Anthropology

The major fields of interest and contributions of social and cultural anthropologists. Accounts of life in different societies are read to illustrate how institutions vary in different cultural settings and to explore what it means to be a member of a culture different from one’s own.

Credits: 3

Explores the different roles that language plays in the lives of people, communities, and nations. Topics include language and thought, language and power, poetics and verbal art, bilingualism, African-American English (“Ebonics”), pidgin and Creole languages, Native American language revitalization, “politically correct”; language, and the rise of English as a global language.

Credits: 3

How useful a tool is film for the study of peoples who come from cultures entirely different from one’s own? Appropriate readings accompany the visual material, in addition to ethnographic accounts of the societies viewed in class and discussions of the problems encountered in filming non-Western peoples.

Credits: 3

An introductory survey of music, theatre, and dance in Western and non-Western cultures, including the relationships between music and religion, dance and weddings, theatre and curing. The course also explores the performing arts as aesthetic phenomena in their own right. Live performances by non-Western performers and optional field trips are planned.

Credits: 3

PREREQ: ANT1500 Or MSA1050 Or NME1050

Students examine and interrogate commonsense distinctions between ‘traditional’ museums and other spaces of cultural-historical exhibition. The aim is to partner with local communities to mount shows that resonate with community aesthetic, political, social and ecological concerns and, in the process, teach apprenticing curators how cultural institutions might become more inclusive and achieve relevance in the daily lives of their patrons.

Credits: 3

Investigates magic and witchcraft in the shadow of technology, industrialization, and capitalism. Readings range from athletes who employ superstition to cope with uncertainty, to more challenging case studies on witchcraft, spirit possession, shamanism, and other forms of magic as healing. Alongside classical anthropological texts, concepts such as fetishism, fantasy, and enchantment are explored in contemporary contexts, including film, art, and literature.

Credits: 3

PREREQ: ANT1500 Or MSA1050

A survey of theoretical orientations and methodologies for the study of musical production, performance, and consumption in particular cultural contexts and within global flows of materials, ideas, cultural forms, and people. Focuses on music as a communication medium and collective poetic process. Students attend and critically engage musical performances and/or engage directly in musical production and performances.

Credits: 3

PREREQ: ANT1500 Or MSA1050

Begins with historical examples of ethnographic work on black diasporic cultures and then moves to contemporary anthropological work on black life from around the world. Underscores the history of anthropology in understanding race and racial politics and also draws on an array of topical issues, from mass incarceration to the Black Lives Matter movement.

Credits: 3

Explores and compares the diverse ways in which sexuality and gender are practiced, experienced, and regulated in different communities around the world. Particular attention is paid to how sexual identities and practices have influenced, and been influenced by, global political, economic, and cultural movements, including colonialism, capitalism, feminism, queer activism, and the spread of world religions.

Credits: 3

Theoretical concepts and their use in analyzing empirical data. Students read and critically analyze the work of some of the major thinkers in anthropology, including Benedict, Mead, Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown, Geertz, Turner, and Lévi-Strauss.

Credits: 4

PREREQ: ANT1500

The experiences and problems of city dwellers in the Third World and migrants from Third World countries to Western cities, including New York. Topics include urbanization and family life, adaptation of migrants, ethnicity and class, the culture of poverty, and methods of urban anthropologists.

Credits: 4

PREREQ: ANT1500 Or ANT2055

Examines both foundational and newer critical approaches to understanding religion from an anthropological perspective. Texts cover a diversity of topics from a variety of cultures, including the construction of religion as an analytical category; religion’s relation to secularism, law, and political ideology; religion and gender; and embodied religious experience. In particular, the relationships between media and religion are explored. Not intended as a general survey of religious traditions.

Credits: 4

PREREQ: ANT1500 Or NME1050 Or MSA1050

Africa is home to some of the oldest and fastest-growing cities in the world. Rapid urbanization brings challenges, opportunities, and expectations. Topics include colonial and postcolonial urban planning; corruption and informal economies; violence and security; ethnicity, nationalism, and pan-Africanism; modernism and traditionalism; youth styles and subcultures; charismatic Christianity and Islamic reformism.

Credits: 4

PREREQ: ANT1500

Explores how African performing artists and audiences have responded to the cultural, political, and economic circumstances of the times and places in which they live. Performance media include music, song, dance, film/video, and the spoken word, with a special focus on western and southern Africa. Students draw on anthropological theories to produce, perform, and critique their own versions of African performance texts.

Credits: 4

PREREQ: ANT1500 Or MSA1050

How have myth, ritual, and performance functioned as ways to comprehend, organize, and even generate the world around us? What are the values and constraints of symbolic structures as they shape and influence bodies and environments? Students consider both structural and poststructural approaches to performance as a medium for exploring, but also transgressing, structures of everyday life.

