NYU Anthropology Courses: Spring 2016
Last Updated: September 21, 2015
MONDAY
2:00pm-4:45pm
Interpreting the Human Skeleton*
ANTH GA 1520
Dr. Scott Williams
Room 706
2:00pm-4:45pm
5:00pm-7:45pm
Molecular Methods
in Biological Anthropology
(with instructor permission)
ANTH GA 3393
Dr. Todd Disotell
Room 403
GIS in Archaeology*
ANTH GA 3398
Dr. Kevin Wiley
Room 706 and
12 Waverly Place, L111
5:00pm-7:45pm
Advanced Topics in Primate Behavior
ANTH GA 3399
Dr. James Higham
Room 612
TUESDAY
9:30am-12:30pm
Topics in Museum Studies:
Anthropology of Museums
MSMS GA 3330.005
Dr. Jane Anderson
Room TBA
11:00am-1:45pm
Video Production II Seminar
(Provisional)
ANTH GA 1219
Dr. Noelle Stout
Room 612
2:00pm-4:45pm
6:00pm-9:00pm
Spirits of Capitalism: Religion
and Economy in Modernity
ANTH GA 3396
Dr. Elayne Oliphant
Room 612
Culture & Media II
ANTH GA 1216
Dr. Faye Ginsburg
KRISER
2:00pm-4:45pm
Semiotics
ANTH GA 3397
Dr. Sonia Das
1st Floor Conference Room
WEDNESDAY
11:00am-1:45pm
Social Theory & Practice II
ANTH GA 1011
Drs. Sally Merry and Rayna Rapp
1st Floor Conference Room
5:00pm-7:45pm
Cities of the Middle East
MEIS-GA 1626
Dr. Michael Gilsenan
Kevorkian Center, LL2
2:00pm-4:45pm
5:00pm-7:45pm
Political Anthropology
ANTH GA 1227
Dr. Bruce Grant
1st Floor Conference Room
The City and the Country
in the Post-Colonial World
ANTH GA 3392
Dr. Thomas Abercrombie
1st Floor Conference Room
5:00pm-7:45pm
Faunal Analysis*
ANTH GA 1212
Dr. Pam Crabtree
Room 706
THURSDAY
10:00am-12:00pm
2:00pm-4:45pm
2:00pm-4:45pm
Video Production II Lab
(Provisional)
ANTH GA 1219
Dr. Noelle Stout
Room 612
Linguistic Anthropology
ANTH GA 1040
Dr. Bambi Schieffelin
1st Floor Conference Room
Paleoanthropology II
ANTH GA 3391
Dr. Shara Bailey
Room 901
FRIDAY
2:00pm-4:45pm
Professional Development (Bio)**
ANTH GA 3394
Dr. Terry Harrison
Room 706
* Open to advanced undergraduate students with permission of instructor
** meets alternate weeks throughout the academic year
MAINT-GA 4747: Maintaining Matriculation
Section 001, Class Nbr:1425 (MA Students)
Section 004, Class Nbr:1428 (PhD Students who are no longer financial aid eligible)
ANTH-GA 1011: Social Anthropology Theory and Practice II
Introduces the principal theoretical issues in contemporary social anthropology, relating recent theoretical
developments and ethnographic problems to their origins in classical sociological thought. Problems in the
anthropology of knowledge are particularly emphasized as those most challenging to social anthropology and to
related disciplines.
ANTH-GA 1040: Linguistic Anthropology
Introduces and examines the interdependence of anthropology and the study of language both substantively and
methodologically. Topics include the relationship between language, thought, and culture; the role of language in
social interactions; the acquisition of linguistic and social knowledge; and language and speech in ethnographic
perspective.
ANTH-GA 1212 Faunal Analysis
Faunal analysis or zooarchaeology is the study of animal bones recovered from archaeological sites. The goals of
faunal analysis include the reconstruction of past hunting, scavenging, and animal husbandry practices, as well as
the study of site formation processes. The faunal analysis course will cover the identification and analysis of
archaeological animal bone remains. The course will also examine some of the ways in which faunal data have
been used in archaeological interpretation.
ANTH-GA 1216: Culture and Media II
This course offers a critical revision of the history of the genre of ethnographic film, the central debates it has
engaged around cross-cultural representation, and the theoretical and cinematic responses to questions of the
screen representation of culture, from the early romantic constructions of Robert Flaherty to current work in film,
television, and video on the part of indigenous people throughout the world.
