ANTH 706.

00 - History of Anthropology II
Spring 2021

Mondays 9:30a-12:30p
Via Zoom

Prof. Leo Coleman

Phone: 614-256-5669 (mobile)
[email protected]
[email protected]
Office @ GC (just in case we get back in person): 6402.11
Office Hours: by appointment, via phone or Zoom

This course is the second of two courses that introduce graduate students to the disciplinary
history of anthropology. In the Spring semester, we focus on anthropology from about 1950,
exploring what academic anthropologists studied, wrote, and did as the discipline was
institutionalized and professionalized. This period witnessed the rapid expansion of fieldsites
and funding for American anthropologists in the Cold War, decolonization and the movement
of postcolonial intellectuals to teach and study at Northern universities, and the expansion of
professional discourses about peoples, places, and regions previously untouched by
ethnographic interest, including North America and urban centers. The readings are selective,
and emphasize intellectual “milestones” and turning-points. We aim to pay equal attention to
ethnographic description as an analytic exercise in its own right and to self-conscious
theoretical efforts to shape the discipline. Occasionally, readings incorporate the work of
thinkers whose reception in anthropology has been important.

The History of Anthropology seminar complements and runs in parallel with the seminar in
contemporary social theory, directed by Prof. Limbert, and throughout the semester we will
aim to highlight overlaps and relations between the readings—and theoretical lineages—we
have selected for study. Both courses aim to prepare students to work within this discipline,
and, by providing an introduction to major schools, traditions, and debates, also to encourage
our common efforts to extend the contemporary practice of anthropology beyond its historical,
geographical, and paradigmatic limitations.

Our common project is to read closely and critically together, and to develop an initial
understanding of major debates through engagement with specific texts on their own terms—I
do not encourage extensive use of synthetic, secondary accounts of the history of the
discipline, which are always partial, bound by their own paradigms, and often can interfere with
as much as illuminate an understanding of a particular text. In relation to each reading, we will
seek to answer—through our own readings and collective discussion—each of the following
questions:

• What is the main argument of the work?

• How does it use key concepts, categories, or terms?
• How are the examples deployed to support the main argument?
• With what theorists, schools, or ideas is it in dialogue?
• What premises underlie its theoretical approach?
• What does this work contribute?
History of Anthropology II Spring 2021 2

Each class will begin with opening comments and questions to help orient our discussion.
However, as this course is primarily a discussion seminar, every student is expected to be well
prepared and to participate in every class session. The success of this class depends on group
dynamics and everyone’s commitment to the process. This will be especially challenging and
important given that our sessions will be conducted on Zoom.

Requirements: As this seminar is a collaborative project, everyone is required to attend class

sessions and participate in discussions on the basis of a careful reading of the assignments. In
addition to participation, there will be three short papers, spaced over the semester, where
students will be asked to respond to specific prompts.

Course Learning Goals: By the end of the course, students should be able to demonstrate
1. knowledge of contemporary anthropological theory sufficient for understanding the
development of the field since World War II.
2. understanding of central concepts and major scholars in anthropology, the field’s major
interlocutors from other disciplines and the intellectual links among them, as well as
their connections with work covered in the previous semester.

Outline of Readings
Subject to change

Most articles can be found on the Dropbox for the class - readings marked with the tag
Reserves are available through GC Library course reserves.
****
Accessing the Course Reserves:
1. Visit the course reserves page on the Mina Rees Library website.
2. Find the course ANTH70600- Cultural Anthropology (It should be listed first!)
3. Enter password (ANTHColeman)

**Please Note: Library personnel will not be able to share the course reserve password for this class. So
make sure you keep this course password handy!
*****

First meeting - Opening conversation:

1. Feb 1 - Anthropology Post-War - State of the Art in France, US, Britain

Orienting readings . . . Just get a sense of these different projects and styles
Claude Lévi-Strauss, “New York in 1941,” from The View from Afar.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Scope of Anthropology (1960) (esp. pp. 30-53)
AAA Declaration on Human Rights (1947)
Edmund Leach, Introduction, Political Systems of Highland Burma (1954), 1-17.

