Courses of Study for the Social and Cultural Anthropology MA and PhD

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PhD Program: At the Intersections of Thought and Action
PhD Program: Rooted in Rich Understandings
PhD Curriculum
MA Program: Inclusivity and Prioritization
MA Program: Frameworks We Explore
MA Curriculum
Anthropology Course Descriptions

Doctoral Program in Social and Cultural Anthropology

At the Intersections of Thought and Action
The task of postcolonial anthropology is to excavate a history of the present. The program prepares students to practice thinking and research that critically engages multicultural and cross-cultural knowledge production.

The curriculum scrutinizes the cultural and political dimensions of knowledge production while strongly supporting the need for moving from interpretation to action and advocacy. Through their journey in the program, students are expected to critically understand links between systems of thought and cultural practices.

They are expected to more fully grasp emancipatory dimensions in 20th-century critical social thought, and see relations between major systems of domination in Western culture, such as metaphysics, colonialism, and globalization.

They are expected to assess systems of dominance as they live in our own notions and practices, and more imaginatively practice resistance to domination. They are expected to situate the human sciences in political and philosophical context, critically relate to this context, and be familiar with emancipatory and heretical traditions of knowledge.

They are expected to situate the development of a crossdisciplinary anthropology in political, historical, and cultural context; grasp the openings and limitations in the responses of early anthropology to issues like racism, ableism, and sexism; link one’s own stories of truth to a historical, political, and cultural context; examine the way one’s own stories challenge and reproduce ways of thinking explored in the program; and reflect critically on one’s own truths.

Through the curriculum, students are expected to assess the effects of one’s truth claims as responses to the present. They are expected to live with thoughtfulness and openness to what stories do as acts, and critically situate their own voices within history, culture, language, and power, in support of cultural diversity, ecological sustainability, and social justice.

The program is trains students in research and scholarship through immersion in qualitative and quantitative genres and diverse research mechanisms, such as: ethnography, auto-ethnography, survey, oral historiography, manual geographical info systems mapping, interview practices, basic statistical analysis, methods in anthropology of law and policy analysis, etc.

Assessments of student work are offered by the faculty instructor and include individualized meetings, in-person and over phone as necessary, and individualized and collective mentoring in each step of the process, from conceptualization, immersion, proposal writing (as required for each course), consent process, and implementation of the research, analysis and writing.

Both written and oral feedback is offered in response to written work and assignments undertaken by the student. In addition, the community students engage in their research also offer feedback.

Further, peer review and feedback are also mandated within the structure of the classroom. The challenges of integration of this feedback and the cultivation of scholarly and practitioner capacities to respond to feedback remains an active process.

Rooted in Rich Understandings
While experimental, the research curriculum is rooted in rich understandings of the complexities of knowledge/power relations that organize systems of truth. Such research is committed to the expansion of voices that organize knowledge, foregrounding marginal and subaltern perspectives, issues, and concerns.

The curriculum links student capacity building in theoretical frames, alliance building, community service, and research to enable and empower citizens and scholar-activists positioned to offer leadership and acumen as sacred practice.

Sacred practice is understood as forms of thinking, acting, caring, self-reflexivity, learning-unlearning, imagining, and interacting that cultivate proximities to histories, memories, and legacies to expand possibilities for freedom as ongoing creative work.

Difficult practices of self that engender and challenge practices of “knowing,” exacting intellectual labor, despair and (im)possibility, history and alliance, gratitude and constructive rage, creative innovation, struggle and resistance, rigor and compassion, memory and tomorrow, continuity and change, relations with difference/the incommensurate, continue to guide and direct, compel and inspire our learning—commitments to not-forgetting, to hospitality, to forging contributions of relevance for ethical futures attentive to others.

PhD Curriculum

PhD in Social and Cultural Anthropology--36 units
I. Required Courses--25 units

ANTH 7500: Reading and Writing Culture
ANTH 7601: Applied Advocacy Research: Postcolonial and Feminist Practices
ANTH 7625: Postcolonial Studies
ANTH 7650: Representations of the Other
ANTH 7727: Academic Writing Skills or
ANTH 7225: Teaching Skills
ANTH 7800: Engendering and Reframing Development
ANTH 7890: Directed Seminar in Research
ANTH 9310: Advanced Seminar Series A
ANTH 9210: Advanced Seminar Series B
ANTH 9000: PhD Specialization Seminar/Dissertation Proposal Writing
ANTH 6900: Thesis/Dissertation Proposal Completion (maximum of three times)
ANTH 7900: Thesis/Dissertation Seminar

II. Directed Electives--11 units

MA Program in Cultural Anthropology and Social Transformation with an Emphasis in Gender, Ecology, and Society

Inclusivity, Prioritization
Class sessions are organized into lectures, and group discussions, reflexive processes and exercises. The readings include works from/of Africa, Asia, Latin/South America, Eastern Europe and Western Europe, and North America (includes works of African-Americans, Arab-Americans (Muslim, Christian, Jewish), Asian-Americans, Native-Americans, East and West European-Americans, Gay-Lesbian-Bisexual-Transgender/Thirdgender-Questioning-GLBTQIQ-Americans, Jewish-Americans). 

