Undergraduate Courses
Graduate Courses
MWF 2:00-2:50 MAX: 100 Lacy
Content: In this introduction to Anthropology we will survey the four fields which comprise this diverse, multi-disciplinary science. Anthropologists employ a wide-range of methods to explore what it means to be human. Biological Anthropologists study human evolution and biological adaptation; Archaeologists study prehistoric societies and sociocultural evolution; Sociocultural Anthropologists bring a comparative approach to the study of society and culture; Linguistic Anthropologists study the evolution of human language systems. Over the course of the semester, we will explore how anthropology helps us understand ourselves, our histories, and our world. This course presents students with the opportunity to learn how each of the sub-fields of anthropology contribute to our understanding of the human condition.
Texts: TBA.
Particulars: 2 mid-course exams, map assignments, response papers, course journal, final exam.
TTH 1:00-2:15 MAX: 25 Peletz
Content: This course offers anthropological perspectives on Southeast Asia, a region that includes the nation-states of Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Burma, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Because this world area has long been known for the relatively “high status of women” and a good deal of pluralism with respect to gender and sexuality, we will be looking at the dynamics of gender and sexuality -- including the vicissitudes of heteronormativity, same-sex relations, and transgender practices -- in some depth. Readings and discussions will also address the culture and political economy of kinship, religion (especially Islam), nationalism, and governmentality, and selected theoretical debates bearing on the ways in which these and other phenomena are keyed to Southeast Asians’ experiences, understandings, and representations of modernity.
Texts: Beatty, Andrew, Varieties of Javanese Religion: An Anthropological Account, Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Davies, Sharyn Graham, Challenging Gender Norms: Five Genders among the Bugis in Indonesia,
Wadsworth, 2007.
Peletz, Michael G. Islamic Modern: Religious Courts and Cultural Politics in Malaysia, Princeton University Press, 2002.
Bishop, Ryan and Lillian Robinson, Night Market: Sexual Cultures and the Thai Economic Miracle.
Routledge, 1998.
Skidmore, Monique, Karaoke Fascism: Burma and the Politics of Fear, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.
Manalansan, Martin, Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora, Duke University Press, 2003.
Particulars: Evaluations will be based on: class participation; a map quiz; an in-class midterm; a take-home essay assignment (approx. 15 pages); and a final exam.
MWF 9:35-10:25 MAX: 20 Davis
Content:
This course is a cultural anthropological survey of cultures of Mediterranean Europe. Readings and class discussion will focus on France and comparatively on ethnographies from Italy, Spain and Greece. Topics to be considered will include family organization and social stratification, honor and shame, patronage systems, the origins of mafia in relationship with pastoralism and agriculture, Sardinian banditry, and the history of Corsican vendetta. We will also look at patterns of contemporary cultural change in Mediterranean Europe; the role tourism plays in that change, and the kinds of conflicts such a change can present at the level of morality and cultural identity. The course will be structured around theoretical problems which students will be encouraged to grapple with over the course of the semester. How do
the forces of capitalism challenge traditional modes of production and exchange? How do patronage systems conflict with Democratic forms of government? How do these economic and political tensions complicate local moral codes and notions of personhood? How do they force us to re-examine our own deeply embedded notions of individual freedom, personhood and economy?
Texts: Several books to be assigned. Selected journal articles and
chapters.
Particulars: There will be several short reaction papers assigned over thecourse of the semester a mid-term exam and final paper.
TTH 10:00-11:15 MAX: 15 McCauley
Content:The current consensus among archaeologists is that members of the species Homo sapiens have been milling about this planet for no more than two hundred thousand years or so. If the ages of the universe or of the earth or of the time when our lineage split from that of chimpanzees were equivalent to twenty-four hours, then those two hundred thousand years would, proportionately, be equivalent to less than a single second, less than five seconds, and less than forty-eight minutes, respectively. Moreover, it is only in the last ten thousand years that humans have settled and begun to pursue agriculture, and it is only within the last five thousand years that they have invented writing. Some representative questions that these observations provoke include:
What distinguishes us and our minds from our nearest cousins (all of whom are now extinct) and theirminds?
Once Homo sapiens evolved, why did it take so long (more than one hundred thousand years) to come up with some of the most basic arrangements of modern human life (such as settled communities and agriculture)?
Why did some human societies prosper and progress, inventing such things as writing, money, legal systems, complex machines, and more, while others remained in conditions that differed little from those of our Pleistocene ancestors?
What impact have technological developments (over the past few hundred years) had on the shapes and fates of human minds and societies?
This seminar will explore these questions and dozens of intriguing corollaries to these questions.
