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~ Human Society and Culture ~
ANTH-UA 1.001 • 12 Waverly Place Room G08
New York University • Spring 2015
Prof. Robin Nagle
14 University Place
[email protected]
Teaching Assistants:
Joseph Livesey (jfl322)
9:30-10:45, 25WV 1st fl
11:00-12:15, 25WV 706
Office hours: Mondays 2:00–4:00
or by appointment
212-998-8065
Schulyer Marquez (stm313)
9:30-10:45, 12WV L113
12:30-1:45, Silver 404
Noah Pleshet (nop204)
11:00-12:15, 12WV L113
12:30-1:45, Silver 404
INTRODUCTION
Anthropology is the study of humanity, past and present, but it is more than just an academic
discipline. Anthropology is an enterprise of infinitely rich potential, a frame of reference for
encountering and making sense of the world. To live within an anthropological perspective is to
perpetually wonder how cultural practices and beliefs came to be the way they are, to be forever
curious about the meanings, benefits and consequences of those customs, and to ask what
alternatives exist (or could be created), in what contexts, under what circumstances.
Anthropology reveals the illusory nature of “facts” that we claim justify our divisions from each
other. An anthropological way of thinking understands that there is no such thing as an “exotic”
“Other” – or perhaps there is, and it’s us.
To put it more simply, anthropology has a basic question and a basic mission. The question:
“What are the rules?” The mission: to make it safe to be different (though “different” should be
in quotes, since the very definition of difference is culturally relative…but I’m getting ahead of
myself. We’ll wade into those waters in a few weeks).
The question is pursued and the mission honored with a three-part methodology. Anthropologists
do fieldwork, meaning they strive to immerse themselves as fully as possible for an extended
time within the worldview and customs of a people about whom they want to learn. Insights and
analysis that comes from fieldwork are conveyed through a genre of writing called ethnography.
Ethnographies used to be limited to academic books and articles, but now ethnographic “texts”
are found in all manner of media. The third element of anthropological method is basic and
continual research, which happens before, during, and after fieldwork, through as full a range of
materials and disciplinary considerations as possible.
By the end of the semester you will be familiar with some of anthropology’s foundational
arguments, you will have carried out your own fieldwork, you will have at least a slightly more
nuanced understanding of the social lives that surround you and in which you are immersed, and
you will see how anthropology can be simultaneously a liberating perspective and a practical
training.
REQUIREMENTS / ASSIGNMENTS
You will write a fieldwork proposal, one response paper, and a fieldwork overview/
ethnography. You will also write questions for your discussion sections each week. In addition,
you will create a kinship chart and take two in-class exams (a mid-term and a final).
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Weekly Questions
Write and post three questions each week (posting instructions are in the next paragraph). The
questions must engage that week’s readings. Use the texts! The purpose of this exercise is to
show me you’ve actually read them, and to show me where the reading and/or the lecture is
unclear. If you don’t understand something we’ve read even after we’ve gone over it in class,
that should be at least one (and perhaps all) of your questions. Another approach is to imagine
you’ve been asked to write parts of the mid-term or final. What can you draw from the reading
that you can turn into a substantive question?
To post your questions, go to the Assignments tab on our NYU Classes portal, find your
discussion section, and put them there. Your questions must be posted no later than 5:00p on
Wednesdays. Late questions won’t be accepted. “Late” means after 5:00 on Wednesdays –
even just a few minutes after 5:00. Missed questions will be calculated as zero in that component
of your grade.
Response paper
This should be between 500 and 1250 words – that is, between two and five pages, double
spaced. Hand-written work will not be accepted. The paper must engage at least two of the
readings from class as they help you analyze and/or critique a museum space and exhibition.
Two readings is the minimum; using more than two reflects a greater effort on your part and
therefore the likelihood of a better grade. Rubrics and guidelines for the writing assignments are
under the Resources section of our NYU Classes site.
Museum Details
Museums are good places to observe how cultural symbols are defined, organized, and narrated.
Choose a museum from this list and visit it at least once. Choose a specific exhibition within it
and consider what it’s telling visitors. What underlying “rules” does it follow or break? If you
were an anthropologist from a distant and very different place, how would you describe it to
people in your native land?
African Burial Ground
American Museum of Natural History
Brooklyn Historical Society
City Reliquary
Nat’l Museum of the American Indian
Museum of the City of New York
New-York Historical Society
New York Hall of Science
Staten Island Museum
Tenement Museum
Transit Museum
Skyscraper Museum
If you want to visit a museum not on this list, convince me.
