Fall 2007 & Spring 2008 Courses

Course descriptions are immediately following. There may be periodic changes and additions, particularly to Spring 2008 courses, so please check back frequently.

For access to course listings for 2006-2007, click here.

Approaching the study of culture and society from a critical perspective, students are encouraged to examine the multifaceted relations between anthropology and its objects. Many courses concentrate on the radical impact of global transformations in the past and in the contemporary world.

GANT 5503
The Country and the City
Spring 2008. Three credits.
Hylton White
Modern cities and countrysides are everywhere joined in extraordinarily complex and varied entanglements, but as Raymond Williams famously noted, modern social thought almost universally contrasts them as sites of separate, even opposing forms of life. To grapple with this paradox we turn to a variety of sources in this seminar, but especially to ethnographies grounded in modern Asian and African landscapes. Topics include: the broader historical contexts in which separations of rural and urban have developed; forms of circulation connecting rural and urban places, including movements of people, labor, money, objects and animals; and representations of rural and urban terrains as spaces imbued with different kinds of social, aesthetic and moral values.

GANT 6050
Anthropology as a History of the Present
Fall 2007. Three credits.
Ann Laura Stoler
In 1950, the don of British anthropology, Evans Pritchard, warned that anthropology would have to choose between being history or being nothing. What did he mean by that statement? How prescient was he in charting the direction that anthropology would take in the 21st century? This course explores the changing form and content of historical reflection in the making of anthropology as a discipline, a set of practices, and mode of inquiry. It starts from the notion that anthropological knowledge is always grounded in implicit and explicit assumptions about the ways in which the past can be known, how people differently use their pasts, and what counts in different societies as relevant and debatable history. We will look at how different understandings of the relationship between history, culture and power and the concepts that join them—habitus, structural violence, cultural debris, imagined community, social memory, genealogy, tradition— have given shape to critical currents in ethnographic method and social theory. This course is required for MA and PhD students in Anthropology.

GANT 6051
Critical Foundations of Anthropology I
Fall 2007. Three credits.
Hylton White
This seminar introduces students to modern social theory, its historical anchorings, and its relations with the anthropological enterprise. It investigates how the concept of society and culture evolved in relation to humanist thought and political economic circumstances as Europeans explored, missionized, and colonized. In capturing various peripheries of knowledge, we ask how anthropological theory and practice has been modeled within and against other natural and social science disciplines. In charting how society and culture have been theorized and debated historically, we reflect on forms of anthropological knowledge and ethnographic sensibilities that are relevant today: their significance for a present and future anthropology and their connection to other scientific, political, and humanistic endeavors. This course is required for MA and PhD students in Anthropology.

GANT 6053
Sites of Contention in Contemporary Ethnography
Spring 2008. Three credits.
Janet Roitman
This course is dedicated to the discussion of thematic, theoretical, methodological, and formal innovation in contemporary ethnography. It proceeds by placing in dialogue a range of theoretical and ethnographic strategies and introducing a selection of potentially interlocutive quasiethnographic texts. Course foci may include ethnographic approaches to the cultural construction of difference, ethnographies of globalization, and contemporary approaches to spatiality, cities, and citizenship. Seminar participants make close readings of at least one substantial text per week and students are asked to write brief reaction papers at regular intervals throughout the course as well as an extended final essay. This course is required for MA and PhD students in Anthropology.

GANT 6062
Critical Foundations of Anthropology II
Spring 2008. Three credits.
Vyjayanthi Rao
This seminar focuses on contemporary theoretical and philosophical debates on the nature of the social, and assesses the impact of these debates on recent ethnographic writing. As the sites in which anthropologists work undergo radical change, our sense of the limits of the social, the political, and the cultural also need renovation. We will pair ethnographic readings with more general, theoretical work, thereby also foregrounding the relationship between anthropological inquiry and adjacent fields of analysis as they grapple with the complications of contemporary socio-historical conditions. Readings include authors such as Bataille, Deleuze, Derrida, Latour, and others whose frameworks are increasingly visible in the making of contemporary ethnography. This course is required for MA and PhD students in Anthropology.

