ANTHRO 1:
Introduction to Cultural and Social Anthropology (ANTHRO 201)
This course introduces basic anthropological concepts and presents the discipline's distinctive perspective on society and culture. The power of this perspective is illustrated by exploring vividly-written ethnographic cases that show how anthropological approaches illuminate contemporary social and political issues in a range of different cultural sites. In addition to class meeting time, a one-hour, once weekly required discussion section will be assigned in the first week of the quarter.
Terms: Win
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-SocSci, GER:EC-GlobalCom, WAY-A-II, WAY-SI
ANTHRO 1S:
Introduction to Cultural and Social Anthropology (ANTHRO 101S, ANTHRO 201S)
This course introduces basic anthropological concepts and presents the discipline's distinctive perspective on society and culture. The power of this perspective is illustrated by exploring vividly-written ethnographic cases that show how anthropological approaches illuminate contemporary social and political issues in a range of different cultural sites.
Terms: Sum
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-SocSci, GER:EC-GlobalCom, WAY-A-II, WAY-SI
ANTHRO 3:
Introduction to Archaeology (ARCHLGY 1)
Aims, methods, and data in the study of human society's development from early hunters through late prehistoric civilizations. Archaeological sites and remains characteristic of the stages of cultural development for selected geographic areas, emphasizing methods of data collection and analysis appropriate to each.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-SocSci, GER:EC-GlobalCom, WAY-A-II, WAY-SI
ANTHRO 10SC:
Evolution and Conservation in Galápagos (HUMBIO 17SC)
The tiny remote islands of Galápagos have played a central role in the study of evolution. Not surprisingly, they have also been important to theory and practice in biodiversity conservation. The fascinating adaptations of organisms to the unusual, isolated ecosystems of the archipelago have left them particularly vulnerable to perturbations and introductions from the outside. Drawing on lessons learned from Darwin's time to the present, this seminar explores evolution, conservation, and their connection among the habitats and organisms of Galápagos. Using case-study material on tortoises, iguanas, finches, Scalesia plants, penguins, cormorants and more, we will explore current theory and debate about adaptation, speciation, adaptive radiation, sexual selection, and other topics in evolution. Similarly, we will explore the special challenges Galápagos poses today for conservation, owing to both its unusual biota and to the increasing impact of human activity in the archipelago.This course includes, at no additional cost to students, an intensive eleven-day expedition to Galápagos, provided that public health conditions permit. The goal of the expedition is both to observe firsthand many of the evolutionary adaptations and conservation dilemmas that we have read about, and to look for new examples and potential solutions. A chartered ship from Lindblad Expeditions, with the highest levels of COVID protection protocol, will serve as our floating classroom, dormitory, and dining hall as we work our way around the archipelago to visit eight different islands. For this portion of the class, undergraduates will be joined by a small group of Stanford alumni and friends in a format called a Stanford "Field Seminar." Because our class time on campus is limited to one week before travel, students will be required to complete all course readings over the summer.The course emphasizes student contributions and presentations. Students will be asked to lead class discussions and to carry out a thorough literature review of some aspect of the evolution and/or conservation of one or more Galápagos species. The final assignment for the seminar is to complete a seven- to ten-page paper about that review and to present its main findings in a joint seminar of undergrads and alumni as we travel in Galápagos.
Last offered: Summer 2022
| Units: 2
ANTHRO 10SI:
Reimagining Democracy: Social Mobilization in Indian Elections
When India held its first elections in 1952, it reinvented what was possible for humanity - hitherto, the notion of democracy was restricted to the small, rich, homogeneous nations of the West. India, a democracy of diversities, took the radical step of adopting universal adult franchise in an impoverished, illiterate, and complex society. Is democracy compatible with a society comprising the multiple identities of caste, class, religion, ethnicity, occupational group, and gender? To understand how the intricacies of Indian society and elections reflect each other, this course delves into the multiple axes of socio-political mobilization in India. How do the politics of gender interact with deep-rooted patriarchies? How do Indian political parties use and misuse caste identities to influence electoral outcomes? How do historical religious fault lines manifest in the 21st century? This course will explore critical themes in Indian society through the lens of its elections. No background in Indian politics is necessary. Student Initiated Course.
Last offered: Spring 2022
| Units: 1-2
ANTHRO 12:
Anthropology and Art
Modernity. How the concept of art appears timeless and commonsensical in the West, and with what social consequences. Historicizing the emergence of art. Modernist uses of primitive, child art, asylum, and outsider art.
Last offered: Spring 2020
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ANTHRO 12SI:
Watching Theory, Reading Television: examining critical themes in contemporary televised media
This student-initiated seminar provides students with a broad overview of critical social and cultural anthropology theory that will serve as a basis for analysis of themes in contemporary televised media content. The application of readings to select media clips from the likes of 90 Day Fiancé, Saturday Night Live, and the Bachelor will seminar will verse both anthropology and non-anthropology majors alike in relevant anthropological theory, and the ability to apply it to understand a variety of trends in contemporary televised media and subsequent public reception.
Last offered: Spring 2022
| Units: 1-2
ANTHRO 13SC:
Evolution: The Unity and Diversity of Life
The theory of evolution is one of the most important theories in all the natural and social sciences, and it is crucial to understanding the diversity of life on Earth. This course explores the history of evolutionary thinking from Darwin (and his predecessors) to Dawkins, with an emphasis on the growing tool kit of evolutionary principles for understanding and conserving the Earth's biodiversity. We'll look in detail at key forces of evolutionary change, including natural selection, sexual selection, kin selection, and more, and we'll look at their leading products in adaptation and diversification. Students working singly or in small groups will take on such fascinating challenges as why do hammerhead sharks have a strange front end? Do flying squid really fly? How and why do pistol shrimp generate light underwater? How does the waved albatross thrive without a nest? Among aerodynamic cormorants, why is there one that does not fly? And why do you have a vermiform appendix? These and other peculiarities will help us understand pattern and process in evolution. Far from being an old and esoteric subject, we'll see how evolution offers indispensable tools both for understanding and conserving the wonderful diversity of life on earth.
Terms: Sum
| Units: 2
ANTHRO 16:
Native Americans in the 21st Century: Encounters, Identity, and Sovereignty in Contemporary America (ARCHLGY 16, NATIVEAM 16)
What does it mean to be a Native American in the 21st century? Beyond traditional portrayals of military conquests, cultural collapse, and assimilation, the relationships between Native Americans and American society. Focus is on three themes leading to in-class moot court trials: colonial encounters and colonizing discourses; frontiers and boundaries; and sovereignty of self and nation. Topics include gender in native communities, American Indian law, readings by native authors, and Indians in film and popular culture.
Last offered: Spring 2020
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-SocSci, GER:EC-AmerCul
ANTHRO 20N:
Islam and the Idea of Europe
Policy makers often ask whether Muslims can be integrated into Europe. The question itself presumes, often without justification, that Islam as such is foreign to Europe. This course seeks to challenge this presumption. What if the very idea of Europe was already shaped by the history of Muslim societies? How will we need to revise our basic assumptions about western civilization, especially with respect to its racial and religious foundations? We will explore these questions from a range of sites, from southern Spain, which witnessed eight centuries of Muslim rule, to the efforts of German converts to Islam who are rethinking their understandings of European enlightenment, and finally to those in France who claim belonging both as Europeans and as devout Muslims. Course materials will include readings in Anthropology, as well as several film screenings.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-EDP, WAY-SI
ANTHRO 23B:
Race and the War on Drugs: Long Roots and Other Futures (CSRE 23)
Current discussions of the war on drugs reference Richard Nixon's 1971 declaration as a starting point. This class will encourage students instead to see the war on drugs beyond seemingly self-evident margins and imaginaries. In this course, we will explore the racialized and gendered history of coca and cocaine in the Americas, and follow the war on drugs as it targets different aspects of drug production and consumption within and beyond the borders of the United States. In examining how drugs and drug policies have been used as tools of discrimination and exploitation from colonialism through to present systems of mass incarceration, we will analyze racialization as it is constructed and experienced through time and imposed onto nations and bodies. Readings and discussion will emphasize Black and Latinx feminist theories, critical race theory, and decoloniality, drawing on anthropological and interdisciplinary scholarship while incorporating other forms of writing (prose, fiction, poetry) and media (graphic novels, visual art, film clips, documentaries). Students will learn to interrogate the longstanding racialized and gendered roots of the drug war and explore critical calls towards other futures.
Last offered: Winter 2020
| Units: 3-5
ANTHRO 27N:
Ethnicity and Violence: Anthropological Perspectives
Ethnicity is one of the most compelling and most modern ways in which people - in the midst of considerable global and local uncertainty - all across the world imagine and narrate themselves. This seminar will take an anthropological look at both the modernity and the compulsions of ethnic allegiance, and, why struggles over ethnic identity are so frequently violent. Our questions will be both historical; how, why and when did people come to think of themselves as possessing different ethnic identities - and contemporary; how are these identities lived, understood, narrated, and transformed and what is the consequence of such ethnicisation. We follow this through anthropological perspectives which ask persistently how people themselves locally narrate and act upon their experiences and histories. Through this we will approach some of the really big and yet everyday questions that many of us around the world face: how do we relate to ourselves and to those we define as others; and how do we live through and after profound violence? The seminar will take these larger questions through a global perspective focusing on cases from Rwanda and Burundi, India, Sri Lanka, Northern Ireland, Guatemala, and the countries of Former Yugoslavia among others. These cases cover a broad canvas of issues from questions of historicity, racial purity, cultural holism, and relations to the state, to contests over religious community, indigeneity, minority identities, globalization, gender, and generation.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 3
ANTHRO 29A:
Race, Indigeneity, and Cultural Heritage in Latin America (ARCHLGY 29A, CHILATST 129, CSRE 129A)
This course introduces students to the anthropological study of social difference and inequality in contemporary Latin America. It focuses on the intersections of race, Indigeneity, and cultural heritage. Since European contact, race has been a key category for governing heterogenous populations across the region. In recent decades, institutions have established cultural heritage formation - particularly the cultural heritages of Black and Indigenous peoples - as central to the development of the modern nation-state. At the same time, Black and Indigenous peoples have mobilized around civil and human rights to decolonize racial hierarchies and transform colonial structures of power. Students will first engage current approaches to race, Indigeneity, and cultural heritage. Students will then explore how racial and Indigenous formations converge with the following cultural heritage forms: museums, tourism, archaeological sites, and language.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-EDP, WAY-SI
ANTHRO 30N:
Does Science Have Culture? (CSRE 31N)
In this course students will engage with the anthropology of science and medicine to explore the how cultural norms shape scientific understandings. Through a series of diverse global case studies, seminar participants will assess how historical conditions yield political possibilities that inflect discoveries. Lastly, students will probe how cultural understandings of nature, human difference and national esteem influence how scientific facts come to cohere as reflections of the societies in which they emerge.
Last offered: Spring 2021
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-EDP, WAY-SI
ANTHRO 31Q:
The Big Shift (CSRE 30Q)
Is the middle class shrinking? How do people who live at the extremes of American society- the super rich, the working poor and those who live on the margins, imagine and experience "the good life"? How do we understand phenomena such as gang cultures, addiction and the realignment of white consciousness? This class uses the methods and modes of ethnographic study in an examination of American culture. Ethnographic materials range from an examination of the new American wealth boom of the last 20 years (Richistan by Robert Frank) to the extreme and deadlyworld of the invisible underclass of homeless addicts on the streets of San Francisco (Righteous Dopefiend by Phillipe Bourgois and Jeff Schonberg). The experiences of Hispanic immigrants and the struggle to escape gang life in Los Angeles are highlighted in the story of Homeboy Industries a job creation program initiated by a priest working in LA's most deadly neighborhoods (G-Dog and the Homeboys by Celeste Fremon). Finally in Searching for Whitopia: an improbable journeyinto the heart of White America, Rich Benjamin explores the creation on ethnic enclaves (whitopias) as fear over immigration and the shrinking white majority redefine race consciousnessin the 21st century. Each of these narratives provides a window into the various ways in which Americans approach the subjects of wealth and the good life, poverty and the underclass, and theconstruction of class, race, and gender in American society. Students will not be required to have any previous knowledge, just curiosity and an open mind.
Last offered: Winter 2021
| Units: 4
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-SocSci
ANTHRO 32:
Theories in Race and Ethnicity: A Comparative Perspective (CSRE 32)
This undergraduate course employs an anthropological and historical perspective to introduce students to ideas and concepts of race and ethnicity that emerged primarily in Europe and the United States in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and that continue to shape contemporary racial attitudes, interactions, and inequalities. Ideas about race and ethnicity forged outside the U.S. and case studies from other nations are presented to broaden students' understanding and to overcome the limitations of an exclusive focus on the U.S. This course is geared to sophomores and juniors who have already taken at least one course on race and ethnicity, anthropology, African American Studies, Asian American Studies, Chicana/o Studies, Jewish Studies or Native American Studies.
Last offered: Spring 2018
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-SocSci
ANTHRO 34:
Animals and Us (ARCHLGY 34)
The human-animal relationship is dynamic, all encompassing and durable. Without exception, all socio-cultural groups have evidenced complex interactions with the animals around them, both domesticated and wild. However, the individual circumstances of these interactions are hugely complicated, and involve much more than direct human-animal contact, going far beyond this to incorporate social, ecological and spiritual contexts.This course delves into this complexity, covering the gamut of social roles played by animals, as well as the methods and approaches to studying these, both traditional and scientific. While the notion of `animals as social actors is well acknowledged, their use as proxies for human autecology (the relationship between a species and its environment) is also increasingly recognized as a viable mechanism for understanding our cultural and economic past. It will piece together the breadth of human-animal relationships using a wide geographic range of case studies.
Last offered: Autumn 2020
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-ER, WAY-SI
ANTHRO 39:
Sense of Place
This course examines the life of places as shaped by environmental events and projects aimed towards rural or urban development. Drawing methodological insights from anthropology, cultural geography and environmental studies, we examine the forces that generate place problems for humans and nonhumans. Each encounter with place and displacement sets up a particular issue for us to grapple with: How would we address issues created by natural disasters, the seizure of land through legal means that fall under eminent domain or gentrification projects? Through a critical dialogue with interdisciplinary fields that inform the readings, the seminar aims to bring theoretical and methodological insights to inform our practical suggestions for how to address placeness and displaceness at different scales.
Last offered: Autumn 2019
| Units: 3
ANTHRO 41:
Genes and Identity (AFRICAAM 41, CSRE 41A)
In recent decades genes have increasingly become endowed with the cultural power to explain many aspects of human life: physical traits, diseases, behaviors, ancestral histories, and identity. In this course we will explore a deepening societal intrigue with genetic accounts of personal identity and political meaning. Students will engage with varied interdisciplinary sources that range from legal cases to scientific articles, medical ethics guidelines, films, and anthropological works (ethnographies). We will explore several case studies where the use of DNA markers (as proof of heritage, disease risk, or legal standing) has spawned cultural movements that are biosocial in nature. Throughout we will look at how new social movements are organized around gene-based definitions of personhood, health, and legal truth. Several examples include political analyses of citizenship and belonging. On this count we will discuss issues of African ancestry testing as evidence in slavery reparations cases, revisit debates on whether Black Freedman should be allowed into the Cherokee and Seminole Nations, and hear arguments on whether people with genetic links to Jewish groups should have a right of return to Israel. We will also examine the ways genetic knowledge may shape different health politics at the individual and societal level. On this count we will do close readings of how personal genomics testing companies operate, we will investigate how health disparities funding as well as orphan disease research take on new valences when re-framed in genetic terms, and we will see how new articulations of global health priorities are emerging through genetic research in places like Africa. Finally we will explore social implications of forensic uses of DNA. Here we will examine civil liberties concerns about genetic familial searching in forensic databases that disproportionately target specific minority groups as criminal suspects, and inquire into the use of DNA to generate digital mugshots of suspects that re-introduce genetic concepts of race.
Last offered: Spring 2019
| Units: 4
| UG Reqs: WAY-EDP, WAY-SI
ANTHRO 60N:
Digging for Answers: 5 Big Questions of Our Time (ARCHLGY 60N)
The aim in this course is to explore the archaeological evidence for long-term change with regard to 5 major questions of our time: Where do we come from? Has inequality increased? Have we become more violent? Why do we have so much stuff? What is the relationship between humans and climate change? You will be introduced to recent publications for class debate, and will also be introduced to the ways in which archaeologists use evidence in order to explore the 5 themes. We will go to Stanford¿s archaeological collections so that you can have hands-on experience of artifacts and will be able to problem solve using data from the instructor¿s own excavations. We will also visit labs (archaeological and genomic for example), local museums and local archaeological excavations.
Last offered: Winter 2021
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-SI
ANTHRO 78A:
Disruption and Diffusion: The Archaeology of Innovation (ARCHLGY 78)
This undergraduate seminar uses engagement with canonical archaeological topics and questions about the emergence of civilization to introduce students to critical perspectives on the nature of novelty, progress, and modernity. The first weeks of the course will be spent learning about archaeological hypotheses and debates on early human innovation (e.g. urban development, agriculture). Later weeks will focus on developing a robust theoretical framework through which to better understand and interrogate claims about the origin of innovation.
