191 - 200 of 390 results for: ANTHRO

This lab-based class examines the ways in which various disciplines and art forms conceive of, and tell stories about, the experiences and stories of others. With permission of instructor.

Poststructuralist theories of iteration and mimesis used by social scientists to negotiate the tension between social structure and social practice: Gidden's structuration theory; Bourdieu's practice theory; Butler's theories of gender performativity; and de Certeau's analysis of tactics and strategies. Ethnographic and archaeological case studies that employ methodologies inspired by these approaches. Intersections and contradictions between these theorists' work; their use in anthropological practice. Issues of gender, sexuality, and ethnicity. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.

Graduate seminar. The history and theories of medical anthropology. Focus is on medical anthropology's transformations in the 20th century: how medical anthropology has emerged as a field of inquiry, grown in dialogue with other areas of scholarships, and come to offer a unique array of theoretical positions and modes of ethnographic engagement. Emphasis is on debates within interpretive and critical medical anthropology, and how an understanding of these debates may be used to assess contemporary works within the field. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.

This course is an investigation of how notions of sacrifice, of ethics and conviction are embedded in both ordinary and extraordinary practices in our contemporary world. The key question is how the modern global condition has transformed the way in which it is possible to hold convictions, and to frame forms of ethical conduct, be they religious or secular. We will ask if convictions based on choice or moral outrage differ from convictions based on inhabiting and reversing stigmatized racial and social identities. Rather than maintaining a categorical distinction between `the religious¿ and `the secular¿, we will focus on how groups and individuals have attached themselves passionately to ideas, abstractions, ritual communities or ethical frames. When do certain attachments appear necessary and compelling, almost beyond choice? How does one forge a sense of ethics and ethical conduct through social media rather than face-to-face contact?n nStudents will acquire a grounded and guided understanding of philosophical and anthropological theories of ideas of ethics, sacrifice, and political conviction as well as explore these ideas through contemporary ethnographic contexts.nReadings will be philosophical, historical and ethnographic ¿ drawing on original texts and ethnographic accounts from Europe, Asia and Africa.

How do we encounter and read each other in public and private spaces? How are these very spaces historically constituted around such distinctions and manners of reading? What do these questions look like in dense heterogeneous cities with differentiated class, caste and ethnic communities? How might we consider the differentiation between private and public in different ethnographic contexts? What kinds of sociality might emerge from these kinds of encounters? This course will explore these questions through social theory and ethnographies. There are two major sets of concepts that will be explored and interrogated. The first is that deriving from the essays of the Georg Simmel such as ¿The Face¿ and ¿The Stranger¿ which explore the new forms of sociality enabled by seemingly anonymous city life, which in turn have been interpreted very differently by Zygmunt Bauman and James Siegel to understand the place of continually excluded outsiders and the high stakes of reading each other. The other is the strand of work on the emergence of the public sphere such as the work of Jurgen Habermas, Richard Sennet, Michael Warner, Nancy Fraser etc. While much of the social theory on the public, the stranger and civility emerge from studies of Euro-American mas politics and city spaces, in this course we will move some of these discussion into considering these questions in the global south and the kinds of sociality (including their historicity) that make up the dense fabric of ordinary life. How does this work out in contexts where we take into account intense social differentiation by class, race, and communitarian divisions? This could be asked of the historical and social context addressed in these theories as well as from the postcolonial world. The course will attempt to understand whether such theorizations can indeed be re-rooted and re-imagined or whether ethnographic and historical difference re-route them instead. In doing so we will also bring theories of the private and the intimate to bear on questions of the public and the stranger.

In the last few years anthropology has taken what has come to be called an ¿ontological turn¿ in which the ways an object or experience is felt to be real is explored from different perspectives. Often this involves exploring phenomena (like ghosts, talking trees and humans who become jaguars) which could be called ¿extraordinary¿ and which challenge secular, western expectations of what is real. There has also been a ¿phenomenological turn¿ in which anthropologists have become interested in classifying and categorizing human experience in particular detail. The class will explore the scholarship in this area. Readings will include an introduction to classic philosophical writing (William James, Karl Jaspers, Martin Heidegger) and more recent work such as David Hufford, The Terror that Comes in the Night; Eduardo Kohn How Forests Think; Morton Pederson Not Quite Shamans; Ann Taves Religious Experience Reconsidered; Annemarie Mol, The Body Multiple; Roger Lohmann Dream Travelers, and others.

In this class we analyze anthropological writing that has examined and pushed the bounds of the discipline. We will focus on how writing itself is a practice in anthropology, and how styles of writing impact argument, affect, and ultimately, the discipline itself. Students will also work in different genres of writing to better understand writing as a craft, a discipline, and a means of communication.

Required of fifth-year Ph.D. students returning from dissertation field research and in the process of writing dissertations and preparing for professional employment. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.

Required of second- and third-year Ph.D. students writing the qualifying paper or the qualifying written examination. May be repeat for credit.