Using three books, this seminar will explore proposals about the most fundamental forces shaping human minds and, later, human societies across the entire history of our species. The first book, Steven Mithen=s The Prehistory of the Mind: The Cognitive Origins of Art, Religion, and Science, discusses the period from six million years ago up to the invention of agriculture. The second book, Jared Diamond=s Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, treats the period from thirteen thousand years ago up to the age of exploration (roughly through the eighteenth century). Although the third book, Neil Postman=s The Disappearance of Childhood, briefly touches on conditions in the ancient world, it focuses on the last five centuries and the last one hundred fifty years, in particular. These books are neither easy nor simple and Diamond=s book is long, but all three are well organized, clearly written, and nothing less than intellectually thrilling.
Recognize that the questions on which this seminar shall focus are all ways of asking the most fundamental question that all human beings and all new college students, in particular, should confront, viz., who are we? We are our own biggest puzzle. This seminar is designed to formally initiate what should become the life long task of exploring that question and trying to solve that puzzle.
Texts: Steven Mithen, The Prehistory of the Mind: The Cognitive Origins of Art, Religion, and Science
Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
Neil Postman, The Disappearance of Childhood
Particulars: Grading is based on three papers that students will write across the semester as well as on students’ attendance, participation, and contributions to the seminar meetings.
TTH 10:00-11:15 MAX: 15 [ANT 200-000]/140 [NBB 201] Gouzoules/Konner
Content: : This course presents an introduction to evolutionary processes and biological bases of behavior. Lectures and readings will be organized around a developmental and life history perspective and will emphasize the importance of context in biological mechanisms and the interaction of social life, behavior, and cognition. Examples drawn especially from humans and nonhuman primates will be used to place human behavior in the context of other species and to illustrate the dual inheritance of biology and culture in our species. Topics covered will include: evolutionary mechanisms, adaptation, phylogenetic constraints, neural and neuroendocrine mechanisms of behavior, life history theory, developmental programs, principles of allometry, sexual selection and alternative reproductive strategies, social bonds and socialization, and the cognitive bases of social interaction in humans and non-humans.
Texts: TBA.
Particulars: Grade will be based on two hourly exams and a final. Prerequisite: Biology 141.
TTH 11:30-12:45 MAX: 100 Kingston
Students must enroll in a lab section:
201 L-A: M 2:30-4:30 Faculty
201 L-B: T 2:30-4:30 Faculty
201 L-C: W 2:30-4:30 Faculty
201 L-D: TH 2:30-4:30 Faculty
Content:Biological Anthropology offers a broad perspective for studying the adaptation and evolution of the human species. Lectures and laboratory sessions examine the role of evolutionary theory in biological anthropology, focusing on such topics as primate biology and behavior, primate evolution, the fossil evidence for human evolution, genetic evidence for biological variability, physiological evidence for adaptation to diverse environments, the role of nutrition and dietary preferences in human evolution, the biological basis for modern human behavior, and the transition to modern lifestyles. We will discuss the evidence used to interpret human adaptation in the past. How do anthropologists interpret behavior from an artifact or fossil remains? Why do some biochemists search for our ancestral ”Eve”? What can we learn about ourselves from the study of nonhuman primates? What can evolutionary biology tell us about human behavior? We then shift this evolutionary and adaptive perspective to fundamental aspects of the human species, beginning with human adaptability and plasticity and continuing with population differences in heritable adaptation to food resources, climate and disease. Armed with this deeper understanding of human variation, we will examine critical and often controversial topics such as biological insights into diet and health, race and racism, sexual behavior, stress, cooperation and violence.
Texts: TBA.
Particulars: Students must enroll in a lab section.
TTH 4:00-4:50 MAX: 35 Lacy
Content: How might Cultural Anthropology help us understand our lives, our communities, and our world in the 21st century? In this course we explore the work of cultural anthropologists to create an inclusive understanding of some of the specific concepts and methods that have shaped our discipline and our world. Through a historical review of innovative research methods and fieldwork we will re-imagine key anthropological concepts including race, poverty, development, inequality, and knowledge and belief systems. We will apply anthropological methods and ideas as part of a local ethnography project which will challenge students to envision a Cultural Anthropology for the 21st century.
Texts: Reading packet (most readings will be available on-line)
Baker, Lee D. (1998) From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896-1954
Marcus, George E. and Michael M.J. Fischer (Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences (Paperback)
Particulars:Coursework will include two exams, a term paper, and full participation in a class project (a local ethnography).
