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.

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.

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.

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.

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.