History of Consciousness - Spring 1999

Instructor: James Clifford
Location: Oakes 105
Time: Tu, Th, 2-3:45

(Note: Friday 8AM section meeting listed in Schedule will be moved to Thursday, probably early evening)

Using films, videos, photographs, novels, ethnographies, and museum-displays, this course will analyze how images of "exotic" peoples have been constructed--focusing on the perennial figure of "primitive man." It will show how primitivist stereotypes have been sustained, challenged, complicated, and reinvented during the course of the twentieth century. The struggle to control images of themselves by Native peoples will be discussed throughout. The course covers contested images of Native Americans and Canadians (with some attention to Inuit). We will spend the largest portion of our time on Native Californians, their supposed disappearance and actual survival.

The goal of this course is to help us become more critical and informed consumers of images, particularly those generated about (and by) tribal groups during the last century of violent conflict, disruption, and change. We will work to sharpen our viewing skills, paying attention to image, sound, framing, montage, narration. And we will work to become aware of the political, cultural, and historical relationships that make knowledge of different peoples possible--messy relationships linking those telling the stories with those portrayed, relationships that also implicate us as readers and viewers.

Requirements: Attendance at lectures and evening screenings (four evenings, tentatively scheduled for Tuesday). Participation in discussion sections. A mid-term exam (in class), a take-home final (two 5-7 page essays), a short paper (due in sections, week 4), and critical viewing notes on films.

Required texts: (on order at the Baytree Bookstore):

--Lucy Lippard, ed. Partial Recall: Essays on Photographs of Native North Americans. The New Press. 1992.

--Theodora Kroeber, Ishi in Two Worlds. Univ. California Press. 1960.

--Greg Sarris, Mabel McKay: Weaving the Dream. Univ California Press. 1994.

--An extensive class reader (available at the end of first week of quarter).

Required films and videos:

--The Shadow Catcher (T.C. Mcluhan)

--Box of Treasures (U'Mista Cultural Center)

--Ishi: The Last Yahi (Jed Riffe and Pamela Roberts)

--The Last of His Tribe (1992)

--Imagining Indians (Victor Masayesva)

--Additional short works

Cross-listed with Anthropology 80U (Culture and Religion)

***IMPORTANT NOTE***

These two courses will be taught together in Thimann Lecture Hall 3 on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 12:00 to 1:45 pm. The instructors will be Susan Harding from Anthropology and Donna Haraway from History of Consciousness. You may register for either HISC 80C or ANTH 80U; you may not register for both.

***Please note there is an error in the information in the Spring 1999 Schedule of Classes. If you register for HISC 80C, it is NOT necessary to register concurrently for HISC 81C. HISC 81C is a one-credit film and video course complementing the joint History of Consciousness and Anthropology course on Alien-Nation and Outer Space. Enrollment in HISC 81C is limited to 25, and the course will meet in Oakes 109, Tuesdays, 2-3:30 pm. Please see Advance Course Information for HISC 81C for details.

Registration in a discussion section is required for HISC 80C and ANTH 80U. Please register for whatever discussion section meets your schedule. Check the times for "Secondary Discussion" under both ANTH 80U and HISC 80C. We will adjust discussion section registrations as needed to balance sections and student schedules the first day of class.

From the point of view of approaches to Culture and Religion and Science and Politics, this course explores alien knowledges and ufologies in contemporary America.

Millennial America is an alien nation,

a nation of aliens,

a nation that is alien.

Most Americans believe that the federal government is covering up evidence of extraterrestrial encounters of one kind or another. We are told millions of Americans have seen UFOs with their own eyes, or have had direct contact with alien beings, or have been abducted by aliens and taken to their space stations. Many women testify that they given birth to alien/human babies. Others, men and women, tell us they are "walk-ins," their bodies having been occupied by aliens. We hear that there is a vast network of secret underground chambers and tunnels centered in Dulce, New Mexico, where thousands of alien beings, both alien grays and reptoids, live and work on trans-species genetic experiments. And we wonder if these unearthly visitors somehow signal the beginning of the end. Are cataclysm and redemption, one or the other or both, just around the corner?

Trust no one.

