ANTH 20100. The Inka and Aztec States. 100 Units.

This course is an intensive examination of the origins, structure, and meaning of two native states of the ancient Americas: the Inka and the Aztec. Lectures are framed around an examination of theories of state genesis, function, and transformation, with special reference to the economic, institutional, and symbolic bases of indigenous state development. This course is broadly comparative in perspective and considers the structural significance of institutional features that are either common to or unique expressions of these two Native American states.

Instructor(s): A. Kolata     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 40100,LACS 20100,LACS 40305

ANTH 20405. Anthropology of Disability. 100 Units.

This seminar undertakes to explore "disability" from an anthropological perspective that recognizes it as a socially constructed concept with implications for our understanding of fundamental issues about culture, society, and individual differences. We explore a wide range of theoretical, legal, ethical, and policy issues as they relate to the experiences of persons with disabilities, their families, and advocates. The final project is a presentation on the fieldwork.

Instructor(s): M. Fred     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): Third- or fourth-year standing
Equivalent Course(s): MAPS 36900,ANTH 30405,CHDV 30405,HMRT 25210,HMRT 35210,SOSC 36900

ANTH 20535. The Social Life of Clean Energy. 100 Units.

This course in political and environmental anthropology focuses on how renewable energy forms (like solar, wind, biofuel, and geothermal) have become increasingly important sites of political activity, commercial opportunity and social imagination across the world. Against the backdrop of an enduring geopolitics and geoeconomics of petroleum, coal, and nuclear power, of transnational activist and governmental discourse on sustainability, and of local concerns about resource entitlement and cultural sovereignty, we examine how clean energy forms are being imagined, developed, institutionalized, and contested in a variety of places across the world. In each case, we explore the unique social life of an emergent technology and source of power.

Instructor(s): C. Howe     Terms Offered: Summer

ANTH 20701-20702. Introduction to African Civilization I-II.

Completion of the general education requirement in social sciences recommended. Taking these courses in sequence is recommended but not required. This sequence meets the general education requirement in civilization studies. African Civilization introduces students to African history and cultures in a two-quarter sequence.

ANTH 21015. Media, Culture, and Society. 100 Units.

This course is a theoretical and ethnographic overview of past, current, and future directions of anthropological research on the mass media. We study issues as diverse as projects of media representation and cultural conservation among indigenous peoples, the relationship of mass media to nationalism across the world, the social life of journalism and news making in an era of new technologies and ownership consolidation, and current debates over the role of mass media.

Instructor(s): D. Boyer     Terms Offered: Summer

ANTH 21102. Classical Readings in Anthropology: History and Theory of Human Evolution. 100 Units.

This course is a seminar on racial, sexual, and class bias in the classic theoretic writings, autobiographies, and biographies of Darwin, Huxley, Haeckel, Keith, Osborn, Jones, Gregory, Morton, Broom, Black, Dart, Weidenreich, Robinson, Leakey, LeGros-Clark, Schultz, Straus, Hooton, Washburn, Coon, Dobzhansky, Simpson, and Gould.

Instructor(s): R. Tuttle     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 38400,EVOL 38400,HIPS 23600

ANTH 21107. Classical Readings in Anthropology: Anthropological Theory. 100 Units.

Since its inception as an academically institutionalized discipline, anthropology has always addressed the relation between a self-consciously modernizing West and its various and changing others. Yet it has not always done so with sufficient critical attention to its own concepts and categories—a fact that has led, since at least the 1980s, to considerable debate about the nature of the anthropological enterprise and its epistemological foundations. This course provides a brief critical introduction to the history of anthropological thought over the course of the discipline's long twentieth century, form the 1880s to the present. Although we focus on the North American and British traditions, we review important strains of French and, to a lesser extent, German social theory in chronicling the emergence and transformation of modern anthropology as an empirically based, but theoretically informed, practice of knowledge production about human sociality and culture.

Instructor(s): Staff     Terms Offered: TBA
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 30000

ANTH 21201. Intensive Study of a Culture: Chicago Blues. 100 Units.

This course is an anthropological and historical exploration of one of the most original and influential American musical genres in its social and cultural context. We examine transformations in the cultural meaning of the blues and its place within broader American cultural currents, the social and economic situation of blues musicians, and the political economy of blues within the wider music industry.

Instructor(s): M. Dietler     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): CRES 21201

ANTH 21217. Intensive Study of a Culture: The Luo of Kenya. 100 Units.

This course is an overview of the history and contemporary culture of the Luo, a Nilotic-speaking people living on the shores of Lake Victoria. We examine the migration of the Luo into the region, the history of their encounter with British colonialism, and their evolving situation within the postcolonial Kenyan state. We also use the wide variety of studies of the Luo to illuminate transformations in the nature of ethnographic research and representations.

Instructor(s): M. Dietler     Terms Offered: Not offered 2012–13; will be offered 2013–14
Equivalent Course(s): AFAM 21217

ANTH 21225. Intensive Study of a Culture: Louisiana. 100 Units.

Louisiana is home to Cajun music, Creole food, and the Yat dialect, as well as some of the most impressive prehistoric mound sites in North America. This course offers an archaeological, historical, and ethnographic introduction to Louisiana's complex culture. We focus on the ways in which race, ethnicity, and identity are constructed within and about Louisiana.

Instructor(s): S. Dawdy     Terms Offered: Not offered 2012–13; will be offered 2013–14

ANTH 21230. Intensive Study of a Culture: Lowland Maya History and Ethnography. 100 Units.

The survey encompasses the dynamics of first contact; long-term cultural accommodations achieved during colonial rule; disruptions introduced by state and market forces during the early postcolonial period; the status of indigenous communities in the twentieth century; and new social, economic, and political challenges being faced by the contemporary peoples of the area. We stress a variety of traditional theoretical concerns of the broader Mesoamerican region stressed (e.g., the validity of reconstructive ethnography; theories of agrarian community structure; religious revitalization movements; the constitution of such identity categories as indigenous, Mayan, and Yucatecan). In this respect, the course can serve as a general introduction to the anthropology of the region. The relevance of these area patterns for general anthropological debates about the nature of culture, history, identity, and social change are considered.

Instructor(s): J. Lucy     Terms Offered: Autumn

ANTH 21251. Intensive Study of a Culture: Modern China. 100 Units.

Contemporary China is often spoken of as undergoing deep and rapid social change. Certainly globalizing forces have been especially evident in all parts of China over the last couple of decades. At the same time, like the rest of East Asia and the Pacific Rim, China has developed distinctive social, cultural, and political forms, many of which circulate nationally and transnationally. This course comes to terms with both the processes of change that have characterized the last few decades and with a few recent social and cultural phenomena of interest. Because the scholarly literature lags behind the pace of transformation in China, we draw on a wide variety of materials: ethnography, memoir, fiction, films, essays, historical studies, short stories, websites. Emphasis in class discussions is on grasping how contemporary Chinese realities are experienced from viewpoints within China—this is the sense in which the course is intensive study of a "culture." Readings and materials are divided into several major units concerned with historical memory, rural China, urban life, labor migration, and popular culture. Students undertake, as a term project, their own investigation of some aspect of contemporary cultural change in China.

Instructor(s): J. Farquhar     Terms Offered: Not offered 2012-13; will be offered 2013-14
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 32200

ANTH 21254. Intensive Study of a Culture: Pirates. 100 Units.

Many questions regarding pirates, smugglers, and privateers go to the heart of major anthropological problems (e.g., the nature of informal economies, the relationship between criminality and the state, transnationalism, the evolution of capitalism, intellectual property and globalization, political revolutions, counter-culture, and the cultural role of heroic [or anti-heroic] narratives). Each week we tackle one of these topics, paring a classic anthropological work with specific examples from the historical, archaeological, and/or ethnographic literature. We compare pirate practices in the early modern Caribbean to examples spanning from ancient ship raiders in the Mediterranean to contemporary software "piracy."

Instructor(s): S. Dawdy     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): LACS 21254

ANTH 21255. Intensive Study of a Culture: The Senegambia. 100 Units.

This course is an overview of history, culture, and society in the Senegambia, a territory situated between the Senegal and Gambia Rivers, and roughly corresponding to the political boundaries of modern-day Senegal. We examine the region in broad historical perspective. We begin with oral accounts of migration and state formation. We then track the gradual entanglement of local societies with global political economic forces during the Atlantic era. We also discuss the legitimate trade, French colonialism, and road to political independence. The focus of the last portion of the course is on cultural, artistic, and political experiences in the postcolonial state of Senegal.

Instructor(s): F. Richard     Terms Offered: Will be offered 2012–13, either Autumn or Spring
Equivalent Course(s): AFAM 21255

ANTH 21264. Intensive Study of a Culture: Political Struggles of Highland Asia. 100 Units.

As Edmund Leach noted in a later edition of The Political Systems of Highland Burma, massive changes largely occasioned by outside forces reshaped political relations in the later twentieth century. And not just in Highland Burma. This course compares political trajectories of societies across the arc of the Himalayan Highlands, from Burma to Afghanistan. From World War II, through decolonization and the cold war, and via many and disparate counterinsurgency campaigns, conflict and violence has marked the region, big states and small, old states and new. This course compares the recent political regimes, struggles and fortunes of Burma, Northeast India, Nepal, Tibet, and Afghanistan.

Instructor(s): J. Kelly     Terms Offered: Not offered 2012–13; will be offered 2013–14
Equivalent Course(s): CRES 21264

ANTH 21265. Intensive Study of a Culture, Celts: Ancient, Modern, and Postmodern. 100 Units.

Celts and things Celtic have long occupied a prominent and protean place in the popular imagination, and "the Celts" has been an amazingly versatile concept in the politics of identity and collective memory in recent history. This course is an anthropological exploration of this phenomenon that examines: (1) the use of the ancient past in the construction of modern nationalist mythologies of Celtic identity (e.g., in France and Ireland) and regional movements of resistance to nationalist and colonialist project (e.g., in Brittany, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Gallicia, Asturias); (2) the construction of transnational ethno-nostalgic forms of Celtic identity in modern diasporic communities (Irish, Scottish, etc.); and (3) various recent spiritualist visions of Celticity that decouple the concept from ethnic understandings (e.g., in the New Age and Neo-Pagan movements). All of these are treated in the context of what is known archaeologically about the ancient peoples of Europe who serve as a symbolic reservoir for modern Celtic identities. The course explores these competing Celtic imaginaries in the spaces and media where they are constructed and performed, ranging from museums and monuments, to neo-druid organizations, Celtic cyberspace, Celtic festivals, Celtic theme parks, Celtic music, Celtic commodities, etc.

Instructor(s): M. Dietler     Terms Offered: Winter

ANTH 21303. Making the Natural World: Foundations of Human Ecology. 100 Units.

This course considers the conceptual underpinnings of contemporary Western notions of ecology, environment, and balance, but it also examines several specific historical trajectories of anthropogenic landscape change. We approach these issues from the vantage of several different disciplinary traditions, including environmental history, philosophy, ecological anthropology, and paleoecology.

Instructor(s): M. Lycett     Terms Offered: Winter
Note(s): ENST 21201 and 21301 are required of students who are majoring in Environmental Studies and may be taken in any order.
Equivalent Course(s): ENST 21301

ANTH 21305. Modern Readings in Anthropology: Explorations in Oral Narrative (The Folktale) 100 Units.

This course studies the role of storytelling and narrativity in society and culture. Among these are a comparison of folktale traditions, the shift from oral to literate traditions and the impact of writing, the principal schools of analysis of narrative structure and function, and the place of narrative in the disciplines (i.e., law, psychoanalysis, politics, history, philosophy, anthropology).

Instructor(s): J. Fernandez     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 45300,HCUL 45300

ANTH 21307. Modern Readings in Anthropology: History, Ethnohistory, and Archaeology. 100 Units.

This course critically examines both the intellectual history and the recent renewal of claims to historical perspectives in archaeology. Our goals are twofold: first, to examine the many uses of and understandings of history as evidentiary source, subject matter, and conceptual framework in the archaeological literature; and, second, to assess the logic and methods used by researchers to incorporate documentary, ethnohistorical, and archaeological evidence.

Instructor(s): M. Lycett     Terms Offered: Not offered 2012–13; will be offered 2013–14

ANTH 21401. The Practice of Anthropology: Logic and Practice of Archaeology. 100 Units.

This course offers an overview of the concepts and practice of anthropological archaeology. We discuss the varied goals of archaeological research and consider the range of ways in which archaeologists build inferences about the past from the material record. Throughout the quarter, the more general discussion of research logic and practice is situated in the context of detailed consideration of current archaeological projects from different parts of the world.

Instructor(s): M. Lycett     Terms Offered: Not offered 2012–13; will be offered 2013–14

ANTH 21406. The Practice of Anthropology: Celebrity and Science in Paleoanthropology. 100 Units.

This seminar explores the balance among research, "showbiz" big business, and politics in the careers of Louis, Mary, and Richard Leakey; Alan Walker; Donald Johanson; Jane Goodall; Dian Fossey; and Biruté Galdikas. Information is gathered from films, taped interviews, autobiographies, biographies, pop publications, instructor's anecdotes, and samples of scientific writings.

Instructor(s): R. Tuttle     Terms Offered: Not offered 2012–13; will be offered 2013–14
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 38300,HIPS 21100

ANTH 21420. The Practice of Anthropology: Ethnographic Methods. 100 Units.

This course introduces theory and practice, as well as situates ethnography within social science research more generally. Students are exposed to a wide range of investigative and analytical techniques used in ethnographic research and to multiple forms of interpretation and representation of ethnographic data. Students are required to apply the methods discussed in class through field assignments and through a final ethnographic project that is developed in consultation with the instructor. This course is particularly useful for students who intend to write a senior thesis the following year. Field trips to sites in Chicago required.

Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): Preference given to third-year anthropology majors, others by consent only

ANTH 21500. Cultural Psychology. 100 Units.

There is a substantial portion of the psychological nature of human beings that is neither homogeneous nor fixed across time and space. At the heart of the discipline of cultural psychology is the tenet of psychological pluralism. Research findings in cultural psychology raise provocative questions about the integrity and value of alternative forms of subjectivity across cultural groups. This course analyzes the concept of “culture” and examines ethnic and cross-cultural variations in mental functioning, with special attention to the cultural psychology of emotions, self, moral judgment, categorization, and reasoning.

Instructor(s): R. Shweder     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): Third- or fourth-year standing
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 21001,ANTH 35110,CHDV 21000,CHDV 31000,PSYC 23000,PSYC 33000

ANTH 21510. Cultural Psychology. 100 Units.

There is a substantial portion of the psychological nature of human beings that is neither homogeneous nor fixed across time and space. At the heart of the discipline of cultural psychology is the tenet of psychological pluralism. Research findings in cultural psychology raise provocative questions about the integrity and value of alternative forms of subjectivity across cultural groups. This course analyzes the concept of "culture" and examines ethnic and cross-cultural variations in mental functioning, with special attention to the cultural psychology of emotions, self, moral judgment, categorization, and reasoning. (C)

Instructor(s): R. Shweder     Terms Offered: Autumn 2013
Prerequisite(s): Third- or fourth-year standing.
Equivalent Course(s): CHDV 21000,CHDV 41050,GNDR 21001,PSYC 23000

ANTH 21525. Love, Conjugality, and Capital: Intimacy in the Modern World. 100 Units.

A look at societies in other parts of the world demonstrates that modernity in the realm of love, intimacy, and family often had a different trajectory from the European one. This course surveys ideas and practices surrounding love, marriage, and capital in the modern world. Using a range of theoretical, historical, and anthropological readings, as well as films, the course explores such topics as the emergence of companionate marriage in Europe and the connections between arranged marriage, dowry, love, and money. Case studies are drawn primarily from Europe, India, and Africa.

Instructor(s): J. Cole, R. Majumdar     Terms Offered: Winter 2013
Prerequisite(s): Any 10000-level music course or consent of instructor
Note(s): This course typically is offered in alternate years.
Equivalent Course(s): SALC 23101,ANTH 32220,CHDV 22212,GNDR 23102

ANTH 22000. The Anthropology of Development. 100 Units.

This course applies anthropological understanding to development programs in "underdeveloped" and "developing" societies. Topics include the history of development; different perspectives on development within the world system; the role of principal development agencies and their use of anthropological knowledge; the problems of ethnographic field inquiry in the context of development programs; the social organization and politics of underdevelopment; the culture construction of "well-being;"  economic, social, and political critiques of development; population, consumption, and the environment; and the future of development.

Instructor(s): A. Kolata     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 35500,ENST 22000

ANTH 22105. The Anthropology of Science. 100 Units.