Diverse indigenous, subaltern, political and theoretical perspectives are prioritized, as well as the works of women scholars, and those immersed in social movements.

The program facilitates self-reflection on our own cultural presuppositions as a prerequisite for sustained, empathic engagement with the realities of difference and culture.

Frameworks We Explore
Our program offers students the opportunity to explore contemporary cultural critique and social relations in historical, postcolonial, and cross-cultural frameworks. Students focus on practices of creative intervention by developing skills in intercultural communication, critical social analysis, emancipatory research, strategic thinking, and multicultural alliance building.

The program offers global and situated perspectives at the intersections of thought and action, spirit and commitment, and a practitioner orientation, integrating scholarship and social practice.

MA Curriculum

Master of Arts in Cultural Anthropology and Social Transformation with an Emphasis in Gender, Ecology, and Society--36 units
I. Required Courses--25 units

ANTH 5000: Building Alliances across Differences
ANTH 5100: Critical History of the Human Sciences
ANTH 5200: Language and Culture
ANTH 6000: Reading and Writing Culture
ANTH 6600: Anthropological Research Methods
ANTH 6601: Applied Advocacy Research: Postcolonial and Feminist Practices
ANTH 6700: Understanding Global Systems
ANTH 6800: Engendering and Reframing Development
ANTH 6850: Cross-Cultural Issues in Social and Environmental Justice
ANTH 6901: Integrative Seminar

II. Directed Electives-5 units
III. General Electives-6 units

Course Descriptions

ANTH 5000: Building Alliances across Differences (3 units)
Class members participate in supportive experiential exercises and discussions that facilitate the unlearning of racism, sexism, class oppression, religious persecution, heterosexism, adultism, anti-Semitism, and other conditionings that separate people. How can we become more effective at building alliances that facilitate social justice? What processes foster solidarity and affirm diversity? How do systems of social oppression, dynamics of internalized oppression, and strategies of resistance organize space of constraint and possibility? In this course, we practice community building through examining the differences and shared concerns that are present among us, and link to larger histories and global dynamics with present effects.

ANTH 5017: Scholar's Toolkit (2 units)
This course will unlock the mysteries of academic literature research for a term paper or a dissertation literature review. It covers not only "consuming" research (how to identify, find, and evaluate other scholars' writings) but also "producing" research (strategies for getting your own work published). These skills will be grounded in discussions of labyrinth learning, learning styles, and other pedagogic theories, with discursions into using technology efficiently, recent politics and economics of the information industry and intellectual property, and strategies for academic success.

ANTH 5100: Critical History of the Human Sciences (3 units)
Through an exploration of the works of major historical figures from traditions of European thought such as Rousseau, Marx, Boas, Mead, Lévi-Strauss, Weber, and contemporary global, postcolonial critique, this course examines forms of reflection and thinking that developed in the West from the 16th century to the present, as shaped by the European encounter with indigenous peoples. How do these systems of knowledge reflect the legacies of Christianity, colonialism, nation-state formation, and biopower? How might we enhance our abilities to intervene in the present through a rigorous inquiry into the cultural traditions of truth that frame the human sciences?

ANTH 5200: Language and Culture (2 units)
Graduate seminar in the structure and power of language as it manifests in culture, community, personality, knowledge, and social reality. Through analysis of everyday conversations and language data, this course encompasses the study of language from perspectives of phonetics and phonology, morphology, syntax, pragmatics, and discourse. Through a combination of direct fieldwork, discussion, in-class exercises, and journal work, we inquire into critical issues of human communication. This course provides students with techniques of linguistic analysis, which help refine their ability to critically examine written and spoken texts.

ANTH 5525: The Holocaust and Disability: Legacies of Nazi Persecution (3 units)
Knowledge about the Nazi campaigns to systematically persecute and murder people with disabilities during and after World War II has not permeated the dominant cultural consciousness to any appreciable degree. While these crimes do not represent new information, the field of Holocaust studies often shows a lack of clarity as to the cause of these particular crimes and their place in the Nazis' social construction of reality. This class will critically engage materials from Holocaust and disability studies. By reading texts as cultural artifacts, and reconfigured.

ANTH 6000: Reading and Writing Culture (2 units)
This course engages the study and practice of classical and experimental anthropological writing, focusing on the relation between language, writing style, and the presentation of cultural "others," as dealt with historically, theoretically, and in anthropological literature. How is authority established in texts? What forms of expression are possible in contemporary anthropology? How can we be sensitive to power relations in knowledge production and in writing in ways that produce knowledge with emancipatory effects, and bring our voice(s)
into dialogue with spaces and communities of research?

ANTH 6001: Documentary Filmmaking (2 units)
This course will explore film and the craft of filmmaking as interrogation of history and the present. We will explore indigenous struggles for survival within modern nation-states and relate this to grassroots movements against systemic global oppression. We will look at immigration laws in relation to empire, resistance, and race; and gender, immigration, law, and state. Relying on film and filmmaking to pose questions of ourselves and others and on the legacies that shape us in relation to landscape, memory, absence, the archive, the course will link the filmmaker's work with the work of students in the course to explore possibilities for solidarities, invigorate dialogue, and challenge structures of oppression.

