Bard College Catalogue 2009-2010
2009-2010

Anthropology

http://anthropology.bard.edu

Faculty

Overview

The Anthropology Program encompasses the subfields of sociocultural, linguistic, historical, archaeological, and applied anthropology. It seeks to understand the cultural dynamics in the formation of the nation-state, the colonial and postcolonial, and the politics of identity, difference, and inequality in the contemporary world. The core of the program consists of courses that examine everyday experiences in relation to a range of societal issues, such as development and the environment, medicine and health, religion, language, kinship and reproductivity, sports, mass media, visual culture, and aesthetics. Anthropology offers a way to understand patterns and contradictions of cultural meaning within a transnational and transcultural world. Areal strengths of the program include West and sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, South Asia, Australasia, and the United States.

Requirements

Majors in anthropology can design a course of study in various topical, areal, and theoretical orientations. Prior to Moderation, students must complete an introductory course and at least two 200-level courses in anthropology. In consultation with their Moderation board, students shape their plan of study in the Upper College to include at least four additional courses in anthropology, at least two of which should be 300-level courses, as well as the Senior Project. One of the 300-level courses required is a seminar on contemporary cultural theory that involves each member of the anthropology faculty. In addition, the program requires students to take at least one course that involves field research as a central component and encourages fieldwork as part of the Senior Project. Students intending to pursue postgraduate study are encouraged to study a foreign language to the 200-level and to take a course in quantitative methods.

Recent Senior Projects in Anthropology:

• “Climate Changes: Making a Global Discourse Relevant in Ghana”
• “Forbidden Fruit: A Social History of Black Currants in New York”
• “Reincarnation and Community amongst the Druze of Mount Lebanon”
• “The Embodiment of Postmodern Environmental Discourse: From Intentional Communities to Eco-villages”

Courses:

Anthropology courses approach seemingly “natural” ideas such as indigeneity, race, gender, sexuality, and class as cultural constructions that change over time. They critically examine, for instance, the international division of labor, the growth of the media, and the global commodification of culture. Many classes apply this anthropological perspective to a variety of sources, ranging from traditional ethnographies to novels, travel literature, music, films, and new forms of electronic media (the program has a film library, which includes ethnographic and experimental films).

Introduction to Cultural Anthropology
Anthropology 101
cross-listed: gis, gss
This course explores the intellectual angles through which anthropologists have engaged culture as a central, yet often elusive concept in understanding how societies work. The course combines discussions, lectures, and films; topics include the transformative roles of ritual and symbol; witchcraft in historical and contemporary contexts; and cultural constructions of gender and sexuality, among others.

Archaeological Field Methods
Anthropology 111
cross-listed: american studies, eus, sre
The course concentrates on excavation and initial lab procedures used in archaeology through a continuation of the dig at Grouse Bluff, a 7,000-year-old site adjacent to the campus. Two digging techniques are emphasized: stratigraphy and small-scale cartography. Fieldwork involves painstaking measurements that permit study of the distribution of debris throughout the site, description of deposit formation over time, and comparison with other sites. Prerequisite: permission of the instructor.

Gender and Social Inequalities in Latin America
Anthropology 201
cross-listed: gis, gss, human rights, lais
Despite recent gains in democratization, contemporary Latin American societies continue to display dramatic inequalities. This course explores inequalities of gender and their interface with hierarchies of social class, ethnicity, and race through examination of ethnographic texts. It looks at historical sources of these inequalities in colonial structures and their expression in contemporary cultural practices. Students critically evaluate Latin American gender stereotypes and consider how gender is practiced and how gender identities are formed in particular local and global contexts.

How the Victorians Put the “Others” in Their Place
Anthropology 208A
cross-listed: africana studies, victorian studies
An examination of how the Victorians sought to know the “other” through ethnographic, missionary, government, and travel encounters; the science of race; the objects of archaeology and museum collections; and photography. How the “other” was then related to the Europeans is studied within the framework of evolutionary and diffusionary theories.

