Revised 11/24/09- Please refer to the directory of courses online for times and locations: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/bulletin/uwb/

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

ANTH W4022y Political Ecology 3 pts.Nicole Peterson. Analyzes global, national, and local environment issues from the critical perspectives of political ecology. Explores themes like the production of nature, environmental violence, environmental justice, political decentralization, territoriality, the state, and the conservation interventions. Instructor's permission.

ANTH G4118y Settler Colonialism in North America 3 pts. Audra Simpson. This course examines the relationship between colonialism, settlement and anthropology and the specific ways in which these processes have been engaged in the broader literature and locally in North America. We aim to understand colonialism as a theory of political legitimacy, as a set of governmental practices and as a subject of inquiry. Thus we will re-imagine North America in light of the colonial project and its "technologies of rule" such as education, law and policy that worked to transform Indigenous notions of gender, property and territory. Our case studies will dwell in several specific areas of inquiry, among them: the Indian Act in Canada and its transformations of gender relations, governance and property; the residential and boarding school systems in the US and Canada, the murdered and missing women in Juarez and Canada and the politics of allotment in the US. Although this course will be comparative in scope, it will be grounded heavily within the literature from Native North America. Enrollment limit 15.

CLAN G4143y Cultures of Accusation 3 pts. Rosalind Morris. This course examines the politics and practices of collective accusation in comparative perspective. It treats these phenomena in their relation to processes of political and economic transition, to discourses of crisis, and to the practices of rule by which the idea of exception is made the grounds for extreme claims on and for the social body?usually, but not exclusively, enacted through forms of expulsion. We will consider the various theoretical perspectives through which forms of collective accusation have been addressed, focusing on psychoanalytic, structural functional, and poststructuralist readings. In doing so, we will also investigate the difference and possible continuities between the forms and logics of accusation that operate in totalitarian as well as liberal regimes. Course readings will include both literary and critical texts.

MDES G4244y Arab Society and Culture 3 pts. Soraya Altorki.

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 Brinkley Messick.

ANTH G4325y The Linguistic Anthropology of Artificial Languages. 3 pts. Paul Kockelman. This course is about artificial languages through the frame of linguistics and anthropology, with a focus on the digital and computational mediation of meaning. In some sense, it is about human-based significance in relation to machine-based sieving. Our focus will be on the poetics and pragmatics of programming languages (e.g. Assembly, LISP, C), mathematical notations (e.g. Gödel numbers, Boolean algebra), conversion codes (e.g. ASCII, Unicode, Huffman), algorithmic processes (e.g. regular expressions, context-free grammars, Turing machines), and design solutions (e.g. machine learning, evolutionary algorithms). There are three parts: 1) information and meaning (or code and channel); 2) computation and interpretation (or sieving and significance); 3) life-forms and forms-of-life (or nature and artifice).

ANTH W4340y Cinemas of the Maghreb (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia). 3 pts. Kevin Dwyer. This course focuses on one expressive form(cinema) in one predominantly Arab Muslim region(the Maghreb, comprising the nations of Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria), as part of an anthropological effort to explore the ways in which films taken individually and a nation’s cinema as a whole can help us understand society.The discussion of films and filmmakers will be set in the historical, political, cultural, and social contexts of the individual countries and of the region.The approach will combine historical and thematic perspectives, highlighting differences and similarities from country to country, from film to film, and from filmmaker to filmmaker.

ANTH G4372y The Public and Publics 3 pts. Catherine Fennell. This course investigates the related concepts of “the public” and “publics” as discursive, semiotic and political formations. We will situate the problem of “the public” within contemporary understandings of democracy and democratic practice, as well as in anthropological and ethnographic relief. Particular attention will be paid to the forms of rationality, sociality and materiality undergirding these related concepts. Enrollment limit 15.

ANTH G4631y Brazilian Feminism, National Politics and International propositions 3 pts. Lia Machado. This course is a contribution for an anthropological study of the historical, social and cultural context of the development of feminism in Brazil since the seventies. At the same time, it is a contribution for a comparative study of feminist movements as women's movements centered on "women's issues" and "gender issues". The focus is on a Brazilian feminist movement that can be considered, depending on the perspective, as a feminism movement in a "Third World" society, a "south" society, a society in development or, as a Western feminist women's movement. We will problematize and challenge this terminology beyond the north/south’ gap on economic development and social inequality thus reinforcing the idea of the possible proximity of these movements as effects arising from the same “new political values” given by the social movements to national cultural, color and ethnic diversity, and as effects derived from the historical constitution of some consensus on the agenda of the international feminist movement in order to fight the “new” conservative (fundamentalist) forces against feminism internationally articulated. From another angle, we will pay attention to all differences on traditional cultures that permit us to see the peculiar and different ways of national feminisms and their forms of struggle and organization strategies. The hegemonic institutionalized traditional culture in Brazil and Hispanic Latin America is the result of Iberian institutional cultures, with effects on judicial and legal institutions.

