81 - 90 of 204 results for: ANTHRO

Why do some organizations - technological, societal, or cultural - fail spectacularly, while others adapt and endure? How have some societies turned failure into a catalyst for creativity and transformation? What do ruins and dystopias have to say about the human condition? This course offers a concise survey of anthropological and archaeological case studies of failure that span diverse temporal and spatial scales. Topics include design flaws, maintenance lapses, unfulfilled promises, infrastructure breakdowns, and societal collapse. Students will examine how past human responses to these failures have succeeded or fallen short, gaining insights into solutions for building a resilient future at individual, community, and societal levels. In addition to case studies, the course introduces theoretical frameworks on failure drawn from philosophy, infrastructure studies, queer theory, and Anthropocene scholarship. By critically engaging with these perspectives, students will develop an expansive understanding of the complexities of failure and its implications for the past, present, and future.

Medical Humanities is a humanistic approach to the topic of medicine. The approach generally emphasizes the subjective experience of health and illness as captured through the expressive arts (painting, music and literature), expressed across historical periods and in different cultures, and interpreted by humanistic scholars in the humanities and social sciences. Its goal is to give students and scholars an opportunity to explore a more holistic and meaning-centered perspective on medical issues. It draws attention not only to diagnosis, but to the meaning and experience of diagnosis, to the way that medicine is an art form as well as a science, to the way institutions and culture shape the way illness is identified, experienced and treated. This workshop includes four sessions per quarter focused on scholarly or artistic presentation and professional development. Winter Quarter 2025 it will be held on the following Wednesdays from 5:30-7pm: April 15, April 29, May 13 and May 27.

This class explores the psychology and sociology of prejudice, asking a deceptively simple question: what is race? From here follows a second question: what is racism? We'll explore implicit bias, and equip students to understand it, recognize it, and critically evaluate it. We'll start by outlining early colonial theories of scientific racism and the ongoing myths around race and intelligence, including phrenology, eugenics, and discussions of stereotype threat and IQ. We will question how race can be at once not based in any evolutionary, demographic, or biological reality and yet be a driving force in many social and political arenas. We will then examine stereotypes more widely, and how they can persist in society despite the decline of overt prejudice, through mechanisms of implicit bias, microaggression, and institutional racism. Students will take from this course a much deeper understanding of how prejudice shaped the contemporary world and how different approaches to understanding our own and others' implicit bias have implications for social policy and social justice.

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.