American Anthropology 1850–1870
Anthropology 208B
cross-listed: africana studies
Up until World War II, American anthropology had three central concerns: the description and understanding of Native American peoples based on participant observation through fieldwork; the defeat of scientific racism; and the placement of the concept of culture at the center of anthropological thought. This course examines this history along with the rise of sociological, psychological, and neomarxist evolutionist thought in American anthropology in this period.

Historical Archaeology
Anthropology 212
cross-listed: american studies, eus, historical studies
Field trips on campus and in neighboring towns provide first-hand contact with diverse groups that left their vestiges here: Native Americans, African-Americans, and German and British settlers. The class works with their artifacts in the lab and visits excavations after reading background material on their history, culture, and archaeological interpretation. Prerequisite: permission of instructor.

Anthropology of Medicine
Anthropology 213
cross-listed: gss, human rights, sts
An exploration of medical knowledge and practice in a variety of healing systems, focusing on the human body as the site in which illness is experienced and upon which social meanings and political actions are inscribed. The course examines the way political economic systems and the inequalities they engender affect human well-being. Among the topics addressed are biomedical constructs, alternative medical systems, epidemic diseases, cosmetic medical interventions, and new medical technologies.

Urban Ethnography and American Capitalism
Anthropology 229
cross-listed: american studies
The city has long symbolized the prospects and problems of American capitalism. This course examines a range of urban ethnographies in relation to the history of urban anthropology and in light of prevailing cultural, political, and economic circumstances affecting communities both here and abroad. Topics include globalization, neoliberalism, class conflict, the politics of urban space, ethnicity, poverty, religion, and the militarization of community life.

Problems in Human Rights
Anthropology 233 / Human Rights 233
See Human Rights 233 for description.

The Sacred, the Uncanny, the Divine: The Anthropology of Religion
Anthropology 238 / Religion 238
cross-listed: religion
A survey of anthropological studies of religious cultures and ritual traditions in modern societies. Topics include Islamic revivalism in the Middle East, Haitian Vodoun festivals, Appalachian snake-handling churches, African witchcraft and possession rituals, and Hindu asceticism. This course is meant to provide students with necessary skills to analyze religious practices from ethnographic as well as comparative perspectives.

Culture, Politics, and Representations of South Asia
Anthropology 246
cross-listed: asian studies, sre
Using anthropological texts, literature, history, and films, this course explores representations of South Asia made by foreigners and South Asians alike. It focuses on how particular metaphors, tropes, and ways of describing South Asia continue to shape our knowledge about the region. Throughout the course, the work of two well-known Indian artists—the novelist Salman Rushdie and the filmmaker Satyajit Ray—is used to complement and challenge the ethnographic texts.

British Colonials in Africa
Anthropology 248
cross-listed: africana studies
This course examines the British African colonies of the early 20th century and the everyday lives of their colonists. These “outsiders” are studied through history, biography, fiction, and film, as well as through the responses of Africans. Various dichotomies—hypocrisy vs. idealism, brutality vs. bravery, racism vs. humanism—are considered as the course seeks to develop an ethnographic portrayal of the rulers and the cultures they created in these colonies; not British, not African, but something very much “other.”

Reading Baseball as Metaphor
Anthropology 250
cross-listed: american studies
Baseball has often been labeled the quintessential American sport. This course explores that claim while examining the history and diffusion of the game, its performance and representation, and its connections to the politics of ethnicity, race, gender, class, region, and place. Cultural constructions are examined and contrasted in U.S., Japanese, and Latin American baseball.

Race and Ethnicity in Brazil
Anthropology 256
cross-listed: africana studies, jewish studies, lais, sre
Brazil, in contrast to the United States, has been portrayed as a “racial democracy.” This course examines the debate over the “problem of race” in its early formulation, as shaped by scientific racism and eugenics, and on through the Brazilian policy of branqueamento (whitening) in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Among the groups discussed are indigenous Brazilians, the Luso-Brazilians, Afro-Brazilians, Japanese Brazilians, Euro-ethnic Brazilians, and Brazilians of Arab and Jewish descent.

