Syllabus of Readings

(class will begin promptly at 9 AM unless otherwise noted,
** indicates reading in the coursepack)

I. Defining Culture: Boundaries in Anthropology and Literature

Date Readings and discussion Additional assignments Key terms, questions, etc.
Monday, September 1, 2003 Plato’s cave parable, Frost’s "Mending Wall," Syllabus, Honor Code Afternoon exercise: Ethnographic interview of a classmate or making the strange familiar/the familiar strange

What is liberal education?
What is social science?
Why boundaries?

Tuesday, September 2, 2003

Monaghan and Just, “A Very Short Introduction”


**Geertz, “Thick Description,” pp 2-30.

Class presentations (including brief write-up) of ethnographic interview by way of introduction

Afternoon exercise:  Small groups will generate a cultural map of a city block

Evening film: Strangers Abroad Series. Malinowski: Off the Verandah. 52 min.

What do anthropologists do?
Where do we find meaning?
Can we use rather than abuse definitions?
Can we translate culture?
ethnocentrism, reify, emic and etic

II. Anthropology’s Beginnings in Practice:
Fieldwork as a Distinctive Methodology

Wednesday, September 3, 2003 Monaghan and Just, Chapter 1


**Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific, “Introduction”

Class presentations of cultural maps (including a brief write-up of your contribution)

Evening FYE meeting (7:30):  Follow-up on The Things They Carried

Read your article from the NYT as a cultural anthropologist (prepare written outline for class tomorrow)

Is cultural anthropology art or science?

Malinowski's contribution/difficulties with method

participant observation, "local knowledge," qualitative research, small island functionalism, synchronic/diachronic, ethnographic present, salvage ethnography
Thursday, September 4, 2003

Monaghan and Just, Chapter 2

**Kutsche, “Ethics”

Explanation of block-long Fieldwork and Ethnography Project  

Complete presentations of ethnographic interviews

Randomly selected presentations of NYT article.  All students must turn in a written outline of article and its cultural significance

Visitor: Krista Caufman, director of Student Writing Center

 The Institutional Research office has asked that I distribute a survey for First Year students to complete.  It is expected to take 20 minutes.  Please bring the finished form to class tomorrow. How do the boxed definitions of culture signal paradigm shifts in anthropology? What is a tribe?

III. Anthropology’s Beginnings in Theory:
The Great Chain of Being and Beyond

Friday, September 5, 2003

 Monaghan and Just, Chapter 3


**Tylor, Primitive Culture, excerpt

Completed First Year Survey

Visit to Tutt library with social science librarian Robin Satterwhite and work on Benedict annotated bibliography in TLC lab

 Weekend Film:  Strangers Abroad Series.  Boas:  The Shackles of Tradition.  52 min. society, cultural evolution, social Darwinism, 
Victorian anthropology (Mr. Tylor’s Science), social anthropology in Britain, functionalism; Goffman's "total institutions," Malinowski v. Radcliffe-Brown, 'modernity' v. tradition,' Maine's status to contract, Durkheim's mechanical v. organic solidarity and collective consciousness, Weber's rationalization, Bourdieu's cultural capital
Monday, September 8, 2003

Due in class: fieldwork proposals (one page)

Benedict, Patterns of Culture, Chapters 1 and 2, plus assigned ethnographic chapter

Class presentations of ethnographic chapter in Benedict

You will be assigned one Act for a close reading of The Tempest due on the day your Act is discussed (Alvarado-Dargon, Act 5; Herlihy-Johnston, Act 4; Kerner-Lovell, Act 3; Moorty-Royal, Act 4; Rubin-Simpson, Act 1)

   cultural anthropology in America, cultural relativism, ethnographic museums, race and ethnicity, applied anthropology, plasticity of culture, homo ferus/adoption, "cradle traits," Dionysian Kwakiutl, Apollonian Zuni, Paranoid Dobu
Tuesday, September 9, 2003

Breakfast and class meeting at our home at 8:30 AM - 1821 N. Tejon

Montaigne, "Of the Caniballes," in the Arden edition, pp. 303-314

Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act I 

 

 

Read the Paper 1
assignment so you can begin to think about it as you read the play

