Summer 2013

The anthropological approach to the study of culture and human society. Using ethnographic case studies, the course explores the universality of cultural categories (social organization, economy, law, belief systems, arts, etc.) and the range of variation among human societies.

What does it mean to be a pious or secular Muslim in the Middle East today? How is this complex identity inhabited, embodied, expressed, nurtured, redefined, contested and debated in the contemporary Middle East? What kinds of ongoing debates about shari'a and authority are constitutive of Islam as a discursive tradition? Through what forms of embodied practices and dispositions do women involved in a mosque movement in Cairo seek to become pious subjects? What does it mean to be secular in Turkey? Or a young person born after the revolution in Iran? How does a Moroccan anthropologists teaching at Princeton University experience and reflect on his pilgrimage to Mecca? We will think about these and other related questions through a series of recent anthropological texts that deal with questions of piety, secularity, modernity and subjectivity among Muslims in the contemporary Middle East.

Local-level political economies in an increasingly globalized process of production, distribution, and exchange, and within complex international divisions of labor. Issues of differential development; stratification and ethnicity; nationalism, conflict, and resistance; intra- and international capital flows; and labor migration.

This course is designed to provide the student with a general overview and understanding of the historical, political, economic and social forces that underlie the creation and maintenance of present-day Caribbean societies and cultures. The first half of the course will deal exclusively with the historical background of the region, focusing on such seminal processes as the transatlantic slave trade; European mercantilism and colonization; New World slavery and plantation societies; and the evolution of national polities, institutions and identities in the English, Spanish and French-speaking Caribbean. The second half of the course will deal with issues of a more contemporary, anthropological nature�things like race, class & ethnicity; gender relations; Afro-Caribbean religious systems; migration; and popular culture.