Spring 2008 Courses

This course will provide students with an introduction to the discipline of anthropological archaeology with a special emphasis on how archaeology contributes to our understanding of American society and the cultures from which it is drawn. Students will learn about the methods, goals, and theoretical concepts of archaeology with attention to the impact archaeology has had on the construction of the histories of diverse communities - Native Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, and European Americans. This course satisfies the American Cultures Requirement.

We will pay particular attention to the ethical dilemmas and issues of contemporary archaeology: "who owns the past?", "who owns native culture?" , what are the emergent new relationships between archaeologists and indigenous groups, between archaeologists and the descendants of the people archaeologists are studying? And we will examine how archaeology has been and is used in the negotiation of identity and power, in politics, and in differential access to resources.

Prerequisites: None.

Required Texts:
1) Archaeology: Down to Earth 3rd edition , paperback. Authors: David Hurst Thomas and Robert Kelly . Publishers: Thomson-Wadsworth.
2) AND the companion CD-ROM: Doing Fieldwork: Archeological Demonstrations by the same authors and publishers.

This introductory course to anthropology positions it as a discipline with key concepts for understanding diverse ways of life, with special insights into our global contemporary situations.  The course also fulfils the American Cultures course requirement, focusing on the global formation of American society and culture. 
Human society is constantly being destabilized and re-formed through engagements with diverse flows of populations, commerce, mass culture, technology, and politics.  No country or culture is cut off from transnational links and influences.  This class stresses the picture of America as "a nation of immigrants" rather than "a stand alone nation," a land that is an open global system rather than a fortress under siege.
Course materials will illuminate the transnational nature of contemporary American problems through an emphasis on global youth experiences to emphasize the relevance of anthropology to students own lives and identities. Key anthropological concepts of kinship, gender, ethnicity, race, and class-- as ideas and as practices -- will be explored in overseas and American communities. Through engagement with the methods of cultural anthropology and a focus on the dynamic and transnational processes of identity-making we will explore what it means to be "American," as well as to be human, today.
Required Books (all paperback)
TEXT : Conrad Kottak, Mirror for Humanity (5th edition)
Margaret Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa (Samoan & American teenagers compared)
Ian Condry, Hip Hop Japan: Rap and the paths of Cultural Globalization

NOTE: This course satisfies the second half of the reading and composition requirement.

"Encounters with the "Other": Madness and Spirit Possession"

In this course we will examine madness and spirit possession from a number of different perspectives. We will consider writings from psychoanalysis, psychiatry, anthropology, and critical theory, including literature and film. Who or what is considered "other" and in need of exclusion and control? What is considered normal and what pathological? What do these texts reveal about the subjectivity, the social conditions and historical formations that generated them?

NOTE: This course satisfies the second half of the reading and composition requirement.

"Religion and Subjectivity in the Age of Technology" (A Course For "Free Spirits")

Modernity -- the age or historical epoch that began sometime in the seventeenth century and has perhaps been at its height since the nineteenth century-- is often regarded as the time in which the natural sciences and machine technology furnish some of our fundamental definitions of reality. How has religion been affected by this transformation of human beings' basic comprehension of their existence? What might be learned from understanding those religious practices and intellectual engagements with religion that evince having been profoundly touched by science and technology? How are metamorphoses of the self made possible by the collision and interlacing of religion and technology?

This course will take an interdisciplinary approach to addressing these three questions by examining writings from many different genres, from anthropology, philosophy, and psychoanalysis to poetry, science fiction, and texts by religious visionaries. Texts will include William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience, parts of Martin Heidegger's Introduction to Metaphysics and The Question of Technology, Avital Ronnell's The Test Drive, and Max Weber's "Science as a Vocation." Other possible authors are science fiction writers Octavia Butler and Phillip K. Dick, poets James Merrill and Fernando Pessoa, philosopher Jacques Derrida, anthropologists James Faubion and Tanya Luhrmann, neuroscientist Oliver Sacks, journalist Erik Davis, and spiritual visionaries Mary Baker Eddy, James Blood, and Jane Roberts.

NOTE: This course satisfies the second half of the reading and composition requirement.

"The Anthropology of Gender"

In this course we will examine the interconnections among gender, power and text. Through an interdisciplinary and critical approach, we will consider how anthropologists, novelists, philosophers and others have written about sex and gender. We will approach each set of readings with the following central questions in mind: what is the central object of analysis? What theories of gender are at work, both implicit and explicit? How are texts shaped by historical circumstances and how do they in turn shape the views of a particular audience and society more broadly? What are the effects of choices about narrative voice, structure, detail and style? Topics will include colonialism and desire, gender and embodiment, intersexuality, and the construction of feminities and masculinities.

Required reading:
Abu-Lughod, Lila. 2000. Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society. University of California Press.
Eugenides, Jeffrey. 2007. Middlesex: A Novel. Picador.
Guttman, Matthew. 2006 (2nd edition). The Meanings of Macho: Being a Man in Mexico City. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Martin, Emily. 2001. The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction. Boston: Beacon Press.
Wolf, Margery. 1992. A Thrice-Told Tale: Feminism, Postmodernism, and Ethnographic Responsibility. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Woolf, Virginia. 1989. To the Lighthouse. Harvest Books.
Additional selected readings by Margaret Mead, Simone de Beauvoir, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Sherry Ortner, Marilyn Strathern, and Donna Haraway.

NOTE: This course satisfies the second half of the reading and composition requirement.

"The Body in Contemporary North American Society"

Through an examination of anthropological works over the past two decades, this course provides students with analytical skills and anthropological perspective to better understand and critically engage with timely issues that involve the body in the contemporary North American society.

Course readings and discussions will focus on topics such as cosmetic surgery and bodily enhancements, harmaceutical interventions, eating disorders,  obesity, aging and the end of the life cycle, commodification of the body and the bodily inscription of gender, racial, sexual, and class difference. There will be special anthropological attention to similarities and differences with other times and places. Emphasis is on critical reading and sustained analytical writing.

