DEPARTMENT OF ANTHROPOLOGY

Fall 2023 Class Schedule

Schedule subject to change

 *Starred courses required of all majors 

Fall quarter 2023 course descriptions.

ANTHRO  101-7-1: First-Year Seminar: Currencies, Passports and Visas

As the era of digital currencies and Global Entry, one might assume that paper money, passports and visas—printed licenses to mobility—are fast becoming relics of an analog past. Yet for whom holds that assumption hold true? With border walls and offshored asylum processing centers troubling that rosy picture of borderless global mobility, this assumption seems begs a reexamination. In this course, we ask: who gets to assume and who is categorically denied the privileges of these mundane papers? How do papers serve that divide between the haves and have-nots of global mobility?

In probing these questions we will read across several different academic disciplines and investigative journalism to become familiar with key analytic concepts, methods, and historical phenomena, such as citizenship-for-investment schemes, the US Green Card lottery, emergency responders across US-Mexico borderlands, methodological nationalism, ethnography, and political economy. Our goal in the seminar is to critically assess how seemingly mundane papers make or break the possibilities of movement across modern state borders, differentiated along axes of ethnicity and race, class, gender, and geography.

ANTHRO  101-7-2: First-Year Seminar: Biological Thought and Action

Science is a process by which people make sense of the world. Scientists examine evidence from the past, work to understand the present, and make predictions about the future. Integral to this process are the methods they use to collect and analyze data, as well as the ways in which scientists work together as a community to interpret evidence and draw conclusions. In this class, we will take a multidisciplinary approach to examining biological thought and action and their social ramifications. We will seek to understand science as a social pursuit: the work of human beings with individual, disciplinary, and cultural differences, and requiring tremendous investments in training and equipment. Does it matter that participation in science is more accessible to some than to others? How do biases, assumptions, uncertainty, and error manifest in scientific work? What is the history of scientific values such as objectivity and reproducibility? The course will conclude by investigating current topics of public debate

ANTHRO  101-7-3: First-Year Seminar: Going Paleo: Ancestral lifeways and their modern implications

 Recently ideas about the “paleo-lifestyle” have begun to be spread in popular culture, often with prescriptions about how modern humans should conduct their lives in order to achieve better health and well-being. This course will survey some of these “paleo” recommendations and popular conceptions of our ancestors. These popular conceptions will be viewed critically against the evidence for what our ancestors actually did and what, if anything, it means for people living in the modern era. Some of the included topics will include dietary recommendations, exercise/barefoot running, childcare and feeding practices, and pathogen exposure/immune function.

ANTHRO 101-7-4: First-Year Seminar: The Goddesses

This class is for anyone who enjoys reading (or writing) about goddesses, witches, saints, heroines, and other powerful, larger-than-life feminine, genderqueer or womanly figures from myth, history and fiction. The first part of the course will introduce a few figures from Native and Latin America, Europe, Asia, and the African diaspora. Possible figures include Deer Woman; Coatlicue; the Virgen de Guadalupe; Joan of Arc; Yemanya; as well as fictional characters from contemporary writers such as Madeline Miller and N K Jemisin. Each week, we will explore the social and political dimensions of our goddesses: how have authors and artists used these figures to express critiques of gender, race, and social inequality; re-examine troubled histories; or re-imagine human/nonhuman relationships, and envision environmental futurities? In the classroom and outside it, we will use these explorations to learn, practice and hone a variety of writing skills. In the second part of the course, students will choose one goddess as their topic, and then learn the fundamentals of academic research by investigating the social and cultural history behind ‘their’ goddess, culminating in a final paper.

ANTHRO  214-0-1: Archaeology: Unearthing History

This course is an introduction to the anthropological subfield of archaeology, its theories and methods, and the political and social issues that arise when we study human pasts. In this course, we look at the history of the discipline and its theoretical underpinnings, as well as methodological topics including how archaeologists create research designs, discover and excavate sites, and analyze artifacts and features. We will also explore how archaeology confronts and deals with contemporary issues critical to the archaeological project and the communities that archaeologists engage with: e.g. heritage preservation and Indigenous/community rights, Black lives and Black histories, environmental degradation and sustainability, feminist archaeology and gender equality. Throughout the course, students will learn about archaeological case studies from around the globe and from a variety of historical periods.

