My spring syllabi

Spring semester is underway over here in my neck of the woods so I thought I would share my syllabi:

“Political Anthropology”:http://socialsciences.people.hawaii.edu/esyllabi/get_esyllabi.cfm?esyllabi=5e9db0ca-7592-418c-807c-90a4c35c6cae
This is a ‘anthropology of recognition’ class that combines liberal political theory with studies of social organization and how anthropology makes its object.

“Theory in Anthropology”:http://socialsciences.people.hawaii.edu/esyllabi/get_esyllabi.cfm?esyllabi=e71604d3-9aeb-40fe-85eb-26d516f3d265
A history of anthropological theory from 1964-2005. Designing this one just about killed me.

Thoughts? Does my college’s insanely obscure URL structure actually lead to a PDF for you people? Let me know.

Rex

Alex Golub is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. His book Leviathans at The Gold Mine has been published by Duke University Press. You can contact him at rex@savageminds.org

9 thoughts on “My spring syllabi

  1. Ooh, assigning Abu El-Haj’s book – controversy! 😉

    But seriously, I’m curious how you plan to utilize that text in your course, and whether you expect it to evoke some spirited class discussions.

  2. 1) Yes. We have long semester. Long. Semesters. The taxpayers of Hawai’i are getting their money’s worth out of me!

    2) I hope that Abu El-Haj’s book is controversial, because that far into the semester students need a bit of a jolt. But to be honest, I suspect this is will not be nearly as polarizing as would, say, a discussion of Hawai’ian sovereignty issues. In fact this course is designed to give students a sense of some ethnography outside of the issues we face in the Asia-Pacific, and doing Israel after Canada will hopefully bookend a discussion about how national culture does (or does not) happen. But honestly (and I could be wrong) I think the politics of Israeli archaeology are so far removed from the politics of multiculturalism in Hawai’i that my undergrads will take it in stride.

  3. I’m still reeling over the 17 semester business, but I notice that you’ll be in Australia the week of 10-16 February. I’m sorry to hear that it will still be our summer break; otherwise we’d want to try to book you for a department seminar. Where in Australia will you be?

    The other thing I notice about this very nice syllabus is how much reading you think your students will do. Here at my uni the kids start shooting me dagger looks if I assign more than about 50 pages of readings a week.

  4. Handler is an excellent text to use in this way (as is Maryon McDonald’s “We are not French”).

  5. For what it’s worth, here’s my take on a contemporary theory course & some notes on my experiences, taught as a senior seminar for undergrad majors at Colby a few years back: http://minerva.union.edu/fayd/theory/ay333-contemporary%20theory.pdf . If I did it again I probably wouldn’t use Balinese Worlds, instead substituting maybe Latour’s Science in Action or Fred Cooper’s Colonialism in Question. The debt to Ortner should be evident in the course structure.

    One thing I tried to do with this course is to integrate gender into every week, as far as possible, which worked well with Ortner’s Making Gender as a kind of recap/stock-taking. I also added Mascia-Lees et al. The Postmodernist Turn in Anthropology: Cautions from a Feminist Perspective and Sangren’s “Rhetoric and the Authority of Ethnography” in place of the Greenfield article that appears in the syllabus in Nov. 3 week. Behar’s book was a nice break from heavy-duty theory, too, the following week.

  6. Thanks for that Derick!

    I’ll be in Canberra for the ASAO meetings, LL. Shoot me an email if you want to try to do some small-world connecting.

  7. Aw, this brings back ‘fond’ memories of Alan Howard’s Ethnology class, a requirement for all grad students. That’s the class in which I learned to read really deep, really fast. And, leave it to Hawaii, when I moved on to Michigan I found myself VERY well prepared for theory seminars. Thanks, Hawaii! You’re continuing a great tradition, Rex.

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