Fall 2006 Courses

One of the themes that will be addressed in the course is the concept of “excluded pasts” – traditional histories written by the dominant culture that are often exclusionary in their accounts of ancient and recent peoples. Mainstream histories often exclude or present in a biased or distorted manner accounts of common or lower status families, members of minority groups, or individuals persecuted for religious, political or sexual persuasions. The reason for touching on this theme is to recognize that the past practices of archaeology were exclusionary. As a western science dominated in its formative years by Euro-American men, archaeologists working in North America excavated burials and sacred sites with minimal consultation with descendant communities. Sensitive materials were appropriated and placed in museums and curation facilities. As will be discussed in class, Native American scholars refer to this kind of archaeology as “scientific colonialism” or “imperial archaeology.” As a consequence of a growing backlash to these past practices, in combination with recent legislation involving the repatriation of material culture back to descendant communities, the field of archaeology is currently undergoing significant changes in its methods and practices as it attempts to become a more inclusive and collaborative science. The course will explore how archaeologists today are creating close working relationships with diverse stakeholders, participating in collaborative research teams, and undertaking educational outreach with the public.

Anthro 2AC will highlight an important goal of contemporary archaeology – the construction of alternative, pluralistic histories using multiple lines of evidence. Course lectures and readings will consider how archaeology can provide a powerful methodology for constructing alternative histories of excluded peoples (and their encounters with the dominant culture) by examining the material culture of their daily practices. As we will see, the performance of daily routines produces patterned accumulations of material culture that are among the most interpretable kinds of deposits found in archaeological contexts. While most people may perceive these kinds of deposits as simply garbage or refuse collections, when analyzed by archaeologists they can provide critical insights about past people. The course examines how the archaeology of daily practice, when integrated with other sources of relevant information (oral traditions, oral histories, written records), provides the most powerful way to understand the past outside of a time machine.

The course will present case studies from California to highlight the potential of writing alternative histories about people with excluded pasts. The case studies will also highlight the benefits and challenges of working with diverse stakeholders, specifically Native Californian tribes (e.g., Kashaya Pomo), Hispanic descendant communities, and Euro-American historical societies.

Course requirements: Three exams required (two midterms and a final exam) and a short research paper. Participation in weekly discussion sections is mandatory. Discussion sections are an important component of the course, you must attend them, and they will count for 20% of your final grade.

Human beings are members of a lineage of African Apes, and yet we are physiologically, mentally, and behaviorally highly divergent, as well as vastly more variable, when compared with our phylogenetic close cousins, or indeed any other species. How did this arise in evolution? What were its antecedents? What does this mean for the much-debated concept of "human nature?" How do the complex interwoven threads of cultural, physiological, and evolutionary influences interact to bring about this uniquely emergent suite of behavioral patterns and propensities? To consider these questions requires a judicious integration of data, theory, and criticism from many fields. This course provides an introduction to the biological and evolutionary background of human behavior and cognition. It will survey efforts to reconstruct the evolutionary context of cognition and social behavioral of human ancestors using data from hominid paleontology and studies of living primates, especially the social behavior and cognition of great apes. It will also introduce and scrutinize theories that endeavor to articulate an evolutionary basis of human behavior and culture, including sociobiology, behavior genetics, behavioral ecology, evolutionary psychology, cultural evolution (e.g. memetics), and co-evolutionary theories of bio-social interaction. These will be further analyzed in the context of their consistency with current data on gene expression, brain function, and behavioral development. Prerequisites: Anthropology 1 (or equivalent introductory background that includes exposure to evolutionary biology, hominid paleontology, primate behavior, and human physiology)

This course attempts to shed new light on the stereotypical images of the traditional Japanese culture and people through archaeological analysis. Specifically, the aims of the course are twofold. First, it shows how recent archaeological discoveries can change conventional interpretations of Japanese history. Particular emphasis will be placed on changing lifeways of past residents of the Japanese islands, including commoners, samurai (the warrior class) and nobles. Second, the course aims to discuss the implications of these archaeological studies on our understanding of Japanese identities. Class lectures will be supplemented by slides of excavation scenes and artifacts, and videos.

