Culture and Meaning (kiso enshû II)

Tama Campus, Wednesdays, 4:35~6:05
The course description for this seminar is here.

November 9: Once again, as agreed, the seminar will meet on Friday (November 11) this week, from 1:20~2:50. My apologies again for the disruption. After this week and for the remainder of the semester we shall meet at the regularly-scheduled Wednesday afternoon time.

Students are reminded that in the Friday meeting this week they are to be prepared to introduce a text they have found that in some way relates to the discussions we have had so far.

The reading for the November 18 seminar meeting will be Michel-Rolph Trouillott, “Adieu, Culture: A New Duty Arises,” from Trouillott’s Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). I shall provide the text try to offer a preliminary contextualization of important issues it raises in this week’s Friday meeting.

October 5, 12, 19: Discussions have been of Geertz, positive science, and interventions into the discourse of anthropology such as George E. Marcus and Michael M. Fischer, eds., Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), and James Clifford and George E. Marcus, eds., Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986). The reading for October 19 was Lila Abu-Lughod, “Writing Against Culture,” in Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present, edited by Richard G. Fox (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1991).

Students are reminded that instead of the usual Wednesday afternoon meeting the seminar will meet next Friday, October 28, at 1:20.

September 28: My apologies for not being able to be present in the first meeting of the seminar.

Reading for October 5: Our first reading is brief but of central importance to the aims of the seminar, sections I and II, pp. 3-10, of Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” the first chapter of Geertz’s immensely influential book The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973). Please read these pages and respond to questions 1-10 and 12-24 of this worksheet.

Also, to contextualize the reading, you’ll need to know something about several concepts and people that Geertz mentions. You may turn to any source you like for this, but following are some links to Wikipedia that may help:

Culture (you may note that Geertz is mentioned here); Clifford Geertz; sociological positivism (what Geertz calls “positive science,” worksheet question #1); E.B. Tylor (worksheet question #3); semiotics (worksheet question #6); Max Weber (worksheet question #7).