Last offered: Autumn 2018
| Units: 3-5
ANTHRO 80A:
Heritage and Human Rights (ARCHLGY 80)
What does archaeology have to say about human rights? Is there a right to cultural heritage? How can archaeology and heritage help protect rights¿or encroach upon them? Themes we will address in this course include the archaeological investigation of human rights topics; the right to heritage; conflicts of different rights regimes in heritage contexts; and ethical considerations about rights during research and heritage management. These questions will take us to cases as diverse as forensic investigation of the disappeared in Argentina, the archaeology of homelessness in the U.K., the destruction of heritage as cultural genocide in Bosnia and the Middle East, and the rights of indigenous groups in Australia and the U.S. to control cultural heritage.
Last offered: Spring 2019
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-ER
ANTHRO 82:
Medical Anthropology (ANTHRO 282, HUMBIO 176A)
Emphasis is on how health, illness, and healing are understood, experienced, and constructed in social, cultural, and historical contexts. Topics: biopower and body politics, gender and reproductive technologies, illness experiences, medical diversity and social suffering, and the interface between medicine and science.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-SocSci, GER:EC-GlobalCom, WAY-EDP, WAY-SI
ANTHRO 82P:
The Literature of Psychosis (HUMBIO 162L, PSYC 82, PSYC 282)
One of the great gifts of literature is its ability to give us insight into the internal worlds of others. This is particularly true of that state clinicians call "psychosis." But psychosis is a complex concept. It can be terrifying and devastating for patients and families, and yet shares characteristics with other, less pathological states, such as mysticism and creativity. How then can we begin to make sense of it? In this course, we will examine the first-hand experience of psychosis. We will approach it from multiple perspectives, including clinical descriptions, works of art, and texts by writers ranging from Shakespeare, to the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, to patients attempting to describe their experience. This class is not only for students thinking of careers in medicine, psychology or anthropology, but also readers and writers interested exploring extraordinary texts. There are no prerequisites necessary; all that is needed is a love of language and a curiosity about the secrets of other minds.
Last offered: Spring 2021
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 10 units total)
ANTHRO 84B:
Incas, Spaniards, and Africans: Archaeology of the Kingdom of Peru (ARCHLGY 84)
Students are introduced to Andean archaeology from the rise of the Inca empire through the Spanish colonial period. We will explore archaeological evidence for the development of late pre-Hispanic societies in western South America, the Spanish conquest, and the origins of key Spanish colonial institutions in the Andean region: the Church, coerced indigenous labor, and African slavery. Central to this course is an archaeological interrogation of the underpinnings and legacies of colonialism, race, and capitalism in the region. Students will also consider the material culture of daily life and those living on the social margins, both in pre-Hispanic societies and under Spanish rule.
Last offered: Autumn 2021
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-EDP, WAY-SI
ANTHRO 89:
Undergraduate Reading Group
Undergraduate student reading group on a thematic topic of interest. Sections: All faculty.
Last offered: Winter 2019
| Units: 1-5
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 5 units total)
ANTHRO 90B:
Theory of Cultural and Social Anthropology
This undergraduate seminar offers students the foundations of theory in social and cultural anthropology. Each section begins with a close reading of the work of a contemporary anthropologist and then traces the intellectual legacies that have shaped it. This is a required course for Anthropology majors. The course also fulfills the requirement for Writing in the Major (WIM). To sharpen students' critical writing skills, there will be several writing and rewriting assignments.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-SocSci, WAY-SI
ANTHRO 91:
Method and Evidence in Anthropology
This course provides a broad introduction to various ways of designing anthropological questions and associated methods for collecting evidence and supporting arguments. We review the inherent links between how a question is framed, the types of evidence that can address the question, and way that data are collected. Research activities such as interviewing, participant observation, quantitative observation, archival investigation, ecological survey, linguistic methodology, tracking extended cases, and demographic methods are reviewed. Various faculty and specialists will be brought in to discuss how they use different types of evidence and methods for supporting arguments in anthropology. Significant work outside of class time is expected of the student for this course.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-SocSci, WAY-SI
ANTHRO 91A:
Archaeological Methods (ARCHLGY 102)
Methodological issues related to the investigation of archaeological sites and objects. Aims and techniques of archaeologists including: location and excavation of sites; dating of places and objects; analysis of artifacts and technology and the study of ancient people, plants, and animals. How these methods are employed to answer the discipline's larger research questions. Significant work outside of class time is expected of the student for this course.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-SMA
ANTHRO 92A:
Undergraduate Research Proposal Writing Workshop
Practicum. Students develop independent research projects and write research proposals. How to formulate a research question; how to integrate theory and field site; and step-by-step proposal writing.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 2-3
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 6 units total)
ANTHRO 92B:
Undergraduate Research Proposal Writing Workshop
Practicum. Students develop independent research projects and write research proposals. How to formulate a research question; how to integrate theory and field site; and step-by-step proposal writing.
Terms: Win
| Units: 2-3
ANTHRO 93:
Prefield Research Seminar
Preparation for anthropological field research in other societies and the U.S. Data collection techniques include participant observation, interviewing, surveys, sampling procedures, life histories, ethnohistory, and the use of documentary materials. Strategies of successful entry into the community, research ethics, interpersonal dynamics, and the reflexive aspects of fieldwork. Significant work is required outside of class. Prerequisites: Consent by instructor. Significant work outside of class time is expected of the student for this course.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 94:
Postfield Research Seminar
Goal is to produce an ethnographic report based on original field research gathered during summer fieldwork, emphasizing writing and revising as steps in analysis and composition. Students critique classmates' work and revise their own writing in light of others' comments. Ethical issues in fieldwork and ethnographic writing, setting research write-up concerns within broader contexts. Significant work outside of class time is expected of the student for this course.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 95:
Research in Anthropology
Independent research conducted under faculty supervision, normally taken junior or senior year in pursuit of a senior paper or an honors project. May be repeated for credit.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr, Sum
| Units: 1-10
| Repeatable
3 times
(up to 10 units total)
Instructors: ;
Bauer, A. (PI);
Bird, D. (PI);
Bird, R. (PI);
Brown, M. (PI);
Curran, L. (PI);
Durham, W. (PI);
Ebron, P. (PI);
Engel, C. (PI);
Ferguson, J. (PI);
Flewellen, A. (PI);
Fox, J. (PI);
Fullwiley, D. (PI);
Garcia, A. (PI);
Hansen, T. (PI);
Hodder, I. (PI);
Inoue, M. (PI);
Jain, S. (PI);
Jones, J. (PI);
Klein, R. (PI);
Kohrman, M. (PI);
Luhrmann, T. (PI);
Malkki, L. (PI);
Meskell, L. (PI);
Rick, J. (PI);
Robertson, I. (PI);
Seetah, K. (PI);
Tambar, K. (PI);
Thiranagama, S. (PI);
Trivedi, M. (PI);
Voss, B. (PI);
Wilcox, M. (PI);
Yanagisako, S. (PI);
Yolacan, S. (PI)
ANTHRO 95B:
Independent Study for Honors or Senior Paper Writing
Required of Anthropology honors or senior paper candidates. Taken in the final quarter before handing in the final draft of the Honors or Senior Paper and graduating. This independent study supports work on the honors and senior papers for students with an approved honors or senior paper application in Anthropology. Prerequisite: consent of Anthropology faculty advisor. Terms: Aut, Win, Spr, Sum Units: 1-5(not repeatable for credit)
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr, Sum
| Units: 1-5
Instructors: ;
Bauer, A. (PI);
Bird, D. (PI);
Bird, R. (PI);
Brown, M. (PI);
Curran, L. (PI);
Durham, W. (PI);
Ebron, P. (PI);
Engel, C. (PI);
Ferguson, J. (PI);
Flewellen, A. (PI);
Fox, J. (PI);
Fullwiley, D. (PI);
Garcia, A. (PI);
Hansen, T. (PI);
Hodder, I. (PI);
Inoue, M. (PI);
Jain, S. (PI);
Jones, J. (PI);
Klein, R. (PI);
Kohrman, M. (PI);
Luhrmann, T. (PI);
Malkki, L. (PI);
Meskell, L. (PI);
Rick, J. (PI);
Robertson, I. (PI);
Seetah, K. (PI);
Tambar, K. (PI);
Thiranagama, S. (PI);
Trivedi, M. (PI);
Voss, B. (PI);
Wilcox, M. (PI);
Yanagisako, S. (PI);
Yolacan, S. (PI)
ANTHRO 95C:
Monumental Pasts: Cultural Heritage and Politics (ARCHLGY 95)
What is heritage? Who decides what and how pasts matter? Our pasts loom monumental in multiple senses. At the intersection of archaeology and anthropology, the emerging discipline of heritage is often described as the politics of the past. What people choose to take from their histories varies and is often contested. Heritage shapes and is shaped by power. This course introduces contemporary themes and debates in cultural heritage. Together we'll develop a critical stance toward dominant perspectives to understand how pasts are used, erased, reclaimed, and mobilized in the present, for the future. In doing so we'll think through concepts such as materiality, intangibility, monumentality, value, memory, identity, community, nationalism, and universality. Our case studies will range from contemporary debates over Jim Crow era monuments in the USA, to UNESCO World Heritage List politics, and the development of community identities. We will also reflect on heritage at a personal scale and its relationship to belonging. Course materials will include readings and media from around the globe. Students will participate through seminar discussions, proposing and presenting topics of their choice, regular journal entries, and a choice of final project, podcast, paper, or exhibition plan.
Last offered: Autumn 2021
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-EDP, WAY-SI
ANTHRO 96:
Directed Individual Study
Prerequisite: consent of instructor.
Terms: Win, Spr
| Units: 1-10
| Repeatable
for credit
Instructors: ;
Bauer, A. (PI);
Curran, L. (PI);
Durham, W. (PI);
Ebron, P. (PI);
Engel, C. (PI);
Ferguson, J. (PI);
Flewellen, A. (PI);
Fullwiley, D. (PI);
Garcia, A. (PI);
Hansen, T. (PI);
Inoue, M. (PI);
Jain, S. (PI);
Klein, R. (PI);
Kohrman, M. (PI);
Luhrmann, T. (PI);
Malkki, L. (PI);
Tambar, K. (PI);
Thiranagama, S. (PI);
Trivedi, M. (PI);
Voss, B. (PI);
Yanagisako, S. (PI);
Yolacan, S. (PI)
ANTHRO 97:
Internship in Anthropology
Opportunity for students to pursue their specialization in an institutional setting such as a laboratory, clinic, research institute, or government agency. May be repeated for credit. Service Learning Course (certified by Haas Center). F-1 international students enrolled in this course cannot start working without first obtaining a CPT-endorsed I-20 from Bechtel International Center (enrolling in the CPT course alone is insufficient to meet federal immigration regulations).
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr, Sum
| Units: 1-10
| Repeatable
for credit
Instructors: ;
Bauer, A. (PI);
Bird, D. (PI);
Bird, R. (PI);
Brown, M. (PI);
Curran, L. (PI);
Durham, W. (PI);
Ebron, P. (PI);
Engel, C. (PI);
Ferguson, J. (PI);
Flewellen, A. (PI);
Fox, J. (PI);
Fullwiley, D. (PI);
Garcia, A. (PI);
Hansen, T. (PI);
Hodder, I. (PI);
Inoue, M. (PI);
Jain, S. (PI);
Jones, J. (PI);
Klein, R. (PI);
Kohrman, M. (PI);
Luhrmann, T. (PI);
Malkki, L. (PI);
Meskell, L. (PI);
Rick, J. (PI);
Robertson, I. (PI);
Seetah, K. (PI);
Tambar, K. (PI);
Thiranagama, S. (PI);
Trivedi, M. (PI);
Voss, B. (PI);
Wilcox, M. (PI);
Yanagisako, S. (PI);
Yolacan, S. (PI)
ANTHRO 97C:
The Structure of Colonial Power: South Asia since the Eighteenth Century (HISTORY 97C)
How did the colonial encounter shape the making of modern South Asia? Was colonial rule a radical rupture from the pre-modern past or did it embody historical continuities? Did colonial rule cause the economic underdevelopment of the region or were regional factors responsible for it? Did colonial forms of knowledge shape how we think of social structures in the Indian subcontinent? Did the colonial census merely register pre-existing Indian communities or did it reshape them? Did colonialism break with patriarchal power or further consolidate it? How did imperial power regulate sexuality in colonial India? What was the relationship between caste power and colonial power? How did capital and labor interact under colonial rule? How did colonialism mediate the very nature of modernity in the region?This lecture-based survey course will explore the nature of the most significant historical process that shaped modern South Asia from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries -- colonialism. It primarily deals with the regions that constituted the directly administered territories of British India, specifically regions that subsequently became the nation-states of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.
Last offered: Autumn 2021
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-SI
ANTHRO 98C:
Digital Methods in Anthropology (ANTHRO 298C)
The course provides an introduction to a broad range of digital tools and techniques for anthropological research. It is geared towards those interested in exploring such methodologies for their research and wanting to add hands-on experience with state-of-the-art digital tools to their skill set. Students will learn to work with some of the most common tools used to collect and manage digital data, and to perform various types of analysis and visualization.Undergraduate students register for 3-5 Units, Graduate students can register for 3-5 units.
Last offered: Spring 2022
| Units: 3-5
ANTHRO 100X:
"I'm Not a Robot": The Contemporary Politics of Man and Machine
Our lives today are full of 'smart' machines that appear to deliberate, make judgements, and interact socially. Yet unlike humans, they are bound to their programming, unable to improvise, feel, or ethically value what one pioneering computer scientist called 'the imperialism of instrumental reason.' What role does this rigid 'computer reason' play in real-life projects of imperialism, of racial and class domination, and other forms of social inequality? How does it work with or against existing power structures? We will examine a variety of human-computer encounters across military and government, law and policing, science and medicine, and media and entertainment. Course materials will include ethnographies of computer science and robotics, readings about the history and philosophy of computing, as well as news articles and films related to pop culture and current events
Last offered: Spring 2022
| Units: 3-5
ANTHRO 101S:
Introduction to Cultural and Social Anthropology (ANTHRO 1S, ANTHRO 201S)
This course introduces basic anthropological concepts and presents the discipline's distinctive perspective on society and culture. The power of this perspective is illustrated by exploring vividly-written ethnographic cases that show how anthropological approaches illuminate contemporary social and political issues in a range of different cultural sites.
Terms: Sum
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-SocSci, GER:EC-GlobalCom, WAY-A-II, WAY-SI
ANTHRO 102:
Cults: Mystics and Messiahs in a Modern World
Why do people choose to invest their faith, intellect, and labor in the fate of a single individual, and what consequences follow from such collective investment? This course brings together anthropological and historical perspectives in the study of religion to examine how mystical and messianic movements form, unfold, and dissolve. By drawing on a range of cases from medieval Iran to contemporary America, students will explore the political, economic, temporal, and spatial dimensions of embodied authority.
Terms: Win
| Units: 3-5
ANTHRO 103:
The Archaeology of Climate (ANTHRO 203, ARCHLGY 106)
This course reviews the long-term relationships between human societies and Earth's climatic systems. It provides a critical review of how archaeologists have approached climate change through various case studies and historical paradigms (e.g., societal 'collapse', resilience, historical ecology) and also addresses feedbacks between past human land use and global climate change, including current debates about the onset of the Anthropocene.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-SI
ANTHRO 103A:
Human Osteoarchaeology (ANTHRO 203A, ARCHLGY 103A)
The course will cover the methodological and theoretical backgrounds to human osteoarchaeology, introduce the student to the chemical and physical characteristics of bone, and to the functional morphology of the human skeleton. Classes will consist of a taught component that outlines how osteoarchaeologists reconstruct individual life-histories based on age, sex etc.; this is combined with hands-on identification of different skeletal elements and the markers used to inform the analytical methods. Additional scientific methodologies are also introduced that increasingly form a major component of human osteoarchaeology.
Last offered: Winter 2022
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 103B:
History of Archaeological Thought (ARCHLGY 103, CLASSICS 170)
Introduction to the history of archaeology and the forms that the discipline takes today, emphasizing developments and debates over the past five decades. Historical overview of culture, historical, processual and post-processual archaeology, and topics that illustrate the differences and similarities in these theoretical approaches. Satisfies Archaeology WIM requirement.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-SocSci, WAY-A-II, WAY-SI
ANTHRO 104:
Tools for Meaningful Communities (LEAD 104, LIFE 104)
How can we live together and honor both difference and belonging? How do we create community amidst divisiveness and the existential threats of climate change, oppression of marginalized peoples, and our disconnection from ourselves and each other? We are inherently relational and have the potential to heal, flourish, and lead. Leadership and changemaking must be rooted in a commitment to deep inner work that cultivates wellbeing, insight, and wisdom. Inner work radiates outward to shape the systems that create and sustain our societies. In this class, grounded in your experiences at Stanford, you will cultivate skills and tools to enhance your intrapersonal, interpersonal and extrapersonal capacities to enact change for yourself and others. Working in teams, you will learn about and practice building community through the application of interdisciplinary frameworks that provide multiple perspectives on the transformation of the self, our relations with each other, our communities, and societal systems.
