal regulations they give rise to , the political action they generate and the forms of everyday life they enable.

Examination of a series of 16th- to 19th-century colonial encounters in North America, the Pacific, and Africa, based on archaeological data, ethnohistoric and oral accounts.  The variability among these encounters, and how contact situations change from inception to late stages.

This course will consider museums as reflectors of social priorities which store important objects and display them in ways that present significant cultural messages. Students visit several New York museums to learn how a museum functions.

Examines anthropological, art, and history exhibits to explore how they visualize culture and identity. Relationships between museums, audiences, and the artists, cultures, and concepts exhibited will be explored.

  This course is a continuation of Museum Anthropology G6352 (not a prerequisite). Through the study of museum exhibitions, this course explores a series of debates about the representation of culture in museums, the politics of identity, and the significance of objects. We will consider the museum as a contemporary and variable form, as a site for the expression of national, group, and individual identity and as a site of performance and consumption. We will consider how exhibits are developed, what they aim to convey, what makes them effective (or not), and how they sometimes become flashpoints of controversy. Because the work of museums is visual, enacted through the display of material forms, we will also consider the transformation of objects into artifacts and as part of exhibitions, addressing questions of meaning, ownership, value, and magic. We will look at this range of issues from the point of view of practitioners, critics, and audiences.

Taking as its point of departure the emancipation of slaves in the British Caribbean as a "triumph" of liberalism, this course examines some aspects of the relation between power, freedom, race, and modernity.

Focussing on the sun and the sea, this seminar is concerned with finding a language for tormented nature, including heat, rain, and the awakening of the bodily unconscious.

This course examines the politics of recognition from the perspective of the security state. Not long ago, scholars and public intellectuals were ringing the death knell of the strong nation-state and celebrating the emergence of a new multicultural, postcolonial world. The sovereign right to kill was being replaced by the governmentalism of neoliberalism and a new kind of racism. The mobility of post-Fordist capital and the new media were thought to have created a qualitatively new mode of global cultural and social commerce fostering hybrid forms of social being and practice. Governmentality was not oriented to killing, but to constituting populations and their vitalities; to making live and letting die. Western states were busy performing shame and apologizing for past colonial practices. Suddenly things are not so clear—perhaps they never were. The post-9/11 world seems to have reorganized the logic and relations of recognition and civilization, the sovereign and neoliberal state. Pundits praised the “prescience” of Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations. Scholars rushed to embrace Agamben’s state of exception. Politicians in democracies sought to reclaim strong executive powers and the right to designate enemies, to kill, to suspend constitutional rights, and to rely on nondemocratic regimes to torture for truth. Civilization reemerged in an unapologetic form—a mode of differentiating the world in social and historical terms. Recognition was no longer merely about tolerance but about camouflage and espionage. This course seeks to understand whether and in what way the politics of recognition has mutated within the techniques of state security.

Fieldwork is what defines anthropology yet is rarely, if ever, discussed. Why? Why so invisible? Is it an art or a science or what, and what happens between f/w and the published text? What is the literary work of the f/w diary?

Sites of medical practice will dominate interrogations of embodied forms of commodification.  Key foci include exploitative labor practices; the marketing of the human body and its parts; and the mechanization of human bodies in contexts ranging from quotidian experiences, to cybernetic contexts, to futuristic visions involving cyborgs and other hybrid human forms.

Reading all of Kafka's writings including diaries and commentaries by Benjamin and Delueze with aim of rethinking ethnographic writing especially in relation to law, the state, fathers, prehistory, animals, and the social conventions which allow absurdity, hypocrisy, and injustice appear as normal.

Presents students with critical theories of society, paying particular attention to classic continental social theory of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We will trace a trajectory through important French and German writings essential for any understanding of the modern discipline of anthropology: from Saussure through Durkheim and Mauss, Marx, Weber, and on to the structuralist elaboration of these theoretical perspectives in Claude Lévi-Strauss, always bearing in mind the relationship of these theories to contemporary anthropology. We come last to Foucault and affiliated theorists as successors both to French structuralism and to German social theory and its concerns with modernity, rationality, and power. Throughout the readings, we will give special care to questions of signification as they inform anthropological inquiry, and we will be alert to the historical contexts that situate the discipline of anthropology today.

This course surveys the historical relationships between anthropological thought and its generic inscription in the form of ethnography. Readings of key ethnographic texts will be used to chart the evolving paradigms and problematics through which the disciplines practitioners have conceptualized their objects and the discipline itself. The course focuses on several key questions, including: the modernity of anthropology and the value of primitivism; the relationship between history and eventfulness in the representation of social order, and related to this, the question of anti-sociality (in crime, witchcraft, warfare, and other kinds of violence); the idea of a cultural world view; voice, language, and translation; and the relationship between the form and content of a text. Assignments include weekly readings and reviews of texts, and a substantial piece of ethnographic writing. Limited to PhD students in Anthropology only.

This course considers two histories of Africa and European colonialism on the continent.  The first is that of the fetish of gold, which both propelled the European frenzy of land acquisition and exploitation in West Africa and especially along the Guinea Coast and in South Africa, and generated a theoretical paradigm for understanding Africanity.  The second is the development of natural resource-extraction based economies, grounded in a libidinized fantasy of value that both repressed the fact of labor and legitimated its organization through displacement.  In undertaking an anthropological reading of these two historical trajectories, this course is broken into two main sections.  In the first half of the course, we engage the literature on fetishism that emerged at the nexus of comparative religion, philosophy and anthropology, as well as the historical literature on colonialism associated with precious metals (and the responses to that history in literature), focusing on the Guinea Coast.  In the second part, we undertake a reading of the transformation of the gold rush into the particular form of migrant labor that it assumed throughout the latter nineteenth and twentieth century, emphasizing the experience of southern Africa.

"The sun gives without receiving." With global warming, this pronouncement by Georges Bataille in The Accursed Share acquires an ironic twist. This seminar explores the philosophical and sensuous role of the sun: in Judge Schreber's Memoirs of My Mental Illness; in Delueze and Guattari, Anti Oedipus; in Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra; and in Bataille's essays on the sun in Documents and The Accursed Share, vol 1.

‘Social organization' originally referred to the study of the various ways in which human groups organized, including kinship, religious organizations and social class or caste. Moreover, because anthropologists were concerned with comparing societies of many different sorts-- from small scale Australian aboriginal societies to archaic states in India, China or Peru-- the study of kinship, marriage, residence and territorial organization was of central importance

In recent years, theories of "alternative modernity" have arisen in anthropology and the other social sciences. Produced out of a concern with non-western difference and shaped by writings on globalization, such theories often betray a lack of sustained understanding of the aporias of modernity as theorized by critical theorists of the Frankfurt school and others. This seminar will work to critique the notion of alternative modernity by engaging critical theoretical works on "uneven development," the dilemmas of otherness, aesthetics and politics, and mass culture. It will do so in tandem with a consideration of what might be thought of as modernities elsewhere (with some emphasis on Japan as a key exemplar of so-called "nonwestern modernity").

