Please note: this syllabus has not yet been finalized,
some readings may be subject to change.
Anthropology of the Body
ANTH 326/526
Instructor: Ayse Parla
Wednesdays, FASS 2119
9:40-12:30
Office hours: Tuesdays 14:00-16:00 and by appointment
Graduate level of the course taught in partnership with:
Michigan University, Ann Harbor, USA
International Christian University, Tokyo, Japan
Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan
Course Outline and Objectives
"Just as it is true that everything symbolizes the body, so it is equally true that the
body symbolizes everything else," wrote Mary Douglas in 1966. Since then, 'the
body' has come to constitute an increasingly popular theme in the social sciences
and humanities, but often approached through diverse theoretical perspectives .
This course aims to introduce these different theoretical approaches to the body,
including, social constructionism, poststructuralism, phenomenology,
embodiment, while at the same time working with these theories through
substantive ethnographies that locate the body physically and symbolically
within everyday practices and structures of power. There is also a historical
emphasis to the course, showing how the body, especially in its gendered
inflections, has come to have different meanings and has been subjected to
different practice in various historical periods and cultural contexts.
Course Format
This course will combine lectures with a seminar format. This requires intensive
student participation, especially for graduate students. While many of the
readings are mutual for graduates and undergraduates, there are additional
requirements for and expectations from graduate students.
For undergraduates, the course is primarily a lecture course combined with
student participation. For graduates, much more intensive student participation is
expected, including in-class presentations and contribution to a blog. (instructions
on blog to follow). Furthermore, the graduate level of the course will be
coordinated in conjunction with Michigan University's graduate seminar, "Gender,
Sexuality, Violence." This is part of a joined effort to bring together students and
faculty from Turkey, Japan and the United States to discuss themes related to
gender, sexuality and violence as they concern the body. A common goal for
both courses is to move beyond a Northern American and European centric point
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of view and to critically analyze the ways in which the Euro-American scholarship
has impacted our perceptions of histories of the world regions in innumerable
ways, not the least of which includes our views of the body.
Requirements and grading:
For undergraduates:
Participation: 15%
In-class midterm: 35 % (open book, essay questions)
In-class final: 50% (open book, essay questions)
For graduates:
Participation, including class presentation: %35
Group project/blog: 20%
Take home final: 45%
For group project/blog
Step 1. Each institution recommends readings to be shared by three locations.
These readings should complement the regional-specific readings, which are on
their syllabus.
Step 2. All students read the shared readings.
Step 3. Based on their understanding of the readings, students at three locations
produce a blog entry for everyone to see and respond to. The entries will raise
discussion questions about the shared readings. A good blog entry will draw
links between the various readings and raise larger questions related to the
weeks theme and are brought up in one way or another in each of the
readings. Critiques and different viewpoints are highly valuable in this exercise.
These questions are posted on-line
at http://globalgraduateseminar.wordpress.com/ two days before the video
conferencing date.
Step 4. All students in three locations read the questions and, among
themselves, prepare to discuss and share their views with students at the other
locations.
Step 5. All students in three locations Skype to discuss what they have prepared
and ask each other questions. The dates for Skype sessions are to be
determined.
Course Schedule
Week 1, February 12: full session: introductions, lecture, film.
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Week 2:, February 19. I will be in University of Michigan, attending the session
for the readings below. Do the readings below for this week, and we will be
discussing them the following week.
Ayse Parla “The ‘Honor’of the State: Virginity Examinations in Turkey” in Feminist
Studies Vol. 27.1 (Spring 2007) [PDF on Ctools]
Koğacıoğlu, Dicle (2004) The tradition effect: framing honor crimes in Turkey.
Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 15 (2). pp. 118-152.[PDF on
Ctools]
graduates also read:
Katherine Ewing, 2008. Stolen Honor: Stigmatizing Muslim Men in Berlin.
Stanford: Stanford Univesity Press. Selections [AYSE PDF?]
Week 3, February 26. Key Legacies
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Selections. Section 6. Welton Reader, pp150-166.,
Mauss, Marcel [1934] 1979. ‘Techniques of the Body’. Reprinted in
Incorporations. J. Crary and S.Kwinter (Eds.) New York: Zone Books, pp. 455477.
Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and Danger. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, pp.
114-139.
1982 [1970]. Natural Symbols. New York: Pantheon Books, pp. 65-81.
graduates also read:
1994a. ‘Introduction: The Body as Representation and Being-in-the-world’. In
Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground of Culture and Self. T.
Csordas (Ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Week 4, March 5
Bodies and War
Pyong Gap Min, “Korea ‘Comfort Women,’: The Intersection of Colonial Power,
Gender, and Class,” Gender and Society 17.6 (Dec., 2003), pp. 938-957.