Reading key works in the philosophy of science, as well as ethnographic studies of scientific practices and objects, this course introduces contemporary science studies. We interrogate how technoscientific "facts" are produced, discussing the transformations in social order produced by new scientific knowledge. Possible topics include the human genome project, biodiversity, and the digital revolution.

Instructor(s): J. Masco     Terms Offered: Not offered 2012–13; will be offered 2013–14
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 32300,HIPS 21301

ANTH 22123. Science Studies III: Information Age. 100 Units.

This seminar explores the sociocultural effects of the digital revolution in information technologies. Interrogating the technoscientific as well as sociocultural logics behind new virtual media, we discuss how new forms of subjectivity (collective and individualized), new forms of governmentality, and new political commitments are being produced via information technologies and supercomputing.

Instructor(s): J. Masco     Terms Offered: Winter

ANTH 22125. Introduction to Science Studies. 100 Units.

Science is a dense site of practices, norms, and values that shapes what it means to be human in the contemporary era. Interwoven with the character of scientific knowledge is the character of the ideas that can be thought and not thought, the diseases that will be treated and not treated, the lives that can be lived and not lived. Yet, science, objectivity, and knowledge have proved resistant to critical analysis. This course is an introduction to thinkers who have withstood this resistance and explores questions about the nature, culture, and politics of scientific knowledge and its production.

Instructor(s): K. Sunder Rajan     Terms Offered: Spring

ANTH 22130. Anthropology of the Machine. 100 Units.

This course examines the machine as a social problematic, asking what is the machine and what is its relationship with technology, science, nature, bodies, and culture. Moving between the tangible and the abstract, we explore the machine as material instantiation, historical paradigm, metaphor, limit, method, and ideal. The course will follow a lecture/seminar format, and students will develop an anthropology of the machine as part of the course requirements.

Instructor(s): M. Fisch     Terms Offered: Not offered 2012-13; will be offered 2013-14

ANTH 22205. Slavery and Unfree Labor. 100 Units.

This course offers a concise overview of institutions of dependency, servitude, and coerced labor in Europe and Africa, from Roman times to the onset of the Atlantic slave trade, and compares their further development (or decline) in the context of the emergence of New World plantation economies based on racial slavery. We discuss the role of several forms of unfreedom and coerced labor in the making of the "modern world" and reflect on the manner in which ideologies and practices associated with the idea of a free labor market supersede, or merely mask, relations of exploitation and restricted choice.

Instructor(s): S. Palmié     Terms Offered: Not offered 2012-13; will be offered 2013-14
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 31700,CRES 22205,LACS 22205,LACS 31700

ANTH 22400. Big Science and the Birth of the National Security State. 100 Units.

This course examines the mutual creation of big science and the American national security state during the Manhattan Project. It presents the atomic bomb project as the center of a new orchestration of scientific, industrial, military, and political institutions in everyday American life. Exploring the linkages between military technoscience, nation-building, and concepts of security and international order, we interrogate one of the foundation structures of the modern world system.

Instructor(s): J. Masco     Terms Offered: Not offered 2012–13; will be offered 2013–14
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 34900,HIPS 21200

ANTH 22410. Introduction to Science and Technology Studies. 100 Units.

Science, technology and information are the ‘racing heart’ of contemporary cognitive capitalism and the engine of change of our technological culture. They are deeply relevant to the understanding of contemporary societies. But how are we to understand the highly esoteric cultures and practices of science, technology and information? During the twentieth century, sociologists, historians, philosophers, and anthropologists raised original, interesting, and consequential questions about the sciences and technology.  Often their work drew on and responded to each other, and, taken together, their various approaches came to constitute a field, "science and technology studies."  The course furnishes an initial guide to this field.  Students will not only encounter some of its principal concepts, approaches, and findings, but will also get a chance to apply science-studies perspectives themselves by performing a fieldwork project. Among the topics we examine are the sociology of scientific knowledge and its applications, constructivism and actor network theory, the study of technology and information, as well as recent work on knowledge and technology in the economy and finance. Beginning with the second week of classes, we will devote the second half of the class to presentations and discussion.

Instructor(s): K. Knorr Cetina     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): SOCI 30217,ANTH 32410,CHSS 30217,SOCI 20217

ANTH 22530. Ethnographic Film. 100 Units.

This seminar explores ethnographic film as a genre for representing "reality," anthropological knowledge, and cultural lives. We examine how ethnographic film emerged in a particular intellectual and political economic context, as well as how subsequent conceptual and formal innovations have shaped the genre. We also consider social responses to ethnographic film in terms of (1) the contexts for producing and circulating these works, (2) the ethical and political concerns raised by cross-cultural representation, and (3) the development of indigenous media and other practices in conversation with ethnographic film. Throughout the course, we situate ethnographic film within the larger project for representing "culture," addressing the status of ethnographic film in relation to other documentary practices (e.g., written ethnography, museum exhibitions, documentary film).

Instructor(s): J. Chu     Terms Offered: Not offered 2012–13; will be offered 2013–14
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 32530

ANTH 22535. Engaging Media: Thinking about Media and their Audiences. 100 Units.

In the first part of the course we look at how post–World War II mass communications and “classical” film theory theorized communication and spectatorship; in particular, we trace the dialogue between these liberatory models and the totalitarianism and propaganda (i.e., top-down models of control) of the times. We then look at theories of mass media reception and spectatorship that put ideology at the center of their analysis, interrogating theories of the “receiver” of media messages as cultural dope (Frankfurt school Marxism), psychoanalytic and (post-)Marxist theories of spectatorship (“Screen” theory), feminist critiques of film spectatorship, and reactions to the above in cognitivist film studies. We then turn to British Cultural Studies’ theories of media, focusing on how such work attempts to reconcile models of reception as ideologically unproblematic and as determined by the ideological structures of production and reception. Particular focus is given to the theoretical arguments regarding ideology and media, the notion of “code,” and the differences and similarities in the model of communication with the sociology of mass communication.
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,In the second half of the course we look at anthropological approaches to media and how anthropologists have taken up the issue of media reception. Why have anthropologists largely ignored media and reception studies until recently? What kinds of contributions can anthropology make to the theorization and methodological approach to reception? By critically looking at ethnographies of reception, we problematize the concept of reception proper, looking at more holistic ways of dealing with the issue of the mediation of social life. In the final part of the course we re-evaluate what we mean by “mass media” and “reception.” First we look media (con)texts that blur the duality of production/reception. We then consider new forms of media and to what extent “reception” as a category even makes sense in attempting to understand how engagement with such new media functions.

Instructor(s): C. Nakassis
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 32535

ANTH 22606. Indiginieties. 100 Units.

Depending on how you look at it, questions of indigeneity – the who, how, what, and why of peoples that either identify, or are identified, as “native” – are questions that at once transcend, entail, and/or are produced by Euro-American scholarly, political and legal inquiry. Whether assailed as the product of colonial orientalism or celebrated as the ur-subjectivity of those who resist it (or something in between), the claims of, to, and about indigeneity continue to excite and demand attention scholarly and political. Indeed some argue that politics of indigeneity have gained unique traction in recent decades, as indigenous actors, scholars and their advocates have pressed for changes to legal, political and cultural/scientific regimes that have indigenous affairs as their chief objects of inquiry. One need only consider the 2007 passage of the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the legal decisions acknowledging the force of native title in the Supreme Courts of Australia and Canada, and even the changes in various regimes of research concerning the social scientific study of native peoples and/or the representation of their material culture, all of which happened less than 20 years ago.           Despite these long-standing interests and recent social, political and economic gains, indigenous communities remain among the most vulnerable in the world. These trenchant inequalities beg the question, how does the condition of indigeneity relate to the various social forces shaping the world today, and to the lived experiences of those who claim to be, or get named as, indigenous. It is towards an exploration of this question that this course is dedicated. Among the lines of inquiry that we will pursue in the course are: 1) tracing the genealogies of indigeneity as a notion, both in Euro-American human sciences and in other epistemological traditions; 2) considering the role that notions of indigeneity play in contemporary national and international political regimes ;3) exploring how indigeneity is claimed or disclaimed, by different peoples around the world, and why; and 4) considering the ways in which notions of indigeneity are being figured in new regimes of possession and commodification, including intellectual property, genetics and genome mapping, and the role of indigenous knowledge in resource extraction and bioprospecting.           In pursuing these questions this course will endeavor to tease out the manifold relationships that the rising politics of indigeneity at the dawn of the 21st century has to other global political economic phenomena. Simultaneously, the course will also attend to the ways in which different peoples, caught up in different sociopolitical milieu, orient to the notion of indigeneity as it articulates with their lived experiences with matters of autochthony (the state of being “from here”), allocthony (being “from elsewhere”) and the consequences of those distinctions to their everyday lives.

Instructor(s): J. Richland
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 33106

ANTH 22710. Signs and the State. 100 Units.

Relations of communication, as well as coercion, are central though less visible in Weber's famous definition of the state as monopoly of legitimate violence. This course reconsiders the history of the state in connection to the history of signs. Thematic topics (and specific things and sites discussed) include changing semiotic technologies; means; forces and relations of communication (writing, archives, monasteries, books, "the" internet); and specific states (in early historic India and China, early colonial/revolutionary Europe, especially France, Britain, and Atlantic colonies, and selected postcolonial "new nations").

Instructor(s): J. Kelly     Terms Offered: Possibly offered in 2012-13: Winter or Spring
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 41810

ANTH 22715. Weber, Bakhtin, Benjamin. 100 Units.

Ideal types? The iron cage? Captured speech? No alibis? Dialectical Images? Charismatic authority? Heteroglossia? Modes of Domination? Seizing the flash? Finished, monological utterances? Conditions of possibility? Strait gates through time?  Weber, Bakhtin and Benjamin provide insights and analytical tools of unsurpassed power. Scholars who use them best have faced and made key decisions about social ontology and social science epistemology, decision that follow from specific, radical propositions about society and social science made by these theorists and others they engage, starting at least from Immanuel Kant. This course is designed for any student who wants to more clearly understand the arguments of Weber, Bakhtin and Benjamin, and to understand more broadly the remarkable trajectories of German social theory after Kant. It is designed especially for anyone hoping to use some of their conceptions well in new research. (Yes, Bakhtin is Russian, and cultural theory in Russia and the US too will come up.) Fair warning: this course focuses on four roads out of Kant’s liberal apriorism (including culture theory from Herder to Boas and Benedict, as well as Benjamin and the dialectical tradition, Bakhtin’s dialogism, and Weber’s historical realism). We will spend less time on good examples of current use of Weber’s, Bakhtin’s, and Benjamin’s ideas, than on the writings of Weber, Bakhtin and Benjamin themselves, and their predecessors and interlocutors (including Herder, Hegel, Clausewitz, Marx, Ihering and Simmel). The premise of the course is that you will do more in your own research with a roadmap than with templates.

Instructor(s): J. Kelly     Terms Offered: Not offered 2012–13; will be offered 2013–14
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 43720

ANTH 22910. Performance and Politics in India. 100 Units.

This seminar considers and pushes beyond such recent instances as the alleged complicity between the televised "Ramayana" and the rise of a violently intolerant Hindu nationalism. We consider the potentials and entailments of various forms of mediation and performance for political action on the subcontinent, from "classical" textual sources, through "folk" traditions and "progressive" dramatic practice, to contemporary skirmishes over "obscenity" in commercial films.

Instructor(s): W. T. S. Mazzarella     Terms Offered: Not offered 2012–13; will be offered 2013–14

ANTH 23101-23102-23103. Introduction to Latin American Civilization I-II-III.

Taking these courses in sequence is not required. This sequence meets the general education requirement in civilization studies. This sequence is offered every year. This course introduces the history and cultures of Latin America (e.g., Mexico, Central and South America, and the Caribbean Islands).

ANTH 23600. Medicine and Society in Twentieth-Century China. 100 Units.

This course is a survey of historical and anthropological approaches to medical knowledge and practice in twentieth-century China. Materials cover early modernizing debates, medicine and the state, Maoist public health, traditional Chinese medicine, and health and medicine in popular culture.

Instructor(s): J. Farquhar     Terms Offered: Not offered 2012–13; will be offered 2013–14
Equivalent Course(s): HIPS 22601

ANTH 23715. Self-Determination: Theory and Reality. 100 Units.

From the Versailles Conference (1919) through the Bandung Conference (1955) and beyond, global politics has been reorganized by efforts to implement and sustain political sovereignty on the basis of national self-determination. This course examines the theories informing this American-led plan and its real consequences, with attention to India, Algeria, Indo-China, New Zealand, Fiji, and Hawaii. Dilemmas in decolonization, partitions, the consequences of the cold war, and the theory and practice of counterinsurgency are discussed together with unintended consequences of the plan in practice, especially the rise of political armies, NGOs, and diaspora.

Instructor(s): J. Kelly     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 43715

ANTH 23805. Nature/Culture. 100 Units.

Exploring the critical intersection between science studies and political ecology, this course interrogates the contemporary politics of "nature." Focusing on recent ethnographies that complicated our understandings of the environment, the seminar examines how conceptual boundaries (e.g., nature, science, culture, global/local) are established or transgressed within specific ecological orders).

Instructor(s): J. Masco     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 43805,CHSS 32805,HIPS 26203

ANTH 24001-24002-24003. Colonizations I-II-III.

This sequence meets the general education requirement in civilization studies. This three-quarter sequence approaches the concept of civilization from an emphasis on cross-cultural/societal connection and exchange. We explore the dynamics of conquest, slavery, colonialism, and their reciprocal relationships with concepts such as resistance, freedom, and independence, with an eye toward understanding their interlocking role in the making of the modern world.

ANTH 24101-24102. Introduction to the Civilizations of South Asia I-II.

This sequence introduces core themes in the formation of culture and society in South Asia from the early modern period until the present. This sequence meets the general education requirement in civilization studies. These courses must be taken in sequence.

ANTH 24320. Cultural Psychology. 100 Units.

There is a substantial portion of the psychological nature of human beings that is neither homogeneous nor fixed across time and space. At the heart of the discipline of cultural psychology is the tenet of psychological pluralism. Research findings in cultural psychology raise provocative questions about the integrity and value of alternative forms of subjectivity across cultural groups. This course analyzes the concept of "culture" and examines ethnic and cross-cultural variations in mental functioning, with special attention to the cultural psychology of emotions, self, moral judgment, categorization, and reasoning.

Instructor(s): R. Shweder     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): Third- or fourth-year standing
Equivalent Course(s): HCUL 30500,HUDV 20500,HUDV 30501,CHDV 21000,GNDR 21000,PSYC 23000

ANTH 24325. Love, Conjugality, and Capital: Intimacy in the Modern World. 100 Units.

A look at societies in other parts of the world demonstrates that modernity in the realm of love, intimacy, and family often had a different trajectory from the European one. This course surveys ideas and practices surrounding love, marriage, and capital in the modern world. Using a range of theoretical, historical, and anthropological readings, as well as films, the course explores such topics as the emergence of companionate marriage in Europe and the connections between arranged marriage, dowry, love, and money. Case studies are drawn primarily from Europe, India, and Africa.

Instructor(s): J. Cole, R. Majumdar
Equivalent Course(s): SALC 43101,SALC 33101,CHDV 33212,AFAM 23101,ANTH 32220,CRES 23101,CRES 33101,CHDV 22212,GNDR 23102,GNDR 31700,HIST 26903,HIST 36903

ANTH 24511-24512. Anthropology of Museums I-II.

This sequence examines museums from a variety of perspectives. We consider the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, the image and imagination of African American culture as presented in local museums, and museums as memorials, as exemplified by Holocaust exhibitions. Several visits to area museums required.

ANTH 24705. Jurisdiction: Language and the Law. 100 Units.

Instructor(s): J. Richland
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 34705

ANTH 24800. Uncanny Modernities. 100 Units.

This seminar examines the concept of the "uncanny" as an ethnographic topic. Pursuing the linkages between perception, trauma, and historical memory, this course asks if the modern state form necessarily produces the uncanny as a social effect. We explore this theme through works of Freud, Lacan, Derrida, Benjamin, and Foucault, as well as recent ethnographies that privilege the uncanny in their social analysis.

Instructor(s): J. Masco     Terms Offered: Not offered 2012–13; will be offered 2013–14
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 54800

ANTH 25102. Local Bodies, Global Capital. 100 Units.