This course explores the archaeological record of Africa in detail from the earliest evidence for hominin behavior up to the beginnings of pastoralism and early settled societies. Much evidence now points to Africa as the birthplace of our genus, species, and as an area critical to the development of modern human behavior. Africa is therefore enormously important to our understanding of human origins and evolution. The three primary objective of this course are to introduce the geographic and temporal diversity of African prehistory, to encourage students to integrate paleoecological, archaeological, and fossil data, and to provide a basis for understanding the global significance of Africa for human evolution. The course is divided into four sections. Beginning with a survey of the physical characteristics of the continent, students become familiar with the climate, vegetation, fauna, topography, and geology of Africa and the ways these impact the archaeological record. In the next section, we discuss the earliest evidence for tool production and foraging strategies. We consider Acheulian and Sangoan sites, variability within the later part of the Early Stone Age, and competing interpretations of ESA lifeways. We again focus on variability in the third section while examining the Middle Stone Age/Middle Paleolithic. This leads to an examination of the evidence for incipient modern human behavior and the transition to the Later Stone Age/Upper Paleolithic. In the final section, we discuss the LSA/UP and end by considering the rise of pastoralism andcultivation in Africa. Lecture topics include paleoecology, culture and tool use among Chimpanzees, and how humans adapt foraging strategies to particular types of environments by considering the rich ethnographic record of African huntergatherers. Students will be evaluated through class participation (10%), three quizzes (30% total), a midterm exam (20%), a final exam (20%), and a research paper (20%). Papers should integrate ecological, fossil, and archaeological datasets. Students will select one geographical region and then choose a paper format from the following options: Use three sites from a similar time period to build up a picture of hominin adaptation. Use one or two sites (at least one of which contains a temporal transition) to describe how hominin adaptation changes from one technological phase to the next. The text for this course, Phillipson's African Archaeology, 3rd edition (2005, Cambridge University Press), is supplemented by numerous articles from the scientific literature.

Zooarchaeology is the study of animal remains (primarily bones, teeth, and shells) from archaeological contexts.  The goal of most zooarchaeological studies is to determine how animals fit into to human economic and ecological strategies.  Zooarchaeological research is therefore applicable in virtually all archaeological contexts (as long as animal remains are preserved) and is an integral component of archaeological analysis.  

This course introduces students to the important issues and analytical techniques of zooarchaeology, including taphonomic processes (that is, how faunal assemblages are formed and altered), quantification of skeletal elements, distinctions between major taxonomic groups, season of death, interpretation of mortality profiles, application of optimal foraging theory, and biometric data analysis.  Laboratory sessions complement lectures and provide hands_on instruction in skeletal identification.  Students learn how to identify bones and teeth to skeletal element, how to distinguish between some major taxonomic groups, and how to identify evidence of bone alteration by various processes (i.e., butchery, burning, acid dissolution, weathering, and carnivore gnawing).  Using modern bone, students work in small groups to simulate some of these processes.  In the laboratory, we also discuss field and laboratory methods, including documentation and conservation.  

By the end of the course students should be able to do the following:

* Summarize the major issues in zooarchaeological analysis, including taphonomic processes, methodology, and interpretation.
* Identify skeletal elements, including fragmented bones, from a variety of animals.
* Identify teeth and some bones to taxon.
* Produce basic quantification summaries.
* Identify evidence on animal bones for various taphonomic processes.

 Students are evaluated on their comprehension of lecture topics in three laboratory quizzes, and two major exams—a midterm and a final (short answer, essay, and practical identification formats).  In addition, students undertake an analytical project using actual zooarchaeological data provided by the instructor.  Students have a choice of working with one of two datasets (an Iron Age fortress and town or a Paleolithic site).  After choosing their assemblage at the start of the semester, students apply statistical and other analytical techniques learned in class to their datasets, creating a summary report for each of these.  Each report should include a graphic presentation that effectively communicates the results.  At the end of the course, students produce an interpretive summary of their findings (~10 pages).

This is a course about the evidence for and interpretations of the visual and material cultures that we might label "art". We will focus particularly on the material, plastic and graphic "arts" of those societies we have labeled as "hunter-gatherers", including the groups of the Northwest Coast. Australia, South Africa, and Native California. The course begins with a consideration of how anthropologists have conceptualized and studied the "arts", with particular consideration of some of the very interesting new directions and shifts in approaches, theoretical frameworks, and studies. How this kind of anthropology of the visual and material is situated in contemporary anthropology will be one introductory topic. The core of the course will focus on how such materials are studied in archaeological contexts; what we might call the "archaeological arts". We will especially consider the so-called rock arts that characterize so many prehistoric and ethnographically known cultures, from the "cave arts" of the late Ice Age to the on-going rock art practices among groups such as Aboriginal peoples of Australia. This focus can serve as an ideal "case study" for understanding the history, methods, debates, and problems in how we study and consider the anthropology of the visual and the materiality of social life. In addition to the presentation of materials in the class meetings by the instructor and various visitors, we will have several Forums for class discussion and debate, and each student will join a panel or group for a presentation on a selected theme. Visit(s) to museum collections or engagement with actual materials and "arts" will hopefully be arranged. Course grades will be based on 1) participation in class discussions that will include the readings, in Forums, in panels, as well as 2) on a research project.
READINGS: There will be a course website in bSpace, a Course Reader, one text (Randall White's 2002 book, Prehistoric Art. The Symbolic Journey of Humankind ), and substantial selections from other paperback texts, including the new Anthropology of Art and Gell's Art and Agency.

