| source Georgetown (X) |
level |
department Culture and Politics (X) |
Credits: 3
Score: 11.823672 Details | Listing | Web page
Credits: 3
Score: 11.823672 Details | Listing | Web page
Through the study of recent anthropological research centering on Europe, students explore a number of important themes including the transformation of rural and urban life, class consciousness and conflict, gender ideologies, affirmations of ethnicity and nationalism, the role of political ritual and collective memory in the construction of regional and national identities as well as the exchange of commodities and the cultural logic of consumption in the core of advanced capitalism.
Score: 11.823672 Details | Listing | Web page
Permission of SFS Dean's Office required.
Score: 11.823672 Details | Listing | Web page
Permission of SFS Dean's Office required.
Score: 11.823672 Details | Listing | Web page
Honors students only. Permission of SFS Dean's Office required.
Score: 11.823672 Details | Listing | Web page
Honors students only. Permission of SFS Dean's Office required.
Score: 11.823672 Details | Listing | Web page
This course will explore the power of cultural values and attitudes to promote or resist progress. We will analyze the traditional explanations like imperialism, dependency and racism to explain the troubling gaps of well-being in the 21st century. We will also look at the role of cultural values as determinants of why some countries and ethnic groups are better off than others. Specifically we will study how culture affects the extent in which societies achieve or fail to achieve progress in economic development and political democratization; view that culture, not politics, determines the success of a society; view that politics can change a culture and save it from itself; case studies on culture and economics; political development and social development; gender, cultural assets for poverty alleviation, etc.
Score: 11.823672 Details | Listing | Web page
Credits: 3
Score: 11.823672 Details | Listing | Web page
Credits: 3
Score: 11.823672 Details | Listing | Web page
This course will begin with a critical examination of a variety of theoretical frames through which western European and American social scientists have attempted to define, describe, and inscribe non-western societies and cultures. Each model will be seen to ask a different set of questions and, therefore, to elicit a different set of answers to inquiries which have concerned social scientists. Anthropological investigation, which historically involved the fieldwork enterprise of constructing ethnographies through participant-observation, will be reconsidered in light of recent post-colonial and post-modern critiques. The last part of the course will focus on selected issues of social organization and identity politics. These topics will be filtered through the various prisms created by the theoretical models set out in the first part of the course. Spring.
Score: 11.823672 Details | Listing | Web page
Credits: 3
Score: 11.823672 Details | Listing | Web page
Credits: 3
Score: 11.823672 Details | Listing | Web page
Examining various theories on perception and subjectivity, this course will look at how film emerges as the quintessential modern object. The course will interrogate how viewing moving images is tied to a circuit of desire. Instead of seeing "postmodernism" as a separate moment in cultural production, we will be exploring how film and its relationship to other visual images maps different routes of desire and subjectivity. Students may not take this course if they have taken ENGL-108. Spring.
Score: 11.823672 Details | Listing | Web page
An overview of the ways in which anthropologists have studied and written about cultural systems in a number of world regions. Using ethnographic case studies, the course explores the nature of anthropological research, concentrating on various schools of thought, including functionalism and structuralism, as well as contemporary perspectives that inquire into modernity, globalization, migration, and historical approaches to ethnography. The anthropologists we will be reading examine such issues as political organization, cosmology, the relationship between ritual and environmental conservation, gender roles and domestic labor, and tourism.
Score: 11.823672 Details | Listing | Web page
This course considers how indigenous peoples might be thought of as "speaking" in key narratives of Spanish's conquering and colonizing activity in the New World. We will read travel accounts, letters, and histories written both by Europeans and New World peoples. We will discuss how individual and collective, Old and New World views shape these stories, offering quite disparate perspectives on early contact among members of previously unacquainted nations. Particular attention will be devoted to the problems involved in reconstructing New World cultures on the basis of these narratives. Selections include: Christopher Columbus's diary and letters about the Discovery; Bartolome de las Casas's polemical treatise on the unlawfulness of Spain's colonization, Hernan Cortes's account of his encounter with Montezuma; Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca's account of shipwreck and survival among natives; Pedro Cieza de Leon chronicle of the discovery and conquest of Peru; Garcilaso de la Vega's portrayals of the Inca empire and its religion. We will also read the experiences of Englishmen in Virginia, i.e. Thomas Harriot. Students are asked to reflect on the relationship among storytelling, ideology, and historical truth.