[Korean “Comfort Women” Pyong Gap Min ]
Veena Das on the partition
graduates also read:
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Martha Hodes “The Sexualization of Reconstruction Politics: White Women and
Black Men in the South after the Civil War,” History of Sexuality 3.3, Special
Issue: African American Culture and Sexuality (Jan, 1993), pp. 401-417 [The
Sexualization of Reconstruction Hodes Martha]
Menon, Ritu, and Kamla Bhasin. Borders & Boundaries: Women In India's
Partition. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1998.(Borders and
Boundaries)
Week 5, March 12
Religion, Gender and the Body
Selections from Sherine Hamdy. 2012. Our bodies belong to God: Organ
Transplants, Islam and the Struggle for Human Dignity in Egypt. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
graduates also read:
Sabine Früstück, “The Uses of Popular Culture for Sex and Violence,” ejcjs 13.3
(Discussion taking place on Sept 6/2013).
http://www.japanesestudies.org.uk/ejcjs/vol13/iss2/fruhstuck.html
Hitomi Tonomura Birth-giving and Avoidance Taboo: Women's Body versus the
Historiography of "Ubuya" Japan Review , No. 19 (2007) , pp. 3-45
[TonoJpnRvUbuya]
Week 6, March 19: ‘Civilizing Bodies’
Lata Mani “The Female Subject, the Colonial Gaze Eyewitness accounts of Sati”
In Mani, Lata. Contentious Traditions: the Debate On Sati In Colonial India.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. (available as e-book through
Mirlyn/ Ordered PDF)
Sir Henry Norman, M.P., The Real Japan: Studies of Contemporary Japanese
Manners, Morals, Administration, and Politics, Illustrated from Photographs by
the Author (London: D. Fisher Unwin, 1892), pp. 9-11, 278-306.
http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015063968237;view=1up;seq=15 pp.
9-11, 275-307, 335-365.
graduates also read:
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Foucault, Michel. 1984. “Docile Bodies,” “The Means of Correct Training,” in The
Foucault Reader, Paul Rabinow (Ed.), New York: Pantheon pp. 179-213.
Ann Stoler, “Educating Desire in Colonial Southeast Asia: Foucault, Freud and
Imperial Sexualities,” in L.Manderson and M. Jolly, 1997, Sites of Desire,
Economies of Pleasure.
Week 7, March 26: Body and the Law
Skype with University of Michigan
Miriam Ticktin, 2008. "Sexual Violence as the Language of Border Control:
Where French Feminist and Anti-immigrant Rhetoric Meet" Signs: Journal of
Women and Culture in Society 33 (4): 863-889.
Miler, Ruth. 2007. Rights, Reproduction, Sexuality, and Citizenship in the
Ottoman Empire and Turkey,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society
32 (2): 347-375.
graduates also read:
Peirce, Leslie P. Morality Tales: Law And Gender In the Ottoman Court of Aintab.
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003. Read: Fatma’s Story starting
pager 231)
Hitomi Tonomura, “Sexual Violence Against Women:Legal and Extralegal
Treatment in Premodern Warrior Societies,” in Tonomura, Walthall, Wakita, eds.,
Women and Class in Japanese History (Center for Japanese Studies, University
of Michigan, 1999), pp. 135-152.
Week 8, April 2 : Habitus and Bodily Capital
Pierre Bourdieu, 1994, “Structures, Habitus, Power: Basis for a Theory of
Symbolic Power,”in Cultures, Power, History: A Reader in Contemporary Social
Theory, Nicolas Dirks, Geoff Eley, and Sherry Ortner (Eds.), Princeton: Princeton
University Press pp. 155- 199.
“Pugs at Work: Bodily Capital and Bodily Labor Among Professional Boxers,”
Loic Wacquant,1995. Body and Society, Vol. 1(1): 65-94.
Graduates also read:
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Couzens Hoy, David. 1999. ‘Critical Resistance: Foucault and Bourdieu’. In
Perspectives on Embodiment: The Intersection of Nature and Culture. G. Weiss
and H.F. Haber (Eds.) New York and London: Routledge, pp. 3-22.
Week 9, April 9.
Prof. Melanie Tanelian from University of Michigan will be here.
"Wicked” Istanbul: The Regulation of Prostitution in the Early Turkish Republic
Wyers Mark David Istanbul: Libra Kitap, 2012 312 pp [PDF On Ctools]
Hanan Hammad “BETWEEN EGYPTIAN "NATIONAL PURITY" AND "LOCAL
FLEXIBILITY": PROSTITUTION IN AL-MAHALLA AL-KUBRA IN THE FIRST
HALF OF THE 20TH CENTURY Journal of Social History , Vol. 44, No. 3 (spring
2011) , pp. 751-783
Week 1O (April 16): spring break
Week 11, April 23:Varieties of Biology, Sexual Desire and Practice
Fausto-Sterling, Ann. Sexing the Body. selections
Graduates also read:
Gregory Pflugfelder, Carotographies of Desire: Male-Male Sexuality in Japanese
Discourse, 1600-1950 (UC Press, 1999), pp. 286-335.
Afsaneh Najmabadi “Types, Acts or What?” in Babayan, Kathryn and Najmabadi,
Afsaneh eds. Islamicate Sexualities: Translations Across Temporal Geographic
of Desire (Harvard Center for Middle Eastern Studies: Cambridge, MA, 2008). pp
277-340.
Week 12, April 30. Body, Affect, Medicine
Selections from: Aslıhan Sanal, New Organs Within Us: Transplants and the
Moral Economy
Or
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Petryna, Adriana. 2002. Life Exposed: Biological Citizens After Chernobyl.
Princeton:Princeton University Press.
Week 13, May 7: Migrant Bodies
Seth Holmes , Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United
States (California Series in Public Anthropology)
Week 14, May 14:
Biehl, João. 2005. Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment. Berkeley:
University of California Press (Selections).