TTh 11:30-12:45 MAX: 35 Rilling
Content: Human biology from conception to senescence. Principles of evolution and genetics relevant to the life cycle. Fetal development, birth, brain growth in infancy and early childhood, hormonal bases of gender, physical growth, puberty, adolescence, adult sexuality, pregnancy, birth (mother's viewpoint), lactation, physical and mental health and disease in adulthood, menopause, aging, senescence, death. Comparative examples from other species and other cultures. All aspects of growth and development will be considered, but somewhat greater emphasis will be given to neurological and neuroendocrine functions underlying behavior and reproduction.
Texts:TBA.
Particulars: This course should serve as an introduction to human biology for students in disciplines outside biology. There are no prerequisites, but a year of high school biology is desirable. A willingness to work hard is essential. It should be viewed as comparable in difficulty to a basic college biology course, but with emphasis on the human life cycle that should make it particularly relevant to students who may anticipate no further training in biology.
TTH 2:30-3:45 MAX: 35 R. Barrett
Content: This course may cover: comparative study of disease ecology and medical systems of other cultures; roles of disease in human evolution and history; sociocultural factors affecting contemporary world health problems; cultural aspects of ethnomedicine and biomedicine; ethnicity and health care.
Texts: TBA.
Particulars: TBA.
TTH 8:30-9:45 MAX: 18 10 [ANT 240S] / 8 [LING 240S] Spitulnik
Content: How are language and culture interconnected? How does language shape culture and the horizons of the thinkable? How is language the very medium through which social identities are forged and expressed? By examining these questions in a range of ethnographic cases (from Africa, Asia, and the US), students are introduced to the fundamental concepts, theories, and methods of linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, and the ethnography of communication. Specific topics include: ritual language; slang; multilingualism; language and power; language and the nation; and language and mass media.
Texts: 1. N. Mendoza-Denton (2007) Homegirls: Language and Cultural Practice among Latina Youth Groups
2. J. Hill (2008) The Everyday Language of White Racism
3. K. E. Hoffman (2007) Language, Land, and Gender in Berber Morocco
4. L. Ahearn (2001) Invitations to Love: Literacy Love Letters, and Social Change in Nepal
5. K. Basso (1996) Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache
6. H. J. Ottenheimer (2006) The Anthropology of Language: An Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology
Particulars: Grading based on class participation, short response papers, short field assignments, and a final research paper.
TTH 10:00-11:15 MAX: 19 Barlett
Content: This course introduces students to the debates and issues surrounding our contemporary industrial food system and the emergence of new practices and critiques that argue for an alternative, more sustainable system. Using both scientific and popular texts, hands-on experience with cooking, farm work, and local markets, students will develop skills to assess the true cost of food and evaluate alternatives. Readings and guest speakers will explore issues of food production (incl. industrial organic, local small-scale, and methods in between), distribution (grocery chains, Whole Foods, farmers markets, CSAs), and changing consumer tastes (Slow Food, seasonality, the “taste revolution”). The health implications of diet choice (both for humans and natural systems) and the experiences of workers will be linked to global implications. The specific focus of this “Anth of Today’s World” will be the hard choices and important opportunities we face as Emory seeks to foster a sustainable food system for the Southeast.
Texts: The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Pollan, Penguin.
Fast Food Nation, Schlosser, Houghton-Mifflin.
Chicken: The Dangerous Transformation of America’s Favorite Food, Striffler, Yale.
The Pull of the Earth, Thorpe, AltaMira.
Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy, Willett, Free Press
Remaking the North American Food System, Hinrichs and Lyson, Nebraska
There will also be a packet of readings.
Particulars: Students will demonstrate learning through quizzes, essay exams, a series of reflection papers, an op-ed piece, and an independent research paper.
MWF 12:50-1:40 MAX: 18 Whitten
Content: This course will focus on primate mating behavior from the perspectives of sexual selection, evolution, and ecology. Mating systems and patterns of sexual activity in a variety of primate species will be reviewed and compared in light of current theories on intrasexual competition and mate choice. Genetic success will be compared to evidence for mating success and mate selection. Alternative strategies and tactics will be compared within and among species.
Texts:Why Is Sex Fun? Jared Diamond
Additional articles available on Blackboard web site
Particulars:Prerequisite is ANT 302 or by permission of instructor. This course satisfies the undergraduate writing requirement. Requirements include discussion of assigned readings, a 12 page term paper, reaction papers on assigned readings, and participation in a debate. Attendance and participation is required.