ANTH 6002: Academic Writing (2 units)
In this course, we shall approach two tasks simultaneously: how to approach a set of historical narratives and how to produce a historical analysis. More specifically, we shall attempt to generate a history of the work of the amateur anthropologist Maurice Vidal Portman, who worked among the indigenous population of the Andaman Islands in the 19th century. We will begin with some introductory exercises, using the Davidson & Lytle textbook on historical methods. We will then do some background reading on the British colony in the Andaman Islands and generally on colonial anthropology. Students will be expected to choose a specific topic and write a 10-page analytical paper.

ANTH 6002: "Terra Nullius": Aboriginal Self-Determination and Governance (1 unit)
Indigenous Australia has a strong history of resistance. The concept of self-determination and how this is experienced in Australia today will be described in relation to concepts of identity, land, law, governance, and "wellness." We will begin with the notion of "Terra Nullius" and the subsequent policies-specifically, "Native Title" and the responses to the "Stolen Generation's report." We will visit the contested ground of the invasion, colonization, and settlement of Australia, and examine the effects of the policies that resulted and their impact on indigenous people today.

ANTH 6003: Middle East: Culture, History, Politics (2 units)
Through readings, discussions, films, documentaries, and lectures, the course aims to discuss the making and remaking of the region, and will cover central issues in the region's history, society, politics, and culture since the late 19th century, which have ramifications for the current situation in the region. Among the issues that will be discussed: gender, colonialism, imperialism, Orientalism, and political, social, and cultural identities.

ANTH 6038: The Extrajudicial and the State (1 unit)
How are extrajudicial forms of governance organized and legitimated in democratic states? In what contexts, with what effects, is rule of law legally suspended? What is the role of law in structuring extrajudicial governance? What interventions on human rights and civil liberties do states perform in the name of national security? We will explore such issues through excavating the extrajudicial in contemporary state practice.

ANTH 6590: Music and Healing: African Traditions in Global Perspectives (1 unit)
This course examines the relation between music and healing in diverse traditions of Africa and the African Diaspora. How is music at once a social ritual, medium for community building, source of resistance to oppression, and spiritual force? We will utilize multiple learning modalities to explore these issues, including analyses of case studies and the experience of music making and dance. Through affirmative relations to intellect, body, soul, earth, and world, creativity will be expressed and shared among participants, including students, teachers, and local musicians and artists.

ANTH 6600: Anthropological Research Methods (3 units)
How can we challenge the motivation and efficacy of knowledge production and raise issues of privilege, representation, intervention, action, and outcome? Immersed in postcolonial and feminist frames, students will negotiate diverse anthropological research principles, methods, and tools. Using deconstructive frameworks, how might we decolonize and decenter the "field" within anthropology, mapping the interrelationships and complexities in and between spatial and political sites of inquiry? We will focus on research as it influences social transformation, advocating that inquiry affecting the lives of people and their ecology be made equitable through partnership. Students will engage in brief research processes over the semester.

ANTH 6601: Applied Advocacy Research: Postcolonial and Feminist Practices (2 units)
Within the space of emancipatory anthropology, how might we engage critical multicultural inquiry for social transformation? Using postcolonial and feminist frameworks, this course examines the ethical dimensions of knowledge production in ethnographic and participatory action research. Challenging assumptions, representations, and constructions of self and other, at home and globally, as mediated by context, history, culture, race, class, and gender, what questions of research and intervention emerge? How might we address issues of power and privilege in relation to the production, construction, and use of knowledge? Students will engage in brief advocacy and applied research processes over the semester.

ANTH 6700: Understanding Global Systems (3 units)
Notions such as "global village" and "international community" have been used to describe the context in which relations between nations take place. Does globalization as the exchange of information and goods bring with it a global compassion or a reciprocal understanding of different cultures? In this course, students examine the analytical metaphors connected to the behavior of global systems. How do concepts of system emerge historically, and how are they applied to the fields of natural and social science? Specific emphasis is placed on the study of multinational corporations, private voluntary organizations, and international institutions, examining the ways they shape globalization.

ANTH 6701: Global Issues in Health (1 unit)
Within the space of emancipatory anthropology, how might we engage critical multicultural inquiry for social transformation? Using postcolonial and feminist frameworks, this course examines the ethical dimensions of knowledge production in ethnographic and participatory action research. Challenging assumptions, representations, and constructions of self and other, at home and globally, as mediated by context, history, culture, race, class, and gender, what questions of research and intervention emerge? How might we address issues of power and privilege in relation to the production, construction, and use of knowledge? Students will engage in brief advocacy and applied research processes over the semester.

ANTH 6705: Ecology and Culture (3 units)
Environmental issues such as the loss of rain forest and biological diversity, the depletion of the ozone layer, and toxic waste are related to the use of modern technology and to a certain sense of human and economic progress. A discussion of these issues is essential to a new understanding of the relationship between the physical environment, the cultures of the world and the modern development project. Equally important is the question of how some traditional cultures around the world have related to their ecological environments in ways that were less destructive, with a sense of balance and sustainability. This course will provide an overview of the basic elements of ecology and cultural strategies used by traditional societies in their relationship to their environmental contexts.

