Michel-Rolph Trouillot

21600. Eye of the Beholder: Travel, Otherness, and Anthropology. If there are basic similarities in the ways travelers tend to perceive foreigners, can anthropology be any more than a sophisticated from of tourism? Would a na�ve traveler to the United States today find Americans as odd as Marco Polo found the Mongol? those are some of the questions this course will address by way of a close reading of the eyewitness accounts of travelers of various backgrounds, from ancient to present times. The course requires a substantial amount of easy reading -- about 300 pages of travel accounts a week -- that students are expected to complete before the corresponding class time. Class participation expected. M-R Trouillot. Winter 1999

24900. The Invention of the Americas. This course examines the material and symbolic transformations behind the changing images of this hemisphere. Utopian America, Conquest America, Plantation America, Imperial America are among the many moments to be analyzed as the dividing lines within the hemisphere move from the Antilles to the mainland, from south to north of the Rio Grande or from race to class. Readings range from Las Casas and Montaigne to Marti, Twain, and Todorov. M-R Trouillot. M-R Trouillot. Spring 1999

25800/33300. Caribbean Culture: The Past in the Present. A history marked by colonialism has deeply shaped Caribbean societies. How much, in turn, does the awareness of that history continue to shape Caribbean sociocultural practices? Rather than outlining a culture area, this course proposes to look at the contemporary Caribbean through the lens of historicity. We will read ethnography and theoretical texts that deal with both historicity in the Caribbean and historicity of the Caribbean. We will also examine the pervasiveness of the historical imagination in Caribbean literature, religion and popular music, from the poetry and theater of Aim� C�saire to the hits of Bob Marley. M-R Trouillot, Winter 2002.

2xxxx/4xxxx. Millenial Historicity: Apologies, Reparations and Other Rituals of Modernity. M-R Trouillot. Winter 2003.

53501-02. Seminar: Categories & Concepts in the Social Sciences I, II. Built on the premises that concepts are neither things nor words, this course suggest theoretical paths that reject both the empiricist notion of social science as mere "science" and the more recent views of social science as mere "literature. It aims to teach students how to move from topics to conceptualizations.

M-R Trouillot. Winter-Spring 1999

54000. Marx’s Method Through His Categories. The political context of Marx scholarship often obfuscates the theoretical and methodological reading of Marx, notably Mars’s unique way of relating the abstract and the concrete through conceptualizations that both claim and contradict their own historicity. This seminar puts on hold both the prevalent Marxist interpretations of Mars and the clich�s of the anti-Marx literature to investigate, via a close reading of Marx’s texts, the process of conceptual production in his work. Each student will pursue a single conceptualization both in thesis and in practice in Marx’s work through a close reading of texts ranging from the Poverty of Philosophy to Theories of Surplus Value. Proposed concepts include: labor, relations of production, fetishism, value, re-presentation, consciousness, and the state. M-R Trouillot. Winter 2002

34101-02. The Development of Social Cultural Theory-I (200 units). This course is a quarter-long exercise in professional development. Its objectives are: 1) professional familiarity with a canon; 2) critical assessment of that canon in light of some of anthropology’s theoretical emphases; 3) critical assessment of that canon in light of both anthropology’s geographical emphases and theory’s universalist claims.

1) Canons are arbitrary. Yet they are also necessary to professional training. The foremost objective of this course is to expose PhD students entering our program to a canonical corpus in social cultural theory that ranges from the Renaissance to the late nineteenth century.

2) The relevance of a canonical corpus to current issues depends in part on the questions we put to that canon. Social-cultural anthropologists have built their professional track record in part by emphasizing among the central problems of social cultural theory some distinctive issues that remain relevant today:

How do social & cultural systems hold together? The problem of structure.

How do social/cultural systems change? The problem of history.

How do actors perceive the social/cultural systems of which they are part – if indeed they perceive (single or overlapping, changing or unchanging) systems? The problem of historicity.

How do actors engage such systems in light of their perception – i.e., how do cognition, volition, desire and practice mesh or contradict one antother? How relevant should that perception be to social cultural theory? The problem of the subject.

How can – should – various groups of humans, who recognize each other as different in terms of these practices or perceptions live in the same society, in the same world? The problem of alterity.

We will read the canonical texts with these problems in mind

3) Anthropology takes great pride in its attention to “non-Western” peoples. Yet our canon is European. Further, our corpus starts at the time when Latin Christendom begot what we now call “the West” in the very same move that started an ongoing military, economic, racial, religious, and cultural domination of the world. Still, North Atlantic theorizing proceeded – and proceeds – largely as if that world and that domination – quincentenial as they may be, were irrelevant to theory. The third objective of this course is to question that silence. We will do so first, in the regular seminar, through an added emphasis on the problem of alterity – and its anthropological avatars, such as cultural relativism – and on the subject and historicity as they relate to alterity. A second strategy will be an attempt to theorize the power relations between social science and its objects. We will look at the deployment of power through the elaboration and maintenance of the “savage slot,” through the routine practice of “normal [social] science,” as well as through unusual cases such as the current controversy about the Yanonami. This second strategy will be the object of our more open Wednesday seminar.