The sudden mainstreaming of ufologies and alien knowledges in the 1990s indexes the extent to which a politics of suspicion has displaced and de-centered science, the state, and rationality as sources of American common sense and national consensus regarding "the truth," what it is, and who knows it. What is at stake-and for whom-in this contest for what counts as evidence, truth, rationality, and experience? How is trust established in public culture in the late twentieth century? What roles do the institutions of religion, science, entertainment, medicine, psychiatry, the academy, and government play? How do 'alternative intellectual communities' outside these institutions operate in alien and ufo discourses? Why have the planet earth and the American citizen become the focus of multiple invasions and abductions now? Are there precedents historically for these kinds of accounts? How do discourses about viruses infecting organic bodies and computers, genetic engineering and genetic pollution, commercialized genomes, high-technology vaccines, mystery diseases, and animal-human hybrids bleed into alien abduction and forced surgery narratives?

The truth is out there.

Alien discourses are functioning as a kind of clearinghouse, or master search engine, for all sorts of contemporary idioms. Everything is aggressively and anxiously connected across the field of these discourses: high technology, information, death and life, body and spirit, science, government, reproduction, disease, sexuality, race, immigration, colonizing and being colonized, fear and desire, trauma and hope, catastrophe and salvation, revealed truth, persecution, research, and cover-up. The growing secondary literature on alien knowledge is still quite small and dwarfed by insider and complicit accounts, textual and graphic, obsessed with and possessed by their own fantastic, phantasmic terms. The latter form a literature which insists on its own terms, but also one which may also be read as an insistent-and incessant-critical commentary, a post-modern popular midrash, on contemporary American politics, society, culture, and everyday life.

Required Books for Alien-Nation and Outer Space:

Michael F. Brown, The Channeling Zone. American Spirituality in an Anxious Age (Harvard University Press, 1997)

C.D.B. Bryan, Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind: A Reporter's Notebook on Alien Abduction, UFOs, and the Conference at M.I.T. (Penguin, 1995)

Jodi Dean, Aliens in America: Conspiracy Cultures from Outer Space to Cyberspace (Cornell University Press, 1998)

Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Ballantine Books, 1982; ©1968)

William F. Hamilton, III, Cosmic Top Secret: America's Secret UFO Program (New Brunswick, NJ: Inner Light Books, 1991)

Patrick Huyghe, The Field Guide to Extraterrestrials (Avon, 1996)

Karla Turner, Into the Fringe: A True Story of Abduction (Berkeley Books, 1992)

Caroline Young, ed., UFOs (Usborne Publishing, 1st © 1977; 1st US edition 1997, available from EDC Publishing, 10302 E 55th Place, Tulsa, OK 74146)

Films:

The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), 92 minutes, B&W

Blade Runner (1982), 114 minutes, color

Men in Black

Videos and Television:

Communion (Whitney Strieber)

Confirmation (Whitney Strieber)

Alien Autopsy, Fact or Fiction? 1995, Roswell story material

X-Files, selected clips

Other readings and resources (preliminary list):

Joan Acocella, "The Politics of Hysteria," New Yorker, April 16, 1998, vol. 74, no. 7, pp. 64-79

Kurt Andersen, "The Origin of Alien Species," New Yorker, July 14, 1997, pp. 38-39

Octavia Butler, Dawn (1st book of the xenogenesis trilogy)

Lynn Cheney

William Cooper, 'Behold a Pale Horse' (Sedon, AZ: Light Technology Publishing, 1991)

Frederick Crews, "The Mindsnatchers" (review of Jacobs, The Threat, Dean, Aliens in America, Strieber, Confirmation), New York Review of Books , June 25, 1998, pp. 14-19

Philip K. Dick, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch; A Scanner Darkly; Radio Free Albemuth; VALIS (idiosyncratic list-many sf writers should be added)

Michel Foucault, I, Pierre Riviére

Ian Hacking

Susan Harding, "Updating Bible Prophecy," on Heaven's Gate, from Histories of the Future

Bud Hopkins, Missing Time (1981)

J. Allen Hynek, The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry (Regentry, 1972)

David Jacobs

J. Keel. The Mothman Prophecies (IllumiNet Press, 1991)

Bob Larson, UFOs and the Alien Agenda (Nelson, 1997)

David Lavery, Angela Hague, and Marla Cartwright, eds., 'Deny All Knowledge': Reading the X-Files (Syracuse University Press, 1996)

Martha F. Lee, The Nation of Islam. An American Millennariun Movement (State University of New York Press, 1996)

Susan Lepselter, "Why Rachel Isn't Buried in Her Grave," from Histories of the Future

Susan Lepselter, "From the Earth Native's Point of View: The Earth, the Extraterrestrial, and the Natural Ground of Home," Public Culture 9 (1997): 197-208

Michael Lieb, Children of Ezekiel: Aliens, UFOs, the Crisis of Race, and the Advent of End Time (Duke University Press, 1998), esp. chpts on the Nation of Islam's prophetic teachings