Terms: Win
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-CE, WAY-EDP
ANTHRO 104A:
Archaeological approaches to Landscapes: How people and things make Places and Spaces (ARCHLGY 162)
This class introduces students to the archaeological concept of landscape as a heuristic that can be used in critical analysis. Students will learn to articulate the ways that landscapes are constituted in the process of 'living'. They will be equipped to understand how they participate in the production of landscapes, and articulate a critical understanding of these processes, including the potentials for and modalities of `resistance' and `dominance' that are inherent in them (think the wearing out of a pathway through a lawn, despite lawns ostensibly not being intended to be walked through on campus). To develop this appreciation of their role and the larger politics of the production of landscapes, this class will draw on archaeological analyses and methods that examine landscapes of varying types and scales ranging from classic landscapes like the Stone Henge, Pyramids of Egypt, and Maya urbanism, and contemporary landscapes like Ground Zero, New York, and the City of Los Angeles, to more quotidian landscapes like homesteads in colonial Australia, plantations in colonial India, United States and the Caribbean and the `ranges' of native American tribes (as processual archaeologists rendered them). It will also explore prescriptive paradigms that have informed spatial practice e.g., the cosmologies of the Maya world and South India, and the grids of modern cities. Students will learn to see spatial production as a complex and political process in which agency is enacted at multiple scales and by agents with varying kinds of agencies, ranging from the spectacular to the quotidian and human to the posthuman. They will also be introduced to a range of analytical methods that draw on cultural ecology, practice theory, political economy, phenomenology and materiality studies amongst others to examine landscapes. Students will then use these analytical methods in projects of their own for their term papers to examine landscapes of their choosing. More advanced students will be introduced to the disciplinary discussions within archaeology that contextualized each of the methods and approaches discussed in class, enabling them to articulate the contexts in which they emerged within the discipline of archaeology as a social science.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 3-4
| UG Reqs: WAY-EDP, WAY-SI
ANTHRO 104B:
Landscapes of Inequality: The Southwestern United (ARCHLGY 104B)
Inequality is one of the major social issues of the current moment in the United States. Racial, economic, and gender inequality has been even more pronounced in the fall out of the COVID-19 pandemic around the world. These injustices are identifiable at the individual and institutional level, but they also are enmeshed in the physical landscapes in which we live. What can archaeology (conventionally defined as the study of the past through material traces) help us learn about present day inequalities and landscapes? This course explores novel approaches to archaeological research across time in the Southwestern United States. We begin with material investigations of the experience of crossing the US-Mexico border, which demonstrate how the landscape itself is weaponized. We then move backwards in time to explore the intimate landscape of incarcerated people of Japanese Ancestry during WWII, where gardens were an important practice of persistence and opportunity for survivors to re-engage the past. Finally, we will explore how ancient Chacoan landscapes index the consolidation of power and hierarchy in the past, and are the site of struggles for indigenous sovereignty and environmental justice in the present. This course will introduce you to major themes in landscape studies and archaeology including: place-making, agency, regional analysis and ethics.
Last offered: Summer 2022
| Units: 3
ANTHRO 104D:
Introduction to Race and Technology (CSRE 104, SYMSYS 104)
How do ideas about race get encoded in the design of new technology? How have science and technology shaped our understanding of race and identity? Drawing on research in anthropology, history, media studies, STS, and beyond, we will consider how technology can reinforce and amplify racial inequality. From the 'scientific' origins of the concept of race in the 18th century to contemporary algorithms that attempt to detect a person's race from their image, we will explore how social ideas about race are both embedded in and transformed by technology. We will also highlight how communities of color have resisted the encroachment of harmful technologies and developed alternatives that promote racial justice. Topics covered will include: algorithmic bias, policing and borders, surveillance, disinformation, data colonialism, and labor issues like micro-tasking and data annotation. This introductory course has no prerequisites and welcomes students of all disciplines.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 106:
Incas and their Ancestors: Peruvian Archaeology (ANTHRO 206A, ARCHLGY 102B)
The development of high civilizations in Andean S. America from hunter-gatherer origins to the powerful, expansive Inca empire. The contrasting ecologies of coast, sierra, and jungle areas of early Peruvian societies from 12,000 to 2,000 B.C.E. The domestication of indigenous plants which provided the economic foundation for monumental cities, ceramics, and textiles. Cultural evolution, and why and how major transformations occurred.
Last offered: Autumn 2019
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-SocSci, GER:EC-GlobalCom, WAY-SI
ANTHRO 108B:
Gender in the Arab and Middle Eastern City (FEMGEN 108B, URBANST 108B)
What are the components of gendered experience in the city, and how are these shaped by history and culture? How do meanings attributed to Islam and the Middle East obscure the specificity of women¿s and men¿s lives in Muslim-majority cities? This course explores gender norms and gendered experience in the major cities of Arab-majority countries, Iran and Turkey. Assigned historical and sociological readings contextualize feminism in these countries. Established and recent anthropological publications address modernity, mobility, reproduction, consumption, and social movements within urban contexts. Students will engage with some of the key figures shaping debates about gender, class, and Islam in countries of the region typically referenced as North Africa and the Middle East (MENA). They will also evaluate regional media addressing concerns about gender in light of the historical content of the course and related political concepts.
Last offered: Winter 2018
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 109A:
Archaeology of the Modern World (ANTHRO 209A, ARCHLGY 109A)
Historical archaeology, also called the archaeology of the modern world, investigates the material culture and spatial history of the past five centures. As a discipline, historical archaeology has been characterized by (1) a methodological conjunction between history and archaeology; (2) a topical focus on the ¿three Cs¿: colonization, captivity, and capitalism ¿ forces which arguably are constitutive of the modern world; and (3) an epistemological priority to recovering the perspectives of ¿people without history.¿ Each of these three trends is widely debated yet they continue to profoundly shape the field. This seminar provides an in-depth examination of the emergence and development of this historical archaeology, with a focus on current issues in theory and method. For undergraduates, the prerequisite is Anthro 3 or consent of instructor.
Last offered: Autumn 2017
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-EDP, WAY-SI
ANTHRO 110:
Environmental Archaeology (ANTHRO 210, ARCHLGY 110)
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.
Last offered: Winter 2022
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 110B:
Examining Ethnographies (ANTHRO 210B)
Eight or nine important ethnographies, including their construction, their impact, and their faults and virtues.
Last offered: Autumn 2021
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 111:
Archaeology of Gender and Sexuality (ARCHLGY 129, FEMGEN 119)
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.
Last offered: Autumn 2019
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-EDP, WAY-SI
ANTHRO 111C:
Muwekma: Landscape Archaeology and the Narratives of California Natives (ARCHLGY 111B, NATIVEAM 111B)
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.
Last offered: Spring 2022
| Units: 3-5
ANTHRO 112A:
Archaeology of Human Rights (URBANST 147)
This introductory seminar provides a critical vantage point about human rights discourse from an archaeological perspective. The seminar is organized around four main questions: (1) Is cultural heritage a human right? (2) What are archaeologists learning about how the material and temporal dimensions of power and resistance? (3) How is archaeological evidence being used in investigations of human rights violations? (4) Can research about the past shape the politics of the present? Topics to be discussed include archaeological research on mass internment, colonialism, enslavement and coerced labor, ethnic cleansing, homelessness, gender discrimination, indigenous rights, and environmental justice.
Last offered: Spring 2018
| Units: 5
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 5 units total)
ANTHRO 113:
Culture and Epigenetics: Towards A Non-Darwinian Synthesis (ANTHRO 213, ARCHLGY 113)
The course examines the impact of new research in epigenetics on our understanding of long-term cultural change. The course examines the various attempts that have been made over recent decades to find a synthesis between cultural and biological evolution. These approaches, often termed neo-Darwinian, include memes, dual inheritance theory, theories of cultural selection and transmission, niche construction theory and macro-evolutionary approaches. Research in all these areas will be examined, with particular reference to explanations for the origins of agriculture, but also including other transformations, and critiqued. New research in epigenetics offers an alternative non-Darwinian evolutionary perspective that avoids many of the problems and pitfalls in the neo-Darwinian approaches. Cultural evolution comes to be viewed as cumulative, directional and Lamarckian, since heritable epigenetic variation can underlie evolutionary change. Epigenetics opens the way for human cultural entanglements to become the drivers for evolutionary change, thus allowing the full range of social processes studied in the social and cultural sciences to take their place in the study and analysis of long-term change.
Last offered: Autumn 2018
| Units: 4-5
ANTHRO 114:
Rights and Ethics in Heritage (ANTHRO 214, ARCHLGY 114)
Heritage is a human thing: made by people and mobilized for their own purposes, it has a range of effects on communities. This course focuses on the human dimension of heritage with special attention to questions of rights and ethics. Where can we locate the intersections of heritage and rights? How do communities and governing structures negotiate control over and participation in heritage, and with what impacts on people? Which ethical challenges arise and how have archaeologists, heritage managers, museums, legislators, community leaders, and others approached these issues?The first half of this seminar course focuses on the theoretical and contextual basis for these discussions. We will address topics such as cultural ownership and participation as well as the global and governing contexts within which heritage is mobilized. Building on this, the second half examines cases in which different rights, needs, and goals come into conflict: museum practice, public memory, upheaval stemming from violence or disaster, and the ethics of the material world itself. Throughout, we will highlight heritage in relation to communities, rights, and responsibilities, all while thinking through ethical modes of heritage research and practice.
Last offered: Autumn 2020
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 115:
The Social life of Human Bones (ANTHRO 215, ARCHLGY 115)
Skeletal remains serve a primary function of support and protection for the human body. However, beyond this, they have played a range of social roles once an individual is deceased. The processes associated with excarnation, interment, exhumation and reburial all speak to the place that the body, and its parts, play in our cultural as well as physical landscape.This course builds on introductory courses in human skeletal anatomy by adding the social dynamics that govern the way humans treat other humans once they have died. It draws on anthropological, biological and archaeological research, with case studies spanning a broad chronological and spatial framework to provide students with an overview of social practice as it relates to the human body.
Last offered: Winter 2021
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-SI
ANTHRO 116:
Data Analysis for Quantitative Research (ANTHRO 216)
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.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-SocSci, WAY-AQR
ANTHRO 116A:
Eating Culture: An Introduction to the Anthropology of Food
Everyone eats, it's an essential and universal part of human existence. But food is not just about calories and nutrition - it is rich with meaning and memory. In this course, we take a broad view of the social meanings of food, cooking, and eating to think about how food choices create and are produced by individual and group identities. We explore different methods that anthropologists use to study food, from the archaeological to the single ingredient study, and we deconstruct ideas about "natural" and "good" ways of eating by placing them in historical and transnational contexts. Enrollment by instructor consent.
| Units: 3
ANTHRO 116B:
Anthropology of the Environment (ANTHRO 216B, ARCHLGY 116B)
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.
Last offered: Spring 2022
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-SI
ANTHRO 117C:
Global Heritage: Conflict, Reconciliation, and Diplomacy (ARCHLGY 105)
Archaeological studies from the 1990s framed cultural heritage as a resource that created attachments to place and to the past as a means to buttress national and cultural identities. But heritage can no longer be viewed as simply a marker of a singular, national identity. As a global era ushers in new regimes of heritage management, heritage becomes embroiled in a multitude of interactions whether acting as a fulcrum of transnational governance or functioning at the crux of community empowered utilizations and initiatives.nnThis course will trace what happens to heritage as it has been drawn into a world of global interactions while also maintaining more local forms of attachment. The class will address three themes (conflict, reconciliation, and diplomacy), all of which result from the multi-scalar relations that emerge from heritage financing, management, and preservation in a transnational arena. While the class will discuss cases that include both tangible and intangible heritage, the focus of the course will center around tangible elements of the past, including heritage sites and archaeological artifacts. Combining readings from the field of international relations, archaeology, and heritage studies, the class will question if and how heritage can be used in local settings while also producing international exchanges.
Last offered: Winter 2019
| Units: 3-5
ANTHRO 118C:
Heritage Development in the Global South (ARCHLGY 116)
Heritage is a site of both promise and contestation in the Global South. These nations use it for a wide range of purposes: Peru¿s thriving tourism sector rests on a basis of heritage attractions, South Africa negotiates a post-apartheid identity through heritage, and India places increasing numbers of sites on the World Heritage List. Outlining different modes of heritage production and interpretation, this class investigates heritage regimes on scales ranging from local communities and national governance to international recognition. We will examine the role of heritage in building communities and identity; the place of heritage within economic development; the efforts of Global South countries to negotiate the legacies of colonialism and global inequality through managing their pasts; and the deployment of heritage as part of international power struggles within worldwide structures like UNESCO. Drawing on anthropology, heritage studies, and archaeology, students will gain a deeper understanding of how heritage is used by Global South countries to produce identity, support development, domesticate the past, and build the future.
Last offered: Winter 2019
| Units: 3-5
ANTHRO 118W:
Asian American and Settler Colonial Entanglements (ARCHLGY 138, ASNAMST 118, HISTORY 258C)
Today, the subject of decolonization is at the forefront of a wealth of scholarship as scholars, activists, and institutions grapple with the legacies of colonialism that are far from over. For Asian Americans, there are entanglements with colonialism in both the countries of their heritage and in the United States, complicating the scope of what it means to deal with colonialism. In this class we look at some of these relationships, thinking through the impact of various types of colonialism on history of Asian Americans, and their positionality alongside colonial structures in the United States. In doing so we look to unpack the nuances behind these interrelationships and the murky overlapping and underdiscussed dynamics that they create. We start the quarter with a discussion of what settler colonialism is, and key discussions of its intersections with the Asian American experience that emerged with the publication of Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life in Hawai'i. We will then move to read our first two books of the quarter which focus on the intersections of Asian American labor and Indigenous erasure from the construction of the transcontinental railroad to the incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII. From here we will pivot towards the Pacific and look to two books which seek to understand Asian American involvement with US colonial projects, and the wake of wartime and post-war resettlement. These works look past the North American continent to consider the ways in which transnational connections and diasporas become entangled with settler colonial projects. Throughout the course, students will work to develop their writing in formulating a research paper that they will work on in steps.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 4-5
ANTHRO 119:
Zooarchaeology: An Introduction to Faunal Remains (ANTHRO 219, ARCHLGY 119)
As regularly noted, whether historic or pre-historic, animal bones are often the most commonly occurring artefacts on archaeological sites. As bioarchaeological samples, they offer the archaeologist an insight into food culture, provisioning, trade and the social aspects of human-animal interactions. The course will be taught through both practical and lecture sessions: the hands-on component is an essential complement to the lectures. The lectures will offer grounding in the main methodological approaches developed, as well as provide case-studies to illustrate where and how the methods have been applied. The practical session will walk students through the skeletal anatomy of a range of species. It will guide students on the identification of different parts of the animal, how to age / sex individuals, as well as recognize taphonomic indicators and what these mean to reconstructing post-depositional modifications.
Last offered: Winter 2022
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-SMA
ANTHRO 119B:
Tech Ethics and Ethnography: the human in human-computer interaction
Do machines have culture? How do engineers write themselves into their products? Can we better anticipate the unexpected and unwanted consequences of technologies?nnTaking as its point of departure the discipline of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), which examines the design and use of computer technology, this course shifts the focus to the humans creating and utilizing the technology. It invites us to think about computer science and social science together and learn how ethnographic methods can be utilized for ethical thinking and design in technology. This course will combine rigorous theoretical thinking with hands-on in-the-field research. Students will devise and engage in their own ethnographic research projects. This course will be of interest to students from a wide range of disciplines, including: computer science, engineering, medicine, anthropology, sociology, and the humanities. Our aim is to have a truly interdisciplinary and open-ended discussion about one of the most pressing social issues of our time, while giving students skills-based training in qualitative methods.
Last offered: Spring 2019
| Units: 3-5
ANTHRO 121B:
"The Will to Adorn": An Anthropology of Dress (AFRICAAM 121B, ANTHRO 221B, ARCHLGY 121B, ARCHLGY 221B)
This seminar explores sartorial practices as a means for examining formations of identities and structural inequalities across space and time. Building off the definition of dress, pulled from Mary Ellen Roach-Higgins and Joanne B. Eicher, this course examines sartorial practices as social-cultural practices, shaped by many intersecting operations of power and oppression including racism, sexism, and classism, that involve modifications of the corporal form (i.e., scarification, body piercings, and hair alteration) as well as all three-dimensional supplements added to the body (i.e., clothing, hair combs, and jewelry). The emphasis on intersecting operations of power and oppression within this definition of dress draws on Kimberlé Crenshaw's conceptualization of intersectionality. Through case studies and examples from various parts of the world, we will explore multiple sources of data - documentary, material, and oral - that have come to shape the study of dress. We examine how dress intersects with facets of identity, including race, age, ethnicity, sexuality, and class.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-EDP, WAY-SI
ANTHRO 122A:
Decolonizing Archaeology (ANTHRO 222A, ARCHLGY 122A, ARCHLGY 222A)
What does it mean to say that archaeology is a colonial discipline? Anthropology and archaeology are rooted historically in projects of domination and extermination by colonial powers. Today many scholars, practitioners, and colonized peoples are exploring ways to recast the archaeological project--to de-colonize it. There are many approaches to such attempts and this course will explore three of them: Indigenous archaeology, community-based participatory research, and activist archaeology. There are no recipes to produce de-colonized archaeology and no clear answers to the questions that arise in the process. As a class we will explore possibilities and chart futures for a practice of archaeology that breaks from divides between researcher and subject, past and present, and scholarship and social justice. From this course you will gain an understanding of foundational critiques of archaeology from inside and outside the discipline and from Indigenous, Black, and people of color who have historically been the subject of archaeology's colonial practices. You will also gain an understanding of attempts to move beyond colonial frameworks and your own position within them through a series of archaeological case studies. You will not leave this course with answers, but you will leave this course with a deeper understanding of the ongoing project of decolonization.