The project of this class is to closely examine the relationship between global capital and local bodies, or put different, to look at the implications of economic forms for particular people's experience and collective forms of existence. The class will read divergently critical theories of capitalism and some historically-situated field materials, focusing on interplays between speculative, scientific, and spectral qualities of economic practice. We will examine some local sites of multinational capital investment, production, and circulation: from factory floors to marketplaces, from transnational scientific research to pharmaceutical marketing. In order to better grasp local bodies, the class will pay special attention to biomedical, genomic, and pharmaceutical industries that emerged as a major locus of global capital investment, as well as read for the existential, bodily, and political complaints about shared market conditions voiced around the globe. By examining comparatively some particular health disorders, incidents, and interventions, the class will ask: How are the ways of being, feeling, and thinking determined by the abstract global power of capital? How do bodies and economies intersect? How do local bodies and subjectivities negotiate temporalities, materialities, and epistemologies associated with the speculative and spectral features of global capital? Can we grasp a shared global condition, which is capitalism, from the vantage point of some embodied local lives?

Instructor(s): L. Jasarevic     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): INST 27501

ANTH 25110. Living with Debt: A Comparative Perspective. 100 Units.

This course approaches debt anthropologically, as a universal cultural practice that forms and undoes social relations, amasses and dissipates wealth, and profoundly shapes the experience of people involved in market or nonmonetary exchanges. Treating debt as a broadly economic category, the course will investigate comparatively how do people live with debt, how does indebtedness feel, and what are the economic and political implications of local borrowing-lending strategies. Because consumer and national debt seem to be a shared contemporary global predicament, the course will also critically examine historical dynamics at work in and different scales of debt economies: national, transnational, familial, and personal. The course will look at practice and experience of indebtedness inside and outside the market: from credit card debts to barter and gift exchanges, from organ donations to military and diplomatic relations. By broadening our definition of debt, these comparative insights aim to excavate an experience of indebtedness held in common cross-culturally as well as complicate what seems most natural about giving, owing, and owning.

Instructor(s): Larisa Jasarevic     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): INST 28525

ANTH 25116. Magic Matters. 100 Units.

The class explores lively presence of magic in the contemporary, presumably disenchanted world. It approaches the problem of magic historically—examining how magic became an object of social scientific inquiry—and anthropologically, attending to the magic in practice on the margins of the industrial, rational, cosmopolitan, and technological societies and economies. Furthermore, this class reads classic and contemporary ethnographies of magic together with the studies of science and technology to critically examine questions of agency, practice, experience, experiment, and efficacy. The class reads widely across sites, disciplines, and theories, attending to eventful objects and alien agents, stepping into post-socialist, post-colonial, and post-secular magic markets and medical clinics, and reading for the political energies of the emergent communities that effectively mix science, magic, and technology.

Instructor(s): Larisa Jasarevic     Terms Offered: Winter 2013
Prerequisite(s): None
Equivalent Course(s): CHDV 25116,INST 27701

ANTH 25200. Approaches to Gender in Anthropology. 100 Units.

This course examines gender as a cultural category in anthropological theory, as well as in everyday life. After reviewing the historical sources of the current concern with women, gender, and sexuality in anthropology and the other social sciences, we critically explore some key controversies (e.g., the relationship between production and reproduction in different sociocultural orders; the links between "public" and "private" in current theories of politics; and the construction of sexualities, nationalities, and citizenship in a globalizing world).

Instructor(s): S. Gal     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 43800,GNDR 25201,GNDR 43800

ANTH 25305. Anthropology of Food and Cuisine. 100 Units.

Contemporary human foodways are not only highly differentiated in cultural and social terms, but often have long and complicated histories. Anthropologists have long given attention to food. But, until quite recently, they did so in an unsystematic, haphazard fashion. This course explores several related themes with a view towards both the micro- and macro-politics of food by examining a range of ethnographic and historical case studies and theoretical texts. It takes the format of a seminar augmented by lectures (during the first few weeks), scheduled video screenings, and individual student presentations during the rest of the course.

Instructor(s): S. Palmié     Terms Offered: Not offered 2012–13; will be offered 2013–14
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 35305

ANTH 25325. History and Culture of Baseball. 100 Units.

Study of the history and culture of baseballcan raise in a new light a wide range of basic questions in social theory. The world of sports is one of the paradoxical parts of cultural history, intensely intellectually scrutinized and elaborately “covered” by media, yet largely absent from scholarly curricula. Perhaps more than any other sport, baseball has even drawn a wide range of scholars to publish popular books about it, yet has produced few professional scholars whose careers are shaped by study of it. In this course, we will examine studies that connect the cultural history of baseball to race, nation, and decolonization, to commodity fetishism and the development of capitalist institutions, to globalization and production of locality. We will compare studies of baseball from a range of disciplinary perspectives (economics, evolutionary biology, political science, history and anthropology) and will give special attention to the culture and history of baseball in Chicago. We hope and expect that this course will be a meeting ground for people who know a lot about baseball and want to learn more about cultural anthropology, and people who are well read in anthropology or social theory who want to know more about baseball. The course will draw heavily on the rich library of books and articles about baseball, scholarly and otherwise, and will also invite students to pursue their own research topics in baseball culture and history.

Instructor(s): J. Kelly
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 35325

ANTH 25410. Anthropology of Everyday Life. 100 Units.

In an effort to clarify the field of everyday life ethnography and stimulate critical reflection on the everyday lives we all lead, this course draws on three bodies of literature: (1) classic anthropological approaches to studying social life (e.g., behaviorism and utilitarianism, the sacred/profane distinction, phenomenology, habitus and practice); (2) twentieth-century cultural Marxist critical theory; and (3) recent studies of popular culture. This course includes a workshop component to accommodate student projects.

Instructor(s): J. Farquhar     Terms Offered: Not offered 2012–13; will be offered 2013–14
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 35410

ANTH 25500. Cultural Politics of Contemporary India. 100 Units.

Structured as a close-reading seminar, this class offers an anthropological immersion in the cultural politics of urban India today. A guiding thread in the readings is the question of the ideologies and somatics of shifting "middle class" formations; and their articulation through violence, gender, consumerism, religion, and technoscience.

Instructor(s): W. Mazzarella     Terms Offered: Not offered 2012–13; will be offered 2013–14
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 42600,SALC 20900,SALC 30900

ANTH 25510. Afterlives of Gandhi. 100 Units.

This course deals with transnational textual, political, and theoretical transmissions of the Gandhi idea in the first half of the twentieth century.

Instructor(s): L. Gandhi, W. Mazzarella     Terms Offered: Not offered 2012–13; will be offered 2013–14
Prerequisite(s): undefined
Note(s): undefined
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 24308

ANTH 25900. South Asia Before the Buddha. 100 Units.

South Asia has a rich historical record, from the very beginnings of our species to the present, and yet the earlier part of this record is surprisingly little-known outside specialist circles. This course provides a broad overview of South Asian archaeology and early history, from the beginnings of agricultural production to the expansion of states and empires in the early days of textual records. We cover critical anthropological processes such as the origins and expansion of agriculture, the development of one of the world's first urban societies—the Harappan or Indus civilization—the growth and institutionalization of social inequalities, and changing contexts of social and religious life. While the course actually extends a bit beyond the time of the Buddha, its major focus is on the periods up to and including the Early Historic. No prior experience of either South Asia or archaeology is assumed; Indeed, we will think quite a bit about the nature of evidence and about how we know about the more distant past.

Instructor(s): K. Morrison     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): SALC 25900

ANTH 25905. Introduction to the Musical Folklore of Central Asia. 100 Units.

This course explores the musical traditions of the peoples of Central Asia, both in terms of historical development and cultural significance. Topics include the music of the epic tradition, the use of music for healing, instrumental genres, and Central Asian folk and classical traditions. Basic field methods for ethnomusicology are also covered. Extensive use is made of recordings of musical performances and of live performances in the area.

Instructor(s): K. Arik     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): Knowledge of Arabic and/or Islamic studies helpful but not required
Equivalent Course(s): NEHC 20765,EEUR 23400,EEUR 33400,MUSI 23503,MUSI 33503

ANTH 26020. Archaeology of Modernity. 100 Units.

This course covers the development, themes, practices, and problems of the archaeology of the modern era (post 1450 AD), or what in North America is better known as the subfield of "historical archaeology." Texts and discussions address topics such as the archaeology of colonialism, capitalism, industrialization, and mass consumption. Case studies from plantation archaeology, urban archaeology, and international contexts anchor the discussion, as does a consideration of interdisciplinary methods using texts, artifacts, and oral history. Our goal is to understand the historical trajectory of this peculiar archaeological practice, as well as its contemporary horizon. The overarching question framing the course is: what is modernity and what can archaeology contribute to our understanding of it?

Instructor(s): S. Dawdy     Terms Offered: Not offered 2012–13; will be offered 2013–14
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 46020

ANTH 26505. Non-Industrial Agriculture. 100 Units.

Agriculture is, fundamentally, a human manipulation of the environment, a deliberately maintained successional state designed to serve human needs and desires. In this course, we use the history of non-industrial agriculture to think through some contemporary concerns about environmental change and the sources of our food—including topics such as genetically modified plants, fertilizers, sustainability, and invasive species. Beginning with the origins of agriculture in the early Holocene, we examine several forms of so-called "traditional" agriculture in the tropics and elsewhere, from swidden to intensive cropping. While the course is framed in terms of contemporary concerns, our focus is primarily historical and ethnographic, focusing on the experiences of agriculturalists over the last ten thousand years, including non-industrial farmers today. Students will be expected to produce and present a research paper.

Instructor(s): K. Morrison     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 46505,ENST 26505

ANTH 26710-26711. Ancient Landscapes I-II.

The landscape of the Near East contains a detailed and subtle record of environmental, social, and economic processes that have obtained over thousands of years. Landscape analysis is therefore proving to be fundamental to an understanding of the processes that underpinned the development of ancient Near Eastern society. This class provides an overview of the ancient cultural landscapes of this heartland of early civilization from the early stages of complex societies in the fifth and sixth millennia B.C. to the close of the Early Islamic period around the tenth century A.D.

ANTH 26715. The Rise of the State in the Near East. 100 Units.

This course introduces the background and development of the first urbanized civilizations in the Near East in the period from 9000 to 2200 BC. In the first half of this course, we examine the archaeological evidence for the first domestication of plants and animals and the earliest village communities in the "fertile crescent" (i.e., the Levant, Anatolia, Mesopotamia). The second half of this course focuses on the economic and social transformations that took place during the development from simple, village-based communities to the emergence of the urbanized civilizations of the Sumerians and their neighbors in the fourth and third millennia BC.

Instructor(s): G. Stein
Prerequisite(s): Any course in archaeology or permission of instructor
Equivalent Course(s): NEAA 20030

ANTH 26830. Archaeology of Religious Experience. 100 Units.

This seminar provides a critical exploration of archaeological approaches to past religious life. Drawing on a variety of case studies spanning a broad temporal and geographic spectrum, we examine/interrogate how object worlds can help to expand our understanding of religion in prehistoric and historic societies. Firmly grounded in contemporary anthropological thinking, this course explores theoretical and methodological possibilities, challenges, and limitations arising from archaeological studies of religious experience.

Instructor(s): F. Richard     Terms Offered: Not offered 2012–13; will be offered 2013–14

ANTH 26900. Archaeological Data Sets. 100 Units.

This course focuses on the methodological basis of archaeological data analysis. Its goals are twofold: (1) to provide students with an opportunity to examine research questions through the study of archaeological data; and (2) to allow students to evaluate evidential claims in light of analytical results. We consider data collection, sampling and statistical populations, exploratory data analysis, and statistical inference. Built around computer applications, the course also introduces computer analysis, data encoding, and database structure.

Instructor(s): M. Lycett     Terms Offered: Not offered 2012–13; will be offered 2013–14
Prerequisite(s): Advanced standing and consent of instructor

ANTH 27130. America: Society, Polity, and Speech Community. 100 Units.

We explore the place of languages and of discourses about languages in the history and present condition of how American mass society stands in relation to the political structures of the North American (nation-) states and to American speech communities. We address plurilingualisms of several different origins (i.e., indigenous, immigrant) that have been incorporated into the contemporary American speech community, the social stratification of English in a regime of standardization that draws speakers up into a system of linguistic "register," and how language itself has become an issue-focus of American political struggles in the past and contemporaneously.

Instructor(s): M. Silverstein     Terms Offered: Not offered 2012–13; will be offered 2013–14
Equivalent Course(s): LING 27130

ANTH 27505. Professional Persuasions: The Rhetoric of Expertise in Modern Life. 100 Units.

This course dissects the linguistic forms and semiotics processes by which experts (often called professionals) persuade their clients, competitors, and the public to trust them and rely on their forms of knowledge. We consider the discursive aspects of professional training (e.g., lawyers, economists, accountants) and take a close look at how professions (e.g., social work, psychology, medicine) stage interactions with clients. We examine a central feature of modern life—the reliance on experts—by analyzing the rhetoric and linguistic form of expert knowledge.

Instructor(s): S. Gal     Terms Offered: Not offered 2012–13; will be offered 2013–14
Equivalent Course(s): LING 27220

ANTH 27510. Language and Temporality: Ethnographies of Time. 100 Units.

How does language create our sense of time, and our conviction that there is/are pasts, presents and futures? How are quite different forms of time (in conjunction with space) constructed by language ideologies and enacted in familiar and exotic interactional events?  National time and memory, narrative time, historical time, romantic time, diagetic time, diasporic time, global time, institutional time, and many others -- have all been proposed and discussed in recent ethnographies. They all require mediation by linguistic or broadly semiotic form and action. The class will start with some theoretical discussion of semiotic tools for analyzing temporality and then read a series of recent ethnographies that take up these issues in depth.

Instructor(s): S. Gal     Terms Offered: Not offered 2012-13; will be offered 2013-14

ANTH 27700. Romani Language and Linguistics. 100 Units.

This is a beginning course on the language of the Roms (Gypsies) that is based on the Arli dialect currently in official use in the Republic of Macedonia, with attention also given to dialects of Europe and the United States. An introduction to Romani linguistic history is followed by an outline of Romani grammar based on Macedonian Arli, which serves as the basis of comparison with other dialects. We then read authentic texts and discuss questions of grammar, standardization, and Romani language in society.

Instructor(s): V. Friedman     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): LGLN 27800,ANTH 47900,EEUR 21000,EEUR 31000,LGLN 37800

ANTH 28010. Introduction to Biological Anthropology. 100 Units.

This course provides a general evolutionary framework for the 360 living and 470 fossil primate species. Applications of chromosomal studies (karyology) and biomolecular comparisons (molecular phylogenetics) are also covered. Other topics include principles of classification, principles of phylogenetic reconstruction, scaling effects of body size, primates in the context of mammal evolution, diets and dentitions, locomotor morphology and behavior, morphology and function of sense organs, evolutionary aspects of the brain, reproductive biology, and social organization. Each lecture concludes with implications for human evolution.

Instructor(s): R. Martin     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): BIOS 10110 or 10130
Equivalent Course(s): BIOS 13330

ANTH 28100. Evolution of the Hominoidea. 100 Units.

This course is a detailed consideration of the fossil record and the phylogeny of Hominidae and collateral taxa of the Hominidea that is based upon studies of casts and comparative primate osteology.

Instructor(s): R. Tuttle     Terms Offered: Not offered 2012-13; will be offered 2013-14
Prerequisite(s): Third- or fourth-year standing and consent of instructor
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 38100,EVOL 38100,HIPS 24000

ANTH 28105. Primate Evolution. 100 Units.

This course is the first of three in the Primate Biology and Human Evolution sequence (see also BIOS 23248 and 23253). This course introduces the evolution of nonhuman primates and humans. We focus on taxonomic classification; the use of fossil and genetic evidence for phylogenetic reconstructions; the evolution of primate morphological and physiological characteristics (e.g., body and brain size, skull and skeleton, sense organs, and dietary and reproductive adaptations); the adaptive radiation of Prosimians, New World Monkeys, Old World Monkeys, and apes into their current areas of geographic distribution; and an overview of the hominid fossil record.

Instructor(s): R. Martin, University of Chicago Paris Center     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): Consent of instructor
Equivalent Course(s): BIOS 23241

ANTH 28210. Colonial Ecologies. 100 Units.

This seminar explores the historical ecology of European colonial expansion in a comparative framework, concentrating on the production of periphery and the transformation of incorporated societies and environments. In the first half of the quarter, we consider the theoretical frameworks, sources of evidence, and analytical strategies employed by researchers to address the conjunction of environmental and human history in colonial contexts. During the second half of the course, we explore the uses of these varied approaches and lines of evidence in relation to specific cases and trajectories of transformation since the sixteenth century.

Instructor(s): M. Lycett, K. Morrison     Terms Offered: Not offered 2012-13; will be offered 2013-14
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 48210,ENST 28210

ANTH 28300. Comparative Primate Morphology. 200 Units.

