BOISE STATE UNIVERSITY SPRING 2008
COURSE SYLLABUS
ANTH200: KINSHIP & SOCIAL ORGANIZATION
MWF 11:40 to 12:30 MP 118
Kendall House, Ph.D
Instructor
Welcome to the new semester. Please treat this syllabus as your first reading assignment, and study it carefully. It is filled with information that you really need to know, including my expectations, requirements, and policies, the schedule of lectures and exams, and what it is we plan to accomplish this semester. I may pose questions regarding it on exams. If you have any questions regarding anything discussed in this syllabus please contact me and ask for clarification.
1
Because I teach part time, primary contact this
semester will be via email. Send your email to khouse@boisestate.edu I will check this email frequently, and answer every email you send me
so long as you clearly identify yourself. Try to be as detailed, and polite, as
possible, and always include your name and class section: I may not
respond to anonymous emails. You are strongly encouraged to use email
rather than telephone to communicate with me.
2
If you wish to talk to me in person, I will be in the
department from 10:45 to 11:15 on MWF. We can meet in the adjunct office,
downstairs in the southeast corner of the Hemingway Western Studies Center (see
the map in the Directory of Classes), adjacent to the main anthropology
department. I am not a full-time faculty member,
and I will usually be unavailable at other times. Like many of
you, I have other obligations and limited flexibility outside my scheduled
campus hours.
COURSE
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
To study kinship and marriage is to reflect on how we go about finding our place in the world. It joins together the intimate and the abstract, the chosen and the imposed, what we take to be normalcy and perversion, natural and artificial, authentic and false, in the disorienting fashion that only anthropology can offer. Whether or not ‘family’ is significant in your life, whether or not you are or intend to marry, whether you have or will or will not beget offspring, the questions we will consider remain relevant. For it could be that more is involved in these matters than your conscious decision-making suggests.
Contemporary anthropologists offer two divergent perspectives on these matters - one suggesting that who and what we are is basically an arbitrary product of our collective imagination, an outcome of the traditions we are born into, the forces that impinge on them, and the courage we show in transforming or preserving them. To share substance is to imagine commonality with other beings, human or not. The other suggests that who and what we are is a product of evolutionary processes and, while historically contingent, the result of material processes that our imagination can marvel at and seek to understand, but cannot escape.
Sounds interesting, I hope.
If it does, it probably will not surprise you that scholars who specialize in the study of kinship and marriage once confidently assured us that it was perhaps the core topic in anthropology, a matter absolutely central to the discipline. From this perspective, an aspiring anthropologist ignorant of kinship and marriage was akin to a pre-med student unacquainted with anatomy and physiology: without a grasp of kinship and marriage, anthropology must elude you. At some point during the 1970s, this truism lost its hold, and today literacy in kinship and marriage is much reduced among anthropologists. It would be interesting indeed to see the results if the questions you will tackle in this course were placed before a random sample of professional anthropologists, particularly those who have taken their Ph.D since 1980.
But the topic is again showing some signs of renewed vigor among anthropologists, and even were it not, much that was said of the topic before 1970 remains true: without a grasp of kinship and marriage, much of anthropology will elude you.
Approximately 80% of the material we will examine in this class was produced before 1970. I hope this does not discourage you. The questions raised and material gathered during this period are far from inert. They are lifeless only if we make them so. I do not intend to simply retreat to the year 1970, however. What we will do in this course is explore why the topic was so central to the field from the 1860s to the 1960s, why it was marginalized after the 1970s, and why it is regaining momentum today.
Put more concretely, a satisfactory survey of kinship and marriage requires delving into four kinds of material that are difficult to cleanly separate. They clump together in thick clods that scrape your knuckles and callous your palms (figuratively speaking, of course, but there is some effort involved).
To begin with, students of kinship and marriage have created a series of partly interconnected but far from consistent bodies of what we can call expert knowledge – intricate conceptualizations replete with rich technical vocabularies that take considerable time and effort to master. These center on topics like classificatory kin terminologies, symmetrical martial alliance, bridewealth and dowry, lineal descent and affliliation, lineages and clans and kindreds, incest and exogamy, and many similar conceptual tangles. It is this, more than anything, that makes the topic intimidating to most students, irredeemably abstract to others, and glorious to a perverse minority. To a large degree, we can attribute this formalism to the influence of law, linguistics, and mathematics.
