Socio-Cultural Anthropology
Revised 8/12/09. Please refer to the online directory of courses for course times and locations: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/bulletin/uwb/
ANTH G4156x The Korean Shaman Lens:Anthropology, Medicine, Popular Religion, and
Performance. 3 pts. L. Kendall.Enrollment
limit 18.Undergraduates must get
instructor’s permission.Using Korea shamans
as a central case study, this course explores the multiple ways anthropologists
and others have researched, written about, and filmed "Shamans" from
late 19th century ethnologists and missionaries to late 20th century western
"neo-shamans." Students will be introduced to a variety of scholarly
approaches to the study of popular religion world-wide. We will examine why the
term "shaman" is used as a comparative category and how
"shamans" function as healers and performers of popular culture. We
will consider histories of persecution and also instances where shamans have
come to be regarded as cultural icons.
ANTH G4201x Principles and Applications of Social and Cultural
Anthropology. 3 pts. E. Marakowitz. Required for students in Anthropology
Department's master degree program and for students in the graduate programs of
other departments and professional schools desiring an introduction in this
field. Prerequisite: graduate standing. Introductory survey of major concepts
and areas of research in social and cultural anthropology. Emphasis is on both
the field as it is currently constituted and its relationship to other scholarly
and professional disciplines.
ANTH G4380x Dangerous Citizens.3 pts. N. Panourgia.Anthropology has been concerned from its
inception with the question of social cohesion and the role that “culture”
plays in this formation. Theories of social cohesion and repair abound in
anthropological theory, from Durkheim onwards. What happens, though, in cases
where cohesion is contested and repair appears impossible? What are the
processes by which the various formulations of the social, within the context
of its Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment materializations as the capitalist
state, engages in the systematic and systemic redrawing of the contours of the
social and excepts increasingly large segments of its population as dangerous
and undesirable. In this course we will concern ourselves with theories of
social cohesion and cases of states of exception. (Enrollment limited to 10 and
instructor’s permission required.
ANTH W4480x Critical Native and Indigenous
Studies.3 pts.A. Simpson.This course is an interdisciplinary survey of the literature and issues
that comprise Native American and Indigenous Studies. Readings for this course
are organized around the concepts of indigeneity, coloniality, power and
"resistance" and concomitantly interrogate these concepts for
social and cultural analysis. The syllabus is derived from some of the
"classic" and canonical works in Native American Studies such
as Custer Died for Your Sins but will also require an engagement with less
canonical works such as Red Man's Appeal to Justice in addition to
historical, ethnographic and theoretical contributions from scholars that
work outside of Native American and Indigenous Studies. This course
is open to graduate students and advanced undergraduates.
ANTH G6016x
Ideologies/Mythologies. 3 pts. Rosalind Morris. This
course examines the major theoretical texts on ideology and mythology and
attempts to bridge what have otherwise been rather distinct analytic traditions
within the field of anthropological analysis, namely symbolic and political
anthropology.The readings from the
course will be grouped to permit an interrogation of several major
problematiques; the relationship between representation and mediation; the
relationship between desire and interest in the representation of the social
field; the question of symbolic efficacy compared to that of mystification;
domination and hegemony in the field of ideas; the status of narrative and its
relationship to truth claims; the relationship between poetics and
politics.Readings are drawn from the canons of
anthropology, political theory and literary criticism.
ANTH G6046x Ethnography of the Nation-State. 3 pts.
Lila Abu-Lughod. Through a close analysis of anthropological works, this
seminar examines possible ways of doing ethnography in and of "the
nation." Readings
include ethnographies of ethnicity and race; cultural production, including
media and museums; and nationalist narratives and memory.
ANTH G6069x TechnoBodies.3 pts.Lesley Sharp. This course
examines technological body interventions as framed by sociality and
subjectivity.Of special interest are
pre- and post-human contexts that generate technological nostalgia, desire,
anxiety, or fear.Topics include
transformative surgeries; cyborgs and other hybrids; the militarized body and
the nation; and body economies.
ANTH G6100x Semiotic Anthropology
I.3 pts. E. Daniel. Semiotic is the study
of the activity of signs. What is the relationship between reality and
representation? In what different ways can this relationship be theorized? What
are the consequences of holding that reality, including the reality of culture,
is a system of representations or of signs? These questions will be explored
with reference to several recent anthropological texts as well as the writings
of some key "non-anthropological" thinkers drawn from the following
list: C.S. Pierce, Ferdinand de Saussure, Mikhail Bakhtin, Roland Barthes, A.J.
Greimas, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Umberto Eco, and Julia
Kristeva.Instructor’s permission
required.
