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Poslední úprava: Mgr. Martin Heřmanský, Ph.D. (04.09.2019)
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Poslední úprava: Martin Fotta, M.Sc., Ph.D. (07.01.2020)
Attendance & Discussion Questions on Assigned Readings: 20% Students shall attend classes on all days prescribed by your programme for this course. If you are unable to attend due to illness you should email me. During the next class, please bring. Maximum two unexcused absences will be tolerated. Any further unexcused lecture will affect your attendance grade and you will have to make up for it by an additional presentation. Timely attendance is also critical; recurrent lateness will affect your attendance grade. It is critical that you come to class prepared to discuss the assigned material. As a way to account for attendance and for your preparation, at the beginning of each class you will have to hand in a piece of paper with ONE central quotation from the reading assigned for that week and TWO questions related to it. These can be also written by hand. Failure to do so will affect your attendance grade.
Presentations: 40% Each student has to prepare ONE presentation on the weekly reading. The presentations should not be longer than 15 minutes. Power point is recommended, but not required. Failure to present on the agreed-upon date will result in lowering of your presentation grade.
Final take home paper: 40% 2-question take-home paper (between 600 and 1,000 words each). Questions are listed below. Take-home papers are due in by 3pm, Tuesday 4 February 2020. To ensure fairness, extensions will not be granted except in cases of documented medical or family emergencies. Late drafts will not receive feedback.
1. Van Gennep writes that: ‘in specific instances these three types [stages of rites of passage] are not always equally important or equally elaborated’. What does he mean by that? 2. Liminality is the antithesis of structure, dissolves structure and is perceived as dangerous by those in charge of maintaining structure. At the same time, it is also the source of structure. Elaborate. 3. In small-scale communities, emotions are experienced not as private and inner motivation, but as a consequence of the enactment of specific public role. Elaborate. 4. Hochschild has noted that emotional labour in the service of work often produces “emotional dissonance” — a conflict between how workers really feel and the surface feelings they’re expected to perform as part of a job. Elaborate. 5. Why should anthropologists not ignore autonomous force and intensity of basic emotions? 6. Sexuality is central to fieldwork practice and not only when one studies a particular sexual subculture. Elaborate. 7. Anthropologists have shown that ‘homosexual behaviour’ can be central to, routinised or normalised within a society. Elaborate. 8. What does social construction of sexuality refer to? 9. How did new reproductive technologies disrupt our assumption about the nuclear family as founded upon sexual and biological integrity? 10. Michelle Rosaldo suggested that: “Much like the nineteenth-century writers who first argued whether mother-right preceded patriarchal social forms, or whether women’s difficult primeval lot has been significantly improved in civilized society, feminists differ in their diagnosis of our prehistoric lives, their sense of suffering, of conflict, and of change.” What do you think she meant by this? 11. In the 19th century changing relationship between sexes was seen as a clue to human development. Elaborate. 12. How did early feminist anthropologists respond to the question of whether sexual asymmetry is universal of not? Discuss at least one author. 13. Is mother-child unit ‘naturally’ universal? 14. If we start with the notion of the domestic as distinct from the public, we cannot ask questions about those ‘domestic’ aspects which seem the most natural, such as mother and mothering. Elaborate. 15. From what perspectives did anthropologists traditionally approach children and childhood? 16. Why is focus on children’s agency a clearly political attitude? 17. Is there a universal progression from childhood to adolescence to adulthood? Provide at least one example. 18. According to Clara Han and other anthropologists, home – a physical space within which caring occurs as well as a form of relatedness – is the reason why people instigate dependencies that exceed it. Elaborate. 19. How does immigration change caring practices within homes? Use at least one example. 20. How is increased longevity shaping meaning, experiences and consequences of life itself? 21. For British school of structural functionalism age was ideology and principle of social organisation. Elaborate. 22. How does the analytical focus on care centre the connections and fissures between large scale transformations and the most intimate aspects of everyday life? 23. Death is not straightforward, because it is not only a dead body you are dealing with, but someone who has been connected to others through complex social relations. Elaborate. 24. What is the social function of mortuary rituals? Please provide at least one example. 25. Grief might be a universal reaction to loss, but mourning is culturally specific. Elaborate.
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Poslední úprava: Martin Fotta, M.Sc., Ph.D. (03.12.2019)
OFFICE HOURS: By appointment – via email – only. Feel free to email me also if you have any questions and concerns. email: Fotta@em.uni-frankfurt.de
Session 1: Welcome and introduction As a social science, anthropology was allocated the ‘savage slot’ (Trouillot), to study people with whom Westerners could not have imagined any conversation as with equals (because they were ‘primitive’ or more generally ‘other’). But is anthropology still suited for the 21st century? · Hage, G. (2012). Critical anthropological thought and the radical political imaginary today. Critique of anthropology, 32(3), 285-308. · Wallerstein, I. (1996). Open the social sciences: Report of the Gulbenkian Commission on the restructuring of the social sciences. Stanford University Press.
