The class meets on Tuesdays, from 5:10 to 6:50 in Zankel 109
[where to look for the required and recommended readings]
I - Introduction:
• Varenne, Hervé "Local controls of mask (not) wearing." Blog entry on April 8, 2022
recommended:
- Qutb, Sayyid The America I have seen. Palgrave. [ 1951] 2000
- Sartre, Jean-Paul On America. in his Situations. New York: .[1950] 1962.
• Miner, Horace "Body ritual among the Nacirema." in The Nacirema: Readings on American culture. Edited by J. Spradley and M. Rynkiewich. Boston: Little, Brown & Co.. pp. 2-13. (First published in 1956) 1975
• Lévi-Strauss, Claude "Father Christmas executed". in Unwrapping Christmas. Edited by D. Miller. Oxford: Clarendon Press. pp. 38-51 (First published in 1952) 1993
recommended:
- di Leonardo Exotics at home. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
- Hsu, Francis "American core values and national character." in Psychological anthropology. Edited by F. Hsu. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1972
- Mead, Margaret And keep your powder dry: An anthropologist looks at America. New York: W. Morrow & Co.. (First published in 1942) 1965
- Sinha, Surajit "Religion in an affluent society." Current Anthropology 7, 2:189-195. 1966
- Varenne, Hervé Americans Together. New York: Teachers College Press. 1978
- Warner, Lloyd Yankee City. Abridged edition. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1963
• Abu-Lughod, Lila "Writing against culture." in Recapturing Anthropology. Edited by R. Fox. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press. pp. 137-154. 1991
• McDermott, Ray & Hervé Varenne "Reconstructing culture in educational research." in Innovations in educational ethnography. Edited by G. Spindler and L. Hammond, 3-31. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates 2006
recommended:
- Boas, Franz The mind of primitive man. New York: The Free Press. 1938 (First published in 1911)
- Bourdieu, Pierre Outline of a theory of practice. Tr. by R. Nice.. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1977 (First published in 1972)
- Geertz, Clifford "'From the native's point of view': On the nature of anthropological understanding.." in Meaning in anthropology. Edited by K. Basso and H. Selby. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. pp. 221-237. 1976
II - Culture as product of imagination
• Gundaker, Grey "Tradition and innovation in African-American yards." African Arts 26, 2: 58-96. 2008
recommended:
- Bannan, Nicholas, Robin Dunbar and Joshua Barnford "The evolution of gender dimorphism in the human voice: The role of octave equivalence." in Current Anthropology 65, 3. pp. 503-527. 2024
• Holland, Dorothy and Debra Skinner "Prestige and intimacy: The cultural models behind Americans' talk about gender types." in Cultural models in Language and Thought. Ed. by D. Holland and N. Quinn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1987
recommended:
- Garfinkel, Harol "Passing and the Managed Achievement of Sex Status in the Intersexed Person." in Studies in ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. 1967.
- Merleau-Ponty Signs. Translated by Richard C. McCleary. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. [1960] 1964
- Lévi-Strauss, Claude Totemism. Boston: Beacon Press. [1962] 1963.
• Ginsburg, Faye 1989 Contested lives: The abortion debate in an American community. Berkeley: University of California Press. (pp. 77-92 and 110 to 129)
• Greenhouse, Carol 1994 Law and community in three American towns. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. (Chapter 4, pp 117-132)
recommended:
- Dumont, Louis German ideology: France-Germany and back. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. [1991] 1995
III - The impact of culture on identity and cognition
• Harding, Susan "Convicted by the Holy Spirit: The rhetoric of a fundamental Baptist conversion." American Ethnologist 14:167-181. 1987
- Benedict, Ruth The chrysantemum and the sword: Patterns of Japanese culture. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. 1946 (Chapter ???)
- Ochs, Elinor "Language acquisition and socialization: Three developmental stories and their implications." in Culture theory. Edited by R. Shweder and R. LeVine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 276-320. 1984
- Sapir, Edward 1966 Culture, language and personality: Selected essays. Berkeley: University of California Press. (First published in 1949)
• Goodwin, Charles "A Competent Speaker Who Can't Speak: The Social Life of Aphasia." Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 14, 2:151-170. 2004
- de Wolfe, Juliette Parents of children with autism: An ethnography. New York: Palgrave. 2014
- McDermott, R.P. & H. Varenne 1995 "Culture as disability." Anthropology and Education Quarterly 26: 324-348. 1995
• Latour, Bruno 1987 Science in action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (pp. 1-100) [available in 'Files' on Canvas]
- Scroggins, Michael "A feral science? Dangers and disruptions between IYbio and the FBI." Critique of Anthropology 43 (1): 84-105. 2023 [available in 'Files' on Canvas]
• Holland, Dorothy Identity and agency in cultural worlds. . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1998 (Chapter 13)
recommended:
- Benedict, Ruth 1934 Patterns of culture. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
- Mead. G. H. 1934 Mind, self and society (pp. 14-15, 42-47, 78)
- Butler, Judith Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge. 1990
IV - Systems: Getting caught in various webs
• Anderson, Benedict Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. Revised Edition. New York: Verso. [1983] 1991 (Chapter 3)
• Weatherford, Jack Genghis Khan and the making of the modern world. New York: Crown Publishers. 2004 (Chapters 8 and 9)
recommended:
- Gramsci Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Tr. by Q. Hoare and G.N. Smith. New York: International Publishers. [1930-32] 1971
- Foucault, Michel Discipline and punish. Tr. by A. Sheridan. New York: Penguin Books. [1975] 1978
- Lenin , Vladimir What is to be done?: Burning questions of our movement. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House. [1902] 1961
V - Culturing education into schooling
• Barry O'Sullivan & Liying Cheng "Lessons from the Chinese imperial examination system." Language Testing in Asia 12, 52: 1-20. 2022
recommended:
- Varenne, Hervé & R.P. McDermott Successful Failure. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. 1998
• Koyama, Jill "Assembling and Dissembling: Policy as Productive Play." Educational Researcher 41, 5:157-162. 2012 (with Hervé Varenne)
recommended:
- Bateson, Gregory "The message 'This is play'.." in Group processes: Transactions of the second conference. Edited by B. Schaffner. New York: Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation. pp. 145-242. 1955
- Boon, James
- Ortner, Sherry
- Steiner-Khamsi, Gita "Transferring education, displacing reforms.". in Discourse formation in comparative education. Edited by Jurgen Schriewer. Peter Lang. pp. 155-187. 2000
• Scott, James The art of not being governed: An anarchist history of upland Southeast Asia. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 2009 (Chapter 3 and, if possible Chapter 7)
recommended:
- Koyama, Jill & Hervé Varenne "Teachers, Educating Themselves About Their School." in Education in Life (Routledge 2019)
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