ANTHROPOLOGY 3AC

American Cultures: Introduction to Cultural Anthropology

Spring 2020
Tu/Th 9:30-11:00
Valley Life Sciences 2050

Professor Stefania Pandolfo

201 Kroeber Hall
[email protected]
Professor Pandolfo Office hours for this class: Thursday 12:00 – 2:00 (a link will be sent to sign
up)

Graduate Student Instructors (GSIs):

Head GSI: Patricia Kubala, [email protected]

Gustavo Capela, [email protected]
Ángela Castillo-Ardila, [email protected]
Caylee Hong, [email protected]
Jacob Liming, [email protected]
Carolina Talavera, [email protected]
Robyn Taylor-Neu, [email protected]

COURSE DESCRIPTION

This course offers an introduction to the basic concepts, ideas, issues, and debates in cultural
anthropology. We will think concepts and methods in anthropology side by side with questions
raised from the lived experience of American cultures. We will begin with James Baldwin, and
what he called the “perpetual challenge” represented by anti-black racism in America. We will
ask: what does it mean to conceive of cultural norms, belonging, and anthropology, taking
seriously the historical wound, and the challenge, of racialized existence?
Anthropology, the study of anthropos, the human, lies at the intersection of the social sciences,
philosophy, biology, and linguistics. In the United States, it has historically been divided into
four sub-disciplines. This course is an introduction to the largest of the four, cultural (or social)
anthropology. It is an American Cultures program course, and its focus in introducing social and
cultural anthropology is on anthropology’s relation to the diversity, rifts, and violent memory of
American experience.

Anthropology is both an approach and a discipline. As an approach, it is a reflection on the

formation and dynamics of human culture and polity, and on the encounter with other worlds,
which can be traced back to well before anthropology was named–and not just the West. As a
scholarly discipline, anthropology emerged in the late 19th century–when the pragmatics of
colonial administration became linked to the scientific ambition to document the varieties of
human existence, when romantic exoticism became entwined with humanist universalism. Since
the discipline’s inception, anthropologists have dedicated themselves to exploring human
societies in their diversity: the distinct cultures, politics, economies, and environments by which
people have given shape to different ways of living, working, speaking, and understanding.

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While our scope in this class will be global, and will lead us to examine in some detail the
heterogeneity of cultural forms found in non-Western societies, we will pay particular attention
to various forms of politics, economics, and culture that exist within the US.

The course is divided in two parts: the first part, “Foundations”, is an exploration of the concepts
of culture, race, colonialism, difference, comparison, myth and science, healing, mutuality and
gift exchange, and the possibility, creativity, and destruction of worlds. The second part of the
course, “Cases”, considers a number of American cases–cultural histories of trauma, memory,
and politics, of the aftermath of war, and life and death at the US-Mexican and Mediterranean
borderlands. We will conclude on a reparative understanding culture as that which is
paradoxically engendered through wrestling with a traumatic history.

ATTENDANCE IN LECTURE AND SECTION

The lectures are a collective space for us to come together as a class to listen, watch, and learn
together. Attendance at lectures is required, and many of the questions that will appear on the
midterm and final exam will be drawn directly from lecture material. If you miss lectures, you
are jeopardizing your success on exams and will also miss out on powerpoint images, screenings
of films, and Q&A time with the professor.

Discussion sections complement the lectures and are a space for students to gather in small
groups to delve deeper into the course readings and themes addressed in lecture. Weekly
attendance to section is required, and attendance records will be kept by your GSI. You are
asked to participate actively in the section by completing the assigned readings and short writing
assignments before you come to the section, and by contributing to the discussion during the
section. Section attendance and participation will constitute 30% of your grade. If prolonged
illness or emergencies require you to miss several sections, GSIs ask that you provide advance
notice (when appropriate) and documentation.

PREPARATION
All reading assignments should be completed before your section meeting for the week. If
possible, you should finish the readings before the lecture as well; this will make the presentation
much easier to follow.

