Courses - Fall 2024

For information on class days and times, enrollment limits, enrollment status, course fees and classroom locations, visit the Online Directory of Classes at http://www.columbia.edu/cu/bulletin/uwb/  

Registration begins for most Schools on Monday, April 15, 2024.

 

COURSES IN SOCIOCULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY:

Anthropology UN1002x THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURE. 3 pts. Instructor: Kaya Williams. The anthropological approach to the study of culture and human society. Case studies from ethnography are used in exploring the universality of cultural categories (social organization, economy, law, belief system, art, etc.) and the range of variation among human societies.

Anthropology UN2004x INTRO TO SOCIAL & CULTURAL THEORY. 3 pts. John Pemberton. This course presents students with crucial theories of society, paying particular attention at the outset to classic social theory of the early 20th century. It traces a trajectory of writings essential for an understanding of the social: from Saussure, Durkheim, Mauss, Weber, and Marx, on to the structuralist ethnographic elaboration of Claude Levi-Strauss and the historiographic reflections on modernity of Michel Foucault. We revisit periodically, reflections by Franz Boas, founder of anthropology in the United States (and of Anthropology at Columbia), for a sense of origins, an early anthropological critique of racism and cultural chauvinism, and a prescient denunciation of fascism. We turn as well, also with ever-renewed interest in these times, to the expansive critical thought of W. E. B. Du Bois. We conclude with Kathleen Stewart’s A Space on the Side of the Road--an ethnography of late-twentieth-century Appalachia and the haunted remains of coal- mining country--with its depictions of an uncanny otherness within dominant American narratives.

Anthropology UN2017x MAFIAS AND OTHER DANGEROUS AFFILIATIONS. 3 pts. Instructor: Naor Ben-Yehoyada. Regimes of various shapes and sizes tend to criminalize associations, organizations, and social relations that these ruling powers see as anathema to the social order on which their power depends: witches, officers of toppled political orders, alleged conspirators (rebels, traitors, terrorists, and dissidents), gangsters and mafiosi, or corrupt officers and magnates. Our main goal will be to understand how and under what conditions do those with the power to do so define, investigate, criminalize and prosecute those kinds of social relations that are cast as enemies of public order. We will also pay close attention to questions of knowledge – legal, investigative, political, journalistic, and public – how doubt, certainty, suspicion and surprise shape the struggle over the relationship between the state and society. The main part of the course is organized around six criminal investigations on mafia-related affairs that took place from the 1950s to the present (two are undergoing appeal these days) in western Sicily. After the introductory section, we will spend two weeks (four meetings) on every one of these cases. We will follow attempts to understand the Mafia and similarly criminalized organizations, and procure evidence about it. We will then expand our inquiry from Sicily to cases from all over the world, to examine questions about social relations, law, the uses of culture, and political imagination.

*Although this is a social anthropology course, no previous knowledge of anthropology is required or presumed. Classroom lectures will provide necessary disciplinary background.

Anthropology UN3040x ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY. 3 pts. Instructor: Brian Larkin. Comprehensive and in-depth engagement with foundational and contemporary theoretical concepts and texts in Anthropology. Required of all Barnard students majoring in Anthropology (including specialized tracks). Permission of instructor required for non-majors. Not open to First Year students.
Prerequisite: an introductory (1000 level) course in Anthropology.

Anthropology UN3091x DISABILITY. 3 pts. Instructor: Mara Green. Drawing both from anthropology and Disability Studies, this course centers disability in its many manifestations and meanings – as lived experience, as organizing discourse, and as analytic framework – in sociocultural settings across multiple countries. Through explorations of a range of scholarly and other materials, many of them produced by people who identify as deaf, disabled, and/or neurodivergent, we will ask what the stakes are – intellectually, socially, politically - for different ways of doing, thinking, and representing disability.

Anthropology UN3160x BODY AND SOCIETY. 3 pts. Instructor: Gina Jae. As an introduction to the field of medical anthropology, this seminar addresses themes of health, affliction, and healing across sociocultural domains. Concerns include critiques of biomedical, epidemiological and other models of disease and suffering; the entwinement of religion and healing; technocratic interventions in healthcare; and the sociomoral underpinnings of human life, death, and survival. Prerequisite: a 1000 level course in Anthropology is recommended, but not required. Instructors' permission required for non-anthropology majors.

