Department of Anthropology
Minor in Ethnography of Communication
Students on Summer 2022, Fall 2022, or Spring 2023 requirements ETHCOMMMIN
The minor in Ethnography of Communication offers students the opportunity to develop a foundation from which they can explore shifts, circulations, and innovations in culture, particularly as it is manifested in language. It looks at the cultural assumptions around the world that underlie communicative acts. Students will gain a set of analytical tools for understanding the cultural specificity of communication and for analyzing communication cross-culturally.
Requirements
The minor requires at least 15 credit hours, including the requirements listed below.
- Introductory Course. One (1) course:
- ANTH-A 122 Interpersonal Communication
- ANTH-L 200 Language and Culture
ANTH-A 122 Interpersonal Communication
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Introduction to the study of communication, culture, identity and power. Each student does original primary research. Covers a range of topics, including small group communication around the world and among high school and college students in the United States, gendered language, slang, verbal play, texting, and institutional language.
- Fall 2024CASE DUScourseSummer 2024CASE DUScourse
- Fall 2024CASE SHcourseSummer 2024CASE SHcourse
ANTH-L 200 Language and Culture
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- An introduction to the field of linguistic anthropology, the social scientific study of language. Examines how languages reflect cultures, how language use reproduces culture(s), how linguistic categories relate to categories of thought, and how linguistic variation both reflects and shapes social categories such as gender, class, race, and ethnicity.
- Fall 2024CASE SHcourseSummer 2024CASE SHcourse
- Electives. At least four (4) courses:
- ANTH-A 200 Topics in Anthropology of Culture and Society (approved topic: "Bad Language")
- ANTH-A 208 Topics in the Anthropology of the Arts and Expressive Behavior (approved topic: "Arts, Politics & Global Encounters")
- ANTH-A 288 Sex, Drugs, and Rock-n-Roll (Subversive Culture)
- ANTH-E 203 Stigma and the Expressive Arts: Cultivating Compassion
- ANTH-E 206 Chanting Down Babylon: Protest and Popular Culture in the Afro-Caribbean
- ANTH-E 208 Global Jazz, Reggae, and Hip-Hop: African Diasporic Music Beyond the African Diaspora
- ANTH-E 210 Rethinking Race Globally
- ANTH-E 212 The Anthropology of Youth and Adolescence
- ANTH-E 220 Performing Human/Nature: Defining Relationships with the Environment
- ANTH-E 317 Ethnographies of Media Worlds
- ANTH-E 338 Stigma and Taboo
- ANTH-E 358 Photography and Ethnography
- ANTH-E 383 A World of Work
- ANTH-E 386 Performance, Culture, and Power in the Middle East and North Africa
- ANTH-E 400 Undergraduate Seminar (approved topic: "Humor in Use")
- ANTH-E 415 Topics in Communication and Culture in Comparative Perspective
- ANTH-E 422 Native American and Indigenous Media
- ANTH-E 424 Sense of Place
- ANTH-E 432 Cultures of Democracy
- ANTH-E 434 Food Communication and Performance
- ANTH-E 438 Communication in the Digital Age
- ANTH-E 442 Ethnographic Memoir
- ANTH-E 460 The Arts in Anthropology
- ANTH-E 485 Art and Craft of Ethnography
- ANTH-L 204 Language and (In)Tolerance in the US
- ANTH-L 208 Ways of Speaking
- ANTH-L 314 Performance as Communicative Practice
- ANTH-L 340 Language and Globalization
- ANTH-L 400 Topical Seminar in the Ethnography of Communication
- ANTH-L 402 Language in/of Media
- ANTH-L 410 Language and Society in Central Eurasia
- One of:
- ENG-W 240 Community Service Writing
- FOLK-F 131 Folklore in the United States
- FOLK-F 225 Forms of Commemoration
- FOLK-F 370 Memory, Art, and Aging: Life Stories and the Expressive Lives of Elders
- INTL-I 220 Global Connections
- INTL-I 421 Human Rights and the Arts
ANTH-A 200 Topics in Anthropology of Culture and Society
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Selected topics in the anthropological study of social and cultural institutions. Emphasizes understanding and developing anthropological approaches to questions about social, economic, political, and historical relationships among groups and individuals in contexts across the globe. Course topics may utilize ethnographic, archaeological, linguistic, and historical information.