ELECTRONICS POLICY
You are strongly encouraged to take notes in lecture, by hand, in a special notebook dedicated to
the class. For those students who need to use electronic devices for note-taking, we ask that you
sit in a dedicated section of the classroom. Out of respect for the professor and other students,
please turn off your cell phone and refrain from browsing the internet during the class.

COURSE ASSIGNMENTS AND GRADING

Course assignments include a midterm and final exam composed of essay questions. The
midterm exam will be a take-home exam due in class on Thursday, March 5 and will draw from
all of the material covered prior to that date in class lectures, discussion sections, readings, films,
and videos. The final exam, scheduled for Wednesday, May 13, will be held in our classroom
and will be cumulative, with a focus on material covered since the midterm. In addition to the
exams, you will be assigned three 2-3 page Response Papers, grounded in readings and lectures.

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These are due in lecture on Tuesday February 18, Thursday March 19, and Thursday April 30.
You will have additional short writing assignments due each week in preparation for your
discussion section (more on these from your GSI).

Assignment Due Dates:

Response Paper #1 Tuesday February 18
Take-Home Midterm Exam Thursday March 5
Response Paper #2 Thursday March 19
Response Paper #3 Thursday April 30
Final Exam Wednesday May 13

Overall Grade Calculus:

Discussion section (participation and attendance): 30%
Three Response Papers: 30%
Midterm exam: 20%
Final exam: 20%

REQUIRED READINGS
The required readings for the course are compiled in the ANTHRO 3AC COURSE READER,
available at Krishna Copy, 2595 Telegraph Ave (@ Parker). There will also be two copies of the
reader available to check out from the course reserves of the Anthropology Library on the second
floor of Kroeber Hall. On the syllabus, required readings in the Reader are marked with an R,
and recommended readings indicated with *, and as (RECOMMENDED). Additional readings
will also be posted on the B-Courses site for the class (indicated as b-courses)

OFFICE HOURS
You are encouraged to visit the office hours of the professor and your GSI to discuss readings,
assignments, and ideas about the course materials.

DISABILITY ACCOMMODATION
If you have a disability and have applied to and been accepted in the Disabled Students Program
(DSP) on campus, we will provide you with the accommodations that the university and federal
and state law mandate for lectures, readings, sections, examinations, and other course
assignments. You must make sure the DSP program sends us a notification by February 15 at
the latest so that we have time to make arrangements for accommodations. Please see us if you
have any questions or if you need assistance in getting hooked up to DSP so that we can help you
make this deadline.

COLLEGIALITY
We are looking forward to working with you this semester, and we ask that you be attentive and
respectful of fellow students, the instructor and the GSIs. Please arrive at the lecture on time and
wait until it has concluded before leaving. Please respect the course electronics policy. Thank
you!

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 SCHEDULE OF LECTURES, READINGS, AND FILMS

PART ONE: FOUNDATIONS

“The time has come to realize that the interracial drama acted out on the American
continent has not only created a new black man, it has created a new white man too.
No road whatever will lead Americans back to the simplicity of this European village
where white men still have the luxury of looking on me as a stranger. I am not,
really, a stranger any longer for any American alive. One of the things that
distinguishes Americans from other people is that no other people has ever been so
deeply involved in the lives of black men, and vice versa. This fact faced, with all its
implications, it can be seen that the history of the American Negro problem is not
merely shameful, it is also something of an achievement. For even when the worse
has been said, it must also be added that the perpetual challenge posed by this
problem was also, somehow, perpetually met. It is precisely this black-white
experience which may prove of indispensable value to us in the world we face today.
This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.”
(James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son)

WEEK 1: Two Introductory Lectures

An introduction to the main arguments and themes, setting the frame for our task during the
semester: thinking concepts and methods in anthropology side by side with questions raised from
the lived experience of American cultures. We will begin with James Baldwin (1924-1987), the
African American writer and activist, and what he called the “perpetual challenge” represented
by anti-black racism in America. We will draw inspiration from his way of wrestling with
difficult questions, complexity and contradictions, and of urging us to confront the intimate
reality of America’s violent history, its destructive legacy and its paradoxical creativity, lodged
in what he called “the black-white experience”, which, he wrote, “may prove of indispensable
value to us in the world we face today.”

