ANTHRO 101-6-21 First-Year Seminar: Perspectives on Primates
In the movies, lemurs dance, capuchins slap people in the face, and apes take over the world. We are faced with images of our closest living relatives everyday. But how accurate are these images? How do they affect our perspectives on primates and their place in the world? In this course we will explore the intersections between human and primate lives in an effort to understand how we view primates, what factors influence those views, and how both humans and primates are ultimately affected. Using writing and discussion, we will consider primates in the media, primates as pets, primates in research, and primate conservation, among other topics. At the end of this course you will be able to evaluate how accurately primates are portrayed in a range of contexts and understand the consequences of those portrayals. You will have a stronger appreciation for the complex relationship between humans and primates worldwide and how it affects our everyday lives. And most importantly, you will have challenged and enriched your own perspectives on primates.
ANTHRO 101-6-22 First-Year Seminar: Ibn Battuta and the Caravans of Gold
"Caravans of Gold: Fragments of Time" is an absolutely unique exhibition at the Block Museum that focuses on the medieval caravan trade across the Sahara Desert between North Africa and West Africa. This was at the time the principal source for gold throughout the Mediterranean world and beyond. The fourteenth century Moroccan traveler Ibn Battuta provided an eyewitness account of the trip across the desert to the West African empire of Mali. This was hardly his only journey. The most famous Muslim traveler of all time, his journeys to India and China among other lands are comparable to those of that other great medieval traveler, Marco Polo.
The first part of the seminar will focus on the fourteenth century world, particularly in Africa and Asia, through the writings of Ibn Battuta and Marco Polo. To what extent did this world appear differently in the eyes of a Christian and of a Muslim traveler? The second part focuses specifically on the caravan trade, based both on written accounts including Ibn Battuta and on material objects uncovered by archaeological excavations. How did the trade operate in practice? How did the incorporation of Mali into the Muslim world structure relations between North and West Africa? The third part deals with the empire of Mali on its own terms, those of Mande culture in particular. The class will focus on the epic of Sunjata, the story of the foundation of the empire of Mali, as told by professional jeli, praise singers or "griots".
Aside from class discussion of the written sources, the class will benefit from a guided tour of the museum exhibition; from guest lectures by and archaeologist of West Africa and scholars of Islamic manuscript culture in Morocco and/or West Africa; and from films.
This course is an introduction to cultural anthropology. Our focus is on understanding what qualitative social science is and how it is done. You will read three contemporary ethnographies and several articles and book chapters and watch some documentaries. These will cover a wide range of topics from contemporary life: from shopping to nightlife, immigration to menstruation; they will also introduce you to the social lives of people including drag queens and sex workers, children and moms, hoarders and mushroom pickers. During the quarter, you will try your hand at doing some qualitative social science yourself through two small projects, one of which will become part of your final paper for the class.
What is a more important predictor of how long you will live, the genes you inherit from your parents, or the zip code of where you grew up? This course aims to answer this question, as well as others, regarding the origins of social disparities in health in the U.S. The course will also consider the broader global context, and ask why the U.S. spends so much money on health care but lags behind many nations in key indicators of population health. It will examine how social stratification by race/ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, education, and neighborhood quality shapes our biology and the health status of individuals, families, and populations; and, conversely, how health itself can be a fundamental determinant of key social outcomes such as educational achievement.
This course is an introduction to three of the leading theories about the nature and meaning of myth: psychoanalytic, functionalist, and structuralist. Each of these three approaches will be considered primarily through the writings of their respective founders: Sigmund Freud, Bronislaw Malinowski, and Claude Lévi-Strauss. Lectures will be primarily concerned with explaining these three theories. Examples of how these theories can be applied to the analysis of specific myths will largely be drawn from the Old Testament Book of Genesis.
This course introduces life history theory as an integrated framework for understanding the biological processes underlying the human life cycle and its evolution. After constructing a solid foundation in life history theory and the comparative method, the class will address questions such as: Why do humans grow and develop much more slowly than other primate species? Why do we have so few offspring? What is the significance of puberty? What is the function of menopause? In-depth analysis of several case studies will allow the class to examine in detail the utility of life history theory for explaining aspects of human development and behavior from an evolutionary perspective.
Knowledge of human osteology forms the basis of physical and forensic anthropology, bio-archeology, 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.
