Information for Honours Students and Course Outline
Congratulations on your acceptance as an Honours student in Anthropology and welcome to the 2008 program! The following is intended to provide you with essential information concerning work requirements over the Honours year.
Students undertaking an Honours degree in Anthropology may enrol full time and complete their degree over one year, or part time, and complete their degree over two years. Full time enrolment is encouraged as it facilitates a stronger sense of program cohesion and encourages mutual peer support. Honours is a transitional year. You are moving from undergraduate studies, where tutors and lecturers have closely directed your work, in the direction of postgraduate studies, where a supervisor advises but a great deal of independence is expected of each student. The Honours year is thus a highly demanding one. Mutual support can help to make it both intellectually stimulating and emotionally manageable.
To successfully complete the Honours degree in Anthropology, students are required to do the following:
- Attend the Honours Seminar on Thursdays at 2-4pm in C3A 630.
- Attend the Anthropology Colloquium series, Thursday 10:30 – 12:30 in C3A 630.
- Satisfactorily complete an Honours Essay (see below).
- Satisfactorily complete an Honours Thesis, the topic of which will be agreed upon with a Supervisor (see below).
Please note that while Honours students are encouraged to complete ANTH 385 Ethnographic Field Studies, this is no longer a compulsory course prerequisite.
The Honours Convenor in 2008 is Lisa Wynn.
Dr Lisa L Wynn
C3A Room 611
office hours: Thursday 4-6pm
work: 9850-8095
1. HONOURS SEMINAR
The Honours Seminar deals with a selected number of theoretical, methodological and interpretive issues that are currently being debated by anthropologists. These issues will vary from year to year according to contemporary developments in anthropology and the interests of the course convenor. Others may be more enduring, such as the theoretical issues related to the "writing culture" debate, "Orientalism" and the problem of the "other," cultural relativism, politics and power and the relation between individual and society.
The Honours Seminar Program will run from the first week of the first semester until the middle of August. The Seminar will be devoted to a discussion of course readings, but we will consider essay and thesis research strategies as well. All students will be asked to present a work-in-progress paper on their thesis in the latter part of the seminar. Students are expected to follow the set readings and to participate in discussions. Over the duration of the seminar, each student will give two or three brief introductions to the week's reading(s), drawing out the main themes and selecting a number of questions or puzzles for the seminar to discuss. These introductory remarks are intended merely to get the seminar rolling – students might wish to focus on something interesting, maddening, or confusing about the reading, for example. Or you might try to link up a theoretical reading with a concrete research issue or dilemma that you are facing in your own project.
The seminar is designed to provide a supportive environment in which students can assist each other in conceptualising their essay and thesis, and in planning their study.
2. HONOURS ESSAY
This essay counts for 20% of the student's overall grade and is required to be some 5,000 to 7,000 words in length. The essay should relate, compare, and critically assess the work of two or more of the authors read in seminar. You may choose to pair a theoretical text – flexibly defined – with an ethnography, or you may juxtapose two different ethnographies. In your essay, critically focus on the relationship between theory, method, ethnographic material, and field site: how does each influence the others? What is the relationship between field data and the written description that is ethnography?
This essay is due on Thursday, July 24th. You should submit 2 printed paper copys as well as an electronic copy by e-mail to lisa.wynn@mq.edu.au.
3. ANTHROPOLOGY COLLOQUIUM
The Colloquium is held weekly on Thursday mornings at 10:30 a.m. and involves a wide range of speakers, from Macquarie staff and postgraduates to some of the most exciting anthropologists at other Australian institutions. Attendance provides Honours students with the opportunity to listen to and engage in debate with professional anthropologists. Here's the tentative schedule for this year's colloquia:
Anthropology Colloquium Series at Macquarie Semester 1, 2008
Thursdays 10:30-12:30 at the Anthropology Meeting Room, Building C3A-630
28 th Feb Deborah Rose, ANU. Job's Grief: Love and Extinction .
13 March Jon Fraenkel, ANU. Fiji 's "Good Governance" Coup Fifteen Months On .
20 March Mayfair Yang, University of Sydney. Ritual Economy and Rural Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics
27 March Cristina Rocha, Macquarie University. TBA.
10 April Gillian Cowlishaw, UTS. Ethnography and Suburban Mythology.
7 May** Special joint seminar with Warawara on Collaboration in Indigenous Contexts. Gabrielle Lorraine Fletcher, Vicki Grieves, Jennifer Deger, Macquarie and Gillian Cowlishaw UTS.