- Repeatability
- May be repeated with a different topic for a maximum of 6 credit hours.
- Fall 2024CASE SHcourseSummer 2024CASE SHcourse
ANTH-A 208 Topics in the Anthropology of the Arts and Expressive Behavior
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Introduction to selected topics in the anthropology of art, performance, music, literature, folklore, belief, and ritual. Examines the methods anthropologists use to study the arts or other expressive behaviors and explores art and expression in a variety of cultural settings.
- Repeatability
- May be repeated with a different topic for a maximum of 6 credit hours.
- Fall 2024CASE AHcourseSummer 2024CASE AHcourse
ANTH-A 288 Sex, Drugs, and Rock-n-Roll (Subversive Culture)
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Taking \"normativity\" and challenges to it as the major problematic, this course explores this problem analytically, through four major conceptual approaches, and thematically, via pop culture and various cultural expressions surrounding sexuality, illicit drug culture, and transgressive music.
ANTH-E 203 Stigma and the Expressive Arts: Cultivating Compassion
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Stigma theory shows how cultural norms create marked categories of persons, who then face social barriers to equal treatment. This course explores expressive arts -- including written and spoken word, film and video, and live or mediated performance -- as effective strategies for disarming the stigmatizing gaze in the U.S.
- Fall 2024CASE AHcourseSummer 2024CASE AHcourse
- Fall 2024CASE DUScourseSummer 2024CASE DUScourse
ANTH-E 206 Chanting Down Babylon: Protest and Popular Culture in the Afro-Caribbean
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Explores Afro-Caribbean popular culture as political protest against colonialism and its legacies, the failures of local government, and global-northern political, economic and other forms of domination. Explores grass-roots Afro-Caribbean popular culture as well as mass-media content such as recorded music, fiction writing and documentary film making.
- Fall 2024CASE GCCcourseSummer 2024CASE GCCcourse
- Fall 2024CASE SHcourseSummer 2024CASE SHcourse
ANTH-E 208 Global Jazz, Reggae, and Hip-Hop: African Diasporic Music Beyond the African Diaspora
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- With focus on jazz, reggae, and hip hop, this course links musical production and consumption in the African diaspora to issues of social identity. Among those aspects of social identity considered are race, nation, religion, class, and gender. The course investigates the spread of these musical genres around the world.
- Fall 2024CASE AHcourseSummer 2024CASE AHcourse
ANTH-E 210 Rethinking Race Globally
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Provides a global understanding of how race and structures of racism have been historically created, contemporarily understood, and structurally maintained.
- Fall 2024CASE SHcourseSummer 2024CASE SHcourse
ANTH-E 212 The Anthropology of Youth and Adolescence
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- A broad introduction to the cross-cultural study of adolescence. Examines classic anthropological concerns such as age sets and age grades, generational groups, and rites of passage, as well as current research on youth language, global youth culture, and intergenerational politics.
- Fall 2024CASE SHcourseSummer 2024CASE SHcourse
ANTH-E 220 Performing Human/Nature: Defining Relationships with the Environment
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Reflects on the complexity of human experience from personal, creative, and cultural perspectives using fiction, poetry, journalism, creative nonfiction, visual art, music, and films. Students explore others' and their own experience of what it means to be human, analyze and compare the tacit philosophies present in these works, and pose their original organizing frameworks. Emphasis on interpretive skills and theory building, testing, and revising these theories to incorporate the lived experiences of others.
- Repeatability
- Credit given for only one of ANTH-E 220 or CMCL-C 220.
- Fall 2024CASE AHcourseSummer 2024CASE AHcourse
ANTH-E 317 Ethnographies of Media Worlds
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Examines the challenges that focusing on the mass media--including technologies, production processes, content, and reception--present for studying cultures. Explores the relationship between media and culture to understand people's experiences and conceptualization of time, space, communities, families, and identities.