We will ask: what does it mean to think about social and cultural norms, belonging, and
anthropology, taking seriously the historical wound, and the “challenge,” of racialized
existence? What if the norms and obligations that, as Durkheim says, “impose themselves upon
us”, are also the sanctioning of and social death? (Baldwin: “I said that it was intended that you
should perish in the ghetto, perish by never being allowed to go beyond the white man’s
definitions, by never being allowed to spell your proper name. You have, and many of us have,
defeated this intention…” 1).

What is anthropology, and what is culture in light of these questions? Throughout lectures and
readings in this first half of the semester, will address the study of socio-cultural formations, and
the culture concept as 1) the shared grammar or code, and fundamental orientations that delimit
and enable a world, at once cognitive and embodied, 2) a human capacity associated with
learning, habituation, and cultivation, 3) the question of difference and encounter: “other
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James Baldwin, “My Dungeon Shook”, p. 294.

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cultures” / “other worlds 4) culture as the site of destruction under colonial domination, and as an
effect of racism and social death 5) culture as that which is paradoxically engendered through
wrestling with a traumatic history.

Tuesday, January 21
Introductory lecture: Presentation of the course and the syllabus

Ingold, Tim. Anthropology: Why it Matters. Medford, MA: Polity Press, 2018: 1-17. R

Thursday, January 23: James Baldwin’s Lesson for Anthropology

Baldwin, James. Notes of a Native Son. Boston: Beacon Press, 1984, Selections:
“Autobiographical Notes”, “Notes of a Native Son”, “Stranger in the Village”. The Fire Next
Time, New York: Dial Press, 1963, Selection: “My Dungeon Shook.” R

Durkheim, Emile. The Rules of Sociological Method. New York: Free Press, 1938: Chapter 1:
“What is a Social Fact”. R

Video clips will be shown and discussed in class. Watch their entirety at home for further
discussion in section.
Excerpt The Price of the Ticket
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_hYraYI2J8

James Baldwin "On being black in America" interview, 1960

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cplZdcp0fQY

UC Berkeley speech, 1979

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQejcZc4uFM

SECTION I: CULTURE, RACE, DOUBLE CONSCIOUSNESS –

BOAS, DUBOIS, AND ANTHROPOLOGY

Franz Boas (1848-1942), the “folk”, language, environment, and the method of culture and
ethnography: “lovingly penetrating the mysteries of reality”, discerning regularities, and pursuing
comparison; Boas’ critique of evolutionary racial thought; W.E.B Dubois, “the soul of black folks,
the “color line”, and the lived experience of “double consciousness”: Whose culture?

WEEK 2
Tuesday, January 28

Boas, Franz. "The Study of Geography." Science 9, no. 210 (1887): 137-141. R

*Stocking Jr, George W. "From physics to ethnology." In Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays
in the History of Anthropology. New York: Free Press, 1968: 53-66. (RECOMMENDED)

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* Stocking Jr, George W. “The Critique of Racial Formalism”. (B-courses, RECOMMENDED)

Video: “Franz Boas (1848-1942) National Endowment for the Humanities, Odyssey series, 1980
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eS3wqv96VcM

Thursday, January 30

Dubois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007: Chapter 1. R

*Dubois, W.E.B. “The Concept of Race,” From Dusk to Dawn. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2007. (RECOMMENDED)

*Gates, Henry-Louis, “The Black Letters on the Sign: W.E.B. Dubois and the Canon”,
Introduction, From Dusk to Dawn (B-courses, RECOMMENDED)