We also examine the impact of modern technology on these societies and discuss the cultural value of "progress." The focus will be on specific case studies from a variety of cultures involving different sectors such as hunting and gathering, animal husbandry, agriculture, and housing in different areas of the world.

Students will learn about the impact of modernization on diverse societies. The class will engage in lively discussion with a view toward understanding the ecological context of the 21st century. Students will address the issues of sustainability from a diverse range of cultural and ecological perspectives. Topics will include ecological principles, environmental ethics, technological practices, and development policies.

ANTH 6800: Engendering and Reframing Development (2 units)
What is development? What have been the cultural, ecological, and political impacts of development? What are the intersections between colonization, development, modernization, and globalization? How can we engender development? This course engages a discursive analysis of development, its deconstruction, and reframing within postcolonial and feminist contexts. What are the distinctions between development processes in the global South and the North as mediated by power, class, gender, race, culture, nation, and rural/urban issues?

Drawing on post-1950 experiences from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, this course examines the historical and contemporary challenges toward prioritizing concerns of marginalized communities, especially women, in development processes.

ANTH 6850: Cross-Cultural Issues in Social and Environmental Justice (2 units)
In this course, we will engage postcolonial frameworks and diverse practices in social and environmental justice in the global South and North. We will examine intersections of nation making and globalization, and the role of international institutions, communities, states, and corporations. In confronting inequities in and between the global North and South, how might we challenge the histories and relations of gender, race and culture, religion, power and class, home and diaspora? Attentive to multiple histories, how might we act in ways that empower justice, ethics, and sustainability? This class includes a practicum with local social-change organizations.

ANTH 6900: Thesis/Dissertation Proposal Completion (0 units)
Prerequisite: ANTH 9000.

ANTH 6901: Integrative Seminar (3 units)
The integrative seminar is a scholarly process designed to demonstrate critical knowledge in the student's area of study. This seminar is the culminating course for the MA program. It provides an opportunity for students to reflect critically upon all work accomplished during the course of the program, while clarifying professional goals. During the seminar, students will locate a particular area of specialization. The term paper will delineate the objectives and domains of the student's area of work, drawing on key theoretical and methodological frameworks in anthropology.

ANTH 6980: Law, Governance, and Social Exclusion: Human Rights in South Asia (1 unit)
South Asia in general, and India in particular, produces diverse experiences of marginalization, impoverishment, and social exclusion. This course focuses on the effects of law and public policy on the lives of marginalized people. How does the postcolonial state invisibilize, illegalize, criminalize, or custodialize people who are vulnerable? In the context of contemporary South Asia, we will focus on the urban homeless and street children; sex workers and sexual minorities; people living with stigmatized ailments such as leprosy, HIV/AIDS, and mental illness; and persons with disabilities. We will utilize film, law and policy documents, critical analyses, and first-person narratives to make visible complex dynamics of oppression and resistance.

ANTH 7200: Intercultural Communication (2 units)
This course is designed to build the capacity of students to understand and respond to the complexities of communication across a wide range of intercultural and cross-cultural settings. Connections between theoretical models and practical applications are established through firsthand field research, guest practitioner presentations, and reviews of interdisciplinary literature. This course enhances the work of change agents in a globalizing world by building an appropriate set of research and interpersonal skills for dealing with people from different ethnic, linguistic, and cultural backgrounds.

ANTH 7225: Teaching Skills (2 units)
Through a variety of group processes, including videotaping and individual projects, students will engage the critical factors in effective presenting and teaching. Drawing from principles of instructional design, theories of adult learning, and practical experience, students will identify and work with the special challenges of cultural communicators.

ANTH 7500: Reading and Writing Culture (3 units)
This course engages the study and practice of classical and experimental anthropological writing, focusing on the relation between language, writing style, and the presentation of cultural "others," as dealt with historically, theoretically, and in anthropological literature. How is authority established in texts? What forms of expression are possible in contemporary anthropology? How can we be sensitive to power relations in knowledge production and in writing in ways that produce knowledge with emancipatory effects, and bring our voice(s) into dialogue with spaces and communities of research?

ANTH 7501: Deviance and Colonialism (1 unit)
In colonial societies, what determined "normal" and "deviant"? According to Michel Foucault, the medieval torture chamber was replaced in the 18th century by the modern penitentiary and its various cousins: the reformatory, mental asylum, hospital. In the 19th century, these new institutions proliferated not only in Europe, but also in Europe's overseas colonies.
They became essential tools of political domination, central to the lives of colonial subjects, who encountered them as inmates, as employees, and as observers. In this seminar, we shall examine the definitions of crime, sickness, insanity, and childhood in Europe and in India, and look closely at the connections between incarceration and colonial rule. We shall ask whether Foucault's analysis of control is applicable to colonized societies, where race was a constant factor in the relationships between the rulers and the ruled.