NOTE: This course satisfies the second half of the reading and composition requirement.

"Language, Power and Society"

This course will focus on anthropological inquiries into multilingualism within a comparative perspective.  In addition to surveying key texts that span the history of linguistic anthropology and language philosophy, the course will primarily explore ethnographic writing about sociolinguistic dynamics in United States and Spain.   The main topics covered include: language politics, language contact, language policy, language and education, language and the media, code switching, critical discourse analysis, and interactional sociolinguistics.

Prerequisites: Anthropology 1, Biology 1A-1B.

3 hours lecture + 3 hours lab per week

A detailed investigation of the fossil record for human evolution. Concepts of stratigraphy, geochronology, evolutionary theory, taxonomy, paleoenvironmental analysis, taphonomy, paleolithic archaeology, and phylogenetic reconstruction will be introduced. The history of fossil hominid discoveries and the current status of interpretations of the fossil hominid record will be presented.

This course will present a history of anthropological thought from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century and will draw upon the major subdisciplines of anthropology. It will focus both upon the integration of the anthropological subdisciplines and upon the relationships between these and other disciplines outside anthropology. Three hours of lecture; one hour of required discussion section per week.

This intensive, undergraduate seminar/field practicum course will explore violence and genocide in the context of human rights. We will study the contested history, theory and practice of human rights. We begin with an understanding of violence/genocide as a continuum that includes often unrecognized forms of violence -- the 'small wars and invisible genocides' -- of everyday life. Most forms of violence are not 'deviant' at all but defined as moral in the service of political norms and economic interests. Thus, we will focus on the structural and symbolic violence of poverty, exclusion, and confinement as these negatively impact the sick-poor, the socially marginalized , the displaced and the disgraced, especially refugees, immigrants, the homeless, street children, prisoners, the mentally ill. Lectures and readings will juxtapose the routine, the ordinary -- the symbolic and normative violence of everyday life ("terror as usual") -- against sudden eruptions of unexpected, extraordinary, or "gratuitous" violence (as in genocide, state terror, dirty wars, drug wars, terrorism, rough justice, guerrilla warfare, and civil wars). We will explore the continuities between political and criminal violence, between state violence and 'communal' violence, between structural violence and domestic violence. Case studies will include: indigenous peoples, autonomy and self-determination; the rights of children and child combatants; gendered violence and human rights; the traffic in workers and organs; human rights as vehicles for achieving social justice; health as a human right; and the role of academic-activists in the struggle for human life and dignity.

Part one of the seminar will introduce students to interdisciplinary (anthropological, medical, philosophical, theological, and literary) approaches to violence, genocide, war, poverty, and other forms of human suffering. Students will be introduced to Franco Basaglia's "peace-time crimes", Conrad's "heart of darkness"; Immanuel Levinas's "useless suffering"; Bourdieu's "symbolic violence"; Taussig's "culture of terror," Primo Levi's "gray zone"; Agamben's "impossibility of witnessing"; and Foucault's "carceral network". We will contrast ethnographic, literary, documentary, and humanitarian forms of 'witnessing', representing, and responding to violence and genocide. The second half of the course will look at the emergence of human rights discourses and humanitarian responses and practices and the applications of human rights to medicine, psychiatry, to expanded notions of citizenship , especially in the fraught context of new nation building following civil wars and political violence. How do conceptions of human rights vary with respect to different social, cultural and political contexts? What social groups do or do not have recognized human rights? Are specific human rights seen as 'owned' by individuals or by social groups? What notions of 'the human' and 'human dignity' are recognized and encoded in various human rights discourses? Guest speakers who have extensive experience as scholars, artists, and activists dealing with violence, genocide, social suffering and human rights will be an integral part of this course

Practicum/Field Research: Finally, and most importantly, this demanding seminar has a required field research component and practicum through which students will participate as 'interns' in local various institutional field sites , programs, institutions related to the themes of the course.

Assigned Readings will include:
Goodale, Mark and Sally Engle Merry, eds. 2007. The Practice of Human Rights: Tracking Law between the Global and the Local. Cambridge University Press
Scheper-Hughes, Nancy and Philippe Bourgois. 2004. Violence in War and Peace: An Anthology. London: Basil Blackwell
Farmer, Paul. 2003. Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor. University of California Press Beatriz Manz. 2003. Paradise in Ashes. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Amartya Sen. Development as Freedom. Anchor Press 2000.
Sontag, Susan 2003.Regarding the Pain of Others,. New York: Farrar, Straus; Giroux
Derrida, Jacques 2001. On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. London: Rutledge
Philip Gourvitch. We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We will be Killed with Our Families. New York: Farrar, Straus;Giroux.
Gobodo-Madikizela, Pumla. 2003.A HUMAN BEING DIED THAT NIGHT: A South African Story of Forgiveness Houghton Mifflin, Ignatieff, Michael. 1997. The Warrior's Honor: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience. NY: Henry Holt.
Uzodinma Iweala. Beasts of No Nation: A Novel. Harper Collins, 2005.
Amartya Sen. Development as Freedom. Anchor Press 2000.
Susan Sontag. Regarding the Pain of Others. Picador Press, 2003.

Enrollment Information: Do not contact the professor about enrollment in this course. Enrollment will be determined solely on the basis of Tele-BEARS enrollment. Once the class is full, if seats do open up they will be awarded based solely on wait-list postion; first on the list gets first open seat and so forth. No other criteria will be considered for enrollment, so do not contact the professor requesting a seat in this class. Inquires about enrollment will not be responded to.

This course will outline the development of native cultures in the American Southwest from Paleo-Indian times (ca. 11,500 BC) through early European Contact (ca. A.D. 1600). Topics to be covered include: the greater environment, early foraging cultures, the development of agriculture and village life, the emergence and decline of regional alliances, abandonment and reorganization, and changes in social organization, external relations and trade.

The course is designed as an advanced upper division seminar for students majoring in Anthropology with an emphasis in archaeology. Will be co-taught as a distance course with UCSC. UCSC prerequisites are Anth 1,2, and 3. A previous course in American archaeology is highly recommended, but not required (UCSC).