Anthropology UN3356x EARTH WORKS: ANTHROPOLOGY, ART, EXTRACTION. 4 pts. Instructor: Rosalind Morris. This undergraduate seminar is offered to students interested in the anthropological analysis of extractive economies and the social and political forms associated with them, as well as the arts through which they have been made the object of both investment and resistance. The course this semester will be focused on mining, and is organized along three axes: 1) mineral object; 2) socioeconomic form; and 3) aesthetics, with the latter including the arts of artisanal extraction, and literary, visual and media artistic practice. Priority for Anthropology Students. Prerequisites: at least one introductory anthropology course, or permission of the instructor for people from fine arts backgrounds.

Anthropology UN3725x POLITICS OF RECOGNITION. 4 pts. Instructor: Elizabeth Povinelli. This course examines the contemporary history of struggles for recognition, reform and revolution as articulated around the politics of recognition. The course is genealogical in spirit, beginning with a set of texts that have provided the touchstone for contemporary theory and practices of politics and then moving to more recent engagements with the same. Priorities: Advanced Undergraduate, graduate students.

Anthropology UN3811x TOXIC. 4pts. Instructor: Vanessa Agard-Jones. It is no secret by now that we live in a toxic sea. Every day, in every place in this world, we are exposed to an unknown number of contaminants, including those in the places that we live, the air that we breathe, the foods that we eat, the water that we drink, the consumer products that we use, and in the social worlds that we navigate. While we are all exposed, the effects of these exposures are distributed in radically unequal patterns, and histories of racialization, coloniality, and gendered inequality are critical determinants of the risks to wellness that these toxic entanglements entail. Scientists use the term "body burden" to describe the accumulated, enduring amounts of harmful substances present in human bodies. In this course, we explore the global conditions that give rise to local body burdens, plumbing the history of toxicity as a category, the politics of toxic exposures, and the experience of toxic embodiment. Foregrounding uneven exposures and disproportionate effects, we ask how scientists and humanists, poets and political activists, have understood toxicity as a material and social phenomenon. We will turn our collective attention to the analysis of ethnographies, memoirs, maps, film, and photography, and students will also be charged with creating visual and narrative projects for representing body burden of their own. Prerequisite: Instructor’s permission. To apply, please contact [email protected].

Anthropology UN3835x AIR MATTERS. 4 pts. Instructor: María José de Abreu. This course focuses on conceptualizing air across cultures, time and space. If western episteme has long relied on earthbound vocabularies in order to edify its modernizing project, what happens when we set to rethink its basic premises through aerial logics? Can we even suggest adopting an air perspective or point of view without falling back into those very earthbound terms on which knowledge has long been made to be grounded? Adopting a multidisciplinary approach, this course proposes to analyze plural histories of the air that have not been sufficiently acknowledged. Drawing on a variety of cultural and historical examples, each week will entail ungrounding air through a particular subject-matter: medical, legal, war, race, gender, religion, media and technology, pollution and climate change, design, art and architecture, cities and countryside, the future of masks, or exoplanet atmospheres.

Anthropology UN3888x DARK ECOLOGIES: ECOCRITICISM NOW. 4 pts. Instructor: Marilyn Ivy. This seminar aims to show what an anthropologically informed, ecocritical cultural studies can offer in this moment of intensifying ecological calamity. The course will not only engage significant works in anthropology, ecocriticism, philosophy, literature, politics, and aesthetics to think about the environment, it will also bring these works into engaged reflection on living in the end times (borrowing cultural critic Slavoj Zizeks phrase). The seminar will thus locate critical perspectives on the environment within the contemporary worldwide ecological crisis, emphasizing the ethnographic realities of global warming, debates on nuclear power and energy, and the place of nature. Drawing on the professors long experience in Japan and current research on the aftermath of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant disaster, the seminar will also take care to unpack the notion of end times, with its apocalyptic implications, through close considerations of works that take on the question of ecocatastrophe in our times. North American and European perspectives, as well as international ones (particularly ones drawn from East Asia), will give the course a global reach. Prerequisites: the instructor’s permission.

Anthropology UN3921x ANTICOLONIALISM. 4pts. Instructor: David Scott. Through a careful exploration of the argument and style of five vivid anticolonial texts, Mahatma Gandhi's Hind Swaraj, C.L.R. James' The Black Jacobins, Aimé Césaire's Discourse on Colonialism, Albert Memmi's Colonizer and Colonized, and Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, this course aims to inquire into the construction of the image of colonialism and its projected aftermaths established in anti-colonial discourse.BC: Fulfillment of General Education Requirement: Cultures in Comparison (CUL).