This course pairs classic works in psychoanalysis with narrative texts, both literary andethnographic. The class will consist of close readings of key psychoanalytic texts by Freud and Lacan, with secondary readings authored by Slavoj Zizek, Jeffrey Mehlman, Jacques Derrida, Samuel Weber, and others. Narrative works include Hoffman's "The Sandman" and Henry James's The Turn of the Screw and ethnographic writings by James Siegel and Claude Levi-Strauss.

This seminar considers these questions through the writings of archaeologists (S. Dawdy, A. GonzSlez- Ruibal, P. Graves-Brown, R. Harrison, W. Rathje, J. Schofield) and others (Latour, connerton, Aug6, Yablon), through film ("Garbage Warrior", "lnto Eternity", "Life After People", "crash"). In the process, we will seek to develop a new body of thought on three core issues: (1) the distinctive temporalities of modernity, which appears to be compressing the present and making an archaeology of contemporary necessary, (2) the dystopian imaginaries that are in ascendance and that continue to re-script Western metanarratives, and (3) the strange methods we are led to adopt each time we examine the present as if it were already dead and gone.

In this course we will first analyze Marx's account of capitalism in Capital and then turn to critical theoretical accounts of neoliberalism, concentrating on Foucault's account in The Birth of Biopolitics. Our work will have two foci: 1) what is and isn't distinctive about neoliberalism as a theory, description or modality of capitalism, 2) what is gained and lost in moving between Marx and Foucault. Thus we will reflect on epistemological and ontological matters in materialism, political rationality, and normative reason, and also on whether central concepts in Marx's critical theory-labor power, commodities, exchange value, fetishism, contradiction, etc.-remain relevant to neoliberal formations. This course is not an introduction to Marx or neoliberalism. It presumes knowledge of both, even as we will attempt to defamiliarize and rethink both. Note: To apply, send no more than a page on your relevant academic background and your interest in the course to wlbrown@berkeley.edu

Intended mainly as a chance to read Proust in a group, this seminar dwells on his dazzling and unique contributions to the arts of memory in relation to language, the senses, and unacknowledged gay sexuality. With Proust we have to confront the apparent decay with modernity in our ability to experience the world, the postmodern sense of fractured selves, and the exquisitely modulated ethnography of class and caste hierarchies-all of which speaks to the world of cultural analysis as well as joyous writing.

This class brings together media theory with anthropological and historical studies of colonialism in order to examine the media system of Empire. This refers to the modes of communication - documents, files, despatches - that constituted empire as a modern organizational system.

A genealogy of intimacy and its criminalization in the history of modernity, the dissemination of these related discourses and procedures in colonial contexts. The rise of the discourse of sexuality in European contexts; historical sources for an understanding of how modern institutionalized forms of homosociality (such as those found in the modern school and the professionalized military) came to be invested with the risk of homosexuality.

This research seminar will prepare students to conduct research and write a paper on the intersections of feminism, social movements, human rights, social-science research on gender, and studies of cultural diversity. Cultural diversity is termed as a human right in the Vienna Conference. In the Preamble to the 31st Session of the UNESCO General Conference in Paris, 2001, the concept of cultural diversity implies tolerance, dialogue and cooperation within a climate of trust, able in so doing to guarantee peace and international security. Human unity does not supersede cultural diversity.

Selected themes in the analysis of Chinese society during late imperial and modern times.

Selected themes in the analysis of Chinese society during late imperial and modern times.

An interdisciplinary perspective on modern Taiwan’s culture, society and polity, including consideration of key historical developments. Each class meeting features a different lecturer with a particular scholarly interest in Taiwan, whose seminar presentation will be from his or her own disciplinary perspective. Lecturers are drawn from the fields of anthropology, economics, history, literature and political science.

Contemporary medical anthropology focusing on such issues as embodiment, medical power and praxis, the commodification of the body and healing, social constructions of suffering, and the cultural significance of medical technologies.

Individual research and tutorial in social and cultural anthropology for advanced graduate students.

Individual research and tutorial in archaeology for advanced graduate students.

Individual research and tutorial in physical anthropology for advanced graduate students.

Individual research in all divisions of anthropology and in allied fields for advanced graduate students

An internship arranged through the Museum Anthropology program of 10 hrs/week (for 3 credits) or 20 hrs/week (for 6). Involves "meaningful" work, requires keeping a journal and writing a paper at the completion of the semester. Not to be taken without permission of the program directors, usually after completing the Museum Anthropology core courses.

    An internship arranged through the Museum Anthropology program of 10 hrs/week (for 3 credits) or 20 hrs/week (for 6). Involves "meaningful" work, requires keeping a journal and writing a paper at the completion of the semester. Not to be taken without permission of the program directors, usually after completing the Museum Anthropology core courses.

Individual research and tutorial in archaeological method and theory for advanced graduate students.

Individual research and tutorial in quantitative methods for advanced graduate students.

Individual research and tutorial in data processing for advanced graduate students.

This course examines the relationship between colonialism, settlement and anthropology and the specific ways in which these processes have been engaged in the broader literature and locally in North America. We aim to understand colonialism as a theory of political legitimacy, as a set of governmental practices and as a subject of inquiry. Thus we will re-imagine North America in light of the colonial project and its ?technologies of rule? such as education, law and policy that worked to transform Indigenous notions of gender, property and territory. Our case studies will dwell in several specific areas of inquiry, among them: the Indian Act in Canada and its transformations of gender relations, governance and property; the residential and boarding school systems in the US and Canada, the murdered and missing women in Juarez and Canada and the politics of allotment in the US. Although this course will be comparative in scope, it will be grounded heavily within the literature from Native North America.

Prerequisite: the written permission of the staff member under whose supervision the research will be conducted.

Susan Sontag famously wrote that, "Most serious thought in our time struggles with the feeling of homelessness". This course examines some of the classic texts that have been written about Africa as a place of "homelessness" or the place in which to search for "the self in others". The course is in two parts - the first part consists of theoretical readings on the history, uses, and abuses of anthropology as a discipline. The second part consists of texts written by African anthropologists. Rather than focus on concepts like kinship, marriage, the gift, etc., this course attempts to provide an intellectual history of the discipline and its relationship to Africa. The "kinship" links that are examined are, therefore, between ideas, authors, locales, and the particular space of southern Africa as a site of ethnographic and anthropological imaginings.

