Results for ANTHRO

This course introduces basic anthropological concepts and presents the discipline's distinctive perspective on society and culture. The power of this perspective is illustrated by exploring vividly-written ethnographic cases that show how anthropological approaches illuminate contemporary social and political issues in a range of different cultural sites. In addition to class meeting time, a one-hour, once weekly required discussion section will be assigned in the first week of the quarter.

This course is a general introduction to archaeology and world prehistory, with additional emphases on the logics, practices, methods and contemporary relevance of archaeological knowledge production. Topics will range from the earliest Homo sapiens to critical considerations of the archaeology of more contemporary contexts and the politics of the past and ancient environments - recognizing that the "past" is not just about the past.

This seminar introduces a variety of themes and issues in linguistic anthropology, with a particular emphasis on the link between language and power. The seminar highlights that language is a constitutive of social realities, including social relationships and identities, rather than a passive tool for communication. The seminar delves into subjects such as the linguistic construction of gender, class, and race, hate speech, censorship, and the interplay of language and power unique to various institutions such as social media, and also explores the strategies of challenging the linguistic forms of power and domination. Students are expected to develop their own research project that involves empirical data collection and analysis, and thus gain hands-on linguistic anthropological research experience.

Is the middle class shrinking? How do people who live at the extremes of American society- the super rich, the working poor and those who live on the margins, imagine and experience "the good life"? How do we understand phenomena such as gang cultures, addiction and the realignment of white consciousness? This class uses the methods and modes of ethnographic study in an examination of American culture. Ethnographic materials range from an examination of the new American wealth boom of the last 20 years (Richistan by Robert Frank) to the extreme and deadlyworld of the invisible underclass of homeless addicts on the streets of San Francisco (Righteous Dopefiend by Phillipe Bourgois and Jeff Schonberg). The experiences of Hispanic immigrants and the struggle to escape gang life in Los Angeles are highlighted in the story of Homeboy Industries a job creation program initiated by a priest working in LA's most deadly neighborhoods (G-Dog and the Homeboys by Celeste Fremon). Finally in Searching for Whitopia: an improbable journeyinto the heart of White America, Rich Benjamin explores the creation on ethnic enclaves (whitopias) as fear over immigration and the shrinking white majority redefine race consciousnessin the 21st century. Each of these narratives provides a window into the various ways in which Americans approach the subjects of wealth and the good life, poverty and the underclass, and theconstruction of class, race, and gender in American society. Students will not be required to have any previous knowledge, just curiosity and an open mind.

This is an introductory course to heritage studies that aims at familiarizing undergraduates with how heritage has been theorized and utilized by multi-disciplinary practitioners in the present global context. It will walk students through how heritage conversations evolved from being primarily dedicated to material tangibility that was rooted in inherent 'heritage value', to a deeper understanding of given value through intangibility of heritage. The focus will be on familiarizing students with the multi-disciplinary and agentic approach to heritage studies in the present day, which manifests in critical conversations in architecture, archaeology, and, anthropology, which are instrumentalized within issues of policy, conflict, urban & non-urban development, museums, social fabric & culture, etc.

This course provides a broad introduction to various ways of designing anthropological questions and associated methods for collecting evidence and supporting arguments. We review the inherent links between how a question is framed, the types of evidence that can address the question, and way that data are collected. Research activities such as interviewing, participant observation, quantitative observation, archival investigation, ecological survey, linguistic methodology, tracking extended cases, and demographic methods are reviewed. Various faculty and specialists will be brought in to discuss how they use different types of evidence and methods for supporting arguments in anthropology. Significant work outside of class time is expected of the student for this course.

Methodological issues related to the investigation of archaeological sites and objects. Aims and techniques of archaeologists including: location and excavation of sites; dating of places and objects; analysis of artifacts and technology and the study of ancient people, plants, and animals. How these methods are employed to answer the discipline's larger research questions. Significant work outside of class time is expected of the student for this course.

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.

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.

Required of Anthropology honors or senior paper candidates. Taken in the final quarter before handing in the final draft of the Honors or Senior Paper and graduating. This independent study supports work on the honors and senior papers for students with an approved honors or senior paper application in Anthropology. Prerequisite: consent of Anthropology faculty advisor. Terms: Aut, Win, Spr, Sum Units: 1-5(not repeatable for credit)

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). F-1 international students enrolled in this course cannot start working without first obtaining a CPT-endorsed I-20 from Bechtel International Center (enrolling in the CPT course alone is insufficient to meet federal immigration regulations).

