ETNOLOGIA SP.

The purpose of this course is to introduce students to the methods, epistemology, and ethics of anthropological practice.
The course aims to provide students with knowledge and tools:
- to learn the main themes and debates in the study in cultural intimacy, social poetics, engaged anthropology, and spatial cleansing from a Cultural Anthropology perspective
- to acquire the ability to identify le limits of theoretical approaches
- to acquire an ability to synthesize ideas and articulate complex theoretical approaches

The instructor also wishes to equip the students with the special opportunity afforded by his presence at Ca’ Foscari and therefore has deliberately included a high proportion of his own writings as well as those of his teachers and students. This is intended to allow students to develop a sense of the historical entailment of the anthropological scholar in a discipline that is heavily dependent on personal engagement, observation, and writing style. It does not imply that students interested in other traditions will be discouraged from pursuing those; on the contrary, debate and analysis of these entailments are warmly encouraged.

Those with no prior experience of anthropology should equip themselves with a copy of the instructor’s Antropologia (Torino: SEID) (English edition: Anthropology: Theoretical Practice in Culture and Society, Blackwell, 2001). Students in this category should acquaint themselves with the instructor in the first week and seek advice on which sections might be most helpful in preparing for the rest of the course.

EXAM PROGRAM ATTENDING STUDENTS:
choose two – or, if they wish, three – from the list

EXAM PROGRAM NON ATTENDING STUDENTS
non-attendees choose four from the list and should read all the optional items in the section breakdown that follows

Please note that your two chosen ethnographies should NOT be about the country of your citizenship and/or native language. If you wish to use any ethnography not on this list, please bring the book to the instructor’s office hours for consultation.

Askew, Kelly M. 2002. Performing the Nation: Swahili Music and Cultural Politics in Tan¬zania. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.***
Berdahl, Daphne. 1999. Where the World Ended: Re-Unification and Identity in the German Borderland. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Caldeira, Teresa P.R. 2000. City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in São Paulo. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Campbell, J.K. 1964. Honour, Family, and Patronage: A Study of Institutions and Moral Values in a Greek Mountain Community. Oxford: Clarendon Press.***
Evans-Pritchard, E.E. 1940. The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People. Oxford: Clarendon Press.***
Favret-Saada, Jeanne. 1980. Deadly Words: Witchcraft in the Bocage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Or in French as: Favret-Saada, Jeanne. 1977. Les mots, la mort, les sorts. Paris: Gallimard.]
Harms, Erik. 2011. Saigon’s Edge: On the Margins of Ho Chi Minh City. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Herzfeld, Michael. 1985. The Poetics of Manhood: Contest and Identity in a Cretan Mountain Village. Princeton: Princeton University Press.***
Malighetti, Roberto. 2004. Il Quilombo di Frechal. Identità e lavoro sul campo in una comunità di discendenti di schiavi. Milano: Raffaello Cortina.
Okely, Judith. 1983. The Traveller-Gypsies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Palumbo, Berardino. 2003. L’UNESCO e il Campanile: Antropologia, politica e beni culturali in Sicilia orientale. Roma: Meltemi.
Shryock, Andrew. 1997. Nationalism and the Genealogical Imagination: Oral History and Textual Authority in Tribal Jordan. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Sopranzetti, Claudio. 2017. Owners of the Map: Motorcycle Taxi Drivers, Mobility, and Politics in Bangkok. Berkeley: University of California Press.***
Zhang Li. 2010. In Search of Paradise: Middle-Class Living in a Chinese Metropolis. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Additionally, final text, draft translations, and redacted fieldnotes produced by Michael Herzfeld in the course of writing Evicted from Eternity: The Restructuring of Modern Rome (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009) and Siege of the Spirits: Community and Polity in Bangkok (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016) will be distributed.
Additional readings will be indicated in class.
*N.B: please see readings for non attending students in "Altre informazioni"

The course consists in face-to-face lectures aimed at presenting the main theoretical and methodological issues in this field of study and introduce the modalities and schedule of completion and submission of learning tasks.