Term paper 40%
Presentations & participation 30%
Reaction papers 30%
MWF 10:40-12:35 MAX: 12 Armelagos
Content: Skeletal remains are a silent witness to the past. The analysis of skeletal populations has been used to determine the impact of the transition of agriculture on health (it resulted in an increase in infectious and nutritional diseases) and to measure the biological cost of slavery that has been obscured from historical records. In this class, you will receive thorough instruction in the practical and theoretical foundation of human skeletal biology. You will learn basic human skeletal anatomy, the forensic techniques for identifying fragmentary remains, methods for determining the sex and age at death of a skeleton, the diseases such as arthritis, trauma, neoplasms, nutritional deficiency and osteoporosis that affect the skeleton (paleopathology). Methods for determining population structure (paleodemography), histological and chemical techniques, morphology and human activity will also be studied. Student’s projects will involve the analysis of some aspect of the biology of a skeletal population.
Texts: TBA.
Particulars: TBA.
TTh 1:00-2:15 MAX: 12 3 [ANT 325S] / 3 [WS 333S] / 6 [LING 333S] Tamasi
Content:This course challenges students to ask questions about the way gender and sexuality are determined by and expressed in language. Some specific questions we will address are: How are sexuality and erotic desire expressed in language? How does language shape our experience and understanding of sexuality and sexual difference? Do gay men and lesbians have a language of their own? Are children socialized into gender-specific speech behaviors? Why do we use euphemism to speak about sex, and what do euphemisms communicate? Are certain languages (including English) inherently sexist? We will also look at miscommunication due to gender differences as well as cross-cultural differences in male and female speech styles.
Texts: Graddol, David and Swann, Joan. 1989. Gender Voices.
Tannen, Deborah. 1990. You Just Don't Understand: Women and men in conversation.
Cameron, Deborah and Kulick, Don. 2006. Language and Sexuality Reader.
Articles on electronic reserve.
Particulars: Students will be expected to engage in scholarly discussion of the topics and readings as well as create and carry out their own research projects. Grading will be based on class participation, weekly journal entries, and a final research paper.
TTh 11:30-12:45 MAX: 18 6 [ANT 328SWR] / 6 [WS 328SWR] / 6 [REL 328SWR] Flueckiger
Content: This is an interdisciplinary course cross listed between religion, anthropology, and women's studies that examines women’s religious traditions cross-culturally. We will read ethnographies that deal specifically with women's rituals, performance, and leadership roles within specific religious/cultural traditions.
Texts:Lila Abu-Lughod, Writing Women's Lives: Bedouin Stories, 1993.
Laurel Kendall, The Life and Hard Times of a Korean Shaman: Of Tales and the Telling of Tales, 1988.
Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, 1976.
Marie Griffith, God's Daughters: Evangelical Women and the Power of Submission, 1997.
Kirin Narayan, Mondays on the Dark Night of the Moon: Himalayan Foothill Folktales, 1997.
Wynne Maggi, Our Women are Free: Gender and Ethnicity in the Hindukush, 2001.
Joyce Flueckiger, In Amma's Healing Room: Gender & Vernacular Islam in South India, 2006.
Reading packet of articles.
Particulars: Four 3-4 page, informal response papers; final research paper (12-15 pages) and oral presentation.
TTH 2:30-3:45 MAX: 35 Konner
Content: This course will survey a wide range of important human diseases at a level suitable for students with little scientific background but a keen interest in health and illness. Students who plan a career touching on disease in some way but unlikely to become doctors or nurses—for example, in health education, public health services, health care administration, hospital-based social work, medical anthropology, medical sociology, medical economics, or aid to international development—will find that it provides a basic foundation for thinking about all the things that go wrong with the human body. We will spend one class on each of about 24 disorders or syndromes. The choice of diseases for study was motivated, first, by their importance in the experience of either people in the developing world (malaria, diarrhea, tuberculosis, etc.), the developed world (coronary artery disease, stroke, breast cancer), or both (cervical cancer, AIDS, depression). Second, the chosen diseases reflect instructor’s desire to touch on most major body systems and, more important, to illuminate all major processes—genetic, physiological, nutritional, infectious, immunological, psychosocial, and cultural—that contribute to disease. Students completing this course should be in a position to approach many other diseases using the principles mastered in relation to those covered in the course.
Texts: A medical dictionary will be required for purchase. Other readings TBA.
Particulars: This course may be used to fulfill the "Social Science and Medicine" or the "Human Biology" requirement areas for Anthropology Department majors (but not both). Two in-class examinations (30 points each), and a cumulative final (40 points).
MWF 11:45-12:35 MAX: 35 K. Barrett
Content: In this seminar, we will explore issues pertaining to women’s health, juxtaposing the health problems faced by Western women with those found among women in the non-Western world. Among the health issues to be explored in some depth through a series of reading modules are fertility and infertility, childbirth, eating disorders/malnutrition, body alteration (plastic surgery, female circumcision), and violence against women. Other women’s health issues will be explored as well through readings, discussions, and student research projects. The theoretical perspectives of medical anthropologists, who use the methodological tools of ethnography, and feminist scholars, who draw upon historical sources and popular culture, will be highlighted and compared.