15 May Second special joint seminar with Warawara on Collaboration in Indigenous Contexts. Norm Sheehan, University of Queensland.
22 May Andrew Kipnis, ANU. Audit Cultures: Neoliberal Governmentality, Socialist Legacy or Technologies of Governing?
29 May Lisa Wynn, Macquarie. 'I'll buy your daughter for a thousand camels': Mimesis, mockery, and post-postcoloniality?
**Please note the change of day and location for this week. Seminar to be held at Warawara's Bukari Room on the ground floor of W3A, Macquarie University.
All honours students are expected to attend these colloquia.
4. HONOURS THESIS
The thesis counts for 80% of the student's overall grade and is normally in the range of 20,000 to 25,000 words in length. It is due on Friday, October 17 th. Three typed copies in binders must be submitted on this date. The early deadline is designed to ensure that theses can be marked and ranked by the department in readiness for the Divisional Postgraduate Studies Committee which ranks applications for Australian Postgraduate Awards at Macquarie University for the Division of SCMP. For this reason, extensions are not normally granted. Any extension of time must be applied for in writing before the due date. Appropriate documentation, such as medical certificates, must be provided. Extensions can only be granted by the Honours Convenor, or in the case of her absence, the Head of Department.
Your thesis topic should be arrived at in consultation with your supervisor. Your thesis should demonstrate a capacity for clear argumentation, critical and creative thinking and wide reading in anthropology. You should begin formulating your topic and collecting research materials now.
Your essay and thesis will be examined by at least two members of staff. Students must keep a copy of all submitted work. Please take careful note of the due dates of your two pieces of written assessment work and begin planning them now.
In terms of actual supervision:
All students should begin their honours year as soon as possible, preferably meeting and choosing their supervisor in the year preceding their enrolment so that they may prepare over summer by doing background research. Students may expect to meet with their supervisors fortnightly in the early stages in order to decide on a topic and how to conduct adequate research; in the latter part of the year they will be submitting drafts and getting feedback. Supervisors expect drafts of work throughout the year. Students are advised that all staff members have busy schedules and sufficient time should be allowed for staff to comment properly on drafts. This should be negotiated with each supervisor at the beginning of the academic year. As many staff members are away at conferences during the three-week recess in late September/October, students should also plan to submit near-final drafts of their thesis to their supervisor before this break.
Students should submit their proposed topic areas and preferences for supervision in writing to Dr Wynn by the second week of seminars of their enrolling year, or earlier if possible. The Department will then decide, in consultation with the student, on the most appropriate staff member to supervise each student.
It is advisable to observe pre-established dates for completion of chapter drafts. These dates are negotiated between supervisor and student, but once determined, represent a contract between them. A working draft should be completed by the end of August for a submission date of October, keeping in mind the necessity of revision, editing, footnotes and formatting, etc. The supervisor should always make the reading, responding to, and editing of the Honours thesis a priority. This is particularly true for the final draft of the thesis. In the event of a student's having difficulties with supervision, s/he should in the first instance advise the Honours convenor who will immediately endeavour to rectify the problem in consultation with the supervisor, if appropriate by arranging alternative supervision. By the same token, make sure you give your supervisor enough time to read your final draft and for you to do justice to their efforts and comments.
Finally, remember that as Honours convenor I am here to help you and to assist you in resolving any problems you might have. It is essential that you inform me of your decisions and of your progress. For example, I need to know who your supervisor is, what your proposed topics are, any changes to your enrolment status, and (this is important) your current contact information: telephone number and e-mail address.
Suggestions for possible thesis topics / areas:
- The body in displacement (refugee, exile, migration, illness, possession)
- Nation formation: nationalism, globalisation, diaspora, ethnicity
- Agency: how it is reconceived by such practices as 'idol worship,' possession, etc.
