Anthropology

The anthropological approach to the study of culture and human society. Case studies from ethnography are used in exploring the universality of cultural categories (social organization, economy, law, belief system, art, etc.) and the range of variation among human societies.

Corequisites: ANTH UN1108 The rise of major civilization in prehistory and protohistory throughout the world, from the initial appearance of sedentism, agriculture, and social stratification through the emergence of the archaic empires. Description and analysis of a range of regions that were centers of significant cultural development: Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus River Valley, China, North America, and Mesoamerica. DO NOT REGISTER FOR A RECITATION SECTION IF YOU ARE NOT OFFICIALLY REGISTERED FOR THE COURSE.

Introduction to the theory and practice of “ethnography”—the intensive study of peoples’ lives as shaped by social relations, cultural images, and historical forces. Considers through critical reading of various kinds of texts (classic ethnographies, histories, journalism, novels, films) the ways in which understanding, interpreting, and representing the lived words of people—at home or abroad, in one place or transnationally, in the past or the present—can be accomplished. Discussion section required.

Only the most recent chapters of the past are able to be studied using traditional historiographical methods focused on archives of textual documents. How, then, are we to analyze the deep history of human experiences prior to the written word? And even when textual archives do survive from a given historical period, these archives are typically biased toward the perspectives of those in power. How, then, are we to undertake analyses of the past that take into account the lives and experiences of all of society’s members, including the poor, the working class, the colonized, and others whose voices appear far less frequently in historical documents? From its disciplinary origins in nineteenth century antiquarianism, archaeology has grown to become a rigorous science of the past, dedicated to the exploration of long-term and inclusive social histories.

“Laboratory Methods in Archaeology” is an intensive introduction to the analysis of archaeological artifacts and samples in which we explore how the organic and inorganic remains from archaeological sites can be used to build rigorous claims about the human past. The 2022 iteration of the course centers on assemblages from two sites, both excavated by Barnard’s archaeological field program in the Taos region of northern New Mexico: (1) the Spanish colonial site of San Antonio del Embudo founded in 1725 and (2) the hippie commune known as New Buffalo, founded in 1967. Participants in ANTH BC2012 will be introduced to the history, geology, and ecology of the Taos region, as well as to the excavation histories of the two sites. Specialized laboratory modules focus on the analysis of chipped stone artifacts ceramics, animal bone, glass, and industrial artifacts.

The course only demands participation in the seminars and laboratory modules and successful completion of the written assignments, but all students are encouraged to develop specialized research projects to be subsequently expanded into either (1) a senior thesis project or (2) a conference presentation at the Society for American Archaeology, Society for Historical Archaeology, or Theoretical Archaeology Group meeting.

This course is an introduction to the interplay between science, technology, and society. Unsettling Science invites students to: ask big questions about science and technology, interrupt preconceived ideas about what sicience is and who does it, and engage deeply with troubling social implications. By offering historical and contemporary perspectives, this course equips students with critical and methodological skills essential to exploring not only longstanding questions about the world but also urgent issues of our time. To do so, the course focuses on a series of fundamental and foundational questions (e.g., what is knowledge? what is prog that underpin the study of science, technology, and society from a variety of interdisicplinary perspectives.

From the early days when the discipline of anthropology was actively constructing notions of race and debating the relationship between race and culture, Black people in the United States have been subjects, objects, authors, and, at times a conundrum of categorization, helping to define and shape social science fields. This course surveys anthropology’s history, methods, debates, big questions, and recurring themes, primarily (though not exclusively) as they relate to Black people in the U.S. It takes into account the specificities of U.S. racial formations and American-style cultural anthropology. What theories and sensibilities emerge within and outside of the disciplinary confine in work by, with, and about Black people in the Americas? This course engages foundational work as well as newer ethnographic writings and other media that push the anthropological horizon. Through reading, listening, watching, discussing, collaborative study, and writing assignments, the course probes key concepts including the social construction of race, the culture concept, “the field,” diaspora, and many others. It also explores more recent turns to decolonizing, activist, and abolitionist anthropologies. Instructor's permission required for enrollment.

