Susan Gal

21202. Intensive Study of a Culture: Eastern Europe. Close study of an ethnographic region. Explores the current dramatic transformations in East­ern Europe after the Cold War, the meanings of nationalism in the region, everyday life under state socialism, how and why the "fall of Communism" occurred, current transnational migrations, the situation of women, ethnic and lin­guistic minorities, and the role of intellectuals in political life.

21302/30300. Modern Readings in Anthropology: Gender Theory and Anthropology. This course examines gender as a cultural category in anthropo¬logical theory, as well as in everyday life. After reviewing the historical sources of the current concern with women, gender, and sexuality in anthro¬pology and the other social sciences, we critically explore some key contro¬versies. These include: the relationship between production and reproduction in different sociocultural orders; the links between "public" and "private" in current theories of politics; the construction of sexualities, nationalities, and citizenship in a globalizing world. and women and gender in postcolonial discourse.

25200/43800. Approaches to Gender in Anthropology (=GNDR 25201/43800). This course examines gender as a cultural category in anthropological theory, as well as in everyday life. After reviewing the historical sources of the current concern with women, gender, and sexuality in anthropology , we critically explore some key controversies. These include: (1) the relationship between production and reproduction in different sociocultural orders; (2) "public" and "private" in current politics; (3) the body and sexualities; (4) work and emotional experience in a globalizing world; (5) consumption and desire; (7) language, communication and the construction of masculinity and femininity; (8) gender in postcolonial discourse.

27505.  Professional Persuasions: The Rhetoric of Expertise in Modern Life (=LING 27220) . This course seeks to dissect the linguistic forms and semiotic processes by which experts (often called professionals) persuade their clients, competitors and the public to trust them and rely on their forms of knowledge.  We will consider the discursive aspects of professional training (e.g., lawyers, economists, accountants), and take a close look at how professions such as social work, psychology and medicine stage their interactions with clients.  The goal of the course is to examine a central feature of modern life:  the reliance on experts, by analyzing the rhetoric and linguistic form of expert knowledge. 

37202. Language in Culture II (=Ling 311-312, Psych 470-471). PQ: Must be taken in sequence. This is the second part of a two-quarter sequence on the relations between language and culture. Building on the first quarter’s discussions of the interactional order and its conceptual dialectics, this quarter’s class explores the implications of language use for the construction of institutions such as schools, nations, states, liberal polities and scientific research, and the simultaneous embeddedness of language use in those very institutions. The aim throughout is to investigate the constitutive role of language and semiotic figuration in socioculteral “power” and in sociohistorical processes. We start with the notion of language ideology and the way it shapes understandings of linguistic differentiation by users -- both professional and non-expert -- and their assumptions about the “natural” indexicality of linguistic forms. This allows us to reconceptualize linguistic units such as ‘language’, ‘dialect’, ‘register’, and ‘variety.’ We study these as normative cultural constructs -- folk concepts as well as scientific ones. We focus on ‘standardization’ as one among many cultural/semiotic processes of language change that are implicated in nation and state-building, colonial and postcolonial projects and other aspects of “modernization” as a discursive phenomenon. Winter Quarter, Annually.

41100. Ethnography of Central and Eastern Europe. PQ: Consent of instructor. This seminar reads a series of classic and recent ethnographic studies of populations in the following countries: Germany, Austria, Poland, Hungary, Rumania, parts of the former Yugoslavia, and parts of the former Soviet Union. Our aim is to get a sense of how a range of communisms worked "on the ground," as well as the range of "transi­tions." Possible questions include the Cold War as the context of anthro­pological studies of Europe ; theorizing Communism; the issue of "nation­alism"; "embourgeoisment" and "underdevelopment"; the imagination of democracy, citizenship, and civil society; and money and the culture of commodities. The implications of these studies for understanding the United States and the “west” during the Cold War and beyond. S. Gal. Spring 1995; Spring 2000

41100. Ethnography of Europe. This seminar breaks with the tradition of considering Eastern and Western Europe in different courses and with different theoretical questions. Instead we will start with the political and scholarly division of Europe itself as our first conceptual issue, asking how the division was recast by the Cold War and now recast again in light of the Maastricht Treaty and 1989. Interactions and social processes that cross this divide will provide the objects for analysis in the course. We will also consider how any single phenomenon -- e.g. migration or tourism -- is understood in divergent ways depending on the symbolic geography that is assumed by the investigator. Our task will be to analyze the connections between such different conceptualizations, and between sociocultural processes in different corners of the continent. The topics to be taken up include: nationalisms and citizenships; the morality of capitalism; bureaucracy; regionalism and new forms of sovereignty; politics of sex and reproduction; utopias and dystopias -- the fate of state socialism; tourism and xenophobia; comparative mafias; memory, nostalgia and revivals. Students will be asked to lead discussions of topics of their choice and/or to present works-in-progress that analyze one or more of these issues.

528. Seminar: Politics of Reproduction. In this course we will take reproduction (of people) as the entry point to the study of social life and the critique of social theory. The notion of “reproduction” has been used broadly to characterize the continuity of culture and society. Building on those approaches, this course will focus more precisely on how culture are produced and contested, as people imagine, enable and direct the creation of the next generation. The course will deal with the intersection between politics and the life cycle, including definitions of sexuality, abortion, contraception, biogenetic technologies, international family planning programs, eugenics and welfare. Significantly, none of these issues is simply a matter of local or familial decision making. On the contrary, the focus of the course will be the ways in which local, regional and global social forces and social movements collide on the terrain of reproduction. Representations of reproduction will be a central concern, as well as their increasingly central role in the formation of states, new regimes, transnational political alliances. Specific topics to be addressed include: Global stratification of reproduction; nationalism and the control of sexuality and population; feminist movements and their varied relation to reproductive issues; militarism, motherhood and morality in diverse regional and cultural contexts; global markets and local users of the new reproductive technologies; the discourse of “rights” and “the body.”

