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From backyard solar panels and water wells to DIY filters and cookware, what can small-scale, locally crafted technologies teach us about survival, adaptation, and creativity in the Anthropocene that high-tech solutions often overlook? This course traces the life-worlds of indigenous technologies across mountains, forests, deserts, and coastal regions. Through case studies such as wildfire management, water harvesting aqueducts, and floating reed islands, students explore how seemingly vernacular technologies meet the functional, economic, socio-political, and aesthetic needs of indigenous communities that create and sustain them. Drawing on anthropology, archaeology, and ecological philosophy, this course further examines the sustainability, resilience, accessibility offered by these low-tech technical solutions in the contemporary world. Students will engage with theoretical frameworks from social ecologies, Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), appropriate technology, and Anthropocene studies.

Community-based research in archaeology

This course explores how anthropologists have approached the study of Islam, intervening in debates about power, agency, and identity. Reading recent ethnographies of Muslim societies, we will examine the legacies of colonialism, the past and future of feminist politics, and the limits of multicultural and multiracial democracy. A major aim of the course is to provide students with resources for thinking critically about the history and politics of modern Muslim societies, with a particular focus on issues of law and ethics, gender and sexuality, and minority politics.

We live in politically turbulent times, and so much of the confounding social and political movements of our times seem to position themselves against 'the elite': feminist movements against patriarchal states, autonomists against neoliberal capitalism and the police, White nationalists, nativists and populist strongmen against 'liberals', etc. These expressions of social and political discontent stand oddly at their political opposites (Left v. Right), share common grievances around the lack of structural responses by the states and the international community towards climate change, neoliberalism, racism and the like. They also all use decentralized, global networks and mediascapes to make themselves present. This course looks at social formations that emerge at the absence, or in opposition to, state and elite control. We will begin by delving into the anthropological record to understand how people throughout history have developed forms of counter-power that delegitimized or put the elites in check. Then, we will look into contemporary ethnographic studies of social and political mobilization that might adopt such strategies of counter-power for different and often contradictory and antagonistic goals. Case-studies will be drawn from Europe, Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East.

What is masculinity? How are masculinities invested with power and meaning in cultural contexts? How is anthropological attention to them informed by and extending inquiry across the academy in spheres such as culture studies, political theory, gender studies, history, and science and technology studies? Limited enrollment. Significant work outside of class time is expected of the student for this course.

This course examines social, political, and religious dimensions of various Middle Eastern societies. Key topics include the development of the modern nation-state, the Islamic revival, human rights, and discourses of democracy. Course materials include ethnographic studies, novels, and films, which provide a rich contextualization of social life and cultural politics in the region.

This is a hands-on museum practicum course open to students of all levels that will culminate in a student-curated exhibit. It entails a survey of the range of museum responsibilities and professions including the purpose, potential, and challenges of curating collections. While based at the Stanford University Archaeology Collections (SUAC), we will visit other campus collections and sites. Students will plan and realize an exhibition at the Stanford Archaeology Center, gaining skills in collections management, research, interpretation, and installation.

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.

The course discusses the politics and practices of exhumation of individual and mass graves. The problem of exhumations will be considered as a distinct socio-political phenomenon characteristic of contemporary times and related to transitional justice. The course will offer analysis of case studies of political exhumations of victims of the Dirty War in Argentina, ethnic cleansing in former Yugoslavia, the Holocaust, communist violence in Poland, the Rwandan genocide, the Spanish Civil War, and the war in Ukraine. The course will make use of new interpretations of genocide studies, research of mass graves, such as environmental and forensic approaches.