ANTHRO  215-0-20: The Study of Culture through Language

This course offers an introduction to the foundational relationship between language and culture by examining anthropological approaches to how language reflects and transforms our ideas about the world and the people living in it. Language enables us to establish relationships with institutions, ideologies, and other human beings. We will discuss general processes of linguistic interaction in first few weeks, then turn to topics in linguistic anthropology to see if we can detect the operation of these processes in action. Case studies will illustrate how language is put to work in specific contexts students might experience on a daily basis, including listening to music, tweeting, and attending class.

ANTHRO 290-0-1: Introduction to Forensic Anthropology

This course provides an introductory overview of forensic anthropology. This subfield of biological anthropology focuses an understanding skeletal biology on questions of medicolegal significance. In this course we will review the full range of issues associated with human skeletal identification and associated forensic investigation including recovery techniques, estimation of time since death, biological profile development (include sex, age, ancestry, and stature estimation), trauma analysis, mass disasters investigation, and ethical consideration in forensic anthropology today. These problems will serve as a model for understanding the broader aspects of the interaction between anthropology and the medicolegal system.

ANTHRO 290-0-2: Food in Culture & Society

This class explores food in all its cultural and social dimensions. Lectures and readings will begin with the deep history and origins of our foods, with a focus on ancient foods of the Americas; then, we turn to the social, economic and political organization of the modern food industry, from industrial production and fast-food empires to small-scale local farms and restaurants; and last, the cultural significance of food, whether as cherished ethnic tradition or in the rise (and fall?) of celebrity chefs, cooking shows and competitions. Individual research projects will allow an in-depth study of a favorite (or least favorite) food, and experiential assignments will take students out of the classroom and into local and regional stores, restaurants, and markets to meet the people who make and sell our food.

ANTHRO 290-0-3: Anthropology of Infrastructure: Technology, Power, and Justice in the Anthropocene

Our lives are configured through the routinized functioning of infrastructures that mostly remain invisible until they break down. Material infrastructures such as roads, bridges, grids, and dams connect people, places, ideas, and things across time and space. They promise spatial and social connectivity, environmental control, technological modernization, and development in the age of Anthropocene defined as the era in which human activities play a dominant role in environmental changes. However, they also lead to uneven access to resources, prevent mobility, and produce injustices and socio-political conflicts. This course will scrutinize infrastructures to discuss their social, political, and environmental lives. We will read and discuss anthropological studies that examine how infrastructures are constructed, used, maintained, and repaired in everyday life. In this exploration, we will pay specific attention to power relations, social meanings, and environmental transformations that shape and are shaped by infrastructures. Conceptual themes include, among others, urban citizenship, state power, social conflicts, securitization, violence, community building, and ecology. These themes will be explored through the focus on water systems, renewable energy, road projects, waste facilities, oil extraction, housing, and other infrastructures. We will pay specific attention to infrastructure and its politics in the Global South, through readings and other course materials on regions such as the Middle East and North Africa, South East Asia, Africa, and South America. The course will also cover new understandings of infrastructure beyond material systems; we will discuss the new perspectives that approach social relations and nature as infrastructures that sustain human and non-human life.

ANTHRO  309-0-20: Human Osteology 

Knowledge of human osteology forms the basis of physical and forensic anthropology, bio-archaeology, paleoanthropology and clinical anatomy. This course will provide an intensive introduction to the human skeleton; particularly the identification of complete and fragmentary skeletal remains. Through this course, you will be exposed to techniques for identification and classification of human skeletal anatomy through hands-on, dry laboratory sessions. Additional time outside of class is available and may be required to review practical materials.

ANTHRO 313-0-1: Evolutionary Medicine

Many diseases of contemporary society, including ailments like obesity, diabetes, and depression, have only emerged as major health issues in recent human history. In addition, different human groups or ethnicities vary markedly in the burden of these conditions, with factors like poverty, inequality and discrimination consistently predicting who is most affected. What might account for these common findings? In this course we explore two related ideas to gain insights into these issues. The first is that many modern ailments may be viewed as an imbalance between modern life ways and those which shaped our biology during much of human evolution. The second is that differences in factors like inequality and discrimination, which trace to political, economic, and historical factors, help explain why some groups tend to be more affected by these conditions than others. We will begin by reviewing foundational concepts in evolutionary biology, molecular biology, anthropology and human evolution, revealing why our bodies by necessity come equipped with biology that is responsive and sensitive to the environments that we inhabit. We will then use these principles to explore domestic and global case studies that illustrate the power of evolutionary principles to shed light on why we get sick, including the role of social, economic and political factors as drivers of major disparities in disease burden.