52805. Colloquium: Gender in Europe (=HIST 53301, GNDR 53300).  This seminar will discuss current theories of gender as they illuminate and are challenged by contemporary and historical visions of gender relations and gender politics across the European continent. Topics to be covered include:  Practices and regulation of sexuality and reproduction (gay marriage, marriage as migration strategy, birth control, abortion, medically-assisted reproduction, adoption); the gendering of politics (national and supranational governmental institutions, NGOs, grass-roots organizations); religion; and, changes in labor force participation and the structuring of the workplace.  In all the cases the implications of post-coloniality and the expanding European union for gender will be considered. Comparisons, circulations and contrasts along an east/west and north/south axis will be of continuing interest; we will focus on material as well as discursive cultural practices. (with Leora Auslander, History)

547. Seminar: Performance and Politics. This seminar examines the ways in which politics in the contemporary world are constituted by forms of (re)contextualized language and performativity. The aim throughout is to critique the overly familiar notions of domination, resistance, naturalization, authority, tradition, and identity. We do this by specifying the precise ways in which the pragmatics of language use – in oratory, secular ritual, public spectacles, documents, riots, and mass media – produces particular social effects in polities founded on diverse cultural principles. The semiotics of social and cultural boundaries, and thus the varying definition of what is “political,” will also be a central focus. We will examine text-making, rhetoric, poetics, metaphor, performance, and language ideology as these are embedded in and enable the operation of large scale political-historical projects/processes such as revolution and mobilization, colonial rule, nation-formation, civil society, commodification of politics, and one-party rule.

577. Linguistic Anthropology Seminar on Current Research Topics: Language and Politics. This graduate seminar takes up ways in which language and political power have been conceptualized in current research. We consider language ideologies, literacy, and standardization; translation, political rituals, ideological sources of language differentiation; and nation building and linguistic difference. How have semiotic processes made possible the operation of modernity's large scale political-historical projects such as nation-formation, civil society, and the naturalization of state forms. How do these operate differently in colonial rule, parliamentary democracy, and one-party systems? How are current political processes -- the formation of supra-state organizations, the mobilization of transnational and international movements -- illuminated by the linguistic/literary concepts of voice, poetics, metaphor, performance, rhetoric, text-making and translation?

57701. Linguistic Anthropology Seminar on Current Research Topics: Boundaries, Borders, Contacts: Processes of Differentiation. The question of boundaries -- between languages, cultures, ethnic groups, institutions, disciplines, territories -- has been a central one in anthropological theorizing. Herderian assumptions equating supposedly grounded languages with territorially delimited culture (on the implicit model of nation-states) were foundational for the discipline. Noteworthy is the persistence of such terms as analysis despite repeated scholarly attacks on the notion of groundedness in language and culture, and attacks on the related assumption of homogeneity within supposed boundaries. We have recently witnessed yet another revival (and critique) of terms meant to recognize the regularity with which boundaries are breached: “hybridity,” “syncretism,” “creolization,” “crossings,” “borderlands,” “global/local,” and “frontiers.” This course examines critically the current use of such terms. The goal of the course is to survey and develop the semiotic, sociolinguistic and institutional processes -- for instance of differentiation, stereotypy, commensuration, and standardization -- that create and regiment cultural difference, and that are often simply glossed (and glossed over) when spatial metaphors are applied to culture, language and space itself. A focus on language ideologies and linguistic differentiation will be our conceptual starting point.

57710. LingAnthSem: Translation and Textual Circulation: Communicative Aspects of Transnational Processes (=LING 57710). This seminar investigates communicative dimensions of globalization. How are movements of people, objects and texts mediated by semiotic processes and by linguistic practices. Some questions concern form: How are texts and text artifacts transformed in the process of moving across national spaces regimented by different standard languages? How does this movement change the national spaces? Is "movement" the apt characterization of this process, or rather imitation, citation, iteration? The political economy of literary and technical translation in this conventional sense is our starting point in the seminar. But denotational codes (named languages) are only one of the sites at which various transformations occur in the apparent movements of texts and practices. The goal of the seminar is to examine "translation" as also a pragmatic process, worked across systems of indexicality, across differently situated discursive formations. Ethnography itself has often been characterized as a discipline of translation in this sense. How and when are commensurabilities established not only between languages but among different registers and discourses (e.g. medical to legal to commonsense)? What social roles and institutions create and mediate commensurabilities or ruptures in specific ethnographic and political contexts? How can we study the nodes of control and conflict? Of censorship, stoppage and obstruction? More generally, what limits are imposed on cultural forms as the condition of their circulation across various types of institutions? How are cultural forms - texts, practices - made transportable and transposable? When are boundaries between cultural, ethnic, linguistic, social units created, contested or erased through such transposition?
Starting with notions of entextualization, recontextualization, language ideology and interdiscursivity as developed in recent linguistic anthropology, the seminar aims to read critically across current ethnographic literature on topics such as: "cultural translation," "cultures of circulation," "publics," "translation studies," "trading zones," and "semiotics of global flows."