Lamb, ANTH 203b, Fall 2017, page 10
Anthropology Department Fall 2017
Brandeis University
ANTH 203b
Contemporary Anthropological Theory
Class: Fridays: 9:00 – 11:50 AM, Brown 115
Instructor: Sarah Lamb, Brown 208, Phone x62211,
Office Hours: Wednesdays 1:30-2:30, Fridays 1:00-2:00, and by appointment
In this seminar, we will examine major theoretical and methodological concerns that inspire and inform contemporary social-cultural anthropology. Our aim is to examine and critically evaluate important theories and debates in anthropology, from about the 1970's on, concerning such topics as: the nature and aims of anthropology as a discipline, the politics of representation, history and social change, practice and agency, social inequality and power, gender and sexuality, post-colonialism and globalization, biopower and governmentality, multispecies ethnography, violence and social suffering, public anthropology, the dilemmas of cultural relativism, and the ways anthropologists theorize and represent “culture” in their work today.
One of the seminar's objectives will be to reflect on the historical roots and philosophical foundations of particular perspectives, asking whether or not current approaches are truly “new,” or whether they are extensions or reformulations of preceding theoretical legacies. We will also probe the interplay between theory and ethnography, evaluating both the philosophical coherence of theories as well as their empirical adequacy. How well does each theoretical perspective help us understand human beings and the worlds they create and inhabit?
Finally, we will aim to assess where anthropology is heading: What is and should be the continuing role of anthropology in the academy? What role does and should anthropological method and writing play in worlds beyond the academy? What inspires you about anthropology, and where do you think the discipline is and should be heading?
The course is designed especially for graduate students in anthropology but students in other graduate programs are welcome to enroll.
The central learning goals of the seminar will be to:
v Gain knowledge about the current trends and historical development of major theories and concerns in contemporary anthropology
v Learn about which theories, methodologies, problems, and styles of ethnographic writing in anthropology inspire you most: What do you see as anthropology’s purpose and mission?
v Develop and enhance critical/analytical thinking, reading, and writing skills
v Hone skills in oral presentation, and collaborative discussion
Required readings: Most of the course reading materials will come from articles and portions of books. Many books are on reserve in the library, and some are available as ebooks through the LTS ebrary. As far as possible, reading materials will also be posted on LATTE. Whenever possible, please bring hard copies and your notes to class. Since the class only meets once per week, it’s important to begin the assigned reading early: I suggest beginning on the weekend before class and continuing throughout the week, completing one text each day or every other day. You will need to post a selected passage + comment on LATTE each week by Wed. at midnight, drawing from one of the week’s assigned readings.
Selected contemporary ethnographies:
For your take-home final exam, you will be asked to read and analyze two of the below significant (i.e., influential, popular, award-winning…) contemporary ethnographies. You may wish to select two to purchase, to facilitate reading very carefully for the final exam assignment (posted on LATTE). We will also read portions (available on LATTE) of most of the books throughout the course, as we use them to explore various theoretical concepts and trends, and modes of ethnographic writing and inquiry.
