Winter 2003

This information effective for Winter 2003. Check with instructor the first day of class for any changes.

History of Consciousness

[HISC-104] [HISC-217A/235A]

104. Deconstructing Globalization

TTh 12:00 p.m.–1:45 p.m., Cowell 223
Instructor: Alain-Marc Rieu

Course Description:

1. The course consists of lectures, group discussions, and close readings of influential texts.

2. The course will use as a manual the following book (on order at Bay Tree Bookstore): P. O'Meara, H. Mehlinger, and M. Krain (ed.), Globalization and the Challenges of a New Century: A Reader, Bloomington and Indianapolis, University of Indiana Press, 2000. This book provides a selected bibliography and a list of various web sites on the subject.

3. Main web sites on these topics:

• Council on Foreign Relations
  
• Information Technology and International Affairs
  
• International Institute for Sustainable Development
  
• National Institute for Research Advancement's World Directory of Think Tanks
  
• Peace Studies Association
  
• Resources for the Future
• World Policy Institute

Weekly Schedule

Week 1. Introduction: Situating Deconstruction.

What is "Deconstruction"? Deconstruction as a historical moment and process.

Week 2. Situating Globalization: the idea of a "New World Order" in the early 1990s.

Globalization and the Challenges of a New Century, Part 4: "Conflict and Security in a New World Order."

Week 3. From "New World Order" to "Globalization": the failures of the idea of a New World Order during the 1990s.

Globalization and the Challenges of a New Century, Part 1: "Global Order and Disorder: Speculations, and Part 2: "Rejoinders."

Week 4. What is being "globalized" during the 1990s? The Economy reigns supreme.

Globalization and the Challenges of a New Century, Part 6: "The New Global Economy."

Week 5. Political paradoxes of the idea of Globalization.

• Globalization and the Challenges of a New Century, Part 5: "Globalization and the Evolution of Democracy."
  
• The concept of "Hegemony" today (for instance, on the web the publications of G. John Ikenberry)

Week 6. The idea of a post-National world and the formation of meta-national entities.

Globalization and the Challenges of a New Century, Part 3: "The new nature of National Borders."

Weeks 7 and 8. Globalization criticized and rejected: fundamentalism of all kinds—neo-Nationalisms, terrorism, etc.

• Critics of Globalization in France: Pierre Bourdieu ("penser la politique sans penser politiquement")—to think politics without thinking politically. See http://rezo.net/bourdieu. Different books and selections of articles from Bourdieu are available in English.
  
• Le monde diplomatique, a French monthly newspaper publishing authors from different backgrounds and nations, including from the U.S. See http://MondeDiplo.com/. Different articles of P. Bourdieu on Globalization, Neo-liberalism, and gender are available at the site (in French). An abbreviated English version of the paper is available at the site.
  
• "ATTAC": an anti-Globalization movement born in France out of the Seattle movement and active in different countries: http://attac.org/index.htm.
• A. M. Rieu, " Overcoming globalization," in Tae-Chang Kim and Yamawaki Naoshi (ed.), The co-construction of a global public philosophy, Tokyo, Tokyo University Press (to be published in 2003; copy to be made available to students).

Week 9. The coming Knowledge-based societies and its inequalities

• Globalization and the Challenges of a New Century, Part 8: "Innovations, Technology Winners and Losers."
  
• A. M. Rieu, "Knowledge Society and the problem of a global public sphere," in Jean-Christophe Merle (ed.), Global Justice, Stuttgart, Frommann-Holzboog Verlag, 2002 (copy to be made available to students).

Week 10. Conclusion: Against the global: what is a "world"? Questioning Humanity. Is the environment a "global" issue? The formation of an international legal order and others issues.

Globalization and the Challenges of a New Century, Part 9: "Think global, act local: the environment."

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217A. Feminist Theory / 235A. Theory of Religion

Note: Draft Syllabus

Winter 2003
Tues 9:30 a.m.–12:30 p.m., Oakes 109

Instructors:

Donna Haraway (responsible for students enrolled in HISC 217A), haraway@snowcrest.net. Office hours: Tues 1–3 and by appt.

Gary Lease (responsible for students enrolled in HISC 235A),
rehbock@ucsc.edu. Office hours: TBA

Books:

• Feminism in the Study of Religion, ed. By Darlene Juschka (New York/London: Continuum, 2001). Selected essays
• Women, Gender, and Religion: A Reader, edited by Elizabeth Castelli (New York: Palgrave, 2001). Selected readings
• Marina Warner: Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism (New York: Knofp, 1981)

Reader:

Donna Haraway:

"Ecce Homo, Ain't (Ar'n't) I a Woman, and Inappropriate/d Others: the Human in a Posthumanist Landscape," Joan Scott and Judith Butler, eds., Feminists Theorize the Political (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 87-101.

Selections from
Modest _Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan©_Meets_Oncomouse™ (New York and London: Routledge, 1997): Front and back covers, Randolph painting, "Immeasurable Results" and commentary, pp. xii-xiv; 1-22, 40-47, 69-78, 148-72, 213-218, 272-73.

