251 - 260 of 271 results for: ANTHRO

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.

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. Pre-Requisite by Instructor Consent. Significant work outside of class time is expected of the student.

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

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