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Workshop. Current issues in the decipherment and analysis of Maya hieroglyphic writing and literacy.

In this course, students will think critically about how knowledge about Islam, Muslims, and Muslim Societies is produced and circulated. As a class, we will consider why and how certain kinds of ideas about Islam and Muslims become representative (i.e., authoritative discourse) while others ideas do not. This is an interdisciplinary class; course material will draw on readings from anthropology, literary criticism, history, sociology and media and cultural studies. We will also be engaging with other kinds of material, including news articles, editorials, documentaries, and films.

This upper-division undergraduate seminar focuses on recent studies by anthropologists and scholars in related disciplines on global supply chains and consumption practices.The goal of the course is to assess concepts and methods for integrating a cultural analysis of transnational production with a cultural analysis of transnational consumption. We will review ethnographic studies of the production and consumption of commodities linked by transnational and global networks. The class will thennpursue collaborative research on the global production, distribution, and consumption of a selected commodity. Prerequisite: junior or senior standing and previous coursework in cultural anthropology or permission of instructor.

"Paperwork" is an intensive reading course in a seminar format, concerning the production, circulation and mediation of "paperwork" both as a material and symbolic infrastructure for the operation of modern institutions and governance. We will explore diverse techniques and technologies of paperwork, including note-taking, memos, lists, files, and documents, and forms of paperwork such as medical record, petition, passport, ID card, immigration paper, as well as archives and other mnemonic technologies both as cultural practices and reflexive objects. The goal of the course is to understand "bureaucracy" in the fields of law, business, and public administration, as well as in civil society generally, from the vantage point of concrete inscription, circulation, and storage of papers and documents. Readings will include works by Bruno Latour, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Cornelia Vismann, Friedrich Kittler, and others.

The course prepare students for the methodological and practical aspects of doing ecologically oriented, quantitative anthropological field research. The primary goal is to explore what it means to ask anthropological questions in a systematic way. We will focus on understanding what can constitute an interesting question, how to frame a question in way that facilitates investigation, and how to design methods to begin investigating a question. In turn, the course will provide a format to refine research projects in preparation for doing more extensive fieldwork.

Environment, nature and race: Politics of belonging, exclusion, and embodiment. Scientific and popular understandings of race and ethnicity remain deeply entangled with ideas about "nature" and the "environment". This course will introduce students to some of the many ways that nature, environment, and race have been and remain intertwined, for better or for worse. What does it mean to claim race is "natural"? To what extent is race shaped by environment and vice versa? How are the politics of race linked to the politics of environmentalism? The class will begin with a brief treatment of current critical consensus on the biology of race and the cultural politics of race and nature, and move on to a theoretical discussion of how humans and "nature" interact. From there, the course moves into historical and ethnographic examples of the politics of race and the environment: the racialized and racializing character of particular environments; the ways that racial politics shape natural environments; and the politics of exclusion and belonging in environmental movements. Case studies will be both rural and urban and draw from anthropology, geography, history, and biology. The course will end by considering the recent resurgence of the race concept in biology.

Seminar focused on issues of tropical sustainability with a particular emphasis on the Osa Peninsula of Costa Rica. Offered in conjunction with the Osa Initiative in the Wood¿s Institute for the Environment, the course highlights issues of human development in the tropics, through such means as agricultural development, ecotourism, conservation efforts, private and indigenous reserves, and mining. The course will draw from diverse disciplines including anthropology, rural sociology, conservation biology, geosciences, history, political science, and journalism. In addition to weekly discussions, students will development a research paper throughout the term which will be presented to a panel of selected Wood¿s Faculty during the final week of the term.

The social and cultural consequences of contemporary environmental problems. The impact of market economies, development efforts, and conservation projects on indigenous peoples, emphasizing Latin America. The role of indigenous grass roots organizations in combating environmental destruction and degradation of homeland areas.

Languages around the world are dying at such a rapid rate that the next century could see half of the world's 6800 languages and cultures become extinct unless action is taken now. This course looks at how and why languages die, and what is lost from a culture when that occurs. We will investigate how this trend can be reversed by methods of language documentation and description, the use of innovative technologies, multimodal fieldwork, writing dictionaries and grammars for different audiences, language planning, and data creation, annotation, preservation, and dissemination. We will focus on a number of current programs around the world to revitalize languages. Finally, the course will examine ethical modes of fieldwork within endangered language communities, and the possibilities of successful collaborations and capacity building, focusing especially on Northern California Indian peoples and their languages.