ANTH G6155x Righting
Wrongs: Trauma, Memory, and the Politics of Repair. 3 pts. D. Scott.."Righting Wrongs" locates its concerns in the post-Cold War
thinking about the repair of historical wrongs. It is concerned with the turn
to "memory," the thematization of trauma, and the politics of
reconciliation. The question of restorative justice, in short, is what
we are concerned with. What is its conceptual domain? What are the nature of
harms and injuries it considers? What is the notion of time that organizes its
idea of the continuing obligation to repair historical wrongs? What conceptions
of the self and generation and memory shape its ideas about historical
entitlements? These are some of the many questions that we will approach in the
course of our readings and discussions.(Enrollment 15 and GSAS graduate students only)
ANTH G6186x Performing Subjectivity in an Age of Revolution. 3 pts.E. Combs-Schilling. Drawing
on the analytical works of Butler, Bakhtin and Hull, this course examines 1780-1786 Vienna as an exceptionally open moment in
history, when expansive visions of persons and community come to the forefront
of political, economic and legal life as well as the theatrical stage. Operas
and other dramas (including rewrites of Shakespeare) reflect and help create
change. Readings include primary sources from Vienna in this moment
(diaries, letters, ethnographies, operas and plays in original languages
German, Italian, French--or in translations.). For the final paper, each
student will select an opera, play or oratorio and analyze its specific
relationship to this moment of change. Course limited to 20 students. Instructor’s permission required. E-mail mec3@columbia.edu.
ANTH G6250x Women of Africa.
3 pts.H. Mokoena. Enrolment limited to 20. The intellectual and literary lives of women
are often written about or thought of as separate from the intellectual lives
of their male counterparts. Due to
sexist exclusion and/or social, legal and political restrictions women’s
literary and intellectual production has often emerged and taken shape as a counterforce
and vindication against these limitations. The course is an exploration of women as
writers and thinkers. It especially
looks at the work of those women who wrote from ‘outside’ the epicentres of
Enlightenment civility: women on the road, women in bondage, women on the
frontier and women in prison.It examines
the myrial ways in which women have used literacy and writing as tools to carve
out a place for themselves in the often masculine ‘republic of letters’.
ANTH G6305x Beyond Sublime: Affects and Aesthetics. 3 pts.M. Ivy. A central concern of modern theory and philosophy
is the place of the aesthetic and its relationship to feelings and
politics.How are feelings articulated
with aesthetic judgments?How do
different aesthetic apprehensions shade into different affective experiences?
What are the political implications of these aesthetico-affective complexes,
particularly under conditions of advanced capitalism, virtualization, and mass
mediation? Starting with Longinus's On
the Sublime and Kant's philosophy of the beautiful and the sublime, the
course will consider aesthetico-affective experiences left out of formal
philosophy but important in everyday life.Minor aesthetic concepts like the uncanny, the grotesque, and the cute
will be intermixed with consideration of affects like anxiety, stupefaction,
and hopefulness.Examples, cases, and
inspiration are drawn from life in the United States (and elsewhere), from
fiction, music, art, and film; disciplinary approaches are taken from literary
criticism, anthropology, psychoanalysis, and philosophy.Theoretical readings include works by Kant,
Hegel, Freud, Lyotard, Gasché, Derrida, Lacan, Deleuze, and others.
ANTH G6430x Recognition, Espionage, Camouflage. 3
pts.E. Povinelli. This course examines
the politics of recognition from the perspective of the security state. Not
long ago, scholars and public intellectuals were ringing the death knell of the
strong nation-state and celebrating the emergence of a new multicultural,
postcolonial world. We were living at the end of history. The sovereign right
to kill was being replaced by the governmentalism of neoliberalism and a new
kind of racism. The mobility of post-Fordist capital and the new media were
thought to have created a qualitatively new mode of global cultural and social
commerce fostering hybrid forms of social being and practice. Governmentality
was not oriented to killing, but to constituting populations and their
vitalities; to making live and letting die. Western states were busy performing
shame and apologizing for past colonial practices. Suddenly things are not so
clear-perhaps they never were. The post 9/11 world seems to have reorganized
the logic and relations of recognition and civilization, the sovereign and
neoliberal state. Pundits praised the "prescience" of Samuel
Huntington's Clash of Civilizations. Scholars rushed to embrace Agamben's
state of exception. Politicians in democracies sought to reclaim strong
executive powers, the right to designate enemies, to kill, to suspend
constitutional rights, and to rely on nondemocratic regimes to torture for
truth. Civilization reemerged in an unapologetic form-a mode of differentiating
the world in social and historical terms. Recognition was no longer merely
about tolerance but about camouflage and espionage. This course seeks to
understand whether and in what way the politics of recognition has mutated
within the techniques of state security.
ANTH G6601x Questions in Anth Theory
I. 3 pts. P. Kockelman. Presents students with critical theories of
society, paying particular attention to classic continental social theory of
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We will trace a trajectory through
important French and German writings essential for any understanding of the
modern discipline of anthropology: from Saussure through Durkheim and Mauss,
Marx, Weber, and on to the structuralist elaboration of these theoretical
perspectives in Claude Lévi-Strauss, always bearing in mind the relationship of
these theories to contemporary anthropology. We come last to Foucault and
affiliated theorists as successors both to French structuralism and to German
social theory and its concerns with modernity, rationality, and power.
Throughout the readings, we will give special care to questions of
signification as they inform anthropological inquiry, and we will be alert to
the historical contexts that situate the discipline of anthropology today.
