Maymester 2018

What is America? Who are the American people? How is American culture defined both “at home” and abroad? Using anthropological and historical knowledge, we will trace how American society, broadly defined, emerged from the precolonial era to the present day. Students will not be required to purchase textbooks for this course; instead, course readings cover a wide spectrum of ethnographic texts with topics ranging from nationalism, immigration, countercultures, religion, rural and urban communities, social justice and political movements. Students will directly apply ethnographic data and methods derived from social science research in and of the United States in projects directly related to their own experiences living in the U.S.

Instructor Allison Formanack

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Current popular, official and academic representations of Islam in the US frequently circulate two fundamentally opposite attributes of the religion and its associated culture: either Islam is provincial and hyper-traditional, or it is threateningly global and transnational. Both perceptions rest on the notion of Islam as singular, and as originating in and synonymous with the Middle East. Through an analysis of the history of Islamic trade and migration to Southeast Asia, the early historical conceptions of a global Islam, European colonialism, questions of nationalism, and contemporary conceptions of the ummah, we will study the relationship between globalization and Islamic identity in the 21st century.

Professor Carla Jones

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This course seeks to ground students’ understanding of contemporary Cuba within the global context.  How do those outside the island imagine Cuba and why? What are the realities?  In a world of U.S. dominated globalization, we have only recently begun to relax a forceful economic blockade on the island: What does the U.S. mean in the Cuban imaginary, both in the past and in the present?  To attend to global processes as they affect local (Cuban) experience, we will draw on texts from anthropology, history, policy, literature, film, and music.  In the process, students will learn how longstanding patterns regarding race, color, class, and gender relations have evolved in(to) the socialist, and now the “post-socialist,” context.

Professor Kaifa Roland

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