ANTHRO  322-0-20: Introduction to Archaeology Research Design and Methods 

This class is fundamentally about how we do archaeology: how to design an archaeological research project.  We will examine the main methods in every archaeologists’ took kit: archaeological survey, excavation, and materials analysis.  Over the course of the quarter, we will take what interests you about archaeology and turn that in to a design for an archaeological research project.  We will learn how to frame archaeological questions in terms of intellectual merit (the potential to advance knowledge) and broader impacts (the potential to benefit society).  The main goal of the course is to design an archaeological research project.  We will achieve this goal across the quarter through writing a proposal to conduct an archaeological research project designed by the student.  We will review successful proposals by archaeologists to decipher how researchers link theory, data, methods, and analysis in their archaeological research design and use these as templates for our own project designs. Upon completion of the course students should be comfortable with designing archaeological research and writing research proposals to get funding for their project, important skills to know whether you plan to continue in archaeology and academia, or not.

ANTHRO  339-0-20: Material Culture 

‘Material culture’ is a term for the physical, tangible parts of the world as used and shaped by humans. This can include tools, clothing, utilitarian objects, architecture, jewelry, food-associated items, and much more. In this class, we will examine all of these object types, alongside literatures from museum studies, archaeology, historical preservation, and many other fields. We will discuss how these various fields analyze, present, and preserve material items. How can material objects teach us about human social worlds? What is the barrier between a natural object and a constructed one? How and why do museums curate objects for public engagement? Students will gain skills in writing about objects and curating them for museum exhibits. Some consider the use of tools or other materials to be a defining feature of human experience; certainly, humans have reshaped and modified landscapes, chemicals, and raw materials more extensively than any other species. Relationships to the material world vary cross-culturally and even between individuals. We will discuss theoretical literatures relating to material objects including new materialisms, commodity fetishism, gift-giving, phenomenology, Indigenous ontologies, object agency, and thing theory. Bringing in perspectives from various discourses, we will explore the materials that surround and are made meaningful through their mobilization in human social worlds.

ANTHRO 343-0-1: Anthropology of Race

This course provides an introduction to discussions of race and ethnicity within anthropology. We will discuss racialization – the process by which people are assigned to categories of race and the associated stereotypes and traits tied to those categories. Because race is a social construct, anthropology is well-situated to examine how racial categories are created and made impactful through historical and social practice. Throughout the course, will examine racial categories, where they come from, how they vary across societies, and what they are used to signify or mean. With readings from the four main subfields of anthropology, students will learn about ideas and conceptualizations of race through biological, cultural, linguistic, and archaeological approaches. The course will begin by complicating and contradicting the idea that racial categories are in any way natural, scientific, or innate. We will examine the history of these categories and the process of creating and maintaining racial categories. While the course does examine racial categories across globally situated projects, we will focus especially on the United States context. The course will conclude with some models and discussions of anti-racist approaches within anthropology.

ANTHRO 368-0-1: Latino & Latina Ethnography

This course will focus on cultural and political expressions and representations of Latinos/as in the US. We will draw from historical accounts, fiction, ethnographies, and media representations. We will consider how these forms of expression are used to represent U.S. Latina/o life. We will examine how ethnography works as a field method and as a form of communication. Our course will cover a broad range of areas and textual modes, so that we may do some comparative work.

ANTHRO 370-0-1: Anthropology in Historical Perspective

Major schools of thought in social, archaeological and biological anthropology over the last century.

ANTHRO  382-0-20: Political Ecology

This class is an introduction to Political Ecology, a multidisciplinary body of theory and research that analyzes the environmental articulations of political, economic, and social difference and inequality. The key concepts, debates, and approaches in this field address two main questions: (1) How do humans' interactions with the environment shape power and politics? (2) How do power and politics shape humans' interactions with the environment? These questions are critical to understanding and addressing the current issues of climate change, the Anthropocene, and environmental justice. Topics discussed in this class will include environmental scarcity and degradation, sustainability and conservation, and environmental justice. Readings will come from the disciplines of geography, anthropology and archaeology. Case studies will range from the historical to the present-day. No prior background in the environmental sciences is needed to appreciate and engage in this course.

