printer friendly pageANTHRO 119W: Cyborg Anthropology
What does it mean to claim we are all cyborgs ¿ a hybrid of human and machine? Cyborgs have long captured the popular imagination of people around the world, appearing in various forms of media including films, books, and video games. In these instances, cyborgs are typically imagined as futuristic entities, portrayed as products of anticipated technological advancements yet to come. This course takes a different approach, employing the cyborg as a framework to understand human existence and experience across space and time, and explore the relationship between the body, culture, and technology. Drawing from anthropology and other relevant fields, this course emphasizes how humans and tools co-construct each other, blurring the boundaries between natural and artificial, human and machine. The first section of the course will present different theoretical perspectives for understanding human-machine interactions and relationships. In the second section, we will spend each week examining
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What does it mean to claim we are all cyborgs ¿ a hybrid of human and machine? Cyborgs have long captured the popular imagination of people around the world, appearing in various forms of media including films, books, and video games. In these instances, cyborgs are typically imagined as futuristic entities, portrayed as products of anticipated technological advancements yet to come. This course takes a different approach, employing the cyborg as a framework to understand human existence and experience across space and time, and explore the relationship between the body, culture, and technology. Drawing from anthropology and other relevant fields, this course emphasizes how humans and tools co-construct each other, blurring the boundaries between natural and artificial, human and machine. The first section of the course will present different theoretical perspectives for understanding human-machine interactions and relationships. In the second section, we will spend each week examining various types of technological embodiments. Specific technologies explored include smartphones and wearables; biohacking and prostheses; virtual reality; and artificial intelligence. And in the last section, we explore the tensions between narratives of technological pessimism and optimism, comparing the ways different individuals and communities perceive and evaluate emergent technologies' consequences for society, now and in the future. This course will provide students with the opportunity to conduct limited, small-scale ethnographic fieldwork on human-machine interactions. The data collected during these ethnographic exercises will inform the in-class presentation and final paper for the course.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-SI
Instructors:
Navarro, A. (PI)
ANTHRO 120H: Introduction to the Medical Humanities (DLCL 120, FRENCH 120E, ITALIAN 120)
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.
Terms: Win
| Units: 4
| UG Reqs: WAY-EDP
Instructors:
Wittman, L. (PI)
ANTHRO 121B: "The Will to Adorn": An Anthropology of Dress (AFRICAAM 121B, ANTHRO 221B, ARCHLGY 121B, ARCHLGY 221B)
This seminar explores sartorial practices as a means for examining formations of identities and structural inequalities across space and time. Building off the definition of dress, pulled from Mary Ellen Roach-Higgins and Joanne B. Eicher, this course examines sartorial practices as social-cultural practices, shaped by many intersecting operations of power and oppression including racism, sexism, and classism, that involve modifications of the corporal form (i.e., scarification, body piercings, and hair alteration) as well as all three-dimensional supplements added to the body (i.e., clothing, hair combs, and jewelry). The emphasis on intersecting operations of power and oppression within this definition of dress draws on Kimberlé Crenshaw's conceptualization of intersectionality. Through case studies and examples from various parts of the world, we will explore multiple sources of data - documentary, material, and oral - that have come to shape the study of dress. We examine how dress intersects with facets of identity, including race, age, ethnicity, sexuality, and class.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-EDP, WAY-SI
Instructors:
Flewellen, A. (PI)
;
Gupta, S. (TA)
ANTHRO 122B: What's New in Australian Archaeology (ARCHLGY 122)
New techniques, new questions, and new approaches are changing our understanding of more than 50,000 years of human life in Australia. When did people first come to Australia? How did humans adapt to the unique, and changing, environment? At the same time, public debates are pushing archaeologists and heritage professionals to be more accountable, leading to questions like, what are the best practices for community-led archaeology? How should Australians commemorate the settler past? What about repatriation? This course will introduce the archaeology of Australia by exploring the latest research and debates playing out in the academic and public spheres. No prior archaeological experience is required.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3-5
