ANTH 170 - Topics in Anthropology

Semester Offered: Fall and Spring
1 unit(s)

Introduction to anthropology through a focus on a particular issue or aspect of human experience. Topics vary, but may include Anthropology through Film, American Popular Culture, Extinctions, Peoples of the World.

Topic for 2022/23a: Caribbean Voices. In this seminar students learn about the cultures and people of the Caribbean, through the lens of cultural anthropology. A brief review of ideas that are foundational to the field of Caribbean anthropology provides a basis for us to explore the importance of things like pageants, festivals, and specific cuisines and foods to local identities, as well as the place of the Caribbean, globally. Through literature, film, poetry, and art we become familiar with what matters, socially, spiritually, and historically to the people of the region, while musical forms like Calypso, Reggae, and Dancehall open a window on the use of expressive culture and public performance to challenge and resist class, racial, and gender hierarchies. Ethnographic studies of specific countries –Cuba, Jamaica, Haiti, the Dominican Republic— provide a comparative framework for students’ semester-long research on a particular country or topic. In addition to reading ethnographic studies, we watch films such as (Jamaica) and (Cuba), read works by writers such as Zora Neale Hurston, Jamaica Kincaid, Paule Marshall, CLR James, Michelle Cliffe, Edwidge Dandicat and poets Mutabaruka, Richard Georges, Gina Ulysse, and Derek Walcott, and explore the music of Carlos Varela (Cuba), Bob Marley (Jamaica), and Calypsonians Calypso Rose and The Mighty Sparrow (Trinidad). In addition to writing critical essays, students will have the opportunity to try their hand at writing and performance modeled on these various genres. Colleen Cohen.

Topic for 2022/23a: The Time(s) of Our Lives: Temporality as an Element of Experience and Community Accomplishment. What is time? What roles does it play in our lives? Can we shape it? What is the relationship between time and the making of our “selves” within the communities to which we belong? What might we learn from engaging empathetically with other’s times and other times? In this course, we consider the variety of ways that time is analyzed, experienced, and crafted in and for different contexts and purposes. Drawing on multiple media, archived materials, material culture, community works, scholarly productions (e.g., symbolic anthropology), and our own experience, we consider contrasts in temporal formations from a variety of sociological worlds, and include an exploration of rituals, historical narratives, dreamtime, and clocks and calendars, and how they can influence our social lives and experience. As students amble through their personal journeys at Vassar, we also explore how practices of time intersect with, and shape our experience of this liberal arts learning community. The course supports well-being through embodied and relational practices, including meditation, story-telling, circle practice, and by encouraging a more informed and intentional relationship with time. Assignments include short essays, journaling, and the design of a timeline of students’ personal and collective encounters with time in their liberal arts community. Carollynn Costella and Candice Lowe Swift.

Topic for 2022/23b: Anthropology of Water. Many anthropologists study water as a focus of political contention and environmental impetus to action. But cultural anthropology’s special contribution to water studies may be its insights into how water is valued, socially and affectively, in culturally and historically different ways. Water is necessary for human life. But it is always, also, meaningful in a remarkable range of ways that do not necessarily begin with scarcity, nor end with any one universal goal, even health or profit. Focusing on the relation between drinking water and wider cultural systems, the course introduces three approaches to drinking water: (1) Semiotics of Bottled Water includes readings from the anthropology of food and beverage, consumer culture, and meaning-making in everyday life. (2) Water as Global Commodity considers water in the context of the anthropology of gifts and commodities. (3) Water Projects considers state, corporate, and activist discourses about water with attention to anthropological studies of social and environmental impacts. The course includes (group) projects on water in local cultural contexts. Martha Kaplan.

Open only to first-year students; satisfies the college requirement for a First-Year Writing Seminar.

Two 75-minute periods.

Course Format: CLS