Results for ANTHRO

Aims, methods, and data in the study of human society's development from early hunters through late prehistoric civilizations. Archaeological sites and remains characteristic of the stages of cultural development for selected geographic areas, emphasizing methods of data collection and analysis appropriate to each.

Comparative approach, using examples from many languages. Emphasis is on generally non-Western speech communities. Topics include: the structure of language; the theory of signs; vocabulary and culture; grammar, cognition, and culture (linguistic relativism and determinism); encodability of cultural information in language; language adaptiveness to social function; the ethnography of speaking; registers; discourse (conversation, narrative, verbal art); language and power; language survival and extinction; and linguistic ideology (beliefs about language).

Homes evoke powerful emotions about place and also highlight the dynamic and complex nature of people, their relationships, and the broader society they live in. Focus on the ways that material traces from the past shed light on the diversity of domestic life, which includes household organization, economic strategies, diet and status, rituals, and identity. Archaeological case studies to see how archaeologists identify reoccurring patterns in material culture found in homes or domestic dwellings to reconstruct household patterns and social relations.

How has archaeology changed our knowledge of the spread of Islam and past Muslim societies? How does archaeology shape heritage debates, conflicts and ideas about Islam today? Topics include the city and urban change, secular and religious life, gender, economy, and globalization. These topics are explored using archaeological and critical heritage approaches. Focus is on examples drawn from Syria-Palestine, Egypt, Iraq, Arabian Peninsula, India, and Africa. Sources include archaeological data and material culture, historical texts in translation, and photography.

The human-animal relationship is dynamic, all encompassing and durable. Without exception, all socio-cultural groups have evidenced complex interactions with the animals around them, both domesticated and wild. However, the individual circumstances of these interactions are hugely complicated, and involve much more than direct human-animal contact, going far beyond this to incorporate social, ecological and spiritual contexts.n This course delves into this complexity, covering the gamut of social roles played by animals, as well as the methods and approaches to studying these, both traditional and scientific. While the notion of `animals as social actors¿ is well acknowledged, their use as proxies for human autecology (the relationship between a species and its environment) is also increasingly recognized as a viable mechanism for understanding our cultural and economic past. It will piece together the breadth of human-animal relationships using a wide geographic range of case studies.

This course examines politics in the Middle East from an anthropological perspective. We will explore the symbolic expression of political identities, the effects of religious revival on political institutions, and the tumultuous culture of protest in the region. Readings discuss the historical development of rights and citizenship, Islamic politics, sectarian tensions, and imaginings of revolution. Course materials are drawn from ethnographic studies and films, which provide a rich contextualization of social life and cultural politics in the region.

Practicum. Students develop independent research projects and write research proposals. How to formulate a research question; how to integrate theory and field site; and step-by-step proposal writing.

Goal is to produce an ethnographic report based on original field research gathered during summer fieldwork, emphasizing writing and revising as steps in analysis and composition. Students critique classmates' work and revise their own writing in light of others' comments. Ethical issues in fieldwork and ethnographic writing, setting research write-up concerns within broader contexts.

Independent research conducted under faculty supervision, normally taken junior or senior year in pursuit of a senior paper or an honors project. May be repeated for credit.

Taken in the final quarter before graduation. Independent study and work on senior paper for students admitted to the program. Prerequisite: consent of program adviser and instructor.

Prerequisite: consent of instructor.

Opportunity for students to pursue their specialization in an institutional setting such as a laboratory, clinic, research institute, or government agency. May be repeated for credit. Service Learning Course (certified by Haas Center).

Archaeological analytical techniques appropriate for data recovered during archaeological fieldwork in Chavin de Huantar, Peru. Open to all interested students; fieldwork participants are expected to take the course. Students work on data from the previous field season to produce synthetic written reports, focusing on specific methodological issues.

Academic, contract, government, field, laboratory, museum, and heritage aspects of the profession.

This course explores the cultural, political economic, and environmental status of contemporary Hawaiians. What sorts of sustainable economic and environmental systems did Hawaiians use in prehistory? How was colonization of the Hawaiian Islands informed and shaped by American economic interests and the nascent imperialsm of the early 20th centrury? How was sovereignty and Native Hawaiian identity been shaped by these forces? How has tourism and the leisure industry affected the natural environment? This course uses archaeological methods, ethnohistorical sources, and historical analysis in an exploration of contemporary Hawaiian social economic and political life.