Film clips: “The Price of the Ticket”, (1990, Karen Thorsen) “I am Not your Negro” (2017,
Raoul Peck)

“A Legacy of Courage: W.E.B Dubois and the Philadelphia Negro” (2012)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQX_0uyDgGw

“W.E.B Dubois Speaks” (1960) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKXglS90qn4

SECTION II: THE TASK OF CULTURE AND ITS INTERRUPTION

The German philosopher E. Cassirer said that symbols and images are “organs of reality”: they
create, delimit and enable the world in which we live. The “task of culture” is a work of invention,
cultivation, and transmission, the passing on across generation, the possibility of community and
life. It is also the imaginative work of ethnographer-cosmographer, and the possibility of
encountering Other Worlds. Translations, variations, destructions, and repair. Zora Neale Hurston,
the Harlem Renaissance and the culture and voice of the American South; Clifford Geertz’s
interpretation of other cultural worlds; Franz Fanon’s analysis of the colonial/racist destruction of
cultural references. What does it mean to reactivate a culture? What is decolonization? Veena
Das’s ethnography of personal and collective loss after the collective violence of India-Pakistan .
Partition, and the everyday work of healing.

WEEK 3
Tuesday, February 4

Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men. Harper Collins e-book, New York: 2008 (1935)
(Selections on B-Courses)
Alice Walker, “Looking for Zora” (B-Courses)

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Thursday, February 6

Geertz, Clifford, The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, 1973: Ch. 14. “Person,
Time, Conduct in Bali” (B-Courses)

WEEK 4
Tuesday, February 11

Fanon, Frantz. "Racism and culture." Toward the African revolution. New York: Grove Press,
1998: 29-44. R

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press, 2008: Selections: Ch. 1, pp. 1-
23; Ch. 5 pp. 89-94; Ch. 8 pp. 198-206. R

Film: Franz Fanon: Black Skin White Mask (1998, Isaac Julien)

Thursday, February 13

Das, Veena. “The Act of Witnessing”, Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the
Ordinary. Berkeley: University of California Press (2007), pp. 59-78 R

SECTION III: ON SIMILARITY AND DIFFERENCE

Variations, Comparison, Myth and Science, the cure of symbols and the failures of cure, between
shamanic illness and modern medicine, in Amazonia and in the California Central Valley.

WEEK 5

Tuesday, February 18

RESPONSE PAPER #1 DUE: 9AM on B-courses, BRING PRINT COPY TO LECTURE

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Myth and Meaning. London and New York: Routledge, 2013, pp. 1-24. R

*Ingold, Tim. Anthropology: Why it Matters. Medford, MA: Polity Press, 2018, Ch. 2 pp. 26-51.
(B-Courses, RECOMMENDED)

Thursday, February 20

Midterm Take-Home Exam Distributed

Film: “Claude Levi-Strauss in his Own Words” (Pierre –André Boutang, 2008).

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WEEK 6
Tuesday, February 25

Levi-Strauss, Claude “The Effectiveness of Symbols”. Structural Anthropology. New York:

Basic Books, 1963, pp. 186- 199, 204. R

Fadiman, Anne, The Spirit Catches you and you Fall. A Hmong Child, her American Doctor, and
the Collision of Two Cultures, New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1997. Ch. 8, Ch. 9, pp.
93-118. R

SECTION IV: THE VITAL NECESSITY OF VARIATION, MIGRATION,

RECIPROCITY, TRANS-FORMATION

Levi-Strauss on the vital necessity of cultural variation, migration, and cultural transformation:
difference is life. Marcel Mauss on reciprocity and mutuality: an anthropological theory of
relations and exchange, between people close by and far away, between human beings, animals
and spiritual entities. Capitalism and gift exchange. Anthropology is not just Euro-American:
Abd al-Rahman Ibn Khaldun, and a XIV Century Arab-Muslim theory of civilization that
ponders the alternation of civilization and ruin. Considerations on planetary thought for our
present.

