Course Offerings

Courses Grid FALL 2019

ANTH-GA/RELST-GA 1001: Theories and Methods in the Study of Religion

Professor Angela Zito

Students explore fundamental theoretical and methodological issues for the academic study of religion, including some of the more important theories of the origin, character, and function of religion as a human phenomenon. Students cover psychological, sociological, anthropological, dialectical, post-colonial and feminist approaches, as well as some problems for the study of religion today: secularization theory and the intersection of religion and media. Departmental permission required.

ANTH-GA 1215: Culture & Media I

Professor Faye Ginsburg

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. Ethnographic film has a peculiar and highly contested status within anthropology, cinema studies, and documentary practice. This seminar situates ethnographic film within the wider project of the representation of cultural lives, and especially of natives. Starting with what are regarded as the first examples of the genre, the course examines how these emerged in a particular intellectual context and political economy. It then considers the key works that have defined the genre, and the epistemological and formal innovations associated with them, addressing questions concerning social theory, documentary, as well as the institutional structures through which they are funded, distributed, and seen by various audiences. Throughout, the course keeps in mind the properties of film as a signifying practice, its status as a form of anthropological knowledge, and the ethical and political concerns raised by cross-cultural representation.

ANTH-GA 1218: VIDEO PRODUCTION I

Professor Margaret Vail

Yearlong seminar in ethnographic documentary video production using state-of-the-art digital video equipment for students in the Program in Culture and Media. The first portion of the 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. Assignments undertaken in the fall raise representational, methodological, and ethical issues in approaching and working through an ethnographic and documentary project. Students develop a topic and field site for their project early in the fall term, begin their shooting, and complete a short (5- to 10-minute) edited tape by the end of the semester. This work should demonstrate competence in shooting and editing using digital camera/audio and Final Cut Pro nonlinear editing systems. Students devote the spring semester to intensive work on the project, continuing to shoot and edit, presenting work to the class, and completing their (approximately 20-minute) ethnographic documentaries. Student work is presented and critiqued during class sessions, and attendance and participation in group critiques and lab sessions is mandatory. Students should come into the class with project ideas already well-developed. Students who have not completed the work assigned in the first semester are not allowed to register for the second semester. There is no lab fee, but students are expected to provide their own videotapes. In addition to class time, there are regular technical lab sessions on the use of equipment.

ANTH-GA 1510: Integrative Paleoanthropology I

Professor Scott Williams

This course provides a detailed overview of the early stages of human evolution from the Miocene to the early Pleistocene, focusing on the fossil and archaeological record of the earliest hominins up to and including early Homo in East and South Africa. It emphasizes the anatomical, phylogenetic, and behavioral traits of Plio-Pleistocene hominins in Africa. Special topics include: a critical review of recently described fossils purported to be early hominins from the late Miocene of Africa; an introduction to phylogenetic methods, geochronology, and the evidence used to reconstruct global climate change; comparative morphology and tool-using behavior of extant hominoids; the earliest tool industries; models of early hominin dietary behavior; functional morphology and locomotor behavior; and debates surrounding early hominin biogeography, taxonomy and phylogenetic relationships. Students will supplement their reading of the primary literature with the study of comparative skeletal materials and casts of early hominins in the laboratory.

ANTH-GA 1516: Osteology

Professor Susan Antón

An in-depth survey of the various ways in which biological anthropologists employ human osteology, the study of bones and the skeleton. In addition to presenting a detailed review of the anatomy of the human skeleton and its associated musculature, examines a series of thematic issues and topics that emphasize the multidisciplinary nature of the study of skeletal morphology. Topics include bone biology and development, comparative osteology, biomechanics, bioarchaeology, forensic anthropology, and taphonomy. Course cannot be taken