As regularly noted, whether historic or pre-historic, animal bones are often the most commonly occurring artefacts on archaeological sites. As bioarchaeological samples, they offer the archaeologist an insight into food culture, provisioning, trade and the social aspects of human-animal interactions. The course will be taught through both practical and lecture sessions: the `hands-on¿ component is an essential complement to the lectures. The lectures will offer grounding in the main methodological approaches developed, as well as provide case-studies to illustrate where and how the methods have been applied. The practical session will walk students through the skeletal anatomy of a range of species. It will guide students on the identification of different parts of the animal, how to age / sex individuals, as well as recognize taphonomic indicators and what these mean to reconstructing post-depositional modifications.

Core course for Urban Studies majors. We will study urban space both historically and cross-culturally. Urban Studies, by definition, is an interdisciplinary field, where the methodological approaches draw upon a diverse set of analytic tools. Disciplines that occupy a prominent place in this class are geography, cultural anthropology, sociology, history, media studies, and literature. In this context, we will discuss the importance of cities around the world to the economic, cultural, and political well-being of modern societies and examine how forces such as industrialization, decentralization, and globalization affect the structure and function of cities.

Recent historical developments, including the widespread adoption of the mobile phone across Africa and Southeast Asia, the ¿Arab Spring,¿ and the rise of technology sectors in cities such as Nairobi, Bangalore, and Accra, have turned digital technology in the ¿global South¿ into a topic of growing popular interest and increasing scholarly concern. This course attempts to make sense of these developments by interrogating diverse theoretical approaches to digital technology and assessing what these approaches reveal and obscure in specific cases of technology adoption in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Students will be introduced to an overview of scholarly approaches to digital technology from anthropology, science and technology studies (STS), critical theory, geography, and communications studies. We will analyze the relative utility of these explanations through case studies of specific instances of technological production and/or use. These case studies will be drawn from both secondary texts and primary materials such as social media, digital maps, videos, blogs, and news reports. At the same time, we will examine how digital discourses and practices both draw upon and inform broader issues of context-specific political and cultural importance. Major topics to be discussed include ¿development¿ and the State, civil society and the ¿public sphere,¿ youth culture, gender politics, mobility, and globalization. Students will come away from the course with a strong understanding of the major issues at stake in the increasing digitalization of the ¿global South,¿ and the socio-cultural, political, and technical debates that frame them

This course examines the significant role 'drugs' play in shaping expressions of the self and social life; in the management populations, and in the production of markets and inequality. It engages these themes through cultural representations of drugs and drug use, analyses of scientific discourse, and social theory. Topics include: the social construction of the licit and illicit; the shifting boundaries of deviance, disease and pleasure; and the relationship between local markets and global wars.

This course is an interdisciplinary approach to understanding human food consumption and nutrition, incorporating biological, evolutionary, ecological and social perspectives. Topics include a broad survey of primate diets and their physiological and behavioral correlates; fossil and archaeological evidence for early human diets; adaptations to dietary shifts since the Neolithic; infant and early child feeding practices and their role in shaping human social arrangements, metabolic syndrome, food security, food taboos; the origins of spices; cultural diversity in the social uses and meanings of food and the sharing of food; gathering, hunting and locavorism as high hipster cuisine. Emphasis is on understanding the diversity of human foodways through time and space: how biology, culture, and ecology interact to shape the food we eat, and how the food we eat shapes us.

This workshop aims to bring together scholars from the social sciences, humanities, medicine and bio-science and technology to explore the ways that health and illness are made through complex social forces. We aim for informal, interactive sessions, full of debate and good will. Dates of meetings will be listed in the notes section in the time schedule.

The contribution of research in the Galapagos Islands to our current understanding of evolution and conservation. Writings from Darwin to Dawkins, as they reveal patterns and processes of evolution including selection, adaptation, speciation, and coevolution. Current conservation strategies in the archipelago, and urgent measures needed today before unique species and adaptations are lost.

