Mar 29, 2024  
Catalogue 2018-2019 
    
Catalogue 2018-2019 [ARCHIVED CATALOG]

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ANTH 260 - Current Themes in Anthropological Theory and Method

Semester Offered: Fall and Spring
1 unit(s)


The focus is upon particular cultural sub-systems and their study in cross-cultural perspective. The sub-system selected varies from year to year. Examples include: kinship systems, political organizations, religious beliefs and practices, verbal and nonverbal communication.

May be repeated for credit if the topic has changed.

Topic for 2018/19a: The Anthropology of Human Rights. Part of the appeal of human rights as an idea is the attempt to set universal standards for justice. In practice, these universalist aspirations are often in tension with efforts to secure national sovereignty and protect local ways of life. This course offers a survey of an anthropological approach to human rights as a practice that straddles local demands and global imperatives. The course also focuses on the tension between the universalist claims and particular realities that shape human rights work. The first unit of the course provides an overview of the history of human rights and the emergence of human rights institutions after World War II. In the second unit, students examine theoretical debates on universalism versus relativism and its impact on anthropological theory and methodology. The third unit of the course focuses on how human rights institutions and human rights activism work in practice. In the final unit, the course examines current topics within human rights such as transitional justice, indigenous rights, gender violence, human trafficking, and human rights-based justifications for military intervention. Throughout we read ethnographic accounts of human rights institutions and workers, as well as historical and theoretical sources. Upon finishing this course, students come away with a more complex understanding of cultural difference, global interconnection, and the bases for transnational solidarity. Louis Römer.

Topic for 2018/19b: Genders, Sexes, Sexualities: Anthropological Perspectives. Gender is one of the major forms of social difference worldwide, and cultural ideas about  gender difference have powerful implications for what it means to be a person, what roles a person is expected to perform, what status a person has, and what access a person has to material, cultural, spiritual, political resources. The course examines gender, sex, and sexuality as a set of culturally constructed meanings that are used to define and police difference. Among the topics covered are: how anthropologists approach the study of gender and sexuality; how gender and sexuality are understood and experienced in different cultural contexts; how gender and sexuality intersect with other categories of identity and difference such as race, class, ethnicity, nation, and how anthropology engages challenges to structures that support beliefs about gender, sexuality, bodies, desire and identity and that constrain people’s lives, often in violent ways. The course reviews ethnographic studies that attend, for example, to meaning as well as materiality, including the way that everyday spaces become gendered and sexualized; to the body as it is represented in art and popular culture, and the way adornment and alteration of the body are used as mediums of communication, conformity and resistance; to the gendered representation of illness and disability; to the ways that sexualities are constructed by scientific and medical discourses. The course provides students with frameworks and methodologies to identify and think critically about taken-for-granted notions about gender and sexuality, including those of their own culture. Course materials include theoretical essays, films, case studies, popular media and culture, art and literature and students conduct a short ethnographic research project focused on a specific aspect of gender/sex/sexuality. Colleen Cohen.

Topic for 2018/19b:  Anthropology of Water.  Many anthropologists study water as a focus of political contention and environmental impetus to action.  But cultural anthropology’s special contribution to water studies may be its insights into how water is valued, socially and affectively, in culturally and historically different ways.  Water is necessary for human life.  But it is always, also, meaningful in a remarkable range of ways that do not necessarily begin with scarcity, nor end with any one universal goal, even health or profit. Focusing on the relation between drinking water and wider cultural systems, the course introduces three approaches to drinking water:  (1) Semiotics of Bottled Water includes readings from the anthropology of food and beverage, consumer culture, and meaning-making in everyday life.  (2) Water as Global Commodity considers water in the context of the anthropology of gifts and commodities. (3) Water Projects considers state, corporate, and activist discourses about water with attention to anthropological studies of social and environmental impacts.  Case studies may include Bali, the US, New Guinea, Eastern Europe, Fiji, and Singapore.  The course includes group projects on water in local cultural contexts. Martha Kaplan.

 

 

Two 75-minute periods.



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