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Anthropology Course Descriptions

Unless otherwise noted, all upper-level (300 and 400) courses have ANTH 101 or ANTH 200 or permission of the instructor as the pre-requisite. Courses marked “FR” satisfy the major requirement for one field-research intensive course.

ANTH 101: Introduction to Cultural Anthropology

Professor Gable . Anthropology’s role in developing the concept “culture.” Cosmopolitan, Glamour, or The New Yorker, talk-show hosts and political pundits, and management gurus tell you that groups of people do this or believe that because of “their culture.” We now habitually assume that people can “know” the world and act on this “knowledge” in dramatically different ways. But where do these assumptions come from? Are they assumptions we tend to have “because of our culture?” And, if they are, how can we disentangle our assumptions about what culture is and does as we study “the culture” of others? These will be the kind of questions we confront in this course as we explore the ways anthropologists developed the concept of “culture.” First, in their studies of the so-called “primitive” or “traditional” societies, and second, as anthropologists have deployed the culture concept in their studies of the contemporary United States.

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ANTH 215: Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica

The spectacular cultures of Mesoamerica–the Maya, Aztec, Zapotec, Olmec, Teotihuacan–have fascinated many people for years. This course introduces you to the major cultural achievements of the pre-Columbian Indians of the area and what those achievements meant for the people themselves. The course focuses on the Olmec, Teotihuacan, the Maya, and the Aztec. Important topics include the development of domesticated foods and sedentary life, the emergence of urbanism and hierarchical societies, militarism, styles of art and architecture, the connections between these cultural developments and the environment of this area, and reasons for the collapse of these civilizations.

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ANTH 298: Ethnography

Ethnography–writing about a particular group of people in a particular place, with an eye toward describing those people and toward testing currently popular theories in the humanistic disciplines–is the bread and butter of socio-cultural anthropology.

Ethnography, as a particular method of writing based on more or less particular method of research, is also what anthropology offers to the humanistic disciplines. Ethnography, broadly conceived, has come to be a crucial textual form in sociology, philosophy, history, literary studies, and related disciplines. In this course, students are introduced to path-breaking ethnographies in anthropology. Along the way, students will see how anthropologists with a range of theoretical perspectives have used the genre of ethnography to persuade their audiences of the validity of their approaches. Students will use these ethnographies as windows into the ways theories are produced and tested.

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ANTH 299: Arguments in Anthropology

As a concept, culture has generated much anthropological debate, especially in the United States. As a phenomenon, if it is one, it has proven notoriously difficult to define or even to characterize. The goal of this course is to introduce you to the most important, i.e., influential, theories about culture and to have you see the reciprocal relationship between these ideas and anthropological representations of people’s lives, which we commonly call ethnography. If you can accept no definition of culture, nevertheless you will understand the difficulties of defining it We introduce you to the problem by having you read what the major theorists have written about culture. At the same time, in ANTH 298: Ethnography, which is the co-requisite for this course, you will read ethnographic works that reflect and shape such theory. You should achieve sufficient familiarity with the theoretical positions presented here that you can recognize their influence on ethnographic work and also decide which of them, or what combination of them, you will use in carrying out your own ethnographic investigations.

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ANTH 271D: Traditional Native North American Cultures–Mrs Huber

NOTE that this course will be offered only in the Spring of 2010.

This course looks at the traditional cultures of Native North Americans: customs of their own invention, not those imposed on them by the United States or Canadian governments–from the late sixteenth to the late nineteenth centuries. The study provides a basis for understanding the situations of native tribes in the modern U.S. and Canada.

After identifying the major culture areas of North America, we look in detail at six of these: the Arctic, the Northwest Coast, the Plains, the Southwest, the Eastern Woodlands, and the Southeast. As time permits, lectures will explore the remaining regions–the sub-Arctic, the Great Lakes, California.

The course will show you how the original peoples of North America lived before modernization. Important theoretical issues are the relationship between the culture and its environment, and the relationship between society and the individual. You should also come to recognize the distinctive cultural traits of each area. Never again will you feel comfortable seeing a totem pole next to a tipi. Most important of all–what did these customs mean to the people themselves?