- Authenticity / invention
- Postcolonial critiques of anthropology's colonial traditions and the project of representing the Other
- Strategies for making anthropology coeval: collaboration
- Economic anthropology: the eruption of the non-economic in enabling economic transactions (e.g. faith and trust) or the relationship between gift and commodity economies
- Visual representation: film, media, photography
- Debates centred on ethnographic regions: e.g. India (Dumont on individual versus collective), Melanesia (constructions of personhood), Islam and gender, etc
- The production of subjects, subjectivity, identity and / or selfhood cross-culturally
- Anthropology of emotions and the senses
- Space and power
Seminar Schedule of Readings
Week 1: Introduction, review of program, discussing research projects
Thursday 28 February 2:00-4:00
Week 2: Anthropology, culture, fieldwork, representations
Thursday 6 March 5:00-7:00 **please note changed time, this week only**
1. Edward Said, "Introduction" to Orientalism. Vintage Books 1978, pp.1-28.
2.George E. Marcus and Michael M.J. Fischer, "Introduction" and "A Crisis of Representation in the Human Sciences," in Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences. University of Chicago Press 1986, pp.1-16.
3. Lila Abu-Lughod, "Writing Against Culture," in Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present, edited by Richard G. Fox. SAR Press 1991, pp.137-162.
4. Michel-Rolph Trouillot,* "Anthropology and the Savage Slot: The Poetics and Politics of Otherness," in Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present, edited by Richard G. Fox. SAR Press 1991, pp.17-44. *(Just skim this)
Additional background readings:
- Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, edited by James Clifford and George E. Marcus, University of California Press, 1986.
- James Clifford, "On Orientalism," in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Harvard University Press, 1988, pp.255-276.
- James Clifford, "On Ethnographic Authority," in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Harvard University Press, 1988, pp.21-54.
- Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983.
Weeks 3 – 5: Reproduction, mimesis, mimicry
Week 3:Thursday 13 March 2:00-4:00
Walter Benjamin:
- "On the Mimetic Faculty." Reflections, NY: Schocken Books, pp.333-336.
- "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Illuminations, NY: Schocken Books, pp.217-251.
Week 4:Thursday 20 March 2:00-4:00
Chapters 1-10 from Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses, NY and London: Routledge, 1993, pp.1-143.
Week 5:Thursday 27 March 2:00-4:00
Chapters 3, 4, and 5 from Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, UK and New York: Routledge Classics, 2004 (1994), pp.94-144.
- "The other question: Stereotype, discrimination and the discourse of colonialism"
- "Of mimicry and man: The ambivalence of colonial discourse"
"- Sly civility"
Additional background reading:
- Chapters 5 and 6 from Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988, translated by Tom Conley.
- "Ethno-graphy: Speech, or the Space of the Other: Jean de Léry" pp.209-243.
- "Discourse Disturbed: The Sorcerer's Speech" pp.244-268.
- "Sherpas in Mirrors," Vincanne Adams, Tigers of the Snow and Other Virtual Sherpas, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996, pp.39-77.
- Paul Stoller, "Double Takes: Paul Stoller on Jay on Taussig." Visual Anthropology Review 10(1):155–162 (1994).
- Erich Auerbach. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature . Fiftieth Anniversary Ed. Trans. Willard Trask. Princeton U Press, 2003.
- Jean Rouch, films available on YouTube: Les Maitres Fous (The Mad Masters), http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPS16T0eaMs&eurl .
- Paul Stoller, "A Tribute to Jean Rouch," available online at http://www.rouge.com.au/3/rouch_tribute.html.
Weeks 6 –7: Kinship, Gender, Sexuality, Agency
Week 6:Thursday 3 April 2:00-4:00The Exchange of Women
- Claude Lévi-Strauss, excerpts from The Elementary Structures of Kinship, 1949, trans. J. H. Bell, J. R. von Sturmer, and Rodney Needham, 1969.
- Luce Irigaray, "Women on the Market," in This Sex Which Is Not One
- Judith Butler, Introduction and Chapter 2 of Gender Trouble
- Gayle Rubin, " The Traffic in Women: Notes on the 'Political Economy' of Sex." In Toward an Anthropology of Women, edited by Rayna R. Reiter. 1975
Additional background reading:
- Lila Abu-Lughod, "Introduction" and "Patrilateral Parallel Cousin Marriage," in Writing Women's Worlds, pp.1-42 and167-202
- Saba Mahmoud, chapter on agency and feminism in Politics of Piety
Week 7:Thursday 10 April 2:00-4:00
Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, Part I: "The Objective Limits of Objectivism," pp.1-71 and notes pp.198-214
Additional background reading:
- Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, Part IV: "Structures, Habitus, Power: Basis for a Theory of Symbolic Power," pp.159-197 and notes pp.231-239
- Lois McNay, (2000) Gender and Agency: Reconfiguring the Subject in Feminism and Social Theory (excerpts)
******Mid-term break through the end of April******
Weeks 8 – 12: Economies, Commodities, Gifts
Week 8:Thursday 1 May 2:00-4:00
Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies (pp.1-83). W.D. Hall translator, New York: W.W. Norton, 1990.
