Fall 2015 Course Offerings

(also ARTH, CLASS, MUSIC) 
Fall.  4 credits.  
Limited to 15 students.  
A. Alexandridis
T: 10:10-12:05

This seminar takes Cornell’s sesquicentennial anniversary as an opportunity to investigate some of the university’s old and often neglected teaching collections. Focus is on those collections that consist of replicas (e.g. musical instruments, Rau plow collection, plaster cast collection, Blaschka glass models of invertebrates). We will explore the collection’s and their object’s multiple temporalities, materiality, and correspondent multi-disciplinarity.

Made at some point in time for one field they now might have become attractive for another and for different reasons. The seminar will draw on Reinhart Koselleck’s concept of time layers (Zeitschichten) to capture both homogenous sequential as well as disruptive ways of reception. In a first historiographical step we want to understand, what purpose these copies serve(d) within a given discipline (e.g. the plow models for agricultural sciences) and how they eventually shaped it. Here the focus is on what the copies represent. In a second step we will look at these replicas and their materiality in their own right to analyze their transformative potential: how are they made to translate the original or prototype? How did/does this “translation” affect the way the very originals or prototypes were understood by different disciplines? –  The seminar hopes to make these collections relevant again to students and the university alike.

Annetta Alexandridis is Associate Professor in the Departments of History of Art and Classics at Cornell, a member of the Cornell Institute of Archaeology and Material Studies (CIAMS), co-curator of Cornell’s Plaster Cast Collection and field member of the Archaeological Exploration of Sardis/Turkey. She holds a PhD in Classical Archaeology from Munich. Before joining Cornell faculty she worked at the Staatliche Antikensammlungen, Berlin and taught at Rostock University.

Informed by gender and animal studies, her work centers on various manifestations of the body in Graeco-Roman antiquity, including Roman portraits and funeral sculpture or depictions of Greek mythological figures. Annetta is also interested in archaeology and its media (photography, plaster casts). She is the author of Die Frauen des römischen Kaiserhauses (Mainz 2004), Archäologie der Photographie (with Wolf-Dieter Heilmeyer; Mainz 2004) and co-editor of Mensch und Tier in der Antike (with Markus Wild and Lorenz Winkler-Horacek, Wiesbaden 2008). Currently, she is revising a book manuscript on Ζ?α. Images of the Body Between Man, Woman and Animal in Ancient Greece

(also ANTHR)
Fall.  4 credits.  
Limited to 15 students.  
C. Campbell
R: 2:30-4:25

The “Lessons in the Anthropocene” seminar examines the idea of the “end of time” with particular attention given to the peoples and culture groups of the circumpolar subarctic and arctic. We begin with key ethnographies in thinking about northern worlds: Robin Ridington’s Little Bit Know Something: Stories in a Language of Anthropology and Piers Vitebski’s Reindeer People: Living with Animals and Spirits in Siberia. By examining ethnographies of peoples who have been depicted as being out-of-time or culturally anachronistic with a modern world the seminar seeks to de-center histories and historical methodologies privileging temporal constructs emergent in Euro-American intellectual, spiritual, and popular traditions. This approach is carefully designed to help gaze beyond the common and conventional discursive frames to develop flexible techniques for looking at life as well as responsive modes of expression to describe it. The idea of time and particularly the end of time will be run against central themes that include human and non-human personhood, cosmological and ecological models of belief, spirit worlds (animism, shamanism), and complexities of culture change under the conditions of colonialism, industrialism, and capitalism/communism.

Each of our circumpolar readings are set against current theory and critique, putting ethnography and history into a critical and challenging conversation with concepts from critical and cultural theory like the event, the end of history, the posthuman, and the anthropocene. The social philosopher Arthur Kroker writes on technologies of acceleration, drift, and crash. Drift in particular, is conceptualized in his work as a kind of post-planning global experience. It is undoubtedly a powerful metaphor. The arctic in peril and the arctic adrift are caught up in the kind of energopolitics described by the anthropologist Dominic Boyer—a concept that helps to frame this moment of increasingly dramatic climate change in the Arctic. Nassim Taleb’s temporal intervention, “The Black Swan,” will be used to examine indeterminacy and probability as factors in predictive temporal modeling – randomness and accident. This directs attention to concepts like deep-time, unearthly agency, and the cosmological event. Selections from Tim Ingold’s Evolution and Social Life will bring us back to a more nuanced exploration of human experience framed against industrialism and extractive economies in the North. This seminar is thus designed to counter pose work of ethnography and cultural history against continental philosophy and critical theory. Thus while reading about Evenki concepts of demonic curses we’re also looking into Brian Massumi’s theory of the Event, the perverse futurity of Lauren Berlant’s ‘cruel optimism,’ or the unabashed threat of Kroeker’s technological drift.

Craig Campbell is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas, Austin.  He received his PhD in Sociology (Cultural Theory) from the University of Alberta in 2009.  Craig is a founding member of the Ethnographic Terminalia curatorial collective (www.ethnographicterminalia.org).  His research is concerned with modes of description with a special focus on ethnographic and documentary images. In particular he has been exploring the possibility for ignored, overlooked, failed, defaced, degraded, manipulated, and damaged images to activate interpretive fields typically unacknowledged in conventional ethnographies and histories. 

Craig Campbell’s ethnographic, historical, and regional interests include:  Siberia, Central Siberia, Indigenous Siberians, Evenki, Evenkiia, Reindeer hunting and herding, Travel and mobility, Socialist colonialism, early forms of Sovietization, and the circumpolar North.  He publishes widely in journals including Space and Culture, Geographical Review, Sibirica, and Visual Anthropology Review.  His second book Agitating Images: Photography Against History in Indigenous Siberia was published by University of Minnesota Press in the fall of 2014.

His website is: www.metafactory.ca