This course covers functional morphology of locomotor, alimentary, and reproductive systems in primates. Dissections are performed on monkeys and apes.

Instructor(s): R. Tuttle     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 38200,EVOL 38200,HIPS 23500

ANTH 28400. Bioarchaeology and the Human Skeleton. 100 Units.

This course is intended to provide students in archaeology with a thorough understanding of bioanthropological and osteological methods used in the interpretation of prehistoric societies by introducing bioanthropological methods and theory. In particular, lab instruction stresses hands-on experience in analyzing the human skeleton, whereas seminar classes integrate bioanthropological theory and application to specific cases throughout the world. Lab and seminar-format class meet weekly.

Instructor(s): M. C. Lozada     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 38800,BIOS 23247

ANTH 28510. Anthropology of Space/Place/Landscape. 100 Units.

Materiality has emerged as a fertile interest in anthropology and other social sciences. Within this broad conceptual umbrella, space, place, and landscape have become critical lenses for analyzing and interpreting people’s engagement with their physical surroundings. Once an inert backdrop to social life, a mere epiphenomenon, the material world is now acknowledged as a generative medium and terrain of cultural production: at once socially produced and framing sociality, shaping and constraining human possibilities, both by and against design… This course concerns itself with these articulations: 1) the spatial production of social worlds, 2) its expressions in different cultural and historical settings, and 3) its trails of ambiguous effects. Drawing on several fields, anthropology and geography chiefly, but also art history, architecture, philosophy, and social theory, we will explore how the triad of space/place/landscape works on, in, and through different social worlds and its role in the making of social experience, perception, and imagination. We will also reflect on how spatial formations frequently elude the very social projects that have birthed them. The objective of the course is to provide you with a foundation in contemporary spatial thought, which can be creatively applied to questions of spatiality in your own research setting.

Instructor(s): F. Richard     Terms Offered: Not offered 2012-13; will be offered 2013-14
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 58510

ANTH 28600. Apes and Human Evolution. 100 Units.

This course is a critical examination of the ways in which data on the behavior, morphology, and genetics of apes have been used to elucidate human evolution. We emphasize bipedalism, hunting, meat eating, tool behavior, food sharing, cognitive ability, language, self-awareness, and sociability. Visits to local zoos and museums, film screenings, and demonstrations with casts of fossils and skeletons required.

Instructor(s): R. Tuttle     Terms Offered: Autumn, Spring
Note(s): BIOS 23241 recommended. Autumn course at University of Chicago Center in Paris; Spring course on campus.
Equivalent Course(s): BIOS 23253

ANTH 28702. Archaeologies of Political Life. 100 Units.

This seminar examines how archaeologists have approached political life in the past forty years. Its aim is to question the categories through which political worlds are often studied (beginning with such unwieldy terms as 'states,’ 'chiefdoms,’ ‘complexity,’ etc…) and complicate analyses of politics in the past. Rather than relying on concepts that already predetermine the outcome of political functioning, we will read key texts in anthropology and political theory (on sovereignty, domination, legitimacy, political economy, governance, ideology, hegemony, subjectivity, anarchy) to dissect the foundations and operations of power, expose its cultural logics, and explore the processes behind the categories. Some of the questions that will guide our discussions include: How do politics work in both past and present? Through what channels and modalities? With what effects (anticipated or not)? And what role does the material world play in mediating these relations? Each week will pair theoretical readings with case-studies drawn from different parts of the world and from different moments in history. Through this seminar, students will gain familiarity with classic archaeological thinking on power and critical perspectives steering contemporary studies of past politics.

Instructor(s): F. Richard
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 58702

ANTH 29105. Pollen Analysis. 100 Units.

Although this course is concerned with Holocene vegetation history and the impact of humans on that vegetation, concepts and lab skills presented can be applied to a variety of disciplines. Initial lab exercises prepare students for the primary focus of the course: the collection, processing, analysis, and interpretation of a pollen core from a local wetland. We take one weekend field trip to collect the core and observe local vegetation. Students then analyze and interpret pollen from the core, culminating in an in-class research symposium.

Instructor(s): K. Morrison     Terms Offered: Not offered 2012–13; will be offered 2013–14

ANTH 29500. Archaeology Laboratory Practicum. 100 Units.

This hands-on lab practicum course exposes students to various stages of artifact processing on a collection from a recently excavated site (e.g., washing, sorting, flotation, identification, data entry, analysis, report preparation, curation). The primary requirement is that students commit to a minimum of nine hours of lab work per week, with tasks assigned according to immediate project needs.

Instructor(s): S. Dawdy     Terms Offered: Autumn, Winter, Spring
Prerequisite(s): Consent of instructor
Note(s): Undergraduates may take this course only once for credit.
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 59500

ANTH 29700. Readings in Anthropology. 100 Units.

Terms Offered: Autumn, Winter, Spring
Prerequisite(s): Consent of instructor and Director of Undergraduate Studies
Note(s): Students are required to submit the College Reading and Research Course Form. At the discretion of the instructor, this course is available for either a quality grade or for P/F grading.

ANTH 29900. Preparation of Bachelor's Essay. 100 Units.

Terms Offered: Autumn, Winter, Spring
Prerequisite(s): Consent of instructor and Director of Undergraduate Studies
Note(s): Students are required to submit the College Reading and Research Course Form. At the discretion of the instructor, this course is available for either a quality grade or for P/F grading. For honors requirements, see Honors section under Program Requirements.

ANTH 29910. Bachelor's Essay Seminar. 100 Units.

Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): Consent of instructor and Director of Undergraduate Studies
Note(s): Open only to students currently writing BA honors papers.

ANTH 30000. Classical Readings in Anthropology: Anthropological Theory. 100 Units.

Since its inception as an academically institutionalized discipline, anthropology has always addressed the relation between a self-consciously modernizing West and its various and changing others. Yet it has not always done so with sufficient critical attention to its own concepts and categories—a fact that has led, since at least the 1980s, to considerable debate about the nature of the anthropological enterprise and its epistemological foundations. This course provides a brief critical introduction to the history of anthropological thought over the course of the discipline's long twentieth century, form the 1880s to the present. Although we focus on the North American and British traditions, we review important strains of French and, to a lesser extent, German social theory in chronicling the emergence and transformation of modern anthropology as an empirically based, but theoretically informed, practice of knowledge production about human sociality and culture.

Instructor(s): Staff     Terms Offered: TBA
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 21107

ANTH 30405. Anthropology of Disability. 100 Units.

This seminar undertakes to explore "disability" from an anthropological perspective that recognizes it as a socially constructed concept with implications for our understanding of fundamental issues about culture, society, and individual differences. We explore a wide range of theoretical, legal, ethical, and policy issues as they relate to the experiences of persons with disabilities, their families, and advocates. The final project is a presentation on the fieldwork.

Instructor(s): M. Fred     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): Third- or fourth-year standing
Equivalent Course(s): MAPS 36900,ANTH 20405,CHDV 30405,HMRT 25210,HMRT 35210,SOSC 36900

ANTH 30415. American Legal Culture. 100 Units.

This seminar examines how the values and norms of American Legal Culture are constructed through both the experiences of the general public and socialization of key actors in institutions such as law schools/firms, popular media, courts, police, and jails/prisons. Sessions combine discussion of relevant literature with presentations by Chicago-area experts from these various institutions. Seminar participants conduct fieldwork in related sites in the Chicago area, presenting the results of their research projects in the final session(s) of the course.

Instructor(s): M. Fred     Terms Offered: Not offered 2012–13; will be offered 2013–14
Prerequisite(s): Third- or fourth-year standing for undergraduates
Equivalent Course(s): LAWS 93801,MAPS 46701,LLSO 26203,SOSC 30416

ANTH 30705. Intensive Study of a Culture: Lowland Maya History and Ethnography. 100 Units.

The survey encompasses the dynamics of first contact; long-term cultural accommodations achieved during colonial rule; disruptions introduced by state and market forces during the early postcolonial period; the status of indigenous communities in the twentieth century; and new social, economic, and political challenges being faced by the contemporary peoples of the area. We stress a variety of traditional theoretical concerns of the broader Mesoamerican region stressed (e.g., the validity of reconstructive ethnography; theories of agrarian community structure; religious revitalization movements; the constitution of such identity categories as indigenous, Mayan, and Yucatecan). In this respect, the course can serve as a general introduction to the anthropology of the region. The relevance of these area patterns for general anthropological debates about the nature of culture, history, identity, and social change are considered.

Instructor(s): J. Lucy     Terms Offered: Autumn

ANTH 31700. Slavery and Unfree Labor. 100 Units.

This course offers a concise overview of institutions of dependency, servitude, and coerced labor in Europe and Africa, from Roman times to the onset of the Atlantic slave trade, and compares their further development (or decline) in the context of the emergence of New World plantation economies based on racial slavery. We discuss the role of several forms of unfreedom and coerced labor in the making of the "modern world" and reflect on the manner in which ideologies and practices associated with the idea of a free labor market supersede, or merely mask, relations of exploitation and restricted choice.

Instructor(s): S. Palmié     Terms Offered: Not offered 2012-13; will be offered 2013-14
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 22205,CRES 22205,LACS 22205,LACS 31700

ANTH 32110. Culture, Power, Subjectivity: Migration and Multiculturalism. 100 Units.

This quarter’s version of Culture, Power, Subjectivity focuses on migration, multiculturalism and the processes of social transformation that occur as people move across cultural/national borders. The goals of the course are threefold.  First, rather than take migration as an already-constituted object of study, we will consider how it is that social scientists (and anthropologists and sociologists in particular) have thought about questions of migration and movement and therefore posed certain kinds of questions and not others.  Examining this problem means that we will also have to consider some foundational texts on “culture,” “society” and “migration.”  The second goal of the class is to develop a new vocabulary for theorizing the social and cultural processes that occur in migration.  Finally, we will scrutinize the content of various ethnographies -- the predicaments people face, how they get resolved, the consequences etc.  Students should leave the class with a better grasp of some of the foundational concepts in anthropology and sociology as well as an appreciation of the empirical phenomenon of migration. (C*)

Instructor(s): J. Cole     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): Consent of instructor required for undergraduates.
Equivalent Course(s): CHDV 32101

ANTH 32200. Intensive Study of a Culture: Modern China. 100 Units.

Contemporary China is often spoken of as undergoing deep and rapid social change. Certainly globalizing forces have been especially evident in all parts of China over the last couple of decades. At the same time, like the rest of East Asia and the Pacific Rim, China has developed distinctive social, cultural, and political forms, many of which circulate nationally and transnationally. This course comes to terms with both the processes of change that have characterized the last few decades and with a few recent social and cultural phenomena of interest. Because the scholarly literature lags behind the pace of transformation in China, we draw on a wide variety of materials: ethnography, memoir, fiction, films, essays, historical studies, short stories, websites. Emphasis in class discussions is on grasping how contemporary Chinese realities are experienced from viewpoints within China—this is the sense in which the course is intensive study of a "culture." Readings and materials are divided into several major units concerned with historical memory, rural China, urban life, labor migration, and popular culture. Students undertake, as a term project, their own investigation of some aspect of contemporary cultural change in China.

Instructor(s): J. Farquhar     Terms Offered: Not offered 2012-13; will be offered 2013-14
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 21251

ANTH 32220. Love, Conjugality, and Capital: Intimacy in the Modern World. 100 Units.

A look at societies in other parts of the world demonstrates that modernity in the realm of love, intimacy, and family often had a different trajectory from the European one. This course surveys ideas and practices surrounding love, marriage, and capital in the modern world. Using a range of theoretical, historical, and anthropological readings, as well as films, the course explores such topics as the emergence of companionate marriage in Europe and the connections between arranged marriage, dowry, love, and money. Case studies are drawn primarily from Europe, India, and Africa.

Instructor(s): J. Cole, R. Majumdar     Terms Offered: Winter 2013
Prerequisite(s): Any 10000-level music course or consent of instructor
Note(s): This course typically is offered in alternate years.
Equivalent Course(s): SALC 23101,ANTH 21525,CHDV 22212,GNDR 23102

ANTH 32300. The Anthropology of Science. 100 Units.

Reading key works in the philosophy of science, as well as ethnographic studies of scientific practices and objects, this course introduces contemporary science studies. We interrogate how technoscientific "facts" are produced, discussing the transformations in social order produced by new scientific knowledge. Possible topics include the human genome project, biodiversity, and the digital revolution.

Instructor(s): J. Masco     Terms Offered: Not offered 2012–13; will be offered 2013–14
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 22105,HIPS 21301

ANTH 32410. Introduction to Science and Technology Studies. 100 Units.

Science, technology and information are the ‘racing heart’ of contemporary cognitive capitalism and the engine of change of our technological culture. They are deeply relevant to the understanding of contemporary societies. But how are we to understand the highly esoteric cultures and practices of science, technology and information? During the twentieth century, sociologists, historians, philosophers, and anthropologists raised original, interesting, and consequential questions about the sciences and technology.  Often their work drew on and responded to each other, and, taken together, their various approaches came to constitute a field, "science and technology studies."  The course furnishes an initial guide to this field.  Students will not only encounter some of its principal concepts, approaches, and findings, but will also get a chance to apply science-studies perspectives themselves by performing a fieldwork project. Among the topics we examine are the sociology of scientific knowledge and its applications, constructivism and actor network theory, the study of technology and information, as well as recent work on knowledge and technology in the economy and finance. Beginning with the second week of classes, we will devote the second half of the class to presentations and discussion.

Instructor(s): K. Knorr Cetina     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): SOCI 30217,CHSS 30217,ANTH 22410,SOCI 20217

ANTH 32530. Ethnographic Film. 100 Units.

This seminar explores ethnographic film as a genre for representing "reality," anthropological knowledge, and cultural lives. We examine how ethnographic film emerged in a particular intellectual and political economic context, as well as how subsequent conceptual and formal innovations have shaped the genre. We also consider social responses to ethnographic film in terms of (1) the contexts for producing and circulating these works, (2) the ethical and political concerns raised by cross-cultural representation, and (3) the development of indigenous media and other practices in conversation with ethnographic film. Throughout the course, we situate ethnographic film within the larger project for representing "culture," addressing the status of ethnographic film in relation to other documentary practices (e.g., written ethnography, museum exhibitions, documentary film).

Instructor(s): J. Chu     Terms Offered: Not offered 2012–13; will be offered 2013–14
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 22530

ANTH 32535. Engaging Media: Thinking about Media and their Audiences. 100 Units.

In the first part of the course we look at how post–World War II mass communications and “classical” film theory theorized communication and spectatorship; in particular, we trace the dialogue between these liberatory models and the totalitarianism and propaganda (i.e., top-down models of control) of the times. We then look at theories of mass media reception and spectatorship that put ideology at the center of their analysis, interrogating theories of the “receiver” of media messages as cultural dope (Frankfurt school Marxism), psychoanalytic and (post-)Marxist theories of spectatorship (“Screen” theory), feminist critiques of film spectatorship, and reactions to the above in cognitivist film studies. We then turn to British Cultural Studies’ theories of media, focusing on how such work attempts to reconcile models of reception as ideologically unproblematic and as determined by the ideological structures of production and reception. Particular focus is given to the theoretical arguments regarding ideology and media, the notion of “code,” and the differences and similarities in the model of communication with the sociology of mass communication.

In the second half of the course we look at anthropological approaches to media and how anthropologists have taken up the issue of media reception. Why have anthropologists largely ignored media and reception studies until recently? What kinds of contributions can anthropology make to the theorization and methodological approach to reception? By critically looking at ethnographies of reception, we problematize the concept of reception proper, looking at more holistic ways of dealing with the issue of the mediation of social life. In the final part of the course we re-evaluate what we mean by “mass media” and “reception.” First we look media (con)texts that blur the duality of production/reception. We then consider new forms of media and to what extent “reception” as a category even makes sense in attempting to understand how engagement with such new media functions.

Instructor(s): C. Nakassis
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 22535

ANTH 33106. Indiginieties. 100 Units.