ANTH 7512: Nation/Nationalisms: Gendered Encounters (2 units)
This course examines the inescapably gendered ideologies and discursive practices of nationhoods and mediates the inadequacies between global capital and national particularisms. It focuses on gendered and subaltern encounters with "nation," delineated by class, ethnicity, caste, religion, sexuality, and region. How is the "local" imbricated with the "global" as it operates through the construction, reification, and manipulation of gendered identities? How does the gendering of violence shift the spaces in which cultural citizenship is shaped? How does violence as political action reshape social structures? In tracing subaltern agency and resistance, and the literal and figurative mechanisms that link states to everyday and episodic violence, this course examines histories of the postcolonial present-their cartography in wars, nationalisms, militarisms, "fundamentalisms," ethnic violence, right-wing movements-in conditions named "peace."

ANTH 7576: International Financial Institutions: Producing Accountability (1 unit)
This course will provide an overview of international financial institutions and their policies and projects, with an emphasis on the World Bank. We will examine emerging citizen-driven accountability frameworks and the efforts by affected communities and their civil society allies to demand that the World Bank move toward a rights-respecting framework and to demand meaningful systems of accountability and redress. Current debates and tensions, such as the push to expand lending for large dams and power plants, attempts to revise and weaken policy standards, and implications for private-sector projects, will also be covered. The students will emerge with an enhanced understanding of the history, policies, projects, and controversies surrounding international development finance.

ANTH 7601: Applied Advocacy Research: Postcolonial and Feminist Practices (3 units)
Within the space of emancipatory anthropology, how might we engage critical multicultural inquiry for social transformation? Using postcolonial and feminist frameworks, this course examines the ethical dimensions of knowledge production in ethnographic and participatory action research. Challenging assumptions, representations, and constructions of self and other, at home and globally, as mediated by context, history, culture, race, class, and gender, what questions of research and intervention emerge? How might we address issues of power and privilege in relation to the production, construction, and use of knowledge? Students will engage in brief advocacy and applied research processes over the semester.

ANTH 7625: Postcolonial Studies (3 units)
Though postcolonial theory (with postmodernism and poststructuralism) is an important critical perspective, many lack a clear understanding of its content and meaning. This is in part due to the diversity of contexts to which the term is applied, from literary criticism to political theory and global culture. This course examines postcolonial theory in historical context. We explore texts and authors that define this way of thinking, engaging major issues that preoccupy postcolonial thinkers, including identity and alterity, nationalism, cultural imperialism, hybridity, and origin. The relationship between postcolonial theory, Marxism, and postmodernism is explored, as well as complexities and contradictions within postcolonial theory.

ANTH 7650: Representations of the Other (3 units)
This course will look at some of the ways in which cultural others have been represented by varying academic interests, specifically ethnography and anthropology, literature, and popular media, including films and photography. We will examine how images and techniques of representation of the other function in a context of ideology and power. Postmodernism and poststructuralism will be among the frameworks used to discuss the different issues associated with representation, be they class, gender, or race.

ANTH 7727: Academic Writing Skills (2 units)
Through close supervision and experimental techniques, students practice academic writing in English in a supportive and rigorous workshop environment. Students complete a substantial writing project related to their own scholarly work and receive feedback on their drafts over the course of the semester from the professor and fellow students. The course builds academic writing skills on four tracks: the writer (journals, strategies for creative expression, getting organized), the community (peer review and response), the language (words, sentences, paragraphs, style, voice), and the discipline (anthropology, gender studies, philosophy).

ANTH 7751: African Traditions: Music and Healing (1 unit)
This course examines the relation between music and healing in diverse traditions of Africa and the African Diaspora. How is music at once a social ritual, medium for community building, source of resistance to oppression, and spiritual force? We will utilize multiple learning modalities to explore these issues, including analyses of case studies and the experience of music making and dance. Through affirmative relations to intellect, body, soul, earth, and world, creativity will be expressed and shared among participants, including students, teachers, and local musicians and artists.

ANTH 7760: Marx and Freud (3 units)
This course examines central works of these two thinkers, as well as their uses in 20th-century social thought. Particular attention is given to the critical, emancipatory, and problematic dimensions of their work. Through readings that locate their thought in philosophical and political contexts, we will explore their impact in historical contexts and in relation to the present. How are these thinkers relevant to understanding modernity/postmodernity? What social movements and interventions draw on their thinking? What shifts and reconfigurations did/does their work make possible, and how has their work been transformed through relations with critical theory, feminisms, postmodernisms, and postcoloniality?

ANTH 7765: Secular/Postsecular Emancipatory Jewish Thought (3 units)
The European Enlightenment and Jewish Haskala were movements for rational critique of religion and orthodoxy in cultural tradition. The Enlightenment responded to prolific oppression in European history linked to the imbrication of Christianity and political states. The Haskala sought to rethink Jewish tradition in the context of secularization in Christianized Europe. Radical social thought disproportionately emerged from Jewish thinkers. What discontinuities and continuities exist between secular Jewish thought and the cultural history of the Jews? How is a people's spiritual legacy renegotiated and transformed through an affirmative and critical relation to the Enlightenment project to organize social relations according to reason and freedom? How are the boundaries between the secular and religious, tradition and modernity, spirituality and politics, challenged by emancipatory Jewish thought? These are some of the questions we will explore through close reading of texts by Marx, Freud, Kafka, Arendt, Benjamin, Derrida, and others.

