Table of Contents
ANTH 1002: Anthropology in the world
Semester 2, 2024
This unit of study examines contemporary global issues from anthropological perspectives. Global crises affect all forms of life—both human and ‘more-than-human’—in different and unequal ways. There are no one-size-fits-all solutions to humanity’s planetary future. The first step towards healing is to stay with the trouble, by listening to each other. Anthropologists are trained to listen so that they can disrupt taken-for-granted norms and imagine the future otherwise. Students will think with anthropological works that explore topics such as climate change, financial crisis, pandemic, and war. By doing so, we aim to explore how we can create a more just and kinder world together.
Coordinator: Ryan Schram
Weekly plan of lectures and topics
| Week & Date | Topic | Main reading | Other reading |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Why do we need anthropology? / Economic rationality and the reality of society | Marx ([1843] 1978) | |
| Jul 29 | 1. Why do we need anthropology?: Anthropology and the critical tradition | ||
| Jul 31 | 2. The reality of society | ||
| 2 | Gifts, commodities, and spheres of exchange | West (2012) | Mauss ([1925] 1990), 1-14, 39-46, 78-83; Marx ([1867] 1972), 319-329; Bohannan (1959); Bohannan (1955) |
| Aug 05 | 1. Gifts, or society as a system of total services | ||
| Aug 07 | 2. Capitalism, commodities, and the bourgeois individual | ||
| 3 | Spheres of exchange, in comparative and historical perspective | Golden (1996); Deomampo (2019) | |
| Aug 12 | 1. Systems of spheres compared | ||
| Aug 14 | 2. Spheres of exchange in historical perspective | ||
| 4 | Family matters | Gilliland (2020) | Carsten (1995) |
| Aug 19 | 1. Kinship is culture, not nature | ||
| Aug 21 | 2. Kinship as social action | ||
| 5 | Transnational families and global gifts | Wright (2020) | Leinaweaver (2010) |
| Aug 26 | 1. Global gifts | ||
| Aug 28 | 2. The commodification of kin | ||
| 6 | Care as capital after the Fordist social contract | Mazelis (2017), chap. 5; Zaloom (2019), chap. 4 | Mazelis (2017), introduction, chap. 4, conclusion; Zaloom (2019), introduction and conclusion |
| Sep 02 | 1. Rules as resources | ||
| Sep 04 | 2. Informal economies of care | ||
| 7 | The new ethnos: Love it or leave it | Rytter (2010) | Hall (2007); Hall (2017); Nyamnjoh (2022); Linke (2021); Eriksen (2015a); Eriksen (2015b) |
| Sep 09 | 1. Nationalism as fiction | ||
| Sep 11 | 2. Kinship as metaphor: Sameness and difference | ||
| 8 | Hindu nationalists and their in-laws | Udupa and Kramer (2023) | Mankekar and Carlan (2019); Krishnan (2023) |
| Sep 16 | 1. Feeling rules | ||
| Sep 18 | 2. The emotional labor of media consumption | ||
| 9 | Normative sexuality, Donald Trump, and whiteness | Bjork-James (2020) | |
| Sep 23 | 1. Whiteness, purity, and classification | ||
| Sep 25 | 2. Nature as metaphor | ||
| B | Mandatory school closure for historical memorial festivals—No class | ||
| 10 | Humans, the environment, and ecology | Palmer (2020); Kimmerer (2011) | |
| Oct 07 | 1. Anthropology and the environment | ||
| Oct 09 | 2. Nature as resource and nature as giver | ||
| 11 | Who’s expected to adapt to climate change? | Jessee (2022) | |
| Oct 14 | 1. Sacrifice zones | ||
| Oct 16 | 2. Climate change adaptation and environmental justice | ||
| 12 | Rethinking restoration as reconstruction | Barra (2024) | |
| Oct 21 | 1. Climate reparations and climate repair | ||
| Oct 23 | 2. Restoring environments as the making of a new world | ||
| 13 | Anthropology in 100 years | ||
| Oct 28 | 1. Anthropology in 100 years, part 1 | ||
| Oct 30 | 2. Anthropology in 100 years, part 2 | ||
| 14 | Stuvac | ||
| 15 | Exam period |
References
Barra, Monica Patrice. 2024. “Restoration Otherwise: Towards Alternative Coastal Ecologies.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 42 (1): 147–65. https://doi.org/10.1177/02637758221146179.
Bjork-James, Sophie. 2020. “White Sexual Politics: The Patriarchal Family in White Nationalism and the Religious Right.” Transforming Anthropology 28 (1): 58–73. https://doi.org/10.1111/traa.12167.
Bohannan, Paul. 1955. “Some Principles of Exchange and Investment Among the Tiv.” American Anthropologist, New Series, 57 (1): 60–70. https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1955.57.1.02a00080.
———. 1959. “The Impact of Money on an African Subsistence Economy.” The Journal of Economic History 19 (4): 491–503. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022050700085946.
Carsten, Janet. 1995. “The Substance of Kinship and the Heat of the Hearth: Feeding, Personhood, and Relatedness Among Malays in Pulau Langkawi.” American Ethnologist 22 (2): 223–41. https://doi.org/10.2307/646700.
Deomampo, Daisy. 2019. “Racialized Commodities: Race and Value in Human Egg Donation.” Medical Anthropology 38 (7): 620–33. https://doi.org/10.1080/01459740.2019.1570188.
