SCHEDULE OF TOPICS

WEEK I
Introduction

WEEK II
Some views of "Culture" and Culture.

Readings:
1. Kroeber, Alfred. L. and Clyde Kluckhohn. excerpts from Culture: a critical review of concepts and definitions
2. D'Andrade, Roy G.. Culture.
3. ----. Cultural meaning systems.
4. Goody, Jack. "Culture and its boundaries: a European view." in Borofsky, R. (ed.) Assessing Cultural Anthropology. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994.
5. Lewis, Herbert. Political anthropology in the 1990s.
6. ----. A concept of culture for a Darwinian model of cultural evolution.

WEEK III
Biology and culture: the interaction that made us human.

Readings:
From D. Tab Rasmussen (ed.) The Origin of Humans and Humanness.
1. Lovejoy, C. Owen. "Modeling human origins: are we sexy because we're smart or smart because we're sexy?"
2. Potts, Richard. "Archaeological interpretations of early hominid behavior and ecology."
3. Boyd, Robert and Peter J. Richardson. "Culture and human evolution."
4. D'Andrade, Roy. "Cultural Darwinism."

WEEK IV
Human Nature, Relativism, and Cultures.

Readings:
1. Spiro, Melford E.. (1978) "Culture and human nature." In Spindler, G.D. (ed.) The making of psychological anthropology. Berkeley: University of California Press.
2. ----. (1986) "A critique of cultural relativism with special reference to epistemological relativism." Ethos:259-286.
3. ----. (1984) "Some reflections on cultural determinism and relativism with special reference to emotion and reason. In Shweder, R. and R. LeVine (eds.) Culture Theory: essays on mind, self, and emotion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
4. ----. (nd) "On a feminist science of emotion: some reflections on a paper by Catherine Lutz." MS
5. Rosaldo, Michelle. (1984) "Toward and anthropology of self and feeling." In Shweder, R. and R. LeVine (eds.) Culture Theory: essays on mind, self, and emotion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reprinted in Spiro: Culture and Human Nature.
6. Geertz, Clifford. (n.d.) "Anti-antirelativism." MS
7. Lebra, Taki Sugiyama. "From cultural relativism to Western self-alienation and self-exoticism: a perplexed non-Western native's view."
8. Gellner, Ernest. (1992) Postmodernism, Reason, and Religion. London: Routledge. pp. 22-40.

WEEK V
An approach to culture's actual part in human life and society: Part 1.

Readings:
1. Chapters from Swartz, Marc J. (1991) The Way the World Is: cultural processes and social relations among the Swahili of Mombasa. Berkely: University of California Press.
   • "Culture"
   • Understanding is Like Hairs
   • Close You One Eye
   • Tongues are Spears

WEEK VI
An approach to culture's actual part in human life and society: Part 2.

Readings:
1. Chapters from Swartz, Marc J. (1991) The Way the World Is: cultural processes and social relations among the Swahili of Mombasa. Berkely: University of California Press.
   • Liking Only Those in One's Eye
   • Leaning on the Cow's Fat Hump
   • The Dynamics of Swahili Culture
2. ----. (1992) "Direct and indirect effects of culture." In DeSoto, Hermine (ed.) Culture and Contradictions: dialectics of wealth, power, and symbols.

WEEK VII
Differentiating among types of understandings and one of these types serving as a funnel that dampens diversity and promotes social life

Readings:
1. Swartz, Marc J. "On culture's efficacy: extrinsic understandings and social life in the Mombasa Swahili community."
2. ----. "Envy, justified dissatisfaction, and jealousy in Mombasa Swahili culture."
3. Wudunn, Sheryl. "Japanese women fight servility", New York Times, 9 July 1995.
4. Dugger, Celia W.. "A refugee's body is intact but her family is torn apart", New York Times 11 September 1996. pp. A1, A8-9.

WEEK VIII
A different approach to culture and human behavior.

Readings:
1. Fox, Richard G.. (1991) "Introduction: working in the present." In Fox, R.G. Recapturing Anthropology Santa Fe: School of American Research Press. pp. 1-16
2. Abu-Lughod, Lila. (1991) "Writing Against Culture." In Fox, R.G. Recapturing Anthropology Santa Fe: School of American Research Press.
3. Clifford, James. (1986) "Introduction: partial truths." In Clifford, J. and G. Marcus (eds). Writing Culture: the poetics and politics of ethnography Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
4. Rosaldo, Renato. (1986) "From the door of his tent: the fieldworker and the inquisitor." In Clifford, J. and G. Marcus (eds). Writing Culture: the poetics and politics of ethnography Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

WEEK IX
Objections and reservations

Readings:
1. Spiro, Melford E.. (1992) "On the strange and familiar in recent anthropological thought." In Spiro, M.E. Anthropological Other or Burmese Brother? New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Press.
2. D'Andrade, Roy G.. (1995) "Moral Models in Anthropology." Current Anthropology.
3. Sangren, P. S.. "Rhetoric and the authority of ethnography: 'postmodernism' and the social reproduction of texts." Current Anthropology. 29(3):277-307.
4. Gellner, Ernest. (1992) Postmodernism, Reason, and Religion. London: Routledge. pp. 40-79.

WEEK X
Final Session.

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