In this course we will examine human growth and development. By its very nature this topic is a biocultural process that requires an integrated analysis of social construction and biological phenomena. To this end we will incorporate insight from evolutionary ecology, developmental biology and psychology, human biology and cultural anthropology. Development is not a simple matter of biological unfolding from birth through adolescence; rather, it is a process that is designed to be in sync with the surrounding environment within which the organism develops. Additionally we will apply these biocultural and socio-ecological insights to emerging health challenges associated with these developmental stages.
How do Anthropologists understand and investigate the social and cultural contexts of health and illness? This course will examine the diverse ways in which humans use cultural resources to cope with pain, illness, suffering and healing in diverse cultural contexts. In addition, we will analyze various kinds of medical practices as cultural systems, examining how disease, health, body, and mind are socially constructed, how these constructions articulate with human biology, and vice versa. The course will provide an introduction to the major theoretical frameworks that guide anthropological approaches to studying human health-related behavior. Theory will be combined with case studies from a number of societies, from India, Japan, Brazil, and Haiti to the U.S. and Canada, enabling students to identify similarities across seemingly disparate cultural systems, while at the same time demonstrating the ways in which American health behaviors and practices are socially embedded and culturally specific. The course will emphasize the overall social, political, and economic contexts in which health behavior and health systems are shaped, and within which they must be understood.
Prerequisite: 100- or 200-level anthropology or sociology course, or consent of instructor.
Food is a universal requirement for humans to survive, yet different cultures have developed radically divergent cuisines. In this course, we will use archaeology to explore the diversity of human foodways, and the various roles food has played throughout time. You will learn about topics like the 'real' Paleo diet, how the Incas used beer at parties to build social alliances, and how Columbus's discovery of the Americas spurred global scale shifts in food and agriculture. The course begins with an overview of how anthropologists and archaeologists study food, and then moves through time, beginning with our hunting and gathering ancestors and ending with colonialism.
ANTHRO 390-0-23 Breaking the Law in the Middle East: The Illicit with MENA 390-3-20
Are some laws meant to be broken? Are those who break them all criminals? Where does the boundary between the legal and the criminal, the legitimate and the illicit, lie? Who gets to draw, manage and enforce that boundary that produces categories of crime out of illicit practices? How do licit and illicit networks and activities intersect to form different constellations of power and ideas of legitimacy? How do ideas and regimes of legality inform our ideas of what is morally right, criminal, and valuable? Drawing on political anthropology and cultural history, this course examines many careers of the illicit in the MENA region to answer these questions. In so doing the course invites you to study the politics of legal and discursive constructions of crime and illicit action, and how these practices interrelate with processes of law, governance, cross-border commerce and regimes of morality in order to reveal categories of crime and many careers of the illicit as historical and political constructs rather than as pre-existent and static categories of analysis.
ANTHRO 390-0-26 Race Across Time in Latin America with SPAN 397-0-1
This seminar will track both the shifts and continuities in racial ideologies operating in Latin America since the colonial period, following the work of historians and anthropologists. The course will consider their impact on subject formation by reviewing their progression over time through theoretical arguments and evidence from case studies. Because race has been central to the forms of power and authority that first undergirded the colonial system and later birthed the many Latin American nations, we can trace a continued line of transmission of racialized ideologies that structure inequality in the region. Using a cultural and linguistic anthropological framework, we will approach these racial categories as composites of markers of otherness that include skin color, clothing, kin affiliations, occupation, among others. The course moves progressively from research about the early colonial period and forward chronologically until the 20th century, with a final discussion of migrant trajectories to the US. Topics covered will include variations in how race is defined and invoked in context, identity as a performative effect, coloniality as an ongoing process, and the role of historical memory in post-colonial Latin America. Taught in English.
ANTHRO 390-0-27 Migrant Sexualities, Queer Travelers: Translocations with MENA 390-3-21
This course draws together scholarship from queer migration studies, queer diasporic critique and critical race and feminist studies in order to examine the historical and contemporary conditions for the intersections of sexuality and mobility. In this course, we will attend to the formation of "gender" and "sexuality" as categories of anthropological, historical and social analysis, surveying the major shifts within the intellectual history of studies in gender and sexuality. At the same time, however, we strive to keep in analytical view the politically pressing ways in which race, class, and nationality complicate studies of mobility and those of gender and sexuality alike. In other words, if one major question that animates the course is what studies of mobility have to contribute to historical and anthropological studies of gender and sexuality, the other is what kind of new analytical ground studies of gender and sexuality could open up in anthropology of mobility, migration and transnationalism.
