Anthropology Department
Brandeis University
Spring 2014
ANTH 203b
Contemporary Issues in Anthropological Theory
Class:
Instructor:
Office Hours:
Tuesdays, 2-4:50 pm, location TBA
Elizabeth Ferry, Brown 220, ferry@brandeis.edu
Tuesdays 1-2 pm; Thursdays 10 am -12 pm
This course in contemporary anthropological theory picks up after the course in History of
Anthropological Theory (ANTH 201) and continues to trace a series of conversations on theory and
method, focusing especially on structure and history; power and resistance; agency; gender and
sexuality; postcoloniality; the concept of the global; value and money; violence and social suffering;
science, knowledge and being; and the role of anthropology in the contemporary world. The course
materials consist primarily of articles, with four book length texts that have been particularly influential
in the field (Sahlins; Bourdieu; Agamben; Latour). Discussions will be aimed at identifying both shifts
and continuities in the thematic foci, methodological stance and guiding concerns of the discipline.
Note: It is not possible to cover all important or even all essential aspects of contemporary anthropological in one semester.
Especially in the last twenty-five years, the discipline has ramified considerably, so that I have had to leave out a number of
themes that you may wish to follow up elsewhere. These include but are not limited to: neoliberalism; the body;
materiality; narrative….
The course is designed especially for graduate students in anthropology. Students in other related
graduate majors may petition to enroll in the course if they are considering graduate study in
anthropology.
Required readings: Books are on reserve in the library, or students may purchase them online via
Powell’s, Amazon, etc. Articles and book chapters will be available on LATTE. Whenever possible,
please bring hard copies to class.
We will be reading substantial portions of the following books, which are available for purchase at
the bookstore and on reserve in the library:
Marshall Sahlins, Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities (available as PDF and on reserve)
Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice.
Giorgio Agamben Homo Sacer
Bruno Latour, We Have Never been Modern
Selected contemporary ethnographies:
For your take-home final exam, you will be asked to read and analyze two of the below significant
contemporary ethnographies. You may wish to select two to purchase and to read in entirety for the
final exam assignment.
Ira Bashkow, The Meaning of Whitemen: Race and Modernity in the Orokaiva Cultural World.
University of Chicago Press, 2006. (2007 Winner of the Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic
Writing)
Ferry, ANTH 203b, Spring 2014, page 2
James Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian
Copperbelt. University of California Press, 1999.
Aihwa Ong, Buddha is Hiding: Refugees, Citizenship, the New America. University of California
Press, 2003. (California Series in Public Anthropology)
Erik Mueggler, The Age of Wild Ghosts: Memory, Violence and Place in Southwest China,
University of California, 2001.
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton University
Press, 2004.
Stefan Helmreich, Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas, Berkeley:
University of California Press. , 2009.
Natasha Schull, Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas, Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2013.
Course requirements:
One take-home midterm exam (8-10 pp.) @ 25%
One take-home final exam (15-18 pp.) @ 35%
One seminar presentation @ 20%
Class participation @ 20%
Written work: Mid-term and final exam topics are posted on LATTE. Due dates are specified in the
syllabus and on the assignments. The exam topics will be based on the course readings. As this is a
core required course for the anthropology graduate program, no extensions will be granted short of
serious illness or emergency.
Seminar presentation: Each member of the class will be responsible for assisting in leading one
seminar discussion, by 1) providing a brief analysis of important points raised by the assigned readings,
2) succinctly placing the assigned readings in a historical context, and 3) framing a set of relevant
discussion questions.
Class participation: This includes regular attendance, careful preparation of the readings, and
informed contribution to seminar discussions. This is a discussion-based rather than lecture-driven
class. Because we only meet once per week, if you miss a class, you will be expected to provide a 4-5
page written analysis of that day’s readings.
If you are a student with a documented disability on record at Brandeis University and wish to
have a reasonable accommodation made for you in this class, please see me as soon as possible.
**********
Introduction to the course.
1/14
Bruce Knauft, Genealogies for the Present in Cultural Anthropology (1996),
chs. 1-2: pp. 9-61.
Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (1973): "Thick Description: Toward an
Interpretive Theory of Culture": pp. 3-30.
