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Course Overview: Los Angeles
is perhaps the most culturally diverse city in the history of the world.
On a daily basis peoples from all walks of life and all parts of the globe
meet, mingle, and craft new communal meanings in the streets of L.A. This
course takes as its subject the fundamental ways that concepts of culture
and cultural traits are located, expressed, and interpreted in the City
of Angels. Sometimes these are sources of integration, sometimes points
of conflict. Course participants will extend the classroom to include the
numerous neighborhoods and local communities of Los Angeles and its environs.
Students will have the opportunity to explore – through lectures,
fieldwork, and research reports – the cultural life of the city. From
East L.A. and Chinatown to Leimert Park and the idealized Main Street of
Disneyland, we will explore the diversity of Southern California’s
cultural landscape. We will also consider, among other things, the polished
marble walls and manicured lawns of Beverly Hills, the haphazard squatter
camps of Skid Row, the tanned and sculpted bodies of Venice Beach, and the
white clad lawn bowlers of Century City. Special emphasis will be placed
on the documentation and analysis of how expressive behaviors (e.g. artworks,
festive events, foodways, musical traditions, sacred sites, etc.) denote
and demonstrate notions of cultural identity and, above all, help to establish
the elusive “sense of place” that marks human inhabitation of
a particular spot on the map. |