 Who is savage?, nature/culture/art, character assessment, liberal learning
Wednesday, September 10, 2003

Shakespeare, The Tempest, Acts II and III 

 

Shorter class today, plan on doing some fieldwork

Mentor Andrew Yarbrough will host students in his room at 7:30 to discuss how best to learn at CC

 noble savage, liberty/slavery, reason/passion, marriage, philosopher king, proper use of magic/knowledge/art/leadership, colonial reading, Gonzalo's isle, Prospero as father,
Thursday, September 11, 2003

Shakespeare, The Tempest, Acts  IV and V 

**Bohanon, "Shakespeare in the Bush"

 

Optional evening film:  The Tempest. BBC Production. 124 minutes. reality/illusion, animal/human, allegory, Prospero's circle, "O brave new world/That has such people in't," "... this thing of darkness I/acknowledge mine," epilogue

'readings' of a 'classic', culture-bound syndromes (Hamlet's madness), ghost vs. witchcraft, elders, ways of knowing
Friday, September 12, 2003

FYI see Professor Susan Ashley's writing link

Anthropological themes paper work day

Due: Paper 1 at 5 PM

    

IV. Kinship and Gender: They R Not US

"There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families" -- Margaret Thatcher
http://www.umanitoba.ca/anthropology/tutor/kinmenu.html

Monday, September 15, 2003

Monaghan and Just, Chapter 4

kinship tutorial (see link above) - read kinship fundamentals; systems of descent, unilineal; patrilineal and matrilineal descent; marriage systems, exogamy and incest taboos

Visitor:  Marla Gerein, social sciences tech specialist about visual anthropology and guidance on fieldwork documentation

                              consanguines, endogamy, exogamy, polygany, polyandry, serial monogamy, virilocal, uxorilocal/neolocal residence, unilinal descent, patrilinal descent, segmentary lineage, parallel/cross cousins, fictive kinship
Tuesday, September 16, 2003  

Sophocles, Antigone

   myth/reality, blessed/cursed, public/private, above/below, man/woman, natural law/human law, fate/free will, honor/shame, just/unjust, gods,underworld, individual/polis, life/death

Can individuals truly move from “custom to contract” (as it is suggested Athenian society is)? Is this an ‘advance’ in social organization? What is kinship really?
Wednesday, September 17, 2003

Due in class:  Fieldnotes-in-progress

Sophocles, Antigone (continued)

In class film

   Is Antigone a religious zealot, a proto-feminist, a loving (too loving?) sister, an activist for social justice, a manic/depressive personality, an existential individualist?
Thursday, September 18, 2003

Memoirs, pp. 1-138.

  genre, fact/fiction/memoir/ethnography, exotic, feminine/masculine, fictive kinship of okiya, beauty, artifice, fate
Friday, September 19, 2003

Memoirs, pp. 139-287.

Visitor:  Bonnie Stapleton, CC debate coach, to prepare us for fieldwork conferences and Block 2 debate

   ritual, mizuage, wives/prostitutes/geisha
Monday, September 22, 2003 Memoirs, pp. 288-434.

 

Visitor:  Haeng-ja Chung, Riley Scholar for Q and A about geisha tradition, contemporary sex workers in Asia, etc. 

   East/West, audience, Japaneseness, three cultural divides - man to woman, American to Japanese, past to present
Tuesday, September 23, 2003 Fieldwork conferences (fieldnotes-in-progress must be turned in) and preparation for exam    
Wednesday, September 24, 2003 Midterm     


Block break– enjoy!