This course explores the construction of gender in the Middle East. Drawing on the historical, sociological and anthropological research in the region, the course aims to question the stereotypes about the subordination of Muslim women and to offer students a systematic reading and analytical discussion of the political, economic and cultural structures that inform gender relations and practices in the region. The course starts with an examination of early Islam and religious sources with regard to women¿s status, then moves on to nationalist and modernization movements in the 19th and 20th centuries, and finally explores women¿s and men¿s lives in contemporary Egypt, Turkey and Iran. In this framework, we will pay special attention to Islamist mobilizations, family and sexual relations, as well as women's changing livelihoods and labor.

Humans, broadly construed, emerged as bipedal apes in the African mixed savanna-woodlands approximately two million years ago. From humble beginnings, humans have gone on to be become the ecologically dominant species in most biomes and grown to a global population in excess of seven billion. This dominance arises from a combination of features of the human organism including its extreme degree of behavioral flexibility and flexible social organization. The prima facie evidence of human evolutionary and ecological success raises a paradox with respect to recent work in economics and psychology which increasingly argues for pervasive irrationality in human decision-making in a wide array of behavioral contexts. How is it possible for an organism with such seemingly flawed software supporting decision-making to become the globally dominant species? We will use this contradiction as the launching point for understanding what rationality means in a broad ecological and cross-cultural context. What do we mean by `rationality¿? How do different disciplines conceive of rationality in different ways? Is there such a thing as a rationality that transcends cultural differences or is the very idea of rationality a cultural construction that is used to justify imperialism and other modes of paternalism? Are there systematic factors that promote or impede rational decision-making? The seminar will provide a gentle introduction to the formal approaches of decision theory which we will apply to an unusual array of topics centered on the subsistence and reproductive decisions of hunter-gatherers, horticulturalists, pastoralists, and agrarian peasants, in short, people living in face-to-face, subsistence societies. In addition to doing reading from a broad array of social and natural science disciplines around the topic of rationality, students will regularly engage in exercises to assess their own approaches to decision-making.

This course examines the new cultural forms that arose out of the use of nuclear technology. Subjects covered will include: The Manhattan Project, nuclear activism, nuclear experimentation in medicine, pre-nuclear history, nuclear energy, and nuclear waste and trade.

Do you know what an anthropological perspective is? Can you describe some of the key assumptions and questions within the discipline? nA major in Anthropology is composed of many specialized courses in different tracks, different emphases and seemingly a never-ending multiplication of perspectives and ethnographies. However, Anthropology is also an ongoing intellectual conversation with foundational questions, some of longstanding and some new. These foundational questions have stimulated different responses and answers and thus have also led to constant renewal of the discipline in the midst of profound disagreement. In this Anthropology Capstone course students across tracks and emphases will address some of the critical debates that have been central to the discipline as it has developed. We will feature three debate questions in the class. Preparation for each debate will be through class discussion of critical readings as well as extra-mural reading and preparation with one¿s debating partners.

Comparative approach, using examples from many languages. Emphasis is on generally non-Western speech communities. Topics include: the structure of language; the theory of signs; vocabulary and culture; grammar, cognition, and culture (linguistic relativism and determinism); encodability of cultural information in language; language adaptiveness to social function; the ethnography of speaking; registers; discourse (conversation, narrative, verbal art); language and power; language survival and extinction; and linguistic ideology (beliefs about language).

As regularly noted, whether historic or pre-historic, animal bones are often the most commonly occurring artefacts on archaeological sites. As bioarchaeological samples, they offer the archaeologist an insight into food culture, provisioning, trade and the social aspects of human-animal interactions. The course will be taught through both practical and lecture sessions: the `hands-on¿ component is an essential complement to the lectures. The lectures will offer grounding in the main methodological approaches developed, as well as provide case-studies to illustrate where and how the methods have been applied. The practical session will walk students through the skeletal anatomy of a range of species. It will guide students on the identification of different parts of the animal, how to age / sex individuals, as well as recognize taphonomic indicators and what these mean to reconstructing post-depositional modifications.

This course examines the significant role 'drugs' play in shaping expressions of the self and social life; in the management populations, and in the production of markets and inequality. It engages these themes through cultural representations of drugs and drug use, analyses of scientific discourse, and social theory. Topics include: the social construction of the licit and illicit; the shifting boundaries of deviance, disease and pleasure; and the relationship between local markets and global wars.