In addition, the study of kinship and marriage has been pursued by scholars hailing from a variety of national traditions utilizing partly incommensurable theoretical perspectives – such as French structuralism, British functionalism, or the underappreciated contributions of American materialism. These are important and cannot be ignored, because they shape how kinship and marriage is conceptualized and the nature of inquiry in a very fundamental manner. More pointedly, they decide the relevance of kinship to anthropology. Understanding kinship, thus, requires gaining some understanding of the theoretical history of anthropology.
But the study of kinship and marriage has a third anchor, woven through the prior two concerns in a kind of conceptual polycoity. This results from the interplay of the expert knowledge and theories discussed above with the analysis of specific cultures and societies. Thus there is a geography to kinship studies, and regions like western Australia, or southern India, or eastern Africa – and often specific peoples, such as the Aranda, the Nayar or the Nuer - are associated with specific national theoretical traditions or specific tangles of expert knowledge. Understanding kinship therefore requires getting a minimal handle on its geographical distribution.
This leads us, finally, to the fourth dimension of kinship studies, the effort at ethnological generalization. This is the rarest sort of anthropology, and in its full expression it is today almost nonexistent. But through resources like the HRAF file some anthropologists have long struggled to summarize and say something conclusive about the range of variation kinship systems possess. Having some sense of how common polyandry is in the world, how it is associated with inheritance or residence, where it is prevalent and where absent, is quite valuable. So we will consider this dimension, too.
So, what should you know if you successfully complete this course? Well, you should find your feet in relation to each of the four topics discussed above, so that you are ready and hopefully encouraged to pursue your interests further.
I have broken the course syllabus into a series of independent sections as indicated below. You should review each section now, and refer back to them as the semester progresses for specific purposes. They will be available online all semester making it unnecessary to print the syllabus. To view them, return to the main syllabus page at Blackboard and click on the appropriate link.
Course Requirements and Attendance Policies This section explains what books you need to purchase, what activities you will be expected to engage in to complete the course, and outlines policies on attending, missed exams - no make up exams will be offered in this class – and so forth.
The Internet and this Course The second portion of the syllabus explains what we will be using the Internet for, and your responsibilities regarding that use.
Methods of Assessment and Grading This section explains what I will base your grade on, and how your grade will be assigned.
Schedule of Lectures, Readings, and Exams This section contains a tentative schedule of events. I ordinarily stick to the plan fairly closely, but I reserve the right to adjust it as necessary as we proceed. I will notify the class of any major changes – such as cancellations – via email and an announcement at Blackboard, and make a revised schedule available on the Blackboard. I will do everything possible to keep the exam dates exactly as scheduled, so you can plan on them.
Remember, by signing up for a class, you are indicating your availability to attend during all scheduled hours.
REQUIRED
BOOKS, ATTENDANCE POLICIES, EXPECTATIONS
There are five required books. This may seem like a
lot, but four are meant to add an element of cultural richness to what can be a
dry, abstract topic. The fifth is a textbook focused on concepts. You will need
to read them to do well. This is most easily accomplished if you own personal
copies. It is a good idea to purchase them early, because the bookstore returns
books to the publishers early and they will not be
available later in the semester at the campus bookstore (you can likely
buy them from another seller online, however, perhaps for considerably less
money). It is your responsibility to have these books at hand. Not
having books will not excuse late work in any fashion, and I do not have extra
copies on hand to lend. I have listed the ISBN of
titles you may be able to purchase online via independent booksellers.
Robert Parkin 1997 Kinship an Introduction to the Basic Concepts. ISBN 0631203591 Blackwell.
This is
in a sense the main text, though the lectures will serve that purpose more
directly. Kinship texts come in two varieties, the trivial and the obscure.
This one tends toward obscurity. However, it has the merit of dedicating four
chapters to Levi-Strauss’s alliance perspective, a topic that can be difficult
to grasp. This makes it worth the investment. You may find this book selling
online used for considerably less than it retails new.
The remaining four books are the “fun” part of this course. They consist of relatively short ethnographic studies either focused on or with substantial sections dealing with kinship and marriage. I have chosen them because of their empirical diversity, and because I am familiar with the wider literature on the societies they consider. Three are written from a humanistic, interpretive perspective. By this I mean that they focus a good deal of attention on how people think about themselves and their relations, and on how to translate the conceptual systems of various cultures into terms that make sense to people outside those societies. We’ll see whether or not you think they are successful. Besides being relatively short, they are also generally available used in online book marketplaces for very little money.