How did the colonial encounter shape the making of modern South Asia? Was colonial rule a radical rupture from the pre-modern past or did it embody historical continuities? Did colonial rule cause the economic underdevelopment of the region or were regional factors responsible for it? Did colonial forms of knowledge shape how we think of social structures in the Indian subcontinent? Did the colonial census merely register pre-existing Indian communities or did it reshape them? Did colonialism break with patriarchal power or further consolidate it? How did imperial power regulate sexuality in colonial India? What was the relationship between caste power and colonial power? How did capital and labor interact under colonial rule? How did colonialism mediate the very nature of modernity in the region?This lecture-based survey course will explore the nature of the most significant historical process that shaped modern South Asia from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries -- colonialism. It primarily deals with the regions that constituted the directly administered territories of British India, specifically regions that subsequently became the nation-states of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Eight or nine important ethnographies, including their construction, their impact, and their faults and virtues.

Medical Humanities is a humanistic and interdisciplinary approach to medicine. It explores the experience of health and illness as captured through the expressive arts (painting, music, literature), across historical periods and in different cultures, as interpreted by scholars in the humanities and social sciences as well as in medicine and policy. Its goal is to give students an opportunity to explore a more holistic and meaning-centered perspective on medical issues. It investigates how medicine is an art form as well as a science, and the way institutions and culture shape the way illness is identified, experienced and treated.

What do trending TikTok diets have to do with biodiversity loss? This course examines environmental problems around bodily contamination, water scarcity, and climate change from a social and cultural perspective. It provides students with an interdisciplinary introduction to the complex relationship between society and the environment using theoretical and methodological approaches from anthropology, geography, and political ecology. From oil spills to celiac disease, this course explores how contemporary environmental problems related to consumption, production, and destruction are shaping - and being shaped by - the politics of race, gender, and class. The course begins with certain foundational texts about the knotty and intimate relations between nature and humanity. We will define and engage with key concepts in social studies of the environment like toxicity, embodiment, perspectivism, dispossession, and structural violence, among others. Readings in this course consider a range of topics, including: agroindustry, chronic disease, urban waste management, mineral extraction, and environmental activism. It will emphasize understanding these issues through a cross-cultural perspective in two ways: 1) by exploring how different cultural practices and forms of knowledge shape unequal environmental relations and 2) by drawing connections across diverse geographic and social contexts. Students will acquire the research skills to trace links between industrial pesticide use and diet culture, between oil spills and colonialism, and between access to clean water and urbanization. The aim of this course is to identify the subtle ways in which environmental politics?however distant they may seem - play out in our everyday lives, and to ask: can we do anything about it?

This seminar will explore how race is understood, lived, and deployed in modern societies around the world. The objective of the course is for students to understand that race is a historical, culturally constructed system of categorization with real structural and everyday political, social, and economic impacts, shaped by and mediated through both global and local processes. The course will begin by establishing race as a social and colonial construct from the complex and contested colonial project of 'race-making' while also foregrounding race as an analytic ripe for contemporary sociocultural analysis. Set up with this historical and conceptual background, students will explore the cultural dimensions of race in particular contexts around the world as they grapple with scholarly and public debates and discussions. While each week¿s readings are clustered around a common theme, students will be encouraged to apply concepts across case studies as they learn different approaches to studying race anthropologically. Course materials include ethnographies of race and readings, films, and podcasts on the histories and theories of race, colonialism, and empire.

This seminar focuses on the intersection between politics and popular culture in contemporary Japan. It will survey a range of social and political implications of practices of popular culture. Topics include J-pop, manga, anime, and other popular visual cultures, as well as social media. Students will be introduced to theories of popular culture in general, and a variety of contemporary anthropological studies on Japanese popular culture in particular. Prior knowledge of cultural anthropology is required.

