THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURE

The anthropological approach to the study of culture and human society. Case studies from ethnography are used in exploring the universality of cultural categories (social organization, economy, law, belief system, art, etc.) and the range of variation among human societies.

• MW 10:10 a.m.-11:25 a.m.
• Instructor: Naor H Ben-Yehoyada
  CULPA: 5 Info
• 3 points

INTERPRETATION OF CULTRE-DISC

• W 1:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• R 2:10 p.m.-3 p.m.
• R 4:10 p.m.-5 p.m.
• R 5:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• W 12:10 p.m.-1 p.m.
• F 11:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Asprey J Liu
  Info
• 0 points

INTRO TO SOC & CULTURAL THEORY

SOCIAL & CULTURAL THEORY

This course presents students with crucial theories of society, paying particular attention at the outset to classic social theory of the early 20th century. It traces a trajectory of writings essential for an understanding of the social: from Saussure, Durkheim, Mauss, Weber, and Marx, on to the structuralist ethnographic elaboration of Claude Levi-Strauss and the historiographic reflections on modernity of Michel Foucault. We revisit periodically, reflections by Franz Boas, founder of anthropology in the United States (and of Anthropology at Columbia), for a sense of origins, an early anthropological critique of racism and cultural chauvinism, and a prescient denunciation of fascism.  We turn as well, also with ever-renewed interest in these times, to the expansive critical thought of W. E. B. Du Bois.  We conclude with Kathleen Stewart’s
A Space on the Side of the Road
--an ethnography of late-twentieth-century Appalachia and the haunted remains of coal-mining country--with its depictions of an uncanny otherness within dominant American narratives.

• MW 11:40 a.m.-12:55 p.m.
• Instructor: John Pemberton
  CULPA: 15 Wikipedia Info
• 3 points

CORPSE LIFE: ANTH HISTORY OF THE DEAD

CORPSE LIFE:ANTH HIST OF DEAD

• TR 1:10 p.m.-2:25 p.m.
• Instructor: Zoe Crossland
  CULPA: 9 h-index: 17 Info
• 4 points

CORPSE LIFE:ANTH HIST OF THE DEAD-DISC

CORPSE LIFE:ANTH OF DEAD-DISC

• M 1:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• M 3:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• T 12:10 p.m.-1 p.m.
• T 4:10 p.m.-5 p.m.
• W 12:10 p.m.-1 p.m.
• R 12:10 p.m.-1 p.m.
• R 3:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• F 12:10 p.m.-1 p.m.
• Instructor: Phoebe G Whiteside
  Info
• 0 points

ARCHAEOL BEFORE THE BIBLE

Please note that this is not a class on “biblical archaeology”. It is a course about the politics of archaeology in the context of Israel/Palestine, and the wider southwest Asia region. This course provides a critical overview of prehistoric archaeology in southwest Asia (or the Levant - the geographical area from Lebanon in the north to the Sinai in the south, and from the middle Euphrates in Syria to southern Jordan). It has been designed to appeal to anthropologists, historians, and students interested in the Ancient Mediterranean and Middle Eastern Studies. The course is divided into two parts. First, a social and political history of archaeology, emphasizing how the nature of current theoretical and practical knowledge has been shaped and defined by previous research traditions and, second, how the current political situation in the region impinges upon archaeological practice. Themes include: the dominance of "biblical archaeology" and the implications for Palestinian archaeology, Islamic archaeology, the impact of European contact from the Crusades onwards, and the development of prehistory.

• TR 10:10 a.m.-11:25 a.m.
• Instructor: Brian Boyd
  CULPA: 6 Info
• 3 points

LIVING WITH ANIMALS: ANTHROPOLOGICAL PER

• MW 10:10 a.m.-11:25 a.m.
• Instructor: Hannah Chazin
  Info
• 4 points

Against Dystopia

Against Dystopia: climate

Ideas of dystopian futures haunt present-day imaginings of the climate
crisis. Such futures are
typically characterized by worsening inequality, disastrous weather effects, and deeply disrupted
social relations. Apocalyptic imaginaries also tend to invoke an individualist politics oriented
around struggle over scarce resources. But what about those for whom the present is already
post-apocalyptic? What about political configurations that insist on solidarity, mutuality, care, and
justice to create liberatory futures? Just solutions to the climate crisis are only as capacious as
the imagination of what the problems are, how the present came into being, who is most
affected, and who gets to decide what futures are created. This interdisciplinary course engages
ethnographic work alongside theorizations of contemporary life and other world-building genres,
including climate fiction, visual art, and poetry. In doing so, the course offers an argument
against the fatalism of dystopia and seeks to imagine what reparative methods centering climate
justice could look like.

