DEPARTMENT OF ANTHROPOLOGY

In this course we will introduce how and why anthropology examines the uniformities and regularities it perceives as existing in social life -- the perceived order that members of society produce so as to live together. We will read, write, and talk about these instances of eradicated contradictions not as isolated and self-contained institutions but as part of a meaningful and systemic thought process. The study of kinship and marriage, love and moral obligation, economic production and exchange, religious beliefs and values, as well as political power and its distribution will be our principal topics. Satisfies College's Non-Western Perspective Requirement.

Because of the current woeful lack of understanding about the economies of other societies, this course offers an insight into the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services practiced by peoples ignored or unknown to classic Western economics. Its principle focus will open upon the obvious differences between cultural concepts of the self and the very notion of its desire. Such arguments as those which theorize on the "rationality" of the market and the "naturalness" of competition will be debunked through the critical purvey of alternative subjectivities. More substantively the course will present societies of the gift, barter, and monetary exchange; the morality of consumption; the value and ethics of production; to name but a few of the topics covered.

An examination of imaginary societies, in particular those in science fiction novels, to see how they reflect the problems and tensions of real social life. Attention is given to "alternate cultures" and fictional societal models. A "cultural imaginary" allows us to think carefully about implications of gender, technology, and social existence that we, for very good reasons, are not allowed to experiment upon. Three papers, mandatory attendance in lecture.

Since the Enlightenment, Westerners have been deeply attached to the idea of progress. In the nineteenth century, rapid technological development inspired an almost limitless confidence in the upward progress of humanity, expressed in theories of social evolution.These same theories introduced, however, somber themes of extinction for those left behind in the struggle. This course raises a series of questions about progress. What are its ideological roots? How is technical progress related to social or moral progress? What threats menace it?

This course is an examination of Buddhism in contemporary Asian societies, from an anthropological perspective that will challenge common reductive depictions of Buddhism as primarily philosophical or "spiritual", and highlight how socially and culturally embedded, and historically situated, the various forms of Buddhism are. Doctrinal and historical aspects, beyond a brief general introduction at the beginning of the course, and occasional mentions later on, will not be a major focus in themselves. The central focus of this course will be the analysis of a very diverse array of living traditions stretching from Sri Lanka, Thailand and Burma to Tibet, parts of Nepal, and Japan. The fundamental, overarching aim, beyond an (assuredly wholesome) sustained exercise in familiarizing ourselves with alien places, will be to reconsider critically our assumptions of what "religion" is.

Prior coursework in anthropology or religion is not required. Students must however be ready to engage in a relatively demanding, reading- and writing-intensive course.

ANTH 240 LANGUAGE AND CULTURE 3.0 TBA
MW 0900-0950

A survey of topics having to do with the relationship between language, culture, and society. We will consider both how language is described and analyzed by linguists, and how data from languages are used in related fields as evidence of cultural, social, and cognitive phenomena. Topics include: nature of language, origins of language, how languages change, use of linguistic evidence to make inferences about prehistory, the effects of linguistic categories on thought and behavior, regional and social variation in language, and cultural rules for communication.
Satisfies the non-western requirement.

This course surveys the history and goals of archaeological research, different theoretical approaches to the study of ancient societies and culture change, and archaeological methods. Alongside the study of archaeological method and theory, we will explore life in the ancient and not-so-ancient worlds as revealed through the work of archaeologists.

 

This course will provide a survey of anthropological theory from the late 19th-century up to the present. We will explore a diverse range of anthropological approaches developed over the course of the century, including: 19th-century evolutionism, Boasian cultural anthropology, British structural-functionalism, French structuralism, British symbolic anthropology, American cultural materialism and neo-evolutionism, later American cultural anthropology, feminism, and post-colonial and post-modern theories. We will be concerned to understand these approaches not only as theoretical frameworks for understanding other cultures, but also as cultural and historical productions, in themselves. The discussion session is obligatory. This is a required course for anthropology majors.