Fieldwork Project
Choose a social setting in which to do anthropological participant observation. Write an initial
proposal for the project and then a final report. We’ll go over this in detail during class and in
your discussion sections; guidelines are on our NYU Classes portal.
Grade Percentages
Section participation
Fieldwork proposal
Mid-term exam
Response paper
10
10
15
10
Fieldwork report
Weekly questions
Final exam
20
15
20
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The Stern Warning
Late assignments will not be accepted, and there are no make-up exams. Exceptions will be
considered only if they are made by your faculty advisor, by someone from the dean’s office, or
if you have documentation supporting a legitimate reason (i.e., a doctor’s note, proof of death in
the family, etc.).
POSSIBLE EXCURSIONS
If there’s interest, we may take a class trip to Dead Horse Bay in Brooklyn, and/or enjoy an
evening on the town with local Freegans. The Dead Horse Bay trip will be on a weekend,
perhaps very early in the day (it depends on the tides). An outing with the Freegans will be
around 9:00 on a week night. These are entirely voluntary, and both will likely have space
limitations.
CONDUCT
Arrive to class and discussion section on time. Respect your classmates and your teachers by
being attentive and by participating in class and section conversations.
In your writing, you must give credit to the source of any and all material you quote directly or
use indirectly. Plagiarism is a crime punishable by failing the class.
Using iDevices in class is a distraction to your classmates. If you are unable to disconnect for 75
minutes, please sit in the designated area we’re calling the Northwest Quadrant.
SCHEDULE
Week 1 | Getting started
January 26
Why anthropology? What are our expectations of you? What are your expectations of the
class? What are your expectations of yourself?
January 28
Miner, Horace. 1956. Body Ritual Among the Nacerima. American Anthropologist 58:
503-507.
Williams, Raymond. 1983. Culture. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society,
rev’d ed. New York: Oxford University Press, p87-94.
Week 2 | How to think like an anthropologist…or how not to
February 2
Brekhus, Wayne. 1998. A Sociology of the Unmarked: Redirecting Our Focus. Sociological
Theory 16(1):34-51.
February 4
Geertz, Clifford. 1973. Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture. The
Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, p311-323.
Week 3 | Ancestors & Method
February 9
Boas, Franz. 1911. The Mind of Primitive Man. Science 13(321): 281-289.
Human Society and Culture | Spring 2015 | Nagle
Lutkehaus, Nancy C. 1995. Margaret Mead and the “Rustling-of-the-Wind-in-the-PalmTrees School” of Ethnographic Writing. R. Behar and D. Gordon, eds., Women Writing
Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Hemenway, Robert. 1976. Folklore Field Notes from Zora Neale Hurston. The Black
Scholar 7(7): 39-46.
February 11
Nelson, Nancy. 1996. The Thief and the Anthropologist: A Story of Ethics, Power, and
Ethnography. City & Society.
Stephens, William. 2014. On Being a Good Neighbor, or Things I Learned in the Field.
Anthropology & Education 45(2): 203-211.
Fine, Gary. 2003. Toward a Peopled Ethnography: Developing Theory from Group Life.
Ethnography 4(1): 41-60.
à Post three questions to your discussion section by 5:00pm (look under
Assignments). See the top of page 2 for guidelines.
à Fieldwork proposal due
Week 4 | It’s all in the family
February 16 [Presidents Day – No Class] & 18
Schneider, David and George Homans. 1955. Kinship Terminology and the American
Kinship System. American Anthropologist 57(6): 1194-1208.
Read the AusAnthro website on kinship, parts 2, 3, & 4:
http://www.ausanthrop.net/research/kinship/index.php
à Post three questions to your discussion section by 5:00pm
à Bring a rough draft of your kinship chart.
Week 5
February 23 & 25
Malinowski, B. 1930. Kinship. Man 30:19-29.
Beattie, J.H.M. 1964. Kinship and Social Anthropology. Man 64: 101-103.
Schneider, David. 1984. Introduction to A Critique of the Study of Kinship. Ann Arbor,
MI: University of Michigan Press.
Schneider, David. 1997. The Power of Culture: Notes on Some Aspects of Gay and
Lesbian Kinship in America Today. Cultural Anthropology 12(2): 270-274.
Watch the documentary “Paris is Burning.”
à Monday: Final kinship chart due
à Post three questions to your discussion section by 5:00pm
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Week 6 | The Gift of Exchange
March 2
Durkheim, Emil. 1964 [1901]. What is a Social Fact? The Rules of Sociological Method.
