Introduction to Cultural Anthropology

ANTH 110b M, W 2:30-3:45 WLH 201 Mike McGovern #120 10 Sachem St. mike.mcgovern@yale.edu Office Hours: Thursday 1-3 pm Cultural anthropologists study cosmology, tacit knowledge and ways of knowing the world in specific social settings. Sociocultural specificity helps to explain the seemingly endless variation of human solutions to the problems of cooperation and conflict, production and reproduction, expression, and belief common to all societies. This course will introduce students to anthropological ways of understanding cultural difference in approaches to sickness and healing, gender and sexuality, economics, religion, and communication. Geographical areas will include Africa, Ireland, Southeast Asia, and the Caribbean while authors include Marcel Mauss, Clifford Geertz, and Victor Turner. The first part of the course is broken into four parts. First, we consider the complexities involved in describing and analyzing cultural difference. Second, we consider the development of anthropological theory. Third, we address the methods that sociocultural anthropologists use to reach their conclusions, and fourth, we look at the ethical and political stakes involved in doing anthropology within both local and global contexts of inequality and injustice. These sections are punctuated by several ethnographic essays that show the ways particular anthropologists have addressed these issues using their own fieldwork data. The second half of the course builds on what we have learned about anthropological theory, methods, and ethics to facilitate critical readings of three ethnographies. Requirements: There will be an in-class midterm exam (30% of grade) and a takehome final exam (50% of grade). Discussion sections will be scheduled every week. Attendance is required, and attendance/participation will constitute 20% of your grade. The teaching fellows will lead discussions jumping off from your responses to brief discussion questions, and will answer questions you may have. Readings: Students are encouraged to purchase the books by Mauss, Turner, Appadurai, Bourgois, Mintz and Aretxaga [the Mauss is also available as an e-book at the library]. They are available at Labyrinth Bookstore. These books are also available at the reserve desk at Cross Campus Library. All other chapters and articles will be available on the V2 site.

Syllabus 14 January Film: Latah 16 January Anthropology and the Study of Culture: Universalism vs. Particularity Laura Bohannon Shakespeare in the Bush Natural History, August-September 1966 Roland Barthes 1972 [1957] The Great Family of Man In Mythologies. New York: Noonday. Defining Culture; the dialectic of similarity and difference; and the attempt to see events from the actors point of view. Who decides whats cultural, and what are the power relations involved? 21 January No Class. Martin Luther King Jr. Day 23 January Holistic View I Clifford Geertz 1973 Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight. In The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. How do anthropologists understand cultural influences? How do they translate their understanding to an audience with little or no knowledge about the place they are describing? Looking at the ways that ethnography, theory, method and style all work together. Film: Blood Sport 28 January Anthropological Theory: From Economics to Kinship Marcel Mauss 1990 The Gift. New York: Norton. Pp. 1-46. Is there such a thing as a free gift? 30 January Marcel Mauss 1990 The Gift. New York: Norton. Pp. In building theory, the ethnologist must determine whether analyses that stress the cultural or historical particularities of one place from all others can ever be compared. What would be the criteria for such a comparison? Introduction

4 February Claude Levi-Strauss 1963 The Bear and the Barber Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute XCIII:1-11. Sociality as exchange and reciprocity. 6 February Victor Turner 1967 Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage In The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Fredrik Barth 1998 (1969) Introduction to Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference. Long Grove: Waveland Press. Film: Imbalu (69 mins) What kinds of work do boundaries accomplish in society? What is the relation between religions expressive aspect and its functional aspect? Between boundaries and difference? 11 February Anthropological Methods: Participant Observation, Key Informants, Case Studies, Ethnology B. Malinowski 1984 (1922) Introduction from Argonauts of the Western Pacific. Prospect Heights: Waveland Press. Anna Tsing 1993 Opening from In the Realm of the Diamond Queen. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 13 February Victor Turner 1967 Muchona the Hornet, Interpreter of Religion In The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. J. Van Velsen The Extended Case Study Method In The craft of social anthropology edited by A. L. Epstein, introduction by Max Gluckman. New York : Pergamon Press, 1979. 18 February Holistic View II Max Gluckman 1958 (1940) Analysis of a Social Situation in Modern Zululand. Lusaka: Rhodes-Livingstone papers. 20 February Ethics and Applications of Anthropology Gonzalez, Roberto 2004 Anthropologists in the Public Sphere: Speaking out on War, Peace, and American Power. Austin: University of Texas Press. 1-72