Anthropology UN3947x. TEXT, MAGIC, PERFORMANCE. 4 pts. Instructor: John Pemberton. This course pursues interconnections linking text and performance in light of magic, ritual, possession, narration, and related articulations of power. Readings are drawn from classic theoretical writings, colonial fiction, and ethnographic accounts. Domains of inquiry include: spirit possession, trance states, séance, ritual performance, and related realms of cinematic projection, musical form, shadow theater, performative objects, and (other) things that move on their own, compellingly. Key theoretical concerns are subjectivity - particularly, the conjuring up and displacement of self in the form of the first-person singular I - and the haunting power of repetition. Retraced throughout the course are the uncanny shadows of a fully possessed subject --within ritual contexts and within everyday life. This is a Global Core Course.
The permission of the instructor is required.

Anthropology UN3976x ANTHROPOLOGY OF SCIENCE. 4 pts. Instructor: Gina Jae. This course examines specific debates in the history and philosophy of science, and in science and technology studies (STS), with a view towards exploring the relationships among science, technology and society. The first half of the course engages methodological questions and theoretical debates concerning the nature of epistemology, and the significance of social interests, material agency, laboratory and social practices, and “culture(s)” in the making of scientific knowledge. The second half delves more specifically into the ways in which sciences and technologies are both embedded in and shape contemporary social and political practices and imaginaries. Prerequisites: non-majors need instructor permission.

Anthropology UN3997x SUPERVISED INDIVIDUAL RESEARCH. 2-6 Pts. Prerequisite: the written permission of the staff member under whose supervision the research will be conducted. Visit the Directory of Classes at http://www.columbia.edu/cu/bulletin/uwb/ for a list of instructors.

Anthropology UN3999x SENIOR THESIS SEMINAR IN ANTHROPOLOGY. 4 pts. Instructor: Audra Simpson. Prerequisites: The instructor’s permission. Students must have declared a major in Anthropology prior to registration. Students must have a 3.6 GPA in the major and a preliminary project concept in order to be considered. Interested students must communicate/meet with thesis instructor in the previous spring about the possibility of taking the course during the upcoming academic year. Additionally, expect to discuss with the instructor at the end of the fall term whether your project has progressed far enough to be completed in the spring term. If it has not, you will exit the seminar after one semester, with a grade based on the work completed during the fall term. This two-term course is a combination of a seminar and a workshop that will help you conduct research, write, and present an original senior thesis in anthropology. Students who write theses are eligible to be considered for departmental honors. The first term of this course introduces a variety of approaches used to produce anthropological knowledge and writing; encourages students to think critically about the approaches they take to researching and writing by studying model texts with an eye to the ethics, constraints, and potentials of anthropological research and writing; and gives students practice in the seminar and workshop formats that are key to collegial exchange and refinement of ideas. During the first term, students complete a few short exercises that will culminate in a substantial draft of one discrete section of their senior project (18-20 pages) plus a detailed outline of the expected work that remains to be done (5 pages). The spring sequence of the anthropology thesis seminar is a writing intensive continuation of the fall semester, in which students will have designed the research questions, prepared a full thesis proposal that will serve as a guide for the completion of the thesis and written a draft of one chapter. Only those students who expect to have completed the fall semester portion of the course are allowed to register for the spring; final enrollment is contingent upon successful completion of first semester requirements. In spring semester, weekly meetings will be devoted to the collaborative refinement of drafts, as well as working through issues of writing (evidence, voice, authority etc.). All enrolled students are required to present their project at a symposium in the late spring, and the final grade is based primarily on successful completion of the thesis/ capstone project. Note: The senior thesis seminar is open to CC and GS majors in Anthropology only. It requires the instructor’s permission for registration. Students must have a 3.6 GPA in the major and a preliminary project concept in order to be considered. Interested students should communicate with the thesis instructor and the director of undergraduate study in the previous spring about the possibility of taking the course during the upcoming academic year. Additionally, expect to discuss with the instructor at the end of the fall term whether your project has progressed far enough to be completed in the spring term. If it has not, you will exit the seminar after one semester, with a grade based on the work completed during the fall term. Requirements: Students must have completed the requirements of the first semester of the sequence and seek instructor approval to enroll in the second.