Deborah Lupton, "Panic Computing: The Viral Metaphor and Computer Technology," Cultural Studies, (date and volume?), pp. 556-68

John Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens, revised edition (Ballantine, 1995)

G. Marcus, ed., Paranoia within Reason: A Casebook on Conspiracy as Explanation (Chicago UP, 1999), esp. Kathleen Stewart, "Conspiracy Theory's Worlds"; Michael F. Brown, "The New Alienists: Healing Shattered Selves at Century's End"; James D. Faubion, "Deus Absconditus: Waco, Conspiracy (Theory), Millennialism, and (The End of) the Twentieth Century"; and Jamer Hunt, "Paranoid, Critical, Methodical: Dalf, Koolhaus, and..."

Jorge Martin, "UFOs, the Government and the Conspiracy. The Chupacabras Phenomenon", ed. OVNI Evidencia

Amalee Newitz, "Alien Abductions and the End of White People," Bad Subjects, #5, May 1993

Phil Patton, Dreamland: A Personal Journey through the Secret World of Roswell and Area 51 (Villard, 1998)

C. Penley, NASA/TREK: Popular Science in America (Verso, 1997)

C.J. Peters, Virus Hunters: Thirty Years of Battling Hot Viruses (Anchor, 1997)

Andrea Pritchard, et al, eds., Alien Discussions: Proceedings of the Abduction Study Conference (North Cambridge Press, 1994)

"The Roswell Files," cover story for Time magazine, June 23, 1997

Carl Sagan and Thorton Page, eds., UFOs-A Scientific Debate (Barnes and Noble, 1996; © 1972, Cornell University Press)

Daniel Paul Schreber, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, introduced by Samuel Weber (Harvard UP, 1988)

Alexander Star, "The Truth Is Out There," review of Dean, Aliens in America and Disch, The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of, New York Times Book Review, August 9, 1998, pp. 10-11

Whitney Strieber, Communion (1980) and Confirmation (1998)

John Tarver, "Communicating Aliens and Conspirators," Qualifying Examination, History of Consciousness, 1998

James Tiptree, Jr., "The Women Men Don't See"

Teri Tyler materials from John Tarver (Tyler v. Carter, et al)

Denis Walker, "The Black Muslims in American Society: from Millennarian Protest to Trans-continental Relationships," in G.W. Trompf, ed., Cargo Cults and Millenarian Movements (Mouton de Gruyter, 1990), pp 343-90

Luise White, "Alien Nation", Transition no. 63 (Duke University Press, 1994), pp. 24-33

March 30, Tuesday, first class day

June 1, Tuesday, no class (exchange day)

June 3, Thursday, last class day

19 class days, total

I. Introduction (Aliens in America , "Alien Politics", pp. 1-24)

Lecture 1. Overviews and contexts. Course arrangements.

Lecture 2. End Times: Apocalypticisms and Millennialisms.

Religious Registers; Scientific Registers

A brief history of contact: "ancient," "Enlightenment," 1900, 1940ff, 1990s

The accounts/voices/tropes/stories

The American Moment: Cold War; post-CW politics

Apocalypse/Millennium; End Times; chosenness; cryptic revelation; midrash/hyperlink; gnostic themes; visions/apparitions; cyborgs; alien biologies

2. "Fugitive Alien Truth" (Jodi Dean, Aliens in America , chpt. 1)

Lecture 3. The 1950s aliens (SH)

Lecture 4. The Scientific Gaze and Invested Experts: the MIT conference (DH)

I, Pierre Riviére; Lynn Cheney

NYRB review of Jodi Dean, Aliens in America

evidence--texts, visual culture, "events", testimony, memory, 'facts'

ARA review

The insider/outsider problem (cf. Favret-Saada)

MIT conference (1992)

"Invested experts"-journalists (Bryan, Patton, Keel), scientists (Sagan, Hynek, Pritchard et al), psychiatrists (Mack), Jacobs

alien autopsy/Roswell--foundational material

3. "Space Programs" (Jodi Dean, Aliens in America , chpt 2)

Lecture 5. Space programs: scientific fact and science fiction (DH)

Lecture 6. Film: The Day the Earth Stood Still

NASA

Star Trek

Penley

astronaut narrative/male hero, masculinities

4. Abduction (Aliens in America , "Virtually Credible", chpt 3)

Lecture 7. Personal accounts: Mack and Turner (DH)

Lecture 8. Channeling: a menagerie of aliens and familiars (SH)