This course is an interdisciplinary approach to understanding human food consumption and nutrition, incorporating biological, evolutionary, ecological and social perspectives. Topics include a broad survey of primate diets and their physiological and behavioral correlates; fossil and archaeological evidence for early human diets; adaptations to dietary shifts since the Neolithic; infant and early child feeding practices and their role in shaping human social arrangements, metabolic syndrome, food security, food taboos; the origins of spices; cultural diversity in the social uses and meanings of food and the sharing of food; gathering, hunting and locavorism as high hipster cuisine. Emphasis is on understanding the diversity of human foodways through time and space: how biology, culture, and ecology interact to shape the food we eat, and how the food we eat shapes us.

This workshop aims to bring together scholars from the social sciences, humanities, medicine and bio-science and technology to explore the ways that health and illness are made through complex social forces. We aim for informal, interactive sessions, full of debate and good will. Dates of meetings will be listed in the notes section in the time schedule.

The contribution of research in the Galapagos Islands to our current understanding of evolution and conservation. Writings from Darwin to Dawkins, as they reveal patterns and processes of evolution including selection, adaptation, speciation, and coevolution. Current conservation strategies in the archipelago, and urgent measures needed today before unique species and adaptations are lost.

Prerequisite: consent of instructor.

The purpose of this course is to introduce key themes in social theory - the social, the modern subject, reason, autonomy, civility, interests, exchange, morality, life, the senses - through a reading of classic texts from Descartes up to psychoanalysis and phenomenology. nnEach section has original texts, commentaries, and background readings that place these texts in their deeper historical setting. Many of these commentaries trace how practical theories of 'lower' or minor selves - the subject people of the colonies, slaves, and other - were integral to the very development of ideas of the modern, autonomous and reasonable self in the western world. Prerequisite, by instructor consent.

The history of archaeological thought emphasizing recent debates. Evolutionary theories, behavioral archaeology, processual and cognitive archaeology, and approaches termed feminist and post-processual archaeology in the context of wider debate in adjacent disciplines. The application and integration of theory on archaeological problems and issues. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.

Required of ANTHRO Ph.D. students; open to all graduate students. Research methods and modes of evidence building in ethnographic research. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.

Required graduate seminar. The history of anthropological theory and key theoretical and methodological issues of the discipline. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.

The imagination as such has not been an accustomed object of ethnographic fieldwork or theoretical debate in anthropology. This seminar consists of a cluster of thematic explorations including: the spatial imagination of states; the imagination of race, colonialism, and domination; the social imagination of evil and of the good; and conceptualizations of the creative imagination.

This advanced graduate seminar explores capitalism as an historically-situated and culturally-mediated articulation of practices rather than as an economic system or social structure governed by an internal logic. It draws on poststructural theories of culture, society and subjectivity to investigate the processes through which diverse capitalist practices are produced. Prerequisite: Graduate standing in Anthropology or permission of the instructor. Previous graduate level coursework in cultural anthropology, social theory or cultural studies is required. No auditing is permitted. Enrollment limited to 12.

In this course, we will examine the concept of the ¿limit¿ in relation to questions of experience. Taking an interdisciplinary perspective, we will explore how the limit (as border, threshold, other, transgression, liminality, etc.) frames and disrupts discourses of experience in ethnography, philosophy and literature.

In this course, we will explore social network analysis, a set of methods and theories used in the analysis of social structure. The fundamental conceit underlying social network analysis is that social structure emerges from relationships between individuals. We will therefore concentrate in particular on the measurement of relationships, emphasizing especially practical methodology for anthropological fieldwork. This is a somewhat unusual course because of its focus on social network research coming out of anthropological and ethological traditions. While most current practitioners of social network analysis are (probably) sociologists, many of both the methodological antecedents and theoretical justifications for the field can be found in these two traditions. A major goal of this course is to understand how the methods and perspectives of social network analysis can be usefully incorporated into contemporary approaches to ethnography and other anthropological modes of investigation. Prerequisite: graduate standing or consent of instructor

Course covers a variety of advanced topics which rotate annually, such as: ownership and egalitarianism, the integration of landscape and behavioral ecology, conservation and indigenous subsistence, or fertility and demography. Course may be repeated for credit when topics change.