At UCB, prerequisites include Anth 1,2,3, and at least Junior standing. The course will be co-taught via teleconferencing facilities between UCSC and UCB. The course schedule will follow Berkeley's semester system, which overlaps Santa Cruz's Winter and Spring Quarters. UCSC students must enroll in BOTH 196A(Winter) and 196B(Spring) to receive credit and an evaluation for either course. Students enrolled in this course must have a basic familiarity with using e-mail and the Web, including access to Adobe Acrobat, since a variety of course material only will be available electronically and communication among the professors and the course participants at both campuses will be largely through the internet and e-mail, to include the take-home exams, and the option of submitting the research paper electronically (any version of Microsoft Word is acceptable).

Course Requirements (note grade percentiles):
Course text: John Kantner (2004) Ancient Puebloan Southwest, Cambridge University
Press. ISBN: 0521788803

And course reader through ERES at UCSC.
Lab projects and quizzes = 25% or grade
*Two take-home essay-style exams = 50% of grade
*20 page research paper (For UCSC students: This paper fulfills the senior thesis requirement in Anthropology. Drafts and revisions will be required.) = 25% of grade

This course is an introduction to skeletal biology and its basis for the analysis of human skeletal remains. The study of the human skeleton provides insight into human evolution and health, and can be applied in archaeological, forensic, and biomedical contexts. The first half of the course will deal with the structure, function, and growth of the human skeleton, while later classes will introduce the methods used to analyze and interpret archaeological skeletal remains and gain information on aspects such as age, sex, health, and biological variation. Lectures provide relevant background, but students are expected to devote a significant amount of time to work and participate in weekly labs.

Prerequisites: Anthropology 1, Biology 1B.

Enrollment information: Consent of Instructor required. See Mary Howell (209 Krober) for details on what you need to submit to the instructor to be considered for enrollment. Do not contact the instructor until you have spoken to Mary.

Students who have taken ANTHRO C103/IB C142 (Osteology) are NOT able to take this course.

Since the 1970s, historical archaeology has provided a new avenue of research into the African-American past. Beginning with the pioneering work of Charles Fairbanks at the University of Florida,African-American Archaeology has come to dominate theoretical and methodological discourses in historical archaeology. This course will provide a survey of the field of African-American archaeology. The relationship between African-American archaeology and other disciplines of African-American studies (particularly those that include material culture studies); the geographic and diachronic diversity of African experiences in the Diaspora; race relations between African- American, Native American and European American populations from the colonial period onwards, and the politics of archaeological practice; will be among the themes covered in this course.

This class involves the analysis of archaeological materials from prehistoric shell mounds in the greater San Francisco Bay Area. Students will be working with archaeological samples from excavations from one or more sites. The purpose of this class is to familiarize students with methods for analyzing archaeological materials, including artifacts, maps, field notes, and photos, in order to generate interpretations about prehistoric sites.The ultimate purpose is to develop a better understanding of the structure of the shell mounds and the context of the artifacts recovered.This will provide the necessary foundation to begin generating interpretations about the function, ecology, chronology, and significance of these very impressive shell mounds.

Prerequisites: There is limited space for students. Preference for course enrollment is given to Anthropology majors. Students must have completed Anthro 2 (or its equivalent). It is highly recommended that you have taken at least one upper division course in archaeology, but this may be waived by the instructor.

Readings: Required Text: Archaeological Laboratory Methods: An Introduction by Mark Q. Sutton and Brooke S. Arkush (2007) Kendall/Hull Publishing.Fourth Edition.

Course Requirements. Students are required to attend six hours of lecture/laboratory sections per week.Grades will be based on participation in class, two mid-term exams, and a research paper.An oral presentation that summarizes briefly the results of your research paper will be delivered at the end of the semester.

Note: Check back soon for a more detailed description.

The major issues, research objectives, databases, and techniques involved in the study of past society's relationship and interaction with the natural environment. Particularly methods that use "noncultural" information in archaeological research, but with a cultural orientation. Major subjects addressed will be paleoenvironmental reconstruction; human-environment interaction, impact, and environmental degradation; paleodiet and domestication; land-use and social environments; with an emphasis on ecofactual analysis.

Three hours of lecture + one hour of lab per week.

This course is about ethnographic fieldwork, public archaeology, the anthropology of pedagogy and education, the anthropology of technology, collaborative learning, and the material and media representation of culture. The course is designed to provide an opportunity for undergraduates to work with 6th 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 culturally diverse middle-school children in the Expedition Program, an after-school program at Roosevelt Middle School in Oakland. The course fulfills the methods requirement for Anthropology majors; it provides an opportunity to learn and use a variety of ethnographic skills, from the writing of field notes and the identification of research questions to the process of participant observation and the development of a research paper based on the field work at the after-school site. The focus of the course this semester is on multi-cultural expressions of material culture in the world of children, as reflected in the production of digital storytelling and other activities.

The Expedition After-school Program brings the archaeological experience to 6th 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 and required.

Requirements: This course is a practicum field 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. Each week, you will be expected to keep fieldnotes of your observations and enter them into the course database.

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 the course.

This class is a collaborative, hands-on experience in ethnographic video production. Students work together in teams to produce short video projects in the Bay Area. Projects will be chosen from proposals submitted by students of 138A. Students share equally the responsibilities of field work, directing, camera, sound recording, and editing. Please note that students will often need to meet with the instructor and/or with their teammates outside of class time.
Prerequisite: Anthro 138A

This course will discuss key theoretical concepts related to power and control and examine indirect mechanisms and processes by which direct control becomes hidden, voluntary, and unconscious in industrialized societies. Readings will cover language, science and technology, law, politics, religion, medicine, sex, and gender. The manner of thinking about controlling processes emphasizes linkages rather than disciplinary boundaries in the anthropological perspectives.