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 advanced level undergraduates and graduate students. Enrollment limit 15.

ANTH G6088y Experimental Ethnographies 3 pts. Neni Panourgia. What has become known as "the linguistic turn" in the humanities and the social sciences has engendered a position that stands critically not only towards the content of analysis but, equally importantly, has enabled new forms of writings. In this course we will read a limited number of fundamental texts that inaugurated this new writing in ethnography along with a good number of experimental ethnographies. Some of the authors that we will consider are Bateson, Boon, Clifford, Crapanzano, Geertz, Marcus, Nelson, Seremetakis, Tyler, Wafer.

ANTH G6102y Semiotic Anthropology II: Doing Anthropology on Power, Violence and the State 3 pts. E. V. Daniel. While this course is taught each year in the spring as a sequel to Semeiosic Anthropology I, which is taught every year in the fall, Semeiosic Anthropology I is not a pre-requisite for taking Semeiotic Anthropology II. In the fall semester l introduced the class to classics in the theories of semeiotic (the analytic study of the essential conditions to which all signs are subject) and semiology (the general science of human culture based on the structure of the linguistic sign), principally, the theoretical writings of Charles Sanders Peirce and Ferdinand de Saussure on the �sign� respectively. In this course we will pick up a topic, a theme, a concept or an interrelated cluster of concepts and explore a selection of major writings of ethnographic, historical, literary and theoretical value�on the subject(s) chosen and analyse them from a semeiotic-critical perspective.

ANTH G6212y Seminar: Principles and Applications in Social and Cultural Anthropology 3 pts. Ellen Marakowitz. Prerequisites: G4201. Principles and Applications of Social and Cultural Anthropology and instructor's permission. Focus on research and writing for the Master's level thesis, including research design, bibliography and background literature development, and writing.

ANTH G6345y The 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. Instructor's Permission Required.

ANTH G6400y Problem of Emancipation 3 pts. D. Scott. Taking as its point of departure the emancipation of slaves in the British Caribbean as a "triumph" of liberalism, this course examines some aspects of the relation between power, freedom, race, and modernity.

MESAAS G6406y The Modern State and the Colonial Subject 3 pts. Mahmood Mamdani. On the development of legal thought on the colonial subject. Focus on the American Indian in the New World, and subjugated peoples in the Ottoman Empire, in British India and in tropical and southern Africa. Enrolment limited to 15 plus instructor permission or after the first meeting of class.

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 serveral 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.

ANTH G G8011y Gender, Feminism and Cultural Diversity 3 pts. Lia Machado. This research seminar will prepare students to conduct research and write a paper on the intersections of feminism, social movements, human rights, social-science research on gender, and studies of cultural diversity. Cultural diversity is termed as a human right in the Vienna Conference.In the Preamble to the 31^st Session of the UNESCO General Conference in Paris, 2001, the concept of cultural diversity implies tolerance, dialogue and cooperation within a climate of trust, able in so doing to guarantee peace and international security.Human unity does not supersede cultural diversity.

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ARCHAEOLOGY

ANTH W4346y Laboratory Techniques. 3 pts. Training in general archaeological methods. Data recording techniques, preparation of reports and illustration, etc. $10.00 mandatory laboratory fee. Instructor to be announced.

ANTH G6101y Archaeology and Social Theory 3 pts. Christopher Matthews. Designed to trace the major theoretical developments in archaeology over the past few decades from a global perspective. The relevance of the numerous strands of social theory that are commonly applied to archaeological materials. Influences from anthropological theory, feminist theory, philosophy, globalism, postmodernism, and poststructuralism.

ANTH G6205y Research Design in Anthropology 3 pts. Terence D'Altroy. Research design in anthropology (all subfields), from theoretical conceptualization to problem formation, methods, and grant writing.

ANTH G6353y Exhibiting Culture: Politics and Practices of Museum Exhibitions 3 pts. Erin Hasinoff. 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.

ANTH G9111y Museum Anthropology Internship II 3 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.

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PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

ANTH G4148y The Human Skeletal Biology II 3 pts. Ralph Holloway. 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. Enrollment limited to 15 students and instructor's permission required.

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