Score: 11.823672 Details | Listing | Web page
Credits: 3
Score: 11.823672 Details | Listing | Web page
This course turns the ethnographic gaze on the societies in the Euro-American core which gave rise to anthropology as an academic discipline. In the seminar we will use paired sets of ethnographic case studies from the same national context in order to investigate changing notions of fieldwork sites, subject communities, research questions, and the notion of culture itself. These case studies will be compared and contrasted in light of the different theoretical models and larger historical circumstances informing them. For example, Scheper-Hughes's Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics (1979), a path breaking study of mental illness in rural Ireland using Durkheimiam theory and psychological models, will be followed by Aretxaga's Shattering Silence (1997). This is an ethnography of the violence and political conflict in the urban West Belfast neighborhoods of Northern Ireland, informed by interpretive anthropology and poststructuralist feminist theory. The course also considers the contemporary fieldwork enterprise and involves consideration of the politics of anthropological research and writing. Through the close study of texts that reflect postcolonial and postmodern critiques of earlier anthropology. Fall.
Score: 11.823672 Details | Listing | Web page
This course explores a number of different formulations about the relationship between culture and politics. Provisionally, culture is seen as a network of shared meanings which provides communities with resources for self-understanding and self-criticism. Politics refers to those activities or processes by which communities make collective decisions which bind their individual members. Readings for the course will be drawn from a variety of sources and disciplines, including political science, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, classics and history. While the purpose of the course is to encourage discussion at a theoretical level, the readings will include a number of studies of specific cultural and political institutions and practices. Spring.
Score: 11.823672 Details | Listing | Web page
Credits: 3
Score: 11.823672 Details | Listing | Web page
Much recent critical attention has been directed at "orientalism" in Western art and literature addressing the East, and the ways in which global power relations define and are defined by the orientalist rhetoric of "East and West." In this course, we will read and discuss some Western writings about the East, including travel diaries (Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad, Langston Hughes's descriptions of Central Asia, and others) and fiction (Leo Tolstoy's Hadji Murat, Pierre Loti's Aziyade, and others). We will also read some Eastern (mainly Ottoman and Turkish) literature which addresses concepts of "self and other," "East and West." Selections will be read from the travel diaries of the Ottoman writer Evliya Celebi, and other Muslim travelers who encountered different cultures. Readings will include poetry from thirteenth-century Anatolian mystic Mevlana Jelaludin Rumi, twentieth-century Turkish leftist Nazim Hikmet, the post-modern Turkish novel The White Castle by Orhan Pamuk, as well as a selection of Turkic epic literature, short stories, and novels. Representations of "East and West" in other arts, including painting, dramatic arts, film, music, and dance will be discussed. Students will be encouraged to react to examples of different arts and literatures both in terms of culturally important aesthetic values and in terms of rhetorical strategies for representing others.
Score: 11.823672 Details | Listing | Web page
Score: 11.823672 Details | Listing | Web page
Score: 11.823672 Details | Listing | Web page
Credits: 3
Score: 11.823672 Details | Listing | Web page
Economic development has been one of the dominant organizing concepts of political and academic discourse for most of the post-1945 period. If, despite the centrality ascribed to it, "catching up with the West" today remains as elusive goal for most of the third world as in the past, this is not because there has not been upward and downward movements on the global ladder of wealth. It is this perpetual and systemic mobility within the world-economy and its provenance, which will form the focal point of this course, and not the historical journey the concept of development undertook or the transformations it underwent over time. We will discuss how ephemeral and short-lived these movements have been when seen from the vantage point of nation-states. Yet, despite the ephemerality of development, the world-economy at the century's end has come to regain and consolidate the globe spanning character it possessed at its beginning which attests to the fact that it is not "national economies" or nation-states which develop but the world-economy as a whole. Investigation of cases of economic mobility, which are of paradigmatic value will therefore allow us to formulate development and depict processes that frame it in a light different from that conveyed by the concept of "national development."
Score: 11.823672 Details | Listing | Web page