221 - 230 of 239 results for: ANTHRO

This advanced graduate seminar reflects on archaeological research on violence in relation to readings in philosophy, political anthropology, cultural studies, and gender and ethnic studies. While some forensic approaches are discussed, the emphasis is more on structural and collective violence and the role of violence in the formation of the archaeological record.

( History 282J is an undergraduate course offered for 5 units; History 382J is a graduate course offered for 4-5 units.) This course explores the history of disasters in the Middle East from the early modern period to the mid-20th-century. We will trace the evolving meanings of disasters and misfortunes by focusing on critical moments -- plagues, fires, earthquakes, wars -- to examine how people have responded to these events, labeled them, and devised strategies to live with or forget them. The course readings follow the evolution of policies and norms together with the articulation of new forms of knowledge and expertise in the wake of catastrophe. Additionally, particular attention will be paid to how modern conceptions of disaster relate to older understandings of apocalypse, as well as to various strands of "disaster reformism," when rethinking tragedy and time helped assert radical agendas for reforming political, economic, social, communal, racial, and gender relations while remodeling social science and intellectual life. The course focuses on various trajectories of disaster thinking in Arabic, Turkish, Greek, Armenian, and Hebrew.

The premise for this course is that anthropology, as well as other domains of social inquiry, have unacknowledged and unredeemed debts to captivity as structure, experience, and event, from the penal colony to the slave plantation. This course is an attempt to begin to think about those debts through readings in anthropology, history, and philosophy. By instructor consent.

This seminar considers subjectivity as a central category of social, cultural, psychological, historical and political analysis. Through a critical and collaborative examination of ethnographic works and psychoanalytic theory, we will identify the processes by which subjectivities are produced, explore subjectivity as a locus of social change, and examine how emerging subjectivities remake social worlds. Some of the questions this seminar will pose include: what is the relation between subjectivity and subjection? How to account for the effects of the social in terms of subject formation without succumbing to social determinism? What else is the subject other than the outcome of a complex constellation of discursive, material, institutional, and historical factors?

This methods seminar focuses on developing ethnographic strategies for representing race, ethnicity, and language in writing without reproducing the stereotypes surrounding these categories and practices. In addition to reading various ethnographies, students conduct their own ethnographic research to test out the authors' contrasting approaches to data collection, analysis, and representation. The goal is for students to develop a rich ethnographic toolkit that will allow them to effectively represent the (re)production and (trans)formation of racial, ethnic, and linguistic phenomena.

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