161 - 170 of 337 results for: Anthropology

An anthropological approach to politics through bringing anthropological ways of thinking and modes of analysis to bear on key presuppositions of modern Western political thought. Ideas of rights, the individual, society, liberty, democracy, equality, and solidarity; ethnographic accounts used to identify the limits of conventional analytical approaches and to document the forms of politics that such approaches either ignore or misunderstand. Prerequisite: By consent of instructor. Significant work outside of class time is expected of the student for this course.

Care: A Critical Inquiry examines ethnographic, philosophical, and social theoretical texts to understand the recent turn to care in anthropology. Topics include care as a relation; care and abandonment; the rationalization of care in law and medicine; the ethics of care; the queering of care, among others. Prerequisite: By instructor consent. Significant work outside of class time is expected of the student.

Archaeological knowledge about the past is a resource for imagining and working towards a better future. This graduate seminar examines how archaeological research contributes to future-building through three core topics: (1) archaeological research about liberation, survivance, and self-determination in the past; (2) archaeological methods, such as community-based participatory research, that build capacity to act in the present; and (3) heritage programs that aim to preserve and present histories of hope to future generations. The seminar is intended to foster an active and engaged learning community that critically engages with the challenges and opportunities of conducting archaeological research in the current moment. Seminar participants can expect to be invited to contribute to the syllabus and to develop and implement a self-designed research project related to course themes.

A central concept in modern social theory, the notion of tradition often invokes a picture of life stressing constraint against freedom, continuity against becoming, and transmission instead of novelty. This course asks why the concept of tradition evokes these binaries and how they limit our analytical imagination. What other understandings are possible? The course brings together ethnographic and archaeological debates on tradition, examining how pasts and futures relate in the present. From these engagements, we will consider themes of virtue and embodiment, learning and conduct, and historicity and time. Prerequisite: By instructor consent. Significant work outside of class time is expected of the student for this course.

"The family" is considered one of the most universal structures of human life. The study of kinship has wandered off anthropological syllabi just as it assumes ever greater significance within contemporary (often dystopic) political debates on the societies produced by different kinds of families. This course explores, cross-culturally and historically, how particular models and ideologies of ideal family structure and form have come to dominate and reshape society. We focus particularly on the importance of ideologies of kinship and family within moral imaginations, as well as the inevitable impossible nature of the emotional and material obligations placed by such ideologies. Firstly, the course will ask whether kinship structures are distinct structures of recognition that generate their own ambivalence, anxiety, and comfort. We will focus this through discussing the relationship of kinship to gender roles and ideologies. Secondly, it will locate how talking, thinking, doing and imagining how people are 'properly' related to each other (as well as potential transgressions) are central to imaginations of the social itself. This will also initiate a larger debate on the nature of social change. Thirdly, the course will give students a precise and calibrated entry point into the debates around kinship from the perspective of three differing disciplines, social history, psychoanalysis, and anthropology. Prerequisites: By instructor consent. Significant work outside of class time is expected of the student in this course

Multimodal Methods

Police in the United States have come under greater public scrutiny in recent years, particularly as cell-phone videos make visible abuses by police, prompting nation-wide protests for social justice, police reform, and abolition. Increased scholarly attention to the police centers on racial profiling, `broken windows' policing strategies and mass incarceration, the surveillance state, and violent policing of political protests. While police represent state authority, ordinary policing practices are notoriously difficult to study, thereby eliding variable conditions and contradictions. This course interrogates policing and the carceral state by focusing on the purpose of the police, quotidian policing practices, and territorial control in diverse U.S. and global contexts. Course readings emphasize ethnographies of policing, along with key texts from critical geography and legal studies, to elucidate multiple topographies of policing, control, and neglect at work in governing contemporary societies. Prerequisites: By instructor consent. Significant work outside of class time is expected of the student in this course

This course provides an introduction to psychological and psychiatric anthropology, the sub discipline in which anthropologists pay careful attention to phenomenological and subjective experience. We will read some classics and more contemporary material, and include a focus on methods and writerly representation. Significant work outside of class time is expected of the student for this course.

This course surveys approaches to the study of language and semiotics, examining the relationship between sign and body, interaction and institution, narrative and action, and discourse and practice. Readings include both core writings in semiotic theory and contemporary anthropology. We will be especially attentive to the links between theoretical and methodological questions in ethnographic research. One major focus of the course will be to explore how students can apply key concepts of semiotic theory (genre, voicing, poetics, performance) in their own research projects. Significant work outside of class time is expected of the student for this course.