Please refer to the directory of courses online for times and locations: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/bulletin/uwb/
ANTH G4246y The Politics of Reproduction 3 pts. Junjie Chen. This course focuses on reproductive politics in the global context and in comparative perspectives. Through comparative case studies, we will examine how cultural, moral, and political values givemeaning to human reproductive events and inform people's uses of medical technologies 'Drawing on case materials from a variety of societies, we will study how competing interests within households, communities, states, and institutions influence reproductive arrangements in society. We focus on how technological mediations of fertility, pregnancy' and birth (e.g.,contraception, abortion, in vitro fertilization, prenatal testing, etc.) offer opportunities for the formation of gender and kinship, the reproduction of social inequalities, and the implementation of national population and intemational development agendas. We will further interrogate how bioethical evaluation of reproductive technologies might take into account the motivations and experiences of actual users. Enrollment limit is 12.
ANTH W4282y Islamic Law 3 pts. Brinkley. Messick. An introductory survey of the history and contents of the Shari'a combined with a critical review of Orientalist and contemporary scholarship on Islamic law. In addition to models for the ritual life, we will examine a number of social, economic and political constructs contained in Shari`a doctrine, including the concept of an Islamic state, and we also will consider the structure of litigation in courts. Seminar paper.
ANTH G4284y Islam and Theory 3 pts. Brinkley Messick.Course Description TBA.
ANTH G6018y Anthropology in Theory 3 pts. Jon Carter. This course is designed for students in their first-year of the MA
program in the Department of Anthropology, and requires a general
knowledge of historical and contemporary debates in the field. We will
examine the formation of anthropology as a discipline by reading from
adjacent scientific and humanistic fields that have shaped
anthropology's theoretical interventions, method, and stylized
practitioners. Readings include classic texts in philosophy, history,
political theory, and psychoanalysis. The course is designed to follow
Anth. G4201, and provide MA students an opportunity for critical
reflection on the construction of alterity in anthropological discourse
and the interdisciplinary itineraries of those ideas across the
nineteenth and twentieth century, and into the present.
ANTH G6037y Biography & Autobiography: A Portrait of South African Intellectuals 3 pts. Hlonipha Mokoena. Portraits are created to represent the likeness of a chosen subject. The writing of biographies and autobiographies has long been the preferred method through which South African intellectuals have written about their or others' political, intellectual, personal or notorious lives. This course is an examination of how the practice of biographical and autobiographical writing emerged and solidified in South African literature in part to compensate for the paucity of biographical writing but also as a substitute for a nuanced or critical engagement with the chequered and complex history of the country's intellectual and cultural inheritance. In particular, the course will consider the mediatory role of the biographer who, in the case of South Africa, often constructed a biographical subject through an ethnographic method of interviewing, translating and then representing the subject.
ANTH G6057y Governmentality, Citizenship and Indigenous Political Critique 3 pts. Audra Simpson. This seminar explores the ways in which Indigenous peoples have theorized, deployed, critiqued notions of 'nationhood', 'citizenship' and 'sovereignty' in order to articulate and claim rights to territory, to jurisdiction and to the past. Our aim is to interrogate what these critical concepts mean in the literature of anthropology, political theory and Native American Studies as well as to examine the ways in which Indigenous peoples understand and critique state practices, maintain and construct their own modes of governance and mobilize politically to achieve their ends. This course is comparative in scope; literature and cases will be drawn from various sites but will dwell largely within Native North America. This course is open to graduate students with a background in anthropological and political theory. Instructor permission is required. Enrollment limit is 15.
ANTH G6102y Semiotic Anthropology II: Theorizations of Violence from Hobbes to The Present 3 pts. E.V. Daniel. This course is a survey of explicit and implicit theorizations of violence in a range of contexts: God and man, sovereign and subject, war and peace, master and slave, European and ‘native, gender and sex, language and culture, state and citizen, colonizer and subject, universal reason and particular unreason, action and forgiveness. Throughout and paralleling these violent contexts run the threads of evils. �Evils�� opposites are not presupposed, but analyzed in each of their defining encounters with �evils� in specified relational contexts wherein we will pursue the question of violence, its ontology and epistemology. This we shall do by reading, beginning in the 4th week, portions from a provocative and diligent book, alongside the other assigned readings. The book is Adi Ophar�s The Order of Evils: Toward an Ontology of Morals, published by Zone Books. The other readings will be drawn from ethnography, philosophy, poetry, novels, sacred texts and social theory. The overall leading question in the course, however, is: What is it to be human and what is the place of violence in human being?
ANTH G6186y Performing Subjectivity In the Age of Revolution 3 pts. Elaine Combs-Schilling. Begins with classical works on ritual theory (Evans-Pritchard, Turner, Geertz) as it applies to prominent rituals in Western Europe and the kind of worldviews they generate; The Renaissance re-invention of the western theatrical stage and the transformations in frame space that such a shift augured, using opera as the representative anecdote.
ANTH G6212y Seminar: Principles and Applications in Social and Cultural Anthropology 3 pts. Ellen Marakowitz. Focus on research and writing for the Master's level thesis, including research design, bibliography and background literature development, and writing. Prerequisites: G4201. Principles and Applications of Social and Cultural Anthropology and instructor's permission.
