Introduction to Anthropology - Spring 2011 – Queensborough Community College

Instructor: Rachel Signer,

adjunct lecturer

E-mail:

Office hours:

Course: SS-110, Anthropology

Prerequisites: BE122 or BE226

Hours/credits: 3 hours = 3 credits

Course description and objectives:

Anthropology has been described, throughout its history, as the study of: culture, “man,”
difference, evolution, civilization, the past, “tribal peoples,” and processes of change.

Studying anthropology, therefore, requires a certain level of metathought. We are not just
studying culture, man, etc.; we are also studying our analyses and representations of those
categories.

In this course we will encounter anthropology through four main work modes: (1) critical
readings of anthropological texts and viewings of (one, maybe two) anthropological films; (2)
analytical writing that reflects on the concepts and practices of anthropology; (3) classroom
discussion and presentations; and (4) an ethnographic research project that students take on
individually or in groups.

Students will gain critical and analytical thinking skills in this course. Students will also have the
experience of developing and implementing an ethnographic research project on the topic of
their choice. Research skills are fundamental in today’s job market, and anthropological subjects
can be useful in fields such as marketing, advertising, non-profit educational or social work,
policy and law, and economics.

Assignments:

(1) Weekly Reflections:

Students will turn in, over the course of the semester, five critical reflections on the
reading assignments. These are not meant to be summaries of the readings. Each
reflection should be 500-700 words long (about a page or less) and refer to the main
ideas in the readings. Additionally students should pose questions in their reflections.
These will be posted on the class Blackboard site no later than the Sunday night
before our class, at 5pm. All students are expected to read their peers’ reflections
every week.

(2) Class Discussion Leaders:

 Each week, two students will come prepared to assist in leading class discussion.
This requires that the leaders read the week’s reflections on Blackboard with extra care,
note some interesting points or questions raised, and add their own ideas, to create a 5-
minute presentation that will help us discuss the week’s readings.

(3) Ethnographic Project:

By about the fourth week of the course, students should identify a field site and an
“ethnos” they want to document. This assignment is meant to allow for creativity,
and students should use it as an opportunity to do something they feel inspired by or
passionate about. For example, you could choose to study a senior citizens’ home, a
particular subway station, a religious or ritualistic event, or an ethnic neighborhood. You
will be using interviews, observation, and/or participant-observation as your
methodology. Partner or group work may be allowed. Students are encouraged to use
multimedia such as photography and film. The end product of this research will be a 10-
minute Power Point presentation for the class, and your final essay (see below).

(4) Final Essay:

All students must turn in a 12-page, double-spaced essay that reflects on their
ethnographic project and the course readings. The general structure of the essay
is a research report that defines in detail the objectives, methods, results, and
conclusions of your research; on top of that you should refer to the course readings
wherever relevant.

Grading:
General class participation and consistent attendance: 15%
Five weekly reflections: 25%
Class presentations: 15%
Ethnographic research project: 25%
Final essay: 20%

Academic Integrity Policy:

This course will not permit plagiarizing, which means the wrongful appropriation, close
imitation, or purloining and publication, of another author's language, thoughts, ideas, or
expressions, and the representation of them as one's own original work (according to
Wikipedia). Students found plagiarizing may fail the course. You must cite your sources.

Week 1, 1/31: Introductions and “What is anthropology?”

Where has anthropology come from and where is it going? We will share our preconceptions of
anthropology, and give our reasons for wanting to be in the class. We will also go over the
syllabus together and discuss the requirements of the course.

Readings for next week:

(1) Claude Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, pg. 1-22 and 35-44

(2) Evans-Pritchard, “Theoretical Beginnings”

(3) Evans-Pritchard, The Nuer, pg. 3-15

(4) Jorge Luis Borges, “The Ethnographer”

Week 2, 2/7: Continue discussion of “What is anthropology?”
What is “culture” and how is it related or opposed to “history” and “nature”? And what
assumptions are built into anthropology’s ideas about culture? We will discuss the importance of
19th-century scientific concepts such as empiricism and positivism. Additionally we will look at
how anthropologists have used concepts such as “structure” and “agency,” the importance of
symbolism in anthropology, and the relationship between language and culture.

Readings for next week:

(1) James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, pg. 5-28

(2) Emily Martin, Bipolar Expeditions, pg. --

(3) Paul Rabinow, Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco, Introduction

Week 3, 2/14: What is Ethnography?

What methods do anthropologists use to do ethnographic research? How do they choose a “field
site” (and an “ethnos”) and how do they collect data? What even counts as “data” in
anthropology? We will consider the concepts of “objectivity” and “subjectivity,” and debate
ethical issues raised by the practice of ethnography.

Readings for next week:

(1) James Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity, pg. 1-24 and 133-144

(2) Melissa Caldwell, “Domesticating the French Fry”

(3) Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development, first page of preface and pg. 21-54

Week 4, CLASS CHANGE: WEDNESDAY, 2/23:

Colonialism, Capitalism, Modernity, and Globalization
What is meant by “Western”? What is it to be “modern”? Following World War II,
anthropologists began to document societies that were transitioning from colonial governance to
independent nation-statehood, particularly in Africa. At the same time, globalization was
bringing Western forms of technology and commercial culture to non-western societies around
the world. We will examine how anthropologists have, in many cases, provided a counter-
narrative to mainstream ideas about these processes.