ANTH 7775: Cultural Notions of Self and Sexuality (3 units)
This course excavates practices and discourses of self and sexuality through cross-cultural and historical inquiry. How do inherited legacies of Christianity and human science inform contemporary relations to the body, pleasure, identity, and community in the Western world? How are these forces resisted or reproduced in liberation movements organized around gender and sexuality? How are experiences and understandings of subjectivity and sexuality mediated by nation, history, language, race, class, gender, and power? What can we learn from an examination of cultural differences regarding these issues among indigenous peoples in New Guinea and North America, or through an analysis of diverse movements and issues in global contexts?

ANTH 7800: Engendering and Reframing Development (3 units)
What is development? What have been the cultural, ecological, and political impacts of development? What are the intersections between colonization, development, modernization, and globalization? How can we engender development? This course engages a discursive analysis of development, its deconstruction, and reframing within postcolonial and feminist contexts. What are the distinctions between development processes in the global South and the North as mediated by power, class, gender, race, culture, nation, and rural/urban issues?
Drawing on post-1950 experiences from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, this course examines the historical and contemporary challenges toward prioritizing concerns of marginalized communities, especially women, in development processes.

ANTH 7804: Marx/Foucault: Archaeologies of Revolution (2 units)
The works of Karl Marx and Michel Foucault circulate throughout contemporary critical discourses concerned with libratory practice, informing ethical dissent. Both thinkers excavate the present through historical analysis attentive to dynamics of power, utilizing thought to expand space for critical reflection and social resistance. How might we use their thought to think the present in ways that facilitate creative intervention for justice that sustains diverse worlds and interrupts the normalization and violence of dominance? How might close readings of their works, and contemporary scholarship in conversation with their thought, enable new relations to questions of race, gender, class, power, sexuality, heteronormativity, colonialism/"post"coloniality, culture, and social change? How might this enable a (re)thinking of justice, of self-determination, of legacy?

ANTH 7855: History and Imagination of 20th-Century Revolutions (2 units)
Engaging the imagination that coerced the sacred and the profane within 20th-century revolutions, and proliferated new cultural, political, economic, and ecological dynamics across the globe, we will examine the relations of power, domination, and resistance as they storied histories of hope and despair, brutality and compassion. This course explores 20th-century revolutions, examining the legacies of colonialism and postcolonial subordination, fascism, and genocide; state and statelessness; communist, socialist, and ethnic movements; and indigenous liberation struggles. Through such engagement, how might we question our historical inheritances? How might we reconvene commitments within diverse worlds to rethink the historical present?

ANTH 7860: Readings in Postmodernism and Poststructuralism (1 unit)
Although postmodernism and poststructuralism have been a part of our academic world for several decades, most people do not have a very good grounding in the issues involved with these topics. Often there is a general embrace or rejection without understanding. In this course, we will look at the ways in which postmodernism and poststructuralism have evolved over time. Specifically, we will examine the main questions that trigger these schools of thought and the philosophical debates that surround them. We will study the main authors (Baudrillard, Lyotard, Deleuze, etc.), their ideas, and their social backgrounds.

ANTH 7875: Colonization: Remembering Silenced Histories (2 units)
Postcolonialism struggles with the death of memory where its promises to the poor are least honored. Their actions for self-determination are policed to benefit the advantaged. The political commitments of the privileged to the marginalized are defiled in once-colonized regions. Engaging the legacies of internal and external colonization, how do we understand the crimes and contradictions of European imperialism since the 15th century? How do we bear witness to the histories of colonization? How do we connect to legacies of resistance and complicity to colonization, and to the imagination of freedom, to intervene effectively in the present?

ANTH 7890: Directed Seminar in Research (3 units)

ANTH 7900: Thesis/Dissertation Seminar (0 units)
The advanced student's researching and writing of a thesis or dissertation progresses with the mentorship of, and in close consultation with, one's Thesis or Dissertation Chair and Committee.

ANTH 7910: Indigenous Cultural Survival: Genocide and Resistance (2 units)
Who has the right to life? Whose life matters? At the intersections of modernization and militarization intrinsic to nation building in the 21st century, the cultural survival of indigenous communities is endangered, as nations perceive traditional subsistence cultures as inadequately productive and socially anachronistic. Indigenous and local struggles for cultural survival raise critical issues for the ecological sustainability of our planet. They point to languages, values, ways of being, spiritualities, imagination, and memory precious to sustaining our world. In this course, we will examine the scope of governmental control; international treaties, covenants, and processes; and the role of progress as it perpetrates the genocide, both physical and cultural, of indigenous peoples.

ANTH 7979: Sexualizing the State (1 unit)
What would it mean to consider the state from the lens of sexuality? How might we engage the nexus of state and sexuality in ways that help us scrutinize the state? This course focuses on queer critiques of the state. The state serves as a site for the biopolitical regulation of subjects and populations. Sexuality, the reproduction of heteronormativity, is the node through which state power and biopolitical regulation proceeds. Bringing to bear strands of queer theory and critical scholarship on the state, this course reassesses how the state is imagined and how state reproduction of heteronormativity is conceptualized. Examples of immigration law, mobilization against "sodomy law," and state policies meant to discipline bodies, sexuality, and market exchanges, among others, will help engage questions of state power and its fractures.

