Fieldwork Ideas

Professor Cati Coe
Armitage Hall, Room 358
phone: (856) 225-6455
email: ccoe@camden.rutgers.edu

Class hours: Wednesdays, 1:30-4pm
Office hours: Mondays, 1:30-4pm, Armitage 358

Course Description
What is the relationship between politics and cultural practices?  How do everyday cultural practices uphold practices of power and resistance and how they are shaped by social conflict?  How does political power express itself through public display and what does this accomplish? Why do political movements—revolutionary and reactionary—seek to rejuvenate traditions of the past and invent new traditions?  What happens to the heterogeneity and vitality of cultural traditions when they are represented and, in a sense, “frozen” in museums and tourist displays?  In thinking through these questions, we will focus on the revival, invention, and representation of parades and festivals, songs and music, clothing, customs, and oral narrative and poetry in nationalism, colonialism, tourism, and museums displays, across a wide variety of historical periods and societies around the world.

Required Texts
The following books are at the campus bookstore:
1) Lila Abu-Lughod. Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
2)  David E. Whisnant. All That is Native and Fine: The Politics of Culture in an American Region. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983.

The remainder of the readings can be found online via the library’s reserve readings or at the library’s reserve reading desk.  I highly recommend printing or photocopying a copy of each reading to bring to class.

Culture and “Culture”
January 22
Introduction to the course
Film: "In and Out of Africa"
Map of Cote d'Ivoire

January 29
Lila Abu-Lughod, Veiled Sentiments, pp. 1-117
Discussion of research proposal

February 5
Lila Abu-Lughod, Veiled Sentiments, pp. 118-167
Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw, Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes, pp. 1-38
Discussion of fieldwork.
Due: Project proposal

February 12
Lila Abu-Lughod, Veiled Sentiments, p. 171-259 
Library trip.
Deposit of $5 for Museum trip due at the Honors College office

February 19
David Whisnant, All that is Native and Fine, pp. 1-101

February 26
David Whisnant, All that is Native and Fine, pp. 183-267

Saturday, March 1st In and Out of Focus: Images from Central Africa, 1885-1960, Exhibit at the Museum of African Art, Smithsonian, Washington DC, 9:30am

Museums
March 5
1) Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett. 1998. “Objects of Ethnography.” Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage. Berkeley: University of California Press. Pp. 17-78.
2) Curtis M. Hinsley. 1991. “The World as Marketplace: Commodification of the Exotic at the World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893.” In Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display. Ed. Ivan Karp and Steven D. Levine. Washington: Smithsonian University Press. Pp. 344-385.

Images from Exhibit
Gaze and Images

March 12
1) Adrienne L. Kaeppler. 1991. “Ali’i and Maka’ainana: The Representation of Hawaiians in Museums at Home and Abroad.” In Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture. Ed. Ivan Karp and Steven D. Levine. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press. Pp. 458-475.
2) Stephen Eddy Snow. 1993. “Pilgrims and Tourists: The Performer-Audience Interaction.” Performing the Pilgrims: A Study of Ethnohistorical Role-Playing at Plimouth Plantation. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press.  Pp. 153-182
Due: Literature Review

SPRING BREAK

Public Display as Power
March 26
1) David Cannadine. 1985. “Splendor out of Court: Royal Spectacle and Pageantry in Modern Britain, c. 1820-1977.” In Rites of Power, Symbolism, Ritual, and Politics Since the Middle Ages. Ed. Sean Wilentz. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Pp. 206-244.
2) Terence Ranger. 1983. “The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa.” In The Invention of Tradition. Ed. Eric Hobsbawn and Terence Ranger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pp. 211-262.
Film: “Trobriand Cricket: An Ingenious Response to Colonialism”

Culture as Resistance
April 2
1) Natalie Zemon Davis. 1984. “Charivari, Honor, and Community in Seventeenth-Century Lyon and Geneva.” In Rite, Drama, Festival, Spectacle: Rehearsals Toward a Theory of Cultural Performance. Ed. John J. MacAloon. Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues. Pp. 42-57.
2) David E. Whisnant. 1995. “Culture as Revolution, Revolution as Culture: The Sandanista Cultural Project.” In Rascally Signs in Sacred Places: The Politics of Culture in Nicaragua. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Pp. 189-235.

Culture & Nationalism
April 9
1)  Richard Handler. 1988. “Some Salient Features of Québécois National Ideology.” Nationalism and the Politics of Culture in Quebec. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Pp. 30-51.
2)  Richard Handler. 1988. “‘Having a Culture’: The Preservation of Quebec’s Patrimoine.”  Nationalism and the Politics of Culture in Quebec. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Pp. 140-158.
3) William A. Wilson. 1975. “The Kalevala and Finnish Politics.” Journal of the Folklore Institute 12 (2/3): 131-155.
4) Katherine Verdery. 1990. “The Production and Defense of ‘the Romanian Nation,’ 1900 to World War II.” In Nationalist Ideologies and the Production of National Cultures. Ed. Richard G. Fox. Washington DC: American Anthropological Association.
Video presentation: "Song & Nationalism in Ghana"
Discussion of coding
Due: Fieldnotes

Tourism
April 16
1) Kathleen Adams. 1995. “Making Up the Toraja?” Ethnology 34(2): 143-154.
2) Michel Picard. 1997. “Cultural Tourism, Nation-Building, and Regional Culture: The Making of a Balinese Identity.” In Tourism, Ethnicity, and the State in Asian and Pacific Societies. Ed. Michel Picard and Robert E. Wood. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Pp. 181-214.
Discussion with peers of outline.
Due: Outline of final paper (2 copies)

April 23
1) Timothy Oakes. 1997. “Ethnic Tourism in Rural Guizhou: Sense of Place and the Commerce of Authenticity.” In Tourism, Ethnicity, and the State in Asian and Pacific Societies. Ed. Michel Picard and Robert E. Wood. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Pp. 35-70.
2) Edward M. Bruner. 1996. “Tourism in Ghana: The Representation of Slavery and the Return of the Black Diaspora.” American Anthropologist 98 (2): 290-304.

April 30
Presentations
Due: Final Paper