- Repeatability
- Credit given for only one of ANTH-E 317 or CMCL-C 310.
- Fall 2024CASE SHcourseSummer 2024CASE SHcourse
ANTH-E 338 Stigma and Taboo
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Examines the relation between stigma and taboo, specifically how stigmatized groups and taboo practices are marked by moral judgement. We examine theory and particular cases to identify strategies to combat moralizing logics as related to race, class, gender, and the body broadly speaking.
- Fall 2024CASE AHcourseSummer 2024CASE AHcourse
ANTH-E 358 Photography and Ethnography
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Anthropologists have understood photographs as primary data, as documentation for colonial projects, as evidence of fieldwork, in museum exhibitions, and as works of art. Examines the political and ethical practice of photography with the aim of learning to think critically about photography in global and historical contexts.
- Fall 2024CASE AHcourseSummer 2024CASE AHcourse
- Fall 2024CASE GCCcourseSummer 2024CASE GCCcourse
ANTH-E 383 A World of Work
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Ethnographic study of how people learn to work in a range of real jobs around the world. Focuses on how people learn to do a job and get along with co-workers in different cultures. Shows how much a country's legal or economic policies can affect daily work lives.
- Fall 2024CASE SHcourseSummer 2024CASE SHcourse
ANTH-E 386 Performance, Culture, and Power in the Middle East and North Africa
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Middle Eastern cultures are well known for their rich and diverse performance practices. Taking an ethnographic perspective, this course views performances as communicative events through which social relations are organized. It explores how performances both participate in local arrangements of power and constitute responses to colonialism, nationalism, and globalization.
- Repeatability
- Credit given for only one of ANTH-E 386 or CMCL-C 422.
- Fall 2024CASE GCCcourseSummer 2024CASE GCCcourse
- Fall 2024CASE SHcourseSummer 2024CASE SHcourse
ANTH-E 400 Undergraduate Seminar
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Intensive examination of selected topics in anthropology. Emphasis on analytic investigation and critical discussion. Topics vary.
- Repeatability
- May be taken with a different topic for a maximum of 9 credit hours.
ANTH-E 415 Topics in Communication and Culture in Comparative Perspective
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Cross-cultural exploration of communication systems, ranging from face-to-face interaction to mediated forms of communication, with an emphasis on their cultural foundations and social organization.
- Repeatability
- May be repeated with a different topic for a maximum of 6 credit hours in ANTH-E 415 and CMCL-C 415.
- Fall 2024CASE SHcourseSummer 2024CASE SHcourse
ANTH-E 422 Native American and Indigenous Media
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Study of contemporary Native American and global indigenous representation and communication, including oral performance and media. Explores the poetics and politics of media and performance in the context of indigenous histories, cultures, and experiences of colonization. Examines the use of performance forms as symbolic resources in literature, film, the Internet, music and television. Addresses intersections of gender, class and race in indigenous media worlds.
- Repeatability
- Credit given for only one of ANTH-E 422 or CMCL-C 430.
- Fall 2024CASE SHcourseSummer 2024CASE SHcourse
ANTH-E 424 Sense of Place
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Examines the relationship between human identities and places through the study of ethnographies, philosophies, personal essays, films, fiction, poetry, and electronic media. Develops ethnographic skills to describe how personal, public, institutional, and virtual spaces are influenced by history, gender, and social forces. Emphasizes analytical, interpretive, and representational skills to communicate the richness of human experience.
ANTH-E 432 Cultures of Democracy
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Examines the role of culture in how democracies are practiced. Ethnographic focus varies and includes cross-cultural comparisons of political speech, voting, and democratic representation in different cultures. Particular attention is paid to the dilemmas surrounding the exportation of democracy, especially to the Middle East, Africa, South Africa, the Pacific, and the Balkans.
- Repeatability
- Credit given for only one of ANTH-E 432 or CMCL-C 446.
- Fall 2024CASE GCCcourseSummer 2024CASE GCCcourse
ANTH-E 434 Food Communication and Performance
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Investigates food as a cultural and communicative device: how it functions in language, icons, ideologies, and power systems. Focuses on contemporary uses of and attitudes about food in daily use in lore, rituals, spectacles, festivals, and popular movements.