GANT 6101
Collaboration: Design and Ethnography
Fall 2007. Three credits.
Vyjayanthi Rao, Colleen Macklin
This collaborative course introduces students to the intersection of design and anthropological practices through innovative projects focusing on social relations, urban media and public space. Graduate students from NSSR and Parsons work together in teams to investigate and develop new approaches, challenge assumptions and invent new prototypes for their respective fields. Observation, experimentation, design intervention and critique are the primary activities employed. We are interested in both the ethnography of design and the design of ethnography. Through projects and readings, students develop reflexive approaches to ethnography and design, interrogating the boundaries of intervention traditionally associated with each field. The results of this course will be published online and in book form. Cross-listed with Parsons The New School for Design.

GANT 6105
The Anthropology of Aid and Development in Africa
Fall 2007. Three credits.
Thomas Bierschenk and Nassirou Bako-Arifari
Since the end of World War II, all over the Global South, but especially in Africa, a particular social constellation of “development” has come into existence, a cosmopolitan universe of experts and public servants, NGO and project leaders, technicians, and researchers who live, in a sense, from the development of others, and who mobilise considerable economic and other resources to that effect. Anthropologists both contribute to development and study it. In this course, we examine the anthropology of development as a field of encounters between actors who originate from very different cultural and social worlds. Cross-listed with the Graduate Program in International Affairs.

GANT 6115
Border Economies
Fall 2007. Three credits.
Janet Roitman
This course will encounter the limits of economy, the limits of the economy, and the limits of political economy. It will do so in a specific way: through the prism of both literal and figurative “border economies.” The latter will be taken in a customary sense, denoting economic spaces emerging out of transborder trade. However, through explicit attention to the ways in which ideas of transgression (of the law, of spatial markers, of the theoretical assumptions of economic and political theory) are inherent to the very idea of “border economies,” this course will also elaborate a critical perspective with regard to the ways in which certain activities and engagements are confined to residual categories. To that end, we will review various manners of describing and conceptualizing the informal economy, war economies, mercenary economies, and offshore entities. Readings will focus on Africa drawing on founding or classic texts which will be read and contrasted to recent monographs and ethnographies. Cross-listed with the Graduate Program in International Affairs.

GANT 6110
Theories of Mind
Fall 2007. Three credits.
Lawrence Hirschfeld
The notions of subjectivity and subject formation are hotly debated topics in anthropology. The quintessential quality of a subject is her capacity for thought—and its susceptibility to manipulation. Individual minds inhabit complex cultural environments; yet thought is the activity solely of individual minds. Anthropologists have convincingly shown that all cultural traditions acknowledge that peoples’ thoughts undergird their actions, although this link is often described by very different public narratives. Cognitive psychologists, in their turn, have found that the development of the rich ability to interpret and predict behavior in terms of unseen mental states is surprisingly robust across cultural and individual variation. Are these two traditions of research addressing different questions using similar language or are they addressing different aspects of the same phenomena? This seminar explores how it is that peoples, whether they be members of folk or academic communities, conceptualize the processes of thinking and the mechanisms that govern them. Our goal will be to understand this multitude of theories of mind and, in particular, the relationship—the contrasts and points of agreement—between cultural and psychological versions. Cross-listed with Psychology.

GANT 6120
The Postcolonial Museum: Recent Debates in the USA , Europe, and Southern Africa
Spring 2008. Three credits.
Larissa Förster
With the emergence of postcolonial approaches in museum and heritage studies, past and current museum practices have come under scrutiny. In various European countries, in the USA, and in southern Africa, debates have centered on museums’ responsibility to deal with colonial history in general and with their own colonial entanglements in particular, as well as around questions of representation and curatorial authority. This seminar explores these debates and critically examines the responses of various prominent ethnographic and historical museums, including the Royal Museum for Central Africa, Brussels; the Quai du Branly, Paris; The British Empire and Commonwealth Museum, Bristol; the National Museum of the American Indian, Washington, D.C.; and the District Six Museum, Cape Town.

GANT 6130
The State in Africa
Spring 2008. Three credits.
Thomas Bierschenk
If the institutionalization of power, the local anchoring of central government and the self-limitation of the ruling classes through the codification of law constitute the central characteristics of the modern, Western-type state, then state-formation in Africa is still underway. At the same time, after the domination of development discourse for many years by a “less state”-paradigm, awareness is now growing that sustainable development is not possible without a “sustainable,” i.e. more functional, state. However, there is a striking absence of empirically grounded studies of the day-to-day functioning of African bureaucracies. This course discusses the “real” workings of states and public services, at both the central and local levels, emphasizing literature that combines institutional, actor-centred, and historical approaches. Cross-listed with the Graduate Program in International Affairs.