This class is intended for upper-level archaeology students who have completed ANTH 280 (Introduction to Archaeology) or ANTH 381 (Field Methods) and are interested in doing further study in archaeological research design (relating questions to methods to data). We will critically examine current approaches to site survey and excavation. Topics to be included throughout the semester are sampling in archaeology, typology and classification, lithic analysis, ceramic analysis, ethnobotanical studies, bioarchaeological studies, and curation. Course requirements include the completion of an excavation and analysis simulation project early in the semester, a weekly lab analysis of artifact types with 1-2 page write-ups, and a final 10-15-page paper expanding on one of the research methods discussed in class.

How does the globalization of economic markets affect people's lives? By readings in various disciplines including economics, history, sociology, and anthropology, this course offers an overview of global capitalism as a cultural phenomenon. Lectures and readings will examine economic phenomena in their cultural dimensions and social impact. Topics will include antecedents of globalization in western imperialism, the social nature of markets, the rise of neoliberalism, the politics of international lending, the "resource curse" and promotion of Third World corruption, the social implications of hidden (outsourced) production chains, the political and cultural roles of corporations and NGOs, and the ethnography of development projects and international aid. Coursework will consist of intensive reading and writing assignments, an ideas and reading journal, and a final take-home exam. Students may enroll in one of the optional discussion sections of 326D that will meet in the evenings to view and discuss films related to course themes.

This course provides an introduction to the people, cultures, and histories of the Middle East, through an examination of language-use in contemporary Middle Eastern societies. The course focuses on Israel/Palestine, and the contact between Hebrew and Arabic, as a microcosm providing insight into important social processes-such as colonization, religious fundamentalism, modernization, and the changing status of women-affecting the region as a whole. Readings contrast ethnographic with novelistic representations of language, society, and identity. A primary concern will be to compare social scientific and literary constructions of self and other in the context of the political and military confrontation between Israel and Palestine. This is a lecture and discussion course. A number of feature films from the Middle East are incorporated into the course material. Requirements include four short essays and a book review. Prerequisite: previous course in anthropology, linguistics, or Middle Eastern studies, or permission of the instructor.

This course covers the basic principles of diachronic linguistics - the study of how languages change over time - and discusses the uses of linguistic data in the reconstruction of prehistory. We will consider the use of linguistic evidence in tracing prehistoric population movements, in demonstrating contact among prehistoric groups, and in the reconstruction of daily life. To the extent that the literature permits, examples and case studies will be drawn from the Mayan language area of Central America, and will include discussion of the pre-Columbian Mayan writing system and its ongoing decipherment. This course fulfills the linguistics distribution requirement for Anthropology majors and for Cognitive Science majors. It also fulfills the comparative-historical requirement for Linguistics majors.

Native Lowland South American people have been portrayed as "animistic," "totemic," "shamanic," "mythologic," "Dreauduan," "slash and burn horticulturalists," "stateless," "gentle," "fierce," and much more. What do these anthropological portraits mean and what do they contribute to the collective body of Western intellectual thought? Is there any relation between such thinking and the experience of being "Indian" in Amazonian societies? Are there any other ways of understanding Amazonian social experiences? This course addresses these questions through a reading of the ethnography of the region. Satisfies College's Non-Western Perspectives Requirement.

Taking a production and exchange orientation to society, this course uses anthropological models to analyze aspects of the US experience in North America and its extension into the world. The models will be drawn from the anthropological analysis of exchange, rites of transition, sacrifice and mythology. The course will be organized in two parts. The first will provide a journalistic introduction to United States culture focusing on its financial/productive center, political institutions, and national ideologies. Anthropological, i.e. analytical, models will be reviewed as part of this introduction. The second part will examine the place of war, athletics, and movies in US culture. The collective readings of this second part are to be used by each student as a point of departure for his or her own research project and paper. Several short thematic and response papers will organize the first part. A research paper anchors the second part. Students must enroll in a section of 355D. Course Satisfies Second Writing Requirement.