on its own; the course MUST be taken with ANTH-GA 1521

ANTH-GA 1251: Osteology Lab

Professor Susan Antón

Human Osteology Laboratory provides an intensive, 2 point, lab-based practical partner course to ANTH GA:1516 (Introduction to Human Osteology and Odontology). The laboratory emphasizes identification of fragmentary human remains, interpretation of anatomical features from bone, and differentiation of human and non-human remains. This hands-on lab will include weekly practical lab write-ups, weekly for-credit and practice quizzes and a final practical lab exam. By the end of this course you should be able to identify and side fragmentary human skeletal remains; differentiate human from nonhuman fragments and adult from subadult human remains; name and recognize normal muscle attachment sites and other bone features, their associated soft tissues and function and pathological manifestations. This knowledge forms the underpinning for research in forensic anthropology, paleoanthropology, and human osteology and cognate areas. Course cannot be taken on its own; the course MUST be taken with ANTH-GA 1516.

ANTH-GA 1540: Research Design in Biological Anthropology

Prof. Susan Antón

Research Design in Biological Anthropology is an intense writing seminar with the goal of teaching the fundamentals required to develop and begin a scientific research project in biological anthropology. The weekly seminar will provide overviews of the structure of a research project, how to identify research problems, how to construct methods of addressing these problems, how to interpret the resulting data and how to present these data. This is not a course about data collection or analysis. This is a course about how to design, pitch (as to a grant agency or your supervisor) and then implement a strong research project in biological anthropology. The course will be hands-on, requiring students to write a scientific paper, peer-review the work of others in the course, and extensively revise their own work. Each week requires written submission of a subsection of a proposal/paper to the class, roundtable discussions and constructive peer-review. The course will conclude with a symposium of ‘meetings- style’ presentations of developed topics. Instructor approval is required to enroll.

ANTH-GA 1640: Elites: Power, Privilege, Dominance

Professor Tejaswini Ganti

Since Laura Nader’s classic essay, “Up the Anthropologist,” calls for studying elites have taken place in anthropology and yet the discipline is most readily identified with the study of subaltern, marginalized, or dispossessed peoples, so much so that ironically elites have been marginal within the discipline. However, paying attention to elites - whether they be social, cultural, economic, or political -- articulates with longstanding concerns about questions of power and privilege within anthropology. Through a focus on elites, this course examines how different forms of privilege, dominance, and power, are constituted, maintained, and reproduced across a variety of geographic and sociocultural contexts - from financial institutions, transnational organizations, and state bureaucracies to media industries, scientific laboratories, corporations, and educational institutions, just to list a few. Reading a range of classic and contemporary texts, the course will investigate the theoretical dimensions -- what constitutes elite status? How do we define or identify certain groups as elites? How do elites maintain their authority, status, and power over other social groups? -- as well as the methodological challenges of studying elites, which involve issues of access, complicity, reflexivity, and representation. The course will also reflect upon what unique perspectives anthropology can provide to the study of elites and the ways in which the study of elites can contribute to anthropology.

ANTH-GA 2229: Heritage, Memory, and Negotiating Temporality

Professor Jane Anderson

What is heritage, how is it produced and to what extent does it (re)arrange relationships between time, memory and identity? How do some heritages come to be memorialized and institutionalized and others excluded and rendered peripheral? This seminar will cover the historical development of the concept of heritage as well as exploring the genesis of international heritage administration, charters, conventions, and national heritage laws. It will highlight emerging trends and practices including exploring the concept of “social memory” and contrast it with the more formalized techniques of heritage didactics and curation. We will explore the increasing interest in “bottom-up” heritage programming that directly involves the general public in the formulation, collection, and public presentation of historical themes and subjects as an ongoing social activity. Case studies from different regions and social contexts will be explored: “conflicted heritage,” “minority heritage,” “indigenous heritage,” “diasporic heritage,” “sites of conscience,” long-term community planning and involvement in “eco-museums”, the relationship between heritage, development and tourism and public heritage interpretation centers. Students will be asked to address specific problems in sites or organizations presented during the course and will formulate socio-interpretive assessments of projects or research of their choosing in the U.S. or abroad.