How did the colonial encounter shape the making of modern South Asia? Was colonial rule a radical rupture from the pre-modern past or did it embody historical continuities? Did colonial rule cause the economic underdevelopment of the region or were regional factors responsible for it? Did colonial forms of knowledge shape how we think of social structures in the Indian subcontinent? Did the colonial census merely register pre-existing Indian communities or did it reshape them? Did colonialism break with patriarchal power or further consolidate it? How did imperial power regulate sexuality in colonial India? What was the relationship between caste power and colonial power? How did capital and labor interact under colonial rule? How did colonialism mediate the very nature of modernity in the region?This lecture-based survey course will explore the nature of the most significant historical process that shaped modern South Asia from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries -- colonialism. It primarily deals with the regions that constituted the directly administered territories of British India, specifically regions that subsequently became the nation-states of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

This advanced undergraduate and graduate seminar will provide students with practical and theoretical training in Geographical Information Systems (GIS) as applied to archaeological research, introducing students to spatial theories and GIS methodological applications to research design and analysis. Topics covered in the course will include: cartographic skills of displaying and visualizing archaeological data, GIS applications to research design and sampling, data acquisition and generation, spatial analyses of artifacts, features, sites, and landscapes, as well as a critical evaluation of the strengths and limitations of GIS spatial analyses and epistemologies. Prerequisites: By instructor consent. Significant work outside of class time is expected of the student in this course.

What stories do data tell? In this course, we will follow digital traces by excavating, interrogating, and pursuing the digital evidence in data. What is the relationship between narratives and digital evidence? How do we address the tension between computational data models, the complexity of the lived experience, and the plurality of voices and methods? How can we understand and identify biases in data structures, archives, and repositories? The course offers the opportunity for extensive hands-on practical work with records, archives, and data collections. Supported by readings on archival practice, data colonialism, and the socio-cultural context of algorithms we will discuss what a critical anthropological perspective can contribute to this debate.

Techniques of interpreting data, organizing bibliographic materials, writing, editing and revising. Preparation of papers for conferences and publications in anthropology. Seniors register for 199; master's students register for 299.

This course introduces basic anthropological concepts and presents the discipline's distinctive perspective on society and culture. The power of this perspective is illustrated by exploring vividly-written ethnographic cases that show how anthropological approaches illuminate contemporary social and political issues in a range of different cultural sites. In addition to class meeting time, a one-hour, once weekly required discussion section will be assigned in the first week of the quarter.

Eight or nine important ethnographies, including their construction, their impact, and their faults and virtues.

One of the most generative regions for medical anthropology inquiry in recent years has been Asia. This seminar is designed to introduce upper division undergraduates and graduate students to the methodological hurdles, representational challenges, and intellectual rewards of investigating the intersections of health, politics, and culture in contemporary China.

This seminar focuses on the intersection between politics and popular culture in contemporary Japan. It will survey a range of social and political implications of practices of popular culture. Topics include J-pop, manga, anime, and other popular visual cultures, as well as social media. Students will be introduced to theories of popular culture in general, and a variety of contemporary anthropological studies on Japanese popular culture in particular. Prior knowledge of cultural anthropology is required.

In this graduate seminar we will explore how writers draw from their worlds of experience to create humanistic works of broad 'and often urgent' appeal. We will pay special attention to how creative writers integrate details of history, kinship, community, identity, pain and imagined possibilities for justice with stories that carry the potential to far exceed the bounds of a particular cultural or geographical place. Our focus will be on how writers combine the personal with larger pressing issues of our times that invite us to breakout of the cloistered spaces of academia (a responsibility, a necessity and also an opportunity) to write for larger publics. We will read and take writing prompts from authors who explore themes akin to those we care about as anthropologists to limn connections between ethnographic telling and literary sensibilities. All of the texts and writing exercises will invite students to intellectually collaborate with writers on the ways they clarify, magnify or explode understandings of power, race, colonial trauma, uncertain futures and societal afflictions as well as how individuals and communities expose and remake the constraints that the modern world has bequeathed us. We will engage works across genres. Potential authors include Lucile Clifton, Natalie Diaz, David Diop, Ralph Ellison, Laleh Khadivi, Moshin Hamid, Zora Neale Hurston, Maaza Mengiste, Toni Morrison, Tommy Orange, Zitkala-Sa and Ocean Vuong.

