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.
ANTH 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.
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)
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.