ANTH-GA 2349: Semiotics

Professor Sonia Das

This course explores how theories of sign relations, also known as “semiotics,” elucidate practices and processes of representation, interpretation, and classification pertaining to the construction of everyday social life and cultural forms. By closely reading structuralist and post-structuralist writings in philosophy, anthropology, literature, history, and linguistics, we will use these texts to deepen our ethnographic inquiries into contemporary topics related to notions of agency, subjectivity, ontology, ideology, politics, capitalism, value, and modernity. We will also explore the diversity and range of material signs, both linguistic and non-linguistic, to better understand the potential of these signs for constituting sociocultural worlds of diverse scales and imaginaries.

ANTH-GA 1011: Social Theory and Practice II

Professor Tejaswini Ganti

(Course Description to come)

ANTH-GA 1040: Linguistic Anthropology
Professor Bambi Schieffelin

This class is open to graduate students in the Anthropology Department. For others outside of the department, permission is required. In this course we take up key foundational themes, research paradigms, and contemporary theoretical contributions and developments in linguistic anthropology. Readings are drawn from scholarship carried out in diverse communities, and themes include talk in interaction, language ideology, language contact and multilingualism, language and old/new media, and translation as a challenge to linguistic and cultural theories and practices.

ANTH-GA 1210: African Prehistory

Professor Justin Pargeter

This course’s main objective is to provide students with a solid understanding of the importance of Africa for the evolution of human cultural behavior. Africa provides the world’s longest archaeological record, and as such the longest record of human bio-cultural evolution. It furnishes evidence for the earliest representatives of the human family, the first artifacts, the most complete account of the development of a hunting/gathering way of life, and a living laboratory for the archaeological study of contemporary societies (i.e. ethnoarchaeology). This course takes a different approach to African prehistory focused on thematic areas rather than chronological developments. Topics of discussion include archaeological approaches to mobility, technology, exchange/interaction, climate reconstructions, cognition, diet, and contemporary heritage issues on the continent. The class is taught in a symposium format with specific importance placed on class discussions and debates.

ANTH-GA 1216: Culture & Media II

Professor Faye Ginsburg

(Course Description to come)

ANTH-GA 1219: Video Production II

Professor Pegi Vail

This is the second part of a year-long course in ethnographic video production. Students will continue to learn advanced production techniques and examine narrative structure, storytelling strategies, and poetic representational techniques. Relating theory to practice, students will explore the dilemmas and possibilities video production holds for representing social experience. The course culminates in a public screening of students’ independent video projects. Seminar meetings will be run as Production Meetings. Students will complete in-class exercises to help them focus their projects, develop a cohesive narrative, learn script writing, brainstorm scene ideas, overcome narrative challenges, and discover their unique aesthetic. Each week students will present new footage and scenes and explain their work in terms their goals for the final project. During lab time, students will review production and post-production techniques. We will also screen student footage along with model films. Individual meetings will be held during seminar and lab time to offer individualized attention to each student.

ANTH-GA 1252: Psychoactivity

Professor Helena Hansen

(Course Description to come)

ANTH-GA 1253: Critical Race Theory

Professor Aisha Khan

This seminar will explore classic and recent work that defines the expanding field of critical race studies. We will inquire into the work of race: the ways that theory is shaped by practice and practice is guided by theory. Our readings will be interdisciplinary and will include thinkers from the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries who have grappled with definitions of “race,” with the ways that race intersects with other categories of identity, and with the potential for the concept of “race” to inform anti-racist forms of agency and practice.

ANTH-GA 1511: Integrative Paleoanthropology II

Professor Susan Antón

This course provides a detailed overview of the later stages of human evolution from the late Pliocene to the latest Pleistocene,focusing on the fossil and archaeological records. It emphasizes the anatomical, phylogenetic, behavioral and cultural aspects of Plio-Pleistocene hominins in Africa, their dispersal into the rest of the Old World, and the origins of modern humans and their contemporaries worldwide. Special topics include: The ecological, behavioral, and morphological factors behind the origin and initial dispersal of Homo from Africa, a critical review of the taxonomic and biogeographic arguments regarding Homo erectus and its contemporaries, the reconstruction of life history patterns in genus Homo, the nature of the relationship between Neandertals, Denisovans and latest H. erectus and the origin of modern humans. Students will supplement their reading of the primary literature with the study of comparative skeletal materials and casts of early hominins in lab sessions. Open to advanced undergraduate majors with instructor approval.

