1 - 10 of 337 results for: Anthropology

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.

In recent decades, there has been a surge in archaeological research related to the African diaspora. What initially began as plantation archaeology and household archaeology to answer questions of African retention and identity, has now developed into an expansive sub-field that draws from collaborations with biological and cultural anthropologists. Similarly, methodological approaches have expanded to incorporate geospatial analysis, statistical analysis, and, more recently, maritime archaeological practices. The growth of African diaspora archaeology has thus pushed new methodological and theoretical considerations within the field of archaeology, and, inversely, added new insights in the field of Africana Studies. This course covers the thematic and methodological approaches associated with the historical archaeology of Africa and the African diaspora. Students interested in Africa and African diaspora studies, archaeology, slavery, and race should find this course useful. In addition to an overview of the development of African diaspora archaeology, students will be introduced to the major debates within the sub-field as well as its articulation with biological and socio-cultural anthropology. The course covers archaeological research throughout the wide geographical breadth of the African diaspora in Latin America, North America, the Caribbean, East, and West Africa, and the Indian Ocean. The themes covered include gender, race, identity, religion, and ethics in relation to the material record. Lectures will be supplemented with documentary films and other multimedia sources.

Medical anthropologists have spent decades complicating face-value diagnoses of human health, disorder, and normative ideas about the body itself. At its best, practitioners in this field expand the conceptual terrain for what it means to fully engage the human experience of illness. Course participants will learn how people - who are also gendered, raced, aged, classed, and frequently "othered" - differentially manifest conditions in various global settings. By chronicling and questioning established norms and modes of communication around health and disease, students in this course will do close readings of how anthropologists relay people's narratives about what it means to be sick, or afflicted, in different parts of the world. Working from a global view throughout the course, yet with close ethnographic detail in weekly readings, students will be invited to examine whether or not biological phenomena can be thought of as strictly "natural." Lectures and discussion sections will invite reflections on how it is that medical anthropologists convey people's illness experiences within the contexts of anthropologists' larger fieldwork projects, which can include research with experts and medical institutions. Course participants will also examine the tensions between "the universal" and "the particular" as we explore how specific conditions, ranging from genetic disorders to infectious disease, reproductive technologies, hormonal health, gendered suffering, and climate grief (to name a few) articulate with the body within larger political contexts, or "body politics," worldwide. Lastly we will be attentive to how cultural articulations of disease expose the priorities and anxieties of the social worlds in which bodies become afflicted in the first place.

An exploration of the life, times, and works of Zora Neale Hurston, who died in obscurity in 1960 despite having published more books than any other African American woman. We will encounter the diversity of Hurston's interests across a range of media - her training as an anthropologist, her work in the folk cultures of the American South and the urban environment of the North, her diasporic interest in Black expression in the US, the Caribbean, and Africa. We will read Hurston's plays, short stories, folklore, essays, anthropology, and novels, and consider her interest in - and contributions to - photography, film, and music."

This course takes a comparative methodological approach to Black Gender Studies, introducing students to the important terms and debates that animate this field, such as Spillers' "ungendering" and Saidiya Hartman's "critical fabulation". We will read academic articles, book chapters, and exhibition materials in the fields of literary criticism, history, anthropology, gender studies, and fine art that trace Black Women's and gender expansive people's experiences across the Western Hemisphere. The purpose of this course is to aid graduate students in growing as theorists in their own fields by engaging with the methodologies and terms present in contemporary Black queer and gender studies. We will also learn to conduct historical scholarship via archival sources. Particular attention will be paid to scholarship published in the past decade, especially as it relates to performance, literary criticism, and expansive gender throughout the modern history of the Western Hemisphere.This course is by application only. Please send a statement of interest and your CV to mlrosa@stanford.edu.

This course uses social theories of difference to examine the intersections of disability, race and culture. The course will examine these concepts drawing from scholarship published in history, sociology of education, urban sociology, cultural studies, disability studies, social studies of science, cultural psychology, educational and cultural anthropology, comparative education and special education. Implications for policy, research and practice will be covered.

An exploration of the life, times, and works of Zora Neale Hurston, who died in obscurity in 1960 despite having published more books than any other African American woman. We will encounter the diversity of Hurston's interests across a range of media - her training as an anthropologist, her work in the folk cultures of the American South and the urban environment of the North, her diasporic interest in Black expression in the US, the Caribbean, and Africa. We will read Hurston's plays, short stories, folklore, essays, anthropology, and novels, and consider her interest in - and contributions to - photography, film, and music."

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 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.