Depending on how you look at it, questions of indigeneity – the who, how, what, and why of peoples that either identify, or are identified, as “native” – are questions that at once transcend, entail, and/or are produced by Euro-American scholarly, political and legal inquiry. Whether assailed as the product of colonial orientalism or celebrated as the ur-subjectivity of those who resist it (or something in between), the claims of, to, and about indigeneity continue to excite and demand attention scholarly and political. Indeed some argue that politics of indigeneity have gained unique traction in recent decades, as indigenous actors, scholars and their advocates have pressed for changes to legal, political and cultural/scientific regimes that have indigenous affairs as their chief objects of inquiry. One need only consider the 2007 passage of the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the legal decisions acknowledging the force of native title in the Supreme Courts of Australia and Canada, and even the changes in various regimes of research concerning the social scientific study of native peoples and/or the representation of their material culture, all of which happened less than 20 years ago.           Despite these long-standing interests and recent social, political and economic gains, indigenous communities remain among the most vulnerable in the world. These trenchant inequalities beg the question, how does the condition of indigeneity relate to the various social forces shaping the world today, and to the lived experiences of those who claim to be, or get named as, indigenous. It is towards an exploration of this question that this course is dedicated. Among the lines of inquiry that we will pursue in the course are: 1) tracing the genealogies of indigeneity as a notion, both in Euro-American human sciences and in other epistemological traditions; 2) considering the role that notions of indigeneity play in contemporary national and international political regimes ;3) exploring how indigeneity is claimed or disclaimed, by different peoples around the world, and why; and 4) considering the ways in which notions of indigeneity are being figured in new regimes of possession and commodification, including intellectual property, genetics and genome mapping, and the role of indigenous knowledge in resource extraction and bioprospecting.           In pursuing these questions this course will endeavor to tease out the manifold relationships that the rising politics of indigeneity at the dawn of the 21st century has to other global political economic phenomena. Simultaneously, the course will also attend to the ways in which different peoples, caught up in different sociopolitical milieu, orient to the notion of indigeneity as it articulates with their lived experiences with matters of autochthony (the state of being “from here”), allocthony (being “from elsewhere”) and the consequences of those distinctions to their everyday lives.

Instructor(s): J. Richland
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 22606

ANTH 33610. Medicine and Society in Twentieth-Century China. 100 Units.

This course is a survey of historical and anthropological approaches to medical knowledge and practice in twentieth-century China. Materials cover early modernizing debates, medicine and the state, Maoist public health, traditional Chinese medicine, and health and medicine in popular culture.

Instructor(s): J. Farquhar     Terms Offered: Not offered 2012–13; will be offered 2013–14

ANTH 34502. Anthropology of Museums I. 100 Units.

Instructor(s): M. Fred     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): Advanced standing and consent of instructor
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 24511,CHDV 38101,CRES 34501,MAPS 34500,SOSC 34500

ANTH 34705. Jurisdiction: Language and the Law. 100 Units.

Instructor(s): J. Richland
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 24705

ANTH 34900. Big Science and the Birth of the National Security State. 100 Units.

This course examines the mutual creation of big science and the American national security state during the Manhattan Project. It presents the atomic bomb project as the center of a new orchestration of scientific, industrial, military, and political institutions in everyday American life. Exploring the linkages between military technoscience, nation-building, and concepts of security and international order, we interrogate one of the foundation structures of the modern world system.

Instructor(s): J. Masco     Terms Offered: Not offered 2012–13; will be offered 2013–14
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 22400,HIPS 21200

ANTH 35110. Cultural Psychology. 100 Units.

There is a substantial portion of the psychological nature of human beings that is neither homogeneous nor fixed across time and space. At the heart of the discipline of cultural psychology is the tenet of psychological pluralism. Research findings in cultural psychology raise provocative questions about the integrity and value of alternative forms of subjectivity across cultural groups. This course analyzes the concept of “culture” and examines ethnic and cross-cultural variations in mental functioning, with special attention to the cultural psychology of emotions, self, moral judgment, categorization, and reasoning.

Instructor(s): R. Shweder     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): Third- or fourth-year standing
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 21001,ANTH 21500,CHDV 21000,CHDV 31000,PSYC 23000,PSYC 33000

ANTH 35305. Anthropology of Food and Cuisine. 100 Units.

Contemporary human foodways are not only highly differentiated in cultural and social terms, but often have long and complicated histories. Anthropologists have long given attention to food. But, until quite recently, they did so in an unsystematic, haphazard fashion. This course explores several related themes with a view towards both the micro- and macro-politics of food by examining a range of ethnographic and historical case studies and theoretical texts. It takes the format of a seminar augmented by lectures (during the first few weeks), scheduled video screenings, and individual student presentations during the rest of the course.

Instructor(s): S. Palmié     Terms Offered: Not offered 2012–13; will be offered 2013–14
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 25305

ANTH 35325. History and Culture of Baseball. 100 Units.

Study of the history and culture of baseballcan raise in a new light a wide range of basic questions in social theory. The world of sports is one of the paradoxical parts of cultural history, intensely intellectually scrutinized and elaborately “covered” by media, yet largely absent from scholarly curricula. Perhaps more than any other sport, baseball has even drawn a wide range of scholars to publish popular books about it, yet has produced few professional scholars whose careers are shaped by study of it. In this course, we will examine studies that connect the cultural history of baseball to race, nation, and decolonization, to commodity fetishism and the development of capitalist institutions, to globalization and production of locality. We will compare studies of baseball from a range of disciplinary perspectives (economics, evolutionary biology, political science, history and anthropology) and will give special attention to the culture and history of baseball in Chicago. We hope and expect that this course will be a meeting ground for people who know a lot about baseball and want to learn more about cultural anthropology, and people who are well read in anthropology or social theory who want to know more about baseball. The course will draw heavily on the rich library of books and articles about baseball, scholarly and otherwise, and will also invite students to pursue their own research topics in baseball culture and history.

Instructor(s): J. Kelly
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 25325

ANTH 35410. Anthropology of Everyday Life,The Anthropology of Everyday Life, 100, Units.

In an effort to clarify the field of everyday life ethnography and stimulate critical reflection on the everyday lives we all lead, this course draws on three bodies of literature: (1) classic anthropological approaches to studying social life (e.g., behaviorism and utilitarianism, the sacred/profane distinction, phenomenology, habitus and practice); (2) twentieth-century cultural Marxist critical theory; and (3) recent studies of popular culture. This course includes a workshop component to accommodate student projects. ,In one sense ethnography has always devoted attention to the form and practice of everyday life; in another sense it has always failed to grasp its essence.  Recently, stimulated by materialist critical theory, anthropologists have returned to the problem of the study of everyday life, only to find that our theories and methods only take us partway there.  In an effort to clarify the field of everyday life ethnography and stimulate critical reflection on the everyday lives we all lead, this course will draw on three bodies of literature:  1) classic anthropological approaches to studying social life (behaviorism and utilitarianism, the sacred/profane distinction, phenomenology, habitus and practice, etc.); 2) 20th century cultural Marxist critical theory; and 3) recent studies of popular culture.  The course will include a workshop component to to accommodate student projects. ,

Instructor(s): J. Farquhar,     Terms Offered: Not offered 2012–13; will be offered 2013–14,
Equivalent Course(s): ,ANTH 25410,ANTH 25410

ANTH 35500. The Anthropology of Development. 100 Units.

This course applies anthropological understanding to development programs in "underdeveloped" and "developing" societies. Topics include the history of development; different perspectives on development within the world system; the role of principal development agencies and their use of anthropological knowledge; the problems of ethnographic field inquiry in the context of development programs; the social organization and politics of underdevelopment; the culture construction of "well-being;"  economic, social, and political critiques of development; population, consumption, and the environment; and the future of development.

Instructor(s): A. Kolata     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 22000,ENST 22000

ANTH 36200. Ceramic Analysis for Archaeologists. 100 Units.

This course introduces the theoretical foundations and analytical techniques that allow archaeologists to use ceramics to make inferences about ancient societies. Ethnographic, experimental, and physical science approaches are explored to develop a realistic, integrated understanding of the nature of ceramics as a form of material culture. Practical training in the use of the ceramic labs is included.

Instructor(s): M. Dietler     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): Consent of instructor

ANTH 36700. Archaeology of Race and Ethnicity. 100 Units.

The correlation between ethnic groups and patterns in material culture lies at the heart of many archaeological problems. Over the last several years, a new emphasis on the social construction of racial and ethnic identities has invited a re-examination of the ways in which aspects of the material world (i.e., architecture, pottery, food, clothing) may participate actively in the dialectical process of creating or obscuring difference. This seminar surveys historical debates and engages with current theoretical discussions within archaeology concerning race and ethnicity in complex societies.

Instructor(s): S. Dawdy     Terms Offered: Not offered 2012–13; will be offered 2013–14
Prerequisite(s): Consent of instructor

ANTH 36705. Celts: Ancient, Modern, Postmodern. 100 Units.

Celts and things Celtic have long occupied a prominent and protean place in the popular imagination, and “the Celts” has been an amazingly versatile concept in the politics of identity and collective memory in recent history. This course is an anthropological exploration of this phenomenon that examines: (1) the use of the ancient past in the construction of modern nationalist mythologies of Celtic identity (e.g. in France and Ireland) and regional movements of resistance to nationalist and colonialist projects (e.g. in Brittany, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Gallicia, Asturias); (2) the construction of transnational ethno-nostalgic forms of Celtic identity in modern diasporic communities (Irish, Scottish, etc.); and (3) various recent spiritualist visions of Celticity that decouple the concept from ethnic understandings (e.g. in the New Age and Neo-Pagan movements). All of these are treated in the context of what is known archaeologically about the ancient peoples of Europe who serve as a symbolic reservoir for modern Celtic identities. The course explores these competing Celtic imaginaries in the spaces and media where they are constructed and performed, ranging from museums and monuments, to neo-druid organizations, Celtic cyberspace, Celtic festivals, Celtic theme parks, Celtic music, Celtic commodities, etc.

Instructor(s): M. Dietler
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 21265

ANTH 37201-37202. Language in Culture I-II.

This two-quarter course presents the major issues in linguistics of anthropological interest. These courses must be taken in sequence.

ANTH 37500. Morphology. 100 Units.

This course deals with linguistic structure and patterning beyond the phonological level. We focus on analysis of grammatical and formal oppositions, as well as their structural relationships and interrelationships (morphophonology).

Instructor(s): Staff     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): LING 21000

ANTH 38100. Evolution of the Hominoidea. 100 Units.

This course is a detailed consideration of the fossil record and the phylogeny of Hominidae and collateral taxa of the Hominidea that is based upon studies of casts and comparative primate osteology.

Instructor(s): R. Tuttle     Terms Offered: Not offered 2012-13; will be offered 2013-14
Prerequisite(s): Third- or fourth-year standing and consent of instructor
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 28100,EVOL 38100,HIPS 24000

ANTH 38200. Comparative Primate Morphology. 200 Units.

This course covers functional morphology of locomotor, alimentary, and reproductive systems in primates. Dissections are performed on monkeys and apes.

Instructor(s): R. Tuttle     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 28300,EVOL 38200,HIPS 23500

ANTH 38210. Colonial Ecologies. 100 Units.

This seminar explores the historical ecology of European colonial expansion in a comparative framework, concentrating on the production of periphery and the transformation of incorporated societies and environments. In the first half of the quarter, we consider the theoretical frameworks, sources of evidence, and analytical strategies employed by researchers to address the conjunction of environmental and human history in colonial contexts. During the second half of the course, we explore the uses of these varied approaches and lines of evidence in relation to specific cases and trajectories of transformation since the sixteenth century.

Instructor(s): M. Lycett     Terms Offered: Not offered 2012–13; will be offered 2013–14
Equivalent Course(s): LACS 28210,ANTH 28210,ENST 28210

ANTH 38300. The Practice of Anthropology: Celebrity and Science in Paleoanthropology. 100 Units.

This seminar explores the balance among research, "showbiz" big business, and politics in the careers of Louis, Mary, and Richard Leakey; Alan Walker; Donald Johanson; Jane Goodall; Dian Fossey; and Biruté Galdikas. Information is gathered from films, taped interviews, autobiographies, biographies, pop publications, instructor's anecdotes, and samples of scientific writings.

Instructor(s): R. Tuttle     Terms Offered: Not offered 2012–13; will be offered 2013–14
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 21406,HIPS 21100

ANTH 38400. Classical Readings in Anthropology: History and Theory of Human Evolution. 100 Units.

This course is a seminar on racial, sexual, and class bias in the classic theoretic writings, autobiographies, and biographies of Darwin, Huxley, Haeckel, Keith, Osborn, Jones, Gregory, Morton, Broom, Black, Dart, Weidenreich, Robinson, Leakey, LeGros-Clark, Schultz, Straus, Hooton, Washburn, Coon, Dobzhansky, Simpson, and Gould.

Instructor(s): R. Tuttle     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 21102,EVOL 38400,HIPS 23600

ANTH 38800. Bioarchaeology and the Human Skeleton. 100 Units.

This course is intended to provide students in archaeology with a thorough understanding of bioanthropological and osteological methods used in the interpretation of prehistoric societies by introducing bioanthropological methods and theory. In particular, lab instruction stresses hands-on experience in analyzing the human skeleton, whereas seminar classes integrate bioanthropological theory and application to specific cases throughout the world. Lab and seminar-format class meet weekly.

Instructor(s): M. C. Lozada     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 28400,BIOS 23247

ANTH 40100. The Inka and Aztec States. 100 Units.

This course is an intensive examination of the origins, structure, and meaning of two native states of the ancient Americas: the Inka and the Aztec. Lectures are framed around an examination of theories of state genesis, function, and transformation, with special reference to the economic, institutional, and symbolic bases of indigenous state development. This course is broadly comparative in perspective and considers the structural significance of institutional features that are either common to or unique expressions of these two Native American states.

Instructor(s): A. Kolata     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 20100,LACS 20100,LACS 40305

ANTH 40205. Knowledge/Value. 100 Units.

This course broadly interrogates conceptual and empirical linkages between epistemology and value. It works on the assumption that we are at a historical moment when epistemology, value and the nature of their articulation are all emergent and at stake. The course is closely coupled to a workshop on “Knowledge / Value” that will be held at the end of spring quarter, which will be a broad consideration of the nature of the fact / value distinction in the context of technoscience, law and finance. Students taking this course will be expected to actively participate in the workshop. Readings will be related to the workshop, but will also include other texts that are foundational in considering questions of Knowledge / Value.

Instructor(s): K. Sunder Rajan

ANTH 41100. Ethnography of Europe. 100 Units.

This seminar breaks with the tradition of considering Eastern and Western Europe in different courses and with different theoretical questions. Instead we will start with the political and scholarly division of Europe itself as our first conceptual issue, asking how the division was recast by the Cold War and now recast again in light of the Maastricht Treaty and 1989. Interactions and social processes that cross this divide will provide the objects for analysis in the course. We will also consider how any single phenomenon -- e.g. migration or tourism -- is understood in divergent ways depending on the symbolic geography that is assumed by the investigator. Our task will be to analyze the connections between such different conceptualizations, and between sociocultural processes in different corners of the continent. The topics to be taken up include: nationalisms and citizenships; the morality of capitalism; bureaucracy; regionalism and new forms of sovereignty; politics of sex and reproduction;   utopias and dystopias -- the fate of state socialism; tourism and xenophobia; comparative mafias; memory, nostalgia and revivals. Students will be asked to lead discussions of topics of their choice and/or to present works-in-progress that analyze one or more of these issues.

Instructor(s): S. Gal

ANTH 41200. Anthropology of History. 100 Units.

Anthropologists have long been concerned with the temporal dimension of human culture and sociality, but, until fairly recently (and with significant exceptions), have rarely gone beyond processual modeling. This has dramatically changed. Anthropologists have played a prominent role in the so-called “historic turn in the social sciences”, acknowledging and theorizing the historical subjectivities and historical agency of the ethnographic “other”, but also problematizing the historicity of the ethnographic endeavor itself. The last decades have not only seen a proliferation of empirically rich and theoretically sophisticated historical ethnographies, but also a decisive move towards ethnographies of the historical imagination. Taking its point of departure from a concise introduction to the genealogy of the trope of “historicity” in anthropological discourse, this course aims to explore the possibilities of an anthropology of historical consciousness, discourse and praxis – i.e. the ways in which human groups select, represent, give meaning to, and strategically manipulate constructions of the past. In this, our discussion will not just focus on non-western forms of historical knowledge, but include the analysis of western disciplined historiography as a culturally and historically specific form of promulgating conceptions of the past and its relation to the present.

Instructor(s): S. Palmié

ANTH 41810. Signs and the State. 100 Units.

Relations of communication, as well as coercion, are central though less visible in Weber's famous definition of the state as monopoly of legitimate violence. This course reconsiders the history of the state in connection to the history of signs. Thematic topics (and specific things and sites discussed) include changing semiotic technologies; means; forces and relations of communication (writing, archives, monasteries, books, "the" internet); and specific states (in early historic India and China, early colonial/revolutionary Europe, especially France, Britain, and Atlantic colonies, and selected postcolonial "new nations").

Instructor(s): J. Kelly     Terms Offered: Possibly offered in 2012-13: Winter or Spring
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 22710

ANTH 41900. Crowds and Publics. 100 Units.