Lecture 9. Whitney Strieber videos, Communion and Conformation

early contact--fulfilled desires

current contact--more invasive and violent

reproduction, sex, bodies

Mack; Turner

Multiple Personality Disorder/therapy/flexible bodies & minds (Emily Martin, Acocella, Ian Hacking)

abductee narratives/female subjects; Tiptree

racial profiles

5. Creative Paranoia and Freedom

Lecture 10. Little Men and the memoirs of Daniel Paul Schreber. Guest lecture by John Tarver

6. Conspiracy/NET/movements (Aliens in America , "I Want to Believe," chpt. 4)

Lectures 11 and 12. Cult Surveys: Revelation and Surveillance (SH)

Lecture 13. Ezekiel and the Nation of Islam (DH)

Lecture 14. Conspiracy discourses (SH)

Cryptic revelation/politics of suspicion

Heaven's gate/Christians

Nation of Islam/Lieb, Lee, Walker

White militants and the End Times

Race/nation; Desire/fear

Mothman

'Behold a Pale Horse'

7. Colonization/immigration/globalization (Aliens in America , "The Familiarity of Strangeness," chpt 5 & "Commemorations, July 1997," postscript)

Lecture 15. Film: Syncopations in black and white: Men in Black and clips from The X-Files

8. Alien Biologies at Home

Lecture 16. Alien bodies, alien species (DH). Reading: The Field Guide to Extraterrestrials

Lecture 17. Film: Blade Runner. Reading: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Lecture 18. Flexible Alienation: Global Capital and Alien Biologies (DH)

Implosion of informatics and biologics: chips, genes, viruses, brains, fetuses, ecosystems, seeds, cyborgs

genetic pollution and venture capital; genetic diversity and the 'vampire project'

Virus Hunters-heroes and aliens

9. The End Game

Lecture 19. Student Projects, Conclusions

Possible Research Topics for Students:

The Godzilla Family: Members, Media, Times, Places, Contexts

UFOlogy and Aliens in children's and young adult literatures and television

Ironic Outer Space Voices (kitsch, SCHWA, etc.)

Apocalypticisms (ironic, divine, technological)

Space programs and SF culture (NASA/TREK, etc.)

Alien foe/alien friend films

First Contact stories in ethnographies, explorers' accounts, the Jane Goodall story and other animal-human stories, medical narratives, colonial histories, etc.

Medicalization of extreme experience

Readings of The Journal of Scientific Exploration

An investigation into the 'Need to Know' society

A study of a science fiction writer; e.g., P.K. Dick, Octavia Butler, or James Tiptree, Jr.

Catalogue Text:
Complementing HISC 80C, HISC 81C offers screenings and discussions to provoke analysis of technoscientific visual culture. The focus in Spring 1999 will be SF film and alien abduction discourses. Please note that in Spring 1999 HISC 80C is to be taught jointly with ANTH 80U. A student wishing to take HISC 81C should also register for HISC 80C or ANTH 80U and an appropriate secondary discussion section.

Description:
Popular visual culture-including film, television, advertising, and computer graphics on web sites-is a crucial aspect of contemporary science, technology and medicine. HISC 81c is an optional 1-unit course that complements the lecture course, HISC 80c, Science and Politics. The specific topics of Science and Politics change each time it is offered; but it always examines past and contemporary science, technology, and medicine in relation to questions about labor processes, research cultures, democracy and social justice, popular culture, health, views of human and nonhuman nature, and political economy. The film, tv, and internet 1-unit course HISC 81c will offer a 1 1/2 hour screening one week followed by a 1 1/2-hour seminar discussion the following week to provoke analysis of narratives, images, explicit and implicit political issues, and practices of production and consumption of technoscientific culture.

In spring 1999, HISC 80c and 81c will be coordinated with a new course in Anthropology, ANTH 80U, Culture and Religion. Professors Donna Haraway and Susan Harding are collaborating on a cross-divisional, large-course-format, undergraduate exploration of themes of alien abduction, conspiracy, surveillance, alien contact, cyborg proliferation, genetic manipulation, human-animal fusion, cloning, ecodisasters, religious cults, nuclear mutants, apocalyptic epidemics, and similar stories that permeate religious, political, and technoscientific culture since the end of World War II and even more intensely since the 1980s. Drawing from scholarly work in cultural studies, religious studies, science studies, and anthropology, the combined courses will explore how the boundaries between the fantastic and the factual, the religious and the profane, the plausible and the absurd, the sacred and the scientific, and the democratic and the totalitarian are constructed and contested by many constituencies. We will draw on a large body of materials. Throughout, we will emphasize the efflorescence of apocalyptic discourses at specific historical conjunctures. How should one relate thematics and technologies in popular apocalyptic discourses to scientific, political, and religious practices in various domains? How do extraterrestrials set up shop with pandemic viruses and errant DNA-sequences? How does charismatic speech work in technoscience and religion? What are the implications for thinking about such matters in popular and elite discourses about immigration, war, progress, race, salvation, sexuality, disaster, family, death, origins, nature, and alienation? The focus will be apparatuses of popular technoscientific and technoreligious production in the United States since 1950, and especially since 1980.