Ethnographic Film and Visual Anthropology in Africa
Anthropology 259
cross-listed: africana studies, sre
This course addresses the visual aspects of culture and cultural production with a particular focus on postcolonial Africa. Students examine how Africa has been represented to the international community through film and other visual mass media. Basic concerns and paradigms of anthropology, in particular ideas of racial and cultural difference, are introduced.

Anthropology of Violence and Suffering
Anthropology 261
cross-listed: gss, human rights
This course considers how acts of violence challenge and support modern ideas of humanity, raising important questions about what it means to be human today. It reviews different forms of violence—e.g., ethnic and communal conflicts, torture, rituals of bodily pain—and examines violence as a means of producing and consolidating social and political power and exerting political control.

Colonialism, Law, and Human Rights in Africa
Anthropology 262 / Africana Studies 262
See Africana Studies 262 for description.

Language and Mass Media
Anthropology 263
Twentieth-century politics and culture were intimately linked to the rapid development of radio, television, and film. This course uses anthropological notions of language to explore radio, video/film, television, the Internet, and mobile phone technologies as forms of social mediation. A particular focus is on how actor-centered performance approaches to language, reference, and authority give insight into the making of contemporary, electronically mediated ways of understanding the world.

Race and Nature in Africa
Anthropology 265
cross-listed: africana studies, eus, gis, human rights
Western fantasies have historically represented Africa as the embodiment of a mythical, primordial wilderness. Within this imagery, nature is racialized, and Africans are constructed as existing in a state closer to nature. This course investigates the racialization of nature under imperial regimes, and considers the continuing legacies in postcolonial situations. Through ethnographic accounts, historical analyses, and works of fiction based in Africa, students learn to decipher cultural representations of nature, and the political agendas that lie within them.

Anthropology of Youth and Youth Politics
Anthropology 266
Since the 18th century, childhood and youth have been depicted as times of happiness, innocence, and closeness to nature distinct from adulthood. However, many writers, activists, and policymakers have witnessed young people in conditions of violence, toil, and poverty. This course examines young people’s experiences in a variety of historical and geographic contexts. A key point of emphasis is that young people are not merely the passive recipients of tradition or targets of policy, but active contributors to social and political change.

Middle Eastern Diasporas
Anthropology 267
cross-listed: gis, human rights, middle eastern studies, sre
This course examines the past and present experiences of Arabs, Iranians, Turks, and Kurds who reside in Europe and North America, as well as Jews of diverse backgrounds who live in Israel and abroad. It also explores how and why these groups are commonly regarded as “diasporas,” and investigates not only the history of “diaspora” as a concept, but also the contemporary circumstances that have encouraged its recent prominence in public and scholarly discussions.

War, Culture, and Politics in Contemporary Sudan
Anthropology 268
cross-listed: africana studies, human rights
Africa's largest and most diverse country embodies many of the challenges that confront the continent as a whole. These include civil war, mass killing, recurrent famine, radical Islam, oil politics, and indigenous cultural destruction. This course examines the current political and humanitarian crisis in Sudan from the perspectives of history, geography, anthropology, and political economy. Historical texts, contemporary reportage, ethnographic monographs, and video, music, and literature from Sudan help students understand the complexities of the country and its borderlands.

Ireland and the Anthropological Imagination
Anthropology 269
cross-listed: gis, ics
Ireland has long captured the anthropological imagination, and the field has provided classic depictions of kinship and community, controversial accounts of rural decline and disorder, and current work on the country’s shifting position in European and world politics. This course includes a range of ethnographic exploration in both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. It considers the multiple, contested meanings of Irish identity in contexts as varied as the increasingly diverse city of Dublin, Traveler communities, and politically divided Northern Ireland towns.

Gender and Feminism in Anthropology
Anthropology 270
cross-listed: gss, human rights
This course examines the emergence and transformation of gender studies within anthropology since the 1970s. It reviews early texts that challenged anthropologists to recognize women’s lives as valid subjects of study, and more recent work that encompasses constructions of both femininities and masculinities, exploring the division between and interrelation of biological and social factors in determining sex and gender. Critical interpretation of gender and sexuality in contemporary American popular culture is reviewed.