Abu-Lughod, Lila: Writing Women’s Worlds: Bedouin Stories (California, 1993, or 2008 15th anniversary edition with new preface)
Bashkow, Ira: The Meaning of Whitemen: Race and Modernity in the Orokaiva Cultural World (Chicago, 2006) (2007 Winner of the Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing)
Biehl, Jiao: Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment (California 2005, 2013, online access through LTS ebrary)
Boellstorff, Tom: Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human (Princeton 2008)
Bourgois, Philipe and Jeff Schonberg: Righteous Dopefiend (California 2009, online access through LTS ebrary), California Series in Public Anthropology
Cox, Aimee Meredith: Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship (Duke 2015) (3rd Prize 2016 Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing)
Dave, Naisargi: Queer Activism in India: A Story in the Anthropology of Ethics (Duke 2012, online access through LTS ebrary)
Gammeltoft, Tine M.: Haunting Images: A Cultural Account of Selective Reproduction in Vietnam (California 2014, online access through LTS ebrary) (2014 Winner of the American Ethnological Society Senior Book Prize)
Ho, Karen: Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street (Duke 2009, online access through LTS ebrary)
Jain, S. Lochlan: Malignant: How Cancer Becomes Us (California, 2013) (2014 Winner of the Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing)
Kohn, Eduardo: How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human (2013 California; big seller for an anthropology book)
Laurence, Ralph: Renegade Dreams: Living through Injury in Gangland Chicago (Chicago 2015) (2015 Honorable Mention Sharon Stephens Prize)
Li, Tanya Murray: Land’s End: Capitalist Relations on an Indigenous Frontier (Duke 2014) (2016 Winner Sharon Stephens Prize)
Mahmood, Saba: Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton 2005, 2012) (Her related Cultural Anthropology 2001 article is one of the most-cited in anthropology publications featured in AnthroSource)
McIntosh, Janet: Unsettled: Denial and Belonging among White Kenyans (California 2016) (2017 Honorable Mention Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing)
Pandian, Anand: Reel World: An Anthropology of Creation (Duke 2015) (2nd Prize 2016 Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing)
Roberts, Nathaniel: To Be Cared For: The Power of Conversion and Foreignness of Belonging in an Indian Slum (2016 University of California Press Anthropology of Christianity Series)
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt: Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton 2015, online access through LTS ebrary) (2016 Winner of the Gregory Bateson Prize, The Society for Cultural Anthropology; 2016 Winner of the Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing)
Course requirements:
One take-home midterm exam/essay (approximately 8 pages) @ 25%
o This assignment may be revised—due two weeks after the first version is returned with comments. The two grades will be averaged.
One take-home final exam (15-18 pp.) @ 35%
One seminar presentation/discussion facilitation @ 15%
Class participation & LATTE postings @ 25%
Written work: Mid-term and final exam topics are posted on LATTE. Due dates are specified in the syllabus and on the assignments. The exam topics will be based on the course readings. Late work: normally grades are lowered by 1/3 of a grade for each weekday late.
Seminar presentation/discussion facilitation: Each member of the class will be responsible for assisting in leading one seminar discussion, by 1) providing a brief analysis of one or more important points or questions raised by the assigned readings, 2) framing a set of relevant discussion questions, and 3) helping to facilitate discussion.
Class participation: This includes regular attendance, careful preparation of the readings, and informed contribution to seminar discussions. This is a discussion-based rather than lecture-driven class.
Since the class normally meets just once per week, missing one class is equivalent to missing a whole week. Therefore, if you must miss a class meeting, you will be expected to provide a 3-4 page written informal analysis of that day’s readings within four days of the missed class.
By Wednesday at midnight each week, you will also be asked to submit on LATTE one selected brief passage (of about 1-2 sentences) from one of the week’s assigned reading materials, and just one or a few (brief, informal) sentences explaining what struck you about the passage—Why is the passage insightful, exciting, confusing, irritating, on-point, expressive of the core nuggets of the author’s argument, akin to something else we’ve read, or….? Your reflections can be very informal! There’s no need to fully flesh out your comments; rather, just add a quick note to be further pursued in class discussion.
Workload: Success in this 4-credit class is based on the expectation that students will commit on average at least twelve hours per week to the coursework (including class meetings, reading, writing, research, thinking, etc.).
If you are a student with a documented disability on record at Brandeis University and wish to have a reasonable accommodation made for you in this class, please see me as soon as possible.
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Some readings and topics below may diverge slightly over the course of the semester, as we figure out our mutual interests, and how much we are able to read. Please feel free to suggest particular readings and topics.
I. Introduction to the course. Beginning explorations: What are the aims of anthropology? What is theory? (September 1st)
Plan to read before class at least the two introductions and one body chapter from each of the below ethnographies:
· Lila Abu-Lughod, Writing Women's Worlds: Bedouin Stories (University of California Press, either the 1993 or 2008 edition is acceptable--the older one can be purchased for just a few dollars online -- the text is the same save for a new preface in the later edition)
· Anna L. Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Late Capitalist Ruins (2015):Available online for free through the Brandeis LTS/library system, or you may wish to purchase your own copy.
Recommended (now or as soon as you get a chance; a helpful overview of some key theoretical trends in anthropology’s history):
· Bruce Knauft, Genealogies for the Present in Cultural Anthropology (Routledge 1996), chs. 1-2: pp. 9-61. (LATTE)
· Laura Ahearn: “Commentary: Keywords as a Literary Practice in the History of Anthropological Theory.” American Ethnologist 40(1) (2013): 6-13. (LATTE)
II. Problems of knowing and writing: Situated knowledges, reflexive anthropology, and the politics of representation. The nature of anthropological understanding. (September 8th)
· Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (1973): "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture": pp. 3-30.