This course is about ethnographic fieldwork, public archaeology, the anthropology of pedagogy and education, the anthropology of technology, and collaborative learning and the material and media representation of culture. The course is designed to provide an opportunity for undergraduates to work with 6 th graders in exploring the worlds of archaeology, history, and computer-based technologies. There is no mid-term or final examination for this course. Students enrolled in Anthropology 128m are expected to mentor and interact with children (predominantly 6 th graders) in Expedition, an after-school program at Roosevelt Middle School in Oakland. Additionally, this course fulfills the methods requirement for Anthropology majors, providing an opportunity to learn and use a variety of ethnographic skills, guided by adjunct faculty member Dr. Charles Underwood. The focus of the course this semester is encouraging the awareness of the multicultural nature of the meaning of material culture and its expression through digital storytelling.

The Expedition after-school program, which is voluntary, is designed to bring the archaeological experience to 6 th graders through facilitated play with a variety of media, including: digital storytelling (video production), computer games, web browsing, hands-on exploration of real artifacts, etc. The facilitator for the Expedition program is Tamara Sturak.

Pre-requisites: Students from fields other than archaeology and anthropology are welcome to participate. Bilingual students are strongly encouraged to apply. The Introduction to Archaeology (Anthro.2) or its equivalent or the permission of the instructor are the only prerequisites. Regular access to an email and Internet account are essential.

Requirements:This course is essentially a practical research/service-learning course. Participation in the Roosevelt School after-school program (approx. 2-3 hrs one afternoon each week) is a required part of the course. You will be expected to keep fieldnotes of your observations and enter them into the course database each week.

Required reading: Kozol, J. 2000 Ordinary Resurrections: children in the years of hope. Crown Publ, New York.

A course reader of weekly required readings will also be available for course.

The 20th century was dominated by utopian visions of how to achieve a happy future society. Artists in competing social systems -- capitalist, communist, fascist and others -- played a central role in the development of these utopian visions. In the beginning of the century futurists, constructivists, and other avant-garde artists believed that the purpose of art was greater than autonomous pursuits of beauty and aesthetics. They aspired to involve art in the construction of the new society and the New Man. However, these sincere experiments contributed to the creation not only of the most liberating and progressive ideals and values but also to the most oppressive regimes and ideologies. At the same time, even the most vile political regimes of the century inspired some of the most remarkable works of art that expose the best and worst that art can achieve. Many artistic movements that developed in these diverse modern contexts, under each other's influence, came to incorporate stark contrasts of good and evil, serious and ironic, rational and absurd. Because of the unpredictable and changing nature of art forms and strategies, 20th century art offers excellent ethnographic material to discuss many issues that are central for the understanding of art in general: what is the nature and purpose of art; what aspects of art are good and bad; what can art achieve at its best and destroy at its worst; what is beauty; what is artistic freedom; what is an artist's role and responsibility in the society; what is the relationship of art to ethics and power, etc? This course grapples with these questions by focusing on the transformations of artistic forms and the role of artists in Europe and the US from an anthropological, rather than art history, perspective. Treating art forms, artistic writings, and details of artists' lives as ethnographic material the course questions what they can tell us about the cultural, social and political forces that dominated the century and continue to shape our lives today.

An introduction to law in culture and society. Among the topics discussed will be the use of law as legitimation, the interplay between law and colonialism, law and ideology, legal pluralism, the evolution of law and conception of justice, legal hegemonies and user theory in the context of local, national, and global disputing processes. A special focus will be on lawlessness:collective punishment, executive privilege, sovereignty, and international law. Reading and lecture materials include perspectives across cultures. Open to, and appropriate for, all majors.

This course is a hands-on engagement with ethnography.  Each participant will plan and conduct independent research around a problem of particular interest to her or himself.  Weekly seminars will discuss the pragmatics, ethics, and philosophy of field research.  Reading is for the most part individualized and depends on the project undertaken.  Many students go on to undertake senior honors theses or graduate research based on the class project; a number have published their research; and some have used their work as part of larger collective projects in fields ranging from public health to media production to education reform.  The once-weekly sessions are divided between lecture and in-class workshops on research design and problem-solving.  There are no formal prerequisites, though background in some field of anthropological or social analysis will help participants link the questions that motivate their research to broader debates in and out of the academy.