Last offered: Spring 2021
| Units: 3
ANTHRO 123:
Ethical Life with Strangers: Sociality and Civility (ANTHRO 223)
How do we deal with strangers in different parts of the world. What is a stranger? And to whom? Many theorists suggest that dealing with anonymous strangers is central to norms of sociality and civility. For the thinker Georg Simmel, the stranger is less concerned with norms of civility, and more with the promise of urban life, a category ripe for marginalization but also an illustration of the possibilities of ambiguous and multi-faceted life with others that reckons not only with our connections with others but our secrets. Others suggest that questions of empathy and ethics are concerned with how others' are imagined and interacted with. However, is social life an encounter with strangers in a simple sense? Surely what it is to be a friend, enemy or a stranger is socially and historically produced? Who are the same and who are the others? Is anybody an 'other' by virtue of not being oneself? What is the public and what is the private in different places, in different interactions? What is the difference between distant others, and those who are others to each other whose histories are intertwined? This class examines these questions and the complex issues around how heterogenous individuals and communities live together, by emphasizing the historical stratifications of race, class, caste, gender that comprise the stakes in any-one meeting in any space, but especially in certain spaces. We will read ethnographies and histories that teach us the ways in which structures of power, colonialism and often as a corollary exclusion and fear structure how and who meets each other, AND, also emphasize the ways in which social life can be exhilarating, complex, violent, contingent and transformative.
Last offered: Spring 2021
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 123B:
Government of Water and Crisis: Corporations, States and the Environment
As the Flint, Michigan water situation began to attract attention and condemnation, Michigan State Representative, Sheldon Neeley, describing the 200 troops on the ground and the Red Cross distributing water bottles, said that the Governor had ¿turned an American city into a Third World country [¿] it¿s terrible what he¿s done [¿] no fresh water.¿ Then at the first Congressional hearing, the Chairman of the House Oversight & Government Reform Committee, Jason Chaffetz, said, ¿This is the United States of America ¿ this isn't supposed to happen here. We are not some Third World country.¿nnWhat is a `third world problem¿? And is the `water problem¿ the same across the world? This course examines how water is governed in a time that is increasingly seen as one of crisis. We will examine how crises are imagined, constructed, sought to be averted, and the governance regimes they give rise to. And how does water, whether as natural resource, public good, a human right, or commodity, determine the contours of such regimes? We will focus mostly on ethnographies, but also examine texts produced by government bodies and aid and environmental organizations, as well as case law. The course will show what anthropology can contribute to the conversation on state and corporate bureaucracies, and their relation with water.
Last offered: Spring 2019
| Units: 3-5
ANTHRO 123C:
"Third World Problems?" Environmental Justice Around the World (CSRE 123C)
As the Flint, Michigan water situation began to attract attention and condemnation, Michigan State Representative, Sheldon Neeley, describing the troops on the ground and the Red Cross distributing water bottles, said that the Governor had "turned an American city into a Third World country [...] it's terrible what he's done [...] no fresh water. Then, at a Congressional hearing, the Chairman of the House Oversight & Government Reform Committee said, "This is the United States of America - this isn't supposed to happen here. We are not some Third World country."What is a "third world problem?" This introductory environmental anthropology course examines how such imaginaries materialize in development programmes and literature, and bespeak charged geopolitical and racial histories; and invites reflection on what futures for working in common they enable/constrain. We will examine how crises are imagined and constructed, and the governance regimes they give rise to. How does water - as natural resource, public good, human right, need, or commodity - determine the contours of such regimes? We will also study chronic, quieter environmental problems and the responses they (do not) generate. Working through a variety of writing genres - ethnographies, policy literature, and legal and corporate publicity material - will enable students to appreciate what anthropology can contribute to the conversation on environmental justice, and state and corporate bureaucracies and their mandates. The course draws on examples from a wide range of settings. The course is offered as an introduction to environmental anthropology and takes students through key themes - infrastructure, race, class, privatization, justice, violence - by focusing on water. It requires no background in anthropology.
Last offered: Spring 2021
| Units: 3-4
| UG Reqs: WAY-ER
ANTHRO 124A:
Law in Social & Historical Perspective
From lawsuits over coffee spills to military action staged in the name of human rights, 'law' is one of the most potent ideas to proliferate the modern world. In this course, students will engage with the philosophical questions that the concept of law raises about 'human nature' and 'society,' and explore the forms that legality takes in different cultural traditions. Using a set of case studies that range from tribal councils and Islamic legal debates to transnational business arbitration and shoplifting, we will interrogate law's relationship to social domination, political mobilization, and ideals of freedom, dignity, and morality. Students will leave the course a grasp of key debates in legal philosophy, an expanded knowledge of legal systems throughout the world, and a deeper understanding of the relationship between law, politics, and social conflict.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 124B:
Environmental Justice and Anthropology (ANTHRO 224B)
This course builds on the idea that considering environmental and social justice concerns together is possible and necessary. As such, it examines key issues in environmental justice alongside anthropological studies of related social and environmental concerns. We will study topics related to cities, agriculture, extraction, water, toxicity, and climate, alongside attentions to racial capitalism, settler colonialism, development, war-making, and state-sanctioned violence. In doing so, we will center a critical race and historical perspective that is attentive to social and environmental dynamics that have shaped present injustices. Through readings, discussions, hands-on projects, and interactive classroom engagement, we will consider the ongoing lived, analytical, and political stakes of these issues. Further emphasis on environmental justice strategies and movements will enhance our critical and heterogeneous understanding of these topics, their lived impacts, and their alternative possibilities.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 124C:
Anthropology of the State
This class seeks to familiarize students with a variety of theoretical perspectives and methodological tools for a study of the state. The social sciences have long deconstructed the image of the state as a coherent unit (along with the Weberian ideal of a neutral bureaucracy) but the idea remains globally prevalent. Therefore, this course's central objective is to contemplate and rethink diverse conceptions of the state in order to open new perspectives and develop the methodological tools necessary for comprehending the state in a distinctively anthropological manner. Our discussions will center around ethnographic and other social scientific research that emphasize the state as a historically situated reality, embodied in the work of its agents and negotiated in everyday encounters with citizens. Important question include how bureaucratic interactions mobilize values and emotions and thereby (re)produce the state, as well as classificatory systems of inclusion and forms of marginalization. Therefore, we will investigate seemingly negative or coercive aspects of states, such as border regimes and military practices, but also aspects that could be seen as their benevolent side, like welfare bureaucracies. By reading different anthropological, humanities, and other social science texts, we will ask how can one think of and research the state, what types of relations characterize different state formations, what kind of routines and subjectivities are formed in interaction with diverse state actors, how well Western concepts of the state, sovereignty, bureaucratic rationality travel to non-Western contexts, how citizens experience and relate to the state in their day to day lives, and how we can think about alternative forms of governing?
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 125A:
Critical Mapping Methods in Archaeology (ANTHRO 225A, ARCHLGY 125A, ARCHLGY 225A)
Another title for this course could be "mapping and its discontents" because this is a critical methods course. You will learn, through hands-on lab assignments, how to create and use maps in archaeological analysis using open-source Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software QGIS and other free online tools. At the same time, you will come to understand the history of mapping as a technology of rule and resistance, how GIS is used to answer archaeological questions, and creative strategies used by scholars and non-scholars alike that challenge conventional practices. This class focuses weekly readings on these topics around assignments that put your critical and spatial thinking to work. By the end of term you will be able to find spatial data from reputable sources, create a GIS using that data, and analyze anthropological questions using that GIS. The course brings together scholarship and resources from anthropology, geography, environmental design and planning, and art to tackle the question "What do maps do?"
Last offered: Spring 2021
| Units: 3-4
ANTHRO 125C:
The Archaeology of Institutions (ARCHLGY 161, HISTORY 107B)
Modern life is marked by institutions - schools, hospitals, international conglomerates, even prisons - so how did they develop and become so common? Historical archaeology can help us tell a different history of institutions because it combines documents, especially official records, with the material items left behind by the people who lived and worked in the institution. This course uses archaeological case studies to look at the different theoretical frameworks used to explain why institutions exist and how they function. We will also use practical examples to make connections between historical institutions and modern life. For example, what can looking at nineteenth century prison menus tell us about prison or hospital food today? And how can we use the archaeology of institutions to 'read' the Stanford campus? No prior archaeological experience required.
Terms: Win
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-EDP, WAY-SI
ANTHRO 125W:
Critical Feminisms in the Americas (FEMGEN 125, ILAC 125)
This course examines critical feminist theories, practices, and movements in the Americas. Together, we will explore, analyze, and discuss the work of creators and activists in South America, Central America, the Caribbean, and North America, attending to local, national, and transnational efforts. Particular consideration will be given to intersectionality (within and across specific works and movements) and to critiques of larger political economic systems (including but not limited to colonialism, capitalism, and imperialism). We will engage works by creators and activists such as Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Faye Harrison, Petra Rivera-Rideau, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Tiffany Lethabo King, Audre Lorde, Eve Tuck, Tourmaline, Maria Lugones, Harsha Walia, Mitsuye Yamada, Haunani-Kay Trask, Lucía Ixchíu, Sylvia Wynter, Francia Márquez, Gina Ulysse, Fatimah Asghar, Cecilia Menjívar, Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley, bell hooks, Sylvia Rivera, Sayak Valencia, and more. Student interests will be included in making a collaborative syllabus. Course will be taught in English, but readings and writing assignments will also be available in Spanish for Spanish Majors, or other students.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 126:
Urban Culture in Global Perspective (URBANST 114)
Core course for Urban Studies majors. A majority of the world's population now live in urban areas and most of the rapid urbanization has taken place in mega-cities outside the Western world. This course explores urban cultures, identities, spatial practices and forms of urban power and imagination in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Participants will be introduced to a global history of urban development that demonstrates how the legacies of colonialism, modernization theory and global race thinking have shaped urban designs and urban life in most of the world. Students will also be introduced to interpretative and qualitative approaches to urban life that affords an understanding of important, if unquantifiable, vectors of urban life: stereotypes, fear, identity formations, utopia, social segregation and aspirations. Significant work outside of class time is expected of the student for this course.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-SocSci, WAY-EDP, WAY-SI
ANTHRO 127B:
Millennial Pop Culture: The Making of a Millennial
This course investigates American popular culture since the year 2000. Our goals will be to establish a working definition of the term "millennials" and to determine how pop culture influences the formation of that identity the 21st century. Through texts that frame issues including race, gender, sexuality, patriotism, and the use of technology, we will develop a discussion that cultivates 21st century engagement skills, reflecting critically on songs, television shows, images, videos, films, written texts, and blogs.
Last offered: Summer 2022
| Units: 3
ANTHRO 127C:
Anthropology of Sport and the Body
What is sport? Fun? Big money? A tool for freedom... or control?This course will use the work of anthropology and critical studies to probe what exactly sport is, and how it shapes the body. We will begin by looking at various ways in which social theorists have proposed studying sport, and then use these theoretical frameworks to examine contemporary sport, from individual practice to global spectacle. We will probe the social nature of sport- how it molds bodies, makes players, enraptures audiences. We will ask questions like: Is sport good? What do the Olympics Games aim to achieve? Should NCAA players be paid? In doing so we will examine the underlying social and political assumptions that undergird what we have come to think of as sport today.As we think through how contemporary theorists of our time have theorized sport, we too will use their tools to form our own analyses of sport as a social and political powerhouse.We will look also at how sport has historically been used as a technique of both control and resistance across the world. We will read several anthropologists' work on sport across a variety of cultures, particularly as it relates to nineteenth century European colonialism.We will conclude the course with a sustained discussion of the Olympic Games, using the tools we have studied to think through this massive spectacle of global import.This course is ideally suited for anyone interested in how sport can be examined as a form of culture and social exchange and, more broadly, how theory can be used to break open contemporary culture.
Last offered: Spring 2020
| Units: 3-5
ANTHRO 127D:
HERITAGE POLITICS (ARCHLGY 127, ARCHLGY 227)
Heritage is a matter of the heart and not the brain, David Lowenthal once said. It does not seek to explore the past, but to domesticate it and enlist it for present causes. From the drafting of the first royal decrees on ancient monuments in the 17th century, political interests have had a hand in deciding which traditions, monuments and sites best represent and best serve the needs of the nation. The sum of these domestication efforts, the laws, institutions and practices established to protect and manage heritage, is what we call heritage governance. In this seminar you will learn about the politics of 21st century heritage governance at national and international level. Students will become familiar with key conventions and learn about the functioning of heritage institutions. We will also examine the hidden practices and current political developments that impact heritage governance: how UNESCO heritage sites become bargaining tools in international relations, how EU heritage policies are negotiated in the corridors of Brussels, and how the current re-nationalization of Western politics can affect what we come to know as our common past.
Last offered: Spring 2019
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-SI
ANTHRO 128:
Visual Studies
Drawing on anthropology, art history, cultural studies, and other fields, this course explores how and why one might want to think critically about the politics of visuality, social imagination, the politics of making and consuming images and things, iconophonia and iconophilia, the classification of people and things into 'artists' and 'art', and cultural production more generally.
Last offered: Spring 2018
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-SocSci, WAY-A-II
ANTHRO 128B:
MAXIMUM CITY: Post-Colonial Mumbai at the Crossroads of Global and South Asian Culture (URBANST 143)
There are few cities more emblematic of the rapid urbanization of today's global population than Mumbai, India, formerly known as Bombay. With over 20 million residents, Mumbai today stands as the most populous city in one of the world's most populous countries, an ever-expanding metropolis marked by starkclass disparities and a heterogenous collage of religious, ethnic, and caste communities struggling to find space on a narrow peninsula painstakingly reclaimed from the Arabian Sea. The city's glitz, glamour, and diversity have long made it an object of fascination for both Indians and foreigners alike. Not only is Mumbai a major engine of culture and politics within India, but the city also has a long history of furnishing imagery of South Asian life to the wider world, whether as a site for documentaries and novels or through colorful Bollywood films. In this course, students will have the opportunity to use Mumbai as a jumping-off point to explore South Asian culture and society, as well as contemporary themes in global urban studies: How do issues such as gentrification, rural-urban migration, segregation, the globalization of capitalism, and decolonialization play out in a city such as Mumbai? What happens to supposedly timeless identities such as religion, caste, and ethnicity when they are subjected to the pressures of intense urbanization? What kinds of data can we use to answer these questions, and what are their respective strengths and limitations?We will address these questions through a wide range of materials, including film, literature, and academic texts. By the end of the quarter, students should not only find themselves with expanded knowledge of South Asia, Mumbai, and global urbanism, but also with increased confidence regarding the types of data, methodology, and analysis they can employ in their own projects. No prior knowledge of South Asia or urban studies is assumed for this course.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-EDP, WAY-SI
ANTHRO 129B:
Black Geographies: An Orientation (AFRICAAM 139)
This introductory course examines racialization and antiblackness as spatial practices as well as the placemaking practices and sensibilities across and within Black communities throughout the Americas. Rather than focusing merely on where Black people live, this course explores the socio-political production of space and the ways Black subjectivity and Black social life imperatively produce a sense of place that often complicate traditional geographic rules. Putting into conversation key texts at the intersection of Anthropology, Human Geography, and Black Studies, we consider how space and place are bound up with contestations over citizenship, autonomy, environmental justice, and state violence - in addition to the alternative spatial imaginations produced therein - in rural and urban geographies across the Americas.
Terms: Win
| Units: 3
ANTHRO 129C:
A Deep Dive Into the Indian Ocean: From Prehistory to the Modern Day (ANTHRO 229C, ARCHLGY 129C)
The Indian Ocean has formed an enduring connection between three continents, countless small islands and a multitude of cultural and ethnic groups and has become the focus of increasing interest in this geographically vast and culturally diverse region. This course explores a range of topics and issues, from the nature and dynamics of colonization and cultural development as a way of understanding the human experience in this part of the world, to topics such as religion, disease, and heritage The course guides studies in the many ways in which research in the Indian Ocean has a direct impact on our ability to compare developments in the Atlantic and Pacific. Significant work outside of class time is expected of the student for this course.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 130D:
Spatial Approaches to Social Science (ANTHRO 230D, POLISCI 241S, URBANST 124)
This multidisciplinary course combines different approaches to how GIS and spatial tools can be applied in social science research. We take a collaborative, project oriented approach to bring together technical expertise and substantive applications from several social science disciplines. The course aims to integrate tools, methods, and current debates in social science research and will enable students to engage in critical spatial research and a multidisciplinary dialogue around geographic space.