• R 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Dilshanie Perera
  Info
• 4 points

ARCH ENGAGE: PAST IN PUB EYE

This course provides a panoramic, but intensive, inquiry into the ways that archaeology and its methods for understanding the world have been marshaled for debate in issues of public interest. It is designed to examine claims to knowledge of the past through the lenses of alternative epistemologies and a series of case-based problems that range from the academic to the political, legal, cultural, romantic, and fraudulent.

• T 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Terence N D'Altroy
  CULPA: 37 Info
• 4 points

ECOCRITICISM FOR THE END TIMES

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. This seminar aims to show what an anthropologically informed, ecocritical cultural studies can offer in this moment of intensifying ecological calamity. The course will not only engage significant works in anthropology, ecocriticism, philosophy, literature, politics, and aesthetics to think about the environment, it will also bring these works into engaged reflection on living in the end times (borrowing cultural critic Slavoj Zizeks phrase). The seminar will thus locate critical perspectives on the environment within the contemporary worldwide ecological crisis, emphasizing the ethnographic realities of global warming, debates on nuclear power and energy, and the place of nature. Drawing on the professors long experience in Japan and current research on the aftermath of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant disaster, the seminar will also take care to unpack the notion of end times, with its apocalyptic implications, through close considerations of works that take on the question of ecocatastrophe in our times. North American and European perspectives, as well as international ones (particularly ones drawn from East Asia), will give the course a global reach.

• M 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Marilyn Ivy
  CULPA: 11 Wikipedia Info
• 4 points

SUPERVISED INDIVIDUAL RESEARCH

Prerequisite: the written permission of the staff member under whose supervision the research will be conducted.

• Instructor: Nadia Abu El-Haj
  CULPA: 13 Wikipedia Info
• Instructor: Lila Abu-Lughod
  CULPA: 17 Wikipedia h-index: 48 Info
• Instructor: Maria Jose de Abreu
  Info
• Instructor: Catherine Fennell
  Info
• Instructor: Marilyn Ivy
  CULPA: 11 Wikipedia Info
• Instructor: Brian Larkin
  CULPA: 16 Info
• Instructor: Claudio Lomnitz
  CULPA: 3 Wikipedia Info
• Instructor: Rosalind Morris
  CULPA: 20 Wikipedia Info
• Instructor: Brinkley Messick
  CULPA: 19 Info
• Instructor: John Pemberton
  CULPA: 15 Wikipedia Info
• Instructor: Elizabeth Povinelli
  CULPA: 14 Wikipedia Info
• Instructor: David Scott
  CULPA: 6 h-index: 72 Info
• Instructor: Lesley Sharp
  CULPA: 22 Info
• Instructor: Paige West
  CULPA: 41 h-index: 23 Info
• Instructor: Kaya N Williams
  Info
• Instructor: Brian Boyd
  CULPA: 6 Info
• Instructor: Naor H Ben-Yehoyada
  CULPA: 5 Info
• Instructor: Marco Castro
  Info
• Instructor: Zoe Crossland
  CULPA: 9 h-index: 17 Info
• Instructor: Severin Fowles
  CULPA: 24 Info
• Instructor: Elizabeth M Green
  CULPA: 2 Info
• Instructor: Vanessa L Agard-Jones
  CULPA: 3 Info
• Instructor: Hannah Chazin
  Info
• Instructor: Audra Simpson
  CULPA: 5 Wikipedia Info
• Instructor: Mahmood Mamdani
  CULPA: 21 Wikipedia h-index: 57 Info
• Instructor: Dilshanie Perera
  Info
• 2-6 points