ANTH G6345y Poetics and Politics of Infrastructure 3 pts. Brian Larkin. Infrastructures are the material forms that allow for the possibility of exchange over space, invisible conduits that comprise the technical architecture that allow urban spaces to form and creates grounds for the circulation that ties those spaces to larger grids. But bodies of recent scholarship have come to interrogate the ways in which infrastructures comprise the conditions of existence for social experience, political action and economic order. This class seeks to examine what an analysis of infrastructure might add to anthropological analysis. Drawing from anthropology, science studies, media theory and history we will analyze the technical conditions of infrastructures, the legal regulations they give rise to, the political action they generate and the forms of everyday life they enable.
ANTH G6602y Questions in Anthropological Theory II: Texts 3 pts. Nadia Abu-El-Haj. This course surveys the historical relationships between anthropological thought and its generic inscription in the form of ethnography. Readings of key ethnographic texts will be used to chart the evolving paradigms and problematics through which the disciplines practitioners have conceptualized their objects and the discipline itself. The course focuses on several key questions, including: the modernity of anthropology and the value of primitivism; the relationship between history and eventfulness in the representation of social order, and related to this, the question of anti-sociality (in crime, witchcraft, warfare, and other kinds of violence); the idea of a cultural world view; voice, language, and translation; and the relationship between the form and content of a text. Assignments include weekly readings and reviews of texts, and a substantial piece of ethnographic writing. (ONLY OPEN TO FIRST YEAR PHD STUDENTS IN ANTHROPOLOGY)
ANTH G8545y Anthropology of Affliction 3 pts. Lesley Sharp. 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. Prerequisites: Instructor's permission. Enrollment limit is 15
ANTH G9999x and y Weekly Seminar 3 pts. All anthropology students are required to attend. Reports ongoing research are presented by faculty members, students and special guests.
ANTH G4045y Temporalities: Archaeological Approaches to Time 3 pts. Zoe Crossland. The concept of the passage of time is a foundational theoretical space which underpins all archaeological work. Over the past thirty years, the discipline of anthropology has absorbed a good deal of continental critique regarding monolithic or objective epistemologies of time, as well as critiques of the inherently teleological or progressive aspect of time. Yet there has been little emphasis on an explicit methodological survey or training for archaeological scholars seeking to orient themselves within these literatures. This has resulted in a disciplinary engagement with the past that frequently omits to chart a clear course or articulate explicitly the sorts of issues at stake in adopting one or another form of historical narrative. This course is intended as an introductory critical survey of different anthropological and philosophical approaches to temporality and will be valuable for all students who seek a more reflexive engagement with their production of the past. Instructor's permission is required.
ANTH G6103y Method and Theory in Archaeology 3 pts. Terence D’Altroy. This course is a seminar on research design in anthropological archaeology. It examines the links among theory, method, and data analysis in project design and interpretation.
ANTH G6192y Exhibitions: Practical Considerations 3 pts. Nan Rothschild. This course addresses the practical challenges entailed in the process of
creating a successful exhibition. Developing an actual curatorial project,
students will get an opportunity to apply the museum anthropology theory they
are exposed to throughout the program. They will be given a hands-on approach
to the different stages involved in the curation of a show, from the in-depth
researching of an exhibition topic to the writing, editing and design of
labels and panels that will be effective for specific audiences.
Prerequisites, if any: Must have taken ANTH G6352,and be taking ANTH
G6353.
ANTH G6353y Exhibiting Culture: Politics and Practices of Museum Exhibitions 3 pts. Laurel Kendall and Jennie Newell, co-teacher. Examines anthropological, art, and history exhibits to explore how they visualize culture and identity. Relationships between museums, audiences, and the artists, cultures, and concepts exhibited will be explored. Enrollment limit is 15.
ANTH G6651y ARCHAEOLOGIES OF THE CONTEMPORARY PAST 3 pts. Severin Fowles. This seminar considers these questions through the writings of archaeologists (S. Dawdy, A. GonzSlez- Ruibal, P. Graves-Brown, R. Harrison, W. Rathje, J. Schofield) and others (Latour, connerton, Aug6, Yablon), through film ("Garbage Warrior", "lnto Eternity", "Life After People", "crash"). In the process, we will seek to develop a new body of thought on three core issues: (1) the distinctive temporalities of modernity, which appears to be compressing the present and making an archaeology of contemporary necessary, (2) the dystopian imaginaries that are in ascendance and that continue to re-script Western metanarratives, and (3) the strange methods we are led to adopt each time we examine the present as if it were already dead and gone.
Courses in Biological/Physical Anthropology not offered Spring term 2013.
Fall and Spring Semesters:
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/bulletin/uwb/
ANTH G9101. Research in Social and Cultural Anthropology 3-9 pts. 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. Prerequisite: Instructor's permission. Individual research and tutorial in archaeology for advanced graduate students.
ANTH G9103. Research in Physical Anthropology 3-9 pts. Ralph Holloway. Prerequisite: Instructor's permission. Individual research and tutorial in physical anthropology for advanced graduate students.
ANTH G9105. Research in Special Fields 3-9 pts. Prerequisite: Instructor's permission. Individual research in all divisions of anthropology and in allied fields for advanced graduate students
ANTH G9110 and ANTH G9111 Museum Anthropology Internship 3-9 pts. Nan Rothschild. 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. Prerequisite: Instructor's permission. Individual research and tutorial in archaeological method and theory for advanced graduate students.
ANTH G9999. Weekly Seminar. All anthropology graduate students are required to attend. Reports of ongoing research are presented by staff members, students, and special guests.
Courses In Anthropology at Teacher’s College
TO BE ANNOUNCED.