The aim of this course is to give historical depth to the various understandings of the central theoretical issues which have preoccupied Anthropology since its founding, especially the theme of human unity in diversity. This course will examine the origins of anthropology in Europe and America, with emphasis on how the historical context of the discipline influences the theoretical constructs which are developed. The course will begin with a discussion of the origins of Anthropology in the early European 18th century revolutionary Enlightenment tradition-Rousseau, Kant, Hegel. We will go on to discuss the development of evolutionism and diffusionism in England and Germany during the Imperial 19th century and the emergence of the theories of cultural anthropology of Boas and his group in the United States in the early 20th century. The theories of social anthropology-structural functionalism in Britain and France--Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown, Durkheim and Mauss which emerged at the same time--will be examined. Finally, we will discuss marxism and the theories of French structuralism and American symbolic and interpretive anthropology-the works of Eric Wolf, Claude Levi-Strauss, David Schneider and Clifford Geertz-which flourished in the 1960s and 1970s at the height of the Cold War. The course concludes by glancing forward-towards the theories of post-structuralism and postmodernism which have emerged against this backdrop in the 1980s and 1990s.

Evaluation: Three papers will be required in total: two will be presented in term and the final will take the form of a sit-down exam at the end of the course.
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This course will discuss contemporary issues in Pacific ethnography, with particular focus on Micronesia and Melanesia. Melanesian and Micronesian studies have been at the forefront of theoretical debates on gender, sexuality, history, symbolism, politics, and more recently, colonialism and post-colonialism. These and other topics will be discussed, and students will be encouraged to read and evaluate ethnographies from the 1920's to the present. Course requirements: One in-class presentation and an end-of-term paper.
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This course will discuss various approaches to qualitative research-positivist, interpretivist, critical and discourse analysis. It will discuss the main methodological issues which arise in adopting one approach over the other. Specific methods of formulating and completing a research project will be examined. A significant part of the course will be devoted to teaching students to becoming proficient in the use of qualitative data analysis software, in particular the program Atlas.ti.

Evaluation: Two pieces of work will be required: a paper on methodological issues and the completion of a short project demonstrating proficiency in the use of qualitative data analysis software.

NOTE: This course fulfills the Graduate Center's research/statistics requirement for Cultural Anthropology students.
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ANTH 70600
Foundations of Anthropological Thought: Marx, Weber, Durkheim
Prof. Blim
Fall 2000

This seminar investigates the writings and critical relevance of three founding figures of social science. Emphasis is placed on original text readings and intepretation.
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Why do people define themselves and others in ethnic and national terms? What is a nation? What is nationalism? Where have nations originated from? While ethnic and nationalist sentiments and movements gain ground rapidly within the international arena, some academics argue that ethnicity and nation do not exist in any objective sense. So how do we understand this apparent "contradiction"? Such questions are fundamental to our grasp of modern society and group politics. This course will examine some of the key approaches to ethnicity and nationalism (and transnationalism) through various ethnographic case studies drawn from Africa, Asia, Europe and America. We will explore ethnic and national identities in relation to culture, gender, religion, group rights and transnational communities in a globalized world. Different theoretical positions will be compared to reflect the multiplicity of perspectives.
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This introductory course is intended for non-archaeologists. It provides the basis for more advanced archaeology courses in the department and prepares students to teach 4 field anthropology courses. The course combines a history of the discipline (from 17th century roots to the present) with an overview of archaeological method and its interaction with changing theoretical orientations. The course then presents a selective overview of world prehistory from the Pleistocene to the rise of the state, making use of case studies drawn from both hemispheres. Throughout the course students are stimulated to consider how they would use course content to build their own course for undergraduate 4 field classes. Museum project, class participation, mid term, final.
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This course is an archaeological survey of prehistoric and early historic cultural developments in South Asia (India, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh) from the Neolithic (7,000 B.C.) through the Chalcolithic, early civilization (Indus Civilization), Vedic and early Buddhist periods. For further information on this course, please contact Prof. Flam at his office: (718) 960-8650 and leave a voice mail message with your telephone number.
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The majority of the world's population is bilingual, and although the United States on the whole is an exception, the increasing bilingualism of cities like New York is central to contemporary cultural and linguistic change. This course is an introduction to the linguistic and cultural aspects of bilingualism, on the individual as well as societal level. Topics include: bilingualism and bidialectalism, language shift or maintenance, the relationship between bilingualism and intelligence, the role of bilingualism in identity-particularly as mediated by speakers' race, class, and gender, and the repercussions of linguistic and cultural contact. Bilingual language acquisition, from a comparative perspective, will be a primary focus on the individual level. On the societal level, students will be able to compare bilingual situations throughout the world via an analysis of language ideologies and specific national language policies, particularly those that affect education and labor.

