Grading Policy

Three Exams: each 33% of grade
Each exam is a combination of 34 true-false and multiple choice questions.
NO extra credit.

Reading:

For each of the 3 exams students will be held responsible for a set of 6-8 assigned readings from the two class readers: and additional class reading made available on the Web.

Core Themes:

To what extent is human behavior universal or culturally relative? Peoples as products and creator of their worlds. Social evolution, genetics and eugenics. Culture: domination and human agency; social roles and individual freedom; hegemony, resistance and co-option. Representing the "other": images of other cultural and ethnic groups, the meanings of ethnicity. Beyond "culture" as code: ways in which culture is embodied and reproduced. Commodity fetishism and image advertising, the media, and globalization. Language: is our thinking limited by our language? Freud "defense mechanisms" and culture. Secular rituals, why are they important?

Major Theorists and Topics to be Covered

Sociological thought in the 18th century: Bacon and Descartes on inductive and deductive reasoning; Locke and Hobbes; Montesquieu on climate and cultural disposition, Rousseau on the noble savage.

Social evolution paradigm: Spencer's ideas about culture and human development, stage theory,. race, and evolution. Who supported this theory and why? The evolution paradigm today; social biology; genetics and Eugenics.

Historical relativism: Boas history and the uniqueness of cultures, the diffusion of traits and the genius of integration, emotions, habits and culture. Boas response to the eugenics movement; why Boas' research agenda is relevant today.

Cultural temperaments; Benedict's view of culture as consensus, cultures as personalities writ large, ethos. Patterns of culture and individual difference…..

Nature and nurture: Margaret Mead and the sociocultural construction of sex roles; Ortner on universal sexual asymmetry; Rosaldo and Lamphere on public/domestic dichotomy, are all gender systems predicated on male dominance?

Functionalism: (Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown) Is society structured to serve the needs of individuals or do the needs of social institutions prevail? What are the roles of ritual in society? Why do anthropologists take joking seriously?

Social organization in simple and complex societies: (Durkheim and heirs of the Durkheimian tradition) Is there a culture out there, how it is constituted, how does it effect us? Social facts, social currents, social constraints, and collective experience. Social solidarity and anomie: the case of suicide among different ethnic and religious groups. Self, Person, and Individual as distinct constructs.

Is social control always positive? (Weber): Are individuals manipulators of cultural resources or are their actions determined by their common socialization? What is the dialectic between bureaucratization and charisma and why is this important? How is social science different from natural science? The work ethic: how does it pervade our lives, what are its historical roots?

Modes of production and the ways they are related to social relations (Marx): The embodiment and reproduction of ideology in everyday life.(Gramsci and Atlhusser:. From crude stereotypes of Marxist theory to the subtle message of hegemony as an unfinished product in process. Women's status and economic production. Sex as symbolic capital. Commodity fetishism.

Worlds Systems and Globalization Theory: What impact does capitalism have on the Third World? From Wold's systems theories to more subtle accounts of globalization. Defective modernization and the development of underdevelopment.

Advertisements, gender, and the "passive imperative voice" of dominant culture: Image advertising, self identity and the embodiment of ideology. Case Studies: Cultural meanings of the thin body ideal among women: advertisements which dismember and foster generalized dissatisfaction to sell products; the work ethic--making up and making over; women of color and homogenized beauty. Film: 'Killing me softly'.. Representation of ethnic minority women in the media.

Resistance to Hegemony: Hegemony as an unfinished process; reappropriating the conventional. Is resistance always framed in relation to hegemony; the issue of aging..

Ethnicity and the Politics of Identity; Moving beyond thinking about 'culture' and ethnicity as nouns and entities to projects in the making; Challenging essentialist notions of identity.

Culture and language (Whorf and Sapir, Vygotsky, Lakoff and Johnson: Does language influence or determine thought? Is thinking silent language? Metaphors we live by. Ways of knowing. Metaphor and politics.

* Conceptual Organization and Culture (Levi-Straus, Goodenough, Frake, Douglas and Leach, Holland and Quinn): Ethnoscience approaches to studying culture. From thinking in terms of taxonomies to an appreciation of the importance of anomalies, cultural model theory. Thinking in and out of the box, Bourdieu on Codes.

Freud's model of psychosexual development: Cultural model or universal? Complementarily between Freud and Marx's ideas, Freud's contribution to the understanding of psychological defense behavior.

Culture, psychology and idioms of distress (Spiro and Stein): From spirits in the air to spirits in the bottle; mediating gender double binds through intoxication on college campuses; smoking and smoke signals.

* Culture and Substance Use: marking times of control and release through intoxicants as temporal keying devices;

* Culture, the individual and American society: Learning core cultural values through secular rituals: football and rock and roll; dieting, control and gender roles; performance and the embodiment of culture.

[* = Time permitting]

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