Modern Times:
Cyborg Anthropology and Traveling Facts

Syllabus

This purpose of this class is to develop anthropological perspectives and critical reflection on the interplay of social, scientific, and global realities in modern times. We will study ways of learning about and mapping the travel of facts, things, concepts and people into and out of our lives.

Requirements

Reading and full class participation are absolutely required. There will be three projects: the first is a short study of an artifact (4-5 pages). The second involves finding and contextualizing an artifact related to computer hardware. And the third project is to examine ethnographically as well as semiotically a site of production related to your own interests.

Books

• Tsing, In the Realm of the Diamond Queen
• Traweek, Beamtimes and Lifetimes
• Martin, Flexible Bodies
• Juma, The Gene Hunters

Sections (in no particular order yet)

Ethnography in the Modern World

• Tsing AL (1993) In the realm of the diamond queen : marginality in an out-of-the-way place. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
• Miner H (1956) 'Body ritual among the Nacirema', American Anthropologist 58(503-7).

What is Postmodernism?

• Harvey, Condition of Postmodernity
• Lyotard, Postmodern Condition
• Appadurai, "Ethnoscapes" in Recapturing Anthropology
• Tsing

Cyborg Anthropology

• Downey GL, Dumit J, & Williams S (1995) 'Cyborg Anthropology', Cultural Anthropology.
• Downey GL, Dumit J, & Traweek S (forthcoming) 'Locating and intervening', in Downey G.L., et al., ed. Cyborgs and Citadels: anthropological interventions in emerging sciences and technologies. SAR Press.

Cultural Metaphors and Cyborgs

• Haraway, Donna. "Manifesto for Cyborgs" Cyborgs, Simians and Women
• Penley, Constance and Andrew Ross, "Cyborgs at Large: Interview with Donna Haraway" in Penley & Ross eds, Technoculture.
• Haraway, Donna "The Actors are Cyborg, Nature is Coyote, and the Geography is elsewhere: Postscript to 'Cyborgs at Large'. in Penley & Ross eds., Technoculture.
• Martin

Cultural Biographies of Things

• Kopytoff I (1986) 'The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process', in Appadurai A., ed. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 64-93.
• Traweek

Cultural Biographies of Facts

• Bernal, Martin Black Athena (selections)
• Martin E (1994) Flexible bodies : tracking immunity in American culture from the days of polio to the age of AIDS. Boston: Beacon Press.

Studying Visualization

• Tagg, John. (1988). "The Proof of the Picture" in The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.
• Rapp R (forthcoming) 'Real Time Fetus: the role of the sonogram in the age of monitored reproduction', in Downey G.L., et al., ed. Cyborgs and Citadels: anthropological interventions in emerging sciences and technologies. SAR Press.

Science Cultures

• Bourdieu P (1975) 'The Specificity of the Scientific Field and the Social Conditions of the Progress of Reason', Social Science Information 14(6): 19-57.
• Traweek S (1988) Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physicists. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Heath D (forthcoming) 'Bodies, antibodies, and modest interventions', in Downey G.L., et al., ed. Cyborgs and Citadels: anthropological interventions in emerging sciences and technologies. SAR Press.

Studying Up, Studying Ourselves

• Downey GL, Dumit J, & Traweek S (forthcoming) 'Corridor Talk', in Downey G.L., et al., ed. Cyborgs and Citadels: anthropological interventions in emerging sciences and technologies. SAR Press.
• Downey GL, & Lucena JC (forthcoming) 'Engineering selves: hiring in to a contested field of education', in Downey G.L., et al., ed. Cyborgs and Citadels: anthropological interventions in emerging sciences and technologies. SAR Press.

Traveling Subjects, Traveling Facts

• Shohat E (1992) 'Lasers-For-Ladies - Endo Discourse And The Inscriptions Of Science (The Realization Of Endometriosis As A Real Disease)', Camera Obscura N29: 57+.
• Ong A (1995) 'Making The Biopolitical Subject - Cambodian Immigrants, Refugee Medicine And Cultural Citizenship In California', Social Science & Medicine 40(9): 1243-1257.
• Tsing

Incorporating Facts

• Douglas M, & Wildavsky A (1982) Risk and Culture: an Essay on the Selection of Technological and Environmental Dangers. Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Dumit J (forthcoming) 'A digital image of the category of the person: PET scanning and objective self-fashioning', in Downey G.L., et al., ed. Cyborgs and Citadels: anthropological interventions in emerging sciences and technologies. SAR Press.
• Harding S (1987) 'Convicted by the Holy Spirit: The Rhetoric of Fundamental Baptist Conversion', American Ethnologist 14(1): 167-181.

An Economy of Knowledge

• Sandra Harding, ed. (1993) The "Racial" Economy of Science: Toward A Democratic Future. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
• Juma, C. The Gene Hunters