Thursday, February 27

Levi-Strauss, Claude. “Race and History,” 1952, also in Structural Anthropology Vol. II,
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1976. Selections. R

WEEK 7
Tuesday, March 3

Mauss, Marcel. The Gift. London and New York: Routledge, 1990 (1950) Introduction and Ch.
1, “The Exchange of Gifts and the Obligation to Reciprocate”, pp. 1-18. R

Thursday March 5

Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddima: An Introduction to History (XIV Century). Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1969. Ch. 2, “Bedouin Civilization, Savage Nations, and their Conditions of
Life”, pp. 91-107. R

MIDTERM TAKE-HOME EXAM DUE: 9AM on B-courses, BRING PRINT COPY TO

LECTURE

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 PART TWO: CASES

SECTION V: TRAUMA, MEMORY, AND POLITICS IN AMERICA

In this section we will pursue the questions of the first part of the class–the question that James
Baldwin formulated for us, about cultural belonging and racialized existence–through a number
of American cases and violent histories: The legacy of slavery and the lost Memory of the
Middle Passage; Hispano inheritance in the American Southwest, addiction, and belonging;
Native-American politics of refusal, and Islam in America. We will read contemporary
anthropologists, writers, and poets: Saidiya Hartman traveling the transatlantic slave route from
the US to Ghana, and encountering a history of “strangers”–the slaves and their descendants–
and an impossible memory of the Middle Passage; Angela Garcia, registering the memory of
land dispossession in Hispanic New Mexico, and the longing for a community through the
precarious lives of heroin addicts; Natalie Diaz’s poetry of family, loss, the ancestors from the
Arizona Navaho reservation; Audra Simpson’s exploration of indigenous politics and refusal in
the settler state; and Zareena Grewal’s ethnography of American Muslim communities in the age
of islamophobia.

WEEK 8
Thursday, March 11

Hartman, Saidiya. Lose your mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. Macmillan,
2008” Prologue, Chapter 1, “Lose Your Mother.” R

Hartman, Saidiya, "Venus in Two Acts." Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008): 1-14. R

Thursday, March 12

Garcia, Angela. "Regeneration: Love, Drugs and the Remaking of Hispano Inheritance." Social
Anthropology 22, no. 2 (2014): 200-212. R

WEEK 9
Tuesday, March 17

Simpson, Audra. Mohawk Interruptus: Political life across the borders of settler states. Duke
University Press, 2014.: Chapter 1. R

Diaz, Natalie. When My Brother was an Aztec. Copper Canyon Press, 2012: Selections. R

Thursday, March 19
Grewal, Zareena. Islam is a Foreign Country: American Muslims and the Global Crisis of
Authority. Vol. 22. NYU Press, 2014: Chapter 2. R

FILM: “The Feeling of Being Watched” Dir. Assia Boundaoui (2018).

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 RESPONSE PAPER #2 DUE IN CLASS
WEEK 10: SPRING BREAK

SECTION VI: THE VIETNAM WAR AND THE AMERICAN WAR, ITS GHOSTS, ITS
CHILDREN

In this section we will continue on the previous theme of trauma and memory through a
reflection on the Vietnam war (the American war as it is called in Vietnam) and its material and
spiritual aftermath. In Eonick Kwon’s ethnography the aftermath of war is filled with ghosts of
the unburied dead, who seek the intercession and welcoming of the living within new forms of
kinship and community, rituals of mourning and novel imaginations of culture and life.
Alongside Kwon’s ethnography we will read the poetry of Vietnamese-Californian poet and
writer Ocean Vuong.