Alma Gottlieb 1997 Under the Kapok Tree: Identity and Difference in Beng Thought ISBN 0226305074 Chicago.
This
book focuses on the Beng of West Africa, who utilize a system of reckoning
ancestry and group affiliation that anthropologists refer to as double descent.
In addition to illustrating double descent, the book has a chapter on cousin
marriage that helps concretize the concepts of alliance discussed by Parkin
(above). This makes it interesting because marriage alliance is usually felt to
“fit” systems in south and southeast Asia, Australia, and lowland South America
much better than African societies.
Hildred Geertz and Clifford Geertz 1975 Kinship in Bali ISBN 0226285162 Chicago.
This book discusses the kinship system of the Balinese, who live on a small, beautiful island in the Indonesian archipelago. The Balinese are mostly Hindu, and practice intensive irrigated rice agriculture. In the past they were organized into a series of competing states, called Negara. The main kin group of the Balinese is known as a Dadia. The Geertz’s seem puzzled by Balinese kinship, and in the end ask whether the Balinese have a kinship system. This may seem odd, but it represents a major argument in late twentieth century cultural anthropology, usually associated with Geertz’s one-time colleague David Schneider.
Gary Witherspoon 1975 Navajo Kinship and Marriage ISBN 0226904172 Chicago.
Witherspoon also has difficulty getting his head around Navajo kinship, but in this he is not alone. The Navajo, a Native American people living in the southwestern United States, are uniformly interpreted as a matrilineal people practicing matrilocal residence, but beyond that things get blurry. This is puzzling, because the Navajo are candidates for most the intensively studied people on the planet. Nonetheless, how Navajo kinship relates to Navajo social organization has never been clear.
Richard Lee 2003 or 1993 The Dobe Ju/’hoansi ISBN 0155063332 or 0030322847. Wadsworth.
Either the second or third editions of this book will work fine. This is a classic introductory ethnography, with fairly straightforward discussions of kinship and marriage from a cultural ecology perspective. The Ju/’hoansi live primarily in the border areas of Botswana and Namibia in southern Africa. They are in competition with the Navajo for the most intensively studied group of people on the planet. Lee presents the Ju/’hoansi as a hunter gatherer society organized around bilateral kindreds. We will use this work as an opening to consider the variety of systems found with foragers and the relationship between kinship, marriage, cooperation, exchange, and demography.
In addition there will be required and recommended readings from anthropology journals held electronically by the BSU library. We will explore a much broader set of ideas relating to kinship than the ethnographies above initially suggest. I will have readings relating to what I cover in class for you to delve into. You will need to learn how to utilize the article and journal search systems of the library to access these materials. Access to these journals is one of the biggest bonuses of your status as a fee paying student. I encourage you to take advantage of it.
Ability and willingness to maintain excellent, punctual attendance is a necessity. Students who accumulate absences rarely pass the course, much less excel. Attendance will be scored this semester, and for most students no other single factor will affect your grade as greatly as attending regularly. Below are answers to the three most common questions students have about attending.
How many absences are excessive? A widely shared national standard for a 45 hour semester course defines more than three hours of missed lectures as excessive (that’s three MWF classes) Many schools place students who miss more than three hours on probation. At BSU, this does not happen. However, you jeopardize your performance with every hour you miss. All else being equal, you will do better the fewer days you miss: the more difficult you find the class, the more important it is to be there for every lecture.
What happens if my life gets messed up and I miss a lot of class? Please be aware that prolonged absence, for whatever reason, may make it advisable to withdraw. After a certain point,it is simply unrealistic to expect to catch up. More than nine hours of missed classes makes passing unlikely for most students. Come see me, and / or visit with your academic advisor, to discuss your options. Late withdrawals are sometimes possible. Please note that an Incomplete is not a remedy for excessive absences.
What if I miss an exam? No make-ups will be given. But your lowest score on one exam prior to and excluding the final will be thrown out at the end of the course. If you miss an exam before the final, your lowest score will be zero. Missing two or more exams will seriously impact your chances of passing the course and may make withdrawal advisable.