This seminar critically reexamines the ancient world from the perspective of gender archaeology. Though the seedlings of gender archaeology were first sown by of feminist archaeologists during the 70’s and 80’s, this approach involves far more than simply ‘womanizing’ androcentric narratives of past. Rather, gender archaeology criticizes interpretations of the past that transplant contemporary social roles onto the archaeological past, casting the divisions and inequalities of today as both timeless and natural. This class challenges the idea of a singular past, instead championing a turn towards multiple, rich, messy, intersectional pasts. The ‘x’ in ‘archaeolxgy’ is an explicit signal of our focus on this diversity of pasts and a call for a more inclusive field of practice today.  

Infrastructures are the built networks moving goods, commodities, people, energy, waste organizing human action in modern societies. This course critically examines the work of infrastructures globally. It examines issues of urbanism, racial infrastructures, infrastructural breakdown and emergency, postcolonial infrastructures, climate change, and extraction.

Practices like veiling, gendered forms of segregation, and the honor code that are central to Western images of Muslim women are also contested issues throughout the Muslim world. This course examines debates about gender, sexuality, and morality and explores the interplay of political, social, and economic factors in shaping the lives of men and women across the Muslim world, from the Middle East to Europe. The perspective will be primarily anthropological, although special attention will be paid to historical processes associated with colonialism and nation-building that are crucial to understanding present gender politics. We will focus on the sexual politics of everyday life in specific locales and explore the extent to which these are shaped by these histories and the power of representations mobilized in a global world in the present and international political interventions. In addition to reading ethnographic works about particular communities, we read memoirs and critical analyses of the local and transnational activist movements that have emerged to address various aspects of gender politics and rights.

This seminar engages--through science fiction and speculative fiction, film, and companion readings in anthropology and beyond—a range of approaches to the notion of the “future” and to the imagination of multiple futures to come.  We will work through virtual and fictive constructions of future worlds, ecologies, and social orders “as If” they present alternative possibilites for pragmatic yet utopian thinking and dreaming in the present (and as we’ll also consider dystopian and “heterotopian” possibilities as well).  

Semester:

What are the consequences of entrenched inequalities in the context of care? How might we (re)imagine associated practices as political projects? Wherein lie the origins of utopic and dystopic visions of daily survival? How might we track associated promises and failures as they travel across social hierarchies, nationalities, and geographies of care? And what do we mean when we speak of “care”? These questions define the scaffolding for this course. Our primary goals throughout this semester are threefold.  First, we begin by interrogating the meaning of “care” and its potential relevance as a political project in medical and other domains. Second, we will track care’s associated meanings and consequences across a range of contents, including urban and rural America, an Amazonia borderland, South Africa, France, and Mexico. Third, we will address temporal dimensions of care, as envisioned and experienced in the here-and-now, historically, and in a futuristic world of science fiction. Finally, and most importantly, we will remain alert to the relevance of domains of difference relevant to care, most notably race, gender, class, and species.

Upper level seminar; 4 points

Summer:

What do we mean when we speak of “care”? How might we (re)imagine practices of care as political and moral projects? What promises, paradoxes, or failures surface amid entrenched inequalities? And what hopes, desires, and fears inform associated utopic and dystopic visions of daily survival? These questions will serve as a scaffolding of sorts for this course, and our primary goals are fourfold. First, we will begin by interrogating the meaning of “care” and its potential relevance as a political project in medical and other domains. Second, we will track care’s associated meanings and consequences across a range of contents, communities, and geographies of care. Third, we will remain alert to the temporal dimensions of care, as envisioned and experienced historically, in the here-and-now, and in the futuristic world of science fiction. Finally, we will consider the moral underpinnings of intra-human alongside interspecies care.

Enrollment limited to 10; 4 points

Beginning from a material and metaphorical construction of the viral, we consider the circulation of pandemics and of knowledge as multi-scalar events of world-making (and breaking). This seminar applies the slow(er) methods of ethnographic research as vital to an apprehension of complex ecologies. This course engages with how social theory “gets done” by means of collaborative research strategies to appreciate social processes as they are at once locally experienced, historically contingent, and globally shared. Drawing from reflexive methodologies including the extended case method, students will learn to apply and refine theory, write analytically, and communicate their findings for inter-disciplinary audiences. Upper level seminar; 4 points

This course addresses the articulation between theatricality and the political from a cross-cultural and trans-historical perspective. From the Renaissance theater to the profuse baroque, to the modernizing logics and aesthetics, to so-called “neo-baroque”, the course addresses logics and grammars within past and present dramaturgies of the social. How do certain theatrical traditions articulate with various power formations? How do these connect and complicate the relation between power and resistance, colonialism and liberation, center and periphery, particular and universal, actors and audiences? What technical apparatuses, cultural structures, ethical dispositions and bodily repertoires are mobilized? And how do old and new media technologies reconfigure protocols of stage-form in ancient and contemporary political theater?