GANT 6201
Anthropology of Movement
Fall 2007. Three credits.
Sareeta Amrute
The study of borderlands, transnational movements, exile, hybridity, enumerating populations, racism, exclusion, and asylum have provided anthropology analytical purchase on many of the most important elements of economy and society—state formation, nationalism, identity, discipline. At the same time, (im)migration and its management are fast becoming a preoccupation of governing bodies the world over. This course reviews the study of the transnational movements of persons across continents, oceans, and political borders as it has emerged within Anthropology and related disciplines (History, Sociology) over the past two decades. Using a combination of ethnography, history, and fiction, we explore the significance of population movements to economic formations, group identity, and language development, and well as embodiment, suffering, and emotion. Through readings that focus our attention away from the United States, we situate current U.S. immigration debates within the wider geographical context of neo-liberal capital regimes and within the longer historical context of human contact, travel and exchange.

GANT 6202
Development, Modernization, and Scientific Progress
Spring 2008. Three credits.
Sareeta Amrute
How have science and technology shaped post-colonial nation-states in Asia, Africa and Latin America? What is the relationship between technology and democratic politics in the global south? This course investigates the role played by science and technology in making such ‘peripheral’ placed modern, and the way that scientific progress itself has depended on its practice outside Europe and the U.S. General readings on science, progress, and modernity will be used as a springboard at intervals during the course to discuss theoretical approaches to the study of technology. The role technology has played in the history of nations from the late colonial period through independence will inaugurate class discussion. The rest of the quarter will be devoted to case studies through to the present day. Along the way, we will ask, what alternatives to the modernization model of development have come about in the last few decades, what are the conditions of possibility and consequences of these new approaches?

GANT 6210
Forms of Life: Aesthetics, Affect, Experience
Spring 2008. Three credits
Neferti X. Tadiar
Since the modern recognition of the historicity of arrangements of collective existence, scholars have sought to understand different kinds of social formation and their underlying laws of organization and cohesion. "Cultures," as 'whole ways of life,' has been an abiding concept for thinking not only about the complexity, variability and dynamic movement of the material social relations comprising distinct communities but also about symbolic, communicative, representational and performative practices (art, music, literature, film,) and their production of an 'inner,' immaterial life of shared meanings and experiences. This course explores theories of forms of life, human and social, which have been seen to develop in the course of a global history of contemporary modernity, with an attention to the role of aesthetics and affect in shaping and expressing dominant as well as subordinate and/or alternative forms of sociality, subjectivity and collective being and experience. We will examine several scholarly literatures that deal with issues of beauty, sensory experience, pleasure, pain, subjectivity and structures of feeling, and their relations to questions of power, social order and struggle, and change. We will also look at questions of biopolitics, violence and the limits and possibilities of different humanist and post-humanist conceptions of "life" for understanding politics in contemporary contexts. Readings include Marx, Benjamin, Buck-Morss, Foucault, Mbembe, Agamben, Chakrabarty, Das, Asad, Sedgewick, McClary, Moten, Povinelli, Shih, Chow, Rose, Feldman, and Raffles.

GANT 6990
Independent Study
Fall 2007, Spring 2008. One to six credits.
Students pursue advanced research on specific topics of their own design with the guidance of a faculty member. Permission of the instructor is required.

GANT 6992
Practical Curricular Training
Fall 2007, Spring 2008. One-half credit.
Students can receive credit for professional training related to the degree. Students are expected to engage in such training for at least five hours per week. Training should take the form of teaching, research, or other work relevant to the student’s program of study. It may take place at institutions of higher learning, with governmental agencies, or at other sites as appropriate. Students meet regularly with an advisor and submit a written report at the end of the training. This replaces the Internship course. Grading is pass/fail.

GANT 7005
Doctoral Proseminar in Anthropology I : Conceptual Methods and Ethnographic Objects
Fall 2007. Three credits.
Ann Laura Stoler

GANT 7006
Doctoral Proseminar in Anthropology II : Ethnographic Methods
Fall 2007. Three credits.
Janet Roitman

GANT 7007
Doctoral Proseminar in Anthropology II : Grant Writing Methods and Ethnographic Objects
Spring 2008. Three credits.
Lawrence Hirschfeld

This page was last updated October 30, 2007.