ANTH 8001: Contours of Violence: Systemic and Everyday (2 units)
What forms of everyday and epical, epistemic and performative violences structure public and domestic spheres, statist and subaltern discourse, institutionalizing gendered, sexualized, heteronormative, religionationalist, raced, and classed dynamics? This course will examine the contours of violence as mediated by historical continuities and discontinuities alive in the present. We will interrogate the governmentalization and
normalization of violence, inquiring into the bloodlines and labyrinths, axioms and protocols that organize domination and resistance across the social, political, and legal body, in local and postlocal contexts.

ANTH 8080: Subaltern Historiographies (2 units)
Engaging subaltern, poststructuralist, feminist frameworks, this course examines culture and community in breakdown, assertion, dislocation. Through archaeological inquiry that excavates majoritarianism, nationalism, identity formation, and related dynamics, we explore the biopolitics of states. In prioritizing minority-subaltern claims in rethinking the historical present, we explore an ethics of response to suffering as it pertains to hybridized, hierarchically organized worlds brutalized by racism, class conflict, war, gender violence. As postcoloniality interrogates academy, how might we think about the effects and contradictions of our struggles, rather than reproduce ourselves as knowers? How does the rewriting of history intervene toward the (im)possibility of justice?

ANTH 8550: History and Anthropology: Genealogy as Deconstructive Practice (2 units)
What is the role of historiography in the constitution of counter-memory? This course examines contemporary scholarship that intervenes in dominant regimes of truth and social relations of injustice. Engaging research, writing, and thinking that utilize genealogical-archaeological approaches, including our own work, we will elaborate on "deconstruction as justice" (Derrida, Spivak) in feminist and postcolonial frames. Through genealogy, we will problematize present discourses and practices to proliferate critical reflection and social experimentation (Foucault). We will focus on analyses of nation, religion, and majoritarianism; gendered violence and resistance; self-determination struggles; diaspora, hybridity, and identity politics; international organizations, law, and transnational border crossings. Through a deconstructive approach to historiography, students will engage the politics and dynamics of thinking/writing the present in ways that are situated and facilitative of refusal, resistance, and alliance. Apportioning ethics to historiography, we will examine issues in the construction and positioning of history as it undermines or affirms subaltern concerns.

ANTH 8799: Independent Study (1-3 units)
Coursework that extends a student's field of inquiry beyond current CIIS courses. Requires a syllabus and contract signed by the student and faculty member, and approved by the program chair.

ANTH 8800 Biopolitics: Culture and State (2 units)
Biopolitical states organize individuals and populations as resources. Knowledge is produced and circulated to facilitate productivity, health, normality, disciplined forms of happiness, and docility. Social expertise is mobilized to enhance nation building and economic expansion. Discourses of eugenics in Nazi Germany, national security in post-9/11 United States, and history as myth in contemporary India domesticate difference, asphyxiate and assimilate dissent. Examining the political and cultural impact of national security laws, such as the Patriot Act (United States), the Prevention of Terrorism Act (India), and Article 23 (Hong Kong), as mediated by race/ethnicity, religion, citizenship, sexuality, and gender, we will examine the biopolitical as it operates through the twin mechanisms of cultural dominance and the state, its governmentalities productive of myriad forms of resistance.

ANTH 8810: War and Peace: Alliance and Confrontation (2 units)
This course examines issues of war and peace in the historical present as persistent crises of religion, nation, ecological destruction, gendered violence, and racism confront us at the turn of this century. Military interventions in the global South violate communities and nations, while democracy is rendered monochromatic in the United States. What legacies produce the fundamentalization of Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, and Judaism? What are the effects on culture, power, class, and gender? What enables the repeated violation of human rights in and between the global North and South? What ethics and processes can further peace linked to justice?

ANTH 8825: A Genealogy of Social Movements: Culture and Politics (2 units)
In response to chronic human rights failures in nation building in the 20th and 21st centuries, movements that enact ethical dissent are critical to the democratization of society. Addressing the culture, history, and politics of social justice movements globally, this course examines their legacy in response to political oppression and religious extremism.
We explore resistance and alliance, attentive to issues that enable and constrain liberatory practice and brutalize resistance. We engage state-community relations and methodologies of dissent, drawing on the civil rights movement in the United States, Hindu nationalism in India, state and statelessness in Israel and Palestine, land struggles in Zimbabwe, and colonialism in Ireland.

ANTH 8888: Special Topics (1-3 units)
A course of study relevant to evolving topics of growing importance in cultural anthropology and social transformation.

ANTH 8888: Women, Islam, and Modernity (2-3 units)
This course examines how women in predominantly Muslim societies of South Asia and the Middle East encounter Islamization, modernization, development, and democracy. How do Muslim women and Muslimness differ within a variety of temporalities and locations? What are the meanings of citizenship? How do the state, women's groups, Western donors, and militant Islam face off in the struggle for full citizenship rights for women? What are the continuities and discontinuities between the colonial past and the postcolonial present?
This course explores how reformist women's movements are transformed under the pressures of economic globalization and neoliberal state policies, and the ways in which we can conceptualize the emergent links between local groups and transnational advocacy networks.

