François Richard 

21255. Intensive Study of a Culture: The Senegambia.  This course offers an overview of history, culture, and society in the Senegambia, a territory situated between the Senegal and Gambia Rivers, and roughly corresponding to the political boundaries of modern-day Senegal. We will examine the region in broad historical perspective, beginning with oral accounts of migration and state formation, and tracking the gradual entanglement of local societies with global political economic forces during the Atlantic era, transition to the legitimate trade, French colonialism, and road to political independence. The last portion of the course will focus on cultural, artistic and political experiences in the postcolonial state of Senegal.

26015/46015. Archaeological Imaginations.

26830/36830. Archaeology of Religious Experience.  This seminar provides a critical exploration of archaeological approaches to past religious life. Drawing on a variety of case studies spanning a broad temporal and geographic spectrum, we will examine/interrogate how object worlds can help to expand our understanding of religion in prehistoric and historic societies. Firmly grounded in contemporary anthropological thinking, the course will explore theoretical and methodological possibilities, challenges, and limitations arising from archaeological studies of religious experience.

26105. Ancient African Societies.  This course explores Africa's rich archaeological past, tracing broad historical trends from the beginning of the Holocene 10,000 years ago up to the time of European voyages. This long period was marked by sweeping transformations across the continent: changes in subsistence and lifestyles; development of trading networks, metallurgy, and craft specialization; and the rise of complex societies. One of our goals will be to examine these processes, their local expressions, and the complex matrices of peoples, objects, and ideas in which they were rooted. This exploration will be paired with a critical assessment of the social contexts that frame our understanding of ancient African societies. What we know of Africa's past has been colored by factors that have little to do with the continent's prehistory, including intellectual currents, scientific debates, over prejudice, muted racism, colonial ideologies, and global political economy. In picturing Africa as a place of timeless chaos and utter otherness, contemporary discourses have done much to sever Africans from their own histories and thwart the growth of perspectives sensitive to the continent's dynamic cultural past. By tacking back and forth between past and present, we will try to paint a more nuanced portrayal of ancient Africa, one of distinct cultural worlds sharing ever widening spaces of historical experience.

26820/46820.  Social Life of Things (And Beyond): Objects, People, Value.  Twenty years ago, Arjun Appadurai published a seminal collection on The Social Life of Things, marking a watershed in anthropological understandings of consumption, circulation, and production, and the role of objects in mediating between cultural sensibilities and economic flows. This work has stimulated a wealth of interest in materiality, and over the years, research has sought to expand the insights of Appadurai's collection to shed greater light on the relationship between mind, matter, and subjectivity. Drawing on these recent developments, this course aims to explore the material dimensions of cultural life and cultural production. As we engage with contemporary and classic writings in cultural anthropology, archaeology, philosophy, and social theory, we will grapple with several key issues: the boundaries between objects and subjects; the agency of persons and things; the relationship between objects and meaning, between experience and imagination; and the production of sociality in the actions/transactions linking people to their material world. The question of value is crucially implicated in these processes, and will require particular attention. And because material transactions are embedded in overlapping fields of power and politics, we will remain attentive to the ways in which objects make/mark/transgress difference, inequalities, and social boundaries. While we will discuss theories of materiality per se, our focus will rest mostly in theorizing how things work in and through concrete social and historical contexts. In this light, ethnographic studies will provide precious resources in helping us outline the logics, terrains, and lineaments of material and cultural production. Indeed, a central goal of this course is to examine how we can mobilize ethnographic insights on object worlds to reframe or expand archaeological inquiries and possibilities, and how, in turn, archaeological imaginations may help to enhance anthropological understandings of materiality.  This course complements the seminar on 'Material Cultures' taught by Adam Smith in Autumn 2007. Prior familiarity with archaeological literature is advisable but not required.