ANTH-GA 1219: Video Production II
Seminar in ethnographic documentary video production using state-of- the-art digital video equipment for
students in the Program in Culture and Media. This course is dedicated to instruction, exercises, and reading
familiarizing students with fundamentals of video production and their application to a broad conception of
ethnographic and documentary approaches.
ANTH-GA 1227 Political Anthropology
This course is designed to visit a wide range of anthropological and related explorations on the concept of “the
political.” We begin with some classic statements from the mid-century British school and consider its
reverberations in building the field through the 1970s. Following an interlude from the French scholar, Pierre
Clastres, who votes for a return for a certain kind of totalizing analytical purchase once espoused by Marcel
Mauss—an approach that refuses the separation of the political from other realms of experience—we see how this
refusal has found new voice in an number of recent works across anthropology, history, cultural studies,
philosophy, political theory, and social studies of science.
ANTH-GA 1520 Interpreting the Human Skeleton
Provides an intensive introduction to the methods and techniques used to reconstruct soft tissue anatomy and
behavior from the human skeleton. Focuses on techniques and applications to all areas of skeletal biology,
including bioarchaeology, paleoanthropology, forensics, and anthropology.
ANTH-GA 3391 Paleoanthropology II
This course picks up where Paleoanthropology I ends, providing a detailed overview of the evolution of the genus
Homo. This course will focus on the fossil evidence and archaeological record to provide insights into hominin
evolution, ecology and culture. Students will supplement their reading of the primary literature with the study of
comparative skeletal materials and casts and of stone and osseous tools, art objects and personal ornaments.
ANTH-GA 3392 The City and the Country in the Post-Colonial World
Anthropologists have taken note of the urbanization of the world's population, and in globalization, of the
generalized (if uneven) extension of technologies and ideas across the planet that have deservedly demolished
some of the discipline's former idylls (isolated cultures, "primitive" peoples, etc.). But in their turn to modern life
and urban worlds, anthropologists have not taken sufficient account of the degree to which social theory and
urban life itself actively conceal the urbanites' utter dependence on the rural. In the characteristic mode of the
anthropocene, the 'country' is a repository of nature, of "raw ingredients" (energy, resources, building materials,
water, crops, food animals, and cheap rural-to-urban migrant labor) of proper modern human life. This course
strives to undo the urbanocentrism of social theory (and of the unexamined parameters of kinds of habitus or
semiotic ideology embedded in our urban lives) by (1) undertaking a genealogy of regimes of knowledge
pertinent to notions of civilization, citizenship, and life in and of the res pública, the "public thing" and the modes
of being that it shapes; (2) tracking the historical extension through colonialism, and then through neoliberal
governmentality, of these European ideas and practices, understood as the material, epistemological, ontological,
and ideological infrastructures supporting the domination and exploitation of some persons (natives, people of
color, laborers, women) by others (white European men); (3) investigating, via a turn to theories of materiality,
the material infrastructures by which the rural/urban dichotomy is sustained while provisioning cities from, and
excreting their wastes to, the once inexhaustible, now imperiled, countryside; (4) examining how the city's plans,
built forms, and social as well as biological hygienic regimes aim to shelter persons from the "elements of
nature", while also channeling, storing, and using them, and seeing how they divide human from non-human life,
aiming to exclude vermin and microbes (and human undesirables) while delivering, storing, and consuming the
products of plants, animals, microbes, and human undesirables; (5) analyzing the ways the urban/rural distinction,
and within the city, the private/public one, participate in the classification and construction of persons according
to distinctions of race, class, and gender; (6) attending to how those distinctions (and that between indigenous
"natives" and settler Europeans or their post-colonial heirs) were and are constituted through property regimes
(generally granting the common kind to native peoples, the private kind to Euro-settlers), differently enabling or
blocking the transmission of lineage privilege via inheritance; (7) investigating how the urban/rural distinction,
the property forms of colonial capitalism, and the effacement of the city's dependency on the countryside,
entrenched presumed ontological distinctions between Europeans and natives, or whites and peoples of color, or
bourgeoisie and laborers, or men and women; (8) studying, with an eye to Goffman and also performativity
theory, and both in every life and in commemorative or festive events, the ways that the city's built form, and the
ways it perspectively arranges the rural as "landscape", serves as a performative stage for enacted commentary
upon the emplotted interactions of the cast of characters it houses. Finally, (9), the course attends to the ways
these urbanocentric ideas and practices, viewed from the vantage of the city's most privileged (European, white,
male) have become (along with the extension of credit) central to capitalist/corporate strategies for achieving
global governance, whether through their private ownership of life itself, or through conditionality agreements
which undermine the sovereignty of the nation state, which apart from indigenous reservations, are the last
repository of collective property left standing in the wake of decolonization. All in all, the course aims to build an
anthropology of cities, not just in them, while keeping the city's dependence on the rural (and of all that classed as
"nature") keenly in mind.