- Repeatability
- Credit given for only one of ANTH-E 434 and CMCL-C 433.
- Fall 2024CASE SHcourseSummer 2024CASE SHcourse
ANTH-E 438 Communication in the Digital Age
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Examines the everyday issues surrounding public speech in new media: how people establish appropriate behavior in new media and respond to new possibilities for deceptive behavior; how ideas of what counts as 'public' and 'private' change as the result of changes in the way communication circulates; why scholars believe public speech and democracy are so intertwined.
- Repeatability
- Credit given for only one of ANTH-E 438 or CMCL-C 429.
- Fall 2024CASE SHcourseSummer 2024CASE SHcourse
ANTH-E 442 Ethnographic Memoir
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- ANTH-E 200; or consent of instructor
- Description
- Explores the intersection of memoir and ethnography. Considers what the defining characteristics of a new genre, ethnographic memoir, would be and how it might differ from ethnography and memoir. Includes experiments in writing that combines observation and description with increasing understanding of the relationships between self and others.
ANTH-E 460 The Arts in Anthropology
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Visual art, music, dance, drama, and oral literature, viewed as structural entities, as aspects of human behavior, and in terms of their anthropological context.
- Repeatability
- May be repeated with different topics for a maximum of 9 credit hours.
- Fall 2024CASE AHcourseSummer 2024CASE AHcourse
ANTH-E 485 Art and Craft of Ethnography
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Ethnography is the defining core of social and cultural anthropology; field research is at the heart of ethnography. The definition and purpose of ethnography, the role of ethnographer, voice, ethics, and modes of presentation, standards, craft, art, and evaluation are examined through specific cases and exemplary ethnographies.
- Fall 2024CASE SHcourseSummer 2024CASE SHcourse
ANTH-L 204 Language and (In)Tolerance in the US
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Explores the roles that perceptions of linguistic differences among groups and individuals play in intolerant behavior on the part of some segments of American society, and the corresponding roles that genuine understanding of these differences can play in promoting tolerance and guiding responses to intolerance.
- Repeatability
- Credit given for only one of ANTH-L 204 or SLST-S 204.
- Fall 2024CASE DUScourseSummer 2024CASE DUScourse
- Fall 2024CASE SHcourseSummer 2024CASE SHcourse
ANTH-L 208 Ways of Speaking
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Exploration in comparative perspective of the social use of language, with a focus on the interrelationships among verbal form, social function, and cultural meaning in ways of speaking.
- Repeatability
- Credit given for only one of ANTH-L 208 or CMCL-C 229.
- Fall 2024CASE SHcourseSummer 2024CASE SHcourse
ANTH-L 314 Performance as Communicative Practice
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Introduction to performance as a communicative practice, focusing on performance as a special artistic mode of communication and performance and as a special class of display events in which the values and symbols of a culture are enacted before an audience.
- Repeatability
- Credit given for only one of ANTH-L 314 or CMCL-C 313.
- Fall 2024CASE AHcourseSummer 2024CASE AHcourse
ANTH-L 340 Language and Globalization
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Explores globalization through the lens of language. Topics include cultural and linguistic contact and translation, migration and assimilation, transnational media, multilingualism, language loss, the emergence and spread of new forms of English, and global discourses of democracy, diversity, and minority rights.
ANTH-L 400 Topical Seminar in the Ethnography of Communication
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Current issues in linguistic anthropology, designed to acquaint the student with readings and points of view not covered in the introductory courses. Topics such as languages of the world, variation in language, problems in linguistic structure, and culture and communication. Topic varies.
- Repeatability
- May be repeated with a different topic for a maximum of 9 credit hours.
ANTH-L 402 Language in/of Media
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Examines how language is represented in media and the language(s) of media as ways of understanding broader sociocultural processes. Explores ways scholars have approached language in/of media to date, while also seeking to open new areas of inquiry. Emphasizes research and analysis methods.