Session 2: *** NO LECTURE*** (Imatrikulace)
Session 3: On schooling as a rite of passage You are at the university in order to learn something new and to get prepared for the labour market. But ‘preparation for the labour market’ is only a mode of talking about a process through which we are made into social persons and pass from one stage to another. From this point of view, schooling can be seen as belonging to what anthropology have called ‘rites of passage’. Key anthropological topics: rites of passage; initiation rites; ritual; social personhood. Required reading:
Recommended readings:
Session 4: Being In love As many university students know, it is hard to study when one has a ‘broken heart’. But what does it mean? How universal is this feeling? Is romantic love a modern invention? Does ‘love’ mean the same thing for all people? By exploring these questions we look at understanding emotions as cultural categories and explore the role emotions play in the politics of social life. Key anthropological topics: self; emotions; affect; individual. Required reading:
Further reading:
Session 5: On sexual desires and practices In this session we will look at human sexuality from the perspective of different cultures. How does modern anthropology analyse phenomena such as hijras of India or berdache of the North America? And what does the way these have been conceptualised (as homosexual practices, as third sex, as transgender) tell us about our own ontological categories pertaining to sex and sexuality? Key anthropological topic: sex and gender; ‘third gender’; heteronormativity; social construction. Required reading
Further reading
Session 6: In the name of the father Anthropology has always been interested in how a natural process of biological reproduction connects with social organisation. But why do some cultures misrecognise physical paternity? We look at how at the core of anthropological kinship studies, and thus anthropology itself, has stood a European (patriarchal, monotheistic and heteronormative) view of conception and how it has been challenged by ethnographic data from other cultures and today by new procreative technologies. Key anthropological concepts: kinship; paternity; nature/culture. Required reading:
Further readings:
Session 7: What does your mother do? One might think: ‘OK, fathers are not certain, but surely mothers are’. Indeed, given a variety of kinship and family models that have existed in human history, a mother-child dyad has been posited as the real nucleus of all family groups. But why should the fact of giving birth automatically translate into individualisation of the mother and the structural importance of a mother-child dyad? Is mother-child bond essentially the same, immutable and based on a natural affective link? Key anthropological term: gender; families; private vs. public spheres. Required reading:
Recommended reading:
Session 8: The world of children Contemporary anthropology acknowledges that childhood and childhood experience differ across societies. Children are social actors in their own right, who have their own perpectives on the social work and participate in it differently. Although they may not occupy central social, political and economic roles in society, they can and do make an active contribution. Is childhood a cultural universal at all? How are they viewed? What is their role? Key anthropological concepts: childhood; family; generation Required reading:
Further readings:
Session 9: ‘Home is where the heart is’ It might seem that households play little integrative function today. And yet, while we the market discourse and practices encourage individual responsibility and initiative, most people around the world interact with the world from a house as a ‘base’ (Gudeman). How embedded is the market economy in the household? And how do processes and dynamics characteristic of these forms of living proximity get captured in a way that makes the logic of the capitalist market dominant? Key topics: household; embeddedness; reciprocity; capitalism. Required reading:
Further reading:
Session 10: ‘He who does not work, neither shall he eat’ Most advanced industrial societies are ‘work-centred’. High value and prestige is accorded to work. We – especially the ‘real men’ from among us – forge our personalised identities around our work and organise our lives accordingly. Indeed, belief in an interpersonal moral duty to work is encoded in both popular attitudes toward work and in policies such as ‘work activation schemes’. How can hunters and gatherers be satisfied with three hours of ‘work’ per day? Do they not eat? Key anthropological topics: work and labour; production and reproduction. Required reading:
Recommended reading:
Session 11: On aging and generations If all goes well, statistically speaking, you will live longer than people in your parents’ and grandparents’ generation. And some of you might already be caring for elderly parents or others relatives. How do different cultures conceptualise relations between generations? What social roles are ascribed to the elderly in different cultures? And why do we today increasingly conceptualise of our relationship with our elders through the notion of ‘care’? Key anthropological topics: Care; generation; life-course Required reading
Recommended readings
Session 12: Death and remembering Death, like birth, is an event which every society has to deal with – it is a change, a life crisis, an opportunity, a conjuncture of transformations of the physical body, a moment for redefining social relations. How do people organise these processes of adjustment? How and what do they remember? How do material objects mediate people’s memory of the dead? Key anthropological topics: death; remembering; mourning; collective memory. Required reading:
Recommended reading:
Session 13: Final Session The final session will provide the summary of topics and themes discussed. |