ANTH GA-1626 : Cities of the Middle East

Professor Michael Gilsenan

C/L with MEIS-GA 1626. The aim of the course is to introduce some of the different ways in which scholars of different disciplines and theoretical inclinations have written and write about aspects of modernity and the urban in general. We look at foundational texts on Paris and Vienna in the 19th century as well as at work on modern cities in the Middle East, Malaysia and Indonesia.

ANTH-GA 1636: History of Anthropology

Professor Fred Myers

Prerequisites: Anthropology background or permission of instructor. The history of anthropology is rooted in philosophical questions concerning the relationship between human beings and the formation of societal arrangements. At the same time, the discipline of anthropology is itself an historical and sociocultural product. In this sense, historicizing the discipline is – or should be – similar to treating anthropology itself anthropologically, as produced historically and within a cultural framework itself.

This course surveys these issues as they relate to the development of method and theory within the context of the discipline’s institutional and cultural locations. The broad frame concerns anthropology as itself an anthropological (or historical) problem, especially its concern with the problem of similarity and difference in human populations, its involvements in the management of difference, and the politics of representation, but also the different institutional loci of practice. Within this frame, we will concern ourselves with the particularities of different kinds of explanatory paradigms and their deployments. The class will consider both the formal qualities and rigor of different paradigms -- that is, their anthropological potential, as well as their embeddedness in histories. Focuses on French, British, and American anthropology and how they contributed to the development of the modern discipline.

ANTH-GA 2397: Religion as Media

Professor Angela Zito

This course will introduce students to the longstanding and complex connection between religious practices and various media, based upon the premise that, like all social practice, religion is always mediated in some form or other. Yet, religion does not function simply as unchanging content, while media names the ways that content is formed. Instead shifts in media technique, from ritual innovations to the invention of printing, through TV, to the internet, also shape religious practice. In turn, religious concerns have famously pushed media invention, such as printing in Buddhist China and Christian Europe. We are interested in gathering theoretical tools for understanding the form and politics of this mutual dialectic. We will analyze how human hearing, vision, and the performing body have been used historically to express and maintain religious life through music, voice, images, words, and rituals. Then we will spend time on more recent electronic media such as cassette, film, television, video, the internet and other forms of digital social media. We will consider, among other things: religious memory, both embodied and out-sourced in other media; religion and gaming; the material culture of Buddhism (icons, relics, sutras); religion and commodification; film as religious experience; Christian Evangelical Media and the activist uses of social media.

ANTH-GA 3211: Professionalization Seminar

Professor Bruce Grant

Addresses the central skills and resources needed for a professional career in anthropology including: how to submit a research proposal to the human subjects review board; how to write grant applications; how to join/participate in professional associations; and how to be a successful teaching assistant. Students also present recent fieldwork experiences and rehearse forthcoming AAA papers. Three sessions provide training toward certification in the “Responsible Conduct of Research” (RCR), now required by some federal granting agencies; students also enroll in the two RCR sessions offered each semester by NYU, fulfilling all five required sessions.

ANTH-GA 3330: Decolonizing and Reassembling the Museum: A New Anthropology of Museums

Professor Jane Anderson

C/L with MSMS-GA 3330. Ethnographic and universal museums are increasingly in crisis. Critical questions about how such museums came to hold their collections, and the colonial conditions of their accumulation are being asked alongside other concerns for appropriate display, collection management and community engagement. Through a lens where decolonization is understood as a call for ethical and equitable transformation of the museum, its objects and its ‘subjects’, this course explores “the museum” as a site of ethnographic inquiry itself, 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 movement to decolonize the museum is only increasing and in this course we will explore what this means at a theoretical and practical level with a focus on how the museum can respond and indeed transform for the future.