SENIOR THESIS SEM IN ANTHROPOL

Prerequisites: The instructors permission. Students must have declared a major in Anthropology prior to registration. Students must have a 3.6 GPA in the major and a preliminary project concept in order to be considered. Interested students must communicate/meet with thesis instructor in the previous spring about the possibility of taking the course during the upcoming academic year. Additionally, expect to discuss with the instructor at the end of the fall term whether your project has progressed far enough to be completed in the spring term. If it has not, you will exit the seminar after one semester, with a grade based on the work completed during the fall term. This two-term course is a combination of a seminar and a workshop that will help you conduct research, write, and present an original senior thesis in anthropology. Students who write theses are eligible to be considered for departmental honors. The first term of this course introduces a variety of approaches used to produce anthropological knowledge and writing; encourages students to think critically about the approaches they take to researching and writing by studying model texts with an eye to the ethics, constraints, and potentials of anthropological research and writing; and gives students practice in the seminar and workshop formats that are key to collegial exchange and refinement of ideas. During the first term, students complete a few short exercises that will culminate in a substantial draft of one discrete section of their senior project (18-20 pages) plus a detailed outline of the expected work that remains to be done (5 pages). The spring sequence of the anthropology thesis seminar is a writing intensive continuation of the fall semester, in which students will have designed the research questions, prepared a full thesis proposal that will serve as a guide for the completion of the thesis and written a draft of one chapter. Only those students who expect to have completed the fall semester portion of the course are allowed to register for the spring; final enrollment is contingent upon successful completion of first semester requirements. In spring semester, weekly meetings will be devoted to the collaborative refinement of drafts, as well as working through issues of writing (evidence, voice, authority etc.). All enrolled students are required to present their project at a symposium in the late spring, and the final grade is based primarily on successful completion of the thesis/ capstone project. Note: The senior thesis seminar is open t

• M 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Lila Abu-Lughod
  CULPA: 17 Wikipedia h-index: 48 Info
• 4 points

THE ANCIENT EMPIRES

The principal goal of this course is to examine the nature and histories of a range of early empires in a comparative context. In the process, we will examine influential theories that have been proposed to account for the emergence and trajectories of those empires. Among the theories are the core-periphery, world-systems, territorial-hegemonic, tributary-capitalist, network, and IEMP approaches. Five regions of the world have been chosen, from the many that could provide candidates: Rome (the classic empire), New Kingdom Egypt, Qin China, Aztec Mesoamerica, and Inka South America. These empires have been chosen because they represent a cross-section of polities ranging from relatively simple and early expansionist societies to the grand empires of the Classical World, and the most powerful states of the indigenous Americas. There are no prerequisites for this course, although students who have no background in Anthropology, Archaeology, History, or Classics may find the course material somewhat more challenging than students with some knowledge of the study of early societies. There will be two lectures per week, given by the professor.

• MW 11:40 a.m.-12:55 p.m.
• Instructor: Terence N D'Altroy
  CULPA: 37 Info
• 3 points

ANCIENT EMPIRES-DISC

• M 10:10 a.m.-11 a.m.
• W 2:10 p.m.-3 p.m.
• W 3:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• R 2:10 p.m.-3 p.m.
• F 10:10 a.m.-11 a.m.
• F 11:10 a.m.-noon
• W 4:10 p.m.-5 p.m.
• R 4:10 p.m.-5 p.m.
• Instructor: William G Odum
  Info
• 0 points

Mexico s Disappeared Practicum

This practicum is an exercise in engaged pedagogy.  The academic work we do will be conducted for the benefit of the cause of Mexico's now over 110,000 disappeared persons.  Students will be engaged in a sustained research effort to development a "context analysis" of disappearances in the state of Zacatecas (Mexico)-- an exercise in social study that focuses on the economic, political, social, and criminological context in which disappearances occur.  Research is done in coordination with Mexico's National Commission for the Search of the Disappeared.  Alongside the practical, real-world, objective, this Practicum is designed to perfect research skills in the social sciences

 

PREREQUISITE: Spanish language comprehension is compulsory for 60% of those enrolled

• M 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Claudio Lomnitz
  CULPA: 3 Wikipedia Info
• 4 points

ISLAMIC LAW

• M 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Brinkley Messick
  CULPA: 19 Info
• 3 points

Art beyond Aesthetics: Decolonizing appr

This course is a combination of lectures, seminar participation, and group practicums which probes the possibility of a decolonial art research practice. This course introduces students to western approaches to politics and art through a sustained engagement with critical Indigenous and anticolonial theories of human relations to the more-than-human world. It is a mixture of lectures, class discussion, and individual practicums which lead to final projects that combine image and text.

• T 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Elizabeth Povinelli
  CULPA: 14 Wikipedia Info
• 4 points

PRIN/APPL OF SOCIETY & CULTURE

Prerequisites: 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. 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.

