This internal catalog is updated regularly. Continue to check the Department bulletin board outside 232 Kroeber for changes (in Bold highlights). For independent study courses, graduate students get CCNs from the Graduate Office; and all undergraduates should fill out and return a signed application with the Undergraduate Office (209 Kroeber) to obtain the CCN.

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This graduate seminar is devoted specifically to the anthropological study of alcohol consumption and its consequences. Course material concerns both the prescription and prohibition of alcoholic beverages. Some of the main topics to be considered in the course are cross-cultural drinking patterns, gender and drink, changing drinking norms and behavior, and religious and ceremonial aspects of drink. Core readings will be selected from classic works on the topic as well as from recent research carried out around the world.

Readings and requirements to be announced.

The course is Instructor Approval Only. In order to apply for admittance to the class, you must come to the first lecture. NO EXCEPTIONS. Selection will be made at that time.

This seminar is intended for advanced students who already have significant background in the archaeology of prehispanic Mesoamerica. The goal is to investigate the historical development of central propositions taken as established knowledge in contemporary study of Mesoamerican prehistory (including archaeology and art history). Seminar participants will each be responsible for researching and writing summaries of the historical development of specific concepts over the past century, for presentation to the seminar as a whole. Each participant will be required to complete three of these "archaeologies of knowledge", and the complete set that the seminar develops will be shared and form a common seminar product.

Concepts to be researched include, but are not limited to: the definition of sites; the determination of population size; the identification of dwellings; astronomical knowledge; mathematics; basic technological repertoires (lithics, pottery, metallurgy); the nature of social stratification; governance; and others. Consent of the instructor required.

This seminar will meet weeks 8-15 (begins March 7).

This seminar will focus on Holocene African prehistory, especially on evidence for the emergence of sedentism, domestication, and food production in Saharan and sub-Saharan Africa. Like Mesoamerica, Africa diverges from the widely-known Southwest Asian trajectories toward settled farming. By the 9th millennium B.P., Sahelian-Saharan sites have ceramics developed in a pre-agricultural context, evidence of very early sedentism, and arguable evidence for early and independent cattle domestication. Moreover, domestic morphologies of the African millets and sorghum appear very late in all regions of Africa. Uniquely African forms of pastoralism and agriculture develop in areas which by the Christian era were communicating with the Eurasiatic zone.

This course is a required pro-seminar for first year graduate students in archaeology. In this semester the focus is on the design and implementation of archaeological research, with an emphasis on strategies for the retrieval and empirical study of material evidence in the field and laboratory. The seminar will also stress the constant interplay between theory and method in the design and implementation of research strategies, which is calculated to compliment your last semester's 229A course in theory.

The seminar is structured to a large degree around the process of developing, writing, submitting, and implementing a research project through the National Science Foundation (NSF). The NSF is the major governmental agency in this country that regularly funds "pure" archaeological research, both at senior and doctoral levels (Dissertation Improvement Grants). Many of you will probably be developing a Dissertation Improvement Grant for NSF at some point during your graduate career, and will probably prepare senior grants after you have received your Ph.D. Thus, it is in your professional interest to learn as early as possible what constitutes a "winning" proposal, one that will be judged positively by your professional peers.

Weekly readings and seminar discussions will explore topics germane for writing your NSF grant proposal, including preparing research designs, undertaking field and laboratory research and developing reasonable budgets. You should identify one or more research problems that you would like to address in a specific region of the world in developing your NSF grant proposal for this class.

Requirements: The requirements for the seminar include the preparation of an NSF grant proposal, participation in class discussions, and the critical review of book chapters and articles that will be assigned to you.

The course will provide an overview of archaeology "in the public interest." University courses tend to focus on archaeology for pure research, as practiced largely within the University setting. However, the vast majority of archaeologists are employed outside of universities. These archaeologists work for Federal, State and local agencies, museums and private companies. In each case, the primary reason for the existence of these archaeologists is not pure research, but to protect or promote the public's interests in archaeology. Much of the course will cover topics usually considered under the heading "cultural resource management" (CRM), such as historic preservation/heritage management, environmental review, legislative basis for CRM, ethical issues, role of government and non-government organizations (NGOs), as well as private enterprise (archaeology for profit). However, in addition, topics such as public outreach and education, the role of museums and universities, employment prospects and training opportunities in archaeology outside the university setting, will be discussed.