Prerequisites: None

Culture is inscribed on the body. Our beliefs about the body, our perceptions of it and the properties we attribute to it, both symbolic and literal, are socially constructed. The body is being invented. The way we hold our bodies, the way we move them, the way we accoutre them, display our membership in a culture. The folklore of the body reveals cultural assumptions about what it is to be a person. Some of the likely topics include: SURFACE INSCRIPTIONS (The examination of tattoos as materializations or literalizations of the inscription of culture on the body); DISCIPLINES OF THE BODY(How practices of the exterior form practices of the interior); BODY SYMBOLS (The body as a source and site of symbolic representations);BOUNDARIES OF SELF(Skin as the boundary of the self, moving from the construction of exteriority in proxemics to the construction of interiority in interoception);BODY IMAGE (The trope of interiority and the invention of an inner self);THE MIND/BODY PROBLEM (The core problematic of the course: the mind/body problem. A phenomenology of the body in terms of which to conceive ourselves as persons);EXPRESSIVE PROPERTIES OF THE BODY (The expression of emotion: inner states or external inscriptions of a social convention?).

Course work consists of a project on body language, worth 30% of the grade; a mid-term examination focusing on the mind/body problem worth 30%; a field research project and final paper on the theory of embodiment of a specific cultural practice worth 40%.

Required Texts:
Elizabeth Grosz. 1994. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Katharine Young, ed. 1993. Bodylore.  Knoxville, Tennessee: University of Tennessee Press and Publications of the American Folklore Society.
Course Reader

There are indeed abundant anthropological studies of China already, but time has come for a new departure, because we need to clear away the problematic ideas and notions with which students of contemporary China are constantly being fed; because from time to time a new grounding for knowledge becomes necessary for continuing our work. The material and empirical impact of China is no longer questionable; but we are far from clear about what anthropology can teach us about this social giant and its place in the world; and we are far from clear about to whom we owe our intellectual dues. This class hopes to prepare a conceptual groundwork in order for students to better understand their immediate experiences of China. To achieve this goal, we will assemble a genealogy of "Chinese" conceptions and compassions, which, rooted in a long history of intellectual debates and political struggles, have once again come to grasp the attention of the contemporary world.

Required Texts:
De Groot, J. J. M. 2003[1912]. Religion in China. Kessinger Publishing.
Doolittle, J. 2006[1876]. Social Life of the Chinese, 2 vols. Kessinger Publishing.
Fei, X-T. 1992. From the Soil: The Foundations of Chinese Society. California.
Schwartz, B. 1964. In Search of Wealth and Power: Yen Fu and the West. Cambridge.
Kristeva, J. 1986[1974]. About Chinese Women. Marion Boyars.
Madsen, R. 1995. China and the American Dream. California.

Cancelled

India is well known for having the world's largest film industry, encompassing not only popular Hindi film produced in Bombay or Mumbai (the so-called Bollywood industry), but large Tamil and Telegu language film production, fairly large Bengali and Malayalam language production, and significant production in numerous other languages and increasingly in English.  These cinemas are popular not only in India, its neighbors, and in the South Asian "diaspora," but among many other non-Indian publics, especially in Africa, Southeast Asia, and Central Asia.

Despite this popularity, much scholarship on Indian cinema has failed to put film into the context of its production and consumption: how it is produced, how consumed, by whom, and how practices of both production and consumption relate to other forms of practice, from politics to kinship to housing to labor to state and non-state violence to other arts to sex and to pleasure more generally.  This course will utilize both films and secondary sources to address these questions, and to link the study of film in India both to the general study of Indian economy and society and to broader questions in anthropology.

Each week is divided into two sessions.  In one, we screen part of a film or films; in the other, there is a lecture and discussion on a major course theme.  Each week students will be expected to watch on their own or in groups one film that will be available in the language lab or in a media lab to be created, or, if there is interest, in a group screening at someone's home.

This course will serve as an introduction to general questions of the politics of culture in India, for those with little familiarity, and as a way to rethink concepts and debates, for those with more background.

The dominant cinema of India is the Hindi cinema and this will be our focus; however, we will be examining the south Indian cinemas in particular as well.

Requirements include (1) class attendance and active participation; (2) weekly readings, from a reader and required books; (3) weekly film screenings;  (4) a midterm examination; (5) final paper (10-20 pages).

This course considers the importance of cities in the making of contemporary citizenship. It begins by examining citizenship as a national construction of social and political association. It then emphasizes a number of city-based problems that have led citizens to subvert old paradigms and create new agendas of citizenship.

These problems include the widespread violation of human rights and rule of law in emerging electoral democracies, the increasing importance of cultural differences in the calculations of rights, and the significance of im/migration and globalization in reshaping national citizenship and state sovereignty.

In each case, the course investigates the significance of the extraordinary global urbanization of the last fifty years. For most of the modern era, the nation and not the city has been the principal domain of citizenship. Indeed, the triumph of the nation-state over the city in defining this domain was fundamental to the project of modern nation building itself. Nevertheless, course readings and lectures show that contemporary urbanization has turned cities worldwide into sites of an unprecedented unsettling and reformulation of national citizenship, as new social forms and forces generate city-specific struggles over sources of rights, definitions of equality, principles of allegiance, locations of sovereign power, kinds of citizens, types of (il)legalities, and forms of collective violence.

"Back to Things!" This is the new motto of what Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel call an "object-oriented democracy", and the first line of the back cover of their edited book Making Things Public. Assembling more than 100 writers-- philosophers, historians, anthropologists and artists-- this book examines "the atmospheric conditions in which things are made public, and reinvests political representation with the materiality it has been lacking." Mainly based on this book (not all of it and with a few additions) we will examine the role that non-humans (i.e., voting machines, bridges, stages, walls, notebooks, buildings, blogs, images, shopping carts, brains, wolves, gods etc...) play in making our social/cultural/political world. In particular, we'll look at the implications of taking the role of non-humans seriously for how we look at cognition, subjectivity, politics and religion.

Prerequistes: None

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.

Requirements: This class is designed for upper-division undergraduates and graduate students with some background in anthropology and in disability studies.

