Spring 2009 Course Descriptions

Prof. Crehan - Core Cultural Anthropology 2
This course, like 70100 in the fall, is designed to introduce students to current issues, debates, and controversies in cultural anthropology. The course emphasizes the anthropological contribution to the study of such topics as globalization, development, neoliberalism, colonialism/postcolonialism, popular politics, crime, law, hegemony, resistance, diaspora, multiculturalism, history and memory. Students will demonstrate their mastery of course material by writing a mid-term paper and by taking an in-class written exam at the end of the semester.
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Profs. Collins/Goncalves da Silva - Black Atlantic:Magic/Sci/Relig
Increasingly, anthropologists and historians have come to recognize that modernity is a contested and contradictory configuration that emanates not simply from some securely metropolitan Europe, but from unequal exchanges across world regions. However, a supposedly more singular modernity has long been made real in both social scientific theory and geopolitical relations through claims about religion, science, and magic. In this seminar we examine one crucible of modernity—that space often referred to as the Black Atlantic—through ethnographic and historical considerations of these three overlapping fields of knowledge and practice. And we do so by working to build a dialogue between social scientific work from the Atlantic and recent rethinkings of secularism, belief, agency-based definitions of the human and the civilized, and the relationships between magico-religious epistemologies and liberal democratic politics put together in other world regions, principally Asia and the Middle East. Nonetheless, this seminar emanates from a quite specific position, namely a Brazilian engagement with a world of forced labor and commodity production that has somehow become an engine of modernity. This history of Atlantic exchanges, when examined through some of their most expressive knowledge practices and associated political economic formations in the South Atlantic and the Caribbean, may provoke novel insights into the closely related sphere of anthropology. The seminar is thus a political investigation of a somewhat iconoclastically defined world area and of a discipline. It is intended to push students and professors to produce new ways of formulating knowledge and evaluating evidence in relation to pressing contemporary debates.  Participants will therefore be encouraged to reflect critically on ethnographic and archival methods; on the historical conditions in the Atlantic that have done so much to generate, and make possible, ethnographic interpretation; and hence on their own preparation for, and ability, to engage through social scientific investigation that which takes form as the real and the practical today.
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Prof. Davis - Race, Class & Gender
This course focuses on four axes of power: gender, race, and class. First we will examine the constructions of each and then move to examining how the categories complicates and intersects with the other. This means analyzing, for example, the color of gender, the gender of class, and the sexualities of race. In this course, we seek to increase our understanding of the inequities in our society and the consequences of those inequities for different communities and individuals within the nation. While this course will privilege anthropological perspectives, it will necessarily encompass an interdisciplinary approach.

Course Objectives
This course has been developed as a discussion/seminar that will rely on student participation.
After taking this course, students will be able to:
• Analyze and apply the concepts of gender, race, class, sexuality, privilege and intersectionality
• Assess and articulate the contributions of a range of scholars to feminist thought; and
• Develop and conduct an independent analytical research project.
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Prof. Coronil - Anthrohistory of the State
What is the state? How does it affect other realms of society and culture? Can one study any aspect of modern societies without also examining the state? How have the state and its effects been approached in specific studies? This course will explore these questions in order to prepare students to carry out research either about the state or in contexts affected by the state. While engaging strictly theoretical texts and seeking to develop theoretical frames, our focus will be on specific studies, mostly by anthropologists and historians. A major concern of this course is the relationship among political power, the production of subjects, and the control of nature.
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Prof. Smith - The Urban Revolution
The question of revolution has dropped precipitously out of fashion, and yet the history of societies suggests that revolution happens with considerable frequency.  The focus of this course will be urban revolution insofar as the world’s population is now majority urban.  But the urban focus also comes from the work of Henri Lefebvre whose book, Urban Revolution, was recently translated into English.  That book raises the question of revolution in several different ways.  First, urban revolution for Lefebvre means the social transformation whereby cities have increasingly become the engines of social and economic change.  Second, Lefebvre suggest a much bolder argument whereby urbanization actually supersedes industrialization as the core of capital accumulation and the basis of the survival of capitalism.  Third, written in the aftermath of the 1960s uprisings, Lefebvre also thinks through some issues concerning social revolt in the city.  This course will take on a wide range of issues and topics as a way of opening up the question of what urban revolution might look like and what it maybe ought to look like. 
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Prof. Swedell - Primate Models/Human Evolution
This course focuses on scenarios of human evolution with a particular emphasis on those derived from studies of nonhuman primates and modern human foraging societies.  We will survey the literature and critically evaluate the various models and scenarios of hominin ecological and social evolution that have been proposed over the past several decades.  This will be a reading- and discussion-based course, with weekly reading assignments from the primary literature and grades based on participation in class discussions, in-class oral presentations, and written assignments.  To register for this course, you must have taken at least one course in biology or biological anthropology, as prior knowledge of evolutionary theory will be assumed.
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PhD Program in Anthropology - The CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10016-4309
phone: 212.817.8005 fax: 212.817.1501 email:

This departmental publication supplements the official Bulletin of The Graduate School as well as the current Graduate Center Student Handbook and "Announcement of Courses."