Spring 2007 Course Descriptions

Prof. Mullings -The African Diaspora
This seminar incorporates interdisciplinary perspectives to explore culture, community and politics in the African diaspora. Among other topics, the seminar will consider: the multiple meanings of diaspora; capitalism, enslavement and the role of African descended people in the making of the modern world; kinship, gender and community; regimes of racism, politics and resistance; cultural production and practices in the African diaspora. We will reflect on such questions as: How have boundaries, identities and communities been constructed through time and space? How have women intervened in diasporic culture and politics? How has globalization interacted with diasporic formations? How can we theorize the articulation of class, race and gender? What are the competing visions of community and politics? What are the limitations of a diasporic framework? Although the course takes a cross-cultural perspective, there will be some emphasis on the north African-American experience and freedom struggle.
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Prof. Bendix - Core Course in Linguistic Anthropology
The study of human verbal behavior, exploring how languages are internally organized as codes of communication, how they are similar under their surface differences in the kinds of information they must allow speakers to express, and how in communicating we create meaning as individuals out of the only physical manifestaton of language, namely the noises we make at one another when speaking or the marks we create on surfaces in writing. Topics include the cognitive organization of languages' speech sounds in their speakers' heads; grammar as internalized code for signaling meaning relations within sentences and the structuring of information across sentences in discourse; hearers' pragmatic interpretation of messages in context using conversational principles of interaction, beliefs about the world, and common sense reasoning; the organization of language in society and nation; language ideology and the construction and maintenance of different individual and national identities; the sociopolitical construction of the concept "a language"; reconstructing sociocultural prehistory through linguistic evidence.
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Prof. Blim - Social Democracy
The seminar explores the origins and development of social democracy as one of the alternatives that emerged among political movements in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries seeking to alter patterns of inequality and privilege set loose by the Industrial Revolution. We analyze the concept of social democracy, its successes, as well as the profound economic and political shifts at the end of the century that exposed its limits, contradictions, and ushered in its decline. We also consider the extent to which social democracy by the mid-20th Century proved an historically viable vehicle for collective well being in countries outside the Euro-American centers of capitalism. Finally the seminar considers the prospects for new social democracies transformed by present circumstances as against other contemporary alternatives presented by global justice movements and the rise populist/socialist governments such as those in Latin America.
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PhD Program in Anthropology - The CUNY Graduate Center
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