This course examines a variety of approaches that claim to explore the relationships between humans and things. Some of the approaches include Marx and material culture studies; Heidegger; cognitive and phenomenological; Actor Network Theory. But there is a need also to examine behavioral and ecological and Darwinian approaches. Many of these approaches do not adequately deal with the physicality of things as objects and there is a need to seek a way to incorporate such aspects of things into social theory. Prerequisite: graduate standing or consent of instructor

This course is an investigation of how notions of sacrifice, of ethics and conviction are embedded in both ordinary and extraordinary practices in our contemporary world. The key question is how the modern global condition has transformed the way in which it is possible to hold convictions, and to frame forms of ethical conduct, be they religious or secular. We will ask if convictions based on choice or moral outrage differ from convictions based on inhabiting and reversing stigmatized racial and social identities. Rather than maintaining a categorical distinction between `the religious¿ and `the secular¿, we will focus on how groups and individuals have attached themselves passionately to ideas, abstractions, ritual communities or ethical frames. When do certain attachments appear necessary and compelling, almost beyond choice? How does one forge a sense of ethics and ethical conduct through social media rather than face-to-face contact?n nStudents will acquire a grounded and guided understanding of philosophical and anthropological theories of ideas of ethics, sacrifice, and political conviction as well as explore these ideas through contemporary ethnographic contexts.nReadings will be philosophical, historical and ethnographic ¿ drawing on original texts and ethnographic accounts from Europe, Asia and Africa.

How do we encounter and read each other in public and private spaces? How are these very spaces historically constituted around such distinctions and manners of reading? What do these questions look like in dense heterogeneous cities with differentiated class, caste and ethnic communities? How might we consider the differentiation between private and public in different ethnographic contexts? What kinds of sociality might emerge from these kinds of encounters? This course will explore these questions through social theory and ethnographies. There are two major sets of concepts that will be explored and interrogated. The first is that deriving from the essays of the Georg Simmel such as ¿The Face¿ and ¿The Stranger¿ which explore the new forms of sociality enabled by seemingly anonymous city life, which in turn have been interpreted very differently by Zygmunt Bauman and James Siegel to understand the place of continually excluded outsiders and the high stakes of reading each other. The other is the strand of work on the emergence of the public sphere such as the work of Jurgen Habermas, Richard Sennet, Michael Warner, Nancy Fraser etc. While much of the social theory on the public, the stranger and civility emerge from studies of Euro-American mas politics and city spaces, in this course we will move some of these discussion into considering these questions in the global south and the kinds of sociality (including their historicity) that make up the dense fabric of ordinary life. How does this work out in contexts where we take into account intense social differentiation by class, race, and communitarian divisions? This could be asked of the historical and social context addressed in these theories as well as from the postcolonial world. The course will attempt to understand whether such theorizations can indeed be re-rooted and re-imagined or whether ethnographic and historical difference re-route them instead. In doing so we will also bring theories of the private and the intimate to bear on questions of the public and the stranger.

Required of fifth-year Ph.D. students returning from dissertation field research and in the process of writing dissertations and preparing for professional employment. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.

Required of second- and third-year Ph.D. students writing the qualifying paper or the qualifying written examination. May be repeat for credit.

Required of second- and third-year Ph.D. students writing the qualifying paper or the qualifying written examination. May be repeated for credit one time.

Supervised experience as assistant in one undergraduate course.

Department Colloquia Lecture Series. Lectures presented on a variety of anthropological topics. Colloquium is intended for the Department of Anthropology's under graduate majors and graduate students. May be repeated for credit.

Current topics and trends in cultural/social anthropology, archaeology, and environmental and ecological anthropology. Enrollment in this noon-time series is restricted to the Department of Anthropology Master¿s students and First and Second-year PhD students.

Supervised work on a research project with an individual faculty member. May be repeated for credit.

Supervised work for a qualifying paper, examination, or project with an individual faculty member.

Provides graduate students with the opportunity to pursue their area of specialization in an institutional setting such as a laboratory, clinic, research institute, or government agency.