Anthropology GU4196x MEXICO’S DISAPPEARED PRACTICUM. 3 pts. Instructor: Claudio Lomnitz. This practicum is an exercise in engaged pedagogy. The academic work we do will be conducted for the benefit of the cause of Mexico's now over 110,000 disappeared persons. Students will be engaged in a sustained research effort to development a "context analysis" of disappearances in the state of Zacatecas (Mexico)-- an exercise in social study that focuses on the economic, political, social, and criminological context in which disappearances occur. Research is done in coordination with Mexico's National Commission for the Search of the Disappeared. Alongside the practical, real-world, objective, this Practicum is designed to perfect research skills in the social sciences. PREREQUISITE: Spanish language comprehension is compulsory for 60% of those enrolled.

COURSES IN ARCHAEOLOGY:

Anthropology UN1007x THE ORIGINS OF HUMAN SOCIETY. 3 pts. Instructor: Camilla Sturm. An archaeological perspective on the evolution of human social life from the first bipedal step of our ape ancestors to the establishment of large sedentary villages. While traversing six million years and six continents, our explorations will lead us to consider such major issues as the development of human sexuality, the origin of language, the birth of “art” and religion, the domestication of plants and animals, and the foundations of social inequality. Designed for anyone who happens to be human.

Anthropology UN2028x THINK LIKE AN ARCHAEOLOGIST. 3 pts. Instructor: Hannah Chazin. This course provides a comprehensive introduction to methods and theory in archaeology – by exploring how archaeologists work to create narratives about the past (and the present) on the basis on the material remains of the past. The course begins with a consideration of how archaeologists deal with the remains of the past in the present: What are archaeological sites and how do we ‘discover’ them? How do archaeologists ‘read’ or analyze sites and artifacts? From there, we will turn to the question of how archaeologists interpret these materials traces, in order to create narratives about life in the past. After a review of the historical development of theoretical approaches in archaeological interpretation, the course will consider contemporary approaches to interpreting the past.

Anthropology UN3007x ARCHAEOLOGY BEFORE THE BIBLE. 3 pts. Instructor: Brian Boyd. Please note that this is not a class on “biblical archaeology”. It is a course about the politics of archaeology in the context of Israel/Palestine, and the wider southwest Asia region. This course provides a critical overview of prehistoric archaeology in southwest Asia (or the Levant - the geographical area from Lebanon in the north to the Sinai in the south, and from the middle Euphrates in Syria to southern Jordan). It has been designed to appeal to anthropologists, historians, and students interested in the Ancient Mediterranean and Middle Eastern Studies. The course is divided into two parts. First, a social and political history of archaeology, emphasizing how the nature of current theoretical and practical knowledge has been shaped and defined by previous research traditions and, second, how the current political situation in the region impinges upon archaeological practice. Themes include: the dominance of "biblical archaeology" and the implications for Palestinian archaeology, Islamic archaeology, the impact of European contact from the Crusades onwards, and the development of prehistory.

Anthropology UN3663x THE ANCIENT TABLE: ARCHAEOLOGY OF COOKING AND CUISINE. 4 pts. Instructor: Camilla Sturm.
Prerequisites: None Humans don’t just eat to live. The ways we prepare, eat, and share our food is a complex reflection of our histories, environments, and ideologies. Whether we prefer coffee or tea, cornbread or challah, chicken breast or chicken feet, our tastes are expressive of social ties and social boundaries, and are linked to ideas of family and of foreignness. How did eating become such a profoundly cultural experience? This seminar takes an archaeological approach to two broad issues central to eating: First, what drives human food choices both today and in the past? Second, how have social forces shaped practices of food acquisition, preparation, and consumption (and how, in turn, has food shaped society)? We will explore these questions from various evolutionary, physiological, and cultural viewpoints, highlighted by information from the best archaeological and historic case studies. Topics that will be covered include the nature of the first cooking, beer-brewing and feasting, writing of the early recipes, gender roles and ‘domestic’ life, and how a national cuisine takes shape. Through the course of the semester we will explore food practices from Pleistocene Spain to historic Monticello, with particular emphasis on the earliest cuisines of China, Mesoamerica, and the Mediterranean.

Anthropology UN3723x AMERICAN MATERIAL CULTURE. 4 pts. Instructor: Severin Fowles. This seminar provides an intensive introduction to material culture analysis and its potential in the study of American history. As such, our focus is methodological. Through a mixture of lecture-style presentations and seminar discussions, we consider texts that give intellectual shape to the central questions in modern material culture studies and exemplify a range of applications demonstrating how to engage in serious object-based research. Classroom inquiries will be supplemented by visits to NYC museums (e.g., the American Museum of Natural History and the 9/11 Museum), laboratory practicums (in which we will consider the material remains of a Spanish colonial village, a 1960s Hippie commune, and trash from the Occupy Wall Street movement), and an analysis of consumption patterns and waste streams on Barnard’s campus (otherwise known as “garbology”).

