ANTH 291E.001 / Anthropology of Europe
Monday, Wednesday, Friday / 10:10 – 11:00 / Hamilton 101
Professor: Janina Fenigsen
(3 credits)

Fulfills World Area Requirement

Course Readings:
Daphne Berdahl, Wherethe World Ended: Re-Unification and Identity in the German Borderland. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.

Tone Bringa, Being Muslim the Bosnian way: Identity and Community in a Central Bosnian Village. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1995.

Matti Bunzl, Symptoms of Modernity: Jews and Queers in Late Twentieth-Century Vienna. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.

Eve Darian-Smith, Bridging Divides: The Channel Tunnel and English Legal identity in the New Europe. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.

Kristen Ghodsee, Red Riviera: Gender, Tourism, and Postsocialism on the Black Sea. Durham: Duke UP, 2005.

Cris Shore, Building Europe: The Cultural Politics of European Integration. New York: Routledge Press, 2000.

Paul Silverstein, Algeria in France: Transpolitics, Race, and Nation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004.

Stacia Zabusky, Launching Europe: An Ethnography of European Cooperation in Space Science. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1995.

Course Content:
This introductory course surveys the anthropology of contemporary European societies since 1989. We will read recent ethnographies that illuminate how the conceptual space of ‘ Europe’ has been imagined and put into practice across the continent. We will explore the changes wrought by the reorganization of Europe since the end of the Cold War – including the relocations of the eastern and southern frontiers of the European Union (EU), and the violence at these borders – in the realms of religion, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, race, nationality, citizenship and class. In turn, we will look at the emerging field of ethnographies conducted in the institutions of the European Union.

Students are expected to develop critical analytic and writing skills, and to use those to critique received notions about Europe and Europeanization. Several assignments over the course of the semester will be the basis of my evaluation of your comprehension of the texts and lectures. You will be asked to react to representations of European culture put forth by institutions of the European Union in its processes of “Europeanization,” to compare and contrast how knowledge about European events in the American and European press is constructed and disseminated in relationship with knowledge and analysis presented in ethnographic accounts of the same phenomena, and finally to imagine, in the context of group collaboration, how you would plot and carry out a local cultural event as (in the lexicon of the EU) a European “cultural animator.” The final exam will evaluate your ability to construct an ethnographic reading of phenomena and material from which anthropologists draw their analyses, and to relate your reading to the ethnographies we cover in class.

Course Presentation:
This class will be taught as a lecture with frequent class discussions of the material covered, complemented by several films screenings. Group projects will be presented to the class for discussion.

Attendance and participation
Class attendance and participation is mandatory. Pleas do not arrive late for class. You must do the reading for that class and come prepared to discuss it. You must bring the readings assigned for that day to class. Students are also expected to keep up with current events in Europe. The course webpage will feature a newsfeed from the New York Times on European affairs, and we will periodically discuss items that appear there in class.

Method & Evaluation:
Your grade will be based on your class participation (discussion), a blog entry analyzing the cultural politics of a particular event(assignment 1), a short essay on popular portrayals of Europe (assignment 2), a group collaboration in which you will be asked to plan a project as a “cultural animator” and present your project to the class (assignment 3), and the take-home final, which will be an analysis of material distributed in the class. Your essay and final exam must be in Times Roman 12-point font, double-spaced, and stapled. For every day an assignment or exam is late, your grade will be reduced by one letter grade.

Grading Procedures:
(a) Class participation (15%)
(b) Assignments 1 (10%)
(c) Assignment 2 (15%)
(d) Assignment 3 (20%)
(e) Take-home final (40%)