In preparation for the class, participants should begin to think through possible research projects.  Ideal projects are first of all, feasible given the time you have: a semester.  They address situations and problems that are interesting and important and that can be studied locally.  Over the past two years, research sites and problems for this course have included topics as diverse as the organization of cannabis clubs in the Bay Area and what they reveal about changing practices of drug use and health care; the practices remaking status and personal identity among Filipino migrants who take nursing positions to migrate to the United States; the study of men who join anti-circumcision groups and of those who  undertake multiple circumcisions on themselves, to think about changing forms of ethics in relation to masculine body image; the forms of food discipline and body discipline undertaken by children training in ballet and how these help rethink current debates on eating disorders.  They have included the study of the social networks by which mainland
Southeast Asian migrants get jobs and establish new kinds of gender identities, focusing on the manicuring trade; the culture of barebacking (unprotected sex) among a group of gay men and its relation to the experience of social marginality and to how the internet refashions relationships; the provision of food advice to Berkeley's homeless population and what this reveals about the organization of support services and their relation to different forms of power; and the study of how American military personnel make the transition back to civilian life, and what this reveals about military service as a form of labor and about the organization of labor today more generally.

This course addresses key areas of anthropological engagement in contemporary Latin America through the lens of science, technology, and medicine. For example, we will explore crucial work on race, gender, citizenship, and the nation-state through an engagement with historical and contemporary interventions in eugenics, reproduction, and public health. The relation between "traditional" knowledge and agricultural or pharmaceutical research (such as in Mexico and Peru) will be our entry point into a consideration of the central role of "knowledge" and natural history in colonialism; the relation between indigenismo and state development strategies; and contemporary concerns about globalization and intellectual property. Current controversies swirling around oil, coca, and water supplies in South America (particularly Bolivia and Venezuela) will be our points of departure for thinking about the relationship between "nature" and national sovereignties. Throughout, we will be attuned to what an anthropological perspective, and particularly work on the anthropology of science, technology, and medicine, brings to our understandings of contemporary issues in Latin America.

Postcolonial and poststructuralist theory has been crucial to the development of feminist debates in the last century. In this course we will focus on some of the key concepts that have been central to the reformulation of feminism including power, subject, agency, embodiment, performativity, and cultural translation. We will draw upon materials that cut across a range of historical and cultural locations with an eye toward different kinds of theoretical interventions these texts stage within dominant paradigms of feminist thought. Please bear in mind that this course assumes a certain familiarity with debates in both critical theory and poststructuralism. While we will devote some time to discussing key tropes within this philosophical tradition, most of class time will be taken up with the transformations these tropes have enacted in the field of feminist theory and politics.

Food is necessary to stay alive, yet it is never consumed without being transformed by a social meaning and setting. Food is the backbone of society. Food is the foundation of every economy. Food marks social differences, boundaries, bonds and contradictions. Eating is a continual evolving enactment of gender, family, and community. We will think about how food-sharing creates solidarity, how food scarcity damages the human community and the human spirit. This course will focus on food and focus on a series of key topics within cultural food studies, including taboos, ritual, religion, health, alcohol use, social feasting, civilizing society through food use, and the global politics of food. Through a series of lectures, readings, movies, and projects we will explore the important yet perhaps un-noticed place of food in shaping our place in the world as well as those of all humans, through time.

Anthropology is underrepresented in the development of interdisciplinary disability studies. Medical anthropology has traditionally chosen to focus its primary analytic lens on the meaning of illness and its amelioration, minimally addressing variations in cross-cultural concepts of impairment, disability, and accommodation. This is changing. Anthropology is beginning to use theoretically grounded and consistent definitions of these phenomena. This course will supply an overview and will demonstrate the important contributions to be gained from a mutual engagement between anthropology and disability studies. We will present the anthropology of disability by engaging multiple perspectives on the sociocultural construction of disability and impairment. The international disablement experience brings up important issues at the interface of identity, society, and culture. These issues are not always necessarily tied to the narratives of cause and cure with which medical anthropologists are familiar, but in some cultural contexts can clearly be viewed as social exclusions and their impact. The distinction between disability meanings and illness meanings and their sometimes intersection and interaction requires theoretical elaboration and this course will address this distinction as well as engage other unique perspectives in discourse on anthropology and disability.

