intro cultural

8/13/2019 Intro Cultural

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Introduction to Cultural AnthropologyANTH 110b

M, W 2:30-3:45WLH 201

Mike McGovern#120 10 Sachem St.

[email protected]

Office Hours: Thursday 1-3 pm

Cultural anthropologists study cosmology, tacit knowledge and ways of knowing theworld in specific social settings. Sociocultural specificity helps to explain the seeminglyendless variation of human solutions to the problems of cooperation and conflict,

production and reproduction, expression, and belief common to all societies. This coursewill introduce students to anthropological ways of understanding cultural difference in

approaches to sickness and healing, gender and sexuality, economics, religion, andcommunication. Geographical areas will include Africa, Ireland, Southeast Asia, and theCaribbean while authors include Marcel Mauss, Clifford Geertz, and Victor Turner.

The first part of the course is broken into four parts. First, we consider the complexitiesinvolved in describing and analyzing cultural difference. Second, we consider thedevelopment of anthropological theory. Third, we address the methods that socio-cultural anthropologists use to reach their conclusions, and fourth, we look at the ethicaland political stakes involved in doing anthropology within both local and global contextsof inequality and injustice. These sections are punctuated by several ethnographic essaysthat show the ways particular anthropologists have addressed these issues using their own

fieldwork data. The second half of the course builds on what we have learned aboutanthropological theory, methods, and ethics to facilitate critical readings of threeethnographies.

Requirements: There will be an in-class midterm exam (30% of grade) and a take-home final exam (50% of grade) .

Discussion sections will be scheduled every week. Attendance is required, andattendance/participation will constitute 20% of your grade . The teaching fellows willlead discussions jumping off from your responses to brief discussion questions, and willanswer questions you may have.

Readings: Students are encouraged to purchase the books by Mauss, Turner, Appadurai,Bourgois, Mintz and Aretxaga [the Mauss is also available as an e-book at the library].They are available at Labyrinth Bookstore. These books are also available at the reservedesk at Cross Campus Library. All other chapters and articles will be available on the V2site.


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Syllabus

14 January Introduction

Film: Latah

16 January Anthropology and the Study of Culture: Universalism vs. Particularity

Laura Bohannon “Shakespeare in the Bush” Natural History , August-September 1966

Roland Barthes 1972 [1957] “The Great Family of Man” In Mythologies . New York: Noonday.

Defining “Culture;” the dialectic of similarity and difference; and the attempt to see events from the actor’s point of view. Who decides what’s “cultural,” and

what are the power relations involved?

21 January No Class. Martin Luther King Jr. Day

23 January Holistic View I

Clifford Geertz 1973 “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight.” In The Interpretation of Cultures . New York: Basic Books.

How do anthropologists understand cultural influences? How do they translatetheir understanding to an audience with little or no knowledge about the place they aredescribing? Looking at the ways that ethnography, theory, method and style all worktogether.

Film: Blood Sport

28 January Anthropological Theory: From Economics to Kinship

Marcel Mauss 1990 The Gift. New York: Norton. Pp. 1-46.

Is there such a thing as a free gift?

30 January

Marcel Mauss 1990 The Gift. New York: Norton. Pp.

In building theory, the ethnologist must determine whether analyses that stress thecultural or historical particularities of one place from all others can ever be compared.What would be the criteria for such a comparison?


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4 February Claude Levi-Strauss 1963 “The Bear and the Barber” Journal of the Royal

Anthropological Institute XCIII:1-11.

Sociality as exchange and reciprocity.

6 February Victor Turner 1967 “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage ” In The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual . Ithaca: CornellUniversity Press.

Fredrik Barth 1998 (1969) Introduction to Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The SocialOrganization of Culture Difference. Long Grove: Waveland Press.

Film: Imbalu (69 mins)

What kinds of work do boundaries accomplish in society? What is the relation between

religion’s expressive aspect and its functional aspect? Between boundaries anddifference?

11 February Anthropological Methods: Participant Observation, Key Informants, CaseStudies, Ethnology

B. Malinowski 1984 (1922) ‘Introduction’ from Argonauts of the Western Pacific .Prospect Heights: Waveland Press.

Anna Tsing 1993 ‘Opening’ from In the Realm of the Diamond Queen . Princeton:Princeton University Press.

13 February Victor Turner 1967 “Muchona the Hornet, Interpreter of Religion” In The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual . Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

J. Van Velsen ‘The Extended Case Study Method’ In The craft of social anthropology edited by A. L. Epstein, introduction by Max Gluckman. New York : Pergamon Press,1979.