44700.  Specters of Marx: Matter, Mind, Method.  In this seminar, we will interrogate a certain number of Marxist perspectives, and examine how/whether they can help to shed light on the relationship between ideas, material expressions, and social analysis in a post-Marxist world. While many post-mortems have been sung for Marxism, and many allegations of bankruptcy declared, there is often limited or distant engagement with the core texts from which this critique departs. Moreover, recent critical homage, such as Jacques Derridas /Specters of Marx/, seems to suggest that the force of Marx's spirit lives on not as timeless doctrine, to be sure, but as recombinant traces, orientations, and possibilities embedded in the work of writers influenced by his thought.
       Without losing sight of the historical logics of capitalism and the state, we will focus on key texts in the Marxist intellectual tradition as they relate to issues of mind, matter, and method. Starting with Marx himself, the seminar will unfold in roughly chronological and thematic progression to track how his seminal ideas have been amplified, transformed, or undermined by later generations of social theorists (Lukács, Gramsci, Adorno, Benjamin, Althusser, Debord, Lefèbvre, Ollman, Sayer, Derrida, Jameson, Eagleton, Zizek). In the process, we will critically reflect on Marxist engagements with ideas of culture, space, time, history, ideology, hegemony, modernity, and politics, to name but a few.
       Each of these topics could easily be the focus of a whole course. In this light, the seminar hopes to offer an introduction to ideas and concepts, while striving for depth of analysis. This being said, a modicum of familiarity with the broad horizon of Marxist thinking (e.g. labor, relations of production, commodity, fetishism, value, consciousness, alienation, etc.) will be useful and is strongly recommended.

46710. Archaeology of African Global Encounters. In this course, we will explore different dimensions of the African experience as it unfolded roughly over the past 500 years. Combining archaeology, anthropology, and history, and drawing from multiple repertoires of sources ( artifacts, texts, images, oral traditions), we will investigate Africa's intensifying encounters with global political economy, from the Atlantic era to the 'age of globalization'. On one level, this involves analyzing historical contexts, processes, and effects across the continent - perhaps following the threads of what Jane Guyer has called the 'turbulence and loss' of Africa's historical past. In parallel fashion, we must also reflect on global encounters as spaces for the production of new historical imaginations that have profoundly shaped anthropological projects. Rather than following a historical or geographical narrative, we will examine different moments, locales, and historicities through a suite of topical lenses: landscapes, states and power, 'identities' and ethnicity, entanglements and embodiment, political economic mosaics, colonialism, modernities, politics, and the postcolony.

58510.  Anthropology of Space/Place.

SUMMER FIELD SCHOOL IN SENEGAL:

36610. Archaeological Field Studies: Method and Theory in African Historical Archaeology: Exploring the Ngasobil Mission. ( PQ Consent of instructor. Must be taken concurrently with ANTH 36611. Class limited to 16 students). This course introduces students to the practice and theory of African historical archaeology through hands-on participation in an ongoing research program at the 19th century Catholic Mission of Ngasobil (Senegal). Students will learn basic field work procedures, including surface documentation and collection, intensive transit mapping, shovel test surveys, excavation procedures, artifact processing, and preliminary artifact analysis. These will be complemented by evening seminars and lectures examining salient theoretical questions and historical concerns that shape contemporary Senegalese archaeology. Summer.

36611. Archaeological Field Studies: Material Culture Analysis: Goree Island, Senegal. (P.Q. Consent of instructor. Must be taken concurrently with ANTH 36610. Class limited to 16 students.) This course will introduce students to the analysis of historic material culture commonly encountered on 18th and 19th century sites in coastal West Africa. Using a combination of lectures and intensive hands-on work, students will learn to identify and analyze major classes of artifacts that were made, used, and traded in Goree Island and coastal Senegal at the height of the Atlantic trade and during the colonial era. Summer.

36612. Archaeological Field Studies: Senegal: Reading/Research. (PQ: Consent of instructor. Offered in conjunction with ANTH 36610 and 36611. Class limited to sixteen students.) This course presents students with an opportunity develop an independent project in consultation with the instructor, and compile a selection of relevant readings that will help them research the topic of interest. Student projects will target a salient theme or question revolving on the archaeology or history of Senegal. This course requires a good reading command of French. Summer.