EXPECTATIONS FOR STUDENT CONDUCT
In a nutshell, like all your instructors, I expect you to arrive prior to the start of lecture, remain seated until its conclusion, and conduct yourself during the interim in a manner that shows consideration for your fellow students and myself. Manners are important.
METHODS
OF ASSESSMENT AND GRADING
Your grade in this class will be
based on your attendance and your performance on the exams. Exams
will consist of combinations of written and objective questions (see Schedule
portion of the syllabus for exam dates). No form of academic dishonesty will
be tolerated in this class. As university faculty I have the authority to
confirm your identity using your student I.D. card at any time I choose, but
particularly prior to accepting your exam.
FIVE EXAMS 900 points possible Including the required final, five
exams will be given. Each of the four exams prior to the final will be worth
200 points. Your lowest score on one of these four PRE-FINAL exams will
be thrown out at the end of the course (leaving 600 points). Should you miss
one of the midterm exams prior to the final, your lowest score will be zero.
Missing more than one midterm exam will result in a significant permanent loss
of points that cannot be recovered. No make ups will be given for any reason.
ABSOLUTELY NO MAKE UPS WILL BE GIVEN ON THE FINAL EXAM, and final scores will
not be thrown out. The final is worth 300 points (hence 900 points total).
ATTENDANCE 100 points
possible plus 10 points bonus for perfect attendance. We are scheduled for
43 meetings, three days a week over 15 weeks. Each day you attend – arriving on
time and remaining until the end of class – you will receive two points. If you
arrive late or leave early you will receive one point. How does this add up to
100? The first day you attend you will receive 16 points, after this it is two
points. If good health and fortune allow you to attend every day, you will
receive a 10 point bonus on the last day of class.
1000 - 970 =
A+
969 - 930 =
A
929 - 895 = A-
____________________________________________________________
894 - 865 = B+
864 - 825 = B
824 - 795 = B-
____________________________________________________________
794 - 750 = C+
749 - 710 = C
709 - 671 = C-
____________________________________________________________
670 - 640 = D+
639 - 600 = D
599 - 560 = D-
____________________________________________________________
559 and below = F
This schedule identifies course topics,
readings, and exam dates.
MONDAY FEBRUARY 11 FIRST EXAM, 70 points
Tylor,
Edward B.
1858 Laws of Descent of the Iroquois. Proceedings of the American
Association for the Advancement of Science
Volume XI, Part II, pgs. 132-148.
II. FUNCTIONALISM AND DESCENT THEORY - FROM FORMATION TO
CRITIQUE
The second portion of the course focuses on the form taken
by the study of kinship and marriage in the 20th century British
tradition of social anthropology. We will consider the influence of W.H.R.
Rivers, the position taken by Bronislaw Malinowski, and the key work of Alfred
R. Radcliffe-Brown, Edward E. Evans-Pritchard, Meyer Fortes, and Jack Goody.
The main line of the British tradition is associated with a perspective known
as descent theory, which focuses on the formation of corporate social groups on
the basis of common ancestry. This tradition is most closely associated with
Africa, and its classical formulations date to the 1940s. By the 1960s, doubts
were being expressed regarding the appropriateness of “African models” when
applied to other areas of the world. By the 1980s, doubts were being expressed
whether the “African models” fit Africa. Additionally, from the 1950s forward,
this tradition was locked in conflict with French thinking, which we will
explore later. Key topics will concern descent, filiation, segmentary lineages,
inheritance, and succession.
WEDNESDAY MARCH 5 SECOND EXAM, 70 points
8 Lectures covered: Wednesday February 13 to Monday March 3.
Readings covered:
From
textbooks Parkin, Kinship, pages 14-36, 143-152. Geertz, Kinship
in Bali
From BSU
library electronic journals -
Fortes,
Meyer
American Anthropologist
55(1): 17-41
Kuper,
Adam
Annual Review of Anthropology
11: 71-95.
Malinowski,
Bronislaw
1930 Kinship. Man 30(17): 19-29.
Radcliffe-Brown,
Alfred R
1941 The Study of Kinship Systems. Journal of the Royal Anthropological
Institute of Great Britain & Ireland 1(1/2):1-18.
(Presidential Address)
Rivers, W.
H. R.
1900 A Genealogical Method of Collecting Social
and Vital Statistics.