ATH G8014x Advanced Seminar on South
Asia.3 pts.P. Chatterjee and NB Dirks (co-teacher). M
2:10-4:00.This course is intended to be
an advanced graduate seminar on late medieval and modern South
Asia (i.e., from roughly 1600 to the present). Students will be
expected either to have taken a previous graduate course on South
Asia or to have extensive background in South Asian studies. The
content of the course will change from year to year depending on the particular
interests of the students and the professor. Students will be expected to
prepare a paper based on primary research, and will make a presentation on the
issues involved in their research at some point during the second half of the
term.
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Archaeology
G4029x Holy
lands, Unholy Histories:Archaeology Before the Bible.(formerly V2007) 3
pts.B. Boyd. Undergraduate students must have permission of the instructor.The
Prehistory of the Near East (or the Levant – the geographical area from Lebanon
in the north to the Sinai Desert in the south, and from the middle Euphrates in
Syria to southern Jordan) has been constructed over the last 80 years by a
number of different research traditions.The first professional archaeological
research carried out in the region can be traced to the post-First World War
British and French Mandates.It was not until the 1960s that indigenous
researches began to make a substantial contribution to the prehistory of the
region, but the colonial legacy remains influential even today.Extensive
fieldwork over the last 30 years or so may have supplied a vast and rich data,
base, but the fundamental categories of research have remained virtually
unchanged since the establishment of the Levantine prehistoric sequence by
archaeological such as Dorothy Garrod in the 1930s.Our critical approach in
this course will show how the richness and quality of the data lend themselves
to rigorous theoretical analysis.
ATNH G4129x Landscape:Interpreting
Place. 3 pts. C. Matthews. This course is intended to be an advanced
graduate seminar on late medieval and modern South Asia
(i.e., from roughly 1600 to the present). Students will be expected either to
have taken a previous graduate course on South Asia
or to have extensive background in South Asian studies. The content of the
course will change from year to year depending on the particular interests of
the students and the professor. Students will be expected to prepare a paper
based on primary research, and will make a presentation on the issues involved
in their research at some point during the second half of the term.
ANTH G6352x Museum
Anthropology: History and Theory. 3 pts.Nan Rothschild. This course will
consider museums as reflectors of social priorities which store important
objects and display them in ways that present significant cultural messages.We
will history, natural history and art museums and will visit several New York
museums.Students will learn how a museum functions.
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Physical Anthropology
ANTH
G4147x Human skeletal biology
I. 3 pts. W 12:00-2:00. R.
Holloway. Recommended for archaeology and physical anthropology students,
pre-meds, and biology majors interested in the human skeletal system. Intensive
study of human skeletal materials using anatomical and anthropological
landmarks to assess sex, age, and ethnicity of bones. Other primate skeletal
materials and fossil casts used for comparative study (Enrollment limit 12 and
Instructor’s Permission required)
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Graduate Research Courses
Fall and Spring
ANTH G9101. Research
in Social and Cultural Anthropology. 3-9 pts. Staff. HTBA. Prerequisite:
Instructor's permission. Individual research and tutorial in social and
cultural anthropology for advanced graduate students.
ANTH G9102. Research in Archaeology.
3-9 pts. Staff. HTBA. Prerequisite:
Instructor's permission. Individual research and tutorial in archaeology for
advanced graduate students.
ANTH G9103. Research
in Physical Anthropology. 3-9 pts. HTBA. Prerequisite: Instructor's
permission. Individual research and tutorial in physical anthropology for
advanced graduate students.
ANTH G9105. Research in Special
Fields. 3-9 pts. Staff. HTBA. Prerequisite: Instructor's permission.
Individual research in all divisions of anthropology and in allied fields for
advanced graduate students
ANEB G9106. Research in Special
Fields. 3-9 pts. Staff. HTBA. Prerequisite: Instructor's permission.
Individual research in all divisions of anthropology and allied fields for
advanced graduate students
ANTH
G9110x and ANTH G9111y Museum Anthropology Internship. 3-9 pts. Staff. HTBA. An internship arranged through the Museum Anthropology program of 10
hrs/week (for 3 credits) or 20 hrs/week (for 6). Involves
"meaningful" work, requires keeping a journal and writing a paper at
the completion of the semester. Not to be taken without permission of the
program directors, usually after completing the Museum Anthropology core
courses.
ANTH
G9112. Research in Archaeological Method and Theory. 3-9 pts. Staff. HTBA. Prerequisite: Instructor's permission. Individual research and tutorial
in archaeological method and theory for advanced graduate students.
ANTH G9113. Research in
Quantitative Methods. 3-9 pts. Staff. HTBA...Prerequisite:
Instructor's permission. Individual research and tutorial in quantitative
methods for advanced graduate students.
ANTH G9114. Research in Data
Processing. 3-9 pts. Staff.
HTBA. Prerequisite: Instructor's permission. Individual research and
tutorial in data processing for advanced graduate students.
Of Related Interest
Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Biology
W4700 Race: The Tangled History of a Biological Concept
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