Ferry, ANTH 203b, Spring 2014, page 3
Bronislaw Malinowski, “Introduction,”Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1984[1922]), pp. 125
Reflexive Anthropology/Problems of knowing and writing
1/21
James Clifford, "Partial Truths," in J. Clifford and G. Marcus, eds., Writing Culture:
The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (1986): pp. 1-26.
Renato Rosaldo, "Introduction: Grief and a Headhunter's Rage," in Culture and Truth
(1989): pp. 1-21; also found in Text, Play, and Story: The Construction and
Reconstruction of Self and Society, E. Bruner, ed. (1984): pp. 178-95.
Susan Seizer, “Paradoxes of Visibility in the Field: Rites of Queer Passage in Anthropology,”
Public Culture (1995) 8:73-100.
Ira Bashkow, “Whiteness and Method” (pp. 15-19) from the Introduction to The Meaning of
Whitemen: Race and Modernity in the Orokaiva Cultural World (Chicago, 2006).
Structure and history.
1/28
Sahlins, Marshall Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities
Ohnuki-Tierney, Emiko “Structure, Event and Historical Metaphor: Rice and Identities in
Japanese History” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 1(2) 227-253 (1995)
Giddens, Anthony, Introduction, “Outline of a Theory of Structuration”
Culture and political economy.
2/4
Eric Wolf, “Modes of Production,” chapter 3 of Europe and the People Without History
(1982): pp. 73-100.
William Roseberry, Political Economy, Annual Review of Anthropology 17: 161-185 (1988)
Sidney Mintz, chapters 2, 3, Sweetness and Power, Viking Press, 1985
Wallerstein, Immanuel, “The Rise and Future Demise of the Modern World-System:
Concepts for Comparative Analysis:” Comparative Studies in Society and History 16(4):
387-415
Practice.
2/11
Sherry Ortner, "Theory in Anthropology since the Sixties," Comparative Studies in Society
and History (1984) 26:126-161.
Ferry, ANTH 203b, Spring 2014, page 4
Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (1977). Read especially chapter 2,
“Structures and the Habitus” (pp. 72-95), and chapter 4, “Structures, Habitus, Power: Basis
for a Theory of Symbolic Power” (pp. 159-197).
Michel de Certeau “Introduction” and “Walking in the City” in The Practice of Everyday
Life
Natalie Zemon Davis, “The Quest of Michel de Certeau” New York Review of Books, May
15, 2008
Winter Break – February 17-21
Power and Resistance, Agency and Constraint
2/25
James Scott, “Preface” and chapter 1, “Small Arms Fire in the Class War,” in Weapons of
the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (1985): pp. xv-xxii & 1-27.
William Roseberry, “Hegemony and the Arts of Contention” In Everyday Forms of State
Formation, edited by Gilbert Joseph and Daniel Nugent, Duke University Press (1997)
Foucault, Michel “Two Lectures” from Power/Knowledge
Lila Abu-Lughod, “The Romance of Resistance: Tracing Transformations of Power Through
Bedouin Women.” American Ethnologist (Feb. 1990) 17(1): 41-55.
Laura Ahearn, “Agency.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology (2000) 9(1-2): 12-15.
http://www.anthrosource.net/doi/pdfplus/10.1525/jlin.1999.9.1-2.12
Saba Mahmood, “Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections on
the Egyptian Islamic Revival,” Cultural Anthropology (2001) 16(2): 202-236.
Gender, sexuality, feminism(s) and queer studies
3/4
Michelle Rosaldo, "Woman, Culture, and Society: A Theoretical Overview," in M.
Rosaldo and L. Lamphere, eds. Woman, Culture and Society (1974): pp. 17-42.
Christine Walley, “Searching for ‘Voices’: Feminism, Anthropology, and the Global
Debate over Female Genital Operations.” Cultural Anthropology (1997) 12(3): 405-438.
Sherry Ortner, "The Problem of 'Women' as an Analytic Category," in Making Gender
(1996): pp. 116-138.
Kath Weston, “The Bubble, the Burn, and the Simmer: Introduction: Locating Sexuality In
Social Science,” in Long Slow Burn: Sexuality and Social Science (Routledge,
Ferry, ANTH 203b, Spring 2014, page 5
1998): pp. 1-27.
Tom Boellstorff, “Queer Studies in the House of Anthropology.” Annual Review of
Anthropology (2007) 36(1): 17-36.