Course requirements include a mid term exam, and papers on some aspect of (1) bilingual language acquisition and (2) national language policy/ language ideology.
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This course provides a general introduction to genetics and human biological variation. We assume that most of the students taking this course have had little exposure to basic molecular genetics, population genetics, or the mathematics required for simple genetic description and analysis. Therefore, these subjects will be covered in some detail at the beginning of the course. We will then examine biological variation at the genetic and morphological level among and within modern human populations and molecular diversity within the primate order.
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The course reviews the nature of connections between well tested processes and mechanisms of evolutionary biology and the sundry assumptions and underpinnings of various taxonomic and systematic methods. The aim is to make clear the nature of relationships between taxonomy and population biology through time, and connect with the macroevolutionary patterns seen today and in the fossil record. A range of selected topics are examined in light of the central themes of the course which are a) mechanisms that resulting in processes and affecting the adaptive evolution of whole organisms (ontogenies) in populations, b) the interpretation of the fossil record of these lineages through time, and c) the relationship of phylogenetic analysis and its taxonomic expression. Many controversies which are currently simmering in both evolutionary biology and taxonomy will be identified, their history traced, and the conflicting issues analyzed. Both theoretical and empirical methodologies, in general, and in evolutionary biology and systematics in particular, will be examined. The issues of development, functional and adaptational aspects of organisms, genesis of species diversity through time and in changing geographical contexts, and the tempo and mode of evolution are the key areas which will form the bases of an attempted systematic synthesis between evolutionary biology and systematics.
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This course provides a detailed examination of current problems and debates in the study of primate evolution. It considers the practical and theoretical issues concerned with evaluating the fossil evidence. Problems will include those relating to phylogenetic interpretation, taxonomy, paleobiological and paleoecological reconstruction. The aim is for students to intensively review the literature, discuss and critically evaluate the evidence, formulate plausible interpretations, and propose possible new avenues of research.

One of the main aims of this course is for students to immerse themselves in the primary literature covering major research problems, rather than just read a few review articles. For each topic there will be a series of assigned REQUIRED readings (20-30 papers) that represent selected key publications in the research area. We will discuss availability of these papers during the first class. These papers should be read BEFORE the relevant class meeting, so that significant discussion can be included. Part of your grade will depend on your participation in these discussions.

Each student will be expected to prepare 4? 10-page papers critically reviewing a topic and its associated debate. The coordination of students and topics will be arranged early in the course. There will also be a final exam, including both written and practical (identification) parts.

For those students who feel that they need a general introduction to the topics that we will be covering, the best source is John Fleagle's book Primate Adaptation and Evolution (2nd ed., 1999). Also see Encyclopedia of Human Evolution and Prehistory (2nd ed, 2000, ed. E. Delson et al.).
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This seminar attempts to develop an anthropology ? and by extension an a poetics -- of the imagination. It will be centered around what the French poet and art critic Yves Bonnefoy calls the arrière-pays -- roughly, the horizon, the hinterland, the beyond -- and the way this hinterland effects our perception, evaluation, and understanding of the foreground, the present-at-hand, the immediate. This hinterland is continually displaced; for, inevitably, its articulation and description constitute new horizons. It seems that our anthropologies have ignored this dimension of social and cultural experience in their descriptions and theorizing. Though a preoccupation of romanticism, it has been largely evaded by formalists theories of poetry and art.

