Spring 2023
Undergraduate Courses
Feminist & Queer Ethnographies: Family, Community, Nation (ANTH 308/WGSS 407) T 1:30pm-3:20pmThis seminar centers the analytics and methods that feminist and queer ethnographic analyses have brought to the fore to revisit a cluster of topical issues, this year assembled around the theme: Family, Community, Nation. As a site in which personhood is distributed and contested, the “family” is one of the building blocks of social scientific analysis—along with “community” and “nation.” Seen as ideological lynchpins for the reproduction of the social order, processes of family-making—like marriage, divorce, childbirth, and intergenerational flows—have been codified differently across historical and cultural contexts. This course engages the feminist and queer ethnographies that revealed the political hierarchies that emerge from seemingly natural categories and distinctions of kinship. We trace the gendered, sexualized, class-making, and racialized concepts, processes, and implicit understandings of family-making that chart the public and private spheres of community and national terrains. Students grapple with the processes of naturalization and denaturalization through which the “political” is mobilized and dyads like kin/kith, blood/soil, human/nonhuman, citizen/noncitizen, us/them, are made to appear. We also engage with feminist and queer methodologies that conjure up speculative fabulations for, what Saidiya Hartman has called, “the radical hope for living otherwise.” We do so at a time when the global Covid-19 pandemic has demanded the resurgence of the state, tested community ties, transformed family arrangements, and isolated most of the world’s population within domestic domains.Ethnography and Capitalism (ANTH 346) M 1:30pm-3:20pm
An introduction to the anthropological study of capitalism. Focus on how markets and commodities are embedded in social, cultural, and political contexts. Discussion of the many ways people have embraced, reinterpreted, and resisted capitalism worldwide. Consideration of the implications of this diversity for theories of capitalism as a whole.Ethnography and Social Theory (ANTH 530) M 3:30pm-5:20pmGraduate Courses
This seminar for first- and second-year Ph.D. students in Anthropology runs in tandem with the department’s reinvigorated EST Colloquium. The colloquium consists of public presentations by cutting-edge speakers—four or five each term—selected and invited by students enrolled in the seminar. In the seminar, students and the instructor discuss selected works (generally no longer than article-length) related to the topics presented by the colloquium speakers and engage in planning activities associated with organizing the EST Colloquium, including but not limited to developing readings lists, creating a viable calendar, curating the list of speakers, securing co-sponsorships, writing invitations, and introducing and hosting the speakers.Biopolitics of Human-Nonhuman Relations (ENV 796) Th 1pm-3:50pm
Seminar on the “posthumanist” turn toward multispecies ethnography. Section I, introduction to the course. Section II, the ontological turn: multispecies ethnography; and ecology and human consciousness. Section III, fauna: human-animal conflict; hunting and politics; and the bushmeat “crisis.” Section IV, flora: “weedy/invasive/pest” species; and ethnobotany. Section V, the long and broad view: the history of natural history; and the classics. Section VI, class contributions: student-selected readings; student presentations of seminar papers; and lecture by teaching fellow.Masculinity and Men’s Health (ANTH 655/WGSS 659) M 7pm-8:50pm
This interdisciplinary seminar—designed for students in Anthropology; Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; and Global Health—explores in an in-depth fashion ethnographic approaches to masculinity and men’s health around the globe. The course begins with two theoretical texts on masculinity, followed by eleven anthropological ethnographies on various dimensions of men’s health and well-being. Students gain broad exposure to a number of exigent global men’s health issues, issues of ethnographic research design and methodology, and the interdisciplinary theorizing of masculinity scholars in anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies. In particular, the course demonstrates how anthropologists studying men’s health issues in a variety of Western and non-Western sites, including the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and Asia, have contributed to both social theory and ethnographic scholarship of importance to health policy.Power in Conservation (ENV 839) T 1pm-3:50pm
This course examines the anthropology of power, particularly power in conservation interventions in the global South. It is intended to give students a toolbox of ideas about power in order to improve the effectiveness of conservation. Conservation thought and practice are power-laden: conservation thought is powerfully shaped by the history of ideas of nature and its relation to people, and conservation interventions govern and affect peoples and ecologies. This course argues that being able to think deeply, particularly about power, improves conservation policy making and practice. Political ecology is by far the best known and published approach to thinking about power in conservation; this course emphasizes the relatively neglected but robust anthropology of conservation literature outside political ecology, especially literature rooted in Foucault. It is intended to make four of Foucault’s concepts of power accessible, concepts that are the most used in the anthropology of conservation: the power of discourses, discipline and governmentality, subject formation, and neoliberal governmentality. The important ethnographic literature that these concepts have stimulated is also examined. Together, theory and ethnography can underpin our emerging understanding of a new, Anthropocene-shaped world. This course will be of interest to students and scholars of conservation, environmental anthropology, and political ecology, as well as conservation practitioners and policy makers. It is a required course for students in the combined YSE/Anthropology doctoral degree program. It is highly recommended for M.E.Sc. students who need an in-depth course on social science theory. M.E.M. students interested in conservation practice and policy making are also encouraged to consider this course, which makes an effort to bridge the gap between the best academic literature and practice.History beyond the Archive (HIST 948/HSHM 780) M 9:25am-11:15am
This course focuses on three broad themes. First, we examine the social construction of “the archive.” What forms of knowledge accumulation constitute a historical repository? Second, we examine the role of the archive in the interplay of ethnography and historiography. How do ethnographic history, historical ethnography, and history of the present differ? Lastly, we examine the necessity of the archive and consider various alternative grounds upon which history can be constructed. What might it mean to imagine a history (or a history of science, medicine, and technology) beyond the archive?Interrogating the Crisis of Islam (AMST 719) M 1:30pm-3:20pm