Japanimation and Culture in Postwar Japan
Anthropology 276
cross-listed: asian studies, gis, sts
Japanese animation, also known as anime, is one of the most dynamic forms of cultural production in contemporary Japan. This course traces the history of anime and its relationships to the nation’s social, political, and economic transformations over the past century. It covers the origins of Japanese animation, the different subgenres that began emerging in the 1960s (e.g., “Tokyo cyberpunk,” “cute young girl” anime), and the globalization of the genre in recent decades.

Culture and Power in the Middle East
Anthropology 277
This course introduces a region that has constituted one of the West’s primary “others.” It pays special attention to the Middle East’s contemporary complexity and heterogeneity. The focus is on four interrelated themes: practices of kinship, gender, and sexuality; nationalism and state building; the social consequences of compulsory education, mass literacy, and mass media; and recent efforts to link, negotiate, and/or reconcile religion with “modern,” secular, and liberal life. Readings include works by Dale Eickelman, Amitav Ghosh, and Rhoda Ann Kanaaneh, among others.

The State in sub-Saharan Africa
Anthropology 278
cross-listed: human rights
This course explores state formation in sub-Saharan Africa, beginning with precolonial states, the colonial settler, and administrative states, and then moving on to contemporary postcolonial, collapsed, and “vampire” states. Case studies are drawn primarily from Liberia, Uganda, and Zimbabwe.

Islam and Europe
Anthropology 279
cross-listed: gis, human rights, middle eastern studies, sre
This course examines Islam’s complex relationships with Europe as a geographic territory, sociopolitical entity, and discursive category. Given its long-standing presence in Europe, why is Islam commonly conceived as a moral and cultural formation external to Europe, European history, and European identities? Why are Muslims regarded as in Europe but not of it, and how does this exclusion shape the everyday practices and perceptions of European Muslims? Such questions are considered through readings, films, and other materials.

The Edge of Anthropology
Anthropology 280
cross-listed: human rights
This course explores the range of genres and techniques that anthropologists and others have used to convey the lived experience of other cultures. Genres addressed include classic field-based ethnographic monographs, travel narratives, historically informed critiques of earlier ethnographies, reflexive accounts of the process of fieldwork, journalistic reportage, visual documentation, and works of fiction. Among the works considered are Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques; Ruth Landes’s The City of Women; and Leni Riefenstahl’s The Last of the Nuba.

Biology and the Imagining of the Jews: Science and the Jews as a Race
Anthropology 281
cross-listed: human rights, jewish studies, sre, sts
This course examines the history of the persistent biological/racial classification of the Jews since about the 15th century, using it to consider the sciences of race as they have flourished and floundered, including the recent reemergence of scientific justification for the race concept and its application to the Jews. It explores social constructions of race as applied to the Jews, and the critiques of these constructions. It also reviews some non-Euro-American efforts to account for Jewish difference in Brazil, India, Africa, and elsewhere.

Evangelicalism and the Myths of Secularization
Anthropology 282
cross-listed: religion
This course explores the conflicted dynamics of evangelical Protestantism and secularization in contemporary cultural forms and social movements, from early U.S. revivalism to the rise of global televangelism, Christian popular media, and the politics of the Christian Right. Students assess how the historical polarizations of religion and science, faith and reason, and fundamentalism and secular humanism have shaped and influenced how evangelical religiosity is practiced and disseminated in modern societies.

Anthropologies of Diaspora
Anthropology 283
cross-listed: asian studies
With the increased dispersion of peoples around the globe, “the diaspora” has become an important lens through which to examine changing ideas about nationalism and global citizenship. This course begins with the premise that the perception of being part of a diaspora is currently enabled by new communication technologies that connect national/ethnic communities dispersed around the globe. Ethnographies focus on South Asian diasporas, including, for instance, Sikhs in North America and Pakistanis in London.