2. Feb 8 - Structuralism and the Durkheimian Legacy

*Claude Lévi-Strauss, Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss (1950) Reserves
Claude Lévi-Strauss, “The Sorcerer and His Magic,” from Structural Anthropology
(1955) (read additional articles in provided PDF as you wish….)
Mary Douglas, Chapter 6: “Powers and Dangers,” in Purity and Danger (1966)
History of Anthropology II Spring 2021 3

Additional Readings:
Susan Sontag, “The Anthropologist as Hero,” The New York Review of Books (28 November
1963): https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1963/11/28/a-hero-of-our-time/
Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, Primitive Classification (1903), translated and with an
introduction by Rodney Needham (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963).
Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind [La Pensée Sauvage] (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1966).
Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked: Introduction to a Science of Mythology, vol. 1
(New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1970) Overture & Parts 1, 2, and 5.
Edmund Leach, “Structuralism in Anthropology” in David Robey, ed., Structuralism: An
Introduction (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1973).
Clifford Geertz, “The Cerebral Savage: On the Work of Claude Lévi-Strauss,” in The
Interpretation of Cultures, pp. 345-360 (NY: Basic Books, 1973).
Terence Turner. “On Structure and Entropy: Theoretical Pastiche and the Contradictions of
‘Structuralism,’” Current Anthropology, Vol. 31, No. 5 (Dec., 1990), pp. 563-658.
Marshall Sahlins, “Infrastructuralism,” Critical Inquiry 36(3) (2010): 371-385.

3. Feb 15 — President’s Day (GC Closed)

4. Feb 22 — Manchester/Africa: Law, Conflict, & The City

*Victor Turner, Schism and Continuity in an African Society Reserves
READ: 1996 Introduction by Bruce Kapferer, and Chapter IV: “Matrilineal Descent,”
Chapter V: “Matrilineal Succession” and Chapter X: “The Politically Integrative
Function of Ritual.”
Max Gluckman, “Analysis of a Social Situation in Modern Zululand.” Rhodes-
Livingstone Institute Papers, no. 28 (1958[1940]), pp. 1-52.
Sally Falk Moore, “Law and Social Change: The Semi-Autonomous Social Field as an
Appropriate Subject of Study,” Law and Society Review 7(4) (Summer 1973), pp.
719-746.
Ulf Hannerz, “The View from the Copperbelt,” in Exploring the City (Columbia UP,
1980).

Additional Readings:
Max Gluckman. Custom and Conflict in Africa (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1955).
J. Clyde Mitchell, The Kalela Dance (Manchester: Manchester University Press, Rhodes-
Livingstone Papers, No. 27, 1956).
David Pocock, Social Anthropology (London: Sheed and Ward, 1961), esp. pp. 72-83.
https://archive.org/details/socialanthropolo00poco
Hortense Powdermaker, “Part V: Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia,” in Stranger and Friend (New
York: W. W. Norton, 1966), 235-284.
Kate Crehan, “’Tribes’ and the People Who Read Books: Managing History in Colonial Zambia.”
Journal of Southern African Studies 23 (2, 1997): 203-218.
James Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
Don Handelman, “The Extended Case,” and Bruce Kapferer, “Situations, Crisis, and the
Anthropology of the Concrete,” in The Manchester School: Practice and Ethnographic Praxis
in Anthropology, ed. T. M. S. Evens and Don Handelman (New York: Berghahn, 2006), 94–
158. [https://www-jstor-org.ezproxy.gc.cuny.edu/stable/j.ctt9qddxc].
Michael Burawoy, The Extended Case Method: Four Countries, Four Decades, Four Great
Transformations, and One Theoretical Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2009).
History of Anthropology II Spring 2021 4

On Decolonization and Anthropology in Francophone Africa:

Gary Wilder, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2015).
Grégoire Mallard, Gift Exchange: The Transnational History of a Political Idea (Cambridge UP,
2019).

5. Mar 1 — Paradigm c. 1970: Symbol, Ritual, and Counter-Programs

Victor Turner, “Liminality and Communitas,” in The Ritual Process (1967).
Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures - See selections in Dropbox. Key essays
include:
“Thick Description,” “The Integrative Revolution,” “Person, Time, and Conduct in
Bali,” and “Notes on the Balinese Cockfight” (1973).

Counter-Programs for a New Anthropology: US Power, Class and Colonialism:

Eric Wolf, “American Anthropologists and American Society” (1969).
Laura Nader, “Up the Anthropologist: Perspectives Gained from Studying Up” (1972).
Talal Asad, Introduction, in Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (1973).