Take-home midterm exam/essay due by midnight, to be submitted via LATTE.
Post-coloniality and critiques of anthropology
3/11
Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for ‘Indian’
Pasts,” Representations 37:1-26 (1992)
Talal Asad, Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (1973) pp. 9-19, 103-118, and/or:
Talal Asad, “Review: Are There Histories of Peoples without Europe? A Review Article”.
Comparative Studies in Society and History (1987) 29(3): 594-607.
Michel-Rolph Trouillot, “Anthropology and the Savage Slot: the Poetics and Politics of
Otherness,” in Recapturing Anthropology, ed. By Richard Fox, SAR Press, 1991
David Scott, “Criticism and Culture: Theory and post-colonial claims on anthropological
disciplinarity” Critique of Anthropology 12: 371-394 (1992)
Chandra Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses”
Feminist Review 30: 61-88 (1988)
Violence and Social Suffering
3/18
Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Philippe Bourgois, “Introduction: Making Sense of Violence,” in
Violence in War and Peace: An Anthology, Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Philippe Bourgois, eds.
(Blackwell 2004): pp. 1-32.
Paul Farmer, “On Suffering and Structural Violence” Deadalus 125(1): 261-283
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer
Anthropology and the Global
3/25
Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, "Beyond 'Culture': Space, Identity, and the Politics of
Difference," Cultural Anthropology (1992) 7(1):6-23; reprinted in Gupta and Ferguson,
Ferry, ANTH 203b, Spring 2014, page 6
eds., Culture, Power, Place (1997:33-51) and in Inda and Rosaldo, eds. Anthropology of
Globalization (2002:65-80).
Arjun Appadurai, Global Ethnoscapes: Notes and Queries for a Transnational Anthropology”
(ch. 3, pp. 48-65) from Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization
(Minnesota, 1996).
Marshall Sahlins, "Cosmologies of Capitalism: The Trans-Pacific Sector of the 'World
System'," Proceedings of the British Academy 74 (1988):1-51; reprinted in
Culture/Power/History (ed. N. Dirks et al.), pp. 412-456.
Anna Tsing, “The Global Situation” Cultural Anthropology 15(3) 327-360 (2000)
Sarah Lamb, “Intimacy in a Transnational Era,” Diaspora 11(3): 299-330
Value and Money
4/1
Arjun Appadurai, The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, introduction,
Cambridge University Press (1986)
David Graeber, “Beads and Money: Notes toward a Theory of Wealth and Money” American
Ethnologist 23(1): 4-24 (1996)
Jonathan Parry and Maurice Bloch, Introduction to Money and the Morality of Exchange.
Cambridge University Press (1988)
Jessica Cattellino, “Fungibility: Florida Seminole Casino Dividends and the Fiscal Politics of
Indigeneity. American Anthropologist 111(2):190-200 (2009)
Caitlin Zaloom, “The Productive Life of Risk” Cultural Anthropology 19(3): 365-394 (2004)
Science, Knowledge, Being
4/8
Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto;”
Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern
Arturo Escobar, “After Nature: Steps to an Anti-Essentialist Political Ecology” and
Comments, Current Anthropology 40(1): 1-30 (1999)
Heather Paxson, “Post-Pasteurian Cultures: The Microbiopolitics of Raw-Milk Cheese
in the United States,” Cultural Anthropology 23(1): 15-47 (2008)
Marisol de la Cadena “Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes” Cultural Anthropology 25(2)
334-370 (2010)
Ferry, ANTH 203b, Spring 2014, page 7
April 15-22 Spring Recess
Anthropology Facing Outward
4/29
Elizabeth Povinelli, “Radical Worlds: The Anthropology of Incommensurability and
Inconceivability,” Annual Review of Anthropology 30 (2001): 319-334.
Marshall Sahlins, “Two or Three Things I know about Culture” Journal of the Royal
Anthropological Institute 5(3): 399-421 (1999)
Shannon Speed, “At the Crossroads of Human Rights and Anthropology” American
Anthropologist 108(1): 66-76 (2006)
Matti Bunzl, “The Quest for Anthropological Relevance” American Anthropologist 110(1):
53-50.
Elizabeth Emma Ferry, “Economic Anthropology and its Audiences” Anthropology of this
Century 5 (2012)