WEEK 11
Tuesday, March 31

Kwon, Heonik. Ghosts of War in Vietnam. Cambridge University Press, 2008: Selection from
chapter 2: 39-42. R

FILM: “Catharsis” dir. Kader Attia (2018)

Thursday, April 2

Kwon, Heonik. Ghosts of War in Vietnam, Ch. 6 “Tranforming Ghosts, pp. 103-130. R

Ocean Vuong. Night Sky with Exit Wounds. Copper Canyon Press. 2016: Selected Poems. (B-
Courses)

SECTION VII: BORDERS OF LIFE, DREAM, AND DEATH

In this section, we will reflect on mobility, migration and refuge, and on the Border, from a
number of related anthropological perspectives: political, humanitarian, religious, and aesthetic.
We will discuss comparatively what is happening now at the US–Mexican border, and on the
Mediterranean and its “liquid” Southern deathly borders, European practices of “managed
inhospitality”, the so-called “refugee crisis”, and on the drive for mobility and refuge from
African continent and the North African and Middle Eastern war-torn shores. We will ask: How
might this recent history be seen and accounted for otherwise? How to undo the phantasy of the
migrant and the barbarian?

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WEEK 12
Tuesday, April 7

De León, Jason. The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail. Vol. 36.
Univ of California Press, 2015.: Chapter 2 , Ch. 4. R

Thursday, April 9

Film: Who is Dayani Crystal? (2014, Marc Silver)

WEEK 13
Tuesday, April 14

FILM: Leila Kilani, “Tangiers, the Burner’s Dream”

Pandolfo, Stefania. “The Burning”, Knot of the soul: madness, psychoanalysis, Islam. University
of Chicago Press, 2018: Chapter 6. R

*Tahir Zaman, Traditions of Refuge in the Crisis of Iraq and Syria, Ch. 1 (RECOMMENDED).

SECTION VIII: COSMIC ALTERNATIVES?

In this section we explore cosmologies and traditions of knowledge beyond the modern Euro-
American frame, reflecting on their capacity to offer insight for our uncertain future in a time of
planetary climate crisis. We will read from an ethnography of Dogon culture in West Africa, and
the way a star system known to the Dogon well before European telescopes could discover it,
regulates cultural, social, and religious life, and is replicated in architecture and agriculture, in
rituals of life and death; we will also read from an Amazonian shamanic account of the world of
the forest and its human, animal, spirit and plant inhabitants, and the disastrous consequences of
the destruction of the forest from a shamanic perspective: the falling sky; and about the
cosmological concept of “nature” in Islamic tradition.

Thursday, April 16

Griaule, Marcel. Conversations with Ogotemeli: An introduction to Dogon religious ideas.

Oxford University Press, 1965: First Day, Second Day, Seventh Day, Twenty-Third Day,
Twenty-Fourth Day, Twenty-Sixth Day. R

*Griaule, Marcel. “A Sudanese Sirius System”. In The Sirius Mystery (RECOMMENDED)

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WEEK 14
Tuesday, April 21

Rahman, Fazlur. Major Themes of the Qur'an. University of Chicago Press, 2009: Chapter 4,
“Nature.” R

Thursday, April 23

Kopenawa, Davi, Bruce Albert. The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman. Harvard
University Press, 2015: Setting the Scene, Chapter 7, Chapter 18. R

SECTION IX: THINKING REPAIR

WEEK 15
Tuesday, April 28

Ralph, Laurence. "Becoming aggrieved: an alternative framework of care in black Chicago."

RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 1, no. 2 (2015): 31-41. R

Mbembe, Achille: “There is Only One World”, Critique of Black Reason (B-Courses)

Kader Attia: RepaiR, (2018) (excerpts on B-courses)

Thursday, April 30

Concluding Lecture: Dispossessions, Reappropriations, Repair

RESPONSE PAPER #3 DUE IN CLASS

WEEK 16: READING WEEK—May 4-May 8 (No classes)

FINAL EXAM: WEDNESDAY, MAY 13

Valley Life Sciences 2050
Bring blue books
11:30am-2:30pm

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