This course will introduce students to anthropological analysis of the traditional Chinese forms of the Chinese family and popular religion, and their modern transformations. Topics to be covered include the dynamics of Chinese marriage and domestic life, gender roles, the religious underpinnings of Chinese family life in ancestor worship and the Chinese cult of the dead, marriage rituals, and the cult of filial piety. The forms of temple worship, the interaction of the Buddhist, Taoist, and Confucian traditions, and the shamanic tradition will also be covered. Finally, attention will be paid to the changing role of the family and religion in 20th- and 21st-century Chinese life. This course will satisfy the Second Writing Requirement. Meets College's Non-Western Perspective Requirements.

The course discusses selected major socio-cultural, religious, political aspects of and issues in India since independence, with particular focus on the distinctly Indian fabrication of modernity for its fast spreading social position, cultural value and practical reach among contemporary Indians. This increasingly interpenetrating change will be studied against (a) India's current caste-family-kin-class social organization; (b) religions, gender issues and the Untouchables or Dalits; (c) caste alliances and Indian democratic politics; (d) Indian modernity in history and social practices; and (e) the Indian identity under globalization. Course Satisfies Second Writing Requirement.

This class will study the intersection of anthropology, art and material culture focusing on Australian Aboriginal art. We will examine how Aboriginal art has moved from relative obscurity to global recognition over the past thirty years. Topics include the historical and cultural contexts of invention, production, marketing and appropriation of Aboriginal art. Students will conduct object-based research using the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection.

This course provides an overview of the contributions of archaeological research to our understanding of the long term history of North America, particularly the history of indigenous Native American people. Following an introductory study of the diverse history of archaeological research in North American from the 18th century to the present, the course shifts focus to specific topics of interest. Among these are the debate over the timing and process of the initial peopling of the Americas, the development of distinctive regional traditions, discussions of the origins of domestication and regional exchange systems and the rise and fall of chiefdoms in prehistory, colonial encounters between Europeans and Native Americans, and the historical archaeology of Europeans and Africans in Colonial America.

This course is an introduction to archaeological approaches to the study of the early modern Atlantic world (1500-1800). Our principal regional foci are Britain, West Africa, North America, and the Caribbean. Topics covered include subsistence and settlement systems, agricultural and ornamental landscapes, the arrangement and the use of architectural space on domestic sites, and commodity production and consumption. The course combines lectures, discussion sessions, and computer workshops. In the latter students have the opportunity to learn technical skills required to analyze effectively real archaeological data. The course aims to teach students in architectural history, art history, history, and archaeology new ways to use material evidence to chart important historical trends and to evaluate explanations for them.

This course surveys the archaeological knowledge currently available about the African continent. The emphasis will be on the Late Stone Age, when fully modern humans dominate the cultural landscape, and the subsequent Iron Age, but will also briefly cover pre-modern humans and the archaeology of the colonial period. The material includes the great social, economic, and cultural transformations in African history known primarily through archaeology, and the most important archaeological sites and discoveries on the continent. Throughout the course a theme will be the politics of the past, and the changing role of the practice of archaeology in Africa.

ANTH 401A SOCIAL INEQUALITIES: THE POSTCOLONIAL AND MODERN 3.0 KHARE
M 1400-1630

This is a seminar on anthropological discussion of social inequalities in the societies postcolonial and modern, with a comparative cultural focus on the inequalities in postcolonial India and the contemporary U.S. Beginning with (a) a comparative discussion of social inequalities in selected modern Western societies, the seminar will turn to (b) Indian caste, religious and gender inequalities; (c) anthropology of race; (d) American class-race-gender-ethnic differences; (e) Indian "casteism" and identity politics and American "race without racism"; and (f) inequalities in health care and globalization. The seminar will encourage students to research and write on innovative programs and activities (local, national or international) addressing inequalities to reduce human suffering. Course Satisfies Second Writing Requirement.

ANTH 401B MARRIAGE IN ANTHROPOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE 3.0 SHEPHERD
TR 9:30-10:45

This seminar will look at the varieties of marriage found cross-culturally and historically. Includes examination of polygyny and polyandry, Goody's theory of the historical origins of the European marriage system, legal controversies over recognition of same sex marriages. Course Satisfies Second Writing Requirement.