Eriksen, Thomas Hylland. 2015a. “Ethnicity.” In Small Places, Large Issues, 4th ed., 329–44. An Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology (Fourth Edition). London: Pluto Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt183p184.21.
———. 2015b. “Nationalism and Minorities.” In Small Places, Large Issues: An Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology, 4th ed., 345–66. London: Pluto Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt183p184.8.
Gilliland, Mary Kay. 2020. “Family and Marriage.” In Perspectives: An Open Invitation to Cultural Anthropology, edited by Thomas McIlwraith, Nina Brown, and Laura T. de González, 182–203. Arlington, Va.: The American Anthropological Association. https://pressbooks.pub/perspectives/chapter/family-and-marriage/.
Golden, Janet. 1996. “From Commodity to Gift: Gender, Class, and the Mmning of Breast Milk in the Twentieth Century.” The Historian 59 (1): 75–87. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1540-6563.1996.tb00985.x.
Hall, Stuart. 2007. “Living with difference: Stuart Hall in conversation with Bill Schwarz.” Soundings 37 (December): 148–59. https://doi.org/10.3898/136266207820465570.
———. 2017. “Nations and Diasporas.” In The Fateful Triangle: Race, Ethnicity, Nation, edited by Kobena Mercer, 125–76. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674982260-005.
Jessee, Nathan. 2022. “Reshaping Louisiana’s coastal frontier: managed retreat as colonial decontextualization.” Journal of Political Ecology 29 (1). https://doi.org/10.2458/jpe.2835.
Kimmerer, Robin. 2011. “Restoration and Reciprocity: The Contributions of Traditional Ecological Knowledge.” In Human Dimensions of Ecological Restoration: Integrating Science, Nature, and Culture, edited by Dave Egan, Evan E. Hjerpe, and Jesse Abrams, 257–76. Washington, DC: Island Press/Center for Resource Economics. https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-039-2_18.
Krishnan, Sneha. 2023. “Carceral Domesticities and the Geopolitics of Love Jihad.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 41 (6): 995–1012. https://doi.org/10.1177/02637758231212767.
Leinaweaver, Jessaca B. 2010. “Outsourcing Care: How Peruvian Migrants Meet Transnational Family Obligations.” Latin American Perspectives 37 (5): 67–87. https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X10380222.
Linke, Uli. 2021. “Love Politics: The Nation Form and the Affective Life of the State.” In Race, Gender, and Political Culture in the Trump Era. Routledge.
Mankekar, Purnima, and Hannah Carlan. 2019. “The Remediation of Nationalism: Viscerality, Virality, and Digital Affect.” In Global Digital Cultures: Perspectives from South Asia, edited by Aswin Punathambekar and Sriram Mohan, 203–22. Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press. https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.9561751.
Marx, Karl. (1867) 1972. “Capital, Vol. 1.” In The Marx-Engels Reader, edited by Robert C. Tucker, 294–438. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
———. (1843) 1978. “For a ruthless criticism of everything existing.” In The Marx-Engels reader, edited by Robert C. Tucker, 12–15. New York: Norton. http://archive.org/details/marxengelsreader00tuck.
Mauss, Marcel. (1925) 1990. “Selections from introduction, chapters 1-2, and conclusion.” In The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, translated by W. D. Halls, 1–14, 39–46, 78–83. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
Mazelis, Joan Maya. 2017. Surviving Poverty: Creating Sustainable Ties Among the Poor. New York: New York University Press. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/usyd/detail.action?docID=4500689.
Nyamnjoh, Francis B. 2022. “Citizenship, Incompleteness and Mobility.” Citizenship Studies 26 (4-5): 592–98. https://doi.org/10.1080/13621025.2022.2091243.
Palmer, Christian T. 2020. “Culture and Sustainability: Environmental Anthropology in the Anthropocene.” In Perspectives: An Open Invitation to Cultural Anthropology, edited by Thomas McIlwraith, Nina Brown, and Laura T. de González, 357–81. Arlington, Va.: The American Anthropological Association. https://pressbooks.pub/perspectives/chapter/culture-and-sustainability-environmental-anthropology-in-the-anthropocene/.
Rytter, Mikkel. 2010. “‘The Family of Denmark’ and ‘the Aliens’: Kinship Images in Danish Integration Politics.” Ethnos 75 (3): 301–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2010.513773.
Udupa, Sahana, and Max Kramer. 2023. “Multiple Interfaces: Social Media, Religious Politics, and National (Un)belonging in India and the Diaspora.” American Ethnologist 50 (2): 247–59. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.13117.
West, Paige. 2012. “Village Coffee.” In From Modern Production to Imagined Primitive: The Social World of Coffee from Papua New Guinea, 101–29. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.
Wright, Andrea. 2020. “Making Kin from Gold: Dowry, Gender, and Indian Labor Migration to the Gulf.” Cultural Anthropology 35 (3): 435–61. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca35.3.04.
Zaloom, Caitlin. 2019. Indebted: How Families Make College Work at Any Cost. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780691195421.
ANTH 1002: Anthropology in the world---A guide to the unit
Lecture outlines and guides: 1.1, 1.2, 2.1, 2.2, 3.1, 3.2, 4.1, 4.2, 5.1, 5.2, 6.1, 6.2, 7.1, 7.2, 8.1, 8.2, 9.1, 9.2, 10.1, 10.2, 11.1, 11.2, 12.1, 12.2, 13.1, 13.2.
Assignments: Module I quiz, Module II essay: Similarities among cases, Module III essay: Completeness and incompleteness in collective identities, Module IV essay: Nature for First Nations.