Texts: TBA.
Particulars: TBA.
TTh 1:00-2:15 MAX: 60 Lampl
Content: Health impacts virtually every societal element – from medicine to law; economics to faith. It is every individual’s concern, and a topic of consequence in the decisions we make regardless of what professional field we pursue. This course is built upon the University’s Predictive Health Initiative and its collaboration with the Georgia Institute of Technology to integrate research, scholarship, and education in an innovative effort aimed at revolutionizing health care. This course introduces students to the efforts seeking to define health and move the practice of medicine from a reactive, disease-focused system to a proactive health-focused one. Students will have the opportunity to engage in this shift in thinking through the course emphasis on the interconnections between mind, body and spirit. Students will gain a better understanding of healthy human function as well as diet, exercise, behavioral motivation and interpersonal interactions. Projects can be group or individual and can cover multidisciplinary topics from business, law, ethics, humanities, engineering, nursing, religion, public and global health as well as the sciences. Faculty guest lecturers from across the university will participate and share insight from scientific research, ethics, economics and policy on how best to apply a predictive health system to individuals and populations.
Texts: Weekly articles.
Particulars: There are no prerequisites for this course.
(For more information: http://predictivehealth.emory.edu and https://www.phi.emory.edu/chd/)
Participation (25%), Two multiple choice exams (50%), Projects (25%)
MWF 3:00-3:50 MAX: 35 Stutz
Content: How do people handle death? Through the different perspectives provided by biological anthropology, cultural anthropology and archaeology, this course explores the dual aspect of death, as a cultural and biological phenomenon, across cultures and through time. The themes discussed in the class range from contemporary mortuary rituals and grief to historic and prehistoric examples. We will also discuss how people deal with death in extraordinary situations, including natural disasters, war, and epidemics. From the biological perspective, we will discuss both the process of dying and the post-mortem processes of decay and decomposition. A recurrent theme of the course is the point of contact between the natural and the cultural dimensions of death.
Texts: TBA.
Particulars: The course is organized as a combination of lectures and discussion sessions. Grades will be based on a midterm and a final exam, response papers, comments on readings posted on Blackboard, and class participation.
MWF 9:35-10:25 MAX: 25 [HIST 285] / 10 [AFS 389] / 5 [ANT 385] Dominguez
Content: Slavery was one of the most enduring social relationships in human history. It took several forms in different places and across time. However, slavery played a crucial role in western history, helping shape thereby the past of many societies today. This course will explore the development of slavery in the Western World up to the dawn of the 21st century. It will survey current knowledge about slavery, and introduce students to new perspectives on this contentious subject.
Texts: Readings for this course will consist of a variety of texts, mostly on E-Reserves, including illustrations, letters, narratives of slaves’ experiences, and historians’ analyzes of past events, people or societies. Students will purchase at least one book.
Particulars: Participation is crucial, facilitated by debates and discussions in class, in addition to four reaction papers to the course’s topics. The course also includes a mid-term exam and a final essay. Participation will count for 30% of the final grade; the reaction papers 20%; and the mid-term exam and the final essay, 25% each.
TTh 1:00-2:15 MAX: 18 Davidson
Content: International experts and media reports in the past few years are warning of an age of “food and water wars,” based on the unforeseen and unprecedented decline in the world food supply, as well as increasing conflicts over access to potable water. This course takes seriously the problems of food and water shortages, while broadening our lens to explore the multiple causes and consequences of such trends. We will examine how people in different parts of the world, past and present, have interacted with food and water. We will look at the production, consumption, and distribution of food, with a particular emphasis on the culture of food; and we will learn about a range of water management systems – and the politics and symbolism of water – in different parts of the world. Food and water offer intriguing ways to look at a range of related topics: ecological history, class, poverty, hunger/thirst, ethnicity, nationalism, capitalism, gender, race, and sexuality. Food and water are at once the most obvious and among the least explored windows into the shaping of identities, desires, and needs in the contemporary world.
Texts: TBA.
Particulars: Anthropology 202 or IDS 213 strongly recommended, but not required
TTh 1:00-2:15 MAX: 5 [ANT 385] / 10 [LAS 385] de la Pena
Content: A review of the changing relationships between political power, indigenous peoples Afroamerican minorities, and society at large: from caste divisions to legal equality and social exclusion; from "indigenist" policies to the struggle for "ethnic citizenship"; with particular reference to Mexico and the Andean region.
Texts: TBA.
TTh 11:30-12:45 MAX: 9 [ANT 385] / 9 [GHCS 300] Brown
Content:
Texts: TBA.