Drawing on theoretical works in the social sciences, archaeological case studies, and ethnographies, this course examines the diverse ways that cultures have used materials and goods to create and transform their worlds. The course takes an inclusive view of material culture that considers settlements, houses, burials and shrines, as well as objects. We consider how the productive context, exchange and cultural uses of goods endow them with spiritual and social meanings. Topics include the use of goods in negotiating social relations, the circulation of goods, gifts and commodities, craft production as ritual, body adornment, gender and identity, and consumption and globalization. Course Satisfies Second Writing Requirement.

The suffering body is inevitable in human experience, but the meaning of suffering is interpreted differently across cultures and time. Conceptions of the body, notions of health and methods of healing vary considerably. The point of this course, which introduces medical anthropology to undergraduates, is to contextualize bodies, suffering, health and power. The aim of the course is to provide a broad understanding of the relationship between culture (particularly in the U.S.), healing (especially the Western form of healing known as biomedicine), health and political power.

Undergraduate & Graduate courses:

This course explores the culture of science and science as a cultural production. It asks how the conventions of science were brought into being in a particular historical and cultural context, and how these conventions are challenged in and by different national contexts and transnational movements. It asks what social hierarchies shape who gets to do science, and how science contributes to the creation and maintenance (or the dismantling) of social hierarchies. It asks how different cultural understandings delimit the questions that can and cannot be asked, the way "facts" are produced, and what "objectivity" might be about. Along the way, it delves into the fascinating ethnographies of a diverse set of scientific topics--from slime mold to high-energy physics, from epidemiology to artificial life, from primatology to biogenetics. This is a graduate course, but it is open to interested upper-level undergraduates, by permission of the instructor. Course Satisfies Second Writing Requirement.

This course explores Claude Lévi-Strauss' maxim that "animals are good to think." It asks how people in different times and places have understood what animals are, and how they participate in the same world as we inhabit. It explores the proposition that religions are not about the supernatural after all, but the natural. Course Satisfies Second Writing Requirement.

This seminar will examine a selection of key debates, theoretical formulations and ethnographies in the anthropology of religion. Some of the major points of focus will be the anthropology of ritual, religious specialization and questions (of internal structure, of relations with the State...) regarding complex religious fields. The ethnographic readings will focus notably, but far from exclusively, on Asian contexts. Course fulfils second writing requirement.

We will survey a number of modern schools of linguistics, both American and European, trying to understand each approach in terms of its historical context, the goals it sets itself, the assumptions it makes about the nature of language, and the relation between theory and methodology. Grades will depend on: four or five written homework assignments that ask you to look at some data from a particular theoretical perspective; weekly reading responses, a take-home, open-book final exam; and evidence (from class discussion) that you have been doing the readings, which are an essential part of the course.

ANTH 549 MIND AND LANGUAGE 3.0 DANZIGER
R 1400-1630

Anthropologists report that across societies, different cultural attitudes exist as to the acceptability of speculating on what is taking place in another person's mind. In certain cultural settings, speculation of this kind is considered completely inappropriate: something to be politely avoided. Meanwhile however, linguistic theories about how conversation works rely heavily on the premise that in order to function successfully, conversational interactants must constantly seek out and interpret the unstated intentions of their conversation partners. How can we reconcile the linguistic account with the anthropological observations? This seminar course covers the relevant literature from ethno-psychology and linguistic pragmatics, and considers the relationship of cultural philosophies of language, including our own, to the actual conduct of interaction. Because figurative language forms (e.g., metaphor, irony) seem especially to require intention-guessing for their interpretation, the course includes significant consideration of the role and range of such forms in different cultural contexts.

ANTH 577 CULTURAL INVENTORIES 3.0 WAGNER
TR 1230-1345

This class uses the work of Jorge Luis Borges and Ludwig Wittgenstein to explore the "inventory" side of the language-phenomenon, the quixotic logic or order of experience that is manifest in what is said, or meant, or intended in the use of language, rather than in its syntax, grammar, or basic structure. The logic of "what to say." Readings and discussion in seminar; course paper.