This course offers a broad overview of the social, cultural, political, and economic dimensions of sexuality. It focuses on the rapid transformations that are taking place globally in the early 21st century, and on the impact that these transformations have had on sexuality. The relationships between men, women and children are changing quickly, as are traditional family structures and gender norms. What were once viewed as private matters have become public, and an array of new social movements (transgender, intersex, sex worker, people living with HIV) have come into the open. Sexuality has become a focus for public debate and political action in important new ways that will be examined in detail in this course.

What is corruption? Is it - as we are prone to suspect - detrimental to social equality, political participation, and economic growth? Through readings on the anthropology of bureaucracy, politics, exchange, and witchcraft, this class will develop a critical perspective on corruption that both problematizes and takes these intuitive claims seriously. 

The class explores the intersection of aesthetics and ethnography in contemporary nonfiction filmmaking. Course readings address the blurring of boundaries between filmic genres and the multiplicity of relationships they establish between the "pro-filmic" and the filmic; the ethics as well as the epistemology of visual and auditory representations and the relationships that are put into play between films' subjects, their makers, and their audiences in a variety of cultural contexts; the social life of images; and the relationship between anthropological knowledge and various documentary modalities.

This course explores the relationship between indigenous and 21st century aesthetics; and social, economic and political relationships in Africa. Students will be encouraged to examine aesthetic traditions in terms of the individual and social aspirations they embody, commerce through the geographies of exchange that articulate with specific resources, and examine politics through the diverse modes of sociality that prevail in different regions. 

This course explores the changing perspectives on African archaeology over the last two centuries. We will trace the history of archaeological fieldwork in Africa, looking at archaeology's relationship to colonialism and European narratives of world history. These will be compared with the ways in which archaeology has been drawn upon in the post-colonial period within nationalist, Afrocentric and postcolonial accounts. Using a variety of archaeological case studies, we will look at the key issues in African archaeology today and assess how these debates have been informed by the particular history of archaeological interpretation in Africa. Topics will include the archaeology of human origins and dispersal out of Africa, the development of farming and the use of metals, the archaeology of African kingdoms and state formation, the colonial encounter, and the archaeology of the African Diaspora. 

Social organization and social change in China from late imperial times to the present. Major topics include family, kinship, community, stratification, and the relationships between the state and local society.

What makes women's migration experience different from men's in global capitalism today? The course will investigate contemporary women's transnational migration from developing countries to newly developed countries in Asia and beyond. We will discuss issues related to labor and marriage migrations, as well as trafficking in women, on both macro - and micro - levels. We are going to ask: how does the global economic restructuring shape the gendered migration today? What makes female labor different from male labor in the global labor market? What are push-and-pull factors that trigger these women to leave their hometown to be workers or wives in foreign countries? What difficulties do they experience after entering host societies and what impact would the migration flow bring to both laborer/bride receiving and sending countries? Moreover, we will explore the global market formation of transnational commodified marriages between women from developing countries and men from more developed countries. We will look at Filipina, Vietnamese, and Chinese women migrating to Taiwan, Korea, Japan, and the United States, in particular. Throughout the semester, we will read empirical works from many disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, political economy, and women's studies, as well as primary source materials, including news reports, online forums, documentaries, and film clips.

This course will examine major elements of Chinese culture historically and in the present-day. We will begin with a study of Chinese society in the late-imperial period (1368-1843), addressing key features of economic organization, kinship systems, popular religion, and state administration. From this foundation, we will examine changes and (apparent) continuities in cultural practices over the course of China’s Nationalist, Maoist and post-Socialist revolutions, with particular attention to the present-day. Through the study of several recent ethnographies of conditions in rural and urban China, we will explore the ways in which the cultural conventions of the past have informed the strategies Chinese have devised in their negotiations with the global commercial economy and with an often predatory state.

This course provides a comprehensive introduction to archaeology. We start with a critical overview of the origins of the discipline in the 18th and 19th centuries, and then move on to consider key themes in current archaeological thinking. These include: ‘Time and the past: what is the difference’? What are archaeological sites and how do we ‘discover’ them? How is the relationship between the living and the dead negotiated through archaeological practice? What are the ethical issues? How do we create narratives from archaeological evidence? Who gets written in and out of these histories? Archaeology in film and media is also covered.

This course provides a broad introduction to the anthropology of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. We will explore social and cultural formations such as caste, class, marriage, and the family; as well as the organization of cultural diversity by colonial rule, nationalism and modern statehood, ethnic and religious conflict, and transnational circulations. In addition to secondary sources, students will be particularly encouraged to engage with primary sources such as treatises, speeches, poetry, music, and film. Through learning about the ethnography of the South Asia region, students will also gain an understanding of contemporary theoretical debates in anthropology, which include: the legacies of colonial rule in postcolonial societies, the social power of analytical categories, and the impact of globalization. 

As literary, cinematic, and musical trope, the Road bears the weight of both transcendent American aspirations and banal evocations of national ethos. Engaging popular literature, film, and music, this course examines the figurative and literal Road as a medium that both reveals and constructs senses of American identity and place. 

An examination of religion and society not limited to the Middle East. A series of Muslim societies of various types and locations will be approached historically and contextually to understand their family resemblances and their differences, their distinctive mechanisms of coherence, and their patterns of contestation. 

This class investigates magic and witchcraft, in addition to spirit mediums and ghosts in the shadow of technology, industry, and rational science. Beginning with the simple and open-ended definition of magic as a means to control and make sense of events that cannot be explained, the course is a journey through uncanny convergences and apparitional events that are at once sensual, yet ghostly. Course material ranges from baseball players who employ magical practices to deal with mathematical uncertainties of the game, to more challenging case studies on witchcraft, spirit possession, shamanism, and other forms of magic as healing. Alongside contemporary readings on the topic, students will also read classic anthropological texts on magic and witchcraft.

To examine anthropological explanation as a passage from the known to the unknown that problematizes the known, as well as leaving some kernel of the strange, the exotic, and the unfamiliar a mystery, and does not reduce everything to an explanation. How might we master the need for mastery? What happens after we have problematized the known? Readings: accounts of fieldwork, select ethnography, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Brecht, Benjamin, Bataille.

This class will construct a dual perspective on the intersection between culture and finance. On the one hand, we will be concerned with finance as a culturally constituted social field; on the other, we will examine the far-reaching sociocultural consequences of financial practices. Students will write four short papers, each corresponding to one of the four thematic sections of the class - Money and Exchange; Debt, Credit, and Value; The Production and Productivity of Risk; and Cultures of Crisis. 

In the past thirty years, disciplines across the social sciences and humanities -- from philosophy to history to sociology to political science to geography to cultural studies -- have undergone a "greening" as the social aspects of nature have come to be seen as a legitimate, even sexy subject of scholarly investigation. In a very real sense, anthropology has always been environmental. Given nature's tremendous capacity to shape nearly every facet of our existence, both physiological and cultural, the self-proclaimed "science of humanity" could hardly be otherwise. This course provides a critical introduction to environmental anthropology, beginning with a brief exploration of its historical roots and examining its various iterations (including cultural, historical, and human ecology) but concentrating especially upon anthropology's contributions to the interdisciplinary field of political ecology, with a particular emphasis on issues of environmental justice. Although the readings for the course are discipline-specific, the course will attempt to contextualize the anthropological take on particular environmental topics within the broader cross-disciplinary framework noted above in lectures and class discussions.

