Duke University 2009-2010 - Office of the Registrar - Duke University

254. Justice, Law, and Commerce in Islam. 3 units. C-L: see Religion 254; also C-L: Medieval and Renaissance
Studies 254
262S. Minority Mental Health: Issues in Theory, Treatment, and Research (P). 3 units. C-L: see Psychology 262S
269S. Harlem Renaissance. 3 units. C-L: see Visual Studies 220S
270S. Topics in African Art. 3 units. C-L: see Art History 270S
278S. Race and American Politics (A). 3 units. C-L: see Political Science 278S; also C-L: Public Policy Studies 278S
279S. Race, Racism, and Democracy. 3 units. C-L: see Cultural Anthropology 279S
293. Special Topics in Literature and History. Instructor: Staff. 3 units.
297S. Teaching Race, Teaching Gender. Interdisciplinary analyses of the problematics of teaching about social
hierarchies, especially those of race, class, and gender. Curricular content and its interaction with the social
constructions of students and teachers. Instructor: Lubiano. 3 units. C-L: Women's Studies 297S, History 297S,
Literature 225S
299. Special Topics. Topics vary from semester to semester. Instructor: Staff. 3 units.
299S. Special Topics. Seminar version of African and African American Studies 299. Instructor: Staff. 3 units.
391. Special Topics. Topics vary from semester to semester. Instructor: Staff. 3 units.
399. Special Readings. Consent of instructor required. Instructor: Staff. 3 units.
Anthropology and History (Certificate Program)
A certificate is available in this program.
For several decades, historians have been turning to cultural anthropology, and anthropologists to history, for
methodological guidance. By now a relatively large number of historians and anthropologists work within a shared
framework, asking similar questions, and seeking answers to these questions from similar kinds of evidence. In both
disciplines, it is widely understood that cultural diversity and cultural change cannot be accounted for either by the
traditional narrative techniques of historians or by the traditional ethnographic descriptions of anthropologists.
Instead, historians realize they must look beyond action, intention, and event, to underlying patterns, unspoken
presuppositions, institutional and discursive structures. Anthropologists realize that kinship, ritual, social role,
discourse, and belief are all subject to improvisation, contestation, politicization, and thus to change. Scholars in both
disciplines have looked to practice theory, as developed by Bourdieu, Giddens, Ortner, and Sewell; to postcolonial
studies, as developed by Stoler, Dirks, Spivak, Das, and Burton ; to performance theory, as developed by Sahlins,
Butler , Sedgwick; and to other, related approaches.
Drawing on these streams of theory, anthropologists and historians strive to come to grips with the full implications
of cultural diversity and change. The challenge is to understand what all actors in a given context consciously know and
intend as well as what they unconsciously take for granted, what they do on purpose and what they do without reflection,
and to see how action and conflict have both intended and unintended consequences. One goal of such research is a new
kind of total history, of the kind the Comaroffs have attempted for South Africa . Another goal is the recovery of forgotten
or suppressed pathways to meaning of the kind rescued from oblivion by recent work on indigenous sexuality in colonial
Mexico or Spanish judicial repression in colonial Peru . Still another is the exploration of historical change in “affect,”
the seemingly automatic responses to situations that often encode cultural assumptions and set the parameters of
meaning and action. Still another is the extention of ethnographic understandings to the materials of Western history,
and the history of anthropology itself.
Collaboration between faculty of the History and Cultural Anthropology departments at Duke has been active since
the 1980s. Numerous crosslisted graduate seminars and joint work on graduate preliminary examination committees and
dissertation defense committees have testified to the vital role of this collaboration for graduate training over the years.
We have now formalized this collaboration with a certificate program to ensure that students who wish to draw on
the other discipline gain familiarity with the joint methods of both disciplines in a more systematic way. Students will
also receive a tangible token in recognition of their accomplishments.
Students enrolled in the PhD programs of either Cultural Anthropology or History wishing to earn a certificate in
Anthropology and History must designate a mentor from among the affiliated faculty of the certificate program. With
their mentors, students will draw up a coherent program of study leading to the certificate. Each student's program of
study must include:
• The core graduate seminar, a two semester sequence that begins with History 210S / Cultural Anthropology
207S, “Anthropology and History,” and concludes with a research seminar in which students prepare and
present their own papers
• Participation, when in residence, in an Anthropology and History colloquium that will be organized by the
affiliated faculty and the students
• Presentation of one's own work at the colloquium at least once, most commonly during the writing phase of
the dissertation
• At least two other courses in the non-degree department
Departments, Programs, and Course Offerings 55