In Conjunction with      massachusetts institute of technology Myth, Ritual, and Symbolism "Symbolical Head, Illustrating the Natural Language of the Faculties." (Image from Wells, Samuel. How to Read Character. New York: Wells Publishing, 1870. p.36.) Course Highlights This course includes a complete set of lecture notes, an extensive bibliography, and samples of student work. Course Description Human beings are symbol-making as well as tool-making animals. We understand our world and shape our lives in large part by assigning meanings to objects, beings, and persons; by connecting things together in symbolic patterns; and by creating elaborate forms of symbolic action and narrative. In this introductory subject we consider how symbols are created and structured; how they draw on and give meaning to different domains of the human world; how they are woven into politics, family life, and the life cycle; and how we can interpret them. The semester will be devoted to a number of topics in symbolism. 1. Metaphor and Other Figurative Language 2. The Raw Materials of Symbolism, especially Animals and The Human Body 3. Cosmology and Complex Symbolic Systems 4. Ritual, including Symbolic Curing and Magic 5. Narrative and Life 6. Mythology Syllabus Overview Human beings are symbol-making as well as tool-making animals. We understand our world and shape our lives in large part by assigning meanings to objects, beings, and persons; by connecting things together in symbolic patterns; and by creating elaborate forms of symbolic action and narrative. In this introductory subject we consider how symbols are created and structured; how they draw on and give meaning to different domains of the human world; how they are woven into politics, family life, and the life cycle; and how we can interpret them. The semester will be devoted to a number of topics in symbolism. 1. Metaphor and Other Figurative Language 2. The Raw Materials of Symbolism, especially animals and The Human Body 3. Cosmology and Complex Symbolic Systems 4. Ritual, including Symbolic Curing and Magic 5. Narrative and Life 6. Mythology The course will focus primarily on symbolic forms and their analysis, rather than on intellectual history or the place of symbolic studies in social theory. Theorists, schools of thought, and intellectual history will be discussed for the most part in the context of the six topics listed above, and technical vocabulary will be kept to a minimum. Readings will consist primarily of articles and chapters, most of them by anthropologists, covering a wide variety of cases from traditional and modern societies. Students, in addition to keeping up with the readings and participating in class discussions, will be expected to write a series of short essays and field studies over the course of the semester. There is one required text, Illness as Metaphor / AIDS and its Metaphors, (by Susan Sontag 1978, 1989, Doubleday). Otherwise, course readings consist of articles and chapters on different aspects of symbolism, which will be discussed in class. Classes will consist of a mixture of lecture and discussion. Each class is keyed to a set of readings, and it is crucial that students keep up with the readings and be prepared to discuss them in class. Class participation — in terms of both regular attendance and participation in discussion — will count strongly towards the final grade. In the first weeks of the semester attendance will be taken. There is no prerequisite: this subject is open to any student. Written work will consist of a series of short papers, divided between essays and field reports. There is no final exam. Calendar LEC # TOPICS KEY DATES 1 Introduction Response essay, on Susan Culture, Sign Sontag's Illness 2 and Symbol as Metaphor (2 pages) due in class Discuss Illness 3 as Metaphor Metaphor and 4 Other Tropes 5 More Tropes Interpreting 6 Metaphor Metaphorical 7 Imperialism 8 Animals Animals and 9 Classification 10 Roosters and Interpretation The Human 11 Body 12 More Bodies Classification 13 and Cosmology 14 Ritual Passage and 15 Persuasion Ritual and 16 Power Magic and 17 Ritual Curing Narrative and 18 Life Narrative and 19 Control Folktale and 20 Form Little Red Riding Hood 21 and the Freudian Wolf Goldilocks 22 Meets Oedipus Hyenas and 23 Demon Brides Jaguars, 24 Vampires, and Starlets 25 Movies on Myth 26 Wrap up Readings Below are readings by class session and a bibliography of supplementary readings. Readings by Class Session LEC # TOPICS READINGS 1 Introduction Culture, Sign and 2 Symbol Discuss Illness as Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor. New York: Doubleday, 3 Metaphor 1990. 