Additional Readings:
Alex Golub, “1974 as a Key Year in Anthropology” (2014):
https://savageminds.org/2014/03/06/1974-as-a-key-year-in-anthropology/

Some Influential ethnographies of the 1970s

Jean Briggs, Never in Anger: Portrait of an Eskimo Family (Cambridge, Harvard University Press,
1970).
Carol Stack, All our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community (Basic Books, 1975).
Paul Rabinow, Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1977).
M. N. Srinivas, The Remembered Village (Stanford UP, 1977).
Barbara Myerhoff, Number our Days: A Triumph of Continuity and Culture among Jewish Old
People in an Urban Ghetto (New York: Dutton, 1978).

Beyond Fieldwork: Studying Historical Processes

Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications (1966/1980)
S. J. Tambiah, World Conquerer and World Renouncer: A Study of Buddhism and Polity in
Thailand against a Historical Background (Cambridge UP, 1976).
Claude Meillassoux, Maidens, Meal, and Money: Capitalism and the Domestic Community (Paris,
1975; Cambridge UP 1981).
Jack Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Mind (Cambridge UP, 1976).

Political Economy (at CUNY!) in the 1970s

Eleanor Leacock, ed., The Culture of Poverty: A Critique (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1971).
Peter and Jane Schneider, Culture and Political Economy in Western Sicily (New York: Academic
Press, 1976).
June Nash, We Eat the Mines and the Mines Eat Us: Dependency and Exploitation in Bolivian Tin
Mines (New York: Columbia UP, 1979).
Eleanor Leacock, Myths of Male Dominance: Collected Articles on Women Cross-Culturally (New
York: Monthly Review, 1981).

First Paper Due March 5 via Dropbox

History of Anthropology II Spring 2021 5

6. Mar 8 — Primitivist Visions and Value (Or, the Endurance of the “Elementary”)
Paul Bohannon, “Some Principles of Exchange and Investment among the Tiv” (1955).
*Marshall Sahlins, “Introduction,” “The Original Affluent Society,” and “The Spirit of the
Gift,” in Stone-Age Economics (1972). Reserves
Nancy Munn, “Introduction” and Chapter 4, “Qualisigns of Value: Gardens, Food and the
Body,”(pp. 74-89, 103-4) in The Fame of Gawa: A Symbolic Study of Value
Construction in a Massim Society (Cambridge University Press, 1986).
Pierre Clastres, “Exchange and Power” in Society Against the State (1977).

Additional Readings:
Annette B. Weiner, Women of Value, Men of Renown: New Perspectives in Trobriand Exchange
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1976).
David Graeber, Towards an Anthropological Theory of Value (New York: Palgrave, 2001).
Hann, Chris and Keith Hart, Market and Society: The Great Transformation Today (Cambridge
UP 2009).
Hann, Chris and Jonathan Parry, Industrial Labor on the Margins of Capitalism: Precarity, Class,
and the Neoliberal Subject (New York: Berghahn, 2018).

7. Mar 15 — Feminist Interventions

Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere, “Introduction,” to Women, Culture,
and Society (Stanford UP, 1974)(focus on 1-7).
Michelle Rosaldo, “The Use and Abuse of Anthropology: Reflections on Feminism and
Cross-Cultural Understanding,” Signs Vol 5 (3) (1980): 389-417 (focus on pp. 389-
393, 401-9.
Sherry B. Ortner, “Theory in Anthropology since the Sixties,” Comparative Studies in
Society and History 26(1) (1984): 126-166.
Marilyn Strathern, “An Awkward Relationship: the Case of Feminism and Anthropology”
Signs 12(2) (1987).

Additional Readings:
Gayle Rubin “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex” in Towards an
Anthropology of Women, Rayna Reiter Rapp, ed. (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975).
Lila Abu-Lughod, Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1986).
Marilyn Strathern, The Gender of the Gift (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).
Kamala Visweswaran, Fictions of Feminist Ethnography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1994).
Sarah Franklin, Biological Relatives: IVF, Stem Cells, and the Future of Kinship (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2013).
Dana-Ain Davis, Reproductive Injustice (New York: NYU Press, 2020).

