Comparative Studies 5957.01 Comparative Folklore: Folklore in Circulation, as Cultures of Waste and Recycling
Th 2:15PM-5:00PM | Journalism Building 291 | Dorothy Noyes
This course explores the notion of the residual: what is left over, useless, unclassifiable. We'll consider processes of symbolic classification through which phenomena can be labelled as out of place or out of phase. We will explore the customary management of communal resources, both human and material, in scarce-resource societies. We'll examine the creation of waste (and its converse, deprivation) with the codification of custom in modernity, and look at strategies by which waste is recuperated as a matter of necessity, aesthetics, or ideology. We'll look at how different kinds of leftover move in and out of systems of value: for example, the labelling of things as "junk" or "antiques," people as "trash," or ideas as "folklore." Throughout, we'll thinkabout the status of residues in social and cultural theory.
Comparative Studies 6390 Approaches to Comparative Cultural Studies I
W 2:15-5:00PM | TBA | Ashley Perez
A graduate introduction to social thought and critical theory, this course offers a survey of key interpretive theories that have guided social and cultural analysis of modernity in all its diverse colonial and postcolonial locations. We will read core sociological, anthropological, and philosophical works including writings by Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, Roland Barthes, and Ruth Benedict, in order to explore the workings of culture, history, and difference in the present. In addition to introducing social thought and social-science methodologies of comparative cultural and civilizational analysis, we will study critical epistemologies including psychoanalysis, ethnography, and feminism. The course concludes with the post-structuralist turn to the cultural analysis of power. This is the first course in a two-semester introduction to critical and cultural theory, while also offering a stand-alone introduction to key concepts for formulating interdisciplinary and critical research projects, with a particular emphasis on anthropological approaches to culture. Primarily designed for graduate students in the Department of Comparative Studies, this course is also open to graduate students from across the university
Comparative Studies 7350.02 Theorizing Folklore II: Ethnography of Performance
T 2:15PM-5:00PM | Hagerty 451| Amy Shuman
Performance as a heightened mode of communication characteristic of vernacular cultural process, studied in the context of ongoing social interaction.
Comparative Studies 7360 Theorizing Culture
Fr 9:10AM-12:00PM | Hagerty 451 | Morgan Liu
What is “culture” and is the concept useful to understanding what people do, say, and think? Is it to be located in ideas, in materiality, in discourse, or in practice/performance? We will think about how the cultural dimensions of human existence are variously involved with tactics of power; with conflations of race, nation, and territoriality; with shaping agency and articulating voice; with universalistic claims and particular politics.
Readings are centered on ethnographies that plumb specific cases and simultaneously theorize subjectivity, knowledge, representation, gender, identity, embodiment, space, networks, colonialism, complexity, the state, the global, etc. We will consider these case studies with respect to perspectives from cultural anthropology, human geography, linguistic anthropology, urban studies, cultural studies, science studies, history, political science, and sociology. Students from all disciplines are very welcome in this course. The central position of the class is your semester-long essay on a topic of your choice (perhaps a piece for your future thesis) in light of perspectives of the course.
The course’s seminar/lecture format involves close engagement among students and with me. There will be a mini-conference where students present their own work to the class for feedback.Prereq: Grad standing or permission of instructor. Not open to students with credit for 716.
Comparative Studies 8890 Colloquium, Workshops, and Departmental Seminars
Th 12:00-2:00PM | Hagerty 451| Theresa Delgadillo
Performance as a heightened mode of communication characteristic of vernacular cultural process, studied in the context of ongoing social interaction.