Last offered: Winter 2020
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-AQR, WAY-SI
ANTHRO 132:
Religion and Politics in the Muslim World
This course provides an ethnographic examination of religion and politics in the Muslim world. What is the role of Islam in the political life of modern Muslim societies? Conversely, how do modern political powers shape and constrain the terms of religious life? This course takes an anthropological perspective on the study of Islam: our investigations will not focus on the origins of scriptures and doctrines but rather on the use of religious texts and signs in social context and on the political significance of ritual and bodily practices. A major aim of the course is provide students with analytical resources for thinking critically about the history and politics of modern Muslim societies, with a particular focus on issues of religious authority, gender and sexuality, and the politics of secularism.
Last offered: Spring 2022
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-SocSci, WAY-EDP, WAY-SI
ANTHRO 132A:
Power and Counter-Power: Anti-Elite Politics in Contemporary Times
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.
Terms: Win
| Units: 3
ANTHRO 132C:
Technology and Inequality (CSRE 132C)
In this advanced interdisciplinary seminar we will examine the ways that technologies aimed to make human lives better (healthier, freer, more connected, and informed) often also harbor the potential to exacerbate social inequalities. Drawing from readings in the social sciences on power and ethics, we will pay special attention to issues of wealth, race, ethnicity, sex, gender, globalization and humanitarianism.
Last offered: Autumn 2021
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-EDP, WAY-SI
ANTHRO 132D:
Thinking Technology: Anthropological Perspectives
What role does technology play in society, and vice-versa? This course considers the question from an anthropological perspective, pairing different conceptual models of social-technical relations (Social Constructivism, Actor-Network Theory, Cyborg Anthropology) with real world examples. Through such technologies as factory machines, trains, Bakelite, slot machines, computers, missiles, and PET scanners, students will gain insights both on how the social suffuses the mundane objects around us, and how technologies have radically redefined how we see the world.
Last offered: Autumn 2019
| Units: 3
ANTHRO 133:
Masculinity: Technologies and Cultures of Gender (ANTHRO 233, FEMGEN 133M)
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.
Last offered: Spring 2019
| Units: 4
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-SocSci, WAY-EDP, WAY-SI
ANTHRO 133W:
Anthropology of Social Movements
In recent years, we have witnessed a growing number of social and political upheavals around the world. With new organizational principles, diversified ways of participation and mediation, and expanding themes and goals, these cases, in bringing the political near to us, also challenge our familiar ways of thinking and doing politics. They are testing the limit of our imagination of a bounded ¿social movement¿ in the forms such as street protest and civil obedience, as well as the limit of analysis. This course explores the uses of anthropological theories in engaging with a politically animated world.
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-SI
ANTHRO 134:
Language, Gender and Sexuality (ANTHRO 234)
This course explores how identities of gender and sexuality are linked to particular ways of speaking and using language, and how language itself becomes the site of the politics of gender and sexuality. Enrolled students should have completed prior coursework in Anthropology, Linguistics, or Feminist Studies. Prerequisite: by instructor consent.
Last offered: Autumn 2021
| Units: 3-5
ANTHRO 134C:
Movements and Migrations: Understanding the Movements of People (ARCHLGY 163, ASNAMST 163)
Mass movements of people across the world is not a new phenomenon. And yet, in the contemporary moment, the pace of migration from global business networks to displacements from violence and climate change as well as the interconnectivity of social networks is unprecedented. In this discussion seminar class, we will focus on the movements and migrations of people in North America. Though we will focus on the contemporary era, we start with examining the multiple ways that anthropologists understand, document, and make sense of the ways in which people have moved throughout history from bioanthropological, linguistic, archaeological, and ethnographic methodologies. We will further unpack some of the key theoretical discourses around the movement of people, and the frames of analysis that are commonly applied. By considering this topic through multiple lenses we will begin to appreciate the complexities of studying the movement of people and the relevance that these questions have to the present day. In addition to understanding the myriad of debates and case studies around movement and migration, students will develop their own research projects, learning essential skills in executing ethnographic approaches and applying the knowledge we survey throughout the course.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-EDP, WAY-SI
ANTHRO 135C:
Moving Worlds: Anthropology of Mobility and Travel
This course looks at human mobility from an anthropological perspective. We will read texts that ethnographically explore the experiences of refugees, labor migrants, tourists and seafarers, among others. In particular, we will look at the intersection of physical mobility and social mobility, as people often move in order to improve their life, to increase safety or economic security, or to gain social capital. However, the mobility perspective has also been criticized for depoliticizing and celebrating movement without critical attention to its socio-political and economic context. While mobility as a term points to the ability to move, human migration is at least as often characterized by restrictions and obstacles to movement, such as borders. We will think critically about the deep inequalities that exist in terms of why and how people move, and who are able to mobilize resources to move.
Last offered: Autumn 2017
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 136:
The Anthropology of Global Supply Chains
This upper-division undergraduate seminar focuses on recent studies by anthropologists and scholars in related disciplines on global supply chains and consumption practices.The goal of the course is to assess concepts and methods for integrating a cultural analysis of transnational production with a cultural analysis of transnational consumption. We will review ethnographic studies of the production and consumption of commodities linked by transnational and global networks. The class will thenpursue collaborative research on the global production, distribution, and consumption of a selected commodity. Prerequisite: junior or senior standing and previous coursework in cultural anthropology or permission of instructor.
Last offered: Summer 2022
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 136B:
White Identity Politics (AFRICAAM 136B, CSRE 136)
Pundits proclaim that the 2016 Presidential election marks the rise of white identity politics in the United States. Drawing from the field of whiteness studies and from contemporary writings that push whiteness studies in new directions, this upper-level seminar asks, does white identity politics exist? How is a concept like white identity to be understood in relation to white nationalism, white supremacy, white privilege, and whiteness? We will survey the field of whiteness studies, scholarship on the intersection of race, class, and geography, and writings on whiteness in the United States by contemporary public thinkers, to critically interrogate the terms used to describe whiteness and white identities. Students will consider the perils and possibilities of different political practices, including abolishing whiteness or coming to terms with white identity. What is the future of whiteness? n*Enrolled students will be contacted regarding the location of the course.
Last offered: Autumn 2017
| Units: 3-5
ANTHRO 136C:
Latin American Pasts: Archaeology and Cultural Heritage (ARCHLGY 136)
Latin America is vast in pre-colonial and colonial monuments. Past societies defined by archaeologists - Aztecas, Chavin, Chinchorro, Inka, Maya, Moche, Nazca, Tiahuanaco, among others - cohabit with Spanish colonial era structures and contemporary human settlements. Most studies on Latin America have focused on monuments, conservation and sustainability, overlooking economic and social struggles related to heritage use and management. Selecting certain case studies of famous archaeological sites, this class will explore the main characteristics of pre-Hispanic cultures from an archaeological perspective as well as from critical heritage studies. Currently, Latin American regions and entire states have adopted some of these 'archaeological cultures' and redefined them as their 'ancestors', adopting archaeological discourses in their daily lives. In addition to learning about these sites archaeologically, this class will analyze native communities´ claims, development projects, education narratives, nation-branding documentaries and marketing spots, memes, and other resources. The class will also consider the accelerated urban growth of these areas - a major feature of Latin American and global south countries - and the consequences for the development of heritage and its sustainable conservation in the Spanish-speaking Americas.
Last offered: Spring 2022
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-EDP, WAY-SI
ANTHRO 137:
The Politics of Humanitarianism (ANTHRO 237)
What does it mean to want to help, to organize humanitarian aid, in times of crisis? At first glance, the impulse to help issue generis a good one. Helping is surely preferable to indifference and inaction. This does not mean that humanitarian interventions entail no ethical or political stakes or that they are beyond engaged critique. We need to critique precisely that which we value, and to ask some hard questions, among them these: What are the differences among humanitarianism, charity, and philanthropy? What of social obligations and solidarities? How does the neoliberal world order currently create structural inequalities that ensure the reproduction of poverty and violence? How does the current order of things resemble or differ from the colonial world order? This course examines the history of humanitarian sensibilities and the emergence of organized action in the 'cause of humanity'. In the early years of humanitarian intervention, political neutrality was a key principle; it has now come under ever greater analytical and political scrutiny. We will examine the reasons for the politicization and militarization of aid -- be it humanitarian aid in natural disasters or political crises; development programs in the impoverished south ('the Third World'), or peace-keeping. We will end with a critical exploration of the concept of human rights, humanity, and personhood. The overall methodological aim of the course is to demonstrate what insights an ethnographic approach to the politics, ethics, and aesthetics of humanitarianism can offer.
Last offered: Autumn 2019
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 137B:
Cuba: Youth in Revolution
This course explores how Cuban youth came to play a pivotal role in 1960s Cuba, a decade when youth culture and politics worldwide were reconstituted. We look at the unique circumstances under which the new socialist revolution in Cuba created an ethos of youth - a major influence that explains how and why the Cuban Revolution survives to this day.
Last offered: Autumn 2021
| Units: 3
ANTHRO 137D:
Political Exhumations. Killing Sites Research in Comparative Perspective (ARCHLGY 137, ARCHLGY 237, DLCL 237, REES 237)
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, and the Spanish Civil War. The course will make use of new interpretations of genocide studies, research of mass graves, such as environmental and forensic approaches.
Last offered: Spring 2020
| Units: 3-5
ANTHRO 138:
Medical Ethics in a Global World: Examining Race, Difference and Power in the Research Enterprise (ANTHRO 238, CSRE 138)
This course will explore historical as well as current market transformations of medical ethics in different global contexts. We will examine various aspects of the research enterprise, its knowledge-generating and life-saving goals, as well as the societal, cultural, and political influences that make medical research a site of brokering in need of oversight and emergent ethics.This seminar will provide students with tools to explore and critically assess the various technical, social, and ethical positions of researchers, as well as the role of the state, the media, and certain publics in shaping scientific research agendas. We will also examine how structural violence, poverty, global standing, and issues of citizenship also influence issues of consent and just science and medicine.
Last offered: Spring 2020
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-EDP, WAY-ER
ANTHRO 139C:
Anthropology of Global Health
Global health has been the contested realm of theoretical debates and praxis in medical anthropology. Rationalities behind global health projects reflected the predominant mode of envisioning health in specific historical moments.nn· In this course, we will first assess the ways in which memories, materiality and institutions of the colonial past persist in the field of global health in Africa.nn· Secondly, we will explore how early medical anthropologists participated in international health projects in order to facilitate implementation of the Western biomedicine in developing countries by investigating cultural barriers under the post-war regime of international development in the efforts of controlling malaria and HIV/AIDS in Latin America. nn· Thirdly, we will examine achievements and limitations of subsequent critical medical anthropologists¿ shift of the focus of analysis on global health from culture to structure, larger political economic conditions that produced vast health inequalities around the world, including World Bank policies under the Cold War and neoliberal reforms that increased the prevalence of TB and other diseases in post-socialist contexts nn· Finally, we will question previous anthropological discourses on global health and propose potential insights by understanding moral imaginations of contemporary global health participants such as WHO or Gates Foundation and humanitarian medicine such as MSF, and continuities and discontinuities of colonial and developmental past in current global health movement.
Last offered: Spring 2018
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 140C:
Mobilizing Nature
From Brazil's Landless Worker's Movement (MST) to Water Wars of Cochabamba to Standing Rock, these moments of protest have turned into movements. This seminar will examine how theoretical framings of movements have shifted from claims about political rights to environmental ones. We will address two overarching questions: How are notions of ethnicity, gender, and class constructed in relation to the environment? And how do people understand these relationships in such a way that motivates them to mobilize? Students will explore what kinds of ecological claims are being made, who is making, how, and who benefits from them. The objective is to ultimately understand how movements not only reflect, but also (re)shape political and social practices around the environment.
Last offered: Autumn 2017
| Units: 3
ANTHRO 144:
Art and the Repair of the Self (ANTHRO 244)
Engaging the body/mind and its senses in the making of images and things has long been considered to have potentially great therapeutic significance. This course is a close examination of making as a form of therapy, as a form of communication, and, vitally, as a form of knowing. As such, it suggests new, analytically powerful possibilities for anthropological practice.
Last offered: Spring 2019
| Units: 3-5
ANTHRO 145S:
Implicit Bias: Stereotyping, Prejudice, and the Psychology of Racism
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.
Terms: Sum
| Units: 3
ANTHRO 147:
Empires and Diasporas (ANTHRO 247)
When a society moves, we call it a diaspora. When a state moves, we call it an empire. This course explores how the interaction of these two kinds of mobility gave shape to the world we live in. We will discuss 1) how to trace the movement of states and societies across space and time, 2) how to understand empire and diaspora both as historical realities and as conceptual categories, and 3) how to use this conceptual history to generate fresh perspectives on contemporary affairs.
Last offered: Spring 2022
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 147B:
World Heritage in Global Conflict (ANTHRO 247B, ARCHLGY 147B)
Heritage is always political, it is typically said. Such a statement might refer to the everyday politics of local stakeholder interests on one end of the spectrum, or the volatile politics of destruction and erasure of heritage during conflict, on the other. If heritage is always political then one might expect that the workings of World Heritage might be especially fraught given the international dimension. In particular, the intergovernmental system of UNESCO World Heritage must navigate the inherent tension between state sovereignty and nationalist interests and the wider concerns of a universal regime. The World Heritage List has over 1000 properties has many such contentious examples, including sites in Iraq, Mali, Syria, Crimea, Palestine and Cambodia. As an organization UNESCO was born of war with an explicit mission to end global conflict and help the world rebuild materially and morally, but has found it¿s own history increasingly entwined with that of international politics and violence.
Last offered: Winter 2018
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 148:
Health, Politics, and Culture of Modern China (ANTHRO 248, CHINA 155A, CHINA 255A)
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.
Last offered: Autumn 2019
| Units: 4-5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-SocSci, WAY-EDP, WAY-SI
ANTHRO 156:
Japanese Anthropology (ANTHRO 256)
This is an advanced reading seminar in the field of Japanses Anthropology. nIt will explore the historical development of the field and the contemporary issues and topics taken up by scholars of Japanese anthropology. Prior knowledge of Japanese language, history, and, society is required.
Last offered: Spring 2019
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 157:
Japanese Anthropology (ANTHRO 257)
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.
Last offered: Winter 2022
| Units: 3
ANTHRO 158:
The Anthropology of Social Class (ANTHRO 258)
Course introduces social theory concepts and paradigms for the understanding of class. It then extends and revises those concepts and paradigms by considering anthropological approaches in different cultural and historical settings that consider the entanglements of class with other social hierarchies, especially race, caste, and ideas of "civilization" and "development".
Last offered: Spring 2020
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 159C:
Ecological Humanities (ANTHRO 259C, DLCL 259C, REES 259C)
What sort of topics, research questions, approaches, theories and concepts lead to an integration of various kinds of knowledges? Ecological Humanities provides a conceptual platform for a merger of humanities and social sciences with earth and life sciences, soil science and forensic sciences. The course will discuss such selected topics as the Anthropocene, geologic/mineral and exhumed subjects/personae, bio- and geosocial collectives, symbiotic life-forms, non-human agencies, and forensic landscapes as examples of this merger.
Last offered: Spring 2018
| Units: 3
ANTHRO 160:
Visual Politics and Social Movements
Images, the visual imagination, and visual/graphic skills have always been vitally important in the empowerment of social movements. Organized as an intensive research workshop, this course will examine the political uses of images in anti-racist movements for social justice in areas like prison abolition, anti-war activism, labor issues, and climate justice.
Last offered: Spring 2021
| Units: 3-5
ANTHRO 166A:
Semiotics for Ethnography (ANTHRO 266A)
This workshop-style seminar introduces students to core theories and concepts in linguistic and semiotic anthropology. Examining current theoretical innovations in this field of study, the course explores the multivalent relationships between language and political authority, discourse and technology, and speech and material infrastructures. Emphasis is placed on how semiotic approaches provide tools for ethnographic analysis, and students will learn how to use semiotic concepts for their own research projects.
Last offered: Spring 2021
| Units: 3
ANTHRO 171:
The Biology and Evolution of Language (ANTHRO 271)
Lecture course surveying the biology, linguistic functions, and evolution of the organs of speech and speech centers in the brain, language in animals and humans, the evolution of language itself, and the roles of innateness vs. culture in language. Suitable both for general education and as preparation for further studies in anthropology, biology, linguistics, medicine, psychology, and speech & language therapy. Anthropology concentration: CS, EE. No prerequisites.
Last offered: Winter 2017
| Units: 4-5
| UG Reqs: GER: DB-NatSci, WAY-SMA
ANTHRO 176:
Cultures, Minds, and Medicine (ANTHRO 276)
This workshop aims to bring together scholars from the social sciences, humanities, medicine and bio-science and technology to explore the ways that health and illness are made through complex social forces. We aim for informal, interactive sessions, full of debate and good will. Dates of meetings will be listed in the notes section in the time schedule.