ANTHRO 390-0-28 Biocultural Perspectives on Water Insecurity with ANTHRO 490 and GBL_HLTH 390
The first objective of this course is to introduce students to the many ways that water impacts our world. We will discuss what the international recommendations for safely managed water are and the health and social consequences of water insecurity. The second objective is explore why there is such variety in water insecurity worldwide. These discussions will be guided by the socio-ecological framework, in which dimensions ranging from the individual to the geopolitical are considered. Influences on access to water will be broadly considered; we will draw on literature in global health, ethnography, the life sciences, and public policy. The third objective is to develop critical thinking and writing abilities to reflect on the multi-dimensional causes and consequences of water insecurity and the appropriateness of potential solutions.
This course covers a range of linguistic anthropology and semiotic anthropology topics, including narrative, affect, materiality, indexicality, qualia, performativity, citationality, scale, interdiscursivity, chronotope, enregisterment, and other areas. The course is intended to broaden and deepen students’ understanding of linguistic and semiotic anthropology in ways that directly support the development of their doctoral research. Graduate students outside of Anthropology should contact instructor with their interest and request permission.
This course will provide an overview of current theory, methods and research directions in human population biology. The course will specifically focus on the influence of ecological and social factors on various aspects of human biological variation. The adaptation concept will first be presented, discussed and critiqued. We will then examine the history of the field of human biology/adaptability, highlighting how early landmark studies have shaped current research directions in the field. Finally, we will explore how adaptation to different ecological stressors (temperature, solar radiation, high altitude, diet/nutrition, and lifestyle changes) promotes human biological diversity. The central theoretical issue is that of natural selection in human populations: how has it operated in the past, and what is the evidence for ongoing selection and adaptation in humans today?
Who owns the past? Why and for whom do we study the past? Archaeology is performed in a variety of political and economic settings and for a variety of reasons. In this class, we will examine the multiple stakeholders involved in the archaeological enterprise, and the often conflicting demands they place on archaeologists as academics and citizens, with the goal of developing tools and strategies that can improve diversity in the subfield and communication to non-academic groups. We will consider calls for diverse "archaeologies" which incorporate alternate models and experiences of the past, but sometimes challenge our basic notions about the field. We will also consider the responsibilities that archaeologists have to communities, and how we might envision future, collaborative community archaeologies. Finally, we will focus on the different publics at home and abroad that impact and consume archaeological research, and how we might better reach diverse audiences.
Although biopolitics is taken as a central preoccupation and analytic for this course, it is also understood as one of many ways to conceptualize or theorize about life -- keeping in mind that many of the most recent deliberations about “life itself” are carried out in dialogue with, or acknowledgement of, various theorizations on biopolitics. In this graduate seminar, we will examine the following questions: what constitutes a life? A death? We will review theoretical positions and anthropological debates concerning life itself, and the various negotiations related to what it means to live a life, to evaluate lives worth living, embracing, regulating, and killing. At the root of many of these questions is our concern with structure and agency: who reserves the right to ‘make live and let die.’ The course is organized around several themes related to anthropological and humanistic inquiry about the numerous ways that life takes on value and becomes the object of and subject to discipline and regulation, deliberation and imagination, fulfillment and meaning.
ANTHRO 490-0-25 Biocultural Perspectives on Water Insecurity with ANTHRO 390, AFST 390 and GBL_HLTH 390
The first objective of this course is to introduce students to the many ways that water impacts our world. We will discuss what the international recommendations for safely managed water are and the health and social consequences of water insecurity. The second objective is explore why there is such variety in water insecurity worldwide. These discussions will be guided by the socio-ecological framework, in which dimensions ranging from the individual to the geopolitical are considered. Influences on access to water will be broadly considered; we will draw on literature in global health, ethnography, the life sciences, and public policy. The third objective is to develop critical thinking and writing abilities to reflect on the multi-dimensional causes and consequences of water insecurity and the appropriateness of potential solutions.
