I'm also (somewhat belatedly) trying to figure out my anthropology syllabus. While it would be easier on me, I hate assigning the same things over and over, and I've never repeated books in successive semesters simply because it's boring. It's hard figuring out the right calibration; my favorite ethnographies are either too "esoteric" or too theory-laden for the first-years to appreciate. At the same time, I want them to be able to sink their teeth into actual ethnography.
Last spring was, I think, a successful one, though one student rightly criticized me for not assigning any ethnographies per se. Anne Fadiman's The Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down is a triumph of journalistic writing, but in terms of anthropological principles and ethics skirts, at times, on the dubious. Donald Stull and Michael Broadway's Slaughterhouse Blues was, strictly speaking, a sociological study and not the single-sited, area-focused work of which most anthropologists are fond. (This was, however, something of a surprise hit: I wouldn't have figured a book on the American meatpacking industry would generate such great discussions.). In any case, both books had their fans (and of course I am one): one student said he would be "greatly disturbed" if I didn't reassign Fadiman this semester, and another thought I should do Slaughterhouse Blues again because it was "important for students to read about social inequity."
I also used to assign at least one book on music -- I'm sure you regular readers know how invested I am in it -- but haven't done so in a long time. My students have read books on techno, hiphop and dancehall -- not all of them ethnographies though -- and enjoyed them, I think. (My former student Jean Jacket thanked me the other night for assigning Deena Weinstein's Heavy Metal -- as she put it, "it got me a boyfriend.")
So far I've boiled it down to a Bay Area-centered fall. (As an outsider, I explain to the students every semester, I'm very fascinated with American culture.) I'm looking through Carla Menjivar's Fragmented Lives, on Salvadoran immigrants in SF (I wonder how it compares with Sarah Mahler's American Dreaming, which actually upset a couple of people one semester), and J.A. English-Lueck's cultures@siliconvalley, and both look quite fascinating. Rebecca Solnit's well-written and still relevant (though really rather breezy) Hollow City, on gentrification in SF, might be a good quick addition as well. (Plus excerpts / articles from Gray Brechin's Imperial San Francisco, or the Castro Street chapter from Frances Fitzgerald's Cities on a Hill, a screening of Curtis Choy's documentary The Fall of the I-Hotel, maybe something of mine about Daly City...)
The other combination I'm considering has not much relevance with each other. Leo Chavez's Shadowed Lives, on undocumented Latino immigrants in San Diego, was a real eye-opener for many of the students a year ago; the fact that Chavez also made two documentaries in connection with his work makes it a no-brainer to assign to an intro class.
The other is Michael Moffatt's Coming of Age in New Jersey, about which I'm still on the fence. His ethnography on Rutgers students is hilarious, well-written and sucks you in; it also features a chapter I've used before that beautifully illustrates how brilliant insights can emerge from seemingly banal but detailed participant observation. But it also happens to be quite dated (the research was done in the '80s) -- which might, in fact, be a good launching point for discussion. (The attitudes toward race, for instance, are pretty hair-raising; the chapters on sex, at least at first skim, seem to just go on in somewhat creepy detail about students' sexual experiences / fantasies.) Or maybe toss Tanya Luhrmann's (I'm a big fan of her work) Of 2 Minds in the mix.
Yesterday at Moe's I bought three more ethnographies that look extremely interesting as well. One of them, Setha Low's Behind the Gates, seems like a better companion to Chavez's ethnography mentioned above; it's a study on gated communities, and should make the students think about fear, security, borders, labor and so on.
But then I could always go back to the old standbys: women in rural Iraq, fellatio rituals in New Guinea, poverty in Naples...