Last offered: Autumn 2018
| Units: 1
| Repeatable
6 times
(up to 6 units total)
ANTHRO 177:
Viral Histories: The Anthropology of Epidemics, Pandemics, and Contagion
This course will offer a history of pandemics, virology, vaccines, and epidemics as distinct but inter-related facets of the rise of biomedicine. Beginning with the discovery of small-pox inoculation, which smeared the pus of humans or animals into small cuts in the arm, and ending with COVID, the course will offer a deep dive into how viruses and pathogens have been understood, spread, and halted. We will examine epidemics of the flu, polio, and HIV, as well as fascinating biomedical issues such as discovery and use of tissue cultures, the use of animals in research, and the use of disenfranchised groups for research. These will be contextualized in terms of structural issues of race, class and gender; the economics of healthcare; and the politics of scientific and military research.
Last offered: Winter 2022
| Units: 3
ANTHRO 178B:
History of Medicine
This seminar course will examine medical successes and failures to better understand the politics, economics, and sociality of medicine as a practice and a culture. Examples will be drawn from technical developments such as vaccines; methodological innovations such as randomized control trials; and the study of specific diseases such as yellow fever, cancer, hepatitis, and HIV/AIDS.
Last offered: Winter 2020
| Units: 3-5
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 10 units total)
ANTHRO 179B:
Culture of Disease: The Social History of Vaccines
This course will detail the history and develop of vaccines, specifically examining critical issues such as personal choice v. public health, the use of experimental subjects, population-wide medical trials, and the use of animal tissues in vaccine development.
Last offered: Spring 2018
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 180B:
Investigating Ancient Materials (ANTHRO 280B, ARCHLGY 180, ARCHLGY 280, MATSCI 127, MATSCI 227)
This course examines how concepts and methods from materials science are applied to the analysis of archaeological artifacts, with a focus on artifacts made from inorganic materials (ceramics and metals). Coverage includes chemical analysis, microscopy, and testing of physical properties, as well as various research applications within anthropological archaeology. Students will learn how to navigate the wide range of available analytical techniques in order to choose methods that are appropriate to the types of artifacts being examined and that are capable of answering the archaeological questions being asked.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 3-4
| UG Reqs: WAY-SI, WAY-SMA
ANTHRO 182N:
Smoke and Mirrors in Global Health
A few years ago, health experts began calling out tobacco as engendering a global health crisis, categorizing the cigarette as the world's greatest weapon of mass destruction. A "global health crisis"? What merits that title if not tobacco use? A hundred million people were killed by tobacco in the 20th century, and ten times that number ¿ a billion people ¿ are predicted to die prematurely from exposure to cigarette smoke over the next hundred years. How has tobaccocome to be labeled a global health crisis over the last decade and what has been the political response? From whence does activism and ongoing complacency regarding tobacco arise? How are they created in different cultural contexts?This course aims to provide students conceptual tools to tackle two specific thought projects: (1) to understand how institutional actors compete to define a situation in the world today as a problem of global health, and (2) to understand the sociocultural means by which something highly dangerous to health such as the cigarette is made both politically contentious and inert. On both fronts, special attention will be given to the ways global health activism and complacency unfold in the U.S. and China.
Last offered: Winter 2020
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-SI
ANTHRO 184A:
Vital Curse: Oil As Culture
Rapidly-evolving technology draws increasing amounts of petroleum from the ground, while wars and friendly agreements move it around the globe, all to occasionally-disastrous result. Pronounced environmental concerns such as fracking, pipelines, plastics, climate change are nearly synonymous with the petroleum industry. And yet, oil is integral to meeting basic human needs like food and water, and integral to meeting modern desires for mobility, energy, and consumer-products on demand. This class approaches the modern world¿s increasingly-reluctant reliance on oil¿from extraction to consumption with problems included¿as a complex cultural practice to be analyzed using anthropology, geography, and environmental studies.
Last offered: Spring 2020
| Units: 3
ANTHRO 184W:
Anthropology of Work
What is work? What kinds of labor can be registered as work? How is a worker made? This course will provide an anthropological inquiry into the category of work. We will explore how work is conceptualized, what is and isn't considered work, and how work is shaped by social relations and inequalities of race, class, and gender and lubricated by networks of kinship, ethnicity, religion and caste. The course will also examine how different imaginaries of "the worker" shape who is included and excluded from recognition and access to protections under labor laws globally. We will look at work across time and space, examining how contemporary and historical networks of migration and mobility have shaped distinct and differentiated meanings, practices, and experiences of work globally. We will draw on critical feminist scholarship on work as well as critical studies of race, ethnicity, class, religion, and caste to inquire how a worker is made under capitalism, looking at the ways in which time, alienation, and the commodification of labor shape different forms of control as well as everyday forms of resistance. This class will have a research component. Enrollment limited to students with Sophomore standing and above
Last offered: Spring 2022
| Units: 3
ANTHRO 186:
Culture and Madness: Anthropological and Psychiatric Approaches to Mental Illness (ANTHRO 286, HUMBIO 146, PSYC 286)
Unusual mental phenomena have existed throughout history and across cultures. Taught by an anthropologist and psychiatrist, this course explores how different societies construct the notions of "madness": What are the boundaries between "normal" and "abnormal", reason and unreason, mind and body, diversity and disease? Optional: The course will be taught in conjunction with an optional two-unit discussion section.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-EDP, WAY-SI
ANTHRO 188:
Matter and Mattering: Transdisciplinary Thinking about Things (ANTHRO 288, APPPHYS 188, ARCHLGY 188)
Things sit at the nexus of cross-cutting heterogeneous processes; tracing the entanglements of any prominent thing or class of things demands a transdisciplinary approach that recruits expertise from the natural sciences, social sciences and humanities. For example, carbon is a key factor in global warming for reasons that are as much socio-historical as bio-physical, and we could not begin to sketch the full significance of carbon without considering such diverse frames of reference. Our growing appreciation in the social sciences and humanities of the agency, polyvalence and catalytic role of things has given rise to The New Materialist and Post-Humanist movements, which in turn raise questions about intra-action and observational perspective that are echoed in the modern physical and life sciences. In this class we will explore these theoretical convergences in considering themes such as `things-in-themselves¿, networks and open systems, assemblages and entanglements. We will also examine specific examples such as oil, metal (guns), dams, viruses, electricity, mushrooms; each thing will be explored both in terms of its social and ethical entanglements and in terms of its material properties and affordances. There will also be hands-on encounters with objects in labs and a couple of local field trips. The key question throughout will be `why and how does matter matter in society today?
Last offered: Spring 2021
| Units: 4-5
ANTHRO 193:
Anthropology Capstone: Contemporary Debates in Anthropology
The Capstone in Anthropology builds on courses in theory and method in the major, asking students to employ anthropological perspectives on contemporary social problems. Students revisit foundational questions in the discipline of anthropology in order to understand critical issues of global relevance today. The course is set up in a debate format, in which students collaborate to research topics, develop positions, and exchange arguments.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 196:
Anthropology of Socialism
This course offers an anthropological perspective on ideas and practices of socialism, past, and present. It is concerned both with the anthropological study of 'actually-existing socialism' and with both classical and contemporary conceptions of what socialism is, or could be. Significant work outside of class time is expected of the student in this course.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 196F:
The Worlds of Labor in Modern India (HISTORY 296L)
This colloquium will introduce students to the exciting and expanding field of Indian labor history and provide them a comprehensive historiographical foundation in this area of historical research. Seminars will engage with one key monograph in the field every week, with selected chapters of the monograph set as compulsory reading. In these seminars, we will explore the world of the working classes and the urban poor in colonial and post-colonial India, as also the Indian labor diaspora. We will understand myriad workplaces such as jute and cotton mills, small workshops, farms and plantations. We will also explore forms of protest and political mobilization devised by workers in their struggles against structures of oppression and in their quest for a life of dignity. Most importantly, these seminars will train students in the methods deployed by labor historians to access the lives of the largely unlettered workers of the region who seldom left a trace of their consciousness in archival documents. Overall, we will connect the debates in the history of labor in modern India to wider discussions about the nature of capitalism, colonial modernity, gender, class, caste and culture.
Last offered: Winter 2022
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-EDP, WAY-SI
ANTHRO 197C:
The Structure of Colonial Power: South Asia since the Eighteenth Century (HISTORY 197C)
How did the colonial encounter shape the making of modern South Asia? Was colonial rule a radical rupture from the pre-modern past or did it embody historical continuities? Did colonial rule cause the economic underdevelopment of the region or were regional factors responsible for it? Did colonial forms of knowledge shape how we think of social structures in the Indian subcontinent? Did the colonial census merely register pre-existing Indian communities or did it reshape them? Did colonialism break with patriarchal power or further consolidate it? How did imperial power regulate sexuality in colonial India? What was the relationship between caste power and colonial power? How did capital and labor interact under colonial rule? How did colonialism mediate the very nature of modernity in the region?This lecture-based survey course will explore the nature of the most significant historical process that shaped modern South Asia from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries -- colonialism. It primarily deals with the regions that constituted the directly administered territories of British India, specifically regions that subsequently became the nation-states of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.
Last offered: Autumn 2021
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-SI
ANTHRO 198A:
Archaeological Geographic Information Systems (ANTHRO 298A, ARCHLGY 198A, ARCHLGY 298A)
This advanced undergraduate and graduate seminar will provide students with practical and theoretical training in Geographical Information Systems (GIS) as applied to archaeological research, introducing students to spatial theories and GIS methodological applications to research design and analysis. Topics covered in the course will include: cartographic skills of displaying and visualizing archaeological data, GIS applications to research design and sampling, data acquisition and generation, spatial analyses of artifacts, features, sites, and landscapes, as well as a critical evaluation of the strengths and limitations of GIS spatial analyses and epistemologies. Prerequisites: By instructor consent. Significant work outside of class time is expected of the student in this course.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 198B:
Digital Traces (AFRICAAM 198B)
What stories do data tell? In this course, we will follow digital traces by excavating, interrogating, and pursuing the digital evidence in data. What is the relationship between narratives and digital evidence? How do we address the tension between computational data models, the complexity of the lived experience, and the plurality of voices and methods? How can we understand and identify biases in data structures, archives, and repositories? The course offers the opportunity for extensive hands-on practical work with records, archives, and data collections. Supported by readings on archival practice, data colonialism, and the socio-cultural context of algorithms we will discuss what a critical anthropological perspective can contribute to this debate.
Terms: Win
| Units: 3
ANTHRO 199:
Senior and Master's Paper Writing Workshop (ANTHRO 299)
Techniques of interpreting data, organizing bibliographic materials, writing, editing and revising. Preparation of papers for conferences and publications in anthropology. Seniors register for 199; master's students register for 299.
Terms: Win, Spr
| Units: 1-2
| Repeatable
for credit
ANTHRO 201:
Introduction to Cultural and Social Anthropology (ANTHRO 1)
This course introduces basic anthropological concepts and presents the discipline's distinctive perspective on society and culture. The power of this perspective is illustrated by exploring vividly-written ethnographic cases that show how anthropological approaches illuminate contemporary social and political issues in a range of different cultural sites. In addition to class meeting time, a one-hour, once weekly required discussion section will be assigned in the first week of the quarter.
Terms: Win
| Units: 3-5
ANTHRO 201S:
Introduction to Cultural and Social Anthropology (ANTHRO 1S, ANTHRO 101S)
This course introduces basic anthropological concepts and presents the discipline's distinctive perspective on society and culture. The power of this perspective is illustrated by exploring vividly-written ethnographic cases that show how anthropological approaches illuminate contemporary social and political issues in a range of different cultural sites.
Terms: Sum
| Units: 3
ANTHRO 203:
The Archaeology of Climate (ANTHRO 103, ARCHLGY 106)
This course reviews the long-term relationships between human societies and Earth's climatic systems. It provides a critical review of how archaeologists have approached climate change through various case studies and historical paradigms (e.g., societal 'collapse', resilience, historical ecology) and also addresses feedbacks between past human land use and global climate change, including current debates about the onset of the Anthropocene.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-SI
ANTHRO 203A:
Human Osteoarchaeology (ANTHRO 103A, ARCHLGY 103A)
The course will cover the methodological and theoretical backgrounds to human osteoarchaeology, introduce the student to the chemical and physical characteristics of bone, and to the functional morphology of the human skeleton. Classes will consist of a taught component that outlines how osteoarchaeologists reconstruct individual life-histories based on age, sex etc.; this is combined with hands-on identification of different skeletal elements and the markers used to inform the analytical methods. Additional scientific methodologies are also introduced that increasingly form a major component of human osteoarchaeology.
Last offered: Winter 2022
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 206A:
Incas and their Ancestors: Peruvian Archaeology (ANTHRO 106, ARCHLGY 102B)
The development of high civilizations in Andean S. America from hunter-gatherer origins to the powerful, expansive Inca empire. The contrasting ecologies of coast, sierra, and jungle areas of early Peruvian societies from 12,000 to 2,000 B.C.E. The domestication of indigenous plants which provided the economic foundation for monumental cities, ceramics, and textiles. Cultural evolution, and why and how major transformations occurred.
Last offered: Autumn 2019
| Units: 3-5
ANTHRO 209A:
Archaeology of the Modern World (ANTHRO 109A, ARCHLGY 109A)
Historical archaeology, also called the archaeology of the modern world, investigates the material culture and spatial history of the past five centures. As a discipline, historical archaeology has been characterized by (1) a methodological conjunction between history and archaeology; (2) a topical focus on the ¿three Cs¿: colonization, captivity, and capitalism ¿ forces which arguably are constitutive of the modern world; and (3) an epistemological priority to recovering the perspectives of ¿people without history.¿ Each of these three trends is widely debated yet they continue to profoundly shape the field. This seminar provides an in-depth examination of the emergence and development of this historical archaeology, with a focus on current issues in theory and method. For undergraduates, the prerequisite is Anthro 3 or consent of instructor.
Last offered: Autumn 2017
| Units: 3-5
ANTHRO 210:
Environmental Archaeology (ANTHRO 110, ARCHLGY 110)
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.
Last offered: Winter 2022
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 210B:
Examining Ethnographies (ANTHRO 110B)
Eight or nine important ethnographies, including their construction, their impact, and their faults and virtues.
Last offered: Autumn 2021
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 212B:
Biology, Culture and Social Justice in Latin America: Perspectives from Forensic Anthropology (CHILATST 212, CSRE 212)
This course will only take place in the first 5 weeks of the quarter.As forensic anthropologists, we are routinely asked to make identifications of unknown human remains and provide courtroom testimony. Latin America has become a nexus for social justice work, as we respond to the humanitarian crisis along the U.S.-México Border. To improve identification methods of the undocumented dead, we must understand the diversity in Latinx people and adopt best scientific practices. This course provides a cross-disciplinary, bio-cultural approach to Latin American variation and training in applied methods of forensic anthropology. Explore how tools of biological and cultural anthropology are used jointly in human rights investigation and social justice advancement. Discover the breadth of Latinx diversity and how historical, geographic, and socio-cultural factors shape this variation. Gain hands-on experience in case analysis, using skeletal, genetic, and recovery context information to estimate key parameters of identity. Use case studies to contextualize this work through an intersectional lens that attends to the living families and the applicable historical, geo-political and socio-cultural conditions.
Last offered: Winter 2021
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 213:
Culture and Epigenetics: Towards A Non-Darwinian Synthesis (ANTHRO 113, ARCHLGY 113)
The course examines the impact of new research in epigenetics on our understanding of long-term cultural change. The course examines the various attempts that have been made over recent decades to find a synthesis between cultural and biological evolution. These approaches, often termed neo-Darwinian, include memes, dual inheritance theory, theories of cultural selection and transmission, niche construction theory and macro-evolutionary approaches. Research in all these areas will be examined, with particular reference to explanations for the origins of agriculture, but also including other transformations, and critiqued. New research in epigenetics offers an alternative non-Darwinian evolutionary perspective that avoids many of the problems and pitfalls in the neo-Darwinian approaches. Cultural evolution comes to be viewed as cumulative, directional and Lamarckian, since heritable epigenetic variation can underlie evolutionary change. Epigenetics opens the way for human cultural entanglements to become the drivers for evolutionary change, thus allowing the full range of social processes studied in the social and cultural sciences to take their place in the study and analysis of long-term change.
Last offered: Autumn 2018
| Units: 4-5
ANTHRO 214:
Rights and Ethics in Heritage (ANTHRO 114, ARCHLGY 114)
Heritage is a human thing: made by people and mobilized for their own purposes, it has a range of effects on communities. This course focuses on the human dimension of heritage with special attention to questions of rights and ethics. Where can we locate the intersections of heritage and rights? How do communities and governing structures negotiate control over and participation in heritage, and with what impacts on people? Which ethical challenges arise and how have archaeologists, heritage managers, museums, legislators, community leaders, and others approached these issues?The first half of this seminar course focuses on the theoretical and contextual basis for these discussions. We will address topics such as cultural ownership and participation as well as the global and governing contexts within which heritage is mobilized. Building on this, the second half examines cases in which different rights, needs, and goals come into conflict: museum practice, public memory, upheaval stemming from violence or disaster, and the ethics of the material world itself. Throughout, we will highlight heritage in relation to communities, rights, and responsibilities, all while thinking through ethical modes of heritage research and practice.
