Sections offered SPRING 2021:
#10249 |
JEFFREY HOLDEMAN |
MW 4:55-6:10 |
WEB |
CLASS NOTES: IUB GenEd S&H credit; COLL (CASE) S&H Breadth of Inquiry credit; COLL (CASE) Diversity in U.S. credit
Above class meets 100% Online through Synchronous instruction. For more information visit https://fall2020.iu.edu/learning-modes/
The United States has been called “the great American melting pot”—a hodge-podge of the peoples of the world—and some foreign visitors contend that it has no discernible culture or identity of its own. Is America a fondue of uniform taste and consistency? A mixed salad of various, separate components? A stew of blended but identifiable ingredients which has a flavor all its own?
In the largest wave of immigration to the U.S.—from the 1880s until 1914—tens of millions of people arrived from Central and Eastern Europe. Over the course of the 20th century, they were joined by millions more. This course will focus on the peoples from the areas of modern-day Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Hungary, Romania, Moldova, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Romania, Albania, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Greece, Kosovo, and Montenegro, as well as stateless groups like Ashkenazi Jews, Carpathian Rusyns, Sorbs, Tatars, and Roma.
In this course we will explore ways in which one’s ethnic culture and identity (traditional and contemporary, from one’s homeland and in one’s new environment) can manifest themselves in art, music, food, clothing, language, social structure, religion, worldview, etc. We will do this through posing a series of questions: What do people arrive with beyond their physical baggage? What do they choose to keep and discard from their native or heritage culture? How do they choose to “perform” or display this for themselves, to each other, and to outsiders? What benefits and costs come from maintaining a foreign ethnic identity in the U.S.?
Students will learn and discuss core concepts from a variety of fields, things such as language maintenance and shift; boundary construction and negotiation; material culture; generation gap; regional variation; endogamy and exogamy; and acculturation, assimilation, and transculturation. At the core will be the concept of identity and the many forms it can take. Students will also learn basic techniques of urban fieldwork and research in order to carry out interviews and projects later in the semester. All of these will come together in the process of trying to answer what it means to be “ethnic” in America.
The course will consist of at-home readings and writing assignments, in-class discussions and group work, essay tests, films, and optional fieldtrips, and it will culminate in the presentation of multimedia course projects based on an ethnic community from our target region in a U.S. locale and time period chosen by the student. Readings and discussions will expose students to a variety of disciplines and approaches, such as those from ethnography, sociology, history, psychology, sociolinguistics, and ethnomusicology.