Particulars: TBA.
MAX: Faculty
Content: TBA.
Texts: TBA.
Particulars: By permission only. Please obtain form in Room 207 Anthropology.
MAX: Gouzoules
Content: TBA.
Texts: TBA.
Particulars: By permission only. Please obtain form in Room 207 Anthropology.
MAX: Faculty
Content: TBA.
Texts: TBA.
Particulars: By permission only. Please obtain form in Room 207 Anthropology.
TTH 4:00-5:15 MAX: 15 Peletz
Content: This course focuses on the history of theory in socio-cultural anthropology, beginning with the founding figures of the 19th century (such as Tylor and Morgan) and continuing through the present (Bourdieu, Foucault, Ortner, Appadurai, Ong, etc). Along the way we will examine important traditions in early and mid-20th-century American anthropology, British Social Anthropology, and French structuralism (represented by Margaret Mead, E.E. Evans-Pritchard, and Claude Levi-Strauss, respectively) as well as the emergence of paradigms that helped define the discipline in the second half of the 20th century, such as the cultural materialism of Marvin Harris and the interpretive/symbolic anthropology pioneered by Clifford Geertz and Victor Turner. In addition to critically examining the strengths and weaknesses of the dominant perspectives and paradigms in the history of the discipline, we will explore the contributions that anthropology can make to our understanding of contemporary societies and cultures and processes of modernity and globalization generally. One of the objectives of the course is thus to help students develop an understanding of anthropology’s relevance in the 21st century.
Texts: Erickson, Paul A. and Liam Murphy, A History of Anthropological Theory, 3rd edition. Ontario: Broadview Press, 2008.
Erickson, Paul A. and Liam Murphy, ed., Readings for a History of Anthropological Theory, 2nd edition. Ontario: Broadview Press, 2006.
Hatch, Elvin, Theories of Man and Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 1973.
Mead, Margaret, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies. New York: William
Morrow, 1935.
Evans-Pritchard, E.E., The Nuer. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1940.
Geertz, Clifford, The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, 1973.
Fischer, Michael and Mehdi Abedi. Debating Muslims: Cultural Dialogues in Postmodernity and Tradition. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990.
Knauft, Bruce, Genealogies for the Present in Cultural Anthropology. New York: Routledge, 1996.
Ong, Aihwa, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationalism. Durham: Duke Univeristy Press, 1999. [Or: Ong’s Buddha is Hiding: Refugees, Citizenship, the New America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.]
Particulars: Twenty to twenty-five percent of your grade will be based on your class participation. The remainder of your grade will be based on your written work, which will most likely consist of two essays (each of approximately 10-12 pages), and a short (take-home) final exam.
TTH 10:00-11:15 MAX: 15 Little
Content: The purpose of this course is to provide the student with a selected overview of the history, debates, and major topical issues in anthropological studies of economy and ecology. It will show how anthropologists have studied the economic and ecological bases of social and cultural life during the past 50+ years. The course is intended to give the student a critical awareness and understanding of the different theoretical and empirical issues that have defined the fields of economic and ecological anthropology, as well as demonstrate the ways they have enriched understandings of important contemporary global issues, including environmental degradation, inequality, and poverty. Students will have an opportunity to pursue a research project related to their own interests.
Texts: Bestor, Theordore. 2004. Tsukiji: The Fish Market at the Center of the World. University of California Press.
Dove, Michael and Carol Carpenter, eds. 2007. Environmental Anthropology: A Reader. Blackwell.
Fairhead, J. and M. Leach. 1996. Misreading the African Landscape: Society and Ecology in a Forest-Savanna Mosaic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Luetchford, Peter. 2007. Fair Trade and a Global Commodity: Coffee in Costa Rica. Pluto Press.
Neumann, R. P. 2005. Making Political Ecology. Oxford University Press.
Roitman, Janet. 2004. Fiscal Disobedience: An Anthropology of Economic Regulation in Central Africa. Princeton University Press.
Wilk, Richard and Lisa Cliggett. 2007 (revised edition). Economies and Cultures: Foundations of Economic Anthropology. Westview Press.
Particulars: Oral and written demonstration of understanding of course materials and class discussions and creative use of those materials in short reflective pages on selected readings, one integrative essay, and a major research paper engaging course materials with an ethnographic problem, region, or theoretical/empirical topic of the student’s choice. Students also will be asked to organize one set of readings of their own choosing for class discussion.