ANTH-L 410 Language and Society in Central Eurasia
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- This seminar explores how language is used to accomplish economic, political, and sociocultural ends in Central Eurasia. Topics covered include multilingualism; regional ethnolinguistic categories; the relationship between language policy and nationalities policy; gendered language; code choice in interactions; the politics of translation; poetics; standardization; and language shift, endangerment, and revitalization.
- Repeatability
- Credit given for only one of ANTH-L 410 or CEUS-R 492.
- Fall 2024CASE SHcourseSummer 2024CASE SHcourse
ENG-W 240 Community Service Writing
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- Completion of the English composition requirement
- Description
- Integrates service with learning to develop research and writing skills requisite for most academic and professional activities. Students volunteer at a community service agency, write an assignment for public use by the agency, and perform coursework culminating in a research paper on a related social issue.
FOLK-F 131 Folklore in the United States
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Folklore and traditional expressive behavior in the United States. Traditional arts, ideas, and practices of folk groups in the United States, including ethnic, occupational, regional, and religious groups.
- Fall 2024CASE AHcourseSummer 2024CASE AHcourse
- Fall 2024CASE DUScourseSummer 2024CASE DUScourse
FOLK-F 225 Forms of Commemoration
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Examines forms of commemoration in order to define their essential features and to describe how they operate in society. Highlights folk commemoration, those informal modes of remembrance that are a part of community tradition.
- Fall 2024CASE AHcourseSummer 2024CASE AHcourse
FOLK-F 370 Memory, Art, and Aging: Life Stories and the Expressive Lives of Elders
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Explores the ways that elders recall, organize, revise, and share their life stories. From older poets and artists, to senior storytellers and musicians, we study the interplay between memory, life review, and creative practice in order to understand the dynamic systems of remembering and forgetting devised by elders.
- Fall 2024CASE AHcourseSummer 2024CASE AHcourse
INTL-I 220 Global Connections
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Focuses on globalization as manifested in the shaping of intercultural communication, artistic expressions, collective identities and human rights discourses from comparative and international perspectives.
- Fall 2024CASE AHcourseSummer 2024CASE AHcourse
- Fall 2024CASE GCCcourseSummer 2024CASE GCCcourse
INTL-I 421 Human Rights and the Arts
- Credits
- 3
- Prerequisites
- None
- Description
- Study of human rights through the arts. Exploration of artistic expressions in various sociopolitical contexts and the global trends from which they emerge.
- Repeatability
- May be repeated with a different topic for a maximum of 12 credit hours.
- Minor GPA, Hours, and Minimum Grade Requirements.
- Minor GPA. A GPA of at least 2.000 for all courses taken in the minor—including those where a grade lower than C- is earned—is required.
- Minor Minimum Grade. Except for the GPA requirement, a grade of C- or higher is required for a course to count toward a requirement in the minor.
- Minor Upper Division Credit Hours. At least 9 credit hours in the minor must be completed at the 300–499 level.
- Minor Residency. At least 9 credit hours in the minor must be completed in courses taken through the Indiana University Bloomington campus or an IU-administered or IU co-sponsored Overseas Study program.
Minor Area Courses
Unless otherwise noted below, the following courses are considered in the academic program and will count toward academic program requirements as appropriate:
- Any course contained on the course lists for the academic program requirements at the time the course is taken—as well as any other courses that are deemed functionally equivalent—except for those listed only under Addenda Requirements
- Any course directed to a non-Addenda requirement through an approved exception
This program of study cannot be combined with the following:
- Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology (ANTHBA)
- Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology and Linguistics (ANTHLNGBA)
- Bachelor of Arts in Linguistics and Anthropology (LINGANTBA)
- Certificate in Global Human Diversity (GLHMDVACRT)
- Certificate in the Ethnography of Communication (ETHCOMACRT)
- Minor in Anthropology (ANTHMIN)
- Minor in Archaeology (ARCHMIN)
- Minor in Medical Anthropology (MEDANTHMIN)
- Minor in the Anthropology of Food (FOODMIN)
Exceptions to and substitutions for minor requirements may be made with the approval of the unit's Director of Undergraduate Studies, subject to final approval by the College of Arts and Sciences.