A new course, sponsored by the Townsend Center for the Humanities, will be offered jointly between the Departments of Anthropology and East Asian Languages and Cultures under the GROUP theme Humanities and Human Rights. The course will problematize normative discourses about human rights by examining a wide area of historical and creative materials through humanistic and social scientific modes of analysis. The class will directly build on the ongoing research on ways of confronting past experiences of violence in Asia and Africa by the two faculty co-teaching it, Professors Alan Tansman of the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, and Mariane Ferme of the Department of Anthropology.

This course will examine a range of European, Asian and African responses to and representations of violent conflict. We will pay close attention to how catastrophic events are productive of new forms of expression—oral, written, visual, and musical—as well as destructive of familiar ones. We will examine the ways in which experience and its representation interact during and in the aftermath of extreme violence. Our empirical cases will be drawn from our research on comparative European and Asian responses to WWII atrocities, and on the post-Cold War civil wars in Africa. Our different perspectives, from both literary and anthropological studies, will bridge the disciplinary divides among literary and cultural theory, psychiatry and psychoanalysis, and anthropology and social theory. We will be especially attentive to the limits and possibilities of representing violence both during the time it is experienced and also in the history of its aftermath. Among the representational genres explored will be personal memoirs, literature and poetry, film, photography, and other visual arts, music (from protest songs to classical compositions), built memorials, as well as the language of numbers—the statistical projections and casualty estimates embedded in human rights reports about otherwise undocumented atrocities. Through both humanistic and social science modes of analysis, and through their combination, we will treat this material as both evidence and representation.

After grounding a series of case studies in their historical contexts, we will examine a variety of real-life and representational coping strategies used in the face and aftermath of violent situations—situations of unprecedented violence that produce both creative experimentations as well as crises in social reproduction and normal epistemological categories. We will analyze, through a comparative lens, various modes of mourning; diverse modes of memorialization of tragedy; the ethics of the representation of tragedy; revenge and survivor guilt; and the pursuit of justice through public forums, ranging from War Crime tribunals to Truth and Reconciliation Commissions. Throughout, we will be asking about the possibilities, and the difficulties, of comparing responses in disparate socio-cultural milieus to different types of atrocities. We will be exploring the relationship between personal suffering and more encompassing societal and political violence. We will be concerned with the relationship among experience, emotion, and their articulation, and redressive actions in the face of violence—if any. How, we will ask, might representations of suffering speak to students interested in considering human rights activism?

Among the authors we will read to conceptualize course case studies are: Hannah Arendt, Jean Amery, Walter Benjamin, Wendy Brown, Susan Buck-Morss, Sigmund Freud, Primo Levi, Lisa Malkki, Veena Das, Achille Mbembe, Oe Kenzaburo, and Elaine Scarry.

This interdisciplinary course explores approaches to popular cultures in South Asia. Materials include the works of anthropologists, historians, political theorists, and cultural critics. Our point of entry will be the concept of the "public sphere" as it enables a space for the modern national collective and for the realm of the popular. We will discuss how the European-derived concept of the "public sphere" has been both used and criticized by scholars of South Asia, and how it interacts with the terms "popular culture" and "public culture". The course will include a historical element as part of which we will discuss anticolonial nationalism of the late 19th and early 20th century and its formative impact on the Indian public sphere. We will also highlight the 1990s as the "liberalized" and globalized era, discussing how this is linked with the ongoing growth of the Indian middle class and the impact of Hindu nationalism on popular culture, the public sphere, and public spaces. We will bring these background discussions to bear on topics such as public parks, cinema halls, pilgrimage, urban restaurant culture, street theater actresses, and television serials. A student need not have any background in South Asia to take this class. This class is open to and appropriate for all majors. Cross listed with IAS 150.1 and Asian Studies 150.2

This course will explore the political significance of the religious resurgence of the last two decades in Europe and North America. Central to this inquiry will be the following questions: how has the increasing power of politically-oriented religious associations--Evangelical, Pentecostal, Catholic, and other--reshaped the conditions of European and American political life?  How do the different legal traditions of Europe and the US regulate the political claims of religious organizations and actors?  How do we understand the current clash between secular and religious values? To what extent are secular states in the West founded upon specific religious traditions, and how does this impact upon the social and political status of religious minorities within different national contexts?

Note: This course satisfies the Physical requirement for the major.

Fast paced introduction to the history and current status of theories concerned with the role of behavior in evolution, including theories of cognitive, social and linguistic evolution. Classic theories of Spencer, Baldwin, Lloyd Morgan, Waddington, Campbell, and others will be reviewed and compared to more recent approaches to the interaction between biological evolution, cognition, and social behaviors. The role of learning and neural development processes will be emphasized.

Prerequisite: Anthropology 111 or consent of instructor.