Socialcultural Anthropology

ANTH G4201x. Principles and Applications of Social and Cultural Anthropology. 3 pts. Enrollment limited to 20 students. 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. Enrollment limited to 10 students. Instructor's Permission required. 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. Readings: Emile Durkheim, Hanna Arendt, Cornelius Castoriadis, Michel Foucault, James Boon, Deborah Poole, Gil Anidjar, Begona Aretxaga.

ANTH G4643x. Politics, Culture and Identity in Contemporary Taiwan . 3 pts. It is virtually impossible to approach Taiwanese society without encountering on this path actions, discourses and representations closely connected to identity issues, whether they are of a national, local, ethnic or cultural order. This course will examine through different aspects of Taiwan 's social life, ranging from electoral culture, social networking, cultural policies, ritual and place, history and memories, nature and imagined territories, the fluid expressions and complex stakes of identity.

ANTH G6023x. Power and Hegemony. 3 pts. N.B. Dirks co-teacher. Gramsci's Prison Notebooks and selected texts by Foucault including Discipline and Punish; The History of Sexuality; The Archaeology of Knowledge; and the later articles and lectures on governmentality. Representative readings of both Gramacian and Foucauldian analysis of power in societies. The productive oppositions and convergences in their approaches to the question of power.

ANTH G6037x. Biography & Autobiography: A Portrait of South African Intellectuals. 3 pts.

ANTH G6048x. Political Economy and Social Relations. 3 pts. Examines the classical critique of the categories and overall problematic of political economy. What precisely constitutes the political in political economy? Examines some questions of political theory a posited from Marxist and feminist standpoints. Seeks to situate the methodological protocols and representational techniques of socio-cultural anthropology in terms of their own conditions of possibility within unequal relations of wealth and power in the modern world system.

ANTH G6059x. Dependency as a Cultural System. 3 pts.

ANTH G6074x. Culture and Consumption. 3 pts. Enrollment limited to 15 students plus the permission of the Instructor required. Over the past five centuries the ideology and practice of the consumption of things and goods as both a source of well being and as the central organizing metaphor for social life has begun to expand to every place on the planet. This culture of consumption is rife with intrinsic contradictions. This course will explore these contradictions. This course will also ask about the kinds of social relations of exchange that existed before this change and how they have been worked and reworked by capitalist transitions. We will address these issues theoretically and methodologically. Our questions will include: What are the theories of consumption and exchange that will allow us to understand modern consumptive practices? How do things become commodities? What is the social history of the production of "the consumer"? How does consumption make bodies? How is social identity configured through the lenses of commodities and consumption? In what ways do nation states promote consumption? In what ways does consumption promote nation states? How do global businesses make consumers? What does social activism against consumption look like? How is the use of nature in places far from reaches of global capital different than other places? How and why have the social relations of production associated with capitalism become taken-for-granted and seen as natural?

ANTH G6100x. Semiotic Anthropology I. 3 pts. Semiotic is the study of the activity of signs. What is the relationship between reality and representation? In what different ways can this relationship be theorized? What are the consequences of holding that reality, including the reality of culture, is a system of representations or of signs? These questions will be explored with reference to several recent anthropological texts as well as the writings of some key "non-anthropological" thinkers drawn from the following list: C.S. Peirce, Ferdinand de Saussure, Mikhail Bakhtin, Roland Barthes, A.J. Greimas, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Umberto Eco, and Julia Kristeva.

ANTH G6118x. Optic Theory. 3 pts.

ANTH G6125x. Language, Culture and Power. 3 pts. This course examines structuralist and pragmatic, post-structuralist and metapragmatic approaches to language and culture and their relevance and availability to the critical analysis of social power.

ANTH G6155x. Righting Wrongs: Trauma, Memory, and the Politics of Repair. 3 pts. (Enrollment limited to 15 GSAS graduate students only)

ANTH G6207x. Profane Illumination II. 3 pts. At the modern, urban crossroads of Jewish and Christian mysticism, Marxism, Surrealism, and love, stands Walter Benjamin's concept of profane illumination. This seminar explores the ramifications of the paradox entailed by such profanation, especially in relation to writing culture by means of the dialectical image as bodied impulse.

ANTH G6601x. Questions in Anthropological Theory I. 3 pts. 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 G6650x. Psychoanalytic Trajectories: Narrative and Ethnos. 3 pts. This course pairs classic works in psychoanalysis with narrative texts, both literary and ethnographic. The class will consist of close readings of key psychoanalytic texts by Freud and Lacan, with secondary readings authored by Slavoj Zizek, Jeffrey Mehlman, Jacques Derrida, Samuel Weber, and others. Narrative works include Hoffman's "The Sandman" and Henry James's The Turn of the Screw and ethnographic writings by James Siegel and Claude Lévi-Strauss.