George Packer 2007 Knowing the Enemy: Can Social Scientists Redefine the War on Terror? The New Yorker. 25 February Li, Tania. 1999. Compromising Power: Development, Culture and Rule in Indonesia. Cultural Anthropology. 14:295-322. Goldman, Michael 2001 The Birth of a Discipline Producing Authoritative Green Knowledge, World Bank-Style. In Ethnography, Vol. 2, No. 2, 191-217. 27 February Holistic View III Arjun Appadurai 2006 Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger. Durham: Duke University Press. pages TBA 3 March Midterm Exam 5 March Anthropology in Industrialized Societies P. Bourgois 1995 In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. xvii-76 How does Anthropology make the familiar exotic and the exotic familiar? Is it possible to study ones own culture anthropologically? Studying up, studying down: does anthropology like Bourgoiss simply shift the space of otherness to an internally exoticized population? 7-23 March Spring Break 24 March P. Bourgois 1995 In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 77-173 26 March P. Bourgois 1995 In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 213-286 Film: My American Girls (62 mins) 31 March P. Bourgois 1995 In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 287-351 2 April Bringing together the local and the global, the past and the present S. Mintz 1985 Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Penguin Books. xv-73

How do we locate the center of the modern world system? What does the history of sugarboth its production and its consumption by poor people on different sides of the Atlantictell us about relations within the world today? 7 April S. Mintz 1985 Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Penguin Books. 74-150 9 April S. Mintz 1985 Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Penguin Books. 151-214 14 April Gender, Conflict and Society Begoa Aretxaga 1997 Shattering Silence: Women, Nationalism, and Political Subjectivity in Northern Ireland. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ix-53. What difference does gender make in situations of endemic violence? What is the relationship between structure and agency, and what does Aretxaga mean when she writes about choiceless decisions? 16 April Begoa Aretxaga 1997 Shattering Silence: Women, Nationalism, and Political Subjectivity in Northern Ireland. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 54-121 21 April Begoa Aretxaga 1997 Shattering Silence: Women, Nationalism, and Political Subjectivity in Northern Ireland. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 122-175 23 April Conclusion and Synthesis Horace Miner 1956 Body Ritual Among the Nacirema In American Anthropologist. Vol 58(3):503-507

A Note on Grading: 30% Midterm: This in-class exam will test your mastery of the factual material presented in the readings, lectures, and films. Key points will already have been underlined in sections, and suggested in reading questions to which you will respond with one-paragraph responses due each section. 50% Final exam: This take-home exam will ask you to integrate some of the themes introduced in the first half of the semester with those developed at greater length in the three ethnographies. After the midterm, you will be presented with a list of questions from which the exam questions will be selected. Your writing assignments for the sections during the second half of the semester will address these questions, and essentially give you a chance to 'practice' for the final exam. 20% Sections: Sections will begin in earnest the third week of the semester, though there will be a 'catch-up' section next week for those who have missed sessions due to shopping period. Out of the 12 sections, you must attend at least 10 to receive an A. You must also submit (electronically, through the v2 site) a one-to-two paragraph response to the question posed on the site about the readings each week, whether you attend the section or not. These responses are due the midnight before your section (for example, if your section meets Thursdays at 6pm, the response is due at midnight on Wednesday into Thursday night). They will be graded as timely good faith efforts. Late submissions will not be accepted. You will be graded on attendance, participation, and the assignments. Doing the minimum for an A in sections will require 15 minutes of sitting down to think and write a paragraph, and 50 minutes in the section. Deriving the maximum from the section will mean that you could have an 'A' final exam mostly written before the semester ends. Note on content: There will not be a one-to-one overlap amongst the material presented in readings, films, and lectures. Thus if you do readings but miss lectures you will invariably miss some material, and the same is true vice versa. I will not be posting lecture notes on-line, so you will have to come to lectures to get the full gist of the supplementary material being presented. Sections should not present too much new material, but will help you to synthesize it and make sense of it all.