Last offered: Autumn 2020
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 215:
The Social life of Human Bones (ANTHRO 115, ARCHLGY 115)
Skeletal remains serve a primary function of support and protection for the human body. However, beyond this, they have played a range of social roles once an individual is deceased. The processes associated with excarnation, interment, exhumation and reburial all speak to the place that the body, and its parts, play in our cultural as well as physical landscape.This course builds on introductory courses in human skeletal anatomy by adding the social dynamics that govern the way humans treat other humans once they have died. It draws on anthropological, biological and archaeological research, with case studies spanning a broad chronological and spatial framework to provide students with an overview of social practice as it relates to the human body.
Last offered: Winter 2021
| Units: 3-5
ANTHRO 216:
Data Analysis for Quantitative Research (ANTHRO 116)
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.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 216B:
Anthropology of the Environment (ANTHRO 116B, ARCHLGY 116B)
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.
Last offered: Spring 2022
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 219:
Zooarchaeology: An Introduction to Faunal Remains (ANTHRO 119, ARCHLGY 119)
As regularly noted, whether historic or pre-historic, animal bones are often the most commonly occurring artefacts on archaeological sites. As bioarchaeological samples, they offer the archaeologist an insight into food culture, provisioning, trade and the social aspects of human-animal interactions. The course will be taught through both practical and lecture sessions: the hands-on component is an essential complement to the lectures. The lectures will offer grounding in the main methodological approaches developed, as well as provide case-studies to illustrate where and how the methods have been applied. The practical session will walk students through the skeletal anatomy of a range of species. It will guide students on the identification of different parts of the animal, how to age / sex individuals, as well as recognize taphonomic indicators and what these mean to reconstructing post-depositional modifications.
Last offered: Winter 2022
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 221B:
"The Will to Adorn": An Anthropology of Dress (AFRICAAM 121B, ANTHRO 121B, ARCHLGY 121B, ARCHLGY 221B)
This seminar explores sartorial practices as a means for examining formations of identities and structural inequalities across space and time. Building off the definition of dress, pulled from Mary Ellen Roach-Higgins and Joanne B. Eicher, this course examines sartorial practices as social-cultural practices, shaped by many intersecting operations of power and oppression including racism, sexism, and classism, that involve modifications of the corporal form (i.e., scarification, body piercings, and hair alteration) as well as all three-dimensional supplements added to the body (i.e., clothing, hair combs, and jewelry). The emphasis on intersecting operations of power and oppression within this definition of dress draws on Kimberlé Crenshaw's conceptualization of intersectionality. Through case studies and examples from various parts of the world, we will explore multiple sources of data - documentary, material, and oral - that have come to shape the study of dress. We examine how dress intersects with facets of identity, including race, age, ethnicity, sexuality, and class.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3-5
ANTHRO 222A:
Decolonizing Archaeology (ANTHRO 122A, ARCHLGY 122A, ARCHLGY 222A)
What does it mean to say that archaeology is a colonial discipline? Anthropology and archaeology are rooted historically in projects of domination and extermination by colonial powers. Today many scholars, practitioners, and colonized peoples are exploring ways to recast the archaeological project--to de-colonize it. There are many approaches to such attempts and this course will explore three of them: Indigenous archaeology, community-based participatory research, and activist archaeology. There are no recipes to produce de-colonized archaeology and no clear answers to the questions that arise in the process. As a class we will explore possibilities and chart futures for a practice of archaeology that breaks from divides between researcher and subject, past and present, and scholarship and social justice. From this course you will gain an understanding of foundational critiques of archaeology from inside and outside the discipline and from Indigenous, Black, and people of color who have historically been the subject of archaeology's colonial practices. You will also gain an understanding of attempts to move beyond colonial frameworks and your own position within them through a series of archaeological case studies. You will not leave this course with answers, but you will leave this course with a deeper understanding of the ongoing project of decolonization.
Last offered: Spring 2021
| Units: 3
ANTHRO 223:
Ethical Life with Strangers: Sociality and Civility (ANTHRO 123)
How do we deal with strangers in different parts of the world. What is a stranger? And to whom? Many theorists suggest that dealing with anonymous strangers is central to norms of sociality and civility. For the thinker Georg Simmel, the stranger is less concerned with norms of civility, and more with the promise of urban life, a category ripe for marginalization but also an illustration of the possibilities of ambiguous and multi-faceted life with others that reckons not only with our connections with others but our secrets. Others suggest that questions of empathy and ethics are concerned with how others' are imagined and interacted with. However, is social life an encounter with strangers in a simple sense? Surely what it is to be a friend, enemy or a stranger is socially and historically produced? Who are the same and who are the others? Is anybody an 'other' by virtue of not being oneself? What is the public and what is the private in different places, in different interactions? What is the difference between distant others, and those who are others to each other whose histories are intertwined? This class examines these questions and the complex issues around how heterogenous individuals and communities live together, by emphasizing the historical stratifications of race, class, caste, gender that comprise the stakes in any-one meeting in any space, but especially in certain spaces. We will read ethnographies and histories that teach us the ways in which structures of power, colonialism and often as a corollary exclusion and fear structure how and who meets each other, AND, also emphasize the ways in which social life can be exhilarating, complex, violent, contingent and transformative.
Last offered: Spring 2021
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 224B:
Environmental Justice and Anthropology (ANTHRO 124B)
This course builds on the idea that considering environmental and social justice concerns together is possible and necessary. As such, it examines key issues in environmental justice alongside anthropological studies of related social and environmental concerns. We will study topics related to cities, agriculture, extraction, water, toxicity, and climate, alongside attentions to racial capitalism, settler colonialism, development, war-making, and state-sanctioned violence. In doing so, we will center a critical race and historical perspective that is attentive to social and environmental dynamics that have shaped present injustices. Through readings, discussions, hands-on projects, and interactive classroom engagement, we will consider the ongoing lived, analytical, and political stakes of these issues. Further emphasis on environmental justice strategies and movements will enhance our critical and heterogeneous understanding of these topics, their lived impacts, and their alternative possibilities.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 225A:
Critical Mapping Methods in Archaeology (ANTHRO 125A, ARCHLGY 125A, ARCHLGY 225A)
Another title for this course could be "mapping and its discontents" because this is a critical methods course. You will learn, through hands-on lab assignments, how to create and use maps in archaeological analysis using open-source Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software QGIS and other free online tools. At the same time, you will come to understand the history of mapping as a technology of rule and resistance, how GIS is used to answer archaeological questions, and creative strategies used by scholars and non-scholars alike that challenge conventional practices. This class focuses weekly readings on these topics around assignments that put your critical and spatial thinking to work. By the end of term you will be able to find spatial data from reputable sources, create a GIS using that data, and analyze anthropological questions using that GIS. The course brings together scholarship and resources from anthropology, geography, environmental design and planning, and art to tackle the question "What do maps do?"
Last offered: Spring 2021
| Units: 3-4
ANTHRO 229C:
A Deep Dive Into the Indian Ocean: From Prehistory to the Modern Day (ANTHRO 129C, ARCHLGY 129C)
The Indian Ocean has formed an enduring connection between three continents, countless small islands and a multitude of cultural and ethnic groups and has become the focus of increasing interest in this geographically vast and culturally diverse region. This course explores a range of topics and issues, from the nature and dynamics of colonization and cultural development as a way of understanding the human experience in this part of the world, to topics such as religion, disease, and heritage The course guides studies in the many ways in which research in the Indian Ocean has a direct impact on our ability to compare developments in the Atlantic and Pacific. Significant work outside of class time is expected of the student for this course.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 230D:
Spatial Approaches to Social Science (ANTHRO 130D, POLISCI 241S, URBANST 124)
This multidisciplinary course combines different approaches to how GIS and spatial tools can be applied in social science research. We take a collaborative, project oriented approach to bring together technical expertise and substantive applications from several social science disciplines. The course aims to integrate tools, methods, and current debates in social science research and will enable students to engage in critical spatial research and a multidisciplinary dialogue around geographic space.
Last offered: Winter 2020
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 233:
Masculinity: Technologies and Cultures of Gender (ANTHRO 133, FEMGEN 133M)
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.
Last offered: Spring 2019
| Units: 4
ANTHRO 234:
Language, Gender and Sexuality (ANTHRO 134)
This course explores how identities of gender and sexuality are linked to particular ways of speaking and using language, and how language itself becomes the site of the politics of gender and sexuality. Enrolled students should have completed prior coursework in Anthropology, Linguistics, or Feminist Studies. Prerequisite: by instructor consent.
Last offered: Autumn 2021
| Units: 3-5
ANTHRO 237:
The Politics of Humanitarianism (ANTHRO 137)
What does it mean to want to help, to organize humanitarian aid, in times of crisis? At first glance, the impulse to help issue generis a good one. Helping is surely preferable to indifference and inaction. This does not mean that humanitarian interventions entail no ethical or political stakes or that they are beyond engaged critique. We need to critique precisely that which we value, and to ask some hard questions, among them these: What are the differences among humanitarianism, charity, and philanthropy? What of social obligations and solidarities? How does the neoliberal world order currently create structural inequalities that ensure the reproduction of poverty and violence? How does the current order of things resemble or differ from the colonial world order? This course examines the history of humanitarian sensibilities and the emergence of organized action in the 'cause of humanity'. In the early years of humanitarian intervention, political neutrality was a key principle; it has now come under ever greater analytical and political scrutiny. We will examine the reasons for the politicization and militarization of aid -- be it humanitarian aid in natural disasters or political crises; development programs in the impoverished south ('the Third World'), or peace-keeping. We will end with a critical exploration of the concept of human rights, humanity, and personhood. The overall methodological aim of the course is to demonstrate what insights an ethnographic approach to the politics, ethics, and aesthetics of humanitarianism can offer.
Last offered: Autumn 2019
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 238:
Medical Ethics in a Global World: Examining Race, Difference and Power in the Research Enterprise (ANTHRO 138, CSRE 138)
This course will explore historical as well as current market transformations of medical ethics in different global contexts. We will examine various aspects of the research enterprise, its knowledge-generating and life-saving goals, as well as the societal, cultural, and political influences that make medical research a site of brokering in need of oversight and emergent ethics.This seminar will provide students with tools to explore and critically assess the various technical, social, and ethical positions of researchers, as well as the role of the state, the media, and certain publics in shaping scientific research agendas. We will also examine how structural violence, poverty, global standing, and issues of citizenship also influence issues of consent and just science and medicine.
Last offered: Spring 2020
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 244:
Art and the Repair of the Self (ANTHRO 144)
Engaging the body/mind and its senses in the making of images and things has long been considered to have potentially great therapeutic significance. This course is a close examination of making as a form of therapy, as a form of communication, and, vitally, as a form of knowing. As such, it suggests new, analytically powerful possibilities for anthropological practice.
Last offered: Spring 2019
| Units: 3-5
ANTHRO 247:
Empires and Diasporas (ANTHRO 147)
When a society moves, we call it a diaspora. When a state moves, we call it an empire. This course explores how the interaction of these two kinds of mobility gave shape to the world we live in. We will discuss 1) how to trace the movement of states and societies across space and time, 2) how to understand empire and diaspora both as historical realities and as conceptual categories, and 3) how to use this conceptual history to generate fresh perspectives on contemporary affairs.
Last offered: Spring 2022
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 247B:
World Heritage in Global Conflict (ANTHRO 147B, ARCHLGY 147B)
Heritage is always political, it is typically said. Such a statement might refer to the everyday politics of local stakeholder interests on one end of the spectrum, or the volatile politics of destruction and erasure of heritage during conflict, on the other. If heritage is always political then one might expect that the workings of World Heritage might be especially fraught given the international dimension. In particular, the intergovernmental system of UNESCO World Heritage must navigate the inherent tension between state sovereignty and nationalist interests and the wider concerns of a universal regime. The World Heritage List has over 1000 properties has many such contentious examples, including sites in Iraq, Mali, Syria, Crimea, Palestine and Cambodia. As an organization UNESCO was born of war with an explicit mission to end global conflict and help the world rebuild materially and morally, but has found it¿s own history increasingly entwined with that of international politics and violence.
Last offered: Winter 2018
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 248:
Health, Politics, and Culture of Modern China (ANTHRO 148, CHINA 155A, CHINA 255A)
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.
Last offered: Autumn 2019
| Units: 4-5
ANTHRO 254C:
Animism, Gaia, and Alternative Approaches to the Environment (FRENCH 254, HISTORY 254B, HISTORY 354B, REES 254)
Indigenous knowledges have been traditionally treated as a field of research for anthropologists and as mistaken epistemologies, i.e., un-scientific and irrational folklore. However, within the framework of environmental humanities, current interest in non-anthropocentric approaches and epistemic injustice, animism emerged as a critique of modern epistemology and an alternative to the Western worldview. Treating native thought as an equivalent to Western knowledge will be presented as a (potentially) decolonizing and liberating practice. This course may be of interest to anthropology, archaeology and literature students working in the fields of ecocriticism and the environmental humanities/social sciences, students interested in the Anthropocene, geologic/mineral, bio-, eco- and geosocial collectives, symbiotic life-forms and non-human agencies. The course is designed as a research seminar for students interested in theory of the humanities and social sciences and simultaneously helping students to develop their individual projects and thesis.
Last offered: Spring 2022
| Units: 3-5
ANTHRO 254W:
Environmental Knowledges: Western and Indigenous (DLCL 254W, REES 254W)
The aim of the course is to analyze the relations between Indigenous and Western knowledges, and highlight the most important points of contact between the two systems. It will contribute to building inclusive and holistic knowledge in order to address the environmental and social problems facing the contemporary world. The course will explore how indigenous knowledges challenge Western worldview based on anthropocentrism, history as a way of approaching the past, individuality, progress, Cartesian rationality, and secularism. It offers opportunities for students to analyze various research perspectives, concepts, methods and approaches that attempt to bridge the human, social, and natural sciences and decolonized forms of indigenous knowledge. Students will explore art, literary and historical writing, as well as scientific artifacts of environmental engagement.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3-5
ANTHRO 256:
Japanese Anthropology (ANTHRO 156)
This is an advanced reading seminar in the field of Japanses Anthropology. nIt will explore the historical development of the field and the contemporary issues and topics taken up by scholars of Japanese anthropology. Prior knowledge of Japanese language, history, and, society is required.
Last offered: Spring 2019
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 257:
Japanese Anthropology (ANTHRO 157)
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.
Last offered: Winter 2022
| Units: 3
ANTHRO 258:
The Anthropology of Social Class (ANTHRO 158)
Course introduces social theory concepts and paradigms for the understanding of class. It then extends and revises those concepts and paradigms by considering anthropological approaches in different cultural and historical settings that consider the entanglements of class with other social hierarchies, especially race, caste, and ideas of "civilization" and "development".
Last offered: Spring 2020
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 259C:
Ecological Humanities (ANTHRO 159C, DLCL 259C, REES 259C)
What sort of topics, research questions, approaches, theories and concepts lead to an integration of various kinds of knowledges? Ecological Humanities provides a conceptual platform for a merger of humanities and social sciences with earth and life sciences, soil science and forensic sciences. The course will discuss such selected topics as the Anthropocene, geologic/mineral and exhumed subjects/personae, bio- and geosocial collectives, symbiotic life-forms, non-human agencies, and forensic landscapes as examples of this merger.
Last offered: Spring 2018
| Units: 3
ANTHRO 262A:
Visual Activism and Social Justice
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.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 265G:
Writing and Voice: Anthropological Telling through Literature and Practices of Expression (CSRE 265G)
In this graduate seminar we will explore how writers draw from their worlds of experience to create humanistic works of broad 'and often urgent' appeal. We will pay special attention to how creative writers integrate details of history, kinship, community, identity, pain and imagined possibilities for justice with stories that carry the potential to far exceed the bounds of a particular cultural or geographical place. Our focus will be on how writers combine the personal with larger pressing issues of our times that invite us to breakout of the cloistered spaces of academia (a responsibility, a necessity and also an opportunity) to write for larger publics. We will read and take writing prompts from authors who explore themes akin to those we care about as anthropologists to limn connections between ethnographic telling and literary sensibilities. All of the texts and writing exercises will invite students to intellectually collaborate with writers on the ways they clarify, magnify or explode understandings of power, race, colonial trauma, uncertain futures and societal afflictions as well as how individuals and communities expose and remake the constraints that the modern world has bequeathed us. We will engage works across genres. Potential authors include Lucile Clifton, Natalie Diaz, David Diop, Ralph Ellison, Laleh Khadivi, Moshin Hamid, Zora Neale Hurston, Maaza Mengiste, Toni Morrison, Tommy Orange, Zitkala-Sa and Ocean Vuong.
