41 - 50 of 204 results for: ANTHRO

Indus Valley civilizations also known as Harapan civilization is one of the three early civilizations of the Near East and South Asia, along with Egypt and Mesopotamia. Indus civilizations sites are very widespread spanning an area from much of Pakistan, to northeast Afghanistan, and northwestern India. Starting from the first brief excavation of Harappa in 1872, over a thousand mature Harappan sites have been reported and nearly a hundred excavated. This course explores different sites of Indus civilization particularly the five major urban centers of this civilization that includes Harappa, Ganweriwala, Rakhigari and two world heritage sites i.e. Mohenjodaro in Pakistan and Dholavira in India. Themes include ancient urbanism, material culture, city planning, trade, art, craftsmanship, pottery and ceramics, agriculture, script, migration, materials, and folklores. Students will learn to engage with the long-sustained legacies of the ancient world which continue to influence life in the contemporary world. We will also learn to critically analyze the existence, management, and recognition of these ancient sites as archaeological heritage today, nationally, and internationally.

This course investigates the field of environmental archaeology. Its goals are twofold: 1) to critically consider the intellectual histories of environmental archaeology, and, 2) to survey the various techniques and methods by which archaeologists assess historical environmental conditions through material proxies. The course will include lab activities.

Eight or nine important ethnographies, including their construction, their impact, and their faults and virtues.

How archaeologists study sex, sexuality, and gender through the material remains left behind by past cultures and communities. Theoretical and methodological issues; case studies from prehistoric and historic archaeology.

This course explores the unique history of San Francisco Bay Area tribes with particular attention to Muwekma Ohlone- the descendent community associated with the landscape surrounding and including Stanford University. The story of Muwekma provides a window into the history of California Indians from prehistory to Spanish exploration and colonization, the role of Missionaries and the controversial legacy of Junipero Serra, Indigenous rebellions throughout California, citizenship and land title during the 19th century, the historical role of anthropology and archaeology in shaping policy and recognition of Muwekma, and the fight for acknowledgement of Muwekma as a federally recognized tribe. We will visit local sites associated with this history and participate in field surveys of the landscape of Muwekma.

Students at Stanford and students at a community mental health site co-learn theories and co-create songs in this community-engaged course. From memes to magazines, "psychoanalysis has returned" - perhaps partly in response to crises of the twenty-first century with no easy, rational answers. How do the participatory arts and music align with contemporary psychoanalytic approaches that act at the level of the psychosocial and institutional? We explore in theory and practice how the psychic is social and the social is psychic. The course culminates in a community song-sharing celebration. Note: no musical training is required to take this course. This is a Cardinal Course certified by the Haas Center for Public Service.

What does it mean to design and imagine a space of memory, haunting and historical trauma? How might we curate images that encapsulate and engender both pain and hope for the future? This course explores the aesthetic traces of trauma in contemporary East Asia through the investigation of cultural spaces of war, ruins, monuments and memorials as sites of critical inquiry. Taking an anthropological approach to understanding both the enactment of war and its cultural consequences, this course focuses on the legacies of the 20th century historical trauma in the present by questioning the symbolic significance of historical space, aesthetics, and memory in human societies. How does historical trauma take shape through a form of contemporary aesthetic? How is it felt within the lived experiences of contemporary Asia? What does it mean to live in the aftermath of the Cold War in Asia, or similarly, in anticipations of future war? By delving into various case studies from China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, this course invites students to read and experiment with hands-on design and curation at the conjunction of applied aesthetics and historical reflection and aspires to begin to understand how aesthetic environments, objects, and interpretations become fundamental modes of existing with and within history.

An introduction to numeric methods in Anthropology and related fields employing the Data Desk statistics package to test hypotheses and to explore data. Examples chosen from the instructor's research and other relevant projects. No statistical background is necessary, but a working knowledge of algebra is important. Topics covered include: Frequency Distributions; Measures of Central Tendency, Dispersion, and Variability; Probability and Probability Distributions; Statistical Inference, Comparisons of Sample Means and Standard Deviations; Analysis of Variance; Contingency Tables, Comparisons of Frequencies; Correlation and Regression; Principal Components Analysis; Discriminant Analysis; and Cluster Analysis. Grading based on take-home problem sets.

This seminar interrogates the history of anthropology's approach to the environment, beginning with early functionalist, structuralist, and Marxist accounts of human-environment relationships. It builds towards more recent developments in the field, focusing on nonhuman and relational ontologies as well as current projects on the intersections of nature, capital, politics, and landscape histories. At the end of this class, students will be familiar with the intellectual histories of environmental anthropology and contemporary debates and tensions around questions of ethics, agency, environment, and historical causality.