· Clifford Geertz, "'From the Native's Point of View': On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding," in Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (1983): pp. 55-70. Originally published in Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 28(1) (Oct. 1974): 26-45.
· James Clifford, "Partial Truths," in J. Clifford and G. Marcus, eds., Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (1986): pp. 1-26.
· Renato Rosaldo, "Introduction: Grief and a Headhunter's Rage," in Culture and Truth (1989): pp. 1-21; also found in Text, Play, and Story: The Construction and Reconstruction of Self and Society, E. Bruner, ed. (1984): pp. 178-95.
· Lila Abu-Lughod's “Preface” and "Introduction" to Writing Women's Worlds (California, 1993): pp. xi-xviii and 1-42. (Reconsider from last week.)
· Esther Newton, “My Best Informant’s Dress: The Erotic Equation in Fieldwork,” Cultural Anthropology 8(1) (1993): 3-23.
Recommended:
Parallels in archaeology: Ian Hodder, Michael Shanks, et al., Interpreting Archaeology: Finding Meaning in the Past (Routledge, 1995): pp. 1-36.
Insights from feminist studies: Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14, 3 (Autumn 1988): 575-99. (You could stop after p. 590 if you are finding the writing style very abstract and difficult.)
Begin to explore some of the contemporary ethnographies from the class list, such as:
Tom Boellstorff, from Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human (Princeton 2008): “Arrivals and Departures” and “Everyday Second Life” from chapter 1 (pp. 3-16), and chapter 3 “Method” (including “Anthropology and Ethnography,” “Participant Observation,” “Ethics” and “Claims and Reflexivity”—pp. 60-86).
Ira Bashkow, “Whiteness and Method” (pp. 15-19) from the Introduction to The Meaning of Whitemen: Race and Modernity in the Orokaiva Cultural World (Chicago, 2006).
Saba Mahmood, “Preface” from Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton 2005): pp. ix-xii.
S. Lochlan Jain, Malignant: How Cancer Becomes Us (California, 2013): Introduction: focus on the first few pages and pp. 18-26.
Jiao Biehl, Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment (California, 2005, 2013): “Introduction: ‘Dead alive, dead outside, alive inside’”: pp. 1- 24 (available through LTS ebrary) (you may wish to also look at the photo essay pp. 25-32).
III. Structure and history. Space, cultural encounters, and the politics of difference. Understanding social change and cultural transformation as situated within interconnected spaces. What is structuralism, and does it remain a useful paradigm today?
(September 15th is the Friday of our class meeting, but I will be out of town that day, so I will ask people to sign up for one of a few alternative meeting times—We will meet in smaller groups instead; food will be provided.)
· Marshall Sahlins, Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities: Structure in the Early History of the Sandwich Islands Kingdom (1981): pp. 1-72 (skim or skip pp. 55-66). (LATTE)
· Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, “Beyond ‘Culture’: Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference.” Cultural Anthropology 7(1) (Feb. 1992): 6-23. (LATTE)
Recommended:
· Patty Jo Watson and Michael Fotiadis, “The Razor’s Edge: Symbolic-Structuralist Archaeology and the Expansion of Archaeological Inference.” American Anthropologist (Sept. 1990): 613-629.
· Danilyn Rutherford, “How Structuralism Matters.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6(3) (2016): 61-77. https://www.haujournal.org/index.php/hau/article/view/hau6.3.008/2607 or pdf on LATTE.
Friday, 9/22: No class: Rosh Hashanah holiday.
IV. Post-coloniality and critiques of anthropology. (September 29th)
Selections from:
*could perhaps include something rom Obeyesekere or Parmentier
Talal Asad, Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (1973) pp. 9-19, 103-118.
Ira Bashkow, The Meaning of Whitemen (Chicago, 2006): chapter 1 “Introduction: The Cultural
Construction of Whitemen” (pp. 1-25) and from the Conclusion, “Recuperating Otherness: Toward an Anthropology of the Foreign” (pp. 239-244).
Lila Abu-Lughod, “Orientalism and Middle East Feminist Studies,” Feminist Studies 27(1)