Z. Ngwane
An introduction to the basic ideas and methods of social and cultural anthropology. Examines major theoretical and ethnographic preoccupations of the discipline from its origins to the present, such as family and kinship, production and reproduction, history and modernization, with particular attention to such issues as race and racism, gender and sexuality, class, and ethnicity.
Not open to students who have completed Bryn Mawr Anthropology 102.
Satisfies the Social Justice requirement.
Z. Ngwane
What is it that rituals actually do? Are they enactments (affirmations) of collective ideals or are they arguments about these? Are they media for political action or are they expressions of teleological phenomena? The course is a comparative study of ritual and its place in religious practice and political argumentation. Concrete case studies will include an initiation ritual in South Africa, the Communion Sacrament in Christianity, a Holocaust commemorative site in Auschwitz, and the cult of spirit-possession in Niger. Emphasis on writing, frequent essays.
Enrollment limited to 20.
Preference to Freshmen and Sophomores. Cross-listed in Religion.
Z.Ngwane
A comparative exploration of the socio-cultural politicsof gender, with particular reference to masculinity, the course combines an intellectual historical approach (i.e.) how the related notions of maleness, manhood and masculinity have featured in the history of social thought and a thematic focus on issues such as the men's movements, popular culture, queer movement, etc. While the course will be grounded on an anthropological notion of the social basis of power, culture and identity formation, the readings will nonetheless be interdisciplinary -- including historical narratives, literature and film, ethnographies (from Africa and the United States) and critical work from fields such as queer, feminist and postcolonial studies. Cross-listed in Gender and Sexuality Studies. Limited to 25.
Staff
The cultural construction of gender and sexuality, kinship, inheritance, and marriage; the performative dimensions of sexual identity; the cultural politics of motherhood; myths of matriarchy; ideologies of masculinity and femininity.
M. Gillette
In this course we examine artisanal and artistic production, and how such productive systems intertwine with other aspects of social organization, such as kinship and gender, and are affected by large-scale forces, such as marketization and globalization. Students will conduct independent research on a small-scale producer in the Philadelphia area.
Prerequisite: Anthropology 102 or 103.
L. Hart
This course looks at the social and cultural foundations of a category of things referred to as “art.” We examine the properties of these things and of the people who make, trade, exhibit, and look at art, and ask why they (we) do that. This involves a) understanding, and making theory about, the general development of the concept and uses of “art” in European civilization, as well how and why objects from “exotic” (that is, colonized) societies (in particular Africa, Native America, and Australia) have been identified and collected as a particular kind of art (“primitive art”) and b) exploring the “power of images” in diverse societies and social contexts. These questions allow us to challenge our received conceptions of what art is and does and to broaden our understanding of human creativity beyond conventional notions of art, taste, and value, and power. Prerequisite: One course in Anthropology or consent of the instructor
M. Gillette
Examines the history and development of anthropology's relationship to the visual, focusing particularly on ethnographic film. Explores the relationship between ethnographic texts and visual ethnographic materials in socio-cultural anthropology. Visual ethnography investigated as a mode for representing culture and a site of cultural practice. Special attention paid to questions of collaboration and documentary for social change. Students produce ethnographic films in crews for final projects.
Prerequisite: Anthropology 102 or 103
M. Gillette
What kinds of uses, values, and meanings do people attribute to objects? Why do museums exist as special sites for housing objects? What do museums do to objects, how, and why? This course is a comparative and historical introduction to museums and objects, and an overview of the kinds of things anthropologists do in and around museums. Students conduct research on museums (museums as the object of research) and museum research (research as museum professionals).
Limited to 15.
Z. Ngwane
Education and schooling in anthropological literature. We will compare the concepts of "socialization" in British Social Anthropology with "cultural transmission" in American Cultural Anthropology to look for the different ways in which the role of education in social reproduction and transformation has been framed over time. In addition to basic works by thinkers Ike, Durkheim, Malinowski, Mead, Benedict and Boas, et al, we will also read a selection of ethnographies of schooling from the United States, Africa and Japan.
Prerequisite: Anthropology 102 or 103.
Limited to 25.
Preference given to Anthropology majors, minors, Education minors, concentrators.
M. Gillette
This course explores issues of power and its operation through examining women and women’s experience. Course readings combine theoretical materials on power and women’s empowerment with ethnographic studies of women in specific contexts. We consider women’s position, agency, and subjectivity.