ANHS G8014x. Advanced Studies In South Asian History, Culture, and Society. 3 pts. Prerequisites: Previous graduate course on South Asia or background in South Asian studies. On late medieval and modern South Asia (1600 to the present).

ANTH G8494x. Seminar On Late Imperial China . 3 pts. Selected themes in the analysis of Chinese society during late imperial and modern times.

ANTH G8545x. Anthropology of Affliction. 3 pts. Enrollment limited to 15 students. Prerequisites: Instructor's permission. Contemporary medical anthropology focusing on such issues as embodiment, medical power and praxis, the commodification of the body and healing, social constructions of suffering, and the cultural significance of medical technologies.

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Archaeology

ANTH W4065x. Archaeology of Idols. 3 pts. "Archaeology of Idols" has been designed to fill a gap in archaeological coursework within the anthropology department at Barnard/Columbia. Alongside our suite of 1000-level introductory courses (including ANTH 1007, which I teach) and 3,000-level regional courses (including ANTH 3300, which I also teach), we have sought to create a core group of advanced courses that will introduce undergraduates to the nature of contemporary archaeological theory. "Archaeology of Idols" has been so designed, but also draws upon subject matter that should attract non-anthropology majors from art history and religious studies.

ANTH G4078x. Clues, Signs, and Traces: Archaeology and Semiotics. 3 pts. As archaeologists living in the present we cannot engage directly with 'the past'; instead we deal with the material traces left by the practices of past people, and use these traces to create narratives, arguments and propositions about what we believe they represent. If we can know past practices at all, it is only through the signs we perceive inhering in the material evidence before us. This class will consider the different ways in which archaeologists have constructed meaning from material remains and explore how we make inferences based on these meanings. We will also consider how archaeology, forensic science and detective fiction draw upon common concepts and ideals of truth, knowledge and the human body that emerged in the 18th century and 19th centuries, and their effects on the construction of archaeological narratives, and on the development of the discipline as a whole.

ANTH G4129x. Landscape: Interpreting Place. 3 pts. Understanding how people inhabit and make sense of the physical world is fundamental to any understanding of human society. This class will explore different archaeological perspectives on the creation and inhabitation of place by reading archaeological accounts together with material from anthropology, architecture, art history, geography and social theory.

ANTH G6004x. Economy and Society in Prehistory. 3 pts. Comparative study of economic formations in prehistory. Topics include hunting and gathering and farming subsistence; non-market exchange systems; markets and money; specialized production; the social economy of consumption; and domestic and political economies in state society

ANTH G6352x. Museum Anthropology: History and Theory. 3 pts. This course will consider museums as reflectors of social priorities which store important objects and display them in ways that present significant cultural messages. Students visit several New York museums to learn how a museum functions.

ANTH G9102. Research In Archaeology. 3-9 pts. Prerequisite: Instructor's permission. Individual research and tutorial in archaeology for advanced graduate students.

ANTH G9110. Museum Anthropology Internship. 3-9 pts. An internship arranged through the Museum Anthropology program of 10 hrs/week (for 3 credits) or 20 hrs/week (for 6 credits). 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. 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. Prerequisite: Instructor's permission. Individual research and tutorial in quantitative methods for advanced graduate students.

ANTH G9114y. Research In Data Processing. 3-9 pts. Prerequisite: Instructor's permission. Individual research and tutorial in data processing for advanced graduate students.

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Physical Anthropology

ANTH G4147x (Section 001). Human Skeletal Biology, I and II. 3 pts. Prerequisites: Permission of the Instructor. Enrollment limited to 12 students. Recommended for archaeology, physical anthropology, premedical, and biology students interested in the human skeletal system. Intensive study of human skeletal materials, using anatomical and anthropological landmarks to assess sex, age, and ethnicity of the bones. Other primate skeletal material and fossil casts are used for comparative study.

ANTH G4200x. Fossil Evidence of Human Evolution. 3 pts. Prerequisites: ANEB V1010 or the equivalent, and permission of the Instructor. Enrollment limited to 12 students. Intended for advanced undergraduates and beginning graduate students who are interested in paleoanthropology. Provides a closer look at what comprises the fossil evidence for human evolution from the australopithecines of 4 million years ago to the fully modern human species of 25,000 years ago. Involves hands-on examination of the departmental casts.

ANTH G9103x. Research In Physical Anthropology. 3-9 pts. Prerequisite: Instructor's permission. Individual research and tutorial in physical anthropology for advanced graduate students.

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Graduate Research Courses

ANTH G9105. Research In Special Fields. 3-9 pts. Staff. HBTA. 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. HBTA. Prerequisite: Instructor's permission. Individual research in all divisions of anthropology and allied fields for advanced graduate students

ANTH G9110**. Museum Anthropology Internship. 3-9 pts. Staff. HBTA. 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. HBTA. 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. HBTA.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. HBTA.Prerequisite: Instructor's permission. Individual research and tutorial in data processing for advanced graduate students.

Of Related Interest

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