Journal of the Anthropological
Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 30: 74-82.
III. HISTORICAL PARTICULARITY, NEO-EVOLUTIONISM, AND KINSHIP SEMANTICS
The third segment of the course will look at the American
tradition in the study of kinship and marriage. American thinking is often
overlooked, and it was in many ways derivative of British thought. However,
American thinking differed in several respects, and generated three quite distinctive
traditions: first, the Boasian tradition, dominated by the work of Robert
Lowie; secondly, the neo-evolutionary tradition, associated with Julian Steward
and Leslie White, but also important in the work of George Murdock; and
thirdly, the semantic tradition, associated with the formal analyses of Ward
Goodenough, Floyd Lounsbury, and Harold Scheffler. Between the Boasians and the
later semantic tradition there is a strand of continuity centered on what to
make of kinship terminologies. Kinship terminologies, along with the search for
cross-cultural patterns based on modes of adaptation, will be the theme of this
segment of the course.
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 2, THIRD EXAM, 70 points
8 Lectures covered: Friday March 7 to Monday March 31.
Readings covered -
From
textbooks Parkin, Kinship, 47-77; Lee,
the Dobe Ju’hoansi pages 1-123.
From BSU
library electronic journals -
Kroeber,
Alfred L.
1909 Classificatory Systems of Relationship. Journal of the Royal Anthropological
Institute of Great Britain & Ireland 39:
77-84
Lowie,
Robert H.
1928 A Note on Relationship Terminologies. American Anthropologist 30(2):
263-267.
Romney, A.
Kimball & Roy D’Andrade
1964 Cognitive Aspects of English Kin Terms. American Anthropologist 66(1):
146-155.
Steward,
Julian
1941 Determinism in Primitive Society? Scientific Monthly 53(6):524-537.
White,
Leslie
1948 The Definition and Prohibition of
Incest. American Anthropologist
50(3): 416-435
IV. ALLIANCE THEORY AND THE FRENCH TRADITION
The fourth segment of the course will look at the formation
of ‘alliance theory’ - a perspective
strongly associated with French structural anthropology and especially Claude
Levi-Strauss, and in France, his disciple Louis Dumont. In Britain, a
structuralist movement was launched which came to be associated primarily with
Edmund Leach and Rodney Needham, and by the 1950s a “debate” was underway
opposing alliance theory to descent theory. We will consider the various forms
of marital exchanges that consumed the energies of alliance theorists, and
focus in on aboriginal Australia. Our technical focus for this segment of the
course will be on marriage systems.
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 23, FOURTH EXAM, 70 points
7 Lectures covered: Friday April 4 to Monday April 21
Readings covered -
From
textbooks Parkin, Kinship, pages
78-122, 153-169; Gottlieb, Kapok Tree pages
1-97.
From BSU library electronic journals
1966 Descent or Intermarriage? A Relational View
of Australian Section Systems.
Southwestern Journal of
Anthropology 22(3): 231-250.
From BSU library ELECTRONIC RESERVES
1966 Structural Analysis in Linguistics and
Anthropology.
Chapter 2 of Structural
Anthropology pgs. 31-54.
V. THE DEMISE AND REVIVAL OF KINSHIP STUDIES
The final segment of the course will look at the ‘demise’
of kinship studies after 1970 and their revival in the last two decades under
very different perspectives. The “demise” was driven by several distinct lines
of criticism: the critique of descent theory within British anthropology; doubt
as to the utility of formal models - whether structural or semantic - within
American anthropology; the growing opposition to materialism in American
anthropology; and the emergence of feminist and critical anthropologies. In
some ways the American rejection was neo-Boasian, as expressed in the work of
Clifford Geertz and David Schneider. But perhaps most significant was simply a
shift away from the concept of ‘primitive’ societies as the subject matter of
cultural and social anthropologists. The revival of kinship studies has come
from two directions - a humanistic culturalist anthropology of kinship,
stressing the influence of historically particular symbolic meanings and the
workings of the cultural imagination, and neo-Darwinian evolutionary
anthropology, stressing genetic interests and natural selection. We will
consider the criticisms of kinship offered by a variety of anthropologists such
as Adam Kuper who questioned the general applicability of both descent and
alliance approaches, as well as the broad scale dismissal of kinship and
marriage as ethnocentric by David Schneider and the specific challenges of
feminists.