8. Mar 22 — The Critique of Representation & Ethnographic Conventions

Vincent Crapanzano, Tuhami: Portrait of a Moroccan (Chicago: U of Chicago Press,
1980). Reserves
James Clifford and George Marcus, Introduction, Writing Culture
James Clifford, “On Ethnographic Authority,” in The Predicament of Culture (Harvard,
1988).
Lila Abu-Lughod, “Writing Against Culture.”
Arjun Appadurai, “Is Homo Hierarchicus?”
Kate Crehan ‘“A Vague Passion for a Vague Proletarian Culture’: An Anthropologist
Reads Gramsci.” The Philosophical Forum 29 (3-4, 1998): 218-231.
History of Anthropology II Spring 2021 6

Additional Readings
“Writing Culture@25,” special issue of Cultural Anthropology (August 2012, Vol. 27, No. 3: 411-
416).
G. Marcus and R. Cushman, “Ethnographies as Texts,” in Annual Review of Anthropology 11
(1982): 25-69.
J. Boon, Other Tribes, Other Scribes (Cambridge UP, 1982).
Clifford Geertz, “Blurred Genres: The Refiguration of Social Thought,” in Local Knowledge, pp.
19-35 (NY: Basic Books, 1983).
F. Mascia-Lees, P. Sharpe, and C. Cohen, “The post-modern turn in anthropology: cautions
from a feminist perspective.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1989: 7-33.
Sherry Ortner, ed. “The Fate of “Culture”: Geertz and Beyond,” [Special Issue] Representations
59 (1997) (reprinted by U of California Press, 1999).
Kregg Heatherington, “What Came Before Post-Truth?” EASST Review 37(2) (2017):
https://easst.net/article/what-came-before-post-truth/

9. Mar 29 — Spring Break (GC Closed)

10. Apr 5 — Ethnography & Capitalism

*Michael Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism (1980) (Selections) Reserves
*Eric Wolf, “Introduction” and “Modes of Production” in Europe and the People without
History (1983) Reserves
Aiwha Ong, “The Production of Possession: Spirits and the Multinationational
Corporation in Malaysia” American Ethnologist 15(1987), no. 1:28-42.
Marshall Sahlins, “Cosmologies of Capitalism.” In Culture-Power-History, N. Dirks, G.
Eley, and S. Ortner, eds., pp. 412-455 (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1994).

Additional readings:
Michael Taussig, “History as commodity in some recent American (anthropological) literature,”
Food and Foodways 2:1 (1987), 151-169.
Sidney Mintz and Eric Wolf, “Reply to Michael Taussig,” Critique of Anthropology, 9:1 (1988), 25-
31.
Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, “Millennial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second
Coming,” Public Culture (2000) 12 (2): 291-343.
Ashraf Ghani, "Writing a History of Power," in Articulating Hidden Histories, ed. J. Schneider and
R. Rapp, pp. 31-48 (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1995).
Ashraf Ghani, “A Conversation with Eric Wolf.” American Ethnologist 14 (1987): 346-366.
Claude Meillassoux, Maidens, Meal and Money: Capitalism and the Domestic Community
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
Sidney Mintz, “The So-Called World System: Local Initiative and Local Response.” Dialectical
Anthropology 2 (1977): 253-270.
Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power (New York: Penguin, 1985).

Second Paper Due April 9 via Dropbox

History of Anthropology II Spring 2021 7

11. Apr 12 — Race & History: The Conversation in Anthropology, c. 1990

Michel-Rolph Trouillot, “The Three Faces of Sans Souci,” in Silencing the Past, pp. 31-69
(Boston: Beacon, 1995).
Jean and John Comaroff, Introduction, Ethnography & The Historical Imagination.
Paul Gilroy. “‘Race,’ Class, and Agency,” in There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack.
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991 [1987]).
Jafari Sinclaire Allen and Ryan Cecil Jobson, “The Decolonizing Generation: (Race &)
Theory in Anthropology Since the Eighties,” Current Anthropology 57(2) 2016: 129-
48.

Additional Readings:
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Race and History (Paris: UNESCO, 1950).
Jane Collier and June Star, Introduction, History and Power in the Study of Law (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1989).
Karen E Fields & Barbara Jean Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life (New
York: Verso, 2012).
Alice L. Conklin, In the Museum of Man: Race, Anthropology, and Empire in France, 1850–
1950 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013).
Mark Anderson, From Boas to Black Power: Racism, Liberalism, and American Anthropology
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019).