Exploration of the social orders and cultural sensibilities that form contemporary Africa. Examining the rise of urban cultures, religious movements, informal economies, crime, and corruption, this class explores the structures of African life, the sensibilities they engender, and the forms of life they give rise to. 

Hindi cinema represents one of the oldest and most dynamic forms of popular cinema whose popularity has spread far beyond India itself into countries from Senegal to Korea. Nigerian cinema, or Nollywood, represents one of the newest. In little more than a decade, it has spread all over Africa and, increasingly, into the Caribbean and Black diaspora.

Introduction to the contemporary societies of China, Japan, and Korea, with special attention to social institutions and cultural patterns that shape hierarchy, egalitarianism, and inequality as reflected in family patterns, community life, religion, and economic behavior of social change.

Social organization and social change in China from late imperial times to the present. Major topics include family, kinship, community, stratification, and the relationships between the state and local society.

Chinese popular religion and ritual during the late traditional period and in modern times. Popular beliefs and practices concerning the cosmos, the gods, and the ancestors; the role in popular religion of Buddhism, Taoism, and the Imperial State Cult; popular religion, social change, and the modern assault on "superstition.

Institutions of social life. Kinship and locality in the structuring of society. Monographs dealing with both literate and nonliterate societies will be discussed in the context of anthropological fieldwork methods.

The second of a two semester sequence intended to introduce departmental majors to key readings in social theory that have been constitutive of the rise and contemporary practice of modern anthropology. The goal is to understand historical and current intellectual debates within the discipline. This course replaces ANTH V 3041 - Theories of Culture: Past and Present.

This class explores the ways in which archaeologists use the dead body to explore past beliefs and social practices, critically assessing these approaches from the broader perspective of anthropological and sociological theories of the body’s production and constitution. We’ll look at the ways in which social status, gender, and personhood are expressed through the dead body and through practices of body modification and display. In this context, we’ll also consider the social relations of archaeological exhumation, the conflict that can arise over the excavation of human remains, and their treatment as courtroom evidence in forensic archaeology.

Since 1989, socialism across Eurasia has experienced profound transformations. Different from the dramatic transition to "capitalism" and "democracy" in the former Soviet bloc, China (and to a large degree, Viet Nam as well) has adroitly combined an authoritarian state, with a highly capitalist economy, with socialism, becoming a nominal rhetoric at large. This course unpacks postsocialist China by interrogating the ways in which China's recent economic success has been accompanied by mounting social and cultural tensions at the heart of Chinese society. In this course, we will explore the complexity and diversity of contemporary Chinese society and culture as well as its ongoing postsocialist transformations. Main topics will include: Chinese kinship and networking/"guanxi"; ethnicity and nationalism; post-socialist rural transformations; the "floating population" of migrant laborers; changing urban spaces; consumerism and the emerging urban middle-class; and transnationalism. Controversies surrounding issues such as HIV/AIDS, sexuality, and birth control policy that have drawn much international attention will be discussed in local contexts. In reading a variety of compelling writings by current authors, we will explore not only what has been written about China, but also how Chinese culture has been written by scholars. 

This course explores the various ways in which cities are planned, represented, and navigated; and interrogates collectively imagined forms of social life and social order as they are reflected in urban design. By pairing fiction films and documentaries with readings from anthropology, sociology, history, and literary criticism, we will discuss the role of planning, speculation, technology, and nostalgia in defining and conceptualizing the city.

This course explores 10,000 years of the North American archaeological record, bringing to light the unwritten histories of Native Americans prior to European contact. Detailed consideration of major pre-Columbian sites is interwoven with the insight of contemporary native peoples to provide both a scientific and humanist reconstruction of the past.

Practices like veiling that are central to Western images of women and Islam are also contested issues throughout the Muslim world. Examines debates about Islam and gender and explores the interplay of cultural, political, and economic factors in shaping women's lives in the Muslim world, from the Middle East to Southeast Asia.

Examines four major aspects of contemporary South Asian societies: nationalism, religious reform, gender, and caste. Provides a critical survey of the history of and continuing debates over these critical themes of society, politics, and culture in South Asia. Readings consist of primary texts that were part of the original debates and secondary sources that represent the current scholarly assessment on these subjects. 

Recent years have seen an upsurge of interest among scholars from across the humanities and humanistic social sciences in the forms, precipitants, and effects of mass incarceration (and ‘the penal state' more generally), especially in the contemporary United States. This course seeks both to engage this growing literature and, at the same time, to broaden its historical, cultural, conceptual, and phenomenological scope through an examination of confinement as it has been conceived of - and imposed - across a wide range of societal and geographical contexts: prisons, internment camps, asylums, slave plantations, native reservations, religious monasteries, and more. What are the links between the regulation of movement and various political, legal, and economic regimes? Between punishment-by-imprisonment and particular forms of sovereign power - in imperial, post-colonial, and settler-colonial societies alike? Why, and in what ways, have certain populations been targeted for confinement in specific times and places? How might we understand the interplay between the partitioning of human bodies in enclosed spaces, on the one hand, and practices of social control, exclusion, and stratification on the other? Drawing on ethnographic accounts, historical case studies, and influential theoretical texts (Durkheim, Bentham, Elias, Fanon, Goffman, Foucault, Agamben), this course ultimately asks how a cross-cultural, historical approach to confinement might allow us to shed light on, and so provincialize, what sociologist Loïc Wacquant has called the hyperincarceration of whole segments of the American populace today.

This course explores zooarchaeology as a subdiscipline, highlighting the potential of archaeofaunal remains to provide insight into social, political, ritual, and economic organization and the history of human interaction with the environment. The course is designed primarily for students in the archaeology major or concentrations, but is open to other undergraduate and graduate students, with instructor's permission. Students are not expected to have prior experience in the lab. Students will gain basic knowledge of the methods and underlying theory of zooarchaeological analysis as well as the ability to assess the strengths and weaknesses of zooarchaeological data in addressing archaeological research questions in Old and New World archaeology.

Scientific laboratories have become important sites for making knowledge about the world, and as such, for remaking the world. But what are scientific laboratories? This course examines the laboratory anthropologically through key ethnographic, historical, and theoretical readings that explore the distinct spaces, selves, and subjects that make up “laboratory life".