Inglese

SHORTER READINGS (code: * required; ** optional):
1. What is anthropological theory and how does it relate to past and present?
a. Geertz, Clifford. Anti-anti relativismo. Il Mondo3. Rivista di teoria delle scienze umane e sociali 1(2): 72-86 (traduzione: Giorgio de Finis e Piero Vereni). (Original: Clifford Geertz. 1984. Anti Anti-Relativism. American Anthropologist [n.s.] 86: 263-278.)*
b. Herzfeld, Michael. 1997. Anthropology: A Practice of Theory. International Social Science Journal 153: 301-318.*
c. Knauft, Bruce M. 2006. Theory in the Middle. Anthropological Theory 6(4): 407–430 (doi 10.1177/1463499606071594).*
d. Herzfeld, Michael. 2018. Anthropological Realism in a Scientistic Age.** Anthropological Theory 118: 129-150.
e. Moore, Sally Falk. 1987. Explaining the Present: Theoretical Dilemmas in Processual Ethnography. American Ethnologist 14(4): 727-736.*
f. Dresch, Paul. 1986. The Significance of the Course Events Take in Segmentary Societies. American Ethnologist 13: 309-324.**
g. Malighetti, Roberto. 2019. The Plural Unification of Sciences: The Epistemological Contributions of a Perpetually Dissatisfied Discipline. International Journal of Anthropology and Ethnology 3: 1-19. (Or consult: Malighetti, Roberto, e Angela Molinari, Il metodo e l'antropologia. Il contributo di una scienza inquieta [Milano: Raffaello Cortina, 2016].)**

2. Doing Fieldwork, Changing Circumstances
a. Geertz, Clifford. 1973. Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight. In Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books), pp. 412-453.*
b. Jenkins, Timothy. 1994. Fieldwork and the Perception of Everyday Life. Man (n.s.) 29: 433-455.**
c. Candea, Matei. 2007. Arbitrary Locations: In Defence of the Bounded Field-Site. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 13: 167-184.*
d. Bestor, Theodore C. 2003. Inquisitive Observation: Following Networks in Urban Fieldwork. In Theodore Bestor, Patricia G. Steinhoff, and Victoria Lyon Bestor, eds., Doing Fieldwork in Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press), pp. 315-334.*
e. Herzfeld, Michael. 2009. The Cultural Politics of Gesture: Reflections on the Embodiment of Ethnographic Practice. Ethnography 10: 131-152.*
f. Gusterson, Hugh. 1997. Studying Up Revisited. PoLAR 20(1): 114-119. https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1525/pol.1997.20.1.114 *


3. Ideas from the field: The art of writing ethnography
a. The final chapter of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, which you may read in the language of your choice.*
b. Evans-Pritchard, E.E., The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940), pp. 1-15.*
c. Herzfeld, Michael. 1991. Textual Forms and Social Formation in Evans-Pritchard and Lévi-Strauss. In Richard Harvey Brown, ed., Writing the Social Text: Poetics and Politics in Social Science Discourse (New York: Aldine De Gruyter), pp. 53-70.**
d. Rosaldo, Renato. 1986. From the Door of his Tent: The Fieldworker and the Inquisitor. In James Clifford and George E. Marcus, eds., Writing Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley: University of California Press), pp.77-97.**
e. Herzfeld, Michael. 2014. Serendipitous Sculpture: Ethnography Is as Ethnography Goes,” Anthropology and Humanism 39: 3-9.*
f. Narayan, Kirin. 2009. Stirring up Ethnography: Beyond the Finished Text. Etnofoor 21: 61-78.*
g. Jackson, Michael. 2009. Ethnographic Verisimilitude. Etnofoor 21: 9-19.*

Oral presentation in class and mid-term written essay. Detailed information will be given at the beginning of classes.