The figure of the unruly crowd, anxiously invoked by social theorists from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, was the dystopian alter ego of democratic mass society. Conversely, the figure of the rational mass public, invoked as an ideal from the middle of the twentieth century onwards, relies upon a demonization of the affectively volatile crowd. Oddly, given that they are so intimately related, the two figures of the crowd and the public are rarely explicitly theorized together. This seminar, moving from the early crowd psychology of Le Bon through to contemporary critiques of Habermas, offers an opportunity to redress this lacuna in two ways. On the one hand, we will explore the relationship between affectivity and politics in a wide range of writings. On the other, we will consider the historical relation between theory and social change during a period that stretches from the dawning of mass publicity through the heyday of fascism and on to the diversified terrain of contemporary identity politics. Students will be responsible for classroom presentations as well as a term paper based on the readings.

Instructor(s): W. Mazzarella

ANTH 41901. The Crowd. 100 Units.

At the end of the nineteenth century, the figure of the unruly, affect-laden crowd appeared as both the volatile foundation and the dystopian alter ego of the democratic mass society. By the middle of the twentieth century, following the traumatic excesses of communism and fascism in Europe, the crowd largely disappeared from polite sociological analysis – to be replaced by its serene counterpart, the communicatively rational public. At the turn of the twenty-first century, however, the previously demonized crowd has unexpectedly returned, now in the valorized guise of ‘the multitude’ – in part as a result of a growing sense of the exhaustion of the categories of mainstream liberal politics.  This seminar tracks the trajectory of the crowd, from mass to multitude, through a series of classic readings and recent interventions. Students will be responsible for classroom presentations as well as a term paper based on the readings.

Instructor(s): W. Mazzarella

ANTH 42500. Anthropology of the Afro-Atlantic World. 100 Units.

Although originally pioneered, more than three generations ago, by scholars and critics such as C.L.R. James, Eric Williams, W.E.B. DuBois, or Walter Rodney, conceptions of an “Atlantic World” have only recently come to prominence in Anthropology. In the past decade, however, students of Africa and the Americas have increasingly begun to phrase their inquiries in terms transcending entrenched geographical divisions of labor within the social sciences, aiming to include Africa, the Americas, and, to a certain extent, Europe into a single analytic field. Parts of this course will be devoted to a concise introduction to some of the major theoretical positions within, and controversies surrounding the new “Atlantic” anthropology of Africa and its New World diasporas. After this, we will examine a number of recent monographs and/or major articles exemplifying the promises and pitfalls of theoretical conceptions and methodological procedures that attempt to go beyond mere transregional comparison or linear historical narratives about “African influences”, and aim at analytically situating specific ethnographic or historical scenarios within integrated perspectives on an "Afro-Atlantic World".

Instructor(s): S. Palmié.

ANTH 42600. Cultural Politics of Contemporary India. 100 Units.

Structured as a close-reading seminar, this class offers an anthropological immersion in the cultural politics of urban India today. A guiding thread in the readings is the question of the ideologies and somatics of shifting "middle class" formations; and their articulation through violence, gender, consumerism, religion, and technoscience.

Instructor(s): W. Mazzarella     Terms Offered: Not offered 2012–13; will be offered 2013–14
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 25500,SALC 20900,SALC 30900

ANTH 42900. Performance and Politics in India. 100 Units.

This seminar considers and pushes beyond such recent instances as the alleged complicity between the televised "Ramayana" and the rise of a violently intolerant Hindu nationalism. We consider the potentials and entailments of various forms of mediation and performance for political action on the subcontinent, from "classical" textual sources, through "folk" traditions and "progressive" dramatic practice, to contemporary skirmishes over "obscenity" in commercial films.

Instructor(s): W. T. S. Mazzarella     Terms Offered: Not offered 2012–13; will be offered 2013–14

ANTH 43700. Weber, Veblen and Genealogies of Global Capitalism. 100 Units.

Two intellectual traditions have dominated discussion of the history of capitalism: classical to neo-classical economics, and Marxism. This course searches for other possibilities. It focuses on critical comparative reading of Thorstein Veblen's theory of the late modern "new order" and Max Weber's comparative sociology, but will also read widely among other authors, including Simmel, Sombart, Mahan, Tolstoy and Gandhi. Questions to engage will include: relations between capital, the state, and military force (between means of production and means of coercion); commerce in Asia before European colonialism and the rise of colonial plantations and monopoly trading companies; types of capital, the rise and spread of joint-stock companies, stock markets, and capitalist corporations; the "new order," decolonization and the nation-state.

Instructor(s): J. Kelly

ANTH 43715. Self-Determination: Theory and Reality. 100 Units.

From the Versailles Conference (1919) through the Bandung Conference (1955) and beyond, global politics has been reorganized by efforts to implement and sustain political sovereignty on the basis of national self-determination. This course examines the theories informing this American-led plan and its real consequences, with attention to India, Algeria, Indo-China, New Zealand, Fiji, and Hawaii. Dilemmas in decolonization, partitions, the consequences of the cold war, and the theory and practice of counterinsurgency are discussed together with unintended consequences of the plan in practice, especially the rise of political armies, NGOs, and diaspora.

Instructor(s): J. Kelly     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 23715

ANTH 43720. Weber, Bakhtin, Benjamin. 100 Units.

Ideal types? The iron cage? Captured speech? No alibis? Dialectical Images? Charismatic authority? Heteroglossia? Modes of Domination? Seizing the flash? Finished, monological utterances? Conditions of possibility? Strait gates through time?  Weber, Bakhtin and Benjamin provide insights and analytical tools of unsurpassed power. Scholars who use them best have faced and made key decisions about social ontology and social science epistemology, decision that follow from specific, radical propositions about society and social science made by these theorists and others they engage, starting at least from Immanuel Kant. This course is designed for any student who wants to more clearly understand the arguments of Weber, Bakhtin and Benjamin, and to understand more broadly the remarkable trajectories of German social theory after Kant. It is designed especially for anyone hoping to use some of their conceptions well in new research. (Yes, Bakhtin is Russian, and cultural theory in Russia and the US too will come up.) Fair warning: this course focuses on four roads out of Kant’s liberal apriorism (including culture theory from Herder to Boas and Benedict, as well as Benjamin and the dialectical tradition, Bakhtin’s dialogism, and Weber’s historical realism). We will spend less time on good examples of current use of Weber’s, Bakhtin’s, and Benjamin’s ideas, than on the writings of Weber, Bakhtin and Benjamin themselves, and their predecessors and interlocutors (including Herder, Hegel, Clausewitz, Marx, Ihering and Simmel). The premise of the course is that you will do more in your own research with a roadmap than with templates.

Instructor(s): J. Kelly     Terms Offered: Not offered 2012–13; will be offered 2013–14
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 22715

ANTH 43800. Approaches to Gender in Anthropology. 100 Units.

This course examines gender as a cultural category in anthropological theory, as well as in everyday life. After reviewing the historical sources of the current concern with women, gender, and sexuality in anthropology and the other social sciences, we critically explore some key controversies (e.g., the relationship between production and reproduction in different sociocultural orders; the links between "public" and "private" in current theories of politics; and the construction of sexualities, nationalities, and citizenship in a globalizing world).

Instructor(s): S. Gal     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 25200,GNDR 25201,GNDR 43800

ANTH 43805. Nature/Culture. 100 Units.

Exploring the critical intersection between science studies and political ecology, this course interrogates the contemporary politics of "nature." Focusing on recent ethnographies that complicated our understandings of the environment, the seminar examines how conceptual boundaries (e.g., nature, science, culture, global/local) are established or transgressed within specific ecological orders).

Instructor(s): J. Masco     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 23805,CHSS 32805,HIPS 26203

ANTH 44700. Specters of Marx: Matter, Mind, Method. 100 Units.

In this seminar, we will interrogate a certain number of Marxist perspectives, and examine how/whether they can help to shed light on the relationship between ideas, material expressions, and social analysis in a post-Marxist world. While many post-mortems have been sung for Marxism, and many allegations of bankruptcy declared, there is often limited or distant engagement with the core texts from which this critique departs. Moreover, recent critical homage, such as Jacques Derridas /Specters of Marx/, seems to suggest that the force of Marx's spirit lives on not as timeless doctrine, to be sure, but as recombinant traces, orientations, and possibilities embedded in the work of writers influenced by his thought.
         Without losing sight of the historical logics of capitalism and the state, we will focus on key texts in the Marxist intellectual tradition as they relate to issues of mind, matter, and method. Starting with Marx himself, the seminar will unfold in roughly chronological and thematic progression to track how his seminal ideas have been amplified, transformed, or undermined by later generations of social theorists (Lukács, Gramsci, Adorno, Benjamin, Althusser, Debord, Lefèbvre, Ollman, Sayer, Derrida, Jameson, Eagleton, Zizek). In the process, we will critically reflect on Marxist engagements with ideas of culture, space, time, history, ideology, hegemony, modernity, and politics, to name but a few.
         Each of these topics could easily be the focus of a whole course. In this light, the seminar hopes to offer an introduction to ideas and concepts, while striving for depth of analysis. This being said, a modicum of familiarity with the broad horizon of Marxist thinking (e.g. labor, relations of production, commodity, fetishism, value, consciousness, alienation, etc.) will be useful and is strongly recommended.

Instructor(s): F. Richard

ANTH 45300. Modern Readings in Anthropology: Explorations in Oral Narrative (The Folktale) 100 Units.

This course studies the role of storytelling and narrativity in society and culture. Among these are a comparison of folktale traditions, the shift from oral to literate traditions and the impact of writing, the principal schools of analysis of narrative structure and function, and the place of narrative in the disciplines (i.e., law, psychoanalysis, politics, history, philosophy, anthropology).

Instructor(s): J. Fernandez     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 21305,HCUL 45300

ANTH 45405. Maverick Markets: Cultural Economy and Cultural Finance. 100 Units.

What are the cultural dimensions of economic and financial institutions and financial action? What social variables influence and shape 'real' markets and market activities? 'If you are so smart, why aren't you rich?' is a question economists have been asked in the past. Why isn’t it easy to make money in financial areas even if one knows what economists know about markets, finance and the economy? And why, on the other hand, is it so easy to get rich for some participants? Perhaps the answer is that real markets are complex social and cultural institutions which are quite different from organizations, administrations and the production side of the economy. The course addresses these differences and core dimensions of economic sociology. This course provides an overview over social and cultural variables and patterns that play a role in economic behaviour and specifically in financial markets. We draw on the ‘New Economic Sociology’ which emerged in the late 70's and early 80's from the work of Harrison White, Marc Granovetter, Viviana Zelizer, Wayne Baker and others. We also draw on recent analysis of the relationship between knowledge, technology and economic and financial institutions and behaviour, and include an emerging body of literature on the financial crisis of 2008-09. The readings examine the historical and structural embeddedness of economic action and institutions, the different constructions and interpretations of money, prices and other dimensions of a market economy, and how a financial economy affects organizations, the art world and other areas.

Instructor(s): K. Knorr Cetina     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): Open to advanced undergraduates
Equivalent Course(s): SOCI 40172

ANTH 45615. Displaced nations and the politics of belonging. 100 Units.

While immigration has given rise to cultural hybridity and cosmopolitan forms of belonging, it has also produced diasporic nations and long-distance nationalisms that strive to maintain relationships with real or imagined homelands. This seminar examines what it means to belong to a nation that is not coterminous with a territorial state. It explores both the impact of diasporic nation-making on immigrant subjectivities and on the cultural politics of belonging in receiving states. How, for instance, does deterritorialized nation-making implicate immigrant bodies, histories, and subjectivities? How is the traditionally ethnos-based diasporic nation reconceptualised by considering intersecting queer solidarities or religious nationalisms? How does deterritorialized nation-making complicate ideologies of citizenship and belonging, and how do immigrant-receiving states manage these complications? To explore these issues, we will draw on ethnographic monographs and multidisciplinary theoretical perspectives that critically examine the concepts of the nation, nationalism, deterritorialized nationalism, and citizenship, as they implicate history and memory, the body, sexual and religious solidarities, and multiculturalism.  (3)

Instructor(s): G. Embuldeniya     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): CHDV 48415

ANTH 46020. Archaeology of Modernity. 100 Units.

This course covers the development, themes, practices, and problems of the archaeology of the modern era (post 1450 AD), or what in North America is better known as the subfield of "historical archaeology." Texts and discussions address topics such as the archaeology of colonialism, capitalism, industrialization, and mass consumption. Case studies from plantation archaeology, urban archaeology, and international contexts anchor the discussion, as does a consideration of interdisciplinary methods using texts, artifacts, and oral history. Our goal is to understand the historical trajectory of this peculiar archaeological practice, as well as its contemporary horizon. The overarching question framing the course is: what is modernity and what can archaeology contribute to our understanding of it?

Instructor(s): S. Dawdy     Terms Offered: Not offered 2012–13; will be offered 2013–14
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 26020

ANTH 46505. Non-Industrial Agriculture. 100 Units.

Agriculture is, fundamentally, a human manipulation of the environment, a deliberately maintained successional state designed to serve human needs and desires. In this course, we use the history of non-industrial agriculture to think through some contemporary concerns about environmental change and the sources of our food—including topics such as genetically modified plants, fertilizers, sustainability, and invasive species. Beginning with the origins of agriculture in the early Holocene, we examine several forms of so-called "traditional" agriculture in the tropics and elsewhere, from swidden to intensive cropping. While the course is framed in terms of contemporary concerns, our focus is primarily historical and ethnographic, focusing on the experiences of agriculturalists over the last ten thousand years, including non-industrial farmers today. Students will be expected to produce and present a research paper.

Instructor(s): K. Morrison     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 26505,ENST 26505

ANTH 46700. Colonial Landscapes. 100 Units Units.

This seminar will explore the ways in which both conscious strategies and practices of colonial control and the unintended effects of colonial encounters have altered the built environment which structures lived experience of the colonial situation for both alien agents and indigenous peoples. At the same time, it will seek to discern the ways in which the conjuncture of differing perceptions of the landscape have affected the experience of colonial encounters and transformations of identity. The seminar is especially concerned to explore possibilities for the archaeological investigation of ancient colonial landscapes; and the ancient Western Mediterranean will serve as a primary empirical focus against which general theoretical constructs and research strategies will be evaluated. Topics include the cultural economy of place and space; the guilt environment, habitus and social practice; monumentality, memory and ritual; networks of communication; cadasters and the agrarian landscape; and landscape and the inscription and contestation of colonial hegemony.

Instructor(s): M. Dietler

ANTH 46800. Ethnoarchaeology and Material Culture. 100 Units.

 This seminar explores the theoretical contributions and research methods of the still developing hybrid subfield of anthropology designed to aid archaeological interpretation by undertaking ethnographic research emphasizing the social understanding of material culture. It also attempts to show the potential ethnoarchaeological research to provide a privileged site of conjuncture between the interests of archaeology and cultural anthropology. The course will proceed primarily by means of a close critical examination of selected ethnoarchaeological case studies and readings in material culture theory. The goals of the course include developing: (1) an appreciation of the range of theoretical approaches being applied to the study of material culture and their relative utility for archaeological interpretation, (2) an understanding of the special problems raised by the process of archaeological interpretation and the nature of archaeological data, and (3) a critically astute competence in evaluating, designing, and executing the techniques and research strategies of ethnoarchaeological fieldwork.

Instructor(s): M Dietler

ANTH 46820. Social Life of Things (And Beyond): Objects, People, Value. 100 Units.

Twenty years ago, Arjun Appadurai published a seminal collection on The Social Life of Things, marking a watershed in anthropological understandings of consumption, circulation, and production, and the role of objects in mediating between cultural sensibilities and economic flows. This work has stimulated a wealth of interest in materiality, and over the years, research has sought to expand the insights of Appadurai’s collection to shed greater light on the relationship between mind, matter, and subjectivity. Drawing on these recent developments, this course aims to explore the material dimensions of cultural life and cultural production. As we engage with contemporary and classic writings in cultural anthropology, archaeology, philosophy, and social theory, we will grapple with several key issues: the boundaries between objects and subjects; the agency of persons and things; the relationship between objects and meaning, between experience and imagination; and the production of sociality in the actions/transactions linking people to their material world. The question of value is crucially implicated in these processes, and will require particular attention. And because material transactions are embedded in overlapping fields of power and politics, we will remain attentive to the ways in which objects make/mark/transgress difference, inequalities, and social boundaries. While we will discuss theories of materiality per se, our focus will rest mostly in theorizing how things work in and through concrete social and historical contexts. In this light, ethnographic studies will provide precious resources in helping us outline the logics, terrains, and lineaments of material and cultural production. Indeed, a central goal of this course is to examine how we can mobilize ethnographic insights on object worlds to reframe or expand archaeological inquiries and possibilities, and how, in turn, archaeological imaginations may help to enhance anthropological understandings of materiality. 