New York: Free Press. (Available online through Bobst)
Mauss, Marcel. 1990. Excerpts from The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in
Archaic Societies. New York: W.W. Norton.
March 4
Malinowski, B. 1950 [1922]. Excerpts from Argonauts of the Western Pacific. New
York: Dutton.
Weiner, Annette. 1994. Cultural Difference and the Density of Objects. American
Ethnologist 21(1): 391-403.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1992. Structures, Habitus, and Practices. The Logic of Practice, R.
Nice, trans. New York: Polity Press.
à Post three questions to your discussion section by 5:00pm
Week 7 | Stuff and Thingness, a.k.a. Material Culture
March 9
Wilk, Richard R. 2011. A Critique of Desire: Distaste and Dislike in Consumer Behavior.
Consumption Markets & Culture 2(1): 175-196.
Shevchenko, Olga. 2002. ‘In Case of Fire Emergency’: Consumption, Security and the
Meaning of Durables in a Transforming Society. Journal of Consumer Culture 2(2):
147-170.
March 11-- Mid-term exam
Week 8 | Spring Break
Week 9 | Infrastructural and Urban Forms
March 23
Larkin, Brian. 2013. The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure. Annual Review of
Anthropology 42: 327-343.
Star, Susan Leigh. 1999. The Ethnography of Infrastructure. American Behavioral
Scientist 43(30): 377-391.
March 25
Barnard, Alex. 2011. ‘Waving the Banana’ at Capitalism: Political Theater and Social
Movement Strategy among New York’s ‘Freegan’ Dumpster Divers. Ethnography 12(4):
419-444.
In-class film screening: documentary about the Freegans by Tate LeFevre
à Post three questions to your discussion section by 5:00pm
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Week 10 | “Race” and Protest
March 30
Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo 2012. The Invisible Weight of Whiteness: The Racial Grammar
of Everyday Life in Contemporary America. Ethnic and Racial Studies 35(2): 173-194.
Razsa, Maple John. 2014. Beyond ‘Riot Porn’: Protest Video and the Production of
Unruly Subjects. Ethnos 79(4): 496-524.
April 1
Bonilla, Yarimar and Jonathan Rosa. 2015. Digital Protest, Hashtag Ethnography, and the
Racial Politics of Social Media in the United States. American Ethnologist.
Hannon, Andrew. 2014. “Whose Streets?” Zones of Performative Occupations.
Transforming Anthropology 22(1): 7-12.
à Post three questions to your discussion section by 5:00pm
à Museum response paper due
Weeks 11 & 12 | Digital Redefinitions?
April 6
Theocharis, Yannis, et al. 2015. Using Twitter to Mobilize Protest Action. Information,
Communication & Society 18(2): 202-220.
Gibbs, Martin, et al. 2015. #Funeral and Instagram. Information, Communication, &
Society 18(3): 255-268.
Lepore, Jill. 2015. The Cobweb: Can the Internet Be Archived? The New Yorker, Jan. 26.
April 8
Coleman, E. Gabriella. 2013. Introduction and Part I (Chapters 1 & 2). Coding Freedom:
The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
à Post three questions to your discussion section by 5:00pm
April 13 & 15
Monday / Coleman, continued: Part II (Chapters 3 & 4)
Wednesday / Coleman, continued: Part III (Chapter 5, Conclusion, Epilogue)
à Post three questions to your discussion section by 5:00pm
Weeks 13 & 14 | For, Of, or With? Public/Applied Anthropology
April 20
Ventura, Jonathan. 2013. Industrial Design, Ethnography, and Anthropological Thought.
Anthropology in Action 21(3): 31-41
Briody, Elizabeth K., et al. Opinions: Ethnographic Methods in the Study of Business.
Journal of Business Anthropology 2(2): 133-167.
Human Society and Culture | Spring 2015 | Nagle
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April 22
Nagle, Robin. 2013. Prelude, Part I (Chapters 1-3), Part II (Chapter 4-6). Picking Up: On
the Streets and Behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of New York City. New
York: Farrar Straus and Giroux.
In-class film screening: The Men of CU-160
à Post three questions to your discussion section by 5:00pm
April 27 & 29
Monday / Nagle, continued: Part III (Chapters 7-10), Part IV (Chapters 11-14).
Wednesday / Nagle, continued: Part V (Chapters 15-19), Postlude, Glossary.
Week 15 | The End of the Beginning
May 4 & 6 - Catch up, conclusion, loose ends, exam review, where to go from here
à Fieldwork overview / ethnography due on Wednesday
Week 15.5
May 11 - Final Exam