Environment, Development, and Power
Anthropology 325
cross-listed: eus
In an age of apocalyptic narrative, the environment has taken center stage in what is constructed as an unprecedented global ecological crisis. This course explores the complex, dynamic interplay between conservation, development, and power. It traces the historical underpinnings of contemporary inequity by examining the logics of colonial sciences in relation to “nature,” and considers the shaping of modern environmental discourses. Finally, it examines the politics of displacement, the emergence of “environmental refugees,” and the need for the conceptualization and practice of an environmental justice.

Performance, Ritual, and Symbolic Practice
Anthropology 327
cross-listed: africana studies
This course examines public performance and various types of theatricality as a way to analyze how lived experience relates to politics, change, and social power. It considers power and its illusory enactment, the relationship between personal experience and broader social processes, and the nature of consciousness, among other issues. Students review particular ethnographic, theatrical, philosophic, and literary examples from West Africa that address the relationships between historical memory, specific kinds of performance, and the local experience of power.

Cultural Technologies of Memory
Anthropology 332
cross-listed: human rights
This course considers several practices and technologies that produce collective and personal memory, and questions the distinction commonly made between “memory” and “history.” Students review techniques and technologies of public memory (e.g., historical writing, oral narrative), and examine how radio and photography are used to produce national and familial representations of the past. The course focuses on how the particular medium of remembering shapes the content of what is remembered, and addresses the link between the production of particular memories and their political uses.

Cultural Politics of Animals
Anthropology 337
cross-listed: africana studies, eus, human rights
Human ideas about animals have metamorphosed throughout history, giving rise to a wide spectrum of attitudes across cultures. Some of the questions this course raises include how, and by whom, is the line between humans and animals drawn? What are the politics of taxonomy and classification? Do animals exercise agency? Students explore these shifting terrains through the angle of “animal geography,” a new field that focuses on how animals have been socially defined, labeled, and ordered in cultural worldviews.

Middle Eastern Modernities
Anthropology 343
cross-listed: gis, human rights, middle eastern studies
What does it mean to be “modern” in the Middle East, in the aftermath of colonialism and in the face of continuing Euro-American efforts to reform the region’s social, economic, and political life? Does modernity require the abandonment of tribal affiliations, cousin marriages, and other putatively traditional social forms and practices? Or does it involve more complex, creative negotiations of existing constraints and available resources? This course examines these and other questions through analysis of recent anthropological literature, popular cultural artifacts, and films.

Discipline, Punishment, and the Embodied Self in China
Anthropology 348
cross-listed: asian studies, human rights
This cultural-historical course provides an extended exploration of the Chinese construction of such basic categories as gender, body, family, and belief. Using Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish as their point of departure, students examine historical and ethnographical work from China on discipline, punishment, and systems for the creation of justice, and contrast Foucault’s historically specific Eurocentric proposals about human subject formation with some comparative insights generated out of engagement with China.

Rethinking Difference: Contemporary Cultural Theory
Anthropology 350
cross-listed: human rights
This introduction to advanced theories of culture in contemporary anthropology is required of all anthropology majors. In contrast to early anthropological focus on seemingly isolated, holistic cultures, more recent studies have turned their attention to conflicts within societies and the intersection of local systems of meaning with global processes of politics, economics, and history. The class is designed around an influential social theorist and the application of his or her theories by anthropologists. Students develop theoretical tools and questions for a Senior Project that makes use of contemporary theories of culture.

Anthropology of the Body
Anthropology 360
cross-listed: gss, human rights
Recent anthropological interest has centered on the individual body as a locus of situated knowledge: it has become a target for the production of consumer desires and a site of commodification and political control. This course explores a range of different issues raised by these perspectives through readings that theorize the body, supplemented by comparative ethnographic studies of bodily knowledge and practice.

Anthropology of Time and Space
Anthropology 370
This course begins by considering the extent to which time and space are cultural constructions that vary within and across social groups. It challenges understandings of these concepts as natural or inevitable, and explores different possibilities for measuring, representing, and creating meaning in relation to them. Finally, it considers how political economy structures experiences of time and space. This includes temporal disciplines of commodity production, state seizure of “private” time under socialism, and descriptions of time-space compression in late capitalism.