Gary Lease:

"Follow the Genes: Religion as Survival Strategy," in Secular Theories on Religion, edited by Tim Jensen and Mikael Rothstein (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2000), 107-116

"The History of 'Religious' Consciousness and the Diffusion of Culture: Strategies for Surviving Dissolution," in Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques 20 (1994), 453-479

"Rationality and Evidence: The Study of Religion as a Taxonomy of Human Natural History," in Rationality and the Study of Religion, edited by Jeppe Jensen and Luther Martin (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 1997), 136-144

"Response: Fighting over Religion," in Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques 25 (1999), 477-484

Saba Mahmood:

"Feminism, the Taliban, and Politics of Counter-Insurgency," with Charles Hirschkind, in AQ (Anthropological Quarterly) 75 (2002), 339-354

"Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections on the Egyptian Islamic Revival," in Cultural Anthropology 16 (2001), 202-236

"Rehearsed Spontaneity and the Conventionality of Ritual: Disciplines of Salat," American Ethnologist 28 (2001), 827-853

Films:

• Carl Theodor Dreyer, La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc (1928); release from 1985 (118 minutes, UCSC VT 3366); release from 1999 (82 minutes, UCSC VT 6585)
• Jean-Luc Godard, Je vous salue, Marie? (Hail Mary) (1985) (107 minutes, UCSC VT 7386)

Seminar Sessions

1) Tuesday, January 7

Introduction to questions and syllabus
Introductions by students
First brief statements by Lease and Haraway (about 30 minutes each)

Assignment for Jan 14:
Please read selections from Haraway and Lease in the Reader. Also, please study the tables of contents, editorial material, cover design, publication data, and marketing semiotics of the two course anthologies, Feminism in the Study of Religion and Women, Gender, and Religion. Skim at least some of the essays from each anthology, and identify the ones you would like to study in depth. Read all the introductions to sections.

2) Tuesday, January 14

Second brief statements by Lease and Haraway, who will try to historicize, situate, compare, and contrast their approaches to theory of religion/feminist theory. Haraway will show Lynn Randolph slides and slides of other visual material from Modest_Witness.

What is an anthology? How might we read Feminism in the Study of Religion and Women, Gender, and Religion? Who and what are included and excluded in these anthologies? How do these anthologies shape what counts as religion? As feminism? As the join between the two? What is the mode of historical consciousness implicit in these collections? Why do these volumes appear now?

What is "religion"? What is "ritual" and what is its function? How do biology and religion intersect as categories in this seminar? Is that a feminist question? Is it a query in the theory of religion? How do "figuratio" and "ritual" work (and fail to work) for Lease and Haraway? What terms best characterize your own approaches to theory of religion/feminist theory?

Assignment for Jan. 21:
Please read Feminism in the Study of Religion, esp. chaps. 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 8, 12, 14, 15, 18, 20, 21, 22, 24, and all of Part 5, pp. 563-693, and any chapters you in particular want to bring to the discussion.

3) Tuesday, January 21

Discussion of Feminism in the Study of Religion.

Assignment for Jan. 28:
Please read Women, Gender, Religion. Skim all of the chapters, and select half a dozen to read carefully. Be prepared to sketch your own map for doing theory of religion/feminist theory. What research projects should be undertaken? By yourself (e.g., for a paper for this seminar and on a longer term)? By the larger scholarly world? What essays do not belong in this anthology? What is conspicuously missing? What is just right? Which questions seem to organize this anthology? Which questions are missing? Who is constituted as a reader of this anthology? How? Is there, in Butler's terms, a constitutive outside?

4) Tuesday, January 28

Discussion of Women, Gender, Religion.

Assignment for Feb. 4:
Please read essays by Saba Mahmood in the course Reader.

Please prepare a one-page prospectus of the paper you will write for the seminar, and list 2-5 references. Please indicate if you wish to present your paper in a 15-minute "conference paper" format at the end of the seminar. Lease and Haraway would very much like to meet with each student about their paper-in-progress.

5) Tuesday, February 4

Discussion of Mahmood essays.
Prospectus due.

Assignment for Feb. 18:
On Feb. 18, we will discuss two films, Goddard's Hail Mary and Dreyer's Passion of Joan of Arc. Please make arrangements to see both films in the next two weeks before we meet on Feb. 18. An evening screening of each film will be arranged in Oakes 107, TBA.

6) Tuesday, February 11

Discussion of Mahmood essays, continued.

7) Tuesday, February 18

Discussion of Dreyer Film (Passion of Joan of Arc) and Godard Film (Hail Mary)

Assignment for Feb. 25:
Please read Warner, Joan of Arc. Be prepared to discuss questions of female figuration in feminist theory/theory of religion. How do poststructuralist/ posthumanist discourses bear on this matter? So what?

8) Tuesday, February 25

Discuss Warner, Joan of Arc.

Selected Student Reports (2). The format will be 15-minute conference style reports followed by 25 minutes of discussion

9) Tuesday, March 4

Selected Student Reports (2). The format will be 15-minute conference style reports followed by 25 minutes of discussion

Third brief statements by Lease and Haraway.

Initial reprise of seminar readings, visual materials, discussion. What readings do seminar members wish to return to for our final week's discussion?

10) Tuesday, March 11

(This session will be rescheduled as a potluck/discussion for Friday evening, March 7, at Donna's house.)

Selected Student Reports (2). The format will be 15-minute conference style reports followed by 25 minutes of discussion.

Summary discussion of seminar readings, films, other materials, themes, conclusions, achievements, failures.

Evaluation:

Grade and Evaluation based on participation in seminar discussion, seminar report (if provided), and final research paper (prospectus due Feb. 4; 15-20 pages, due March 19).

For each week's discussion, please bring a written, one-paragraph (or shorter) question or statement based on a specific passage in the readings or viewings. Make enough copies to distribute the question to everyone at the beginning of class. We will have an e-mail list to which you are urged to post your question/statement before class, if possible.