18 February Holistic View II

Max Gluckman 1958 (1940) ‘Analysis of a Social Situation in Modern Zululand.’Lusaka: Rhodes-Livingstone papers.

20 February Ethics and Applications of Anthropology

Gonzalez, Roberto 2004 Anthropologists in the Public Sphere: Speaking out on War, Peace, and American Power . Austin: University of Texas Press. 1-72


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George Packer 2007 ‘Knowing the Enemy: Can Social Scientists Redefine the “War onTerror”?’ The New Yorker .

25 February

Li, Tania. 1999. ‘Compromising Power: Development, Culture and Rule in Indonesia.’Cultural Anthropology . 14:295-322.

Goldman, Michael 2001 ‘The Birth of a Discipline Producing Authoritative GreenKnowledge, World Bank-Style.’ In Ethnography , Vol. 2, No. 2, 191-217.

27 February Holistic View III

Arjun Appadurai 2006 Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger .Durham: Duke University Press. pages TBA

3 March Midterm Exam

5 March Anthropology in Industrialized Societies

P. Bourgois 1995 In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio . Cambridge:Cambridge University Press. xvii-76

How does Anthropology make the familiar exotic and the exotic familiar? Is it possible to study one’s own culture anthropologically? Studying up, studying down: doesanthropology like Bourgois’s simply shift the space of otherness to an internallyexoticized population?

7-23 March Spring Break

24 March P. Bourgois 1995 In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio .Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 77-173


Film: My American Girls (62 mins)


2 April Bringing together the local and the global, the past and the present

S. Mintz 1985 Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History . NewYork: Penguin Books. xv-73


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How do we locate the ‘center’ of the modern world system? What does the history of sugar—both its production and its consumption by poor people on different sides of the Atlantic—tell us about relations within the world today?

7 April S. Mintz 1985 Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History .

New York: Penguin Books. 74-150

9 April S. Mintz 1985 Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History . New York: Penguin Books. 151-214

14 April Gender, Conflict and Society

Begoña Aretxaga 1997 Shattering Silence: Women, Nationalism, and PoliticalSubjectivity in Northern Ireland. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ix-53.

What difference does gender make in situations of endemic violence? What is the

relationship between structure and agency, and what does Aretxaga mean when shewrites about ‘choiceless decisions’?

16 April Begoña Aretxaga 1997 Shattering Silence: Women, Nationalism, and PoliticalSubjectivity in Northern Ireland. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 54-121

21 April Begoña Aretxaga 1997 Shattering Silence: Women, Nationalism, and PoliticalSubjectivity in Northern Ireland. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 122-175

23 April Conclusion and Synthesis

Horace Miner 1956 ‘Body Ritual Among the Nacirema’ In American Anthropologist .Vol 58(3):503-507


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A Note on Grading:

30% Midterm : This in-class exam will test your mastery of the factual material presented in the readings, lectures, and films. Key points will already have beenunderlined in sections, and suggested in reading questions to which you willrespond with one-paragraph responses due each section.

50% Final exam: This take-home exam will ask you to integrate some of thethemes introduced in the first half of the semester with those developed at greaterlength in the three ethnographies. After the midterm, you will be presented with alist of questions from which the exam questions will be selected. Your writingassignments for the sections during the second half of the semester will addressthese questions, and essentially give you a chance to 'practice' for the final exam.

20% Sections : Sections will begin in earnest the third week of the semester,though there will be a 'catch-up' section next week for those who have missedsessions due to shopping period. Out of the 12 sections, you must attend at least10 to receive an A. You must also submit (electronically, through the v2 site) aone-to-two paragraph response to the question posed on the site about thereadings each week, whether you attend the section or not. These responses aredue the midnight before your section (for example, if your section meetsThursdays at 6pm, the response is due at midnight on Wednesday into Thursdaynight). They will be graded as timely good faith efforts. Late submissions will not

be accepted. You will be graded on attendance, participation, and theassignments. Doing the minimum for an A in sections will require 15 minutes ofsitting down to think and write a paragraph, and 50 minutes in the section.Deriving the maximum from the section will mean that you could have an 'A'

final exam mostly written before the semester ends.

Note on content: There will not be a one-to-one overlap amongst the material presented in readings, films, and lectures. Thus if you do readings but misslectures you will invariably miss some material, and the same is true vice versa. Iwill not be posting lecture notes on-line, so you will have to come to lectures toget the full gist of the supplementary material being presented. Sections shouldnot present too much new material, but will help you to synthesize it and makesense of it all.

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