311 - 320 of 337 results for: Anthropology

The role of ritual practices in a country that has more than one festival on any given day ofnthe year cannot be denied. It is a highly significant one that has pervaded the everyday life,nwhere many gestures have acquired a ritual meaning, be it social or sacred. The presentncourse aims to offer an overview of contemporary Japanese society with a focus onnsacred rituals (related to religious practices) and profane rituals, those daily practices thatnhave gained ritual characteristics: cyclic repetition in a pre-determined space, with predetermined participants, roles, and activities.

Jazz and Flamenco are music genres that originated and evolved in subaltern groups. They are both artistic practices that sufficiently resemble one another, thus inviting a comparative study. This course is multi-disciplinary in scope, and consciously emphasizes the links between history, politics, and expressive culture employing readings and theoretical frameworks from the areas of ethnomusicology, jazz studies. Jazz criticism, anthropology, flamencology, and folklore. Note: This course must be taken for a minimum of 3 units and a letter grade to be eligible for Ways credit.

The purpose of this course is to provide students with an opportunity to learn more about mental health in children, adolescents, and young adults from not only a US but broader perspective by engaging in readings, discussions, visits and lectures by local experts who bring local and regional expertise into the seminars. Mental health is a major concern of students at Stanford and there are students from almost all departments who are engaged in some way with mental health whether it be through the arts (performance, contemplation - Art Pharmacy, athletics (risks to athletes, exercise as intervention, eating disorders), or technology (apps, wearables, AI, etc.), medical anthropology, and history of science to name a few.

A pandemic is a biological and medical event, but it is also a social one. Medical anthropology studies these intersections and the biosocial and cultural dimensions of health, illness, and disease. This course uses anthropological theory, social science research methods, writing across the humanities, and visual representations to help us understand infectious disease. We will explore broad debates in medical anthropology, though the focus will remain on recent pandemics. In this course, we will explore and unpack many large questions which shape our lives: what is it to be ill? To be healthy? How do we experience and narrate pain and illness, and how might others do so differently? How might health disparities and outcomes be culturally created? In probing these questions, this course will provide students with a framework for critically engaging with discourse on infectious diseases, as well as approaching the social challenges illuminated by the Covid-19 pandemic. Through this course we will learn to approach disease and illness within their specific cultural, political, economic, and ecological contexts.

Engage with material cultural theory debates of the late 20th century and examine the impact of the digital revolution on the way we exhibit culture two decades into the third millennium. Reflect upon the transformation of the politics and poetics of museum display analysing readings and exhibitions from the 1990s to the present day. Digital interfaces in our daily lives have altered the way we seek information and the way we communicate with each other. What have we learned about representing cultures in museum spaces and what have we put into practice? Examine contemporary issues and contentions relating to cultural display in relation to exhibits in Western art and anthropology museums.

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.

The philosophy of social science is both descriptive and prescriptive. It describes the philosophical assumptions that form the basis of social inquiry and its practices, and it criticizes them to secure their ability to explain and/or predict social phenomena. This seminar will focus, primarily, on social scientific methodology. The main goal of the seminar is to clarify our answers to the question: should social scientific methodology be different from the methodology employed in the 'hard' sciences? To answer this question, first, we will focus on economic methodology. We will assess topics such as: the epistemic virtues of economic models, whether macroeconomic models need microfoundations, ceteris paribus clauses, randomized control trials, etc. For the second part of the seminar, we will focus on the epistemic value of ethnographic research methods in Anthropology, which is fundamentally different from any method used in the natural (hard) sciences. Although the use of ethnographies has become more popular in the last decades, philosophers of science have failed to focus on their epistemic import. Because of this, we will ponder on questions such as: what type of knowledge is produced by ethnographies? Is this knowledge scientific enough? If not, what is lacking? If yes, should ethnographies be used in other scientific domains?

This course studies the cognitive scientific foundations of political economy. It builds on the explosion of research in cognitive psychology, evolutionary anthropology, and allied fields over the last few decades to provide perspectives on political beliefs and behavior that are not tweaks on theories of complete rationality; they are distinct ideas with their own premises of how humans think, plan, and decide. These premises do not posit that we are irrational. Such claims are wildly off the mark; they cannot explain how we have become the dominant species on this planet. Instead, they describe a clever but computationally constrained primate whose evolution, cultural as well as biological, has produced a characteristic configuration of mental software and external symbol systems (writing, numbers). The representational and computational capacities of this software and these symbol systems, combined with our unusual ability to cooperate with unrelated strangers, has in a remarkably short time produced massive knowledge-intensive political institutions that can deploy nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and can use epidemiology and molecular genetics to combat epidemics. Such achievements warrant explanations. In short, we are boundedly rational, but that's only half the story; we're also really really clever problem-solvers. This course explores theories that explain both halves in a unified way.

A critical introduction to one of the most ambitious theories in the human and social sciences, which has the potential to revolutionize them, including anthropology, sociology, economics, but also philosophy and theology. Professor Girard (1923 - 2015) taught at Stanford for more than twenty years and is internationally recognized as one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century. This seminar will be anything but an exercise in proselytism. It will keep a critical distance towards the theory, questioning its internal consistency as well as putting it to the test of actual facts and events.