The course will focus on cross-cultural and comparative study of South Asias great civilizations in the Indus River Valley during the fourth and third millennia BC and later on, in the Ganges Valley during the early historical period. Various levels of socio-cultural, economic, religious and political complexities occurring through time in these two different regions will be critically examined in the light of available archaeological evidence.

The course will explore the beginning of organizational complexities of early cultures or state level societies in South Asia coinciding with a revolutionary shift from the hunting-gathering stage to permanent settlements. Information on various cultural markers like location and layout of settlements; plan, size and functions of buildings; domestication of plants and animals; craft specialization and existence of trade or exchange networks will be critically reviewed. The subsequent developments in the Greater Indus Valley which climaxed into a highly complex organization of society will be a topic of special discussion. All relevant data pertaining to this stage so far gathered by a large number of archaeologists and specialists in other disciplines on ancient animal and plant remains, physical types of human populations, architecture, technology and arts, religious symbolism and rites, burials, subsistence practices and economic wealth, political structure, class stratification, inter-regional and inter-settlement communications etc., will be considered and evaluated. Evidence relating to environmental change in the physical and cultural landscape, causes and consequences of cultural change and eventual disappearence of the highly complex and developed Harappan/Indus state will be studied.

The second urbanization in South Asia which took place almost two millennia later on in the Gangetic Valley of northern India presents yet another interesting case study during the early historic era. Pertinent archaeological evidence of that period, supported by literary sources reveals different kinds of complexities. The course will explore those parameters in which cultural developments took place in the Ganges Valley in sharp contrast to those in the Greater Indus Valley.

Course Structure: This course is aimed at providing a broad perspective of current concepts and theoratical frameworks for complex societies of ancient South Asia. It is also intended to provide a positive environment to those students who are exposed to the archaeology, anthropology or ancient cultural history of other regions of the world and wish to enrich and broaden their horizon through indepth study of South Asians phenomena. They would be very much encouraged to express themselves meaningfully and critically on this subject in the seminar.

Requirements: The students will be assigned specific readings from the textbooks and recommended literature. They will be expected to submit a brief analysis of their readings and present it in the classroom for discussions. All students will write a research paper 30 35 pages long with bibliography on any topic of their choice but related to the main theme of this seminar. They should meet with the instructor early in the semester. They are expected to have written a draft by the middle of semester for presentation in the classroom. There will be no written examination for this course. The students will be graded on the basis of their performance in reading assignments and class presentations (30%) and final research paper (70%).

This seminar is an introduction to themes in the social thought that informs anthropological analysis and ethnographic practice and to modes of critical engagement important both to the design of research and to the articulation of intellectual fields.

In addition to the reading, seminar members will be expected to prepare concise (5 minute) analytic discussions of assigned texts along with questions for discussion. There will be a seminar paper.

This description has not been made available. Contact Professor Pandolfo for more information: pandolfo@uclink4.berkeley.edu

This description has not been made available. Contact Professor Erwin for more information: krserwin@sscl.berkeley.edu

This graduate seminar traverses the terrain of anthropology, critical human geography, history, and cultural studies to examine the cultural politics of landscape and identity in diverse historical and geographical contexts. The project is less to trace a genealogy of 'landscape' as an analytical construct and more an occasion to explore the simultaneity of material and symbolic practices that carve out landscapes and their related keywords: space, place, locality, territoriality, region, and nation. We will devote particular attention to the politics of memory and geographical imaginaries; governmentality and state territorial ambitions (including cartographic encounters); the mappings and reterritorializations of identity; the construction of belonging, exclusion, and citizenship in relation to imagined and practiced landscapes; livelihoods and landscapes; and the production of multi-local and transnational sociocultural spaces. One goal of the seminar is to 'ground' a series of theoretical debates in the particularities of the historical and ethnographic work we explicitly engage as well as in our own research projects.

This seminar is open to students who have just returned from the field or who are in the midst of writing their dissertation. The seminar is divided into two parts. First, we will discuss, using appropriate examples, the different types of ethnographic works that are produced today. What is the goal of ethnographic production? Is it to recover the voices of the silenced subaltern, to highlight cultural difference, to provincialize Europe, to produce a literary masterpiece, or to explain social problems? Do we see ourselves primarily as healers or as social scientists with something to say about contemporary cultures and social change? Most dissertations, I suspect, are driven by a set of intentions (besides getting a Ph.D.!), but it will help to make explicit what our purpose is in producing particular kinds of anthropological works. The major part of the seminar will involve presentations of chapters in progress and discussions in relation to the specific goals of the dissertation and the larger purpose of anthropology.