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.

This course provides the aspiring anthropologist with an array of primarily qualitative methodological tools essential to successful urban fieldwork. As such, it is a practicum of sorts, where regular field assignments help build one’s ability to record and analyze social behavior by drawing on several key data collection techniques. Because we have the luxury of inhabiting a large, densely populated, international city, this class requires that you take a head-first plunge into urban anthropology. The NYC area will define the laboratory for individually- designed research projects. Be forewarned, however! Ethnographic engagement involves efforts to detect social patterns, but it is often a self-reflexive exercise, too. Readings provide methodological, analytical, and personal insights into the skills, joys, and trials that define successful field research.

Prerequisites: Must complete ANTH BC3871x. Limited to Barnard Senior Anthropology Majors. Offered every Spring. Discussion of research methods and planning and writing of a Senior Essay in Anthropology will accompany research on problems of interest to students, culminating in the writing of individual Senior Essays. The advisory system requires periodic consultation and discussion between the student and her adviser as well as the meeting of specific deadlines set by the department each semester.

We explore the possibilities of an ethnography of sound through a range of listening encounters: in resonant urban soundscapes of the city and in natural soundscapes of acoustic ecology; from audible pasts and echoes of the present; through repetitive listening in the age of electronic reproduction, and mindful listening that retraces an uncanniness inherent in sound. Silence, noise, voice, chambers, reverberation, sound in its myriad manifestations and transmissions.  From the captured souls of Edison’s phonography, to everyday acoustical adventures, the course turns away from the screen and dominant epistemologies of the visual for an extended moment, and does so in pursuit of sonorous objects.  How is it that sound so moves us as we move within its world, and who or what then might the listening subject be?

Examines the historical and contemporary social, economic, and political factors that shape immigration law and policy along with the social consequences of those laws and policies. Addresses the development and function of immigration law and aspects of the immigration debate including unauthorized immigration, anti-immigration sentiments, and critiques of immigration policy.

While the existence of processes of anthropogenic climate change is well established, predictions regarding the future consequences of these processes are far less certain. In no area is the uncertainty regarding near and long term effects as pronounced as in the question of how climate change will affect global migration. This course will address the issue of climate migration in four ways. First, the course will examine the theoretical and empirical literatures that have elucidated the nature of international migration in general. Second, the course will consider the phenomena of anthropogenic climate change as it relates to migration. Third, the course will consider how human rights and other legal regimes do or do not address the humanitarian issues created by anthropogenic climate change. Fourth, the course will synthesize these topics by considering how migration and climate change has arisen as a humanitarian, political, and economic issue in the Pacific. Human Rights elective.

Culture, technology, and media in contemporary Japan. Theoretical and ethnographic engagements with forms of mass mediation, including anime, manga, video, and cell-phone novels. Considers larger global economic and political contexts, including post-Fukushima transformations. Prerequisites: the instructor's permission.

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. 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, 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 --within ritual contexts and within everyday life.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prerequisites: The instructors permission. Students must have declared a major in Anthropology prior to registration. Students must have a 3.6 GPA in the major and a preliminary project concept in order to be considered. Interested students must communicate/meet with thesis instructor in the previous spring about the possibility of taking the course during the upcoming academic year. Additionally, expect to discuss with the instructor at the end of the fall term whether your project has progressed far enough to be completed in the spring term. If it has not, you will exit the seminar after one semester, with a grade based on the work completed during the fall term. This two-term course is a combination of a seminar and a workshop that will help you conduct research, write, and present an original senior thesis in anthropology. Students who write theses are eligible to be considered for departmental honors. The first term of this course introduces a variety of approaches used to produce anthropological knowledge and writing; encourages students to think critically about the approaches they take to researching and writing by studying model texts with an eye to the ethics, constraints, and potentials of anthropological research and writing; and gives students practice in the seminar and workshop formats that are key to collegial exchange and refinement of ideas. During the first term, students complete a few short exercises that will culminate in a substantial draft of one discrete section of their senior project (18-20 pages) plus a detailed outline of the expected work that remains to be done (5 pages). The spring sequence of the anthropology thesis seminar is a writing intensive continuation of the fall semester, in which students will have designed the research questions, prepared a full thesis proposal that will serve as a guide for the completion of the thesis and written a draft of one chapter. Only those students who expect to have completed the fall semester portion of the course are allowed to register for the spring; final enrollment is contingent upon successful completion of first semester requirements. In spring semester, weekly meetings will be devoted to the collaborative refinement of drafts, as well as working through issues of writing (evidence, voice, authority etc.). All enrolled students are required to present their project at a symposium in the late spring, and the final grade is based primarily on successful completion of the thesis/ capstone project. Note: The senior thesis seminar is open to CC and GS majors in Anthropology only. It requires the instructor’s permission for registration. Students must have a 3.6 GPA in the major and a preliminary project concept in order to be considered. Interested students should communicate with the thesis instructor and the director of undergraduate study in the previous spring about the possibility of taking the course during the upcoming academic year. Additionally, expect to discuss with the instructor at the end of the fall term whether your project has progressed far enough to be completed in the spring term. If it has not, you will exit the seminar after one semester, with a grade based on the work completed during the fall term. Enrollment limit is 15. Requirements: Students must have completed the requirements of the first semester of the sequence and seek instructor approval to enroll in the second.