Last offered: Winter 2022
| Units: 3
ANTHRO 266A:
Semiotics for Ethnography (ANTHRO 166A)
This workshop-style seminar introduces students to core theories and concepts in linguistic and semiotic anthropology. Examining current theoretical innovations in this field of study, the course explores the multivalent relationships between language and political authority, discourse and technology, and speech and material infrastructures. Emphasis is placed on how semiotic approaches provide tools for ethnographic analysis, and students will learn how to use semiotic concepts for their own research projects.
Last offered: Spring 2021
| Units: 3
ANTHRO 271:
The Biology and Evolution of Language (ANTHRO 171)
Lecture course surveying the biology, linguistic functions, and evolution of the organs of speech and speech centers in the brain, language in animals and humans, the evolution of language itself, and the roles of innateness vs. culture in language. Suitable both for general education and as preparation for further studies in anthropology, biology, linguistics, medicine, psychology, and speech & language therapy. Anthropology concentration: CS, EE. No prerequisites.
Last offered: Winter 2017
| Units: 4-5
ANTHRO 276:
Cultures, Minds, and Medicine (ANTHRO 176)
This workshop aims to bring together scholars from the social sciences, humanities, medicine and bio-science and technology to explore the ways that health and illness are made through complex social forces. We aim for informal, interactive sessions, full of debate and good will. Dates of meetings will be listed in the notes section in the time schedule.
Last offered: Autumn 2018
| Units: 1
| Repeatable
6 times
(up to 6 units total)
ANTHRO 280B:
Investigating Ancient Materials (ANTHRO 180B, ARCHLGY 180, ARCHLGY 280, MATSCI 127, MATSCI 227)
This course examines how concepts and methods from materials science are applied to the analysis of archaeological artifacts, with a focus on artifacts made from inorganic materials (ceramics and metals). Coverage includes chemical analysis, microscopy, and testing of physical properties, as well as various research applications within anthropological archaeology. Students will learn how to navigate the wide range of available analytical techniques in order to choose methods that are appropriate to the types of artifacts being examined and that are capable of answering the archaeological questions being asked.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 3-4
| UG Reqs: WAY-SI, WAY-SMA
ANTHRO 282:
Medical Anthropology (ANTHRO 82, HUMBIO 176A)
Emphasis is on how health, illness, and healing are understood, experienced, and constructed in social, cultural, and historical contexts. Topics: biopower and body politics, gender and reproductive technologies, illness experiences, medical diversity and social suffering, and the interface between medicine and science.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 286:
Culture and Madness: Anthropological and Psychiatric Approaches to Mental Illness (ANTHRO 186, HUMBIO 146, PSYC 286)
Unusual mental phenomena have existed throughout history and across cultures. Taught by an anthropologist and psychiatrist, this course explores how different societies construct the notions of "madness": What are the boundaries between "normal" and "abnormal", reason and unreason, mind and body, diversity and disease? Optional: The course will be taught in conjunction with an optional two-unit discussion section.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3-5
ANTHRO 288:
Matter and Mattering: Transdisciplinary Thinking about Things (ANTHRO 188, APPPHYS 188, ARCHLGY 188)
Things sit at the nexus of cross-cutting heterogeneous processes; tracing the entanglements of any prominent thing or class of things demands a transdisciplinary approach that recruits expertise from the natural sciences, social sciences and humanities. For example, carbon is a key factor in global warming for reasons that are as much socio-historical as bio-physical, and we could not begin to sketch the full significance of carbon without considering such diverse frames of reference. Our growing appreciation in the social sciences and humanities of the agency, polyvalence and catalytic role of things has given rise to The New Materialist and Post-Humanist movements, which in turn raise questions about intra-action and observational perspective that are echoed in the modern physical and life sciences. In this class we will explore these theoretical convergences in considering themes such as `things-in-themselves¿, networks and open systems, assemblages and entanglements. We will also examine specific examples such as oil, metal (guns), dams, viruses, electricity, mushrooms; each thing will be explored both in terms of its social and ethical entanglements and in terms of its material properties and affordances. There will also be hands-on encounters with objects in labs and a couple of local field trips. The key question throughout will be `why and how does matter matter in society today?
Last offered: Spring 2021
| Units: 4-5
ANTHRO 296F:
The Worlds of Labor in Modern India (HISTORY 396L)
This colloquium will introduce students to the exciting and expanding field of Indian labor history and provide them a comprehensive historiographical foundation in this area of historical research. Seminars will engage with one key monograph in the field every week, with selected chapters of the monograph set as compulsory reading. In these seminars, we will explore the world of the working classes and the urban poor in colonial and post-colonial India, as also the Indian labor diaspora. We will understand myriad workplaces such as jute and cotton mills, small workshops, farms and plantations. We will also explore forms of protest and political mobilization devised by workers in their struggles against structures of oppression and in their quest for a life of dignity. Most importantly, these seminars will train students in the methods deployed by labor historians to access the lives of the largely unlettered workers of the region who seldom left a trace of their consciousness in archival documents. Overall, we will connect the debates in the history of labor in modern India to wider discussions about the nature of capitalism, colonial modernity, gender, class, caste and culture.
Last offered: Winter 2022
| Units: 4-5
ANTHRO 298A:
Archaeological Geographic Information Systems (ANTHRO 198A, ARCHLGY 198A, ARCHLGY 298A)
This advanced undergraduate and graduate seminar will provide students with practical and theoretical training in Geographical Information Systems (GIS) as applied to archaeological research, introducing students to spatial theories and GIS methodological applications to research design and analysis. Topics covered in the course will include: cartographic skills of displaying and visualizing archaeological data, GIS applications to research design and sampling, data acquisition and generation, spatial analyses of artifacts, features, sites, and landscapes, as well as a critical evaluation of the strengths and limitations of GIS spatial analyses and epistemologies. Prerequisites: By instructor consent. Significant work outside of class time is expected of the student in this course.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 298C:
Digital Methods in Anthropology (ANTHRO 98C)
The course provides an introduction to a broad range of digital tools and techniques for anthropological research. It is geared towards those interested in exploring such methodologies for their research and wanting to add hands-on experience with state-of-the-art digital tools to their skill set. Students will learn to work with some of the most common tools used to collect and manage digital data, and to perform various types of analysis and visualization.Undergraduate students register for 3-5 Units, Graduate students can register for 3-5 units.
Last offered: Spring 2022
| Units: 3-5
ANTHRO 299:
Senior and Master's Paper Writing Workshop (ANTHRO 199)
Techniques of interpreting data, organizing bibliographic materials, writing, editing and revising. Preparation of papers for conferences and publications in anthropology. Seniors register for 199; master's students register for 299.
Last offered: Spring 2022
| Units: 1-2
| Repeatable
for credit
ANTHRO 300:
Reading Theory Through Ethnography
Required of and restricted to first-year ANTHRO Ph.D. students. Focus is on contemporary ethnography and related cultural and social theories generated by texts. Topics include agency, resistance, and identity formation, and discourse analysis. Prerequisite: consent of instructor. Significant work outside of class time is expected of the student for this course.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 301:
History of Anthropological Theory, Culture and Society
Required of Anthropology Ph.D. students. The history of cultural and social anthropology in relation to historical and national contexts and key theoretical and methodological issues as these inform contemporary theory and practices of the discipline. Enrollment limited to 15. Prerequisite: Consent of instructor. Significant work outside of class time is expected of the student for this course.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 301A:
Foundations of Social Theory
Modern social theory is based on intellectual horizons emerging in Europe from the 17th to the 19th/20th centuries. This burst of new ideas was intertwined with some of the darkest chapters in Europe's history: the enslavement, subjection and exploitation of vast populations across the globe as Europe's imperial domination expanded and deepened. This course will explore how virtually all the most consequential ideas emerging from now canonical thinkers - on human freedom and autonomy, reason, popular self-determination, property rights, civility, liberal toleration, equality, empirical social sciences and much else - arose as direct answers to the new epistemic, moral and political challenges of empire and colonial conquest. The world of empire indelibly shaped and created the intellectual legacy that informs modern social theory on a global scale - both its internal critiques, its liberal, and emancipatory potentials, as well as its many illiberal, racist and exclusionary strands and impulses. Each section has original texts, commentaries, and background readings that place these texts in their deeper historical setting. Many of these commentaries trace how practical theories of 'lower' or minor selves - the subject people of the colonies, slaves, and other - were integral to the very development of ideas of the modern, autonomous and reasonable self in the western world. Prerequisite: By instructor consent. Significant work outside of class time is expected of the student for this course.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 302A:
Technopolitics: Materiality, Power, Theory (HISTORY 302)
This graduate readings seminar provides a lively introduction to some of the major themes and issues in the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS). How do technologies and material assemblages perform power? How are their designs and uses shaped by social, cultural, and political dynamics? How do they shape those dynamics? The course draws on an interdisciplinary body of literature in humanities and social science, mixing theoretical material with more empirically oriented studies, and classics with new scholarship.
Last offered: Autumn 2019
| Units: 4-5
ANTHRO 302D:
Power in the Anthropocene: Pasts, Presents, Futures (HISTORY 302D, SUSTAIN 352)
The Anthropocene designates the present geological epoch, in which humans have irreversibly changed planet Earth, with impacts discernible in the atmosphere, biosphere, and more. The term has also become a "charismatic mega-category" in the humanities and social sciences, where some critique the very concept, while others focus on how power dynamics, political economy, racial capitalism, and human/non-human relations manifest--and often accelerate--Anthropocenic transformations. This PhD-level course dives into these debates, drawing on work in a wide range of fields in the humanities, social sciences, arts, and natural science (the latter with works accessible to non-expert audiences). The course involves considerable reading. Written assignments will be varied and often experimental. The format of the final assignment will be flexible, with options that can be adapted to the needs and interests of individual students.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 4-5
ANTHRO 303:
Introduction to Archaeological Thought
The history of archaeological thought emphasizes recent debates. Evolutionary theories, behavioral archaeology, processual and cognitive archaeology, and approaches termed feminist and post-processual archaeology in the context of wider debate in adjacent disciplines. The application and integration of theory on archaeological problems and issues. Prerequisite: By consent of instructor. Significant work outside of class time is expected of the student for this course.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 303A:
Contemporary Debates in Archaeological Thought
This course provides students an introduction to archaeological theory, ethics, and practice in the early 21st century. We will consider the wide range of moves beyond post-processualist archaeology; These will include but not limited to materiality, symmetry, the move from identity to intersectionality, the turn to engaging semiotics, anthropologies of infrastructure, religion and secularism, and the debate over practices and prospects of collaborative and community-based research. We will characterize each of these in terms of their philosophical commitments and inspirations, their methodological programs, their modes of writing and polemics, alongside an assessment of their ethical horizons. Prerequisite by consent of instructor. Significant work outside of class time is expected of the student in the course.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 303E:
Infrastructure & Power in the Global South (AFRICAST 303E, HISTORY 303E)
In the last decade, the field of infrastructure studies has entered into conversation with area studies, post/colonial studies, and other scholarship on the "Global South." These intersections have produced dramatic new understandings of what "infrastructures" are, and how to analyze them as conduits of social and political power. This course offers a graduate-level introduction to this recent scholarship, drawing primarily on works from history, anthropology, geography, and architecture.
Last offered: Winter 2019
| Units: 4-5
ANTHRO 303X:
Memory, Materiality, and Archaeology (ARCHLGY 303)
This seminar will explore several themes related to memory and material culture - broadly conceived to include art, architecture, the built environment, and landscapes, through archaeological, historical, and ethnographic lenses. How can we understand the role of socially resonant individual and collective memories through materiality in the past? What is the materiality of memorialization and commemoration, and are they affected by political contestation and power? Additionally, how does material culture through anthropological interpretation aid or transform social memory in the present?This seminar does not attempt to be all-inclusive of the themes and topics generated by intersection of memory and materiality. Rather, the seminar is designed around an introduction to how humanists and social scientists (including sociocultural anthropologists and archaeologists) have approached social and collective memory, and seven specific theoretical or threads for which archaeologists offer unique insight. Some of the works we will read and discuss are established classics of archaeology and related disciplines, while others are more recent works. By putting certain works in conversation through our seminar, the aim is to push our understanding of the potential for thinking through materiality in exploring memory.
Last offered: Winter 2022
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 304:
Becoming Muslim: Practice, Assemblage, Tradition (ARCHLGY 201)
The growing study of material Islam broadly occupies two distinct fields: first, archaeologies of premodern Islam and material histories and second, ethnographic meditations on the distinctive relation between the materiality of practice and subjectivity in muslim societies. This intensive reading seminar brings major recent studies from both these fields into conversation. We will read archaeological, historical, and ethnographic studies to consider how debates over the materiality of practice from muslim contexts pose problems to social theory. The course will first engage with definitional and theoretical problems in understanding Islam and conversion to Islam. Subsequently, the course considers the following themes: conduct, embodiment, prayer, suffering and care. Through these engagements we will examine the relations between moral and material substance, the place of objects within ethical pursuits, and the salience of material assemblages to the in/disciplines of the body. These explorations will be situated within wider anthropological discussions of agency and volition, becoming, and theorizations of materiality, assemblages, and forms of life.Prerequisite: consent of instructor.
Last offered: Spring 2021
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 306:
Anthropological Research Methods
Required of ANTHRO Ph.D. students. Other graduate students may enroll. Research methods and modes of evidence building in ethnographic research. Prerequisite: By instructor consent. Significant work outside of class time is expected of the student for this course.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 307:
Archaeological Methods
Methodological aspects of field and laboratory practice from traditional archaeological methods to the latest interdisciplinary analytical techniques. The nature of archaeological data and inference; interpretive potential of these techniques. Prerequisite: By consent of instructor. Significant work outside of class time is expected of the student for this course.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 308:
Proposal Writing Seminar in Cultural and Social Anthropology
Required of second-year Ph.D. students in the culture and society track. The conceptualization of dissertation research problems, the theories behind them, and the methods for exploring them. Participants draft a research prospectus suitable for a dissertation proposal and research grant applications. Limited enrollment. Prerequisite: By consent of instructor. Significant work outside of class time is expected of the student for this course.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 308A:
Proposal Writing Seminar in Archaeology
Required of second-year Ph.D. students in the archaeology track. The conceptualization of dissertation research problems, the theories behind them, and the methods for exploring them. Participants draft a research prospectus suitable for a dissertation proposal and research grant applications. Limited enrollment. Prerequisite: By consent of instructor. Significant work outside of class time is expected of the student for this course
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 310C:
Intersections
Themes of materiality and visuality, aesthetic and other forms of cultural production, and the meanings of creativity and convention. Ethnographic and archaeological material and case studies from worldwide cultural contexts. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.
Last offered: Winter 2020
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 310G:
Introduction to Graduate Studies
Required graduate seminar. The history of anthropological theory and key theoretical and methodological issues of the discipline. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 2
ANTHRO 311G:
Introduction to Culture and Society Graduate Studies in Anthropology
Required graduate seminar for CS track. The history of anthropological theory and key theoretical and methodological issues in cultural anthropology. Prerequistes: this course is open only to Ph.D. students in anthropology or by permission of the instructor.
Terms: Win, Spr
| Units: 2
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 4 units total)
ANTHRO 312:
Time Travel: Pasts, Places, and Possibilities
Is the past dead or alive? Where do we find it? What possibilities emerge when we discover it? This course explores how people think and live with history in the present, how different places can harbor different times, and how movement between them can create the effect of time travel. We will read monographs that bring the historian's concern with chronology, historicity, and change into dialogue with the anthropological themes of ritual, myth, and kinship. By synthesizing anthropological and historical approaches to time, we will learn how to build temporally capacious perspectives that unsettle commonplace divisions such as medieval-modern, colonial-postcolonial, and imperial-national. Prerequisite: By consent of instructor. Significant work outside of class time is expected of the student for this course.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 313A:
Fine Observation: Ways of Seeing, Forms of Fieldwork
Explores possibilities for reimagining ethnography as a genre of writing and mode of knowledge production through delving into documentary and representational practices in other fields, including literature, journalism, art history, graphic novels, documentary photography, etc. Challenges any habituated acceptance of the fiction/nonfiction opposition while insisting on the necessity of evidence in anthropology. Prerequisite: By consent of instructor. Significant work outside of class time is expected of the student for this course.
Last offered: Spring 2021
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 316:
The Archaeology of the Contemporary Past
Archaeology is not limited to the study of the remote past. What happened a fifty years ago or even this morning can be subjected to archaeological scrutiny as well. In this course, we will see what the discipline has to say about the Second World War, refugees, climate change or music festivals through a diversity of global examples. We will also learn how to use archaeology to explore and understand our everyday world -our house, the town we live in, and the garbage we produce. Political and ethical issues are very relevant in the archaeology of the contemporary past: we will tackle them through readings, debates and the discussion of case studies.Prerequisite: consent of instructor.
Last offered: Spring 2021
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 323:
Graduate Seminar in Economic Anthropology
Classical and contemporary anthropological perspectives on topics such as money, markets and exchange; capitalist and non-capitalist modes of production; class and socio-economic differentiation; globalization