TTH 11:00-12:30MAX: 15 Whitten
Content: The goals of this course are 1) to provide an overview of the major research traditions and methods in primatology; and 2) to investigate the contribution and limitations of a cross-disciplinary perspective by examining the application of primatological approaches, research, and theory to other areas of anthropology. Emphasis will be placed on critical analysis of models and theoretical constructs, hypothesis testing and research methodology, and the origins and applications of primatological research. Topics to be covered include: the influence of views of human nature on primatological research and theory; the roles of phylogeny, ecology, and individual strategies in the origin and evolution of primate societies; the competing and cooperative relations and strategies of males and females; and the limits and evolution of primate intelligence.
Texts: CJ Campbell et al. 2006 Primates in Perspective. Oxford University Press
D Cheney & Rober Seyfarth 2007 Baboon Metaphysics. University of Chicago Press
Assigned book chapters and journal articles.
Particulars: Requires participation in discussions, presentations of reading material, several reaction papers, and a term paper.
TTH 11:30-12:45MAX: 10 [ANT 511] / 5 [LING 585] Spitulnik
Content: This is a theory and a methods course. It is designed to prepare graduate students with a conceptual and practical framework for theorizing and documenting the effects of communicative practices in society and culture. We consider a range of theories about how language and communicative practices are constitutive in/for society, culture, and human experience. We have hands-on experience with data collection/analysis. Students are introduced to basic concepts in discourse analysis, semiotics, linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, and the ethnography of communication. Topics include: the nature of the linguistic sign; discourse and power; the linguistic mediation of social identity; language ideologies and the politics of language; power and agency; and the influence of language on thought. We also consider critical issues regarding the place of language in the practice of sociocultural research, e.g. in the field work encounter and in the generation and presentation of data. Techniques of linguistic description, discourse analysis, and transcription are examined through close readings of texts and with recordings of naturally occurring speech collected by students.
Texts: Bakhtin. The Dialogic Imagination.
Bakhtin. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays
Basso. Western Apache Language and Culture.
Fairclough. Language and Power.
Goffman, Forms of Talk.
Hill. The Everyday Language of White Racism.
Jaworski and Coupland eds. The Discourse Reader
Mendoza-Denton Homegirls: Language and Cultural Practice among Latina Youth Groups.
Silverstein and Urban, eds. Natural Histories of Discourse.
Tedlock and Mannheim, eds. The Dialogic Emergence of Culture.
Particulars: Grading based on seminar participation, short response papers, short field assignments, and a final research paper.
M 10:00-1:00 MAX: 8 [ANT 580] / 7 [WS 585] Freeman
Content: This seminar will approach feminist anthropology and ethnography from historical and epistemological perspectives to examine the emergence of feminist research within the field of anthropology and what is meant by doing/writing feminist ethnography. We will begin by reading some of the forerunners of feminist anthropology and ethnography, whose research and writing foreshadowed some of the theoretical debates about ethnographic authority, positionality, and textuality that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, and will end with experimental examples of feminist ethnography from the past two decades. Each week, by reading an ethnography and critical essays, we will examine the ways in which the focus of study (kinship; production; reproduction; myth and ritual; etc.), the theoretical ferment of a particular time (structural-functionalism; Marxism; postmodernism), world area/region (East Asia; South Asia; Africa; Caribbean; Latin America; the USA), and other factors shape the production of fieldwork and texts in particular ways. The course will explore both thechallenges of feminist theory/practice for doing/writing ethnography, and the implications of ethnographic work/writing for feminism.
Texts: TBA
Th 4:30-5:30 MAX: 30 Kingston
Content: TBA
Texts: TBA
M 10:00-1:00 MAX: 15 Hadley
Content:Birth, death, marriage, migration, and household organization represent central events and decisions in the lives of all people. This graduate level seminar will consider such demographic or population issues from an anthropological perspective. An anthropological approach views demographic phenomena from a comparative, evolutionary, biocultural, and holistic perspective. The seminar is organized thematically and will cover issues such as basic demographic theory and method, demography in evolutionary perspective, kinship and demographic outcomes, demographic transitions, and the relationship between fertility and nutritional status.
Texts: TBA.
Particulars: By permission only. Requirements include participating and leading seminar, two short writing assignments, and a final research paper.
W 5:30-8:30 MAX:15 Knauft
Content: This course examines the use of critical theory in ethnographic writing. The goal is to sharpen our attentiveness to the challenges and intellectual openings that come with working at the intersections of these two genres and to help students refine the theoretical orientations of their own projects. The course will engage, in alternating weeks, works by a major Western theorist of the 19th or 20th century and a recent ethnography that uses that material to explicate the author’s findings in the field. Theorists likely to be considered include Hegel, Marx, Gramsci, Foucault, Bourdieu, and Freud. Specific world area and ethnographic readings will be selected in line with individual and collective interests of students taking the course. Reading of major theoretical works by canonical authors will be configured insofar as possible to complement rather than duplicate readings commonly undertaken in other currently taught graduate courses.