Credits: 4

PREREQ: ANT1500 Or THP2020 Or MSA1050 Or MSA1050

Students perform close readings and engage in in-depth discussions of theoretical texts, illustrative ethnographic works, and audio/video recordings on the relationships between language and culture. Questions explored include: What assumptions about culture are implicit in any given method of analyzing language practices? What lies beyond the reach of language? Topics covered include affect, gesture, semiotics, and symbolic violence.

Credits: 4

PREREQ: ANT1500

An anthropological and ethnomusicological approach to sound and listening with emphasis on the politics of sound. Topics include sound and the senses, weaponization of sound, music as torture, sounds of protest and police surveillance, and background music and consumption.

Credits: 4

PREREQ: ANT1500 Or MSA1050

What theories of embodiment, mind, and matter must be adopted to adequately grasp experiences of time, space, color, emotion, and attention? How can people conceptualize forms of experience without purging them of poetic resonance? Students explore this interdisciplinary field in connection with the arts. Includes readings in cognitive science, anthropology, and poetry, plus collaborative art projects, sensory experiments, and excursions.

Credits: 4

PREREQ: ANT1500 Or PSY1530 Or MSA1050

The methodological, political, and ethical issues of participant observation. Students read and discuss classical examples of participant-observation research. Each student conducts a participant-observation field research study and presents a preliminary version of the results to the seminar before submitting the written report. Limited to anthropology majors.

Credits: 4

PREREQ: ANT1500 And ANT3150

Students focus on recent theoretical texts in cultural anthropology and are expected to present short oral reports on these texts and to lead class discussion. Limited to anthropology majors in their senior year.

Credits: 4

PREREQ: ANT1500 And ANT3150

Explore the rural as a meeting place of working-class expressive cultures, an atmosphere of slow or strange time, a dramatic history of industry and agriculture, a notoriously tense racial zone, and a place of exuberant stories and poetics. Examine the vital ideological function of the rural as the urban's dark twin in American myth throughout history and today.

Credits: 4

PREREQ: MSA1050 Or ANT1500

Special anthropological topics by geographic area.

Credits: 4

PREREQ: ANT1500 Or MSA1050

Focuses on the prehistory of the Americas from the first peoples through 1492, beginning with the Ice Age cultures of the New World and moving forward chronologically. South, Central, and North American cultures are examined, including the Olmec, Woodlands, and Mississippi Valley cultures, pueblo culture, and the Maya, Aztec, and Inca.

Credits: 4

Introduces the largest unit of political organization, the empire, and its early appearances in various regions of the world. The focus is on Akkadia in Mesopotamia, Egypt’s New Kingdom, the Qin Dynasty in China, and the Inca Empire in South America (also known as the Inka Empire). The course reviews theories of sociopolitical organization and development drawn from anthropological archaeology, economics, ecology, and political science.

Credits: 4

Students focus on how humans are represented and configured across media platforms, how the self is culturally constructed, and how technology continually redefines the meaning of “human.” The class also considers what these figurations indicate about contemporary political subjectivities, gender identities, and species belonging. The work of notable thinkers, including William Gibson, Masamune Shiroh, Stellarc, and Spike Jonze, is studied.

Credits: 3

In 1991, The Real World pioneered a genre of “unscripted” television that reshaped national media culture, culminating in the reality of the 2016 election. Students study theories of Hall, Habermas and Gramsci to explore how the genre reflects and shapes attitudes of U.S. audiences to surveillance, class conflict, and the performance of truths. Examples include Jersey Shore and American Idol.

Credits: 4

Students look at forms of production and exchange in various contexts throughout the world that are alternatives to dominant, formal economies. These include trash picking and trash art-making, piracy and counterfeiting, independent farming, and alternative banking. Students consider the notion of value in a variety of ways and trace how production, exchange, circulation, and consumption elaborate new forms of social life.

Credits: 4

PREREQ: MSA1050 Or ANT1500

In recent years, anthropologists, physical and cultural geographers, biologists, and media theorists have tried to account for the more-than-human world in order to emplace humans in a general ecology of liveliness. Using methods from multiple disciplines, students explore the animacy of ordinary and extraordinary places. Topics include landscape as a contingent process, geological time, energetics, dwelling, regenerative design, and industrial-chemical ecologies.

Credits: 4

PREREQ: (MSA1050 Or NME1050 ) Or ANT1500

Investigate the relation between violence and the senses. Think through how our culturally patterned modes of perception can inherently carry traces of violence (e.g. ocular aggression) or be weaponized. Draw on anthropology, cultural studies and media studies to explore the relation between violence (broadly conceived), racialization, the gaze and looking, and regimes of perception.

Credits: 4

PREREQ: MSA1050 Or ANT1500

People’s everyday lives are monitored on multiple levels through mechanisms they take for granted. Surveillance systems and technologies provide knowledge about people through identification, monitoring, and analysis of individuals, groups, data, or systems. These systems are examined as social entities that organize and shape cultural values and norms. Issues of identity, security, fear, control, and vulnerability are also explored.

Credits: 4

PREREQ: SOC1500