Arts & Science



NYU Anthropology Courses: Spring 2016Last Updated: September 21, 2015Monday2:00pm-4:45pm 2:00pm-4:45pm 5:00pm-7:45pm Interpreting the Human Skeleton*ANTH GA 1520Dr. Scott WilliamsRoom 706 Molecular Methods in Biological Anthropology(with instructor permission)ANTH GA 3393Dr. Todd DisotellRoom 403 GIS in Archaeology* ANTH GA 3398Dr. Kevin WileyRoom 706 and12 Waverly Place, L1115:00pm-7:45pm Advanced Topics in Primate Behavior ANTH GA 3399Dr. James HighamRoom 612 Tuesday9:30am-12:30pm11:00am-1:45pm2:00pm-4:45pm Topics in Museum Studies: Anthropology of Museums MSMS GA 3330.005Dr. Jane Anderson Room TBA Video Production II Seminar(Provisional)ANTH GA 1219Dr. Noelle Stout Room 612SemioticsANTH GA 3397 Dr. Sonia Das1st Floor Conference Room 2:00pm-4:45pm 6:00pm-9:00pm Spirits of Capitalism: Religionand Economy in ModernityANTH GA 3396 Dr. Elayne OliphantRoom 612Culture & Media IIANTH GA 1216Dr. Faye GinsburgKRISER Wednesday11:00am-1:45pm 2:00pm-4:45pm 5:00pm-7:45pm Social Theory & Practice IIANTH GA 1011Drs. Sally Merry and Rayna Rapp1st Floor Conference Room Political AnthropologyANTH GA 1227Dr. Bruce Grant1st Floor Conference Room The City and the Country in the Post-Colonial World ANTH GA 3392Dr. Thomas Abercrombie1st Floor Conference Room 5:00pm-7:45pm5:00pm-7:45pm Cities of the Middle EastMEIS-GA 1626Dr. Michael GilsenanKevorkian Center, LL2 Faunal Analysis*ANTH GA 1212Dr. Pam CrabtreeRoom 706 Thursday10:00am-12:00pm2:00pm-4:45pm 2:00pm-4:45pm Video Production II Lab(Provisional)ANTH GA 1219Dr. Noelle Stout Room 612Linguistic AnthropologyANTH GA 1040Dr. Bambi Schieffelin1st Floor Conference Room Paleoanthropology IIANTH GA 3391Dr. Shara Bailey Room 901Friday 2:00pm-4:45pm Professional Development (Bio)** ANTH GA 3394Dr. Terry HarrisonRoom 706* Open to advanced undergraduate students with permission of instructor** meets alternate weeks throughout the academic yearMAINT-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 IIIntroduces 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 AnthropologyIntroduces 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 AnalysisFaunal 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 IISeminar 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 AnthropologyThis 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 SkeletonProvides 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 IIThis 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 WorldAnthropologists 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 AnthropologyThis 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 ModernityExamines 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 SemioticsThis 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 post-structuralist 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 ArchaeologyIntroduces 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 BehaviorThis 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 EastIssues 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 MuseumsThis 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. ................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download