91 - 100 of 337 results for: Anthropology

This course engages multimodal approaches to music ethnography through student-driven research into the musical ecologies of the Bay Area. Students explore the entanglements of sound, space, and social life through collaborative, project-based work with local artists. The course cultivates ethical, reflexive, and sustained modes of inquiry, attending closely to issues of power and representation in ethnographic practice.

Industrial production has fundamentally remade the globe and reorganized social life, even as it has generated countless commodities and mountains of waste. This course considers how an archaeological emphasis on materials and the built environment can elucidate industrial histories and clarify how industrialization, the rise of factory production, and the ecological consequences of those processes has restructured social and political life across the last three centuries. In the course, students consider archaeological evidence for industrial precursors, engage with theorizations of industrial production, and examine how archaeologists and anthropologists have studied the sites and social worlds of industry through case studies ranging from Caribbean plantations, slaughterhouses of the Canadian prairie, and lumber mills in the Pacific Northwest.

One of the most generative regions for medical anthropology inquiry in recent years has been Asia. This seminar is designed to introduce upper division undergraduates and graduate students to the methodological hurdles, representational challenges, and intellectual rewards of investigating the intersections of health, politics, and culture in contemporary China. This course is the same as OSPBEIJ 55. Students may not earn credit for both ANTHRO 148/248/ CHINA 155A/255A and OSPBEIJ 55.

This class is about the archaeology of the Maya, a diverse group of millions of people who live globally today, and whose ancestors built a thriving society in the rainforests of Mesoamerica. In our exploration of ancient Maya archaeology, we will pay special attention to dynamic continuities from ancient to contemporary worlds. We begin with an introduction to ancient words, both by reading Maya literature and learning to decipher hieroglyphs. We will then learn about all facets of ancient Maya society, including cosmology, environment, cities, and gender. The course concludes with considerations of what lessons we can learn by studying the ancient Maya past, and why the stories we tell about the past are important to the present.

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.

This course draws from ethnography, social theory, media and literature to examines the place of the asylum in the constitution of knowledge, politics, and populations. An ancient juridical concept, asylum has been used to describe a fundamental political right, medical and penal institutions, as well as emergent spaces of care and safety. As such, thus course invites students to think of critical issues associated with asylum, including: illness, trauma, violence, immigration, displacement, human rights, sanctuary, and testimony.

This seminar focuses on the intersection between politics and popular culture in contemporary Japan. It will survey a range of social and political implications of practices of popular culture. Topics include J-pop, manga, anime, and other popular visual cultures, as well as social media. Students will be introduced to theories of popular culture in general, and a variety of contemporary anthropological studies on Japanese popular culture in particular. Prior knowledge of cultural anthropology is required.

This course will introduce students to the theories and methods that archaeologists use to study ceramic objects. Ceramic materials are ubiquitous at most archaeological sites, making their analysis critical for interpreting the past. This course applies an anthropological lens to consider not just the ceramics themselves, but the people for whom these objects were critical in daily life. As such, we will examine theory alongside method, so that students learn how these areas inform each other and what information can be gleaned through specific research questions and techniques. We will dedicate one day a week to discussing theory, while the other day will focus on methodological applications through hands-on labs. Students will be introduced to the physio-chemical methods for ceramic analysis (e.g., ICP-MS, petrography), with an emphasis on paste analysis using digital and polarized light microscopy. We will also consider the ethics of analysis. For instance, we will weigh the merit of destructive techniques against knowledge gained and conservation concerns. This class is appropriate for anthropology, archaeology, classics, art history, and history majors, or anyone with an interest in material culture analysis.

Anthropology and the academy more generally have long valued text, language, and cognition more highly than the image, visuality, and the imagination. Yet, contemporary political movements and strategies for social justice and transformation vividly demonstrate why effective social research needs to study both.Pre-requisite by instructor consent.