In spring 1999, HISC 81c will meet in Oakes 109 on Tuesdays after the HISC 80C/ANTH 80U lectures in Thimann 3. Students who elect to take the supplementary visual culture course will prepare 1) a written 1-page commentary on each screening, and 2) at the end of the course an annotated guide on a topic of the student's choice. Examples of such guides might include the UFO literature in Santa Cruz or on the internet, cloning debates in the media, technoscientific elements in creationist literature, or ecodisaster scenarios in extraterrestrial literatures.

Evaluation will be on the basis of attendance at screenings, participation in discussions, submission of one-page commentaries on films, and an annotated guide (about 5 pages) to visual material focused around a theme of the course.

I. Alien Encounters: the 1950s

Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 1956

II. Biological Crises and Genetic Constructs

Species, 1995, 1hr 48min

III. Immigrants and Aliens: the 1980s

Brother from Another Planet, 1984

IV. Alien Abduction, Visitation, and UFOs: the 1990s

Deep Space Nine television episode parodying the Roswell story

V. Slime and Cyborgs

Alien Resurrection (1997)

A 2-unit course to fulfill the "extra" course obligation of all UCSC faculty. tp be offered Spring Quarter 1999.

A survey of Near-Eastern archaeology through the 20th century. History and technology of excavation in Egypt, Anatolia, Mesopotamia, Syria, Palestine, and Arabia.

INSTRUCTOR: Gary Lease, History of Consciousness
(rehbock@ucsc.edu) Merrill 7b

FORMAT: Depending on the desires of the students, the course will meet either once a week for two hours over the ten-week quarter or twice a week for five weeks. Each class meeting will feature a fullvisual (slide) presentation of the week's topic accompanied by lecture and commentary. Outside readings each week will prepare students for each upcoming presentation.

SCHEDULE AND TOPICS:

week 1: introduction: concept and overall history of the "Near East"

week 2: introduction to material culture and technologies of excavation, particularly in the Near East

week 3: Egypt I: Pharonic case studies: Giza plateau, Delta, Amarna, Abydos, Luxor

week 4: Egypt II: Byzantine/Coptic case studies: Faw Qibli, Meidum

week 5: Anatolia: Hittite case studies: Bogazkoy

week 6: Mesopotamia: Case Studies: Ur, Sumer, Assyrians

week 7: Syria: Case Studies: Mari, Ebla, Ugarit, Dura-Europos, Assyrians

week 8: Palestine I: Israelite case studies: Dan, Taanach, Negev, Gezer, Jerusalem

week 9: Palestine II: Roman Case Studies: Qumran, Masada, Caesarea

week 10: Arabia: Case Studies: Petra

READINGS: outside readings selected from the following texts:

Silberman, Neil A.: Between Past and Present: Archaeology, ideology, and Nationalism in the Modern Middle East New York: Doubleday-Anchor, 1989)

Trigger, Bruce G.: A History of Archaeological Thought (Cambridge: University Press, 1989)

Shanks, Michael and Christopher Tilley: Social Theory and

Archaeology (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 1988)

Barker, Philip: Techniques of Archaeological Excavation (New York: Universe Books, 1983)

Lloyd, Seton: The Archaeology of Mesopotamia (London: Thames and Hudson, 1984)

Hopkins, Clark: The Discovery of Dura-Europos (New Haven: Yale University, 1979)

Silberman, Neil A.: Digging for God and Country: exploration, archaeology, and the secret struggle for the Holy Land, 1799-1917 (New York: Knopf, 1982)

Kenyon, Kathleen: Archaeology in the Holy Land (London: E. Benn, 1970)

Kenyon, Kathleen: Digging up Jerusalem (London:E. Benn, 1974)

VISUAL MATERIALS: extensive slide collection from all the sites mentioned, many from actual excavation participation, others from archaeologists and archives.

EVALUATION: Students will be evaluated on the basis of attendance and a final examination. 

Revised 8/3/04.