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.

• TR 8:40 a.m.-9:55 a.m.
• Instructor: Naor H Ben-Yehoyada
  CULPA: 5 Info
• 3 points

THINK LIKE AN ARCHAEOLOGIST

This course provides a comprehensive introduction to methods and theory in archaeology – by exploring how archaeologists work to create narratives about the past (and the present) on the basis on the material remains of the past. The course begins with a consideration of how archaeologists deal with the remains of the past in the present: What are archaeological sites and how do we ‘discover’ them? How do archaeologists ‘read’ or analyze sites and artifacts? From there, we will turn to the question of how archaeologists interpret these materials traces, in order to create narratives about life in the past. After a review of the historical development of theoretical approaches in archaeological interpretation, the course will consider contemporary approaches to interpreting the past.

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

The Secret Lives of Plants

An interdisciplinary seminar exploring the new science of plant intelligence alongside the colonial, racial, and ecological histories that have shaped human-plant relations. Drawing on plant biology, Indigenous knowledge systems, Black botanical legacies, critical race studies, and multispecies anthropology, the course asks what plants know, who has always known them, and what they have been made to do in the service of empire. Students purchase and maintain a living plant throughout the semester. Readings range from bench science to postcolonial theory to Caribbean literature.

• T 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Vanessa L Agard-Jones
  CULPA: 3 Info
• 4 points

LISTENINGS: AN ETHNOG OF SOUND

LISTENING: AN ETHNOG OF SOUND

We explore the possibilities of an ethnography of sound through a range of listening encounters: in resonant urban soundscapes of the city and in natural soundscapes of acoustic ecology; from audible pasts and echoes of the present; through repetitive listening in the age of electronic reproduction, and mindful listening that retraces an uncanniness inherent in sound. Silence, noise, voice, chambers, reverberation, sound in its myriad manifestations and transmissions.  From the captured souls of Edison’s phonography, to everyday acoustical adventures, the course turns away from the screen and dominant epistemologies of the visual for an extended moment, and does so in pursuit of sonorous objects.  How is it that sound so moves us as we move within its world, and who or what then might the listening subject be?

• T 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: John Pemberton
  CULPA: 15 Wikipedia Info
• 4 points

TEXT, MAGIC, PERFORMANCE

TEXT MAGIC PERFORMANCE

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. This course pursues interconnections linking text and performance in light of magic, ritual, possession, narration, and related articulations of power. Readings are drawn from classic theoretical writings, colonial fiction, and ethnographic accounts. Domains of inquiry include: spirit possession, trance states, séance, ritual performance, and related realms of cinematic projection, musical form, shadow theater, performative objects, and (other) things that move on their own, compellingly. Key theoretical concerns are subjectivity - particularly, the conjuring up and displacement of self in the form of the first-person singular I - and the haunting power of repetition. Retraced throughout the course are the uncanny shadows of a fully possessed subject --within ritual contexts and within everyday life.

• M 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: John Pemberton
  CULPA: 15 Wikipedia Info
• 4 points

SUPERVISED INDIVIDUAL RESEARCH

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

• 2-6 points

From Ruins to Remains: Palestine & Archa

This new course aims to provide advanced undergraduate and graduate students with a critical history of Palestine-related archaeology from the mid-19th century to the present, and (b) an examination of how archaeological narratives relating to Palestine have been impacted by state nationalism, colonialism and conflicting local, regional and global religious interests from the "Classical World" to the 21st century.

• W 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Brian Boyd
  CULPA: 6 Info
• 4 points

Vegetalities

This seminar examines the "vegetal turn" in the humanities through the lens of Black studies, Indigenous studies, and  feminist/queer studies approaches to science and technology. Beginning with Suzanne Césaire's 1942 definition of Caribbean being as fundamentally vegetal, the course reads across plant science, multispecies ethnography, critical race theory, queer ecologies, and plantation studies to ask what plants know, who knows them, and what vegetality offers as an analytic for thinking about racialized and gendered life in the Anthropocene. Students produce an annotated bibliography, a vegetal fieldwork exercise, and a seminar paper suitable for development toward publication. They also maintain a living plant throughout the semester.