Week 9:Thursday 8 May 2:00-4:00
Karl Marx, Capital Vol. 1, Part 1: Commodities and Money. Pay particular attention to "The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof." Available online at http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm.
Week 10:Thursday 15 May 2:00-4:00
Michael Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America. University of North Carolina Press, 1980.
Week 11:Thursday 22 May 2:00-4:00
- Daniel Miller, "Introduction" to Material Culture and Mass Consumption. Basil Blackwell 1987, pp.1-18.
- Thornstein Veblen, Chapters 1-4 of The Theory of the Leisure Class, pp.1-101. Penguin Books, 1994 (1899).
Week 12:Thursday 29 May 2:00-4:00
- Diane Tober, "Semen as Gift, Semen as Goods: Reproductive Workers and the Market in Altruism." Body Society 7(2-3), pp.137-160 (2001).
- Nancy Scheper-Hughes, "Min(d)ing the Body: On the Trail of Organ-Stealing Rumors," in Exotic No More: Anthropology on the Front Lines, ed. Jeremy MacClancy, U Chicago Press 2002, pp.33-63.
- Lawrence Cohen, "Where It Hurts: Indian Material for an Ethics of Organ Transplantation," Daedelus 128(4):135-165.
Weeks 13-14: Travel, Space
Week 13:Thursday 5 June 2:00-4:00
- James Clifford, "Prologue," "Travelling Cultures," and "Spatial Practices: Fieldwork, Travel, and the Disciplining of Anthropology," in Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Harvard U Press 1997, pp.1-46, 53-91.
- Arjun Appadurai, "Global Ethnoscapes: Notes and Queries for a Transnational Anthropology," in Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present, edited by Richard G. Fox. SAR Press 1991, pp.191-210.
Week 14:Thursday 12 June 2:00-4:00
- Michel de Certeau, Part III: Spatial Practices, in The Practice of Everyday Life, U California Press, 1988 (1984), pp.91-130.
- Quetzil Castañeda, "Guidebook to the Archaeology of Chichén Itzá," in In the Museum of Maya Culture, Minnesota U Press, 1996, pp.1-30.
Additional background readings:
- Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques.
- Anna Tsing, In the Realm of the Diamond Queen. Princeton U Press, 1993.
- Xiang Biao, Global Body Shopping. Princeton U Press, 2006.
- Nicole Constable, Maid to Order in Hong Kong: Stories of Migrant Workers. Cornell University Press, 2007 (2 nd edition).
- Edward Bruner, Culture on Tour: Ethnographies of Travel. Chicago U Press 2005.
Week 15: The Obligatory Foucault Week
Week 15:Thursday 19 June 2:00-4:00
- Michel Foucault (1990) The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books (excerpts).
- Everett Zhang, "Rethinking Sexual Repression in Maoist China: Ideology, Structure, and the Ownership of the Body." Body and Society11(3):1-25 (2005).
Week 16: Cyborgs, Cyberspace, Science, Methodologies
Week 16:Thursday 26 June 2:00-4:00
- Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feministm in the Late Twentieth Century." In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Routledge, 1991, pp.149-181.
- Julian Dibbell, "A Rape in Cyberspace," in My Tiny Life, 1998, available online at http://www.juliandibbell.com/texts/bungle.html.
- Radhika Gajjala, Introduction and Chapters 1-2, Cyber Selves: Feminist Ethnographies of South Asian Women. Alta Mira Press, 2004, pp.1-27
****** Semester break ******
Week 17:Thursday 24 July 2:00-4:00
** Readings to be decided by students**
Week 18:Thursday 31 July 2:00-4:00
** Readings to be decided by students**
Week 19:Thursday 7 August 2:00-4:00
** Readings to be decided by students**
Week 20:Thursday 14 August 2:00-4:00
** Readings to be decided by students**
**Note: Remainder of meetings for the year are to discuss progress of research and writing. There are no assigned outside readings but we will take turns reading and commenting on drafts of thesis chapters.**
Week 21:Thursday 4 September 2:00-4:00
Week 22:Thursday 25 September 2:00-4:00
Week 23:Thursday 16 October 2:00-4:00