This course will introduce students to Black Atlantic discourses from ethnographic and cultural studies perspectives. Building on Gilroy's Black Atlantic paradigm, we will explore the political economy of the Atlantic slave trade and its historical ramifications in the Creole societies of Cuba, Haiti, Brazil and New Orleans. Working through ethnographies, we will emphasize questions of social complexity and its representation through the critical study of terms such a syncretism, hybridity, Creolization, and metissage. The course will privilege African-inspired religious formations while giving attention to political, aesthetic, medical, and musicological concerns. Authors such as W.E.B. DuBois, Marcus Garvey, Ida B. Wells, Fredrick Douglass, Melvielle Herzkovits, Fernando Ortiz, William Bascom, Pierre Verger, Maya Deren, Zora Neale Hurston, Aime Cesaire, Franz Fanon, Edouard Glissant, Robert F. Thompson, Maryse Conde, Cornell West, Paul Gilroy, Buck-Morss, Achille Mbembe, Randy Matory, Benitez-Rojo, Apter and Palmie will be read alongside critiques of the production and assimilation of difference such as those elaborated by Hegel, Nietzsche, Adorno, Foucault, and Deleuze and Guattari.

NOTE: This course satisfies the Archaeology core or an elective requirement for the major.

Being a mother, a father, a son or daughter: these are universal human conditions, yet in every human society they are experienced differently. Grounded in universals of human sexual variation, this course takes experiences of people of different sexes at many points in history as a lens to explore how history, art history, and anthropology make arguments about human beings in the past. Archaeological case studies are used to explore masculinity, motherhood, childhood and aging, and the intersection of sex with other aspects of identity such as race and ethnicity. Central to this course is the way archaeologists use expertise in the study of material remains to approach such questions, often considered accessible only through texts or direct observation of action.

This course is the second half of the required seminar for first year graduate students in archaeological Anthropology. In contrast with Anthropology 229A, our focus is on the process of conducting archaeological research: how to frame a research question, define specific strategies for creating data appropriate to address that question, and how to carry out the research strategy, including finding funding, negotiating permits and contracts, and defining and writing reports. The emphasis of the seminar is pragmatic, building on the work already accomplished in Anthropology 229A, which students are expected to apply without further direction from the instructors.

The final product of the seminar will be a grant proposal written according to the standards of the National Science Foundation (NSF). The NSF is the major governmental agency in this country that regularly funds archaeological research, both at the senior and doctoral levels (that latter through Dissertation Improvement Grants). The ability to present a fundable research proposal to the NSF is not only a pragmatic necessity for many archaeologists; it can serve as a method to develop proposals for other funding sources. During the seminar, we will identify and discuss a number of these alternative funding sources, and consider how the basic pieces required for an NSF proposal can be used to assembled proposals for these alternative sources.

This course is intended to engage students with possible theoretical resources for their own research projects and/or to develop further our understandings of the formation and uses of theory in contemporary archaeology.  We will begin the course with discussions of "what is theory?" how do archaeologists use "it", and what are some of the current theoretical resources being drawn upon and for what kinds of research. From there, we will cover at least three weeks worth of different theoretical resources as a group, such as materiality, social memory, semiotics, structuration and practice theory, and feminist theory.  Following upon these considerations, each student in the course will bring to the seminar a particular theoretical approach in which they are interested in our pursuing more deeply; he/she will provide a "starter" bibliography, and lead the discussion day on that approach. There will be at least two or three off-campus guests to discuss various theoretical approaches and/or their views on the state of theory in archaeology today.

Course Requirements:
The course requirements will be: active participation in discussion; developing and leading at least one seminar meeting on "your" theoretical approach (or an aspect of one); writing up a final statement (5-7 pages) as to what you think about the state of  theory in archaeology today within your specific theoretical topic, how archaeologists have used theory, and a Table of Contents for a 2008 Reader in Theory for Archaeology.  Everyone will also prepare an essay where you weave together some aspect of your current research with a part of a theoretical topic, covered in class.  If you are working on a particular theoretical approach for a field statement, or for a dissertation chapter, or for a meeting paper (SAA, WAC, AAA), we will meet with you to discuss what your target essay for the course will be.  You should think that you can use the course readings and discussions as a way to "get into" theoretical resources that you are interested in or want to learn about or are incorporating into on-going research and writing.

The class meets on Wednesdays from 9-11 ( or per class agreement). We have ordered a number of books that contain some papers that we want to discuss as well as being quite comprehensive.  Sorry about the price of some, but we thought you would at least like the opportunity to purchase them easily and locally.   You do not have to purchase any of them.  These books also will be on reserve in the Anthropology Library for us.

Preucel, Robert, 2006, Archaeological Semiotics, Blackwell, Oxford  ISBN  1-5578-6657-0
Meskell, Lynn and Robert Preucel, 2004, A Companion to Social Archaeology, Blackwell Publ. Oxford.   ISBN  0-631-22578-1
Hodder, Ian and Scott Hutson, 2003, Reading the Past, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.   ISBN 0-521-82132-0
Tilley, Christopher, et al. editors, 2006, Handbook of material culture, SAGE,  London.

The course focuses on the Maya region as conceptual and territorial anchor point in a workshop seminar that explores the central notion that I have called Ethnoexodus.

This concept is critique of the idea ethnogenesis as a way of understanding "Maya" identity, and identity formation in general, and how it relates to production of ethnos.  Ethnoexodus, as a conceptual tool, focuses on how an individual/social actor can "exit" a temporal "point" of identity suture without having necessarily ever been "in" that particular construction of identity. Simultaneously, ethnoexodus conveys how an individual/social actor "enters" the territories of identities that multiply his or her already numerous identity formations in an apparent genesis of the ethnos. This mobility between identities constitutes what can be called Ethnoexodus, a viable analytical alternative to ethnogenesis.

Ethnoexodus is not the search and interpretation for a binary subject-object, nor is it the search for a "lost identity" or the "promised identity". These identity politics are a product of essentialist constructions of Maya identity and are the bread and butter of the political indigenous discourse of the nation-state, tourist industry and the academic dissertations about the homogenized ethnos.

