Week
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Topics
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Assignments Due
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1
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Course Overview and Introduction
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2
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Ethnographic Participation
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Nanook of the North Reflection
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3
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Race and Ethnicity
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4
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Patterns of Culture
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5
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Sex and Gender
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6
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Exchange
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7
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Structure
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8
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Ritual and Symbol
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9
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Mid-term Exam
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10
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Interpretation
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11
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Production
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One-page thick-description statement
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12
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Colonialism
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13
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Religion
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14
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Power and Biopolitics
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2-3-page thick-description paper
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15
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Nationalism and Populism
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16
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Science, Technology, and Society
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17
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Life and Being
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18
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Final Paper
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9/15 Week 1: Course Overview and Introduction
- In-class screening: Nanook of the North (1922, 79 min., B&W, silent, Dir: Robert Flaherty)
Supplementary readings:
- Rony, Fatimah Tobing. 1997. Ch. 4 “Taxidermy and Romantic Ethnography,” in The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle, pp. 99-126.
- Grimshaw, Anna 2001. “The Innocent Eye: Flaherty, Malinowski and the Romantic Quest,” in The Ethnographer’s Eye, pp. 44-57.
9/22 Week 2: Ethnographic Participation
- Malinowski, Bronislaw 1960 (1922). “The Subject, Method and Scope of this Inquiry” and “Conclusion.” In Argonauts of the Western Pacific. London: EP Dutton, pp 1-25 and 516-518.
Supplementary readings:
9/29 Week 3: Race and Ethnicity
- Boas, Franz 1920. The Methods of Ethnology. American Anthropologist. 22(4): 311-321
- Boas, Franz 1889. On Alternating Sounds. American Anthropologist. 2(1): 47-54
10/6 Week 4: Patterns of Culture
- Benedict, Ruth 1934. “The Integration of Culture” and “The Individual and the Pattern of Culture.” In Patterns of Culture. Boston: Mariner, pp 45-56 and 251-278
- Benedict, Ruth. Excerpt TBD, in The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture.
10/13 Week 5: Sex and Gender
- Mead, Margaret 1935. Introduction, Chapters 2 and 3. In Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies. Pp. v-xiv,15-39. New York: William Morrow and Company.
- Mead, Margaret. Excerpt TBD, in Coming of Age in Samoa: A Study of Adolescence and Sex in Primitive Societies.
10/20 Week 6: Exchange
- Mauss, Marcel. Excerpt TBD, in The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. Translated by W. D. Halls. London; New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000.
10/27 Week 7: Structure
- Radcliffe-Brown, Alfred 1965. “On Social Structure.” In Structure and Function in Primitive Society. New York: Free Press, pp 189-204.
- Evans-Pritchard, Edward, “Political System,” in The Nuer. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 139-191.
11/3 Week 8: Ritual and Symbol
- Levi-Strauss, Claude, “The Sorcerer and his Magic,” 167-185. In Structural Anthropology. Revised ed. edition. New York: Basic Books, 1974.
- Turner, Victor 1970. “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage.” In The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, pp 94-111.
Supplementary reading:
- Saussure, F. 1959. “Nature of the Linguistic Sign” and “Immutability and Mutability of the Sign” in Course in General Linguistics. New York: McGraw-Hill Book.
- Munn, Nancy D. The Fame of Gawa: A Symbolic Study of Value Transformation in a Massim (Papua New Guinea) Society. The Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures 1976. Cambridge?; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
- Rutherford, Danilyn. “How Structuralism Matters.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6, no. 3 (2016): 61–77.
11/10 Week 9: Midterm Exam. No Class.
11/17 Week 10: Interpretation
- Geertz, Clifford 1973. “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture.” In The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, pp 3-30.
- Geertz, Clifford 1973. “Deep Play: Notes on a Balinese Cockfight.” In The Interpretation of Cultures, pp 412-453.
11/24 Week 11: Production
- Marx, Karl. “Section 4 - The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret thereof,” In Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Translated by Ben Fowkes. New York: Penguin Books in association with New Left Review, 1990. (Chinese edition available).
Supplementary reading:
- Mintz, Sidney 1985. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Penguin Books. “Introduction,” & “Food, Sociality and Sugar " Pp. xv-xxx, 3-18.
- Srnicek, Nick. 2017. Platform Capitalism. Theory Redux. Cambridge, UK?; Malden, MA: Polity Press.
12/1 Week 12: Colonialism
- Frantz Fanon, Chapter 1 “Concerning Violence,” and Chapter 3: “The Pitfalls of National Consciousness,” in The Wretched of the Earth. (Chinese edition available)
- Amin, Samir. 2010. Preface and Chapter 1. In Eurocentrism. 2nd ed. edition. Monthly Review Press.
Supplementary film: The battle of Algiers
12/8 Week 13: Religion
- Asad, Talal 1973. “Introduction,” in Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter, pp 9-19
- Mahmood, Saba 2001. “Feminist Theory, Embodiment and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections on the Egyptian Islamic Revival.” Cultural Anthropology 16(2): 202-236
12/15 Week 14: Power and Biopolitics
- Foucault, Michel 1995 (1975). “Docile Bodies.” In Discipline and Punish. New York: Vintage, pp 135-170 (Chinese edition available).
- Foucault, M. 2003 “Lecture 11” in Society Must Be Defended. New York: Picador. pp. 239-264.
Supplementary reading:
- Foucault, M. 2007 “Lectures 1” in Security, Territory and Population. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 1-27
- Ortner, Sherry B. “Dark Anthropology and Its Others: Theory since the Eighties.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6, no. 1 (2016): 47–73.
- Besteman, Catherine Lowe, and Hugh Gusterson, eds. 2019. Life by Algorithms: How Roboprocesses Are Remaking Our World. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
12/22 Week 15: Nationalism and Populism
- Anderson, Benedict. Chapters 1, 3, and 10. In Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Revised edition. London New York: Verso, 2016. (Chinese edition available)
Supplementary reading:
- Chatterjee, Partha. 2015. “Nationalism,” in Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Rutherford, Danilyn. “Affect Theory and the Empirical.” Annual Review of Anthropology 45 (2016): 285–300.
- Laclau, Ernesto. 2005. “Populism: What’s in a Name?” In Populism and the Mirror of Democracy. Edited by Francisco Panizza. First Printing edition. London: Verso.
***Bonus points: Visit Taipei Biennial 2020 at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, details TBA***
11/28 氣候變遷（地球小屋)、12/26 核廢料
12/29 Week 16: Science, Technology, and Society
- Latour, B. 1993. “Part 1” in The Pasteurization of France. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
- Bruno Latour, pp.1-16, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime (Polity, 2018).
Supplementary reading:
- Latour, Bruno. “Introduction.” In We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1993.
- Coleman, Gabriella. 2015. “Introduction.” In Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous. Reprint edition. London: Verso.
- Hallinan, Blake, and Ted Striphas. 2016. “Recommended for You: The Netflix Prize and the Production of Algorithmic Culture.” New Media & Society 18 (1): 117–37.
1/5 Week 17: Life and Being
- Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. “Part Two. After Progress: Salvage Accumulation,” pp. 55-148. In The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015.
Supplementary reading:
- Stevenson, Lisa. “Introduction,” in Life beside Itself: Imagining Care in the Canadian Arctic. Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2014.
- Kohn, Eduardo. “Introduction,” in How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human. First edition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013.
Week 18: Final Paper
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