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Nicole Kousaleos PhD, Indiana University, 2000. Personal narrative and transformation; Violence against women and children; Feminist theory and ethnography; Media and body image; Medical anthropology; Contemporary Amercan "alternative" identities; Applied ethnography and community action.
office: 501, North Park
email:
nkousale at indiana.edu
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F101 Introduction to Folklore: Folklore throughout the life cycle
What is folklore? Every culture has folklore-- all people create ways to understand the world around them and communicate these understandings to others through their stories, their food, their art, their music, their life rituals, and various other traditions. Introduction to Folklore is designed to introduce students to the ways in which folklore functions in the everyday lives of people around the world throughout the life cycle. The course begins with birth traditions and continues through childhood, adolescence, adulthood, aging, death, and after death (communication with spirits and beliefs involving the afterlife). How do different groups and individuals communicate and represent their cultural identity through their artistic expressions?
Fulfills COLL Arts & Humanities |
F363 Women's Folklore, Gender and Embodiment
This course focuses on the embodied cultural experiences and expressions of women as viewed from an ethnographic perspective. It is the goal of this course to explore women's cultural experience (mainly in the U.S. and West Africa), by focusing on the ways women transform their experiences and make meaning in their lives through art, ritual, performance, narrative and other expressive forms. This course also seeks to examine the gender systems in various cultural contexts that influence and shape (and sometimes constrain), the way that individual women make meaning. We will be looking in depth at some of our own gender systems and the institutions through which these are spread, in order to explore some of the ways our cultural constructions of gender affect the way we experience being women living inside particular bodies. Some of the readings we will be doing will be theoretical while the bulk of the material will come from the field experiences and writings of various women ethnographers and women artists. Coursework for the class includes several mini-papers, a journal, and a in-depth fieldwork project.
Fulfills COLL Arts & Humanities, CSA |