This is an advanced course in spatial modeling developed specifically for Anthropology students, particularly those pursuing a degree through the inter-departmental Archaeology program. This course will provide a foundation for understanding a variety of issues related to spatial analysis and modeling. Students will explore the concepts, tools, and techniques of GIS modeling and review and critique its application within archaeology. The course will also offer students the opportunity to design, build and evaluate their own spatial analyses. We will draw from a wide range of examples, including trade and exchange networks in Greece, placement of shrines and homes in the pre-Hispanic American Southwest, and the imposition of power within sacred spaces at Angkor Wat in Cambodia. The course will consist of lectures, reading assignments, lab assignments, and a final project. Priority given to senior and juniors.

This course introduces undergraduate students in anthropology, sociology, and related fields to ethnographic fieldwork. It is designed as a seminar/practicum, and we will divide our class time between the analysis of texts and the analysis of our own attempts to carry out the ethnographic methods described in those texts. Students will formulate an ethnographic question, which they will systematically investigate through weekly field assignments and a final research proposal. Throughout, we will attend not only to the application of particular methods to particular questions, but also to the broader epistemological and ethical questions that inform ethnographic fieldwork.

This course uses primary and secondary source materials to teach the histories, cultures, and philosophical systems of Indigenous peoples located within the United States and Canada. This course moves geographically through the East into the Circumpolar North, the Dakotas, and then into the Pacific Northwest; and then moves temporally through pre-settlement into settlement periods through materials that comprise an active archive of Indigenous communicative practices, philosophies, and politics. The course resists the earlier anthropological conceit of placing Indigenous peoples within a "before" state, as matter to be salvaged in an immanent disappearance of pure, cultural form and difference; as Indigenous people, in fact, have not disappeared, and possess deep histories that are alive within the present and in different cultural forms. As such, the course pairs cultural "artifacts," ethnography with contemporary expressive culture (autobiography, visual art) in order to create an intellectual genealogy and cultural history of Indigeneity, and Indigenous sovereignty that lives within the present.

Critiques the many ways the great Red Island has been described and imagined by explorers, colonists, social scientists, and historians—as an Asian-African amalgamation, an ecological paradise, and a microcosm of the Indian Ocean. Religious diasporas, mercantilism, colonization, enslavement, and race and nation define key categories of comparative analysis.

Politics revolves around what can be seen, felt, and sensed. Political acts are encoded in medial and aesthetic forms - bodies protesting in the street, punch holes on a card, images on a television newscast, tweets about events unfolding in real time  -by which the political becomes manifest in the world. How do these forms gain their force? What role do they play in shaping people as subjects and defining the terms of political possibility? How do they reinscribe particular relations of power as issues of political concern and concrete transformation? This course will explore these questions as part of our effort to trace the connections between media, aesthetics, and politics.

In light of the ascendance of neuroscience, this course explores the social history of brain science from the mid-19th century to the present. We will consider the contexts in which cerebral technologies, including psychoanalysis, psychosurgery, brainwashing, and psychotropic medications were created, as well as the doctors, psychologists, and military personnel who deployed them for various social and political ends. Throughout the course, we will investigate persisting interest in knowing the mind, enhancing mental functioning, and managing problem brains.

One of the most conspicuous changes in South Asia in the last decades has been the enormous growth of cities across the region. The rate of urbanization in South Asia has historically been relatively modest. Today, more than sixty five cities in South Asia have more than a million people, and there are hundreds of smaller cities around 300,000 to half a million people across the wider region. The World Bank projects that in less than a decade, India alone will have around half a billion people living in cities. Of these, at least a third and possibly more will be living in slums. Urban slums in India and elsewhere in the subcontinent are the most highly politicized places with more people voting and taking to the streets than anywhere else. The future of particularly India, but also other countries in the region, is undoubtedly urban, political power is urban, and new technologies and new cultural phenomena are all decidedly urban. This course has two aims: Firstly, to give the participants a strong overview of the historical development of cities and urban culture across the South Asian region from the pre-colonial cities until today. Secondly, the participants will be given a broad and sensitive introduction to many aspects of contemporary urban cultures, conflicts, identities, and experiential frames in South Asian cities. The readings will be work by critical historians and social theorists of South Asia, recent ethnographies of many aspects of contemporary urban life in South Asia’s cityscapes, popular novels, short stories, and films that address various aspects and mythologies of urban life in the region. 

What do we mean when we say something is "in crisis"? How do we recognize crisis and what are the consequences of that recognition? 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

This course investigates the complex relationships among colonialism, psychoanalysis, and race. The first part of the course examines the impacts of colonial ideologies of race on key Freudian theories, as well as the complicity of psychoanalysis in the colonial project. It then considers specific means by which imperial regimes shaped the subjectivities of colonizers and the colonized, including the application of theories and treatments connected to ethnopsychiatry. The second part of the course looks at racialized theories of mental illness and modes of social control in current mental health practice. After considering the global circulation of Freudian concepts, the course examines contemporary schools of psychoanalysis that revise classical understandings of mental structure, psychopathology, race, and therapeutic action. The course concludes with readings of recent case studies in cross-racial psychoanalysis. 

What is corruption? Is it-as we are prone to suspect-detrimental to social equality, political participation, and economic growth? Through texts on the anthropology of liberalism, exchange, post-colonialism, and witchcraft, this seminar will develop a critical perspective on corruption that both problematizes and takes these intuitive claims seriously.

This course seeks to understand the relationship between secular and religious forms of authority in the modern world. Among topics to be considered include the rise of religiosity in the public and political spheres, tolerance and pluralism, and the legal organization of religious practices. 

This seminar will construct a dual perspective on the intersection between culture and finance: On the one hand, we will examine finance as a culturally constituted social field; on the other, we will trace the far-reaching sociocultural consequences of financial concepts, practices, and discourses. The course is composed of two thematic parts: Money, Gifts, and Regimes of Value; and The Productivity of Risk and Crisis

This course is intended as an advanced seminar for anthropology students and others engaged in questions of social theory. Students must already have taken at least 2 anthropology courses and/or equivalent classes in social theory, religious studies, or philosophy. The course provides an in-depth exploration of both the theories of mythology that have dominated classical anthropology and four ‘case studies’ through which students will engage particular but recurrent problematics in the history of mythology. These case studies are drawn from a variety of contexts, and in their juxtaposition will provide the basis for a consideration of what it can mean to do a comparative study of mythology today. The ‘four case studies,’ address themselves to: 1), the animal-human relation; 2) the question of kinship; 3) the idea of sovereignty and the problem of the political; and 4) the myth of modernity, and the commodity economy. Select theoretical texts drawn from anthropology, literary criticism, history, and philosophy will provide the analytic terms through which these materials will be examined. 

