Below are readings by class session and a bibliography of supplementary readings.
Readings by Class Session
| LEC # | TOPICS | READINGS |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Introduction | |
| 2 | Culture, Sign and Symbol | |
| 3 | Discuss Illness as Metaphor | Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor. New York: Doubleday, 1990. |
| 4 | Metaphor and Other Tropes | Cohn. "Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals." Signs 2, no. 4 (1987): 687-718. Gregor, Thomas. "Far, Far Away My Shadow Wandered…" American Ethnologist 9 (1981): 709-720. Ohnuki-Tierney, Emiko. "Structure, Event, and Historical Metaphor: Rice and Identities in Japanese History." J. of Royal Anthro. Inst. 1, no. 2 (1995): 227-248. |
| 5 | More Tropes | Foong Khong, Yuen. Analogies at War: Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu and the Vietnam Decisions of 1965. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992, pp. 174-190. (Excerpts) |
| 6 | Interpreting Metaphor | |
| 7 | Metaphorical Imperialism | Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live by. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980, pp. 3-32. (Excerpts) Ohnuki-Tierney, Emiko. "Monkey as Metaphor?" Man 25, no. 1 (1990): 89-104. |
| 8 | Animals | Douglas, Mary. "The Abominations of Leviticus." In Purity and Danger. New York: Routledge, 1966, pp. 41-57. Ritvo, Harriet. "Cave Canem." In The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987, pp. 167-202. |
| 9 | Animals and Classification | Tambiah, S. J. "Animals Are Good to Think and Good to Prohibit." In Culture, Thought, and Social Action. Cambrdge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985, pp. 169-211. |
| 10 | Roosters and Interpretation | Geertz, Clifford. "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight." In Myth, Symbol, and Culture. Edited by Clifford Geertz. Norton, 1971, pp. 1-29. Dundes, Alan. "Gallus as Phallus." In The Cockfight, A Casebook. Edited by Alan Dundes. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994, pp. 241-275. |
| 11 | The Human Body | Turner, Terence. "Tchikrin: A Central Brazilian Tribe and its Symbolic Language of Bodily Adornment." Natural History (Oct. 1969): 50, 52, 57-59 and 70. Firth, Raymond. "Hair as Private Asset and Public Symbol." In Symbols. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1973, pp. 262-298. Hertz, Robert. "The Pre-eminence of the Right Hand." In Death and The Right Hand. Aberdeen: Cohen & West, 1960 [1909], pp. 89-113. |
| 12 | More Bodies | Martin, Emily. "Science and Women's Bodies." In Body/Politics: Women and the Discourses of Science. Edited by Mary Jacobus et al. New York: Routledge, 1990, pp. 69-79. Gilman, Sander. "The Jewish Foot." In The Jew's Body. New York: Routledge, 1991, pp. 38-59. Gusterson, Hugh. "Nuclear War, the Gulf War, and the Disappearing Body." J. of Urban and Cultural Studies 2, no. 1 (1991): 45-52. Foucault, Michel. "The Body of the Condemned/ Docile Bodies." Excerpts from Discipline and Punish, in 1984, The Foucault Reader. Edited by Paul Rabinow. New York, Pantheon, 1984, pp. 170-187. |
| 13 | Classification and Cosmology | Durkheim, Emile, and M. Mauss. Primitive Classification. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966, pp. 3-26 and 42-66. (Excerpts) Fox, James. "On Binary Categories and Primary Symbols." In The Interpretation of Symbolism. Edited by Roy Willis. New York: Wiley, 1975, pp. 99-132. |
| 14 | Ritual | Turner, Victor. "Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Phase in Rites de Passage." In The Forest of Symbols. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967, pp. 93-110. Gusterson, Hugh. "Nuclear Weapons Testing — Scientific Experiment as Political Ritual." In Naked Science: Anthropological Inquiries into Boundaries, Power, and Knowledge. New York: Routledge, 1996, pp. 131-146. Goffman, Erving. Asylums. New York: Doubleday, 1961, pp. 4-35. |
| 15 | Passage and Persuasion | none |
| 16 | Ritual and Power | Cohn, Bernard. "Representing Authority in Victorian India." In The Invention of Tradition. Edited by Eric Hobsbawm, and Terence Ranger. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 165-209. Howe, James. "Fox Hunting as Ritual." American Ethnologist 8, no. 2 (1981): 278-297. |