ANTHRO  384-0-2: Traveling While Muslim: Islam, Mobility and Security after 9/11

Particularly after the 9/11 attacks and during the war on terror that has ensued shortly thereafter, Muslim on the move—ranging from international students, pilgrims to scientists, athletes and artists—have continued to face increasingly scrutiny and surveillance in both global travel economies and national immigration regimes. These regimes gained even more significance under the rule of authoritarian leaders in power across the globe from the US to India. What often united Modi's India and Trump's United States is Islamophobia—albeit in different guises—as racialization of Islam and Muslims continues to punctuate our current era. What are the stakes of traveling while Muslim in that post 9/11 era of racing Islam? How do we come to understand such mobility? What assumptions underpin the attendant construction of Islam in such understandings, as various state and non-state actors enlist themselves to manage the movements of Muslims, specifically and exceptionally? In probing these questions, amongst others, in this seminar we examine the interlocked relationship between Islam, mobility and security. We have three aims in front us: (1) becoming exposed to studies of Islam and Islamophobia in the US and across the globe, (2) gaining a better understanding of Islam as a historical tenet in a deeply uneven and racialized regime of ‘global' mobility, and lastly, (3) critically analyzing global and local designs of security that underpin and manage those differential regimes of mobility.

ANTHRO  390-0-1: Nature, Culture, and Environmentalisms

This course examines anthropological treatments of the concept of nature and human relations with the natural environment. We discuss how conceptions of nature are always shaped, transformed, and produced by social relations. Course materials focus primarily on ethnographies on the intersections of political ecology, science studies, and postcolonial critiques. Course topics include the history of the Western nature-culture opposition and its critics, as well as recent scholarship on such topics as food studies, the social life of forests, race and the genome, human-animal interactions, and interspecies relations.

ANTHRO  390-0-2: Witches, Bots, & Trolls: Misinformation in Society

This course surveys the social scientific study of misinformation in society. We will query the past to learn about how misinformation has evolved over time as a sociocultural feature of human societies. We will interrogate the present to examine how misinformation figures in the defining political, social, and economic problems of our time. And we will imagine the implications of misinformation for the future and explore our agency in shaping that future. We will draw on case studies, documentaries, and anthropological and social scientific literature on rumor and gossip, conspiracy theories, post-truth politics, deradicalization, and social media to explore topics and concepts such as "fake news," digital populism, algorithmic bias, weaponized disinformation, the "infodemic," deep fakes, and more. Case studies may include COVID-19, election, and climate change denialism; political conspiracy theories from the French Revolution to QAnon; troll farms and other tactics of information warfare; and the role of misinformation in current controversies over sexual and racial politics.

ANTHRO  390-0-3: Indigenous Nations and Anthropology

Central to the constitution of the American anthropology were the Indigenous peoples of North America. This course considers the development of U.S. anthropology, which studied Indigenous peoples who simultaneously challenged, subverted, and undermined their treatment as subjects of study. We will consider the conditions in which anthropological knowledge was produced, its deployment in colonial and imperial projects, and how Indigenous peoples and nations have engaged and responded to such projects throughout time. In particular, we will focus on how Indigenous peoples and nations have retooled anthropology to revitalize their cultures and affirm their sovereignty, which includes finding ways to work with, within and outside of institutions of anthropological knowledge such as museums, archives, and universities.

ANTHRO 401-2-1: Logic of Inquiry in Anthropology (Cultural) 

This course focuses on the key themes, concepts and debates that have characterized cultural anthropology's logic of inquiry. We pay careful attention to the historical precedents of the sub-field's mode of questioning, both within the broader discipline and in the social sciences and humanities, more generally. We will also inquire into how cultural anthropology articulates with the other sub-fields of the discipline as it changes in the broader social fields of academe and American political economy. Examining these core dimensions of the sub-field will provide a strong understanding of how cultural anthropologists conceptualize their subjects/objects of study in relationship to the shifting terrains in academia and national and global political economic processes. Throughout, we will address the larger stakes—both ethical and political—of taking particular ethnographic and theoretical approaches. We will both cultivate a critical approach to the readings, and try to understand them on their own terms in the circumstances of their production. Key concepts we will investigate include: culture/society; self/other; structure/agency; time; nature/science; economy; materiality; emotion/affect; institutions.