Instructors:
Connor, K. (PI)
ANTHRO 126: Urban Culture in Global Perspective (URBANST 114)
Core course for Urban Studies majors. A majority of the world's population now live in urban areas and most of the rapid urbanization has taken place in mega-cities outside the Western world. This course explores urban cultures, identities, spatial practices and forms of urban power and imagination in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Participants will be introduced to a global history of urban development that demonstrates how the legacies of colonialism, modernization theory and global race thinking have shaped urban designs and urban life in most of the world. Students will also be introduced to interpretative and qualitative approaches to urban life that affords an understanding of important, if unquantifiable, vectors of urban life: stereotypes, fear, identity formations, utopia, social segregation and aspirations. Significant work outside of class time is expected of the student for this course.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-SocSci, WAY-EDP, WAY-SI
ANTHRO 129C: A Deep Dive Into the Indian Ocean: From Prehistory to the Modern Day (ANTHRO 229C, ARCHLGY 129C, OCEANS 129C, OCEANS 229C)
The Indian Ocean has formed an enduring connection between three continents, countless small islands and a multitude of cultural and ethnic groups and has become the focus of increasing interest in this geographically vast and culturally diverse region. This course explores a range of topics and issues, from the nature and dynamics of colonization and cultural development as a way of understanding the human experience in this part of the world, to topics such as religion, disease, and heritage The course guides studies in the many ways in which research in the Indian Ocean has a direct impact on our ability to compare developments in the Atlantic and Pacific. Significant work outside of class time is expected of the student for this course.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 3
Instructors:
Seetah, K. (PI)
ANTHRO 131W: Intro to The Illicit Economies of Addiction: Anthropological Perspectives on Drug Use and Policing
This course introduces contemporary anthropological perspectives on the phenomenon of addiction with a focus on mental health and incarceration. In the first part, the course will introduce the making of addiction in the history of drug policing and public health through shifting discourses of the legal and cultural significance of drugs and drug scenes. Then, it will situate drugs at the heart of dispossession of specific communities over generations and geographies in the 20th century. In the final part, the course will invite students to go beyond common analytical categories to historically situate drug use on the links between therapeutic approaches and penal mechanisms. Readings and discussion will focus on the centrality of drugs to regimes of violence and dispossession, while developing a theory of illicit drug economies crucial to the development of modern state and medicine across geographies. The course will make use of philosophical, historical and anthropological literature and video clips and films.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-SI
Instructors:
Atici, S. (PI)
ANTHRO 133W: Anthropology of Social Movements
In recent years, we have witnessed a growing number of social and political upheavals around the world. With new organizational principles, diversified ways of participation and mediation, and expanding themes and goals, these cases, in bringing the political near to us, also challenge our familiar ways of thinking and doing politics. They are testing the limit of our imagination of a bounded social movement in the forms such as street protest and civil disobedience, as well as the limit of analysis. This course explores the uses of anthropological theories in engaging with a politically animated world.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-SI
Instructors:
Huang, S. (PI)
ANTHRO 134D: Introduction to Museum Practice (ARCHLGY 134, ARCHLGY 234, ARTHIST 284B)
This is a hands-on museum practicum course open to students of all levels that will culminate in a student-curated exhibit. It entails a survey of the range of museum responsibilities and professions including the purpose, potential, and challenges of curating collections. While based at the Stanford University Archaeology Collections (SUAC), we will visit other campus collections and sites. Students will plan and realize an exhibition at the Stanford Archaeology Center, gaining skills in collections management, research, interpretation, and installation.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-CE, WAY-A-II
| Repeatable
3 times
(up to 15 units total)
Instructors:
Raad, D. (PI)
ANTHRO 134W: Elements of the Environment
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
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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?
Terms: Win
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-EDP, WAY-SI
Instructors:
Zhang, A. (PI)
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