This advanced undergraduate and graduate seminar will provide students with practical and theoretical training in Geographical Information Systems (GIS) as applied to archaeological research, introducing students to spatial theories and GIS methodological applications to research design and analysis. Topics covered in the course will include: cartographic skills of displaying and visualizing archaeological data, GIS applications to research design and sampling, data acquisition and generation, spatial analyses of artifacts, features, sites, and landscapes, as well as a critical evaluation of the strengths and limitations of GIS spatial analyses and epistemologies. Prerequisites: By instructor consent. Significant work outside of class time is expected of the student in this course.

Techniques of interpreting data, organizing bibliographic materials, writing, editing and revising. Preparation of papers for conferences and publications in anthropology. Seniors register for 199; master's students register for 299.

Modern social theory is based on intellectual horizons emerging in Europe from the 17th to the 19th/20th centuries. This burst of new ideas was intertwined with some of the darkest chapters in Europe's history: the enslavement, subjection and exploitation of vast populations across the globe as Europe's imperial domination expanded and deepened. This course will explore how virtually all the most consequential ideas emerging from now canonical thinkers - on human freedom and autonomy, reason, popular self-determination, property rights, civility, liberal toleration, equality, empirical social sciences and much else - arose as direct answers to the new epistemic, moral and political challenges of empire and colonial conquest. The world of empire indelibly shaped and created the intellectual legacy that informs modern social theory on a global scale - both its internal critiques, its liberal, and emancipatory potentials, as well as its many illiberal, racist and exclusionary strands and impulses. Each 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. Significant work outside of class time is expected of the student for this course.

The history of archaeological thought emphasizes 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: By consent of instructor. Significant work outside of class time is expected of the student for this course.

Required of ANTHRO Ph.D. students. Other graduate students may enroll. Research methods and modes of evidence building in ethnographic research. Prerequisite: By instructor consent. Significant work outside of class time is expected of the student for this course.

Required graduate seminar for CS track. The history of anthropological theory and key theoretical and methodological issues in cultural anthropology. Prerequistes: this course is open only to Ph.D. students in anthropology or by permission of the instructor.

This seminar examines scholarship produced and informed by Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben, particularly as relating to biopolitics, governmentality, subjectification, and death. Focus is given to how anthropology and related disciplines have been applying, challenging, and extending these areas of thought in order to address contemporary predicaments. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.

This seminar will focus on recent and seminal texts in Medical Anthropology, broadly construed.Prerequisite: by instructor consent

This graduate seminar introduces interdisciplinary approaches to landscape study. The broad range of theoretical approaches includes human and non-human interactions and overlapping and divergent, spatial and temporal questions derived from the exchange between landscapes and humans. Fields such as Art history, Political Ecology, Anthropology, Geography, and Natural History draw attention to representational and non-representational ways that material and symbolic aspects of landscapes help constitute the making of place. Throughout the seminar students will development their research question or project. The requirements for this course are demanding. Prerequisite: Those not at the graduate level must seek the instructor's consent for enrollment.

For fifth-year Ph.D. students returning from dissertation field research and in the process of writing dissertations and preparing for professional employment. Prerequisite: By consent of instructor. This course will take place Jan 10th and 24th, Feb 7th and 21st and March 6th from 10am - 12pm.

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.

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 teaching in Anthropology

Supervised work for terminal and coterminal master's students writing the master's project in the final quarter of the degree program. Significant work outside of class time is expected of the student for this course.

Graduate student reading group on a thematic topic of interest. Intended for first or second-year cohort PhD students.

Medical Humanities is a humanistic approach to the topic of medicine. The approach generally emphasizes the subjective experience of health and illness as captured through the expressive arts (painting, music and literature), expressed across historical periods and in different cultures, and interpreted by humanistic scholars in the humanities and social sciences. Its goal is to give students and scholars an opportunity to explore a more holistic and meaning-centered perspective on medical issues. It draws attention not only to diagnosis, but to the meaning and experience of diagnosis, to the way that medicine is an art form as well as a science, to the way institutions and culture shape the way illness is identified, experienced and treated. This workshop includes four sessions per quarter focused on scholarly or artistic presentation and professional development. This quarter it will be held on four Wednesdays from 5:30-7pm: Jan 10th, Jan 31st, Feb 21st, Feb 28th, and March 6th in the Stanford Humanities Center Boardroom.

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 Masters 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. F-1 international students enrolled in this course cannot start working without first obtaining a CPT-endorsed I-20 from Bechtel International Center (enrolling in the CPT course alone is insufficient to meet federal immigration regulations).