GIS course with training in landscape analysis, digital mapping and web-based presentations of geospatial data. We will draw on archaeological and historical evidence, aerial photographs and satellite imagery to map and explore the history and politics of the irrigated landscape around Madagascar’s capital city. We will critically assess what different mapping techniques offer, and what kind of narratives they underpin or foreclose upon.

This course examines the politics and practices of collective accusation in comparative perspective. It treats these phenomena in their relation to processes of political and economic transition, to discourses of crisis, and to the practices of rule by which the idea of exception is made the grounds for extreme claims on and for the social body-usually, but not exclusively, enacted through forms of expulsion. We will consider the various theoretical perspectives through which forms of collective accusation have been addressed, focusing on psychoanalytic, structural functional, and poststructuralist readings. In doing so, we will also investigate the difference and possible continuities between the forms and logics of accusation that operate in totalitarian as well as liberal regimes. Course readings will include both literary and critical texts.

Classical anthropological theory placed the muted sister at its core, in a theory of kinship originating in the traffic of women among men. Political theory placed the invisible sister at its core by coding democracy as fraternity. Psychoanalytic theory placed the forbidden sister at its core with the theory of incest taboo. Tragic theory placed the self-effacing sister at its core in the Sophoclean figures of Antigone and Ismene. Popular (Hollywood) cinematic production placed the absent sister at its core, with its relentless circulation of narratives in which a ‘band of brothers’ finds its moral purpose in the rescue of someone else’s sister. And yet, and within these traditions, the sister arose in the interstices as a phantasmatic figure of extraterritorial and insurrectionary possibility. If feminisms have, on occasion, attempted to both mobilize and contain this possibility in a discourse of sisterhood, much more remains to be thought. This course explores the figure of the sister in its muted, invisible, forbidden, self-effacing and absented forms—and moves to consider the radical possibilities that emerged therefrom in Social and Political Theory, Literary Fiction, Drama and Cinema.

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.

This seminar explores religious difference in imperial states. It does so by comparing multiple theories of imperial rule through case studies from the Russian and Chinese Qing empires. The empirical focus of this course is accordingly on the interface between communities of religious practice and state institutions, rather than these communities on their own terms. After introducing several approaches to studying empire, and examining each empire’s state religion and institutions of religious governance, much of the remainder of the course will be devoted to the Muslim and Buddhist minorities who inhabited both empires. Through these and other examples this course seeks to understand religion’s place in the social fabric of empire, as well as its role in their collapse.

Prerequisites: 2ND YEAR PHD STATUS IN GOOD STANDING Corequisites: ANTH G6205 Within this seminar, one will master the art of research design and proposal writing, with special emphasis on the skills involved in writing a dissertation prospectus and research proposals that target a range of external funding sources. Foci include: bibliography development; how one crafts and defends a research problem; the parameters of human subjects research - certification; and the key components of grant proposal design. Required of, and limited to, all Second Year PHD anthropology students.

Archaeology is a sprawling, messy discipline and the role that theory does, should, and might play in the process of archaeological data collection, analysis, and interpretation has been highly contested. Archaeologists argue over whether there is such a thing as a stand-alone ‘archaeological theory’ and what kinds of theory from other disciplines should (or should not!) be imported. This course explores a range of recent theoretical conversations, orientations, and interventions within archaeology, with an eye to understanding what is currently at stake – and what is contested – in how archaeologists think about making archaeological knowledge in the contemporary moment. In doing so, this course encourages students to think about theory in archaeology as an important form of “practical knowledge” or “know how” for archaeologists (cf. Lucas 2018).