• W 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Vanessa L Agard-Jones
  CULPA: 3 Info
• 4 points

Contemporary Archaeological Theory

CONTEMP ARCH THEORY

Archaeology is a sprawling, messy discipline and the role that theory does, should, and might play in the process of archaeological data collection, analysis, and interpretation has been highly contested. Archaeologists argue over whether there is such a thing as a stand-alone ‘archaeological theory’ and what kinds of theory from other disciplines should (or should not!) be imported. This course explores a range of recent theoretical conversations, orientations, and interventions within archaeology, with an eye to understanding what is currently at stake – and what is contested – in how archaeologists think about making archaeological knowledge in the contemporary moment. In doing so, this course encourages students to think about theory in archaeology as an important form of “practical knowledge” or “know how” for archaeologists (cf. Lucas 2018).

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

SPECTERS OF ORGANIZED SUBVERSION

Ruling powers of various shapes and sizes tend to prosecute those people whom they fear because of their identity, class, craft, or convictions. Often, the object of accusation, inquiry, prosecution, and persecution includes not just one (or more) individual persons, but a set of relationships that these ruling powers see as anathema to the social order they seek to establish or maintain, and on which their power depends. Specters can personify residuals of antediluvian political or cosmological order (heretics and witches, officers of toppled regime, Catholics after the reformation, idolatry trials in the new world, mafiosi after their criminalization, Bundists in Soviet Russia) or emergent forms (emancipated Jews, dissidents, or anarchists). All share that role in social dramas that cast them as enemies of The State, The Church, The People, or Humanity. In this seminar we will begin to explore the array of social rituals, routinized practices (like rumors and media-oriented lynching) and institutions that have been developed specifically in order to name such specters and summon them publicly. We will examine, among others: trials, conspiracy theories (as a mode of recounting a presence that is constantly putting the specter back in), investigative committees, inquisitorial tribunals. We will examine how such social rituals and routinized practices and institutions give us unique opportunities to examine what conceptions of society, of relationships good and evil, and of justice underlie political orders, how they codify and pursue them, and what historical processes these enactments trigger or shape. We’ll focus on cases from early modern and modern societies, with an eye towards the emergence and stabilization of republican order.

• R 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Naor H Ben-Yehoyada
  CULPA: 5 Info
• 3 points

EXHIBITION CULTURES

Laurel Kendall. This course is a continuation of Museum Anthropology G6352 (not a prerequisite). Through the study of museum exhibitions, this course explores a series of debates about the representation of culture in museums, the politics of identity, and the significance of objects. We will consider the museum as a contemporary and variable form, as a site for the expression of national, group, and individual identity and as a site of performance and consumption. We will consider how exhibits are developed, what they aim to convey, what makes them effective (or not), and how they sometimes become flashpoints of controversy. Because the work of museums is visual, enacted through the display of material forms, we will also consider the transformation of objects into artifacts and as part of exhibitions, addressing questions of meaning, ownership, value, and magic. We will look at this range of issues from the point of view of practitioners, critics, and audiences. G6365 works in tandem with the exhibition project that will be developed in “Exhibition Practice in Global Culture” to produce a small exhibit at AMNH.

• T 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Laurel Kendall
  Info
• 3 points

ETHNOGRAPHY STUDIO

Ethnography is often taught as a method of observation. This course begins from a different  premise: ethnography is a political technology of knowledge production shaped by empire, race,  capital, gender, and disciplinary power. It is also a fragile and unfinished writing practice that  scholars continually remake. This seminar treats ethnography as a site of struggle over these  questions: Who can produce knowledge? Whose worlds become legible? Which archives  endure? What research should refuse to know? And, how writing itself organizes relations of  power?

• M 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Paige West
  CULPA: 41 h-index: 23 Info
• 4 points