Texts: Authors read will include Lynn M. Thomas, Martin Chanock, Barbara M. Cooper, Richard A. Schroeder, John Lonsdale, Belinda Bozzoli, Kenda Mutongi, and John Wood, among others.
Particulars:The class is open to students from various disciplines but has a maximum enrolment of twelve students. The course will meet in the ICIS seminar room for three hours one evening over per week – probably on Wednesdays – during spring 2009. Dinner will generally be provided. Class format will foreground seminar discussion and active engagement by students with both critical theorization and ethnographic exploration or application.
This is an ICIS seminar. Funding is hence possible for pilot doctoral research undertaken in relation to projects developed in the course. Funding for graduate students who enroll in the course is not guaranteed but will be considered on a case-by –case basis depending on appropriateness, merit, and need.
Note: Students interested in taking this class will be invited to a casual exploratory discussion over dinner some time during the fall 08 semester to consider themes / implications / possible readings. If you are interested in this possibility, please contact Bruce Knauft @ bruce.knauft@emory.edu with copy to Chris Krupa @ ckrupa@emory.edu and Art Linton @ alinton@emory.edu.
F 3:00-4:30 MAX: 7 [ANT 585] / 8 [PSYCH 585] Shore/Rochat
Content: Tracing the origins of human sociality to ritualized forms of reciprocity has central to moral philosophy, social anthropology and developmental psychology. But rarely are these traditions of scholarship brought together. This is what we propose to do in this interdisciplinary graduate seminar. For moral philosophy, the problem of mediating self-interest and altruism underlies classic works in both political and economic theory, and is the key philosophical issue behind contract theory. For social anthropology, these issues have been addressed in classic exchange theory, beginning with Marcel Mauss’ famous Essay on The Gift, and developed in an extensive anthropological literature on ritualized forms of social reciprocation. While providing some novel perspectives on the wide variety of social arrangements human cultures have produced for mediating self-interest and altruism, the underlying theoretical and philosophical issues of exchange theory were set out in the social contract literature of political and economic philosophy. Meanwhile psychologists have explored these same themes from the intra-psychic and interpersonal perspectives in developmental psychology and primatology. In psychology the key theoretical issues are framed as the ontogenesis of altruism, perspective-taking, play and game behavior and transitional object theory. Jointly taught by a developmental psychologist and a psychological anthropologist with long-standing interests in these issues, and utilizing the resources of local and outside scholars, this course is proposed as an ideal interdisciplinary seminar sponsored by Emory’s new Center for Mind, Brain and Culture.
Texts: TBA.
W 1:00-3:00 MAX: 5 de la Pena
Content:This seminar examines the complicated attempts to define “citizenship” in Latin American countries today and in the past as well as the struggles that have ensued over its meaning and its terms. It explores the historic tensions that have erupted between notions of “ethnic” particularity and national-juridical equality in Latin America and the different ways in which subaltern populations have manipulated these discourses in political struggle. Particular emphasis will be given to understanding the transition from peasant to ethnic-political identities in the context of diminishing nationalist and populist policies and to the emergence of new types of indigenous leadership and urban indigenous movements under neoliberalism.
Texts: TBA.
MAX: 999 Faculty
Content: TBA.
Texts: TBA.
Particulars: By permission only. Please obtain form in Room 207 Anthropology. All enrollments are processed through Anthropology.
MAX: 999 Faculty
Content: TBA.
Texts: TBA.
Particulars:By permission only. Please obtain form in Room 207 Anthropology. All enrollments are processed through Anthropology.
MAX: 999 Faculty
Content: TBA.
Texts: TBA.
Particulars: By permission only. Please obtain form in Room 207 Anthropology. All enrollments are processed through Anthropology.
MAX: 999 Faculty
Content: TBA.
Texts: TBA.
Particulars:By permission only. Please obtain form in Room 207 Anthropology. All enrollments are processed through Anthropology.
MAX: 999 Faculty
Content: TBA.
Texts: TBA.
Particulars: By permission only. Please obtain form in Room 207 Anthropology. All enrollments are processed through Anthropology.
MAX: 999 Faculty
Content: TBA.
Texts: TBA.
Particulars: By permission only. Please obtain form in Room 207 Anthropology. All enrollments are processed through Anthropology.
MAX: 999 Faculty
Content: TBA.
Texts: TBA.
Particulars: By permission only, and for students admitted to Doctoral Candidacy. Please obtain form in Room 207 Anthropology. All enrollments are processed through Anthropology.