Prerequisites: ANTH G6352 Museum Anthropology: history and theory / ANTH G6353 Politics and Practice of Museum Exhibitions; G9110, G9111 and the instructors permission. Corequisites: ANTH G6353. This course addresses the practical challenges entailed in the process of creating a successful exhibition. Developing an actual curatorial project, students will get an opportunity to apply the museum anthropology theory they are exposed to throughout the program. They will be given a hands-on approach to the different stages involved in the curation of a show, from the in-depth researching of a topic to the writing, editing and design of an exhibition that will be effective for specific audiences.

Prerequisites: ANTH G4201 Principles and Applications of Social and Cultural Anthropology and the instructors permission. Focus on research and writing for the Masters level thesis, including research design, bibliography and background literature development, and writing. Prerequisites: ANTH G4201 Principles and Applications of Social and Cultural Anthropology

While kinship as an institutional category of training has had a rocky route over the past several decades, the roles that received and transformed terms of relatedness shape the way people make and brake social relations and political projects enjoy periodical waves of interest. After introductory critical engagement with foundational texts, we will examine current theoretical and methodological issues in the analysis of kinship, relations, and relatedness. We will focus the social processes through which (and projects in which) people define, create, extend, limit, sever or transform their relatedness with others within and over generations. We will ask what is the relationship between the reach of relatedness and the bounds communities and associations; how people distinguish who is or is not their kin, kith, friend, relative, family member, and so forth; when and how they propose to replace one term of relatedness for another, to act “as if” those unrelated are related, or vice versa; what roles substances (blood, water, milk, &c.) play in conveying, expressing, and forging relations. We will focus on the vicissitudes of relatedness through settlement and migration, as well as on the intersections of kinship and political economy.

What can we learn from anthropological and ethnographic research in and about a damaged world, a world confronted by the violence and effects of war, climate change, transnational migration, post-industrial abandonment, and the lives and afterlives of colonialism and slavery? What are the ethnographic debates that address the catastrophes produced by capitalism and the lifeforms that emerge out of its ruins? What types of anthropological critique emerge in times enunciated as ‘the end of the world’? And what comes after this end? Ethnographies at the End of the World addresses these questions by paying close attention to some of the most relevant debates in contemporary anthropological theory and anthropological critique. These debates include, among others, discussions on violence and trauma, the politics of life and death, the work of memory and oblivion, and the material entanglements between human and non-human forms of existence. The aim of this seminar is to generate a discussion around the multiple implications of these theoretical arrangements and how anthropologists deploy them in their ethnographic understandings of the world we live in. In doing so, this course provides students with a fundamental understanding and conceptual knowledge about how anthropologists use and produce theory, and how this theoretical production is mobilized as a social critique. This course is reading intensive and operates in the form of a seminar. It is intended, primarily, for MA students in the department of anthropology and graduate students in other departments.

Laurel Kendall. 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. G6365 works in tandem with the exhibition project that will be developed in “Exhibition Practice in Global Culture” to produce a small exhibit at AMNH.

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 is intended primarily for graduate students in Anthropology and related disciplines, and aims to critically examine and playfully practice that elusive yet vital thing we call ethnographic writing. We will approach ethnographic writing thoughtfully as a concrete set of practices, strategies, and debates within and around the discipline of anthropology, asking how different authors have responded to the challenges of the genre. The list of questions and challenges is long, and part of the work of the class will be to track them as they come up. From the role of the ethnographic vignette and the problem of the savage slot to the question of the ethnographer’s positionality; from ethnographic writing as (social) science to ethnographic writing as a form of fiction; from thick description to thin description, and across the awkward and socially constructed scales of the local and the global, ethnographers struggle to write about what they find, and find their writing choices to be deeply fraught and political. This course is not a comprehensive review of ethnographic writing nor a how-to. Rather, we will closely read a diverse set of ethnographic texts to try to get a sense of how each author has navigated these challenges. Alongside this project of reading ethnographic writing, we will also practice ethnographic writing, workshopping, and revising through written assignments.

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research and tutorial in social and cultural anthropology for advanced graduate students.

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research and tutorial in social and cultural anthropology for advanced graduate students.