12. Apr 19 — Sex, Scandal, & Colonial Ethnography

*Ann Stoler, Race & The Education of Desire (Durham, 1995) (Selections) Reserves
*Elizabeth Povinelli, Introduction, The Cunning of Recognition (Chicago, 2001)
Reserves
*Talal Asad, “The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology”
Genealogies of Religion (Baltimore, 1993) Reserves
Fernando Coronil, "Beyond Occidentalism: Towards Non-Imperial Geohistorical
Categories" Cultural Anthropology 11 (1996): 51-87.

Additional readings:
Bernard Cohn, An Anthropologist among the Historians. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987.
Chandra Bhimull, David William Cohen, Fernando Coronil, Edward L. Murphy, Monica Patterson,
and Julie Skurski, Editors. Anthrohistory: Unsettling Knowledge, Questioning Discipline (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011).
Edward Said, “Introduction,” in Orientalism, pp.1-30 (NY: Pantheon Books, 1978).
____. “Representing the Colonized.” Critical Inquiry 15 (2, 1989): 205-225.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of
Cultures, C. Nelson and L. Grossberg, eds. (Univ. of Illinois Press, 1988).
____. In Other Wor(l)ds: Essays on Cultural Politics (Methuen, 1987).
Morris, Rosalind, ed.. Can the Subaltern Speak? Reflections on the History of an Idea (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2010).
Marshall Sahlins, Islands of History (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1985).
Leela Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction (Columbia Univ. Press, 1998).
Ania Loomba, Suvir Kaul, and Matti Bunzi, eds., Postcolonial Studies and Beyond (Duke Univ.
Press, 2005).
Sharad Chari and Katherine Verdery, “Thinking Between the Posts: Postcolonialism,
Postsocialism, and Ethnography after the Cold War.” Comparative Studies in Society and
History 51 (1, 2009): 6-34.
History of Anthropology II Spring 2021 8

13. Apr 26 — Law, Human Rights, & The International

Heonik Kwon, “Anthropology and World Peace: Levi-Strauss Memorial Lecture.” HAU:
Journal of Ethnographic Theory 10 (2) (2020): 279–288.
Sally Engle Merry, “Human Rights Law and the Demonization of Culture (And
Anthropology Along the Way).” Political and Legal Anthropology Review 26(1)
(2003):55–76.
Annelise Riles & Iris-Jean Klein (2005) "Introducing Discipline: Anthropology and
Human Rights Administrations" Political and Legal Anthropology Review.
Kamari Maxine Clarke, Affective Justice: The International Criminal Court and the
Pan-Africanist Pushback (Durham, Duke University Press, 2019). Reserves

Additional Reading:
Li, Darryl, The Universal Enemy (Chicago UP, 2019).
Billaud, Julie. “Afterword: A Post-Human Rights Anthropology of Human Rights?” PoLAR:
Political and Legal Anthropology Review Online, November 2016, https://polarjournal.org/a-
post-human-rights-anthropology-of-human-rights
Jean & John Comaroff, “Introduction,” Law & Disorder in the Postcolony

14. May 3 — Anthropologies of the State & Globalization

*Aihwa Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006) Reserves
Akhil Gupta and Aradhana Sharma, “Introduction: The Anthropology of the State,” in The
Anthropology of the State: A Reader (Wiley, 2006).
Veena Das, “Affliction: An Introduction,” in Affliction (New York: Fordham University Press,
2015).
Sarah Muir and Akhil Gupta, “Rethinking the Anthropology of Corruption,” Current
Anthropology (2018) 59(S18): S4-S15.

15. May 10 — Affect, Things, Value

Jane Schneider, “Anthropology of Cloth,” Annual Review of Anthropology.
Nitzan Shoshan and Andrea Muehlebach, “Post-Fordist Affect,” Anthropological
Quarterly 2010.
Andrea Muehlebach, “The Body of Solidarity,” Comparative Studies of Society and
History, Jan 2017.

Final Paper Due May 14 via Dropbox

16. May 17 — Back to the Future: Mana, Resonance, Ontology

*William Mazzarella, Mana of Mass Society (U Chicago, 2017) Reserves
Boellstorff, Tom, “For Whom the Ontology Turns,” Current Anthropology 2016.

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