THURSDAY, MAY 15 10:30
to 12:30, FINAL EXAM, 90 points
7 Lectures covered - Friday April 25 to Friday May 9
Readings covered -
From
textbooks Parkin, Kinship, pages 123-132.
From BSU
library electronic journals
2002 Kinship and Evolved Psychological
Dispositions. Current Anthropology 43(5): 723-748.
1981 What is Polynesian Kinship All About? Ethnology 20(2): 115-131.
Leonetti,
Donna; Dilip Nath, and Natabar Heman
2007 In-law Conflict: Women’s Reproductive Lives
and the Roles of Their Mothers and Husbands among the Matrilineal Khasi. Current Anthropology 48(6): 861-890.
1991 The Human Community as a Primate Society. Current Anthropology 32(3): 221-254.
Use of
the Internet is a Requirement in this Course
This is an Internet Enhanced Course. This course has a required Internet component, and you will need to make extensive use of the Internet to complete it. As a student, you have a free campus email account, and free Internet access through the campus computer labs. This section of the syllabus answers some common questions.
Blackboard is Boise State’s campus-wide instructional Internet system, located at http://blackboard.boisestate.edu. Students maintain an identity in this system from which they can access the Internet component of their courses. The university provides substantial support, including online support and tutorials. It is your responsibility to use the resources the university provides to acquire Internet competence. I have scheduled a trip to the library so that you can become acquainted with using their resources..
To complete this class, you will be required to utilize the Internet for three primary purposes:
1. to access necessary course materials at the Blackboard website, including this syllabus, handouts, required readings, web sites, check your grades, and many other aspects of this course. There is no way to do well in the course and not use the Internet.
2.
to acquire necessary readings from the electronic
journals collection at the Albertson’s library, as indicated in the
syllabus and as we proceed in class.
3.
to utilize email to communicate with me.
Whether you send me email or not, you will need to be able to receive it. I
will be using email to send the class as a whole notifications throughout the
semester.
Technical difficulties happen. Given this, it is never a good idea to leave critical Internet assignments until the last minute. Technical problems will not excuse late work or incomplete assignments. I am neither a technician nor a technical advisor Recent changes to Blackboard mean that I cannot reset passwords. If you are having problems accessing the Blackboard website, send an email to blackboard@boisestate.edu.
Email is very important in this class: My email address for this course is khouse@boisestate.edu You should use email to notify me of illnesses, absences, or problems, to ask procedural questions about the course and exams, or any questions of a personal or private nature you would not want to ask in class. Email has significant advantages over the phone. It eliminates playing phone tag, and it makes it possible to convey precise information quickly and concisely.
Each semester I trade several hundred email messages with students. Because of the volume most of my responses are rather brief. I will do my best to address your questions in the time available.
When sending me email, please always identify yourself and the section of the course you are enrolled in. I may not respond to anonymous emails. However, I do answer ALL properly attributed emails, usually within 48hours.
There are two things I will not use email for:
a) I will not argue with you. Email is poorly suited for presenting complaints, as the absence of voice and gesture can lead to misinterpretations of intent. It also creates a permanent, indelible record of things you may later regret saying. If you become upset about something, first calm down, and then make an appointment to see me in person.
b) I will not deliver lectures, offer quizzes, distribute materials, or accept any work via email, nor will I open any attachments (due to the risk of viruses, I encourage you to do the same).
POLICIES ON ONLINE CONDUCT: The Blackboard site is part of the BSU campus: although it is online, the Internet portion of this course is part of the BSU campus and subject to the same expectations for student conduct as the campus as a whole. If you are unfamiliar with these standards, you should review your Student Handbook.
In particular, you should expect significant penalties if you masquerade under false identities, harass other students or staff in any manner, or engagein academic dishonesty on the campus Internet. A good rule of thumb is this: anything unacceptable in the real world campus environment is also unacceptable in the Internet campus environment. The difference? When you are online, you leave a record of every move you make. The Internet is not an anonymous nor private, and I can generate a history of your activity on our course site (including the date and time of each log in) with the click of a button.
And you ought to take special note of that last point: when you login at the Blackboard site, every move you make is "tracked" and recorded. This means I know how often you visit the Blackboard site, when, and what features of the site you have utilized. BSU has recently formulated an Internet Privacy policy. It is available on the Blackboard home page.