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research and tutorial in social and cultural anthropology for advanced graduate students.

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research and tutorial in social and cultural anthropology for advanced graduate students.

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research and tutorial in social and cultural anthropology for advanced graduate students.

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research and tutorial in social and cultural anthropology for advanced graduate students.

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research and tutorial in social and cultural anthropology for advanced graduate students.

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research and tutorial in social and cultural anthropology for advanced graduate students.

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research and tutorial in social and cultural anthropology for advanced graduate students.

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research and tutorial in social and cultural anthropology for advanced graduate students.

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research and tutorial in social and cultural anthropology for advanced graduate students.

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research and tutorial in social and cultural anthropology for advanced graduate students.

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research and tutorial in social and cultural anthropology for advanced graduate students.

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research and tutorial in social and cultural anthropology for advanced graduate students.

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research and tutorial in social and cultural anthropology for advanced graduate students.

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research and tutorial in social and cultural anthropology for advanced graduate students.

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research and tutorial in social and cultural anthropology for advanced graduate students.

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research and tutorial in social and cultural anthropology for advanced graduate students.

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research and tutorial in social and cultural anthropology for advanced graduate students.

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research and tutorial in social and cultural anthropology for advanced graduate students.

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research and tutorial in social and cultural anthropology for advanced graduate students.

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research and tutorial in social and cultural anthropology for advanced graduate students.

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research and tutorial in social and cultural anthropology for advanced graduate students.

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research and tutorial in social and cultural anthropology for advanced graduate students.

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research and tutorial in social and cultural anthropology for advanced graduate students.

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research and tutorial in social and cultural anthropology for advanced graduate students.

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research and tutorial in social and cultural anthropology for advanced graduate students.

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research and tutorial in social and cultural anthropology for advanced graduate students.

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research and tutorial in social and cultural anthropology for advanced graduate students.

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research and tutorial in social and cultural anthropology for advanced graduate students.

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research and tutorial in social and cultural anthropology for advanced graduate students.

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research and tutorial in archaeology for advanced graduate students.

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research and tutorial in archaeology for advanced graduate students.

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research and tutorial in archaeology for advanced graduate students.

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research and tutorial in archaeology for advanced graduate students.

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research and tutorial in archaeology for advanced graduate students.

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research and tutorial in archaeology for advanced graduate students.

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research and tutorial in archaeology for advanced graduate students.

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research in all divisions of anthropology and in allied fields for advanced graduate students

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research in all divisions of anthropology and in allied fields for advanced graduate students

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research in all divisions of anthropology and in allied fields for advanced graduate students

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research in all divisions of anthropology and in allied fields for advanced graduate students

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research in all divisions of anthropology and in allied fields for advanced graduate students

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research in all divisions of anthropology and in allied fields for advanced graduate students

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research in all divisions of anthropology and in allied fields for advanced graduate students

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research in all divisions of anthropology and in allied fields for advanced graduate students

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research in all divisions of anthropology and in allied fields for advanced graduate students

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research in all divisions of anthropology and in allied fields for advanced graduate students

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research in all divisions of anthropology and in allied fields for advanced graduate students

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research in all divisions of anthropology and in allied fields for advanced graduate students

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research in all divisions of anthropology and in allied fields for advanced graduate students

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research in all divisions of anthropology and in allied fields for advanced graduate students

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research in all divisions of anthropology and in allied fields for advanced graduate students

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research in all divisions of anthropology and in allied fields for advanced graduate students

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research in all divisions of anthropology and in allied fields for advanced graduate students

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research in all divisions of anthropology and in allied fields for advanced graduate students

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research in all divisions of anthropology and in allied fields for advanced graduate students

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research in all divisions of anthropology and in allied fields for advanced graduate students

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research in all divisions of anthropology and in allied fields for advanced graduate students

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research in all divisions of anthropology and in allied fields for advanced graduate students

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research in all divisions of anthropology and in allied fields for advanced graduate students

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research in all divisions of anthropology and in allied fields for advanced graduate students

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research in all divisions of anthropology and in allied fields for advanced graduate students

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research in all divisions of anthropology and in allied fields for advanced graduate students

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research in all divisions of anthropology and in allied fields for advanced graduate students

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research in all divisions of anthropology and in allied fields for advanced graduate students

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. 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.

All anthropology graduate students are required to attend. Reports of ongoing research are presented by staff members, students, and special guests.