Judith B. Farquhar

21251/32200. Intensive Study of a Culture: Modern China. Primarily for undergraduates. Contemporary China is often spoken of as undergoing deep and rapid social change. Certainly globalizing forces have been especially evident in all parts of China over the last couple of decades. At the same time, like the rest of East Asia and the Pacific Rim, China has developed distinctive social, cultural, and political forms, many of which circulate nationally and transnationally. This course will come to terms with both the processes of change that have characterized the last few decades and with a few recent social and cultural phenomena of interest. Because the scholarly literature lags behind the pace of transformation in China, we will draw on a wide variety of materials: ethnography, memoir, fiction films, essays, historical studies, short stories, websites. Emphasis in class discussions will be on grasping how contemporary Chinese realities are experienced from viewpoints within China - this is the sense in which the course is intensive study of a "culture." Readings and materials will be divided into several major units concerned with 1) historical memory, 2) rural China, 3) urban life, 4) labor migration, and 5) popular culture. Students will be encouraged to undertake, as a term project, their own investigation of some aspect of contemporary cultural change in China.  

23600. Medicine and Society in 20th Century China. Survey of historical and anthropological approaches to medical knowledge and practice in 20th Century China. Materials will cover early modernizing debates, medicine and the state, Maoist public health, traditional Chinese medicine, and health and medicine in popular culture.

25410/35410. Anthropology of Everyday Life. In one sense ethnography has always devoted attention to the form and practice of everyday life; in another sense it has always failed to grasp its essence. Recently, stimulated by materialist critical theory, anthropologists have returned to the problem of the study of everyday life, only to find that our theories and methods only take us partway there. In an effort to clarify the field of everyday life ethnography and stimulate critical reflection on the everyday lives we all lead, this course will draw on three bodies of literature: 1) classic anthropological approaches to studying social life (behaviorism and utilitarianism, the sacred/profane distinction, phenomenology, habitus and practice, etc.); 2) 20th century cultural Marxist critical theory; and 3) recent studies of popular culture. The course will include a workshop component to to accommodate student projects.

Anth 42000. Anthropological Methods. This course provides a critical introduction to the methods of anthropology, paying special attention to topic formation, deployment of theoretical resources, techniques of engagement in "fields," and the politics and ethics of fieldwork and ethnographic knowledge production. Our approach will combine readings in critical anthropology relevant to methodological practice with workshop-style demonstrations of particular techniques for gathering and analyzing field material. The limits and powers of ethnography (broadly construed) will be explored through exploratory engagement with students' ongoing projects and a few examples of anthropological writing. This course is intended to help students develop the tools needed to develop their own research objects and strategies while reflecting critically on anthropology as a practice.

ANTH 52100. Seminar: Anthropologies of Body and Experience. Classically in sociocultural anthropology bodies occupied a default position that could be safely left to the biological sciences. Since the 1980s, however, the combined influence of Foucault, phenomenology, feminism, and medical anthropology has made bodies ("the body," embodiment, bodiliness) a topic in new ways. Once the life of the body has been made an issue for anthropology, many other areas of interest are somewhat recast: consciousness, materialism, subjectivity, agency, discipline, everyday life, practice, and experience all come into play in new ways. No one seminar could accommodate even the majority of work claiming to elucidate these newly framed topics. This course will narrow the field by considering embodiment together with the vexed theoretical and empirical question of experience. Readings (and a few films) will fall into the following broad categories: phenomenology and the critique of phenomenology; representations and their consumption; materialist methods in the interpretation of culture; sexuality and the Freudian body; non-Western theories of bodies and experience; virtual bodies and the senses; bodies (in)visible in ethnography and history.

53900. Modern China: Anthropological and Historical Studies. This graduate seminar will cover a range of recent studies of (mostly) 20th century China . Though one goal of the course is simply to digest and evaluate the best recent social, cultural and political reporting on Chinese modernities, another goal is to consider questions of method in anthropology and history in the wake of area studies eclecticism. For those not planning to do research in East Asia these readings could serve as a useful case study of theory and method after area studies. Ethnographies will include books by Anagnost, Farquhar, Litzinger, Liu, Rofel, Scheid, Schein, and Yan as well as a number of articles. Historical studies will focus on cultural histories, including some that examine early sources of Chinese traditions (e.g. Kuriyama, Jullien). Because literary and media studies have been influential in Chinese studies, some works in these fields will be covered as well.