Prerequisite: Anthropology 102 or 103 or one course in Gender and Sexuality Studies
Staff
Exploration of the impact of globalization on everyday life from an anthropological perspective. In this course, we will investigate the relationship between local cultures and global forces in particular settings and in the lives of actors including consumers, workers, migrants, and tourists. In addition to reading selected examples of writing on globalization in other social sciences and the popular press, we will focus upon anthropological approaches to global phenomena such as consumption, labor, and social movements and the challenges they pose to theories of "culture."
Prerequisite: Anthropology 102 or 103, or consent of the instructor
Staff
This course surveys ethnographic accounts of everyday life, community, and modernization in rural and urban Europe in the context of a critical study of the concept of Europe in anthropology. What it means to be "European" and how concepts of "Europe" have influenced the anthropological enterprise.
Prerequisite: one course in anthropology.
L. Hart
This course focuses on pluralism and cultural interaction in circum-Mediterranean societies. It includes such topics as: orientalism and the problematics and politics of ethnographic production in and on “peripheral” societies; the use and abuse of concepts of cultural continuity; ethno-religious interaction in rural and urban settings; imperial legacies and nation-state ideologies in 21st century cultural politics; local and transnational economic systems; migration patterns, conflicts, and contemporary social transformations.
Prerequisite: one course in anthropology or Global History.
M. Gillette
This course is a basic introduction to the anthropology of China. We investigate family, religion, and politics, paying particular attention to "the problem of women," as anthropologists and the Chinese Communist Party have termed the study of gender relations and gendered representations. The scope of our inquiry is about one century: we begin with traditional China and end with the present. Our primary site is the Chinese mainland (rather than Taiwan, Hong Kong, or the Chinese diaspora). Our goals include learning specific information about China, Chinese society, and Chinese culture; examining a range of diverse anthropological approaches to the study of human beings; and exploring the political dimensions of representation.
Prerequisite: one course in anthropology or East Asian Studies.
Z. Ngwane
Through analysis of the development of writing in colonial and apartheid South Africa this course examines the "crisis of representation" of the past two decades in literature and anthropology. We will consider debates about the textual status of ethnographic monographs and the more general problem of writing and social power. Specifically we will look at how such writing contributed to the construction and transformation of black subjectivity. Selected texts: 19th and 20th century texts by black South Africans including life narratives, particularly collaborated autobiographical texts by women in the 1980's.
Prerequisite: one course in literature or anthropology.
Enrollment limited to 30.
Preference given to Anthropology majors, minors, Comp Lit and Africana Studies concentrators.
Cross-listed in Comparative Literature.
Staff
This course considers politics as what groups of people do to affect their social conditions, and examines how their ability to affect those conditions is organized and controlled. Through the reading of ethnography and anthropological theory, we will raise questions about how "leaderless" societies organize social action, about the interrelations of gender, bodies, and politics, and about the ways in which power is exercised and contested in different societies. We will discuss how modern states rose and what impact they have had on the peoples they incorporate and on options for political action in contemporary complex global political systems.
Prerequisite: Anthropology 102 or 103.
L. Hart
The comparative study of ethnic identity and collective violence. Ideological systems of classification and differentiation, such as kinship, race, class, ethnicity, and nationality. Case studies of contemporary struggles and conflicts, informed by classic and recent anthropological theory.
Prerequisite: one other course in Anthropology or Peace Studies or consent of the instructor.
Satisfies the Social Justice requirement.
M. Gillette
The social aspects of memory. Collective representations and memorial genres. Institutional memory and the effects of institutions on individual memory. Memory in oral and literate societies. Memory as a political act and a tool of political legitimacy. Mourning and trauma. Role of narrative in memory and the relationship between non-narrative forms and memory. How memory relates to the present and to the past. The course will examine a number of influential theoretical texts on memory and look at selected case studies.
Prerequisite: one course in anthropology or consent of the instructor
L. Hart
Space, place and architecture in anthropological theory; the contributions of anthropology to our understanding of the built and imagined environment in diverse cultures. Topics include: the body and its orientation in space; the house, kinship and cosmology; architecture as a communicative/semiotic system; space and sociopolitical segregation and integration; space, architecture and commodity culture; modernism and post-modernism in architectural theory; social inequality and the politics of space (from Haussman to Lagos.)
Prerequisite: one other course in anthropology or Cities or consent of the instructor.
May be taken for Bryn Mawr Cities credit.
L. Hart
This course traces areas of convergence of anthropology and psychoanalysis from the beginnings of the discipline of anthropology to the present. Selected topics include kinship, society and the self; sexual difference; the interpretation of dreams; ethnography and clinical practice (listening, transference and countertransference); magic and fetishism; individual and collective violence.
