Summary of topics and readings
| Week | Dates | Topic | Required readings | Supplemental readings |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Feb 27, Feb 28 | Anthropology as a great conversation | ||
| 2 | Mar 5, Mar 6 | Symbolic anthropology | Geertz (1973a); Geertz (1973b) | |
| 3 | Mar 12, Mar 13 | Anthropology in the world system and world history | Wolf (1982), introduction and chapter 6 | Ortner (1984) |
| 4 | Mar 19, Mar 20 | The structure of the conjuncture | Sahlins (1981) | Sahlins (1988); Sahlins (1992); Sahlins (1996) |
| 5 | Mar 26, Mar 27 | Structure and history | Continue reading Sahlins (1981) | |
| 6 | Apr 2, Apr 3 | Historical anthropology | Comaroff (1987); Comaroff and Comaroff (1989) | Comaroff and Comaroff (1990) |
| 7 | Apr 9, Apr 10 | Globalization as turning point | Appadurai (1990) | Trouillot ([2003] 2016), chapters 1 and 5 |
| B | Apr 16, Apr 17 | Mandatory school closure due to the public recognition of a religious festival | ||
| 8 | Apr 23, Apr 24 | Identity, belonging, citizenship | Malkki (1992); Middleton (2013) | Gupta and Ferguson (1992); Ferguson and Gupta (2002) |
| 9 | Apr 30, May 1 | Conjunctures revisited | Friedman (1994) | Bashkow (2004); Englund and Leach (2000) |
| 10 | May 7, May 8 | Difference and being in question | Kohn (2007) | Kohn (2015); Bessire and Bond (2014) |
| 11 | May 14, May 15 | Cosmopolitics and ethnopolitics | de la Cadena (2010); Blaser (2013) | |
| 12 | May 21, May 22 | Liberalism and its others | Mazzarella (2010); Yeh (2012) | |
| 13 | May 28, May 29 | Culture and the changing conditions of subjectivity | Gershon (2011) | Gershon (2018) |
| 14 | Jun 4, Jun 5 | Extra seminar: Where is anthropology headed in the future? |
References
Appadurai, Arjun. 1990. “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy.” Theory, Culture & Society 7 (2-3): 295–310. doi:10.1177/026327690007002017.
Bashkow, Ira. 2004. “A Neo-Boasian Conception of Cultural Boundaries.” American Anthropologist 106 (3): 443–58. doi:10.1525/aa.2004.106.3.443.
Bessire, Lucas, and David Bond. 2014. “Ontological Anthropology and the Deferral of Critique.” American Ethnologist 41 (3): 440–56. doi:10.1111/amet.12083.
Blaser, Mario. 2013. “Ontological Conflicts and the Stories of Peoples in Spite of Europe: Toward a Conversation on Political Ontology.” Current Anthropology 54 (5): 547–68. https://doi.org/10.1086/672270.
Cadena, Marisol de la. 2010. “Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes: Conceptual Reflections beyond ‘Politics.’” Cultural Anthropology 25 (2): 334–70. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2010.01061.x.
Comaroff, Jean, and John L. Comaroff. 1989. “The Colonization of Consciousness in South Africa.” Economy and Society 18 (3): 267–96. doi:10.1080/03085148900000013.
Comaroff, John L. 1987. “Of Totemism and Ethnicity: Consciousness, Practice and the Signs of Inequality.” Ethnos 52 (3-4): 301–23. doi:10.1080/00141844.1987.9981348.
Comaroff, John L., and Jean Comaroff. 1990. “Goodly Beasts, Beastly Goods: Cattle and Commodities in a South African Context.” American Ethnologist 17 (2): 195–216. https://www.jstor.org/stable/645076.
Englund, Harri, and James Leach. 2000. “Ethnography and the Meta‐Narratives of Modernity.” Current Anthropology 41 (2): 225–48. doi:10.1086/ca.2000.41.issue-2.