Readings for next week:

(1) Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, pg. 1-43

(2) Talal Asad, Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter, pg. --

(3) Edward Said, Orientalism, pg. --

Week 5, 2/28: The “Postcolonial Critique”

What happened to anthropology when those who it claimed to speak for began to represent
themselves? Many societies that had been colonized began to produce their own intellectuals in
the second half of the twentieth century. Their work was often dedicated to responding to
Western academic ideas that developed in colonial contexts. We will discuss the power relations
inherent to anthropology as a discipline, and evaluate the impact of postcolonial intellectuals.

NOTE: We will introduce and discuss the ethnographic projects.

Readings for next week:

(1) Saba Mahmood, “Feminist Theory and the Egyptian Islamic Revival”

(2) Kimberle Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins,” Critical Race Reader

(3) Leith Mullings, “Resistance and Resilience”

Week 6, 3/7: Race, Class, and Gender

How has anthropology been transformed by ideas of social justice? As feminism took hold in
U.S. culture in the 1960s and 70s, its ideas also seeped into anthropology. In some ways,
anthropology has problematized feminism by exposing its liberal, Western roots. Meanwhile,
anthropologists who began doing ethnography in what are called “complex” societies shifted the
focus from “culture” to race and class, and the historical, social constructions that underlie
them. In part this was due to the “postcolonial critique” that we studied last week.

Readings for next week:

(1) Nadia Abu El-Haj, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-
Fashioning in Israeli Society, pg. --

(2) Jean and John Comaroff, “Ethnography and the Historical Imagination”

(3) Michael Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism, pg. 1-18

Week 7, 3/14: The Politics of the Past: Archaeology and Historical Anthropology
How can we understand who we are today, without knowing where we’ve come from? While
archaeology and historical anthropology are very different methodologies of understanding the
past, both produce narratives about the present and challenge the idea that culture is “static”
and unchanging.

NOTE: We will present our ethnographic project proposals and students will turn
them in to the professor.

Readings for next week:

(1) Rayna Rapp, “Gender, Body, Biomedicine”

(2) Paul Farmer, Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor,
pg. --
(3) Emily Martin, The Woman In the Body, pg. 1-14 and 139-155

Week 8, 3/21: Medical Anthropology

How has anthropology deconstructed the common belief that disease and health are solely
biological factors? Beyond looking at illnesses such as HIV/AIDS, obesity, and drug abuse,
anthropologists have used ethnography to study cultural beliefs about the body. We will
consider how medical anthropology can be considered a form of “applied anthropology.”

Readings for next week:

(1) Bronislaw Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific, pg. --

(2) Stefan Helmreich, “Replicating Reproduction in Artificial Life, or, the Essence of Life in the
Age of Virtual Electronic Reproduction”

(3) Marcel Mauss, The Gift, pg. --

Week 9, 3/28: Kinship Studies

What does anthropology mean by “kinship,” and how has this concept changed over time? We
will discuss concepts such as belonging and community, and examine how kinship has been
conceived of in drastically different ways as the discipline of anthropology has transformed.

Begin film in class: “The Ax Fight” or “The Feast” by Tim Asch

Readings for next week:

(1) Faye Ginsburg, “Screen Memories: Resignifying the Traditional in Indigenous Media”

(2) John L. Jackson, “An Ethnographic FlimFlam: Giving Gifts, Doing Research, and
Videotaping the Native Subject/Object” in American Anthropologist, March 2004

Week 10, 4/4: Visual Anthropology and Media Studies

How has image-making contributed to the study of culture as well as the production of false
stereotypes? We will examine visuality within anthropology from two angles; one, how it has
been used to document “the other,” and two, how it has been studied as an object of culture.

NOTE: Essay proposal due in class.

Finish Asch film

Readings for next week:

(1) Michel Foucault, “Subjectivity and Truth”

(2) Sigmund Freud, “The Unconscious”

Week 11, 4/11: Subjectivity I: Psychoanalysis and Subject-Formation

How have individuals been made into analytic categories by psychologists, such as founder of
psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud, or social theorists, such as historian Michel Foucault? We will
discuss the idea of the “subject,” and examine a few approaches to the study of subjectivity.

Readings for next week:

(1) Joao Biehl, Vita, “Introduction,” pg. 1-24, and pg. 92-107

(2) Stephania Pandolfo, “The Burning”

NOTE: 4/17 - 4/26  SPRING BREAK (work on your ethnographic projects!)

Week 13, 5/2: Subjectivity II: Ethnographies of the Subject

How have anthropologists approached studying subjectivity? What might be some of the ethical
issues involved in this kind of work? We will discuss our reactions to these ethnographies of
subjectivity, and compare them to other ethnographies we’ve read in the course.

Readings for next week:

(1) Caitlin Zaloom, Out of the Pits, pg. --

(2) Paul Rabinow and George Marcus, Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary, pg.
33-44

(3) Andrew Lakoff, “Preparing for the Next Emergency,” Public Culture Vol 19 (2). 2007.

Week 13, 5/9: Anthropology of “the West”

And finally, anthropologists realized that “otherness” exists within our own society, particularly
as technology advances at a rapid pace. How has ethnography been able to capture Western
society, and how has this new field of study in anthropology transformed the discipline as a
whole?

Week 14, 5/16: Presentations of Ethnographic Projects in Class

Week 15, 5/23: Presentations Continued and Final Essay Due