• R 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Ellen Marakowitz
  CULPA: 1 Info
• 3 points

ETHICAL ISSUES IN MUSEUMS

Ethical questions about museum activities are legion, yet they are usually only discussed when they become headlines in newspapers. At the same time, people working in museums make decisions with ethical and legal issues regularly and seldom give these judgments even little thought. In part, this is due to the fact that many of these decisions are based upon values that become second nature. This course will explore ethical issues that arise in all areas of a museum's operations from governance and management to collections acquisition, conservation, and deaccessioning. We will examine the issues that arise when the ownership of objects in a museum's are questioned; the ethical considerations involved in retention, restitution and repatriation; and what decolonization means for museums.

• F 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Sally Yerkovich
  Info
• 3 points

PLACE, SPACE, NATURE

• M 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Paige West
  CULPA: 41 h-index: 23 Info
• 3 points

VALUE, OBJECTS, AND MEANING

VALUE OBJECTS AND MEANING

This course explores how anthropologists have engaged with the question of value as means of understanding and comparing human social engagement with the creation, circulation, and consumption of objects and ideas. In doing so, this course will read classical anthropological texts concerned with exchange, social meaning and action and consider a variety of topics of anthropological interest such as gifts, commodities, capitalism, inequality, and the relationships between humans and nonhumans of many kinds. The course traces how questions and arguments that emerged out of earlier debates in “economic” anthropology were taken up and altered in later conversations about the analytical importance and utility of material and semiotic approaches. In doing so, the course explores what these genealogies might say about the possibility of, and the potential usefulness or desirability of, a contemporary or future-looking anthropology of value.

• R 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Hannah Chazin
  Info
• 3 points

MAKING ETHNOG:METHOD & WRITING

This course begins with two central and related epistemological problems in conducting ethnographic research: first, the notion that objects of scientific research are ‘made’ through adopting a particular relational stance and asking certain kinds of questions. From framing a research problem and choosing a ‘research context’ story to tell, to the kinds of methods one selects to probe such a problem, the ‘how’ and ‘what’ – or means and content – are inextricably intertwined. A second epistemological problem concerns the artifice of reality, and the nebulous distinction between truth and fiction, no less than the question of where or with whom one locates such truth.

With these issues framing the course, we will work through some key themes and debates in anthropology from the perspective of methodology, ranging from subject/object liminality to incommensurability and radical alterity to the politics of representation. Students will design an ethnographic project of their choosing and conduct research throughout the term, applying different methodological approaches popular in anthropology and the social sciences more generally, such as participant observation, semi-structured interview, diary-keeping and note-taking.

• R 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Sheng Long
  Info
• 3 points

Waste and Leftovers

Generations of anthropologists have seized upon waste as an object to think through issues as wide-ranging as labor divisions, religious devotion, and processes of social classification and value production. In recent years the discipline has renewed attention to this object by way of puzzling through how apparently intensifying global processes of industrialization, consumption, and extraction shape contemporary politics and ecological sensibilities. This seminar charts some of these moves within and beyond our discipline by inviting students to consider how and to what ends societies work through wasted things but also other kinds of durable leftovers (i.e. “ruins,” “byproducts,” “rubble,” “remainders” etc). Of particular concern for us will be the production and (re)appropriation of things that defy strict classification as “waste,” that is, as things imagined to be readily and permanently ejected from a social group or order. Students will read seminal texts on waste, excess, abjection, and reappropriation alongside ethnographic and historical monographs that take up these themes.

• F 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Catherine Fennell
  Info
• 3 points

Semiotics-1

This course examines the canonical texts of modern semiology and semiotics from the perspective of anthropological methods and theories. Beginning with an extensive examination of the works of Ferdinand de Saussure and Charles Sanders Peirce, the course examines the theoretical elaborations and movements of structuralism and pragmatism through the 1960s.

• T 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Elizabeth Povinelli
  CULPA: 14 Wikipedia Info
• 4 points

MUSEUM ANTHROP:HIST & THEORY

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.

• T 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Brian Boyd
  CULPA: 6 Info
• 3 points

MODERN STATE/COLONIAL SUBJECT

On the development of legal thought on the colonial subject. Focus on the American Indian in the New World, post-1857 India, indirect rule in post-Mahdciyya Sudan and South Africa, and Israel/Palestine

• T 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Mahmood Mamdani
  CULPA: 21 Wikipedia h-index: 57 Info
• 3 points

QUESTIONS-ANTHROP THRY I:TEXTS

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.