Ferguson, James, and Akhil Gupta. 2002. “Spatializing States: Toward an Ethnography of Neoliberal Governmentality.” American Ethnologist 29 (4): 981–1002. doi:10.1525/ae.2002.29.4.981.
Friedman, Jonathan. 1994. “The Political Economy of Elegance: An African Cult of Beauty.” In Consumption and Identity, edited by Jonathan Friedman, 167–87. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers.
Geertz, Clifford. 1973a. “The Impact of the Concept of Culture on the Concept of Man.” In The Interpretation of Cultures, 33–54. New York: Basic Books. http://books.google.com?id=BZ1BmKEHti0C.
———. 1973b. “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture.” In The Interpretation of Cultures, 3–30. New York: Basic Books. http://books.google.com?id=BZ1BmKEHti0C.
Gershon, Ilana. 2011. ““Neoliberal Agency”.” Current Anthropology 52 (4): 537–55. doi:10.1086/660866.
———. 2018. “Employing the CEO of Me, Inc.: US Corporate Hiring in a Neoliberal Age.” American Ethnologist 45 (2): 173–85. doi:10.1111/amet.12630.
Gupta, Akhil, and James Ferguson. 1992. “Beyond ‘Culture’: Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference.” Cultural Anthropology 7 (1): 6–23. doi:10.1525/can.1992.7.1.02a00030.
Kohn, Eduardo. 2007. “How Dogs Dream: Amazonian Natures and the Politics of Transspecies Engagement.” American Ethnologist 34 (1): 3–24. doi:10.1525/ae.2007.34.1.3.
———. 2015. “Anthropology of Ontologies.” Annual Review of Anthropology 44 (1): 311–27. doi:10.1146/annurev-anthro-102214-014127.
Malkki, Liisa. 1992. “National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the Territorialization of National Identity Among Scholars and Refugees.” Cultural Anthropology 7 (1): 24–44. doi:10.1525/can.1992.7.1.02a00030.
Mazzarella, William. 2010. “The Myth of the Multitude, or, Who’s Afraid of the Crowd?” Critical Inquiry 36 (4): 697–727. https://doi.org/10.1086/655209.
Middleton, Townsend. 2013. “Anxious Belongings: Anxiety and the Politics of Belonging in Subnationalist Darjeeling.” American Anthropologist 115 (4): 608–21. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.12051.
Ortner, Sherry B. 1984. “Theory in Anthropology Since the Sixties.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 26 (1): 126–66.
———. 2016. “Dark Anthropology and Its Others: Theory Since the Eighties.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (1): 47–73. http://www.haujournal.org/index.php/hau/article/view/hau6.1.004.
Robbins, Joel. 2013. “Beyond the Suffering Subject: Toward an Anthropology of the Good.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19 (3): 447–62. doi:10.1111/1467-9655.12044.
Sahlins, Marshall. 1981. Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities: Structure in the Early History of the Sandwich Islands Kingdom. Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press.
———. 1988. “Cosmologies of Capitalism: The Trans-Pacific Sector of “the World System”.” Proceeedings of the British Academy 74: 1–51. https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/sites/default/files/74p001.pdf.
———. 1992. “The Economics of Develop-Man in the Pacific.” Res 21: 13–25.
———. 1996. “The Sadness of Sweetness: The Native Anthropology of Western Cosmology.” Current Anthropology 37 (3): 395–428. doi:10.1086/204503.
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. (2003) 2016. Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-137-04144-9.
Wolf, Eric R. 1982. Europe and the People Without History. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Yeh, Rihan. 2012. “Two Publics in a Mexican Border City.” Cultural Anthropology 27 (4): 713–34.
ANTH 3601: Contemporary theory and anthropology
General info: About this seminar, Summary of topics and readings, The key tasks of collaborative editing
Seminars: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | B | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14
Assignments: Weekly reflections, Various contributions to an online, collaborative knowledge base, Debate brief, Proposal of possible topics, Annotated bibliography, Literature review essay
Discussions:
| Week 1: Anthropology as a great conversation | 2020/03/18 00:07 | 1 Comment |