ANTH-GA 3393 Molecular Methods in Biological Anthropology
This course will meet twice a week for 2-3 hours with the faculty instructor in the Molecular Primatology
Laboratory. Depending upon the instructor, training will either involve laboratory methods and analyses of DNA,
hormones, peptides, and other metabolites.
ANTH-GA 3394 Professional Development (Biological)
This course aims to provide an introduction to many of the ethical issues that confront students and scholars in
biological anthropology, as well as to provide practical training in professional skills that students will find
essential in their early academic careers. The topics included in this course are not generally covered as part of
traditional disciplinary courses, but they are cotnsidered just as critical for long term professional development.
Individual classes will focus on ethical issues related to science in general, research with animals and humans,
and professional relationships, and practical skills such as proposal writing, writing for publication, the peer
review process, oral presentation, and how to succeed in the job market.
The course is structured to encourage students to critically discuss and debate ethical issues from a more
informed perspective, and to provide a forum for students to gain practical experience in honing their skills in
both oral presentation and writing. Students will be evaluated on their in-class contributions, as well as on short
written assignments and presentations.
ANTH-GA 3396 Spirits of Capitalism: Religion and Economy in Modernity
Examines the connections between theories of exchange, value, and religion. We will address what makes
capitalism a unique, but also familiar, mode of exchange, and explore examples of the spirits that haunt the
market’s invisible hand as well as those that resist its powerful reach.
ANTH-GA 3397 Semiotics
This course will explore how the theory of sign relations, semiotics, is also the study of representation and
meaning making in the construction of social life and cultural forms. By closely reading structuralist and poststructuralist writings in philosophy, anthropology, literature, and linguistics, we will use these to consider
ethnographic inquires into topics related to notions of language ideology, agency, politics, and power. We will
also explore the diversity and range of material signs, both linguistic and non-linguistic, which are manifest in
voice, register, and qualia, to explore the potential of signs for constituting sociocultural worlds of different
scales and imaginaries. Students will have the opportunity to critically reflect upon and apply different analytic
methods used in linguistic anthropology to analyze communicative and ethnographic data.
ANTH-GA 3398 GIS in Archaeology
Introduces students to key concepts and applications of GIS within archaeology. Focuses on students’ own
research questions with an emphasis on how GIS can help frame those questions and serve as a tool in answering
them. Topics will include but not be limited to spatial analysis and statistics, predictive models, and 3D analysis.
Special attention will be given to survey-based approaches and settlement pattern/landscape analysis. Does not
require previous knowledge of GIS. Appropriate for students of all background levels.
ANTH-GA 3399 Advanced Topics in Primate Behavior
This class serves as a broad introduction to the ecology, behavior, and conservation of nonhuman primates, and
is primarily aimed at 1st year PhD students from across the NYCEP training consortium.
MEIS-GA 1626 Cities of the Middle East
Issues of modernity in Middle Eastern cities and regions. Topics may include approaches to the transformation of
cities in the Middle East; colonial and postcolonial urban spaces; architecture, politics, and social identities;
discourses of the city; tradition and modernity; and everyday life, work, and gender issues.
MSMS-GA 3330 Topics in Museum Studies: Anthropology of Museums
This course considers "the museum" as an object of ethnographic inquiry, examining it as a social institution
embedded in a broader field of cultural heritage that is perpetually under negotiation. We reflect on how museum
principles of classification, practices of collection and exhibition, uptake of media, technology, and archiving
have influenced the ways in which knowledge has been formed, presented, and represented; and interrogate the
role of museums as significant social actors in broad anthropological debates on power, materiality, value,
representation, culture, nationalism, circulation, aesthetics, science, history, and "new" technologies.
The museum is never simply a repository of arts, cultures, histories, or scientific knowledges, but also a site of
tremendous creativity and a field of complex social relations.