The primary goal of this seminar is to think through the conceptual framework that gives rise to Ethnoexodus. This will be accomplished byway of considering, in the first part of the semester, the case study of Maya Yucatec Topographic Ruptures.

This goal will be to explore: How and why the identity politics of being Indian/Indigena and Maya in Yucatan differ from the politics of Indigeneity in Chiapas, other parts of Mexico, Guatemala and the Americas in general?  

In the second half of the semester participants will contribute conceptual or ethnographic supplementary readings related to case studies of their own research interest.  These case studies are meant to engage, challenge and critique the concept of Ethnoexodus.

Requirements include: (1) attendance and discussion; (2) weekly readings and presentations; (3) group or individual case study presentation and supplementary readings; (4) final paper (15-20 pages).

This seminar will focus on overarching themes of globalization as theory, process, and imaginary in relation to cultural production, nationalism, capitalism,
transnational networks, and biopolitics. The focus is on Asian and Western contexts where heterogeneous figurations of the global and of the human are under formation.

This seminar explores the intersections of governmentality, biocapitalisms, new value regimes, and global philanthropy. We will read new approaches to these phenomena and their specific articulations in reconfiguring citizenship, redefining the human and the biological stakes of survival. The seminar is limited to graduate students.

Anthropology 250R  Dissertation Writing
M 12-2P, 101 2251 COLLEGE (first meeting), afterwards in 305 Kroeber
Spring 2008 
: 
Prof. Nancy SCHEPER-HUGHES

Office Hours: TBA

 This intensive  writing   seminar is  limited  to 8 participants. This  is  an advanced dissertation writing  group designed for  graduate students  in anthropology and medical anthropology  who have returned from the field  and who have already begun the task of  data analysis and  dissertation writing.  It is not suitable for people who are just back from the field  and have not yet  assembled their data into a format that will allow them to begin the task of  writing.     

Permission of the instructor is required.

 Seminar Format:  Each seminar participant is expected to submit for discussion and constructive criticism  a  dissertation outline , a prospectus,  in addition to  two  (draft) chapters of the dissertation.  Students who are more advanced in the writing of their dissertation may want to present three chapters for discussion by the instructor and the group. Copies of the chapters  are to be circulated electronically or in hard copy [anthro department copier]  to each member of the seminar on  Friday at  noon  (no exceptions)  prior to the  seminar when the chapter is to be discussed.  The seminar participants and the seminar leader will need at least two days to read and write comments on the draft chapters that will be discussed each week.   As this  is a co-taught seminar  it is the obligation of each participant to read and respond in detail and in legibly  written  marginal comments and in  a brief summary statement  for  each chapter that is submitted to the group.  Additionally, each week two seminar members will be asked to introduce  another  seminar members  chapter , to do a  'deep reading'  of the text, as it were, before the rest of the seminar participants chime in with their comment and  suggestions.    It goes without saying that  criticism should be  frank  but   presented in a supportive and collegial manner.  Writing  is a terrifying experience and circulating what  we have written among peers is not easy. 

Normally, two draft chapters will discussed at each seminar meeting.  Occasionally the group  will go to the  faculty club or to a local cafe  for informal  discussion, mutual support,  and  refreshment following the seminar.

Although preparation of  dissertation manuscripts for publication will be addressed in the seminar, conference papers and  drafts of articles based on the dissertation  will not  be accepted  in lieu of dissertation chapters. The increasing pressure to publish, publicize, give papers and otherwise  report on ones work is  often a  detriment and obstacle   to the  successful and timely  completion of the dissertation project itself which must be given the highest priority.     

Seminar Guests: Students are encouraged to invite their dissertation advisor to the seminar on the days  they  present  their chapters.  I will invite  an  editor from an academic press  to visit the seminar  once   during the semester  to discuss  the preparation of dissertations for submission to academic and university publishers.

For inspiration:  Anthony Storr. Solitude: a Return to the Self
For comic relief:  Anne Lamott  Bird by Bird: Instructions on Writing and Life

This seminar is intended for graduate students and visiting scholar with interest in research involving tourism – embedded of course in other phenomena. It is supposed to be for those who are beginning to get a grip on the topic, writing research proposals, preparing Field Statements, undertaking research, and in some cases writing up masters’ or doctoral research. If there are topics/sections they want to focus on or to make a contribution to, please email or come and see me. In all cases please return the attached questionnaire. We often follow the seminar by having lunch together.

This seminar explores some of the core features of modernity and modernizing forces in the contemporary world. Touristic processes are emblematic of modernity and are a major force in the transnational penetration to hinterlands and the III and IV Worlds. Artistic expressions may now be created as a measure of modernity, both to express new (national) identities and as resistance to cultural appropriation. Other art forms are preserved from pre-modernity but used the same way. 'Heritage' is a new form of packaging (and possessing) the past
This course focuses of reading the key works and recent developments. The emphasis will be on topics of immediate professional interest to the participants and the instructor. Books and journals may be distributed digitally or put on reserve.
This seminar is slated for WEDNESDAY OR THURSDAY MORNINGS 10-12 am in my office 307 Kroeber Hall; I will hold individual Office Hours after lunch.

*Please join the Tourism Studies Working Group at Berkeley.
E-mail: tourism@berkeley.org Web site: www.tourismstudies.org

This seminar is organized around three intersecting questions: (1) the relation of the figure of sex/gender to anthropological discipline and critique; (2) the contemporary welfare/recognition-based (e.g., as part of formal or political struggle in medical or legal context or as a component of AIDS research) versus elite analysis of sex/gender marginality, "globalization," and normalization; (3) the subject and conduct of the investigator in projects of sex/gender research.

This graduate seminar examines the emergence and problematization of citizenship as a fundamental mode of association and distribution of power in the contemporary world.