ANTH 8925: Critical Social Thought (3 units)
Critical reflection on social relations has animated thought in its modern and postmodern expressions in thinkers such as Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, Arendt, Adorno, Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, and Spivak. Some name this move to thought oriented toward the historical present as a transition from philosophy to social theory. Others speak of the end of metaphysics or deconstruction or a critical ontology of ourselves.
Critique finds life in "objects" like truth, history, subjectivity, capitalism, reason, consciousness, sexuality, Christianity, culture, power. Through the above, in conversation with feminist and postcolonial thought, we will interrogate intersections of reflection and action toward social justice.

ANTH 8930: Postcoloniality in South Asia: Confronting Nationalism, Religion, and Politics (2 units)
This course examines histories of postcoloniality in South Asia. Addressing competing nationalisms in Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Bangladesh, and focusing on India and Pakistan, we will inquire into institutionalized and gendered violence in nation building in South Asia. We will explore the intersections of globalization and militarization, and constructions of sectarian, monolithic, and religious nationalisms. We will trace contested histories of state building via Hindu majoritarianism in India and military dictatorship in Pakistan. How do current formulations of state limit a resolution to conflict in Kashmir and escalate nuclear politics in South Asia? What democratic forces intervene for justice and peace?

ANTH 8931: Critical Discourses on Religion (3 units)
What cultural, political, and historical forces collide to produce and organize a sphere named "religion"? How might we think "religion" in its "actuality," as multiple, contested discourses and practices intervening in the present? How is "religion" shaped through struggle in ways that resist and reproduce relations of domination? How are notions and activities named "religion" mediated by gender, race, class, sexuality, and nation? What history of the present can be written through an interrogation of religion in relation to colonization, globalization, nationalism, capitalism, subjectivity, bodies, terror, politics, ethics, secularism, and histories of thought? What do these clashes in the present allow us to think, regarding identity, community, knowledge, culture, difference, and justice?

ANTH 8935: Critical Discourses in Feminism (2 units)
What are some of the ethical and political issues within contemporary feminist thought/praxis? How do critical discourses locate oppression and resistance as diverse and contradictory? How is gender as discourse and practice contingent on class, race, power, gender, and sexuality; culture, memory, identity, desire, and experience; borders, nation-nationalisms, institutionalizations, and religion; violences; inevitable and uneven subjectivities? How might gendered counter-memory contravene the present? This course is situated within anthropologies of gender, interrogating the processes of social organization, cultural decentering, reassertion, and resignification to enable complex understandings of postcolonial social relations and political labor.

ANTH 8940: Feminist Jurisprudence (1 unit)
Is it possible to eradicate sexual violence through law? Can marriage/domestic partnerships be inscribed outside the domain of exchange? Is human rights discourse the best solution for mainstreaming gender justice issues? In this seminar, we examine a few discursive trajectories through which feminists have theorized the law, tracing the development and transformation of some core tools in feminist jurisprudence as a lens to understand the imbrications of the law in kinship, sexuality, and the state.

ANTH 8950: Nietzsche/Foucault: An Archaeology of Western Culture (3 units)
We examine two thinkers important to a critical analysis of, and reflections on, Western culture. Through contextualizing their work historically, with close textual readings of key books and essays and secondary interpretations from leading scholars, plus lectures, class discussion, and dialogue "with present concerns," we will excavate the unconscious of our cultural practices and forms of thought. Through their work we will conduct rigorous inquiry into "systems of truth and ways of being." Truth, power, subjectivity, history, identity, "difference," cultural change, and social movements will occupy our attention as we use Nietzsche and Foucault to think the present.

ANTH 8960: Historiography: Genealogy as Deconstructive Practice (2 units)
What is the role of historiography in the constitution of counter-memory? This course examines contemporary scholarship that intervenes in dominant regimes of truth and social relations of injustice. Engaging research, writing, and thinking that utilize genealogical approaches, including our own work, we will elaborate on "deconstruction as justice" (Derrida, Spivak) in feminist and postcolonial frames. Through genealogy, we will problematize present discourses and practices to proliferate critical reflection and social experimentation (Foucault). We will focus on analyses of nation, religion, and majoritarianism; gendered violence and resistance; self-determination struggles; diaspora, hybridity, and identity politics; international organizations, law, and transnational border crossings.

ANTH 9000: PhD Specialization Seminar/Dissertation Proposal Writing (0 units)
The doctoral dissertation in the Anthropology Program at CIIS is based on applied research. It is conceived in collaboration with department faculty that students perceive as key to their dissertation work. It is also conceived in collaboration with communities of practice relevant to the research. A dissertation proposal is a scholarly document designed to demonstrate critical knowledge in the student's area of inquiry. It demonstrates the ability to design and conduct applied and participatory research. The proposal explores research alliances and themes, delineating relevant discursive, cultural, and methodological frameworks, and contributions to the discipline of anthropology and to social change.

ANTH 9210: Advanced Seminar Series B (2 units)

ANTH 9310: Advanced Seminar Series A (3 units)