ANTHRO 430-0-1: Intergrative Seminar in Society, Biology, and Health

The objective of this course is to survey current efforts to understand the dynamic relationships among society, biology, and health. Many scholars and agencies recognize the need for interdisciplinary approaches that draw on concepts and methods from the social/behavioral sciences as well as the life/biomedical sciences, but successful linkage across levels of analysis has remained an elusive goal. What are the epistemological and methodological challenges to successful integration, particularly in an era of increasing specialization in training and the production of knowledge? What can be learned from prior attempts at integration emerging from distinct disciplinary traditions, including biocultural anthropology, biodemography, psychobiology/health psychology, social epidemiology, and psychosomatic medicine?

ANTHRO 490-0-1: History of Anthropological Theory: 20th Century Ethnography

"Anthropology in the twentieth century was characterized by an increasingly professionalized practice of ethnography that initially developed along different lines on both sides of the Atlantic. Following the lead of Franz Boas, American anthropology conceived of itself as the study of “culture”, learned modes of thinking and feeling. In Britain, students of Malinowski saw the object of their research as “society”, structured patterns of social interaction. In this seminar, we will focus on some of the ways in which these two traditions developed along separate tracks in the first half of the century before converging in the second half. We will also consider the contributions of scholars, notably women and minorities, who contributed substantially to the discipline in spite of their marginalization.
This class is a pilot version of the second part of a 2-quarter sequence on the history of anthropology. The first part covers the development of grand theory in the long nineteenth century. However, this class can be taken independently."

ANTHRO 490-0-3: Queer Politics & Pleasures

This course focuses on queer politics and personhood as differently articulated and practiced across diverse cultural contexts. Focusing on how a range of pleasures, intimacies, desires, caretaking and kin relations present an outside to cis-heteronormativity, the course examines the ways that queerness might challenge racial and gendered settler colonial, nationalist, and capitalist projects. Specifically, we focus on ethnographic and historiographic works that push the boundaries of queer theory, exploring the blurred lines between what constitutes LGBTQIA+ activism and decolonial practices of living otherwise to cis-heteronormativity.

ANTHRO 490-0-4: Households & Everyday Life

In a few short decades the field of household archaeology has emerged and exploded within contemporary archaeology. On an empirical level this may be because archaeological remains of houses are ubiquitous in the archaeological record. On a theoretical level this may be because studies of households lead us to focus on peopled pasts. Thus despite its short history, household archaeology has taken a leading role in epistemological shifts which place people and their practices and differences at the center of archaeological interpretations of the past, rather than subsuming these into the "noise" of passive and depersonalized depictions of social systems. Our studies of household archaeology across this course will lead us to consider the importance of studying everyday life in the past. A study of everyday life in the past can lead to a more democratic understanding of societies inclusive of the full range of people that inhabited past societies. Studies of households and everyday life are not without their detractors and these detractors are often quite hostile. Because households and daily life are often considered "micro" domains were people interact with one another, they are not considered suitable areas of studies to answer "macro" questions of politics and society. In this class we will explore how "micro" and "macro" intersect in the analysis households and daily life making these vibrant domains to understand how micro (self, interaction, experience) and macro (institutions, power relations, society) merge as they shape and are shaped by people and societies. This class is designed to be a forum for collaborative discussion on central issues and ethical considerations in contemporary archaeology. Participants will be encouraged to apply household and everyday life studies in their own research.

ANTHRO 496-0-20 Bridging Seminar 

The bridging seminar is designed as a forum to generate conversation across anthropology's four subfields. Intended for first year anthropology PhD students, the bridging seminar covers material across the subfields that relates to a specific theme or set of themes that rotates every year. Students are expected to complete readings, attend department colloquium talks, and be an active discussant. This year, we will focus on a mix of external speakers and readings on the hottest topics in linguistic, sociocultural, biological, and archaeological anthropology, including the impact of COVID-19 on anthropological research.