The course has three objectives, each concentrated in a five-week segment. The first is to provide students with a historically grounded foundation for the study of citizenship. Readings focus on several transformative historical developments: the emergence of nation-states and colonial empires, the explosion of industrial cities, the globalization of democracy and liberalism, and the production and management of socio-cultural differences in the calculations of rights. We consider the development of citizenship in these contexts of change as a means to incorporate people into a body politic and to distribute in/equalities among them that has produced both subversion and repression, inclusion and exclusion, equalization and differentiation.

The second objective is to apply this historical understanding to an investigation of contemporary problems. During this part of the course, we will focus on the significance for citizenship of such problems as the widespread violation of human rights and rule of law in emerging electoral democracies; current realignments of local, national, and transnational sovereignties; feminist and multiculturalist critiques of liberalism; the extraordinary global urbanization of the last fifty years; and new forms of participatory citizenship pioneered in cities of the Global South. This part of the course emphasizes the importance of insurgent practices and formulations of citizenship that subvert old paradigms and create new agendas.

The last third of the course focuses on a single research problem. Our aim is to produce a set of final papers that will be published as an edited volume.
This seminar is limited to graduate students.

Profs. Charles Briggs (Anthropology) and Candace Slater (Spanish and Portuguese)

What is the relationship between narratives and acts of violence? Is there a discernible difference between violence as it is described in fictional and ostensibly non-fictional accounts? If so, how can this difference or differences be assessed? How and why do they change over time? Do particular sorts of acts of violence seem to require particular sorts of narratives? Do narratives of violence automatically produce social effects, such as healing or more violence? How do scholars, activists, "victims," and "perpetrators" get drawn into the politics of narratives and violence when they write about these issues?

This course, taught by Profs.Charles Briggs and Candace Slater, looks at a number of ways that scholars have answered these questions. Its examples come primarily from Latin America, where both professors work. Candace Slater is writing a book on wonder and violence in a rapidly changing Northeast Brazil; Charles Briggs' writing project focuses on narratives about infanticide and other types of violence in Venezuela, as they are told in police stations, courtrooms, in the mass media, and in popular narratives that circulate in complicated ways between wealthy and poor neighborhoods.

Texts in Spanish and Portuguese will be available for students who know one or both languages, but knowledge of Portuguese or Spanish is optional.

This graduate seminar explores affinities, antagonisms, and historical relations among the practices, projects, and politics of specific activist and anthropological endeavor. How, we ask, have anthropological and allied academic approaches bounded, understood, and oriented toward complex constellations of praxis deemed "activist"? In turn, how have activist commitments become entangled in anthropological projects, in the locales and situated modalities of fieldwork practice, and in the agendas, aspirations, and conduct of engaged research? Anthropologists and activists represent overlapping rather than mutually exclusive collectivities. How do those who profess allegiances to both constituencies negotiate their own positioning within political, conceptual, and professional landscapes where social scientists as well as their research subjects are interpellated? What epistemological, ethical, and practical challenges confront those whose work seeks to ally activist and anthropological commitments? Rather than presuming affinities between anthropology and activism, the seminar seeks to problematize an array of positioned practices that claim allegiance to these twinned terms while examining their historical tensions as well as political possibilities. We attend to the contending loyalties, coalitions, and politics of representation that infuse research allied to advocacy, direct action, and specific social movements. At the same time, we examine the analytical and methodological tools scholars deploy to understand, to ally themselves in solidarity with, and to oppose translocal activist networks, regimes of power, and political formations.

Required Texts:

Gilmore, Ruth Wilson
2007 Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Jaffee, Daniel
2007 Brewing Justice: Fair Trade Coffee, Sustainability, and Survival. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Nordstrom, Carolyn
2007 Global Outlaws: Crime, Money, and Power in the Contemporary World. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Prashad, Vijay
2007 The Darker Nations: A People‚s History of the Third World. New York: New Press.
Speed, Shannon
2007 Rights in Rebellion: Indigenous Struggle and Human Rights in Chiapas. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
Tate, Winfred
2007 Counting the Dead: The Culture and Politics of Human Rights Activism in Colombia. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Wendy Wolford
Forthcoming This Land Is Ours Now: Social Mobilization and the Meaning(s) of Land in Northeastern Brazil. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Young, Cynthia A.
2006 Soul Power: Culture, Radicalism, and the Making of a U.S. Third World Left. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Suppose you inhabited a reality in which your fellow inhabitants conjured up other realities at will, displaying them before you by acts of narration? "Theories of Narrative" proposes a range of approaches to such conjuring acts in face-to-face, mouth-to-ear,
skin-to-skin interaction. The course centers on fast folklore, narrative genres that dissect out into the matrix of the ordinary, that cut to the quick, preeminently, storytelling in conversation as key to the more durable folk genres-- the folktale, the legend, the epic, the myth-- genres that change slowly, that hold out against the rhythms of modernity and constitute themselves enclaves of the traditional. Moving across a spectrum of genres, the course examines the formal, structural, and contextual properties of narratives in relation to gestures, the body, and emotion; imagination and fantasy; memory and the senses; space and time. These narratives turn on transmission as well as tradition; they are narratives at work, on the move, in action.

"Between Heritage and a Hard Place: The Future of Folklore"
In recent years, organizations ranging from UNESCO to WIPO and from the World Bank to the WTO have inscribed folklore on the international agenda. Some of the most intricate and pressing questions surrounding folklore are being rehearsed in these forums, including the ways in which claims may be staked to culture and, based on culture, to economic and political rights. Taking our cue from the international politics of folklore, in the first half of the seminar we will examine ways of controlling and harnessing the circulation of expressive culture and traditional knowledge. These include heritage practices, discourses of diversity and democracy, government through community, intellectual property regimes, the moral economy of copies and originals, and notions of tradition and authorship. In the second half, mindful of the issues raised, we will step back to take stock of basic concepts in the study of expressive and everyday culture, exploring how they have shaped the field and gauging their continued usefulness for our research: structure, practice, performance, the folk/popular, global and local, and the vernacular, to name a few.

