Instructor: M. Vail

How have cultures been represented through film? This course offers a selective introduction to the past and present of ethnographic and documentary filmmaking. It also considers Hollywood depictions of “other” cultures and the growing number of films by directors working within their own communities. Film & Culture joins scholarly and filmmaking sensibilities to examine the relation of cultural identity to portrayal in film.

Freud is a protean figure and can be approached in a number of ways. We are going to approach him through what was not only a central theme in his thinking, but through what became a central theme in his life.

With regard to his thinking, when he was too ill to attend the last Congress of the International Psychoanalytic in Europe before the Second World War, Freud sent his daughter, Anna, to read a text praising the vale of Spirituality over Sensuality -the value of mastering the instincts – to his followers who were gathered in Paris. This was his final testament.

And with regard to his life, he chose to die in freedom and on his own terms when he had his physician inject him with a lethal dose of morphine when his cancer-ridden-life no longer made sense to him. That was the way he mastered fate. We are not, however, going to take the value of self-mastery on face value. Freud was not sufficiently open to the charge, voiced by many critics of psychoanalysis, that the prices of this sort of self-mastery is too high. It may be the case, they argue, that too much instinctual gratification is sacrificed with a stance that puts such a one-sided emphasis on mastery, thus diminishing the prospects for happiness in life. We will examine these criticisms as we proceed.

Instructor: P. Kockelman

This course introduces students to functional linguistics and language typology. Functional linguistics involves describing, classifying and explaining the relation between linguistic form (e.g. various grammatical patterns embodied in phonology, morphology, and syntax) and linguistic function (e.g. the ends communicative utterances serve and the meanings grammatical categories encode). Language typology involves describing and comparing the forms and functions of the worlds languages in order to uncover, classify and explain cross-linguistic patterns.

Instructor: S. Gregory

We will explore contemporary theories and methods, as well as trace historical trajectories in anthropological engagement with regional trade, production, and labor systems. Many of the questions about globalization revolve around cultural confrontations and social, political and economic transformations. Observers of these processes in multiple disciplines attempt to answer similar questions.

How did trade systems transform production and labor in participating areas in other periods of history? How is identity reconfigured and manipulated in contemporary globalization? How are forms of identity commoditized and marketed in global transactions? What forms of resistance to globalization have emerged, where and why? How do issues of race, gender, class, ethnicity and religion intersect in global labor settings? How are sexualities, bodies and body parts implicated in global economies of consumption?

The anthropological encounter with these complex issues invokes particular theories and methodologies. Fieldwork, longitudinal engagement with issues and locations, multi-sited studies, and following commodity chains are some of the current methods used to uncover the voices and perspectives various actors bring to encounters. Selected ethnographies, case studies, fiction and other forms of media all explore the lived experience of globalized work, travel, and technological encounters at various sites of interaction.

Instructor: W. Bao

This course explores East Asian Cinema from the perspective of film genre. In particular, the course examines East Asian genre films as active interaction with the circulation of global film genres as well as mass mediated engagement with specific economic, social, and political histories of East Asia. We will study contemporary theories of film genre, examine how the case of East Asian genre films complicate existing theories, while paying due attention to the parallel transnational traffics–between East Asian Cinema and global film genre, and across East Asian Cinema in their history of cultural and economic flow as well as political confrontation. We will integrate our investigations of genre-specific questions (industry, style, reception, spectatorship, affect) with those of gender, ethnicity, power as well as nation and transnational/transregional identity. Discussion Section Required.

This course is intended to explore important themes in modern political thought from texts taken from traditions outside the modern West. It will not be devoted to textual exegesis, but use as sites of exploration central questions of modern politics. The attempt will be not merely to grasp what these thinkers thought, but to think more widely with and through their texts. The course will focus on the works of M K Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Mohammad Iqbal, and Leopold Senghor. It will involve reading assigned texts and critical and comparative analysis of their theoretical ideas.

Instructor: S. Sassen

Using classical texts about cities (do they still work for us?) and on the diverse new literatures on cities and larger subjects with direct urban implications, we will use a variety of data sets to get at detailed empirical information, and draw on two large ongoing research projects involving major and minor global cities around the world (a total of over 60 cities are covered in detail as of 2008). Global Core.

Instructor: S. Kaviraj and D. Miron

Instructor: S. Moyn

Dedicated to four main topics on human rights: 1) long-term origins; 2) short-term origins; 3) evolution through the present; 4) moral defenses and ideological criticisms