This course focuses on the political ecology of the Anthropocene. As multiple publics become increasingly aware of the extensive and accelerated rate of current global environmental change, and the presence of anthropogenesis in ever expanding circumstances, we need to critically analyze the categories of thought and action being developed in order to carefully approach this change. Our concern is thus not so much the Anthropocene as an immutable fact, inevitable event, or definitive period of time (significant though these are), but rather for the political, social, and intellectual consequences of this important idea. Thus we seek to understand the creativity of "The Anthropocene" as a political, rhetorical, and social category. We also aim to examine the networks of capital and power that have given rise to the current state of planetary change, the strategies for ameliorating those changes, and how these are simultaneously implicated in the rhetorical creation of "The Anthropocene".

Indigenous Australia has been of immense importance in the history of Anthropology as well as in the sociology of religion and psychoanalysis (e.g., 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. 

How did whale oil become replaced by fossil fuels? What were the turning points in implementing electricity networks within urban centers? What is the role of markets and industries when producing such new energy infrastructures? This interdisciplinary course will trace ideas of energy in anthropology, science and technology studies, literary studies, and environmental history, and investigate how energy production and consumption affects social life.

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.

This class is an engagement between theoretical texts on the uses and production of space and place in Western modernity and conceptions of regional culture and identity in popular American imaginations, with particular emphasis on the genres commonly referred to as "roots" music. We begin by tracing a few major threads in theoretical treatments of place and space, with examples from phenomenological, historical materialist, and semiotic schools of thought. We will then attempt to distill the relevance of these approaches to lived experience by looking at a short selection of ethnographic accounts of the relationships among regional, class, and racial identities in the U.S. The ultimate goal is to bring the theoretical and ethnographic to bear upon articulations of what music anthropologist Steven Feld calls "senses of place" in performance of roots music, particularly early blues and country. To this end, we combine close, in-class listenings with historical readings on the popularity of these music genres, and their performers, in the 20th century. As a final task, students will be asked to examine, in light of the course readings, representations of place or place-based identity in a musical artifact of their choosing. 

This course examines the history and human impact of Chinese science and medicine in broad East Asian and transnational contexts. Using a socio-cultural approach, we will examine social, cultural, and political milieus within which various forms of science and medicine were practiced and understood across Chinese history and beyond the stereotypical "Chinese" boundary.

How might we speak of an imaginary within biomedicine? This course interrogates the ideological underpinnings of technocratic medicine in contexts that extend from the art of surgery to patient participation in experimental drug trials. Issues of scale will prove especially important in our efforts to track the medical imaginary from the whole, fleshy body to the molecular level. Key themes include everyday ethics; ways of seeing and knowing; suffering and hope; and subjectivity in a range of medical and sociomedical contexts.

This course explores how corporal senses (e.g., of touch, vision, smell listening) are formed through various sociocultural practices which render bodies, objects, and media part of a word ‘sensible.’ Upper-division seminar open to advanced undergraduates.

Today, localities with high incidences of genetic, species, and ecosystem diversity more often than not map directly onto localities with high incidences of human cultural and linguistic diversity. These localities are generally in parts of the world that have been, until quite recently, at the frontiers of resource extraction, human migration and resettlement, and capital expansion. Extraction, migration, and economic expansion tend to result in a decrease in both biological and cultural diversity. People living in these diverse areas often fall into the lowest categories of indicators for poverty and are often desirous of economic development. Equally often are they targeted for economic development interventions by expansionist states and resource-hungry businesses. Conservation organizations often target these localities for protection because of the various forms of diversity found in them and because they also often have high numbers of species with restricted ranges. This course examines the articulation of biological, linguistic, and cultural diversity.

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, and the colonial encounter; skepticism, mysticism, demonology, and fascism; psychoanalysis, art, poetry, film; digitality, virtuality, and special effects; Enlightenment Europe, Evangelical America, and 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.

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.

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. 

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. Anthropologists 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 regime-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.

This course investigates contemporary Central Asia as a specific context of post-socialist and postcolonial transition to newly independent statehood in the aftermath of global Cold War politics. Drawing on cultural artifacts and scholarly analyses, this course introduces students to Central Asian politics, economy, society, and culture. We will survey the processes related to macro-political and economic structure, such as democratization, market reforms, and nation-building, in conjunction with the everyday life of communities. Besides scholarly accounts of Central Asia, course materials include films, artworks, and internet discussions forums.

Although polemical and demonizing visions of Africa continue to proliferate within various quarters of public discourse, scholarly characterizations are more agnostic, tending to cycle between the fatalistic and upbeat. "Africa," it seems, has become a montage of competing destinies: alongside accounts of unrelenting debt and extreme precarity, war machines and disposable populations, occult imaginaries, and eviscerated states, we are given vibrant sketches of a continent to come, of novel styles of life, and habits of self-creation. This course explores the contours of Africa's variegated present through engagement with its emergent social and cultural forms: the refiguring of the city through the informal and the informational, state pullback and a privatized commons, development projects and humanitarian interventions, the intoxicating efflorescence of miracles and so many prosperity gospels, new techniques of law and criminality, experimental forms of violence and warfare, newly public - and vigorously ostracized - modes of intimacy, and desire. Engaging these issues from a cross-disciplinary perspective, with materials spanning the ethnographic and historical to the literary and philosophical, this course will serve as a critical introduction to the debates, concepts, and orientations through which African futures are being produced and apprehended.

This course addresses the ways that we can understand the variety of issues and challenges facing individuals, organizations, and nations as we come to understand and combat anthropogenic climate change. Drawing on work in anthropology, sociology, geography, and other disciplines, this course will examine how climate change is affecting and will continue to affect communities worldwide, concepts of risk and vulnerability, the role of science and local knowledge, and the social contexts of policies and actions.

This course will examine cities in comparative perspective, over time and space, from several viewpoints. We will examine how and when they develop, how they function, and what urban life is like. Is the urban experience the same for all residents? At all times? In all places? We will begin with theory and some urban history and then focus on New York as a laboratory, from its origins to the present. The course involves a kind of archaeology called "ethnoarchaeology" in which we look at living societies and communities in order to gain a better understanding of past and present. Our examination of contemporary urban life pays special attention to spatial organization and order, the geography of power in the urban landscape, and to material things, as these are the kinds of data that archaeologists typically focus on.

This course introduces students to functional linguistics and language typology. Functional linguistics involves describing, classifying and explaining the relation between linguistic form (e.g., various grammatical patterns embodied in phonology, morphology, and syntax) and linguistic function (e.g., the ends communicative utterances serve and the meanings grammatical categories encode). Language typology involves describing and comparing the forms and functions of the world’s languages in order to uncover, classify, and explain cross-linguistic patterns.

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.

Contemporary China through the writings of anthropologists who have done fieldwork there during the past decade.