In official and unofficial discourses in the United States, diagnoses of Islam’s various “crises” are ubiquitous, and Muslim “hearts and minds” are viewed as the “other” front in the War on Terror. Since 9/11, the U.S. State Department has made the reform of Islam an explicit national interest, pouring billions of dollars into USAID projects in Muslim-majority countries, initiating curriculum development programs for madrasas in South Asia, and establishing the Arabic Radio Sawa and the satellite TV station Al-Hurra to propagate the U.S. administration’s political views as well as what it terms a “liberal” strain of Islam. Muslim Americans are also consumed by debates about the “crisis” of Islam, a crisis of religious authority in which the nature and rapidity of change in the measures of authority are felt to be too difficult to assimilate. This course maps out the various and deeply politically charged contemporary debates about the “crisis of Islam” and the question of Islamic reform through an examination of official U.S. policy, transnational pulp Islamic literature, fatwas and essays authored by internationally renowned Muslim jurists and scholars, and historical and ethnographic works that take up the category of crisis as an interpretive device.Methods in Gender and Sexuality Studies (AMST 798) W 1:30pm-3:20pm
This seminar is designed for graduate students developing research projects that center feminist, queer, decolonial/postcolonial, and critical race methodologies. Taking an epistemological approach that centers “encounter” in its multiple scales and fronts, the course is designed to bridge the disciplinary divides across the humanities and social sciences. As such, it begins with the interdisciplinary insight that any research method can be used in a feminist, queer, decolonial/postcolonial, and critical race manner—and maybe can even be used to counter-disciplinary ends. While the course engages a wide variety of methods—from ethnographic, historiographic/archival, and geographic, to literary, media, textual analysis, and cultural studies, and to political theory—this does not unfold as part of a practicum. Students do not experiment with a ready-made “toolkit.” For the most part, we critically engage book-length projects that exemplify counter-disciplinary methodologies. Ultimately, students reflect hermeneutically on how method and theory relate in these texts. Foucault has theorized these kinds of reflections as a practice of “the archaeology of knowledge,” and the seminar channels it for its potential to lay bare the discursive formations that have rendered only certain Eurocentric, supremacist, and patriarchal preoccupations as legitimate objects of inquiry as well as for its potential to explore the relationship of power to knowledge, the ethics of representation, questions of accountability, and the relationship between disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity.Emotional Technologies of Affect, Artificial Intelligence, and Social Robotics in East Asia (ANTH 418/ANTH 518) T 3:30pm-5:20pm
This course proposes to study the relationship between emotions and material culture by analyzing techniques, technologies, and material culture through a variety of ethnographic studies of technological systems such as urban train systems in Tokyo, slot machines in Las Vegas, televised military commemorations in Pakistan, and emotionally intelligent robots emerging around the world. As such, this seminar links discussions on affect, emotion, and subjectivity to engagements with material culture, and considers how affect is not only constructed as an ethnographic object by anthropologists but also targeted as a technical device for subjects, states, and corporations. The course proceeds by examining the interrelation of social processes and interior worlds through key anthropological concepts, such as embodiment, materiality, and performance. Moreover, it also explores how ethnographic descriptions can challenge and undo these concepts, and in doing so highlight processes of bias, blindness, and ethnocentrism entangled in the very concept of technology. Lastly, the course also includes discussions on artificial intelligence, automation, and robots, analyzing how emotional technologies connect social processes and environments to the intimate spaces of bodily experience around the world, especially among tech-savvy Asian urbanites.Culture and Politics in the Contemporary Middle East (ANTH 538) M 1:30pm-3:20pm
This interdisciplinary seminar is designed to introduce students to some of the most pressing contemporary cultural and political issues shaping life in the Middle East and North Africa. The course aims for broad regional coverage, with particular focus on several important nation-states (e.g., Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq) and Western interventions in them. Students should emerge with a keener sense of Middle Eastern regional histories and contemporary social issues, as described by leading scholars in the field of Middle Eastern studies and particularly Middle Eastern anthropology. Following a historical introduction, the course is organized around three core themes—Islam, politics, modernity—with movement from the macropolitical level of Islamic discourse and state politics to the most intimate domains of gender, family life, and contemporary youth culture. Through reading, thinking, talking, and writing about a series of book-length monographs, students gain broad exposure to a number of exigent issues in the Middle Eastern region, as well as to the ethnographic methodologies and critical theories of Middle East anthropologists. Students are graded on seminar participation, leadership of seminar discussions, two review/analysis papers, and a comparative written review of three books. Required for Council on Middle East Studies (CMES) graduate certificate students. Recommended for Middle East concentrators in other disciplines.Anthropological Imaginations (ANTH 600) T 1:30pm-3:20pm
This is the second course of a yearlong sequence for doctoral students in Anthropology and combined programs. The seminar explores anthropological imaginations as modes of experience, perception, and writing. Anthropology as a discipline has transformed from the frontline of colonial projects to critical reflections on power dynamics that produce and reproduce systems of oppression, injustice, and violence. Yet knowing and representing are never external to these power dynamics, and there is simply a vast unknowability of human and non-human experiences. How do we as anthropologists give meanings to the world out there that is so intertwined and complex beneath what we see and hear? How do we see what seems invisible and how to listen to silence? How do we account for our own implication in the encounters through which we experience and learn, and reflect upon? How do we weave stories through writing? While there are no right or wrong answers to these questions, in this seminar we explore how different imaginaries open up new possibilities as we embark on our ethnographic research.