Reading will comprise six classic ethnographies about Native Americans: Never in Anger, by Jean Briggs (Inuit); To Make My Name Good, by Drucker and Heizer (Kwakiutl); The Crow Indians, by Robert Lowie; Spider Woman, by Gladys Reichard (Navajo); Midwinter Rites of the Cayuga Longhouse, by Frank Speck; and Powhatan Lords of Life and Death, by Margaret Holmes Williamson. Other assignments include a mid-term test and a short research paper about some aspect of a Native American culture.
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ANTH 309: Anthropology of Art

Asking the question, are there universal aesthetic canons, this course introduces students to the sculpture, painting, architecture, textiles, ceramics, and self-secoration of Africa, the Pacific, and native North America, focusing on relating the styles and subject matter of these arts to their respective cultural contexts in order to understand the intentions of the artists and the meanings of the owrks for the people who make and see them. Students learn to see with the “native’s” eye, understanding the meanings and the aesthetic canons of the cultures in question, rather than the eye of a western connoisseur of art. Finally, we look at how western and non-western artistic forms have mutually influenced each other, and consider issues arising from the western appropriation of these works by museums and private collectors.

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ANTH 312: Anthropology of Gender

The course aims to provide a broadly human understanding of gender. Looking at gender definitions and gender relations from a variety of cultures around the world, we address the questions “Are gender and sex the same thing, and if not, what are they and how are they related?” “How is gender related to other ideas of the person such as intelligence,
personality, morality?” “What do ‘female’ and ‘male’ mean, and are they universal concepts?” “Are gender hierarchy and male dominance inevitable?” “Are there only two genders?” We first look at the meanings of gender in several cultural contexts, and in that connection we study cultures in which three or more genders are identified. Finally we address gender hierarchy, taking it as an aspect of gender definition. In particular, we consider whether the appearance of gender hierarchy is the result of European colonial expansion. Readings include classic works on the subject of gender as well as modern studies.

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ANTH 317: Gifts and Commodities

It’s common to think of the economy of a society as its basis, what drives everything else about it. The economy is, in turn, perceived to be a necessary consequence of the ecology. In other words, people have the economy they do in order to survive, and survival is precarious.  Farmers live in areas that can support farming, and everyone else is a forager. Common sense concludes that foragers are worse-off than farming peoples, themselves worse-off than peoples in industrialized societies None of these ideas is valid. This course will show you why. We will see that the form the economy takes is an expression of cultural ideas just as religion, architecture, and clothing are. Non-western foraging and horticultural economies can and do produce surpluses for exchange. Until recently they did not use money, unlike western culture. An important question addressed in this course is the consequences of contact between a non-money economy and the global money-based capitalist economy. Besides reading extensively about such non-western economies the class conducts a limited ethnographic enquiry into some aspect of the economy of Fredericksburg such as personal gift-giving, small-scale retailing, or the art market.

This course satisfies the major requirement for one field-research intensive course.

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ANTH 318: Anthropology of Religion

(Formerly ANTH/RELG 217: Primitive Religions)

A study of religious ideas and practices, mainly in non-western cultures, from the anthropological point of view. Religious ideas include “sacred,” “profane,” “divine,” “sin,” “taboo,” and the like; and also the varieties and nature of spiritual beings, identified as “gods,” “spirits,” “ghosts,” and so on; and the possible or actual relations between these beings and humans. The practices arise from these ideas and include shamanism, sacrifice, oracles and divination, exorcism, millenarianism and revitalization movements, funeral customs, and mythology. We examine many of these practices in specific cultural contexts to show how they can be used to arrive at the religious ideas of the culture, ideas which may often be otherwise ill-articulated. We see that religion in these cultures is not a sometime thing; on the contrary, for the people who acknowledge them religious ideas permeate, and explain, every aspect of life.

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ANTH 321: Anthropology of Food

Food is a human universal. Everyone needs food to live. Moreover, the production, preparation, exchange, and consumption of food take up an enormous amount of time, energy, and attention in every human society. But besides being a necessity, food is everywhere a way of expressing and maintaining social status and social relations, establishing identity and difference, honoring divinities and humiliating opponents. This course takes it for granted that people must eat, and focuses on the meanings that people around the world attach to the foods they eat–including other human beings–and the things they classify as inedible. This allows us to consider the related topic of how foods cross cultural boundaries. Such foods a chocolate, maize, sugar, and hamburgers have traveled well beyond their areas of origin to form a part the diet in all parts of the globe. We look at this history of the dissemination of these foods and suggest reasons why so many societies have accepted them. Finally, we consider the modern American diet as a cultural phenomenon, together with the related issues of anorexia and obesity.