Ancient Egypt was one of the most advanced cultures in antiquity. This course will go beyond the pyramids and pharaohs to investigate the culture and daily life of the ancient Egyptians from the Old Kingdom to the Hellenistic period. Students will learn about ancient Egyptian magic, emotion, cosmogony, education, recreation, travel, and diplomacy by reading ancient Egyptian folklore, dream spells, love poetry, wisdom texts, religious hymns, and royal propaganda in translation. In addition to exploring the laws, occupations, and medical knowledge of the ancient Egyptians, we will also analyze how gender, race, sexuality, class, and disability were constructed and represented.

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 Bolivia 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.

This course will explore Sufism in Central Asia under czarist and Soviet rule to the present day from an anthropological perspective. The seminar will begin with a broad overview of the origins and historical development of different Sufi orders throughout Central Asia, particularly the Naqshbandiyya, Yasawiyya, and Qadiriyya orders. We will cover Sufism in Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Xinjiang, and the Caucasus. Emphasis will be placed on the practice of Sufism, the political role of Sufism, Sufi-inspired music, and the multifarious portrayals of Sufis as miraculous healers, elite soldiers, wandering dervishes, indispensible powerbrokers and raving madmen.

Through a careful exploration of the argument and style of five vivid anticolonial texts, Mahatma Gandhi's Hind Swaraj, C.L.R. James' The Black Jacobins, Aimé Césaire'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 construction of the image of colonialism and its projected aftermaths established in anti-colonial discourse.

This course is a consideration of the choices and dilemmas faced by the category of intellectuals who have been labeled ‘colonial intellectuals’.

This course examines various approaches to the study and representation of natural and humanly caused disasters. Course readings include eyewitness accounts of calamities, personal memoirs of genocide, and ethnographic reports of the aftermath of floods, earthquakes, political violence, and nuclear reactor explosions. The course also considers conventional patterns of disaster response, as well as shifting notions of disaster preparedness that have emerged since 9/11. It concludes with an examination of post-disaster reconstruction, looking at the ways social divisions, economic conditions and political interests invariably affect the cultural, public health, and psychological repercussions of disasters.

This course is an examination of how postcolonial intellectuals have participated in the creation and contesting of alternative/multiple/’fugitive’ modernities.

Reading theories of media and of religion, we will examine how transformations in media technology shift the ways in which religion is encoded into semiotic forms, how these forms are realized in performative contexts, and how these affect the constitution of religious subjects and religious authority. Topics include word, print, image, and sound in relation to Islam, Pentecostalism, Buddhism and animist religions.

This course is an introduction to the civilization of ancient Egypt, beginning with the pyramids and ending with Hellenistic Alexandria. We will analyze artistic and archaeological evidence, such as tomb decoration, temples, pyramids, mummies, papyri, and sanctuary, to understand the ancient Egyptian civilization through material culture. Students will become familiar with the legendary pharaohs, hieroglyphic writing, and elaborate mythology of ancient Egypt. We will also investigate the most recent discoveries and controversies in Egyptology.  

This course explores Arabia as a global phenomenon. It is organized around primary texts read in English translation. The site of the revelation of the Quran and the location of the sacred precincts of Islam, Arabia is the destination of pilgrimage and the direction of prayer for Muslims worldwide. It also is the locus of cultural expression ranging from the literature of the 1001 Nights to the broadcasts of Al Jazeera. We begin with themes of contemporary youth culture and political movements associated with the Arab Spring. Seminar paper.

How do new media technologies affect social worlds? What is the relationship between mass mediation and modernity? Explores the force of media technology and its relationship to transnational forms of capital, to the development of new subjectivities, and to the rise of new networks of power and social relations.

This course pursues interconnections linking text and performance in light of magic, ritual, possession, narration, and related articulations of power. Readings are drawn from classic theoretical writings, colonial fiction, and ethnographic accounts. Domains of inquiry include: spirit possession, trance states, séance, witchcraft, ritual performance, and related realms of cinematic projection, musical form, shadow theater, performative objects, and (other) things that move on their own, compellingly. Key theoretical concerns are subjectivity - particularly, the conjuring up and displacement of self in the form of the first-person singular "I" - and the haunting power of repetition. Retraced throughout the course are the uncanny shadows of a fully possessed subject.

An introduction to the occult sides of making history, colonialism, and transforming reality through the study of south American shamanism, magic in Shakespeare's Tempest, sexual magic in politics and dictatorships, the uncanniness in Freud's hysterics, and William Burroughs' Cities of the Red Night.

Examines theories and ethnographies of consumption, as well as the political economy of production and consumption. Compares historic and current consumptive practices, compares exchange-based economies with post-Fordist economies. Engages the work of Mauss, Marx, Godelier, Baudrillard, Appadurai, and Douglas, among others.

The transgression of taboos is the basis of crime, sex, and religion in any society. As "the labor of the negative", transgression is also a critical element in thought itself. Working through anthropology of sacrifice and obscenity, as well as relevant work by Bataille, Foucault, and Freud, this course aims at understanding why taboos exist and why they must be broken.

Examines how bodies become mechanized and machines embodied. Studies shifts in the status of the human under conditions of capitalist commodification and mass mediation. Readings consist of works on the fetish, repetition and automaticity, reification, and late modern technoprosthesis.

The ‘Ethnography of the Everyday’ offers students an opportunity to engage the discipline’s methods and genres, and the ethico-philosophical questions about representativeness and exemplarity that subtend them.The course will consider the everyday as an alternative concept to ‘culture’ and habitus,’ while looking at the ethnographic works that were informed by those ideas. Students will undertake weekly writing assignments as part of an investigation not only of method, but of aesthetics, expression, and representation in general.

A field course and seminar considering the aesthetic, political, and sociocultural aspects of selected city museums, public spaces, and window displays.

Explores the dynamic interaction between operatic compositions (especially Mozart's Don Giovanni and The Marriage of Figaro) and their subsequent performances, with particular emphasis on the cultural, political, and economic contexts that shape both the original composition and the following reproductions. Critical apparatus includes Abbate and Butler.

This course considers mental disturbance and its relief by examining historical, anthropological, psychoanalytic and psychiatric notions of self, suffering, and cure. After exploring the ways in which conceptions of mental suffering and abnormality are produced, we look at specific kinds of psychic disturbances and at various methods for their alleviation.

Pursues the spectral effects of culture in the modern. Traces the ghostly remainders of cultural machineries, circuitries of voice, and representational forms crucial to modern discourse networks through a consideration of anthropologically significant, primarily nonwestern sites and various domains of social creation - performance, ritual practice, narrative production, and technological invention. 

Examines the figure of the child in modernity. Study of children and the delineation of a special time called childhood have been crucial to the modern imagination; for example, the child tended to be assimilated to the anthropological notion to the "primitive" (and vice versa), with repercussions ranging from psychoanalysis to painting, from philosophy to politics. Engages the centrality of the child through interdisciplinary readings in anthropology, history, children's literature, art criticism, educational theory, and psychology.