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…" Metaphor and 4 American Ethnologist 9 (1981): 709-720. Other Tropes 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. Foong Khong, Yuen. Analogies at War: Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu and the Vietnam Decisions of 1965. 5 More Tropes Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992, pp. 174-190. (Excerpts) Interpreting 6 Metaphor Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live by. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980, pp. 3-32. Metaphorical (Excerpts) 7 Imperialism Ohnuki-Tierney, Emiko. "Monkey as Metaphor?" Man 25, no. 1 (1990): 89-104. Douglas, Mary. "The Abominations of Leviticus." In Purity and Danger. New York: Routledge, 1966, pp. 41-57. 8 Animals 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. Tambiah, S. J. "Animals Are Good to Think and Good to Animals and 9 Prohibit." In Culture, Thought, and Social Action. Cambrdge, Classification MA: Harvard University Press, 1985, pp. 169-211. Geertz, Clifford. "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight." In Myth, Symbol, and Culture. Edited by Clifford Geertz. Norton, 1971, pp. 1-29. Roosters and 10 Interpretation Dundes, Alan. "Gallus as Phallus." In The Cockfight, A Casebook. Edited by Alan Dundes. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994, pp. 241-275. 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." 11 The Human Body 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. 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 12 More Bodies 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. Durkheim, Emile, and M. Mauss. Primitive Classification. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966, pp. 3-26 and 42-66. (Excerpts) Classification and 13 Cosmology Fox, James. "On Binary Categories and Primary Symbols." In The Interpretation of Symbolism. Edited by Roy Willis. New York: Wiley, 1975, pp. 99-132. 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 14 Ritual 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. Passage and 15 none Persuasion Cohn, Bernard. "Representing Authority in Victorian India." In The Invention of Tradition. Edited by Eric Hobsbawm, and Terence Ranger. New York: Cambridge University 16 Ritual and Power Press, 1992, pp. 165-209. Howe, James. "Fox Hunting as Ritual." American Ethnologist 8, no. 2 (1981): 278-297. Turner, Victor. "An Ndembu Doctor in Practice." In The Forest of Symbols. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967, pp. 359-393. Magic and Ritual 17 Curing Holloman, Regina. "Ritual Opening and Individual Transformation: Rites of Passage at Esalen." American Anthropologist 76, no. 2 (1974): 265-278. Bruner, Jerome. "The Legal and the Literary." In Making 18 Narrative and Life 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) Howe, James, and Joel Sherzer. "Friend Hairyfish and Friend Rattlesnake." Man 21 (1986): 680-696. Narrative and 19 Control Ewick, Patricia, and Susan Silbey. "Subversive Stories and Hegemonic Tales: Toward a Sociology of Narrative." Law and Society Review 29, no. 2: 197-226. Propp, Vladimir. Morphology of the Folktale. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1968, pp. 19-37 and 96-99. 20 Folktale and Form Colby, Benjamin. "A Partial Grammar of Eskimo Folktales." American Anthropologist 75 (1973): 645-660. Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. New York: Vintage, 1975, pp. 3-19 and 166-183. Little Red Riding 21 Hood and the Dundes, Alan. "Interpreting Little Red Riding Hood Freudian Wolf Psychoanalytically." In The Brothers Grimm and Folktale. Edited by James M. McGlathery. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988. Leach, Edmund. "The Structure of Myth." In Claude Lévi- Strauss. Goldilocks Meets 22 Oedipus Hammel, Eugene. "The Myth of Structural Analysis: Lévi- Strauss and the 3 Bears." In Modules in Anthropology 25, Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1972. Beidelman, Thomas. "Hyena and Rabbit." Africa 31, no. 1 (1961): 61-74. Hyenas and Demon 23 Hymes, Dell. "The Wife who Goes out Like a Man." In In Brides Vain I Tried to Tell You: Essays in Native American Ethnopoetics . Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981, pp. 274-299. Jaguars, Vampires, Howe, James, and Lawrence Hirschfeld. "The Star-Girls' 24 and Starlets 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. Lecture Notes LEC # TOPICS 1 Introduction (PDF) 2 Culture, Sign and Symbol (PDF) 3 Discuss Illness as Metaphor (PDF) 4 Metaphor and Other Tropes (PDF) 5 More Tropes (PDF) 6 Interpreting Metaphor (PDF) 7 Metaphorical Imperialism (PDF) 8 Animals (PDF) 9 Animals and Classification (PDF) 10 Roosters and Interpretation (PDF) 11 The Human Body (PDF) 12 More Bodies (PDF) 13 Classification and Cosmology