Anthropology UN3812x ACCUSING CORPSE-FORENSIC TRACE.  4 pts.  Instructor:  Zoe Crossland.  This colloqium explores the history of forensic anthropology, and the ways in which it produces the body as evidence. We will consider how truth claims are made based on the evidence of the dead body and follow the ways in which the evidence of the dead is explained and delineated for peers and for different publics by forensic anthropologists. The course will also trace the history and background to forensic anthropology and explore the assumptions around race and ancestry that were folded into its methods and which remain a part of forensic anthropological practice today.  Priorities:  Majors and concentrators in Anthropology and Interdepartmental program in Archaeology. The permission of the instructor is required.

Anthropology UN3823x ARCHAEOLOGY ENGAGED: PAST IN PUB EYE. 3 pts. Instructor: Terence D’Altroy. This course provides a panoramic, but intensive, inquiry into the ways that archaeology and its methods for understanding the world have been marshaled for debate in issues of public interest. It is designed to examine claims to knowledge of the past through the lenses of alternative epistemologies and a series of case-based problems that range from the academic to the political, legal, cultural, romantic, and fraudulent.

Anthropology/History GU4001x THE ANCIENT EMPIRES. 3 pts. Instructor: Terence D’Altroy. The principal goal of this course is to examine the nature and histories of a range of early empires in a comparative context. In the process, we will examine influential theories that have been proposed to account for the emergence and trajectories of those empires. Among the theories are the core-periphery, world-systems, territorial-hegemonic, tributary-capitalist, network, and IEMP approaches. Five regions of the world have been chosen, from the many that could provide candidates: Rome (the classic empire), New Kingdom Egypt, Qin China, Aztec Mesoamerica, and Inka South America. These empires have been chosen because they represent a cross-section of polities ranging from relatively simple and early expansionist societies to the grand empires of the Classical World, and the most powerful states of the indigenous Americas. There are no prerequisites for this course, although students who have no background in Anthropology, Archaeology, History, or Classics may find the course material somewhat more challenging than students with some knowledge of the study of early societies. There will be two lectures per week, given by the professor.

 

CROSS LISTED CLASSES:

CSER UN3935x HISTORY OF THE US-MEXICO BORDER. 4 pts. Instructor: Claudio Lomnitz. In the 1990s, the study of border crossing became an academic rage in the humanities and the social sciences. This was a consequence of globalization, an historical process that reconfigured the boundaries between economy, society and culture; it was also a primary theme of post-modernism, that celebrated the playful combination of disparate historical references. As a result, interest in the US-Mexican border increased dramatically, since that border is the longest and most intensively crossed in the world. The US-Mexico border became a paradigmatic point of reference for an emerging field of Border Studies. Until then, places like Tijuana or El Paso, with their rather seedy reputations, had been of interest principally to local residents, now, all of a sudden, they touted as examples of post-modern “hybridity,” and were supposed to inspire the transnational scholarship that was required. Indeed, the US-Mexican border itself became a symbol, a movable imaginary boundary that marks ethnic and racial distinction in American and Mexican cities. Things have changed since then. Attitudes toward globalization are no longer as cheery, and transnational immigration has become a political football. Sealing off the US-Mexico border has become a popular campaign promise. In the years since 1990, border towns became famously violent and the border acquired a dystopian image. This course is an introduction to the historical formation of the US-Mexican border, from the 19th-century to the present.

RELI GU4425x  CLIMATE, RELIGION AND COLONIALISM. 4 pts.  Instructor:  Raffaella Taylor-Seymour. This course examines intersections between religion and climate through the lens of colonialism. In recent years, scholars across the humanities, social sciences, and physical sciences have suggested that the climate crisis dates to the advent of European colonialism in the 16th and 17th centuries. This literature argues that colonial projects involved the remaking of landscapes via “terraforming,” seeking to inscribe European imaginaries on the land and extract value from it, while violently suppressing and destroying local and Indigenous lifeworlds. At the same time, a longstanding body of literature has investigated the relationship between colonialism and religion, focusing on missionary efforts to remake religious subjects and subjectivities and draw boundaries between true religion and its opposites, “paganism” and “superstition.” This course seeks to understand these two processes within the same frame, examining how colonial projects entailed simultaneous efforts to subjugate, extract value from, and transform people and landscapes. By the end of the semester, students will have deepened and nuanced their understandings of climate, religion, and colonialism, and come away with new ways of thinking about the climate crisis.