Some of the authors we will read are Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Regina Bendix, Michel de Certeau, Susan Stewart, Steven Feld, Pertti J. Anttonen, Barbro Klein, Dorothy Noyes, Tony Bennett, Nikolas Rose, Dominique Poulot, George Yúdice, Richard Bauman, Charles Briggs, Michael Brown, Mark Rose, Peter Shand, Barre Toelken, Lawrence Lessig, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, Mary Hufford, Deborah Kapchan, Nestor García Canclini, Diarmuid Ó Giolláin, Stuart Hall, James C. Scott, Arjun Appadurai, and Amy Shuman.

This graduate seminar aims at providing students with an overview of the field of African studies in the social sciences, and its practical outcome will be a draft field statement to satisfy the PhD Orals requirement. It is structured around recent social scientific and humanistic writings in this interdisciplinary field, as well as drawing on classic debates in the anthropological literature. Among the topics addressed will be the legacies of slavery and colonialism in contemporary Africa (e.g., Hegel, Fanon, Gilroy, Comaroffs); the place of "Africa" in conversations between social scientists and philosophers from the "rationality" debates of the 1960s to the writings of Appiah, Mudimbe, and Mbembe; African political cultures and comparative politics (Bayart, Apter, Monga); economies and development (Ferguson, Roitman, Berry and Guyer); changing rural-urban dynamics (Simone, Ferguson, de Boeck, Colson); Africa confronting globalization (Ferguson, Piot, MacGaffey and Bazenguissa-Ganga); youth and conflict (Malkki, Richards, Nordstrom, Honwana and de Boeck); and modernity and religion (Geschiere, Sanders, Comaroff and Comaroff). The seminar will also try to address research interests of participants, who are encouraged to contact as soon as possible the convenor by email (mcf@berkeley.edu), while the course is still in its planning phases.

REQUIREMENTS:
Seminar attendance with active participation and engagement with readings.
Individual members of the seminar will take responsibility for writing a 1-2 page précis on select readings and leading discussions of those readings. Their written work must be posted on the seminar's B-space site by 8pm the evening preceding the seminar. Each participant will write a total of 5 such documents during the term, although the number of their oral presentations will depend on the size of the group.
The final requirement is a 20 page field statement. This paper will be pre-circulated in draft form and discussed among seminar participants during the last sessions, to give writers a chance to incorporate criticism in the final version.

There are indeed abundant anthropological studies of China already, but time has come for a new departure, because we need to clear away the problematic ideas and notions with which students of contemporary China are constantly being fed; because from time to time a new grounding for knowledge becomes necessary for continuing our work. The material and empirical impact of China is no longer questionable; but we are far from clear about to whom we owe our intellectual dues. This seminar hopes to sort out such dues by, first, putting together a genealogy of Chinese conceptions and compassions, which, rooted in a long history of intellectual debates and political struggles, have once again come to grasp the attention of the contemporary world. Second, perhaps more important, we will try to read into a history of perception of China by the Western eyes, which focused on, in different historical moments, different features of it. Needless to reiterate that Chinese self-understanding, in modern times, has always been an understanding of the self by way of the Other--the modern West. There is an intriguing history of conjuncture in their reciprocal imaginations of each other; and this history, of a long duration and vital importance, will make up a central theoretical concern for the seminar.

Required Texts (in the order of reading sequence):
De Groot, J. J. M. 2003[1912]. Religion in China. Kessinger Publishing.
Needham, J. 1978. The Shorter Science & Civilization in China: 1. (Abr. Ronan). Cambridge.
Needham, J. 1956. Science & Civilization in China; vol. 1. Cambridge.
Van Gulik, R. H. 1996[1961]. Sexual Life in Ancient China. Barnes and Noble.
Henriot, C. 1997. Shanghai Ladies of the Night. Cambridge.
Levy, H. S. 1966. Chinese Footbinding. Walton Rawls.
Gernet, J. 1962[1959]. Daily Life in China: 1250-1276. Stanford.
Doolittle, J. 2006[1876]. Social Life of the Chinese, 2 vols. Kessinger Publishing.
Fei, X-T. 1992. From the Soil: The Foundations of Chinese Society. California.
Wittfogel, K. A. 1957. Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power. Yale.
Schwartz, B. 1964. In Search of Wealth and Power: Yen Fu and the West. Cambridge.
Levenson, J. R. 1953. Liang Chi-chao and the Mind of Modern China. Cambridge.
Hinton, W. 1966. Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village. Vintage.
Kristeva, J. 1986[1974]. About Chinese Women. Marion Boyars.
Madsen, R. 1995. China and the American Dream. California.

"Between Heritage and a Hard Place: The Future of Folklore". In recent years, organizations ranging from UNESCO to WIPO and from the World Bank to the WTO have inscribed folklore on the international agenda. Some of the most intricate and pressing questions surrounding folklore are being rehearsed in these forums, including the ways in which claims may be staked to culture and, based on culture, to economic and political rights. Taking our cue from the international politics of folklore, in the first half of the seminar we will examine ways of controlling and harnessing the circulation of expressive culture and traditional knowledge. These include heritage practices, discourses of diversity and democracy, government through community, intellectual property regimes, the moral economy of copies and originals, and notions of tradition and authorship. In the second half, mindful of the issues raised, we will step back to take stock of basic concepts in the study of expressive and everyday culture, exploring how they have shaped the field and gauging their continued usefulness for our research: structure, practice, performance, the folk/popular, global and local, and the vernacular, to name a few.

Some of the authors we will read are Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Regina Bendix, Michel de Certeau, Susan Stewart, Steven Feld, Pertti J. Anttonen, Barbro Klein, Dorothy Noyes, Tony Bennett, Nikolas Rose, Dominique Poulot, George Yúdice, Richard Bauman, Charles Briggs, Michael Brown, Mark Rose, Peter Shand, Barre Toelken, Lawrence Lessig, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, Mary Hufford, Deborah Kapchan, Nestor García Canclini, Diarmuid Ó Giolláin, Stuart Hall, James C. Scott, Arjun Appadurai, and Amy Shuman.