• W 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Claudio Lomnitz
  CULPA: 3 Wikipedia Info
• 3 points

DARK ECOLOGIES: ECOCRITICAL THOUGHT NOW

DARK ECOL: ECOCRTICAL THOUGHT

This seminar aims to disclose what an anthropologically informed, ecocritical cultural studies can offer in this moment of intensifying ecological calamity. With global warming and associated crises of pollution, habitat and species extinction, new forms of disease, and the ongoing issue of the nuclear, there is a pervasive anxiety about the fate of the earth and, with it, life itself. How can ecocritical thought grapple with this “great unraveling,” as ecotheorist Joanna Macy has put it? This seminar will engage significant works in anthropology, ecocriticism, philosophy, literature, political thought, and art to help us think about this central question.  Readings will include works by Morton, Bonneuil and Fressoz, Bennett, Zizek, Kohn, Descola, Stengers, Haraway, Latour, Macy, and others. Enrollment limit is 15 and the instructor's permission is required.

• T 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Marilyn Ivy
  CULPA: 11 Wikipedia Info
• 3 points

MUSA DIGITAL MEDIA,MATERIALITY&PRACTICE

MUSA DIGITAL MEDIA & MATE

Class sessions will include the discussion of assigned readings, multimedia, and digital resources, as well as short lectures. Each student will co-lead one discussion section during the term. During most classes there will be presentation and discussion of student assignments. In this course we will learn how to digitally map and visualize museum systems and use this knowledge to facilitate a visitors journey from thinking to making. In the first part of the semester readings, class discussion and weekly “experiments” will be used to investigate how mapping, sketching, and modeling techniques can help develop sustainable frameworks for exhibition. In the second part of the semester we will begin modeling solutions and use these models to refine the way we communicate them to various stakeholders and audiences. Ultimately, the course aims to help students clearly articulate their thinking, explore ways of planning and communicating solutions and develop new models of engagement and action in an exhibition context. The class will combine lectures, seminars, field observation and prototyping.

• R 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Marco Castro
  Info
• 3 points

RSCH IN SOCIAL/CULTURAL ANTHRO

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research and tutorial in social and cultural anthropology for advanced graduate students.

• Instructor: Nadia Abu El-Haj
  CULPA: 13 Wikipedia Info
• Instructor: Lila Abu-Lughod
  CULPA: 17 Wikipedia h-index: 48 Info
• Instructor: Naor H Ben-Yehoyada
  CULPA: 5 Info
• Instructor: Maria Jose de Abreu
  Info
• Instructor: Catherine Fennell
  Info
• Instructor: Marilyn Ivy
  CULPA: 11 Wikipedia Info
• Instructor: Brian Larkin
  CULPA: 16 Info
• Instructor: Claudio Lomnitz
  CULPA: 3 Wikipedia Info
• Instructor: Ellen Marakowitz
  CULPA: 1 Info
• Instructor: Brinkley Messick
  CULPA: 19 Info
• Instructor: Rosalind Morris
  CULPA: 20 Wikipedia Info
• Instructor: John Pemberton
  CULPA: 15 Wikipedia Info
• Instructor: Elizabeth Povinelli
  CULPA: 14 Wikipedia Info
• Instructor: David Scott
  CULPA: 6 h-index: 72 Info
• Instructor: Lesley Sharp
  CULPA: 22 Info
• Instructor: Paige West
  CULPA: 41 h-index: 23 Info
• Instructor: Kaya N Williams
  Info
• Instructor: Elizabeth M Green
  CULPA: 2 Info
• Instructor: Audra Simpson
  CULPA: 5 Wikipedia Info
• Instructor: Vanessa L Agard-Jones
  CULPA: 3 Info
• 3-9 points

RSCH IN SOCIAL/CULTURAL ANTHRO

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research and tutorial in social and cultural anthropology for advanced graduate students.

• Instructor: Mahmood Mamdani
  CULPA: 21 Wikipedia h-index: 57 Info
• 3-9 points

RSCH IN SOCIAL/CULTURAL ANTHRO

RSRCH SOCIAL & CULTURAL ANTHRO

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research and tutorial in social and cultural anthropology for advanced graduate students.

• Instructor: Dilshanie Perera
  Info
• 3-9 points

RESEARCH IN ARCHAEOLOGY

RESEARCH IN PREHISTORIC ARCH

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research and tutorial in archaeology for advanced graduate students.

• Instructor: Brian Boyd
  CULPA: 6 Info
• Instructor: Marco Castro
  Info
• Instructor: Zoe Crossland
  CULPA: 9 h-index: 17 Info
• Instructor: Terence N D'Altroy
  CULPA: 37 Info
• Instructor: Severin Fowles
  CULPA: 24 Info
• 3-9 points