Syllabus for Roster(s):

  • 14F ANTH 7590-003 (CGAS)
In the UVaCollab course site:   14F ANTH 7590-003 (CGAS)

Anthropology of Time and Space

ANTH 7590-003 (19413)                                                                                              Frederick H. Damon

MW 5:00-6:15 New Cabell Hall 332                                                                                    206 Brooks Hall

Scheduled Final Exam: Final project only                                                               924-6826/fhd@virginia.edu

                                                                                                         OH: M&F 11-13 and by appointment

 

Anthropology of Time and Space

Syllabus

The Graduate Version

 

All societies position themselves in space and time. This course samples the anthropological discussion of the ways social systems have configured spatial/temporal orders.  We will consider both internalized conceptions of time and space and the ways an analyst might view space and time as external factors orientating a society’s existence. We will sample classic discussions of spatial-temporal orientations in small and large, “pre-modern” and “modern” societies.  What are the differences between these scales and kinds of societies? While for the undergraduates the course closes with a comparative study of US temporal constructs, graduate students are expected to engage in their own area-specific inquiry while participating in the undergraduate discussion. Graduate students will be responsible for producing 2-3 page summaries of all major texts in the course and meet as a group with Damon every other week (tba). The general parameters of graduate student final papers should be defined by the end of the course’s first part.  Class time will be divided between lecture format and discussion, increasingly turning to the latter towards the end of the semester as we focus on the US and as each student moves towards his or her own project.  It is expected that each graduate student move the requirements of this course towards their anticipated research interests as quickly as possible.

 

Books Available for Purchase (all other items available on Collab)

  • Primitive Classification, Durkheim and Mauss, U Chicago Press 9780226173344
  • At the Crossroads of the Earth and the Sky: An Andean Cosmology (1982) Gary Urton 10: 0292704046
  • Eternal Frontier – 1999 Timothy Flannery 0-8021-3888-8
  • By Noon Prayer: The Rhythm of Islam (2008) El Guindi, Fadwa 9781845200978

 

Tentative Calendar

 

I.  INTRODUCTION—anthropological foundations

  A. Introduction to course scope, history and potential projects.                                                    8/27

  B.   Considering Durkheim and Mauss’s Primitive Classifications (1903)?                                    8/27-9/10

-a reaction Granet, Marcel, "The right and left in China" (1933)

  C. The First Steps                                                                                                                            9/11-9/17

            1). E.E. Evans-Pritchard Chapter 3, “Time and Space” from The Nuer.

 2). E. P. Thompson 1967 “Time, Work-discipline, and Industrial Capitalism” Past and Present, #38:56-97.

 

  D.  The Next Steps                                                                                                                           9/17-10/10

1). Claude Lévi-Strauss , “Do Dual Organizations Exist” (ca. 1956)                                                  

2). Gary Urton At the Crossroads of the Earth and the Sky: An Andean Cosmology (1982)

3). Mosko, Mark 2013 “Omarakana revisited, or ‘do dual organizations exist?’ in the Trobriands” JRAI (N.S.) 19, 482-509

Note bene: required lecture

Thomas R. Trautmann

Elephants and kings:

India in the optic of China

October 3, 2014
Brooks Hall, 1:00 P.M.-3:00 P.M.

 

October 8

No Class, Dinner at Damon’s, Discussion of 1st paper drafts

 

  1. ‘EXTERNALITIES’?
  1. Totalizing the environment?

(Tim Flannery 1999, Eternal Frontier

 

  1. Totalizing Social Systems?    

Regionality in Anthropology and Immanuel Wallerstein

  1. G. William Skinner 1964 “Marketing and Social Structure in Rural China: Part I” in The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 24(1): 3-43.
  2. Alfred Gell 1982 “The Market Wheel: Symbolic Aspects of an Indian Tribal Market” Man n.s. 17(3) 470-491.
  3. Charles D. Piot 1992 “Wealth Production, Ritual Consumption, and Center/Periphery Relations in a West African Regional System” American Ethnologist, Vol. 19(1): 34-52.
  4. Immanuel Wallerstein 2004 World-Systems Analysis — An Introduction.

 

11/X Open Class Discussion of 2nd Papers

11/X +2, 5pm 2nd Papers Due

 

  1. ‘INTERNALITIES’—Time and Calendrics
  1. Time

Nancy Munn 1992 “THE CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY OF TIME: A CRITICAL ESSAY. ANNUAL REVIEW OF ANTHROPOLOGY Volume 21, 1992: 93-123.

 

  1. Calendars

1). [for historical purposes…] E. R. Leach 1950 “Primitive Calendars” OCEANIA XX(4): 245-262.[1]

2) Francis Zimmermann   “Monsoon in Traditional Culture” (South Asia) in MONSOONS 1987 EDITED BY Jay S. Fein, Pamela L. Stephens National Science Foundation. New York: A Wiley-Interscience Publication of John Wiley & Sons Pp. 51-76.

3) Helmer Aslaksen “Mathematics of the Chinese Calendar,” Department of Mathematics, National University of Singapore, March 2006 draft.

 

1&2) The graduate student assignment for these two texts is to create a 4 page comparative summary seeking to generate a research question for a more intensive study in the future.

 

3). El Guindi, Fadwa BY NOON PRAYER: The Rhythm of Islam (2008)

4). The US System

Totalizations— On the domains of ‘time’ and ‘space:’ life cycles and their rituals—family-education-business; sports; money and the organization of capital structures; politics (?).


 


[1] This is, I believe, the first of a series of brilliant papers Leach wrote on Malinowski’s Trobriand corpus. It is very symptomatic of its time, was almost immediately criticized by L Austen, who had been a Resident Magistrate on the Trobriand Islands in the 1930s and who took very seriously Malinowski’s writings and strictures…Together the two left an exceedingly interesting ethnographic puzzle and problem. My worked picked up on it, but unfortunately no other Massim ethnographer has to date. But transcending my own work, though becoming a stimulant to it, was the rise of “ethnoastronomy” in the 1960s for which, eventually, Leach’s paper became pivotal. One of the significant writers in the orbit of ethnoastronomy is Anthony Aveni, an astronomer who teaches/taught at Colgate where, also, Gary Urton taught until he became a Certified Genius and was thus bought by Harvard. One of Aveni’s many books for which Leach’s piece plays an (exceedingly) important role is EMPRIES OF TIME: Calendars, Clocks, and Cultures 1989 (many later editions), Basic Books. Malinowski tended to generalize his ethnographic insights to the whole world (very understandably?). Cleverly, Aveni follows in that tradition in this book.