Prerequisite: Anthropology 102 or 103.
Staff
This course traces the development of anthropological thought in the West. We examine the major thinkers of British, French, and American schools of anthropological thought and investigate how their ideas are applied in ethnographic writing. Students will read social theorists such as Durkheim, Marx, Weber and Foucault as well as major anthropologists like Boas, Hurston, Malinowski, Geertz, Turner, Ortner and Appadurai. The course concludes with a discussion of the emerging concerns of the discipline in the 21st century.
Prerequisite: Anthropology 102 or 103. Not open to students who have taken Anthropology 303 at Bryn Mawr.
L. Hart
Anthropology as a discipline concerned with the translation of cultures. Propositions concerning "modes of thought" or "belief" in traditional and modern societies, debates about rationality and models of social and cultural evolution.
Prerequisite: Anthropology 102 or 103
Staff
Qualitative research methods, with a focus on participant-observation. Theoretical debates, ethical questions, and practical issues concerning the craft of ethnographic field work will both be addressed. Students will conduct several small-scale field exercises and design and implement a larger ethnographic project.
Prerequisite: Anthropology 102 or 103
Preference given to anthropology majors and minors
L. Hart
This class is an intensive reading workshop on contemporary ethnography with an emphasis on questions of the anthropological representation of marginalized groups and on the predicaments of contemporary life in the context of globalization and social change. We discuss how the craft of anthropology draws on its disciplinary resources to address these predicaments and to communicate its insights. We interrogate the complex and changing relations between ethnography and the concept of “culture.” As we explore the ethnographies, we read work by theorists who have informed the ethnographers. The intention of the course is to deepen students’ understanding of the history, theory, and uses of anthropology through its application in ethnography, and to develop students’ capacity to read deeply and learn from ethnographic work that treats subjects and lives unfamiliar to them.
Prerequisite: Anthropology 303
Z. Ngwane
An examination of recent trends in reflection on modernity in the human and social sciences. This course addresses questions about social subjectivity, globalization, and the endurance of modernity through a number of ethnographic snapshots from different parts of the world.
Prerequisite: Anthropology 303
M. Gillette
This course explores capitalism from an anthropological perspective. We combine study of theoretical work on capitalist processes and the nature of capitalism with ethnographic studies of how capitalism operates in particular places at particular times. Our work includes examining and producing materials in multiple media, including written texts, film, and oral presentations. Students will conduct ethnographic studies of capitalisms over the course of the semester, and will work together in crews to make films about capitalisms. Each crew will produce at least two short films.
Prerequisite: Anthropology 207 or 303 or consent of the instructor
Staff
Advanced work in the study of an ethnographic area offered in the department. In addition to ethnographic monographs, course materials will include missionary records, memoirs, and realist fiction where appropriate. The course is intended to develop skills of social and cultural analysis and to deepen the student's understanding of an ethnographic area.
Prerequisite: One course in an appropriate ethnographic area or consent of instructor.
M. Gillette
This course focuses on the production and collecting practices of Chinese porcelain. It provides a basic introduction to research on material culture, Chinese high-fired ceramics, and the practices of collectors and porcelain producers. Students who complete this class will gain a good basic understanding of the technical and social aspects of Chinese ceramic production, forms and decoration of Chinese ceramics, the porcelain center of Jingdezhen, and the political and cultural aspects of Chinese porcelain consumption. In addition to engaging with course materials, each student will design and complete a major independent research project related to ceramics or an aspect of Chinese material culture.
Prerequisite: one course in anthropology or consent of the instructor
Staff
Senior Theses Seminar: Theory and Practice is the first of a two course sequence for seniors in Anthropology. The seminar includes readings in contemporary social and cultural theory as well as methods of research. Students begin ethnographic field work, complete a literature review, design a research methodology and write a thesis prospectus. Also includes discussion of career opportunities after graduation.
Prerequisite: Senior standing in Anthropology at Haverford.
Staff
Supervised Research and Writing is the second in the two-course sequence for seniors in Anthropology. Students will complete a thesis, give an oral presentation on their research, and take an oral exam.
Prerequisite: Senior standing in Anthropology at Haverford.
Staff
Discussion leader and course assistant in Anthropology 103 or other designated anthropology course. Includes responsibility for selected tutorials. Final paper.
Prerequisite: senior standing in anthropology and consent of the instructor.
Staff
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