Instructor(s): F. Richard

ANTH 47305. The Evolution of Language. 100 Units.

How did language emerge in the phylogeny of mankind? Was its evolution saltatory or gradual? Did it start late or early and then proceed in a protracted way? Was the emergence monogenetic or polygenetic? What were the ecological prerequisites for the evolution, with the direct ecology situated in the hominine species itself, and when did the prerequisites obtain? Did there ever emerge a language organ or is this a post-facto construct that can be interpreted as a consequence of the emergence of language itself? What function did language evolve to serve, to enhance thought processes or to facilitate rich communication? Are there modern “fossils” in the animal kingdom that can inform our scholarship on the subject matter? What does paleontology suggest? We will review some of the recent and older literature on these questions and more.

Instructor(s): S. Mufwene     Terms Offered: Winter 2013
Equivalent Course(s): CHSS 41920,CHDV 41920,EVOL 41920,PSYC 41920,LING 21920,LING 41920

ANTH 47615. Citationality and Performativity. 100 Units.

This class explores the concept of citationality—the (meta)semiotic form and quality of reflexive interdiscursive practices—and its relationship to various social forms and formations. Particular focus is given to the citational form of performativity and the performativity of citational acts. In the first part of the class we explore issues of reflexivity and (meta)semiosis through Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotic and its reformulation by linguistic anthropology. We then turn to J. L. Austin’s discussion of performativity, Jacques Derrida’s critique of speech act theory, and Judith Butler’s reading of Derrida. The second part of the class explores various forms of citationality, including reported speech; gender performativity; forms of negation and disavowal; mimicry, passing, and pretending; mockery and parody; and commodity and brand fetishes.

Instructor(s): C. Nakassis

ANTH 47900. Romani Language and Linguistics. 100 Units.

This is a beginning course on the language of the Roms (Gypsies) that is based on the Arli dialect currently in official use in the Republic of Macedonia, with attention also given to dialects of Europe and the United States. An introduction to Romani linguistic history is followed by an outline of Romani grammar based on Macedonian Arli, which serves as the basis of comparison with other dialects. We then read authentic texts and discuss questions of grammar, standardization, and Romani language in society.

Instructor(s): V. Friedman     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): LGLN 27800,ANTH 27700,EEUR 21000,EEUR 31000,LGLN 37800

ANTH 48210. Colonial Ecologies. 100 Units.

This seminar explores the historical ecology of European colonial expansion in a comparative framework, concentrating on the production of periphery and the transformation of incorporated societies and environments. In the first half of the quarter, we consider the theoretical frameworks, sources of evidence, and analytical strategies employed by researchers to address the conjunction of environmental and human history in colonial contexts. During the second half of the course, we explore the uses of these varied approaches and lines of evidence in relation to specific cases and trajectories of transformation since the sixteenth century.

Instructor(s): M. Lycett, K. Morrison     Terms Offered: Not offered 2012-13; will be offered 2013-14
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 28210,ENST 28210

ANTH 48400. Fieldwork in the Archives. 100 Units.

This is a methods seminar designed for both archaeology and sociocultural graduate students interested in, or already working with, archival materials and original texts. The goal of the course is to develop a tool-kit of epistemological questions and methodological approaches that can aid in understanding how archives are formed, the purposes they serve, their relation to the culture and topic under study, as well as how to search archives effectively and read documents critically. We will survey different types of documents and archives often encountered in fieldwork, and sample approaches taken by historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists from contexts as diverse as the ancient Near East to 1970's Cuba. This seminar will also be driven by the problems and examples that students bring to the discussion. A major outcome will be a research paper that uses original documents from the student's own fieldwork or from locally available archive sources identified during the course. 

Instructor(s): S. Dawdy

ANTH 50500. Commodity Aesthetics: Critical Encounters. 100 Units.

Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno’s classic writings on the relationship between cultural production, capitalism and aesthetic experience, value and embodiment are back on the anthropological agenda. Why should this be the case? What relevance does the cultural critique of the Frankfurt School hold for contemporary ethnographic projects? Although this seminar in a sense hinges on the work of Benjamin and Adorno, it is above all an attempt to locate the questions they asked in relation to a longer philosophical genealogy: broadly, German critical responses to capitalist modernity and its particular claims on the senses. Readings will include excerpts from key texts by Kant, Hegel, Marx, Lukacs, Weber,Simmel, Balasz, Kracauer, Adorno, and Benjamin.

Instructor(s): W. Mazzarella

ANTH 50501. Žižek. 100 Units.

Academic stand-up? Intellectual rock star? Slavoj Žižek’s frenetic, eclectic style has often led the theoretical and political seriousness of his project to be eclipsed by his celebrity. Through a series of readings from his most substantial works, this seminar explores the originality of Žižek’s attempt (in a poststructuralist, post-socialist world) to bring Lacanian psychoanalysis into conversation with the Kant-Hegel-Marx lineage of theorizing modernity.

Instructor(s): W. Mazzarella

ANTH 50700. Seminar: Biopower. 100 Units.

The politics of life in modernity has come to occupy center stage in the human sciences. Studies of modern techniques of governmentality, the naturalizations of transnational neoliberalism, the medicalization of social and historical experience, and the growing hegemony of an interventionist bioscience offer some of the most interesting and challenging models for a contemporary and cosmopolitan anthropology. This seminar will read a number of recent studies in anthropology, science studies, and critical social theory in an effort to better grasp the centrality of the life sciences and biotechnology in modern and contemporary arrangements of power.               We will presume that most students will have already read the germinal writings of Georges Canguilhem (The Normal and the Pathological), Michel Foucault (The Birth of the Clinic, Madness and Civilization, Discipline and Punish, “Governmentality”), and Giorgio Agamben (Homo Sacer). These works will not be assigned. (Students who have not read this work are also welcome to enroll, of course.) The materials assigned for the course will first address broad social-theoretical concerns with life and modernist forms of power, then turn to some powerfully analyzed ethnographies of medicine and other institutions that govern life. The third part of the course will turn to science studies and some methodologically innovative approaches to the ethnography of power/knowledge in the “contemporary” moment.

Instructor(s): J. Farquhar

ANTH 50705. Capital and Biocapital. 100 Units.

This course will explore some recent work on the political economy of the life sciences, exploring what myself and others have called biocapital. But it will do so through a reading of Marx. It will, therefore, be a course in two parts. The first half of the course will involve reading sections of the later Marx (probably some combination of The Grundrisse and Capital). The second half will involve reading various contemporary works on biocapital, in what Stefan Helmreich has referred to as “Weberian-Marxist” and “Marxist-feminist” veins.

Instructor(s): K. Sunder Rajan

ANTH 50720. Knowledge/Value: Life Sciences and Information Sciences. 100 Units.

Instructor(s): K. Sunder Rajan

ANTH 51305. Illness and Subjectivity. 100 Units.

While anthropology and other social sciences have long explored the social and cultural shaping of the self and personhood, many scholars have recently employed the rubric of “subjectivity” to articulate the links between collective phenomena and the subjective lives of individuals. This graduate seminar will examine “subjectivity”—and related concepts—focusing on topics where such ideas have been particularly fruitful: illness, pathology and suffering.  We will critically examine the terms “self,” “personhood” and “subjectivity”—and their relationship to one another. Additional literatures and topics covered may include: illness and narrative; healing and the self; personhood and new medical technologies. (3, 4*)

Instructor(s): E. Raikhel     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): Graduate students only.
Equivalent Course(s): CHDV 43302

ANTH 51920. Enigma of the Network. 100 Units.

So much has been written about networks, especially since the advent of the Internet, that it is difficult to know how and where to begin specifying the term. Responding to these circumstances, Bruno Latour writes that “the word network is so ambiguous that we should have abandoned it long ago.” Far from abandoning it we have embraced it, and with such vigor that everything and everyone seems to be part of a network. This has rendered the network even more indeterminate while amplifying the enigma of its putatively positive and negative capacities. Some current notions of the network suggest that it is the contemporary fundamental social form, others specify it as a cooperative arrangement of human and non-human actors dispersed in space and time and enabled through electronic communication technologies. The network has come to be an organizational imperative, a paradigm of emergence, and an inherent emergent paradigm. This course will explore several different iterations of the network through close readings of texts that celebrate, critique, expand, and think the network. Special attention will be paid to neo-materialist conceptions of the network that problematize its representational register. 

Instructor(s): M. Fisch

ANTH 52100. Seminar: Anthropologies of Body and Experience. 100 Units.

Classically in sociocultural anthropology bodies occupied a default position that could be safely left to the biological sciences. Since the 1980s, however, the combined influence of Foucault, phenomenology, feminism, and medical anthropology has made bodies (“the body,” embodiment, bodiliness) a topic in new ways. Once the life of the body has been made an issue for anthropology, many other areas of interest are somewhat recast: consciousness, materialism, subjectivity, agency, discipline, everyday life, practice, and experience all come into play in new ways. No one seminar could accommodate even the majority of work claiming to elucidate these newly framed topics. This course will narrow the field by considering embodiment together with the vexed theoretical and empirical question of experience. Readings (and a few films) will fall into the following broad categories: phenomenology and the critique of phenomenology; representations and their consumption; materialist methods in the interpretation of culture; sexuality and the Freudian body; non-Western theories of bodies and experience; virtual bodies and the senses; bodies (in)visible in ethnography and history.

Instructor(s): J. Farquhar

ANTH 52700. The Anthropology of Security. 100 Units.

One of the foundational concepts of international order is the notion of security. Though this category is rarely defined in practice, it is the basis for war and peace, for the internal management of populations within states, as well as a rhetorical structure that is increasingly used to mobilize resources (economic, military, and ideological). This seminar interrogates the concept of security through the theoretical literature informing state concepts of security, through ethnographic studies of insecurity, and particularly, through an analysis of U.S. power in the post-Cold War period.

Instructor(s): J. Masco

ANTH 52710. Publics, Privates, Secrets. 100 Units.

George Simmel once wrote that secrecy was "one of the greatest achievements of humanity" because it added complexity to social life, making every social encounter a complex negotiation over concealment or revelation.  This course explores the critical theory of secrecy, and its others -- the public and the private.  We will assess how the deployment or withholding of knowledge is constitutive of experiences of self, social life, and state power.

Instructor(s): J. Masco

ANTH 52715. Anticipatory Knowledge. 100 Units.

Prognosis, prediction, forecasting, risk, threat – we live at a time of proliferating expert anticipatory futures.  This seminar explores how the future is brought into the present as a means of establishing new modes of governance.  It focuses on the historical evolution of expert regimes from closed world systems to emerging forms, tracking how notions of danger (marked as crisis, disaster, and catastrophe) index and invade the present.  The seminar approaches expert futurism as a vehicle for thinking through complex systems, ethics and knowledge production, and the role of the imaginary in security institutions (crossing techno-scientific, military, financial, environmental, and health domains).

Instructor(s): J. Masco

ANTH 53320. Urban Emergence. 100 Units.

This course considers the aesthetics, politics, economies, and lived experiences that materialize in relation with thinking the city as a paradigm of emergence and/or an emergent paradigm. As such, it is concerned with the city as a site of generative tension between sedimented practices and nascent phenomena, top-down planning and self-organization, and spatialized morality and temporal becomings. In traversing these themes, it attends to the city as an object, process, and site of reflective theorization. The approach will be both historical and comparative, guided by urban social theory and ethnographic engagements that highlight the sociocultural irreducibility of specific urban conditions, experiences, and questions. Special attention will be given to questions of urban experience and theory vis-à-vis the effects of mass mediation, governmentality, infrastructure, architecture, affective and sensorial registers. This is a graduate seminar but open to undergraduates by permission from the instructor.

Instructor(s): M. Fisch

ANTH 53815. Public Affect. 100 Units.

Affect is everywhere in cultural theory today, and public life is supposedly more affective than it ever was before. Affect represents freedom from the prison-house of reason. Affect represents enslavement to sentiment and passion. Affect is emotion. Affect is not emotion, but rather something more corporeal. Affect is intuitive. Affect is deliberate. Affect is transcendent. Affect is socially and historically mediated. How can we begin to grasp this ubiquitous yet enigmatic concept? In this advanced graduate seminar, we will engage with a series of texts that seek, in very different ways, to mobilize affect as a category of social analysis. A continuous conceptual thread will be a consideration of how a notion of affect might serve to mediate between dialectical and immanentist critical traditions.

Instructor(s): W. Mazzarella

ANTH 53820. Mediation, Modernities and Beyond in Japan. 100 Units.

This seminar engages questions surrounding technological mediation and modernity through the particular socio-historical circumstances of Japan. Our focus will be on the relation in modernity between media and new social forms, representation, experiences and subjectivities. We will explore how contemporary emergent forms of technological media challenge some of the dominant theoretical assumptions that have guided discussions concerning the impact of technological media in the twentieth century. Ultimately, our goal will be to imagine new approaches to contemporary Japan as well as other sites of dense technological mediation. While our overall focus will be on Japan, the readings and discussions will speak across geopolitical boundaries.

Instructor(s): M. Fisch

ANTH 53825. The Anthropology of Sound. 100 Units.

This course is an intensive reading seminar surveying some key works and debates relevant to the anthropological study of sound and sensibility. Students will examine the relation of sound to “modern” modes of reasoning, sentiment and historical consciousness, space and place, the ethics of listening, mechanical reproduction, infrastructure, the phenomenology and politics of voice and silence, the “problem” of noise and the weaponization of sound technologies. The class will involve active listening exercises and an audio production assignment. Readings will include Feld, Schaefer, Corbin, Sterne, Adorno, Kittler, Derrida, Barthes, Hirschkind, Cage, Attali.

Instructor(s): J. Chu

ANTH 53900. Modern China: Anthropological and Historical Studies. 100 Units.

This graduate seminar will cover a range of recent studies of (mostly) 20th century China.   Though one goal of the course is simply to digest and evaluate the best recent social , cultural and political reporting on Chinese modernities, another goal is to consider questions of method in anthropology and history in the wake of area studies eclecticism. For those not planning to do research in East Asia these readings could serve as a useful case study of theory and method after area studies.  Ethnographies will include books by Anagnost, Farquhar, Litzinger, Liu, Rofel, Scheid, Schein, and Yan as well as a number of articles. Historical studies will focus on cultural histories, including some that examine early sources of Chinese traditions (e.g. Kuriyama, Jullien). Because literary and media studies have been influential in Chinese studies, some works in these fields will be covered as well.

Instructor(s): F. Farquhar

ANTH 54400. Paradoxes of Race. 100 Units.

Notionally grounded in nature, race has a history. We know that racializing discourses and practices are distinctly modern phenomena, intellectually postdating, rather than informing enlightenment ideas about the biological origins of human variation, yet simultaneously growing out of the practical exigencies of the establishment of European domination in colonial scenarios. The historical “artificiality” and ethnographic variability of contemporary projections of embodied racial otherness notwithstanding, ideologies of “race” inform not just patterns of everyday sociality and conflict, but become enshrined in legal and scientific (e.g. medical) policies often explicitly geared towards anti-racist goals. This course examines racializing ideas and practices in several historical and contemporary social and cultural contexts not only with a view towards establishing a genealogy of conceptions of racial difference, but in order to develop a perspective on how to disrupt the social routinization and effectiveness of race as both a discriminatory technos, and a template for self-making.

Instructor(s): S. Palmié.

ANTH 54410. Hybridity. 100 Units.