Investing trauma from interdisciplinary perspectives, the course explores connections between the interpersonal, social, and political events that precipitate traumatic reactions and their individual and collective ramifications. After examining the consequences of political repression and violence, the spread of trauma within and across communities, the making of memories and flashbacks, and the role of public testimony and psychotherapy in alleviating traumatic reactions.

The dialogic imagination focuses upon 3 remarkable stories beginning with the young freedom fighter Franco Zeffirelli, who later became a major figure in opera in Italy, as well as in the US. As a teenager, Zeffirelli fought against Mussolini and twice was close to death by firing squad, but each time escaped through unexpected felicities. Students in the class will choose one Zeffirelli opera to analyze. The second story analyzed Platee: Prologue and 3 acts were first presented at Versailles by Command of the French King on Le mecredi Tuesday 31 of March 1745, playing the music of Rameau. In 2003, Music Director Marc Minkowski revitalized the French music with innovative sounds and staging, whereas, in 1998, Director Jonathan Miller created his stunning re-articulation of The Marriage of Figaro, first written and performed in 1786 and performed in New York in 1998 to considerable acclaim.

The recent proliferation of writings on the social significations of the human body have brought to the fore the epistemological, disciplinary, and ideological structures that have participated in creating a dimension of the human body that goes beyond its physical consideration. The course, within the context of anthropology, has two considerations, a historical one and a contemporary one. If anthropology can be construed as the study of human society and culture, then, following Marcel Mauss, this study must be considered the actual, physical bodies that constitute the social and the cultural.

This course will cover the basic readings in the contemporary debate over nationalism. It will cover different disciplinary approaches and especially look at recent studies of nationalism in the formerly colonial world as well as in the industrial West. The readings will offer a mix of both theoretical and empirical studies. The readings include the following: 1) Eric Hobsbawm's Nationalism since 1780; 2) Ernest Gillner's Nations and Nationalism; 3) Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities; 4) Anthony Smith's The Ethnic Origins of Nations; 5) Linda Coley's Britons; 6) Peter Sahlins's Boundaries; and 7) Partha Chatterjee's The Nation and Its Fragments.

Focusing on the Anglo-Creole Caribbean, this course examines some aspects of popular culture, literary expression, political change, and intellectual movements over the past thirty years.

Scientific inquiry has configured race and sex in distinctive ways. This class will engage critical theories of race and feminist considerations of sex, gender, and sexuality through the lens of the shifting ways in which each has been conceptualized, substantiated, classified, and managed in (social) science and medicine.

This course provides a panoramic, but intensive, inquiry into the ways that archaeology and its methods for understanding the world have been marshaled for debate in issues of public interest. It is designed to examine claims to knowledge of the past through the lenses of alternative epistemologies and a series of case-based problems that range from the academic to the political, legal, cultural, romantic, and fraudulent.

Analyzes global, national, and local environment issues from the critical perspectives of political ecology. Explores themes like the production of nature, environmental violence, environmental justice, political decentralization, territoriality, the state, and the conservation interventions.

The aim of this course is to provide an overview of the archaeology of the modern world-the era that began with European voyages of discovery and conquest in the fifteenth century and continues into the present. Using case studies from the Americas, Europe, South Africa, and Australia, we will examine the way historical archaeologists use artifacts, structures, landscapes, along with oral, documentary, and visual sources to interpret the past. Subjects include comparative colonialism in the Americas; plantations and slavery; landscape and buildings archaeology; archaeology of gender and sexuality; and the archaeology of African Americans, Irish Americans, Asian Americans, and other racial and ethnic groups. By the end of the semester students should be familiar with the methodology of historical archaeology and the theoretical issues that guide interpretation in historical archaeology towards an understanding of the processes that have helped shaped modernity.

Treats the interrelated notions of agent, person, subject, and self from a semiotic and social perspective.

Explores 40,000 years of the human creation of, entanglement with, enchantment by, and violence towards idols. Case studies roam from the Paleolithic to Petra and from the Hopi to the Taliban, and the theoretical questions posed include the problem of representation, iconoclasm, fetishism and the sacred.

At the turn of the twentieth century, writing was considered the evolutionary “hallmark” of civilization. Its presence or absence in societies also served to demarcate the boundaries of disciplinary inquiry, with anthropologists then specialized in peoples “without” writing. In recent decades, however, as critical reflection began to focus on writings by anthropologists, attention also turned to what James Clifford referred to as “the scratching of other pens.” Studies of our own and other textualities now are part of advancing conversations between Anthropology, History and Literary Studies. Among other topics, we will study the earlier print revolution for ideas that might help us understand "texting" and other aspects of writing in the current digital revolution.

Intended for advanced undergraduates and begnning graduate students who are interested in paleoanthropology. Provides a closer look at what comprises the fossil evidence for human evolution from the australopithecines of 4 million years ago to the fully modern human species of 25,000 years ago. Involves hands-on examination of the departmental casts.

Readings in recent research.

This class explores how to map and visually represent New York's history and the continuing presence of past traces in the city. Students will receive training in the key archaeological techniques of landscape analysis and digital (GIS) mapping. We will draw on available archaeological evidence, landscape analysis, and documentary sources to map and explore different aspects of the city's past. We will critically assess what different mapping techniques offer, and what kind of narratives they underpin or foreclose upon. How do we draw upon such evidence as archaeologists and historians to represent and mediate the city's past?

This course focuses on one expressive form (cinema) in one predominantly Arab Muslim region (the Maghreb, comprising the nations of Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria), as part of an anthropological effort to explore the ways in which films taken individually and a nation’s cinema as a whole can help us understand society. The discussion of films and filmmakers will be set in the historical, political, cultural, and social contexts of the individual countries and of the region. The approach will combine historical and thematic perspectives, highlighting differences and similarities from country to country, from film to film, and from filmmaker to filmmaker. 

Training in general archaeological methods. Data recording techniques, preparation of reports and illustration, etc. 

Examines conflict talk and conflict-solving mechanisms in various communicative environments. Through a review of the most significant studies in legal anthropology and conflict talk, explores issues such as the public nature of conflict talk, its referentiality, the structural practices involved in this process, and the roles played by power and by communicative performances to reach a judgement and carry out a sentence. 

This course addresses social and cultural processes currently taking place in the formerly socialist Eastern Europe focusing on how postsocialist lives are defined, experienced and understood by those living them. Among the topics discussed are emerging forms of nationalism, gender relations, language use, production and consumption, identification with place, and emigration and diaspora. 

The study of legal institutions, the utilization of case materials, and the critical analysis of legal texts. Recent social historical and ethnographic work on trial procedures, evidence regimes, legal writing, interpretation, and disciplinary systems. Non-Western, premodern and colonial materials shed comparative light on Western notions of law, truth and justice.