This seminar will be devoted to the comparative study of contemporary small scale, kin-based, non-stratified, foraging and subsistence agricultural or herding societies. Often referred to as "tribal societies," and many of them identified as "endangered peoples," they comprise the archetypical subjects for anthropological studies. We will consider contemporary anthropological definitions, theories, perceptions and interpretations of such peoples. Of special interest will be some dozen major contemporary debates among informed anthropologists concerning the nature of small scale societies in general (such as: "the great hunter-gatherer debate") and in specific instances (such as those concerning the San, the Inuit, the Yanamamo, the Ik, the Samoans, Australian Aborigines, the "Tasaday," rain forest dwellers of SE Asia, etc.). These will be examined with reference to such issues as war and violence, female subordination, social hierarchy political centralization and subordination, etc.

A second focus will be on the fate of, and prospects for, such peoples in the contemporary world in the face of globalization: neo-colonialism, environmental degradation, tourism, capital penetration, exploitation of cultural property, national expansion, anthropological "authority," etc. The specific topics to be selected for the seminar's attention--and therefore the resources to be consulted and papers to be written--will be decided during initial meetings of the seminar.

Please see instructor for more details.

This description has not been made available. Contact Professor Nader for more information.

In this seminar we will explore some of the diverse ways in which human beings use dress--broadly construed as the adornment and modification of the body--to express, control, perform, and represent diverse facets of identity. In addition to examining such topics as national, ethnic, and sectarian dress, we will likewise consider the ways people manipulate, negotiate, and transform their identities through dress. In considering strategies of assimilation, passing, dressing-for-success, cross-dressing, oppositional dress, masking, and disguise, we will see how the study of dress can illuminate issues of gender, race, sexuality, resistance and power--as well as the indeterminacy and instability of identity.

This description has not been made available. Contact Professor Yurchak for more information: alexei@sscl.berkeley.edu

This seminar aims at an anthropological understanding of the very transition that Chinese society has gone through in the last two decades of the twentieth century, and argues that the phenomenon of China at the very present time must be understood in the light of its unique shape of the recent past, known as the Maoist revolution. Three different but related areas of inquiry are central to this seminar. First, in terms of materials used, it will focus on the changes taking place in the sphere of urban life as a key to the overall transformation in Chinese society. Second, in terms of theoretical orientation, this seminar will bring to our attention the question of how alternative forms of modern experiences are shaped as the result of a particular set of historically situated cultural practices. This is part of a large framework of inquiry that some anthropologists have called it "the anthropology of modernity." Third, in terms of methodological consideration, this seminar will try to show how ethnographic approach remains one of the best means in dealing with the global penetration of capitalism and the effect of transnational capital.

Required texts:
Lee, Leo Ou-fan. Shanghai modern: the flowering of a new urban culture in China, 1930-1945. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999.
Whyte, Martin King, and William L. Parish. Urban life in contemporary China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.
Walder, Andrew George. Communist neo-traditionalism: work and authority in Chinese industry. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.
Anagnost, Ann. National past-times: narrative, representation, and power in modern China. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997.
Rofel, Lisa. Other modernities: gendered yearnings in China after socialism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
Lu Xiaobo and Elizabeth Perry, eds., Danwei: the changing Chinese workplace in historical and comparative perspective. Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1997.
Wang, Jing. High culture fever: politics, aesthetics, and ideology in Deng's China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.
Solinger, Dorothy J. Contesting citizenship in urban China: peasant migrants, the state, and the logic of the market. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
Lee, Ching Kwan. Gender and the south China miracle: two worlds of factory women. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.
Wank, David L. Commodifying communism: business, trust, and politics in a Chinese city. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Hertz, Ellen. The trading crowd: an ethnography of the Shanghai stock market. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Watson, James L. ed., Golden arches east: McDonald's in East Asia. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1997.

The departmental seminar, which is held on alternate Mondays from 4-6 p.m. in 160 Kroeber throughout each semester, presents a range of speakers on current topics in anthropology. Speakers and topics are announced prior to the event on the glassed-in bulletin board opposite the main office (232 Kroeber). All students are invited; however, enrollment is strictly limited to and required of all Anthropology, Medical Anthropology, and Demography graduate students who have not been advanced to candidacy.

FOLKLORE

This seminar is a survey of the history of development of Folklore and Folkloristic theory and method worldwide. Assignment includes writing a research paper for possible publication.

Prerequisites: Consent of the instructor.