Postgraduate Course: Ethnographies of the United States (PGSP11574)
Course Outline
| School | School of Social and Political Science |
College | College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 11 (Postgraduate) |
Availability | Available to all students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| Summary | This course will provide PG students with an introduction to the anthropological study of the USA, incorporating perspectives on a variety of topics and regions, and referring to research carried out at a range of historical moments. It will provide a grounding in key debates. It will show how ethnographic work carried out in the US has influenced the discipline of anthropology. The course will take a (self)-critical look at what area-based foci of study do. Those teaching the course will draw from rich ethnographies and from their own fieldwork experiences in the US. |
| Course description |
Description
This course will explore themes and provocations that emerge from a range of ethnographies written about the USA or about places within the USA. It looks at how historical regimes and critical events, from slavery and the Civil War, 9/11 to Hurricane Katrina have influenced US society. It unpacks ethnographies that both describe and problematize the idea of 'the everyday'. Selected ethnographies explore ideas of social change, such as those brought about by or following civil rights movements. Students might discuss and problematise concepts that have been central to constitutional, political, and quotidian discussions and conflicts about what the US is or about what various groups think it should be: justice, 'family', happiness, and democracy. They will critically engage with popular themes for discussing the US ethnographically such as individualism and capitalism. Emphasis will also be placed on looking at emergent lenses: dystopia, whiteness, captivity.
It will explore a variety of key questions and topics, such as:
- How have ethnographies explored and problematized the emergence of the USA? How do ethnographies represent slavery and its afterlives, and the displacement of indigenous peoples?
- How do people experience legal and medical systems and how can this be explored ethnographically?
- What is the role of organised religion in everyday life and in electoral politics in the US?
- How do ethnographers of the US approach subcultures?
- How does ethnography make apparent how 'race', gender, sexuality, class, and nationality are constructed?
- How are ideas about public and private domains, rights, and activism salient in a US context?
Indicative topics
1) Anthropology from an American Vantage: Decentering the Canon. How can we reread classic anthropological debates through a perspective situated in the American experience? How would the discipline be different if our 'founding figure' was Zora Neale Hurston rather than Bronislaw Malinowski?
2) Freedom and Captivity
3) Care and Disregard
4) Dispossession and Ownership
5) Secularism and Faith
6) Rationality and Affect
7) Unity and Multiculturalism
8) Indigeneity and Nativism
9) Autonomy and Dependence
10) Equality and Difference
Student Learning Experience
This course will be delivered by lecture (one hour per week) and seminar (two hours per week), with an emphasis on student participation and discussion during seminars. Seminar and lecture alike will centre on set readings. Films, visual art, and music will be used to complement and complicate the readings. Students will be asked to approach these latter materials with an 'ethnographic eye' to practice their ethnographic argumentation within the scope of the classroom.
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Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
| Pre-requisites |
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Co-requisites | |
| Prohibited Combinations | |
Other requirements | None |
Information for Visiting Students
| Pre-requisites | None |
| High Demand Course? |
Yes |
Course Delivery Information
| Not being delivered |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- Demonstrate extensive and specialist knowledge of the ethnography of the United States and use comparison and historical perspectives to evaluate the findings of these ethnographies at an advanced level.
- Show an advanced, critical understanding of how the history of the US informs how anthropologists choose topics and analyse their findings.
- Synthesize materials from the course in order to discuss topics in class at an advanced level and to write clear, detailed, creative, and convincing essays.
- Will have an advanced understanding of the methodological and ethical challenges of carrying out research in the US.
- Provide advanced-level reflections upon how use of aesthetics and poetics in ethnographic texts give insight into social phenomena.
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Reading List
Lynd, Robert, and Helen Lynd 1929[1959] Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture.
Lepselter, Susan. 2016. The resonance of unseen things: poetics, power, captivity, and UFOs in the American uncanny.
Mariner, Kathryn, A. 2019. Contingent kinship: the flows and futures of adoption in the United States.
Shange, Savannah. 2019. Progressive dystopia: abolition, antiblackness, and schooling in San Francisco.
Weston, Kath. 1992. Families we choose: lesbians, gays, kinship
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Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
The course will help the students to:
- critically analyse highly complex theoretical and empirical texts
- discuss complex topics in a considered and sensitive manner, not only talking but truly listening to others
- collaborate and debate at an advanced level with colleagues
- communicate through writing and speech to form original and persuasive arguments.
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| Keywords | Not entered |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr Siobhan Magee
Tel:
Email: Siobhan.Magee@ed.ac.uk |
Course secretary | Mrs Casey Behringer
Tel: (0131 6)50 2456
Email: Casey.behringer@ed.ac.uk |
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