Fall 2024 Anthropology UN2004 section 001

INTRO TO SOC & CULTURAL THEORY

SOCIAL & CULTURAL THEORY

Call Number 10726
Day & Time
Location
MW 10:10am-11:25am
633 Seeley W. Mudd Building
Points 3
Grading Mode Standard
Approvals Required None
Instructor John Pemberton
Type LECTURE
Method of Instruction In-Person
Course Description

This course presents students with crucial theories of society, paying particular attention at the outset to classic social theory of the early 20th century. It traces a trajectory of writings essential for an understanding of the social: from Saussure, Durkheim, Mauss, Weber, and Marx, on to the structuralist ethnographic elaboration of Claude Levi-Strauss and the historiographic reflections on modernity of Michel Foucault. We revisit periodically, reflections by Franz Boas, founder of anthropology in the United States (and of Anthropology at Columbia), for a sense of origins, an early anthropological critique of racism and cultural chauvinism, and a prescient denunciation of fascism.  We turn as well, also with ever-renewed interest in these times, to the expansive critical thought of W. E. B. Du Bois.  We conclude with Kathleen Stewart’s A Space on the Side of the Road--an ethnography of late-twentieth-century Appalachia and the haunted remains of coal-mining country--with its depictions of an uncanny otherness within dominant American narratives. 

Web Site Vergil
Department Anthropology
Enrollment 36 students (60 max) as of 9:05PM Wednesday, December 11, 2024
Subject Anthropology
Number UN2004
Section 001
Division Interschool
Note ANTH UN2104 INTRO-SOC/CULTURAL THEORY-DISC required
Section key 20243ANTH2004V001