| 17 | Magic and Ritual Curing | Turner, Victor. "An Ndembu Doctor in Practice." In The Forest of Symbols. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967, pp. 359-393. Holloman, Regina. "Ritual Opening and Individual Transformation: Rites of Passage at Esalen." American Anthropologist 76, no. 2 (1974): 265-278. |
| 18 | Narrative and Life | Bruner, Jerome. "The Legal and the Literary." In Making Stories: Law, Literature, and Life. Cambrdge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002, pp. 37-62. Mattingly, Cheryl. Healing Dramas and Clinical Plots: The Narrative Structure if Experience. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 72-103. (Excerpts) |
| 19 | Narrative and Control | Howe, James, and Joel Sherzer. "Friend Hairyfish and Friend Rattlesnake." Man 21 (1986): 680-696. Ewick, Patricia, and Susan Silbey. "Subversive Stories and Hegemonic Tales: Toward a Sociology of Narrative." Law and Society Review 29, no. 2: 197-226. |
| 20 | Folktale and Form | Propp, Vladimir. Morphology of the Folktale. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1968, pp. 19-37 and 96-99. Colby, Benjamin. "A Partial Grammar of Eskimo Folktales." American Anthropologist 75 (1973): 645-660. |
| 21 | Little Red Riding Hood and the Freudian Wolf | Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. New York: Vintage, 1975, pp. 3-19 and 166-183. Dundes, Alan. "Interpreting Little Red Riding Hood Psychoanalytically." In The Brothers Grimm and Folktale. Edited by James M. McGlathery. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988. |
| 22 | Goldilocks Meets Oedipus | Leach, Edmund. "The Structure of Myth." In Claude Lévi-Strauss. Hammel, Eugene. "The Myth of Structural Analysis: Lévi-Strauss and the 3 Bears." In Modules in Anthropology 25, Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1972. |
| 23 | Hyenas and Demon Brides | Beidelman, Thomas. "Hyena and Rabbit." Africa 31, no. 1 (1961): 61-74. Hymes, Dell. "The Wife who Goes out Like a Man." In In Vain I Tried to Tell You: Essays in Native American Ethnopoetics . Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981, pp. 274-299. |
| 24 | Jaguars, Vampires, and Starlets | Howe, James, and Lawrence Hirschfeld. "The Star-Girls' Descent: A Myth about Men, Women, Matrilocality, and Singing." J. of Am. Folklore 94, no. 373 (1981): 292-322. |
| 25 | Movies on Myth | none |
| 26 | Wrap up | none |
Supplementary Readings
Bell, Catherine. Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Douglas, Mary. Natural Symbols. New York: Vintage Books, 1973.
Fernandez, James, ed. Beyond Metaphor: The Theory of Tropes in Anthropology. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991.
Gibbs, Raymond. The Poetics of Mind: Figurative Thought, Language, and Understanding. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Humphrey, Caroline, and James Laidlaw. The Archetypal Actions of Ritual. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
Kertzer, David. Ritual, Politics, and Power. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Raw and the Cooked. New York: Harper & Row, 1969.
———. The Savage Mind. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1966.
Maybury-Lewis, David, and Uri Almagor, eds. The Attraction of Opposites: Society and Thought in a Dualistic Mode. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989.
Needham, Rodney, ed. Right and Left: Essays on Dual Symbolic Classification. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973.
Ortony, Andrew, ed. Metaphor and Thought. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979.
Polkinghorne, Donald. Narrative Knowing and the Human Sciences. Albany: Status University of New York Press, 1988.
Rappaport, Roy. Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Sapir, J. David, and J. Christopher Crocker. The Social Use of Metaphor. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1977.
Tambiah, S. J. Culture, Thought, and Social Action. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985.
Turner, Victor. Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974.
———. The Ritual process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1969.
Hendy, Andrew Von. The Modern Construction of Myth. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002.
Willis, Roy, ed. Signifying Animals: Human Meaning in the Natural World. New York: Routledge, 1990.