Cultures in Contact
ANT 326L (30410)
Spring, 2008
Samuel M. Wilson
Introduction
Cultures in Contact" is a multi-disciplinary course which combines Historical, Anthropological, Geographical and Literary analyses of the continuing "contact period" in the New World. The issues addressed span the last 500+ years of cultural interaction in the Americas, looking especially at the processes of cultural interaction, competition, cooperation, and synthesis that have taken place among people from the Americas, Europe, Africa, and Asia.
Books: readings for this class are primarily on-line, linked to from the Schedule page of this web site. Peter Nabokov (ed.) Native American Testimony is available at the UT Coop bookstore and online at, e.g. Amazon or Froogle. Wherever you get the book, please mkake sure that you get the 1999 revised addition (0140281592), not the 1991 edition (0140129863) or any other version. The 1991 version does not contain all of the assigned readings.
Requirements: Grades will be assigned on the basis of three exams and twelve short assignments. See the Assignments page for details.
Important Details: This is the main web site for the class, but Blackboard will occasionally be used for posting files and sending out information. eGradebook will be used for posting grades.
The Teaching Assistants for this class are Maria Martinez and Shannon Iverson. They will hold office hours in the Anthropology Department (E. P. Schoch Building) from 1:00 to 2:00 on Tuesday and Thursday. They will be in EPS 2.136. If you have questions, please contact the Teaching Assistants before contacting the Professor. For questions of interest to the whole class we will try to come up with an answer and then send it out to everyone.
[Obligatory threatening passages]
Students who miss exams or the due dates of assignments without notifying the professor orTeaching Assistants (471-4206) in advance will, under most circumstances, not be allowed to take the exam and will forfeit that portion of their grade.
If you do not hand in a short "activity" report on the day it is due, you may hand it in the next class period. After that, the assignment will not be accepted without an adequate written explanation. Activity assignments must be handed in on paper. Email submissions will not be accepted.
Attendance will not be taken, but you should consider being in class to be extremely important. The exams will cover both the reading material and our discussions in class. Powerpoint presentations and other material used in class will not be made available on the web or released individually.