Course Outline:

This course has three goals:

1. To review a number of ethnographic works (primarily) from the last ten years. Books are chosen both for their representativeness of recent trends in anthropology, and for the controversy or accolades with which they have been received.
2. To learn to analyze ethnographic works for the structure of their arguments, for the theoretical lineages and debates in which they participate, for the ways in which the authors stake their claims to authority and position themselves in relation to various anticipated readers, and as material productions of the academic publishing industry.
3. To develop skills in producing works of ethnography or anthropological theory. Over the course of the term, you will workshop a substantial paper that you have already written, with the aim of revising it into a publishable paper. Also, ethnographic readings will be paired with shorter selections of works from other genres -- essays, journalistic articles, novels, etc. -- in order to highlight aspects of the writing as writing.

Readings

N.B.: This list of readings is reconstructed and incomplete.

WEEK ONE
Tanya M. Luhrmann. (1989) Persuasions of the Witch's Craft. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
----. (1996) The Good Parsi: the fate of a colonial elite in a postcolonial society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
George Orwell. (1950) "Shooting an Elephant", in Shooting an Elephant, and other essays. London: Secker and Warburg.

WEEK TWO
James Clifford and George Marcus (eds.) (1986) Writing Culture: the poetics and politics of ethnography. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. selected chapters.

WEEK THREE
Lila Abu-Lughod. (19 ) Veiled Sentiments: Honor and poetry in a Bedouin society. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
John Steinbeck. (1939) The Grapes of Wrath. New York, P. F. Collier. Chapter I.

WEEK FOUR
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. (1993) In The Realm of the Diamond Queen: marginality in an out-of-the-way place. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

WEEK FIVE
Mary Margaret Steedly. (1993) Hanging Without A Rope: narrative experience in Colonial and postcolonial Karoland . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

WEEK SIX
Kathleen Stewart. (1996) A Space on the Side of the Road: cultural poetics in an "other" America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
James Agee and Walker Evans. (1941) Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Boston, Houghton Mifflin company, selection.

WEEK EIGHT
Philippe Bourgois (1995). In Search of Respect: selling crack in El Barrio. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Malcolm Gladwell. (17 March 1997) "The Coolhunt," The New Yorker.

WEEK NINE
Paul Willis. (1977) Learning to Labor: How working-class kids get working-class jobs. New York: Columbia University Press.
Susan Faludi (30 Oct 1995) "The money shot: men in the pornography industry." New Yorker 71(34):64-86.

WEEK TEN
Margaret Trawick. (1990) Notes on Love in a Tamil Family. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Further Readings in Recent Ethnography:
Sharon E. Hutchinson (1996) Nuer Dilemmas: coping with money, war, and the state. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Smadar Lavie. (1990) The Poetics of Military Occupation: Mzeina allegories of Bedouin identity under Israeli and Egyptian rule . Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

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