After having looked, superficially to be sure, at the genealogy of the the imagination in the Western world, we will turn to the relationship between imagination and discursive and representational practices. Particular attention will be given to the (rhetorical) role of silence, communicative gaps and their concealment, and that which resists articulation: the intransigent. I am particularly interested in the relationship between notions of closure, completion, and totalization and those of openness, incompletion, and fragmentation (as they are manifested, for example, in aesthetic ideals -- Navaho sand paintings versus Western landscapes -- or in social and cultural ideologies: fundamentalism versus postmodernism). Among the theme s to be considered are conceptions of history (cyclical, linear, oscillating, meaningful, meaningless, purposeful, purposeless, redemptive, damning), of space ("real," symbolic, mythic, static dynamic) and of the transcendent: the ec-static. We will explore the "notion" of the beyond in terms not only of the future ? millennial, apocalyptic, and utopian dreams -- but also of the past: the beyond of both personal and collective memories, their delimitation and cessation) We will look at the construction of desire and hope ( in cargo cults), at the way pain and trauma "anchor" articulation and freeze time, and at memory as private and public memorializations ( as biographical and historical orientation points) that deny time as they celebrate history.

This seminar is for advanced students. A research paper will be required.
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This course focuses on contemporary challenges of multiculturalism and cultural pluralism. We begin by analyzing how relations of globalization have transformed constructions of nationality, race, ethnicity and gender. We then trace popular and academic notions of culture underlying public policy concerning race, ethnicity, class and immigration in the United States. As we critically explore theories of multiculturalism and how these are played out in 'liberal,' 'corporate' and 'radical' directions, we examine a range of sites characterized by competing concepts of culture and relations of power. Seminar participants are encouraged to explore specific problems of contemporary multi-ethnic societies.
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This will take up a range of writings from anthropology, history, philosophy, theology, and law that deal with the concept of tradition. In doing so it will examine such ideas as the invention of tradition, tradition and memory, social practice, authority, common law, authenticity. Among the authors to be read will be Hobsbawm and Ranger, Raymond Williams, MacIntyre, Gadamer, Aries. The course will also draw on material from the Arabic-speaking Middle East in which arguments over tradition, religious and secular, are articulated. Permission of the instructor is necessary to register.
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By way of introduction, this course will examine the emergence of "consumption" as a topic - principally in anthropology, but also in cultural studies and sociology. We will read Arjun Appadurai, Daniel Miller, Michel de Certeau, and some representatives of the Frankfurt and Birmingham schools in order to gain an understanding of why, in the 1980s, the study of consumption took on a legitimacy that it seemed to lack before.

The course will then explore a series of issues in the domain of consumption research, with emphasis on the following: 1. Specific "consumer revolutions" in historical perspective - for example, the emergence of the department store in France; the shift from the colonial truck system to indigenously owned commercial enterprises in Zimbabwe; the take-off of branded soft drinks in Trinidad; the shift to white bread from barley gruel in highland Ecuador. 2. The concept of the commodity chain, with attention to particular chains that have been studied by anthropologists - for example, coffee, polyester, Nikes, narcotics, hamburgers. We will explore how knowledge of the interaction of production and consumption in these chains bears on our understanding of "globalization". 3. The recent marketization of United States society and culture, with an effort to chart the hegemonic discourses and practices that normalize "the cash nexus". 4. Consumption as "Americanization". The emphasis here will be on perceptions held outside the US, and the implications of these perceptions for our understanding of "post-colonialism". 5. Consumption as a site of refusal and resistance, with examples from past and present religious movements and morally motivated boycotts.

In addition to class presentations related to the assigned reading, students will be required to do a consumption-related research project using both interviews and secondary sources, and to write up their results as a term paper.
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