Just as some objects (for instance, Native American "crafts") have been studied as objects of cultural knowledge (and studied as commodities within a booming tourist trade), so other objects (jars, pitchers, vases) have been the source of phenomenological and psychoanalytic speculation. This course will track the ways in which literary and artistic texts stage the convergence of (or disjunture between) anthropological and philosophical (or personal, cultural, and ontological) understandings of particularly "fetishized" objects, including cars and clothes, dolls and Pueblo pots. We will examine how literary and visual texts portray "object culture," how they explore the accumulation and traffic in artefacts, and how they dramatize the formation and transformation of value. Although we will read broadly in the history of consumer culture in the U.S., I presume that our interest will lie in portraits of the subject/object relation that are irreducible to what goes by the name of commodity fetishism (classically understood). The fiction will include work by Fitzgerald, Barnes, and Cather; the art will include work by Stella, Demuth, and O'Keefe. Other readings will be diverse: in anthropology, Frank Hamilton Cushing, Igor Kopytoff, Ira Jacknis, and Barbara Babcock, for instance; in philosophy (broadly conceived), Georg Simmel, Ernst Bloch, Adorno, Heidegger, and Derrida. Our focus will gradually narrow to the American South West, and to the impact of the "Cliff-Dwellers" on American and European thought. The course will include a film screening and a trip to the Field Museum. Besides the final essay (25 pp.), students will present at least one "position paper" (addressing the weekly reading) and give an oral presentation of their research.