 

V. Political Boundaries: Ethnicity, Nation, State

"Tribalism names the commitment of individuals and groups to their own history, culture, identity, and this commitment is a permanent feature of human social life." -- Michael Walzer

Monday, September 29, 2003 (class will begin at 10 AM) **Barber, "Jihad vs. McWorld"

**Walzer, "The New Tribalism:  Notes on a Difficult Problem"

Monaghan and Just, Chapter 5

  

Read the Paper2 assignment so that you can begin to think about it as you read the novel

 ethnicity, nation, state,  nationalism, patriotism, "clash of civilizations, 'tribe' as natural or cultural, Sept. 11, 2001
Tuesday, September 30, 2003 Coetzee, Barbarians, Parts I-II   civilization/barbarism, seeing/blindness, respect for/conquest of nature, empire, freedom
Wednesday, October 1, 2003 Coetzee,  Barbarians, Parts III-VI   social man, "We are the great miracle of creation," justice
Thursday, October 2, 2003

 

**Rushdie, "Step Across this Line," Tanner lectures at Yale 2002

Film:  From the Other Side to be screened and discussed with Prof. Bizzarro's Spanish language and culture FYE

 

 

 "The journey creates us.  We become the frontiers we cross," freedom, "stories are the tracks we leave," frontier/post-frontier thesis
Friday, October 3, 2003 Paper writing day

Due:  Paper #2 at 3 PM so that you can begin Monday's extensive reading (early papers gladly accepted)

    

VI. THE Anthropological Dilemma:  Relativism in the Study and the Field

Monday, October 6, 2003

 

Monaghan and Just, Chapters 7 and 8


**Introduction to readings by Grinker and Steiner in course pack
**Livingstone, Conversations on Rainmaking
**Winch, “Understanding a Primitive Society”
**Horton, “African Traditional Thought and Western Science"

E-P, Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic, Chapters 1, 2, 8, Appendices I and IV

 Evening Film: Witchcraft Among the Azande. 52 min. 

 

Read the Debate assignment so that you can begin to think about it

 rites of passage, millenarian movements, syncretism, autonomous individual vs. relational concept of the person, culture bound syndromes, modes of thought, essentialism, cultural relativism, universalism
Tuesday, October 7, 2003

Things Fall Apart, Part I

 

   Is tradition a “shackle” as Boas suggested?
Wednesday, October 8, 200

Due in class:  Fieldnotes-in-progress

Things Fall Apart, Part II and III

In class video: Moyers interview with Achebe

 

 

Independent research for debate. Consult reserve reading at Tutt and your own sources.

 

 change, Westernization, Christianization, who is the ‘hero’ in this novel? how best to ‘write culture’?
Thursday, October 9, 2003

Independent research for debate and morning meeting with team

OVERNIGHT TO CABIN for debate – pick up at north side of Barnes 2 PM

 

 

 We will explore/hike, eat an African dinner, and then convene for the debate  
Friday, October 10, 2003 Breakfast, hiking, and return in time for lunch at dining hall

Fieldwork day and time for reflection on debate and related issues

    


VII. Writing (Righting) Culture:
Being There to Being Here

Monday, October, 13 2003 (we will have the first part of class until 10:15 and then meet again at 1:30 in Palmer 20)

Geertz, Works and Lives, "Being There ..."

 

 1:30 PM:  Marla Gerein on PowerPoint presentations in Palmer 20 (it will be helpful to have a draft of your ethnography at this time)

How would the anthropologists we have studied respond to 'the world according to Geertz'?
Anthropology equals ethnography?
"the discourse problem," founders of discoursivity
Tuesday, October 14, 2003 Geertz, “Slide Show: Evans-Pritchard …” (refer back to Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic)

Geertz, “Us/Not-Us: Benedict …” (refer back to Patterns of Culture)

   responsibility in the field and study, dialectical ethnography
Wednesday, October 15, 2003 Geertz, “I-Witnessing: Malinowski …” (refer back to Argonauts)

Geertz, “Being Here …”


Monaghan and Just, “Afterword: Some Things We’ve Learned”

Abbott Memorial Lecture (Packard, 7:30):  Jaber Gubrium experimental ethnographies, genre, allegory
Thursday, October 16, 2003

Fieldwork wrap-up

    
Friday, October 17, 2003 Ethnography writing day
    
Monday, October 20, 2003

(Meet in WES room in Worner)

Due in class: ethnography with epilogue (“reflections on my fieldwork and ethnography”)

PowerPoint presentations (listen and take notes on the work of your peers)

    
Tuesday, October 21, 2003

(WES room again)

 PowerPoint presentations continued and examination preparation    
Wednesday October 22, 2003 Final examination    


Have a wonderful break and please keep me updated on your lives and studies!