This satisfies the major requirement of one field-research intensive course.

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ANTH 322: Symbolic Anthropology

Arguably, culture is a structure of symbols, or of symbolic classification. Therefore the study of symbols must occupy a central position in cultural anthropology. This course is both an examination of anthropological theorizing on the subject and an introduction to the methods by which anthropology has analyzed cultural forms. We establish a working definition of “symbol,” and then look at such matters as how symbols acquire meaning, how as an anthropologist one may determine the meanings of symbols, whether it is permissible to attribute implicit meanings to symbols, and–depending on the answer to that question–how best to understand symbolic forms such as myth, ritual, art, and text. Most of the course focuses on non-western cultures, but it also addresses comparable American cultural forms such as the birthday cake, Superman and Batman, and the Tooth Fairy.

This satisfies the major requirement of one field-research intensive course.

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ANTH 341: Practices of Memory

Collective memory, or a shared understanding of the past, plays a vital role in group identity and in the way present events are understood and acted upon.  Memories are made in the present, and they are always selective.  Indeed, remembering always involves forgetting.  What is remembered and forgotten can be extremely important: the stories we tell about our past, the events we commemorate, the museum exhibits we visit, the films we produce and watch, and the monuments we build all play a significant role in defining our identity by shaping how we view the past.  For this very reason representations of the past are a source of political power and often become the focus of conflict.  In this course we will examine the concept of collective memory, the ways different groups construct representations of the past in different contexts, and explore conflicts over remembering.  The contexts range from the U.S. to Madagascar, from the Vietnam War and Columbus Day to the colonial past and venerated ancestors.

Satisfies the major requirement of one field-research intensive course.

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ANTH 342: Touring Cultures

In this course we explore “touring cultures”–cultures of tourists and tourism, as well as the cultures of those toured and the effects of tourism on them. Tourism is one of the largest and fastest-growing industries in the world today, but it also represents a specific form of experience and a culture unto itself that some authors have compared to religious pilgrimage. We will examine interactions between tourists, local people, and institutions, and the ways people, places, and historic periods are produced and packaged for consumption by tourists. Other topics will include the connections between tourism and issues of leisure and consumption, globalization, class and ethnic identities, authentic vs. manufactured experiences, and sex tourism. We will also examine the increasing dependence of many communities on tourist dollars for their livelihood and how this affects those communities.

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ANTH 343: Culture and Identity in Europe 

The economic and political integration of Europe finds part of its justification in the idea of a common European culture. Yet efforts by European Union officials to create a European identity have proven only marginally successful. Most Europeans still see themselves first and foremost as members of local, regional, and national communities. In this course we will use ethnographic texts to consider the variety of cultural forms and identities in Europe, including communities in formerly socialist states and immigrant communities such as the Algerian Berbers in France. We will also examine attempts to define the boundaries of Europe and a common European culture.

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ANTH 344: Urban Theory and Ethnography

This course focuses on the history and characteristics of cities and suburbs with respect to how they shape social relationships and experience as well as views of cities and society.  We specifically examine issues of public space, suburbanization, and gentrification.  The course also seeks to encourage reflection and dialogue about conducting ethnographic research in and about urban and suburban settings.  In addition to participating in reading and discussion, I will ask you apply theoretical perspectives on cities and suburbs in the course of conducting an ethnographic study in the Fredericksburg area.

Satisfies the major requirement of one field-research intensive course.

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ANTH 480: Senior Research

Required of all senior anthropology majors, this course allows a student to carry out independent research on a topic of specific interest to her- or himself in preparation for writing the senior thesis in ANTH 481: Senior Thesis.  Class combines seminar meetings to discuss individual project progress with independent research and one-on-one tutorials.  Students may focus on a non-western, non-industrialized society, ancient or modern; or create a research project based on the Fredericksburg region. The research should demonstrate the student’s familiarity with the chosen topic as well as with relevant anthropological concepts, including the concept of culture itself. The course is one of two (the other is ANTH 481: Senior Thesis) required for honors in anthropology.

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