This laboratory course provides students with the background and skills needed to analyze animal bones from archaeological sites. Emphasize will be placed on the potential of faunal analysis for contributing to anthropological issues, such as the domestication of animals, political economy, state formation and the organizational dynamics of urban economies, and the construction of ritual systems. Lectures will include a critical survey of the methodological approaches and techniques to address anthropological questions through the analysis of animal bones. Topics such as research design, strategies of field collection of animal bones, and data analysis and interpretation will be covered. In the laboratory, students will learn to identify fauna remains to species, determine age and sex of species, distinguish between wild and domestic animals, recognize bone pathologies, and observe cultural modification of bones. This course is intended for undergraduate anthropology or archaeology majors, undergraduate students in related fields, and graduate students with a specialization in archaeology.

This seminar explores the archaeology of colonialism by placing European expansions against a backdrop of other archaeologically-known examples. The course is in three sections. We begin by examining a selection of the literature that shaped the way we talk about colonialism in anthropology today, and will in each case discuss the relationship and relevance of that literature to archaeological research. The middle weeks focus on how thematic issues at the center of colonialism studies have been tackled archaeologically (and sometimes historically, or in other complementary disciplines). And the last segment of the course focuses on case studies that I hope will be of broad interest to the class, concluding with presentations of research paper topics. The core of the class will be critical readings of case studies, contextualized against the changing theoretical landscape of colonialism studies. Course Satisfies Second Writing Requirement.

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Graduate Courses:

This required course for first year graduate students explores the diverse intellectual roots of Anthropology from the 18th to the mid 20th Century. We attempt to keep clear the differences and interweavings amongst US, English and French traditions that lay the ground work for late 20th and early 21st century Anthropology.

In this third semester of the Anthropology graduate core sequence, we will read and discuss a series of monographs to study the creation and presentation of ethnographic analyses and arguments. Course is restricted to Anthropology graduate students in their third semester.

An intensive investigation of theory and method in anthropological archaeology, with particular attention paid to the evolution of archaeological theory in the last fifty years, and to the diversity of modern approaches in archaeology.

This course surveys theories of nationalism in relationship to theories of culture, and then looks at culture-building and history-making processes as these reflect nationalist politics. The course also considers racial and ethnic identity and cultural authenticity.

Co-taught by Norm Oliver, M.D. (UVa Health Systems-Family Medicine) and Wende Marshall, the course will explore health and disease in socio-cultural, political-economic, and historic contexts. We will pay particular attention to the current popular discourse on "minority health disparities," exploring its conceptual meaning, and its limits for understanding the relationship between race, poverty, health and disease. Readings are interdisciplinary and will range across anthropology, epidemiology and public health, history of science, and sociology among others. The course is appropriate for graduate students in the social sciences and humanities, as well as in the health sciences.

This course provides an introduction to the people, cultures, and histories of the Middle East, through an examination of language-use in contemporary Middle Eastern societies. The course focuses on Israel/Palestine, and the contact between Hebrew and Arabic, as a microcosm providing insight into important social processes-such as colonization, religious fundamentalism, modernization, and the changing status of women-affecting the region as a whole. Readings contrast ethnographic with novelistic representations of language, society, and identity. A primary concern will be to compare social scientific and literary constructions of self and other in the context of the political and military confrontation between Israel and Palestine. This is a lecture and discussion course. A number of feature films from the Middle East are incorporated into the course material. Requirements include four short essays and a book review. Prerequisite: previous course in anthropology, linguistics, or Middle Eastern studies, or permission of the instructor.

This course is an introduction to archaeological approaches to the study of the early modern Atlantic world (1500-1800). Our principal regional foci are Britain, West Africa, North America, and the Caribbean. Topics covered include subsistence and settlement systems, agricultural and ornamental landscapes, the arrangement and the use of architectural space on domestic sites, and commodity production and consumption. The course combines lectures, discussion sessions, and computer workshops. In the latter students have the opportunity to learn technical skills required to analyze effectively real archaeological data. The course aims to teach students in architectural history, art history, history, and archaeology new ways to use material evidence to chart important historical trends and to evaluate explanations for them.