Ever since the late 1980s when James Clifford discovered that the “pure products” had “gone crazy”, and Ulf Hannerz alerted us to the fact that the “world” was “in creolization”, notions of “hybridity” and “hybridization” (and their various conceptual relatives such as mestizaje, creolization, syncretism, and so forth) have enjoyed increasing currency in our discipline. Often seen as the results of globalization-induced and medially accelerated Hyperdiffusionism, “hybrids”, it seems, are the ubiquitous sign of a postmodern denouement of both “cultures” as “we knew them” (once, when we were “modern”), and the antidote to older anthropological reifications. How ironic then that while the “hybrid” obviously gestures toward what Marilyn Strathern has called “post-plural” conceptions of culture, the languages that are supposed to make it analytically visible often hearken back to the vocabularies of regimes of “breeding” (“hybrid” or “creole”), religious orthodoxies (“syncretism”), systems of racial exclusion and domination (“mestizaje”), or other institutional mechanisms and practices that reproduce and police categorical boundaries – often in order to stabilize particular distributions of power and privilege. This experimental course aims less to scrutinize the analytical utility of the conceptual language these terms appear to put at our disposal, than to probe into the epistemological conditions and taxonomic politics that make “the hybrid” thinkable in the first place, and seemingly “good to think” at the current moment. The central question it poses is: how do we know that something is “hybrid” (or not)? After a very brief initial survey of contemporary “hybridology” and the forms of analysis it seeks to supercede, we will take our departure from Bruno Latour’s suggestion that “hybrids” are the inevitable products of practices of categorical “purification”. In line with this, we will examine the politics of classificatory discernment, recognition, and naturalization that are productive of both the “purities” and the “hybrids” that appear to stand out, and even ostensibly militate, against them. After a foray into taxonomics and “natural kind” philosophy, we will discuss an array of case studies concerning the maintenance of classificatory infrastructures and categorical boundaries in regard to species, sex, language, race, and distinctions between humans and animals, nature and society, persons and things, and life and death. My hunch is that we might conclude that contemporary “hybridity”-talk is epistemologically problematic and politically troubling because far from destabilizing normalized categorical schemes, it necessarily reinforces precisely those distinctions that make “hybrid anomalies” visible in the first place. However, I remain entirely open to be convinced of the merits of hybridity (or rather: conceptualizations of it that I have, so far, failed to take into account).

Instructor(s): S. Palmié

ANTH 54800. Uncanny Modernities. 100 Units.

This seminar examines the concept of the "uncanny" as an ethnographic topic. Pursuing the linkages between perception, trauma, and historical memory, this course asks if the modern state form necessarily produces the uncanny as a social effect. We explore this theme through works of Freud, Lacan, Derrida, Benjamin, and Foucault, as well as recent ethnographies that privilege the uncanny in their social analysis.

Instructor(s): J. Masco     Terms Offered: Not offered 2012–13; will be offered 2013–14
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 24800

ANTH 55400. Utopia. 100 Units.

Some claim that utopian thought was a casualty of the late twentieth century, and that we now live in a post-utopian age. This seminar calls this claim into question by exploring the various ways in which utopianism (and its dark twin, dystopianism) continue to structure our lives. We will ask what utopianism implies as social critique, as imaginary practice, and as political-cultural ideology. Departing from a series of classic utopian texts, we move into detailed engagements with Marxist utopias, modernist architectural utopias, anti-colonial utopias, totalitarian utopias, consumerist utopias and technological and/or virtual utopias. 

Instructor(s): J. Masco, W. Mazzarella

ANTH 55605. Regulating Il/Licit Flows: State, Territoriality, Law. 100 Units.

This course examines how changing state practices, legal norms and technical innovations have variously shaped the flows of people, goods, capital and information within and beyond the “national order of things.” Drawing on anthropological theories and methods, we will explore both the historical genealogies and emergent forms of state sovereignty and territoriality and their relation to the production of “lawful” movements vis-à-vis illicit flows. The course is divided into two parts. Part I introduces students to anthropological approaches for analyzing the different spaces of state regulation (land, the seas, the market, checkpoints, refugee camps) while Part II focuses on the pragmatics and effects of law on the movement of various persons (citizens, refugees, migrants) and commodities (drugs, money, contraband).

Instructor(s): J. Chu

ANTH 56000. The Preindustrial City. 100 Units.

This seminar will be an intensive examination of the origins and structure of the preindustrial city, with an emphasis on social theories of the city that will take us into the spectrum of preindustrial/industrial/post-industrial cities. Lectures, discussions and participant presentations will be framed around an examination of theories of urban genesis, function, and meaning with speicl reference to the economic, sociological and ideological bases of city development. The seminar is broadly comparative in perspective and will consider the nature of the preindustrial city in a variety of regional and temporal contexts.. Although substantial emphasis will be placed on preindustrial urban formations and urban-rural relations, we will also touch upon issues relating to more recent historical and contemporary patterns of urbanism.

Instructor(s): A. Kolata

ANTH 56010. The City in History. 100 Units.

This seminar will be in intensive examination of the origins, structure and cultural experience of city life. Lectures, discussion and participant presentations will be framed around an examination of theories of urban genesis, function, and meaning with special reference to the economic, sociological and ideological bases of city development. The seminar is broadly comparative in perspective and will consider the nature of the city in a variety of regional and temporal contexts with an emphasis on social theories of the city that will take us into the spectrum of preindustrial/industrial/post-industrial cities. The seminar will consist of initial orienting lectures, discussion of selected texts concerned with social theories of the city, and presentation of research projects by class participants.

Instructor(s): A. Kolata

ANTH 56200. The Human Environment: Ecological Anthropology and Anthropological Ecology. 100 Units.

This graduate seminar is framed around a critical intellectual history of Nature/Culture concepts from the 18^th century to the present. We will explore multiple, contradictory strands of social thought regarding Human/Environment interactions, including the concepts of Descartes, Thoreau, Linneaeus, Darwin, and Spencer, as well as a broad range of contemporary analysts. We will be particularly engaged in exploring the tensions between dualistic and monadic conceptions of the Human/Environment relationship.

Instructor(s): A. Kolata

ANTH 56305. Time and Temporality. 100 Units.

How is time understood, experienced, and represented by different human societies? How are we to understand the social significance of ruins, heirlooms, origin stories, science fiction and millenarianism? How can we (re)construct past times? How do imagined futures structure practice? Does modernity represent a rent in the fabric of human time, as it so often claims? How do temporalities affect our research? We will explore these and other questions through a reading of philosophical, anthropological, and archaeological texts on time and temporality, drawing on sources as disperse as Heraclitus, Marx, Benjamin, Munn, Bradley, Koselleck, Gell, and Dietler. While the course may be of special interest to archaeologists and will emphasize how time is spatialized and materialized, the discussion and readings will be broad and interdisciplinary.

Instructor(s): S. Dawdy

ANTH 56500. The Archaeology of Colonialism. 100 Units.

This seminar is a comparative exploration of archaeological approaches to colonial encounters. It employs temporally and geographically diverse case studies from the archaeological and historical literature situated within a critical discussion of colonial and postcolonial theory. The course seeks to evaluate the potential contribution of archaeology both in providing a unique window of access to precapitalist forms of colonial interaction and imperial domination and in augmenting historical studies of the expansion of the European world-system. Methodological strategies, problems, and limitations are also explored.

Instructor(s): M. Dietler

ANTH 56515. The Underworld: Archaeology of Crime and Informal Economies. 100 Units.

Archaeology often claims to substantiate undocumented histories. In such a view, almost any kind of archaeology performs a type of forensics of informal social and economic processes. We will take an epistemological look at the most literal examples – archaeological interpretations of criminal acts and informal and/or illegal economic practices. Readings will span from classic foundations of economic anthropology and economic archaeology to the artifactual evidence used to interpret felicide, smuggling, prostitution, and contemporary war crimes. The central questions around which this student-led seminar will focus are: what are the evidentiary logics of archaeology?; what is at stake in parsing social and economic practices into 'formal' and 'informal' domains?; and what are the challenges and potentials of doing an archaeology of practices intended to leave no trace?

Instructor(s): S. Dawdy

ANTH 57701. Linguistic Anthropology Seminar: Boundaries, Borders, Contacts: Processes of Differentiation. 100 Units.

The question of boundaries - - between languages, cultures, ethnic groups, institutions, disciplines, territories - - has been a central one in anthropological theorizing. Herderian assumptions equating supposedly grounded languages with territorially delimited culture (on the implicit model of nation-states) were foundational for the discipline. Noteworthy is the persistence of such terms as analysis despite repeated scholarly attacks on the notion of groundedness in language and culture, and attacks on the related assumption of homogeneity within supposed boundaries. We have recently witnessed yet another revival (and critique) of terms meant to recognize the regularity with which boundaries are breached: “hybridity,” “syncretism,” “creolization,” “crossings,” “borderlands,” “global/local,” and “frontiers.” This course examines critically the current use of such terms. The goal of the course is to survey and develop the semiotic, sociolinguistic and institutional processes - - for instance of differentiation, stereotypy, commensuration, and standardization - - that create and regiment cultural difference, and that are often simply glossed (and glossed over) when spatial metaphors are applied to culture, language and space itself. A focus on language ideologies and linguistic differentiation will be our conceptual starting point.

Instructor(s): S. Gal

ANTH 57710. Linguistic Anthropology Seminar: Translation and Textual Circulation: Communicative Aspects of Transnational Processes. 100 Units.

This seminar investigates communicative dimensions of globalization. How are movements of people, objects and texts mediated by semiotic processes and by linguistic practices. Some questions concern form: How are texts and text artifacts transformed in the process of moving across national spaces regimented by different standard languages? How does this movement change the national spaces? Is “movement” the apt characterization of this process, or rather imitation, citation, iteration? The political economy of literary and technical translation in this conventional sense is our starting point in the seminar. But denotational codes (named languages) are only one of the sites at which various transformations occur in the apparent movements of texts and practices. The goal of the seminar is to examine “translation” as also a pragmatic process, worked across systems of indexicality, across differently situated discursive formations. Ethnography itself has often been characterized as a discipline of translation in this sense. How and when are commensurabilities established not only between languages but among different registers and discourses (e.g. medical to legal to commonsense)? What social roles and institutions create and mediate commensurabilities or ruptures in specific ethnographic and political contexts? How can we study the nodes of control and conflict? Of censorship, stoppage and obstruction? More generally, what limits are imposed on cultural forms as the condition of their circulation across various types of institutions? How are cultural forms – texts, practices – made transportable and transposable? When are boundaries between cultural, ethnic, linguistic, social units created, contested or erased through such transposition. Starting with notions of entextualization, recontextualization, language ideology and interdiscursivity as developed in recent linguistic anthropology, the seminar aims to read criticallyacross current ethnographic literature on topics such as: “cultural translation,” “cultures of circulation,” “publics,” “translation studies,” “trading zones,” and “semiotics of global flows.”

Instructor(s): S. Gal

ANTH 57715. Linguistic Anthropology Seminar: Narrative. 100 Units.

The goal is to find and analyze narratives in ethnographic materials: what counts as narratives, how they are (sometimes) institutionalized, their effects on social organizations and their implications for various cultural processes such as, for instance, memory and tradition, political conflict, career building, nation-making, regionalization, health-maintenance, among others. We will try various modes of narrative analysis to see how they work and why.  In the first few weeks, we review some philosophical questions about time and its experience via linguistic/textual representations, then move to some literary and theory-of- history opinions/traditions, including the question of emergent story practices and their cultural categorizations. Most of the course will focus on recognizing and analyzing various genres or their fragments in fieldnotes and interviews, in interactions, mass media products and in the ethnographic accounts of others. Seminar participants will present their own field materials or critically read ethnographies focused on narratives (or ones that include such but do not highlight them) and discuss how storytelling-in-action and in interaction operates: e.g. how it might orient and align speakers and produce the textures of social life.

Instructor(s): S. Gal

ANTH 57718. Linguistic Anthropology Seminar: Politics of Translation: Circulations and Commensurations Across Social Domains. 100 Units.

Ethnography has long been considered the “translation” of cultures, but the process of translation has not often been closely examined in anthropology. Since the middle of the 20^th century it has been problematized by philosophy of science, in which incommensurability between “paradigms” was thought to block translation across them, undermining the possibility of progress. Similarly, the politics of multiculturalism in many parts of the globe has revived Herderian notions of cultures as “monads” between which there is only miscommunication, apparently undermining the founding assumptions of liberalism. Cultural, ethical, epistemic and linguistic “relativity” were the labels for discussing such matters in earlier decades. Today, these concepts are increasingly problematic as anthropology engages with the ubiquitous facts of circulation: in addition to objects, materials and commodities, financial instruments, discourses, media, methods, theories, political movements, institutional arrangements all seem to “travel” across space-time, seeming to contradict assumptions of cultural incommensurability. This course asks: How (if at all) do cultural “objects” come to be measured by similar metrics (i.e. commensurated), and/or equated in meaning (i.e. translated) so that they are taken up, recognized, reanimated, imitated in diverse locations and thus seem to travel and circulate. We start with the hypothesis that there are semiotic processes and practices by which translation and commensuration are achieved, fought over, and/or rejected. What are they? Especially: How are the social worlds, “objects,” personae and sites of commensuration/translation themselves transformed by these processes. The strategy of the course is to start with practices of linguistic translation, as these are among the mediators of virtually all other commensuration processes. We explore how far linguistic and semiotic practices at language boundaries in specific sociohistorical and ideological circumstances can help illuminate other forms of commensuration and boundary work. What are the implications of these processes for the practice of anthropology?

Instructor(s): S. Gal

ANTH 58200. Material Culture and Consumption: Embodied Material Culture -- Food, Drink, and Drugs in History. 100 Units.

The Material Culture and Consumption seminar is designed to explore a series of current major research frontiers in the understanding of material culture. This domain of inquiry constitutes an exciting new convergence of interests among the fields of archaeology, cultural anthropology, history, and sociology; hence, the seminar seeks to explore the intersection of novel theoretical developments and empirical research among all these fields. The theme for this year’s seminar is "Embodied Material Culture": that is, objects which are produced specifically for consumption by ingestion into the human body. Readings and discussion will center around works that grapple with the social and cultural understanding of food, alcohol, and drugs in ancient and modern contexts. Their close association with the body and the senses, as well as their nutritive and psychoactive properties, make these forms of material culture an especially salient, symbolically charged form of "social fact" and make the study of their consumption a particularly revealing key to social relations, cultural concepts, and articulations of the domestic and political economies.

Instructor(s): M. Dietler

ANTH 58510. Anthropology of Space/Place/Landscape. 100 Units.

Materiality has emerged as a fertile interest in anthropology and other social sciences. Within this broad conceptual umbrella, space, place, and landscape have become critical lenses for analyzing and interpreting people’s engagement with their physical surroundings. Once an inert backdrop to social life, a mere epiphenomenon, the material world is now acknowledged as a generative medium and terrain of cultural production: at once socially produced and framing sociality, shaping and constraining human possibilities, both by and against design… This course concerns itself with these articulations: 1) the spatial production of social worlds, 2) its expressions in different cultural and historical settings, and 3) its trails of ambiguous effects. Drawing on several fields, anthropology and geography chiefly, but also art history, architecture, philosophy, and social theory, we will explore how the triad of space/place/landscape works on, in, and through different social worlds and its role in the making of social experience, perception, and imagination. We will also reflect on how spatial formations frequently elude the very social projects that have birthed them. The objective of the course is to provide you with a foundation in contemporary spatial thought, which can be creatively applied to questions of spatiality in your own research setting.

Instructor(s): F. Richard     Terms Offered: Not offered 2012-13; will be offered 2013-14
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 28510

ANTH 58600. Social Theory of the City. 100 Units.

This graduate seminar explores various historical, sociological and anthropological theories of cities. The course analyzes major theoretical frameworks concerned with urban forms, institutions and experience as well as particular instances of city development from pre-modern to contemporary periods. The seminar will consist of initial orienting lectures, discussion of selected texts concerned with social theories of the city, and presentation of research projects by class participants.

Instructor(s): A. Kolata

ANTH 58702. Archaeologies of Political Life. 100 Units.

This seminar examines how archaeologists have approached political life in the past forty years. Its aim is to question the categories through which political worlds are often studied (beginning with such unwieldy terms as 'states,’ 'chiefdoms,’ ‘complexity,’ etc…) and complicate analyses of politics in the past. Rather than relying on concepts that already predetermine the outcome of political functioning, we will read key texts in anthropology and political theory (on sovereignty, domination, legitimacy, political economy, governance, ideology, hegemony, subjectivity, anarchy) to dissect the foundations and operations of power, expose its cultural logics, and explore the processes behind the categories. Some of the questions that will guide our discussions include: How do politics work in both past and present? Through what channels and modalities? With what effects (anticipated or not)? And what role does the material world play in mediating these relations? Each week will pair theoretical readings with case-studies drawn from different parts of the world and from different moments in history. Through this seminar, students will gain familiarity with classic archaeological thinking on power and critical perspectives steering contemporary studies of past politics.

Instructor(s): F. Richard
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 28702

ANTH 59500. Archaeology Laboratory Practicum. 100 Units.

This hands-on lab practicum course exposes students to various stages of artifact processing on a collection from a recently excavated site (e.g., washing, sorting, flotation, identification, data entry, analysis, report preparation, curation). The primary requirement is that students commit to a minimum of nine hours of lab work per week, with tasks assigned according to immediate project needs.

Instructor(s): S. Dawdy     Terms Offered: Autumn, Winter, Spring
Prerequisite(s): Consent of instructor
Note(s): Undergraduates may take this course only once for credit.
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 29500