Students required to do field research on a campus group, and write an ethnographic account. The fieldwork involves painstaking measurements. These data permit study of the distribution of debris throughout the site, description of deposit formation over time, and comparison with other sites. Such methods increase the strength of inferences about the activities that took place and their roles in the evolution of cultural ecosystems in our area. The field and lab sessions last six hours each Friday.
Enrollment is limited to eight students.
The course explores the emergence of a new, diasporic, Jewish world in the United States between the late nineteenth century and the Great Depression of the 1930s. Poverty, racism, social mobility, and progressive political engagement will be explored, as well as the creation of new cultural forms, sacred and secular, that have come to constitute the culture of many contemporary American Jews. We examine what it means to be a gendered person in relation to culturally variable, locally imagined, and transnational systems of power and prestige. For example, in South and Southeast Asia, West Africa, and the Pacific, we study the gender politics of imperial cultures, their domestic arrangements and encompassing political structures, the constitution and coding of racial differences in gendered terms, the effects of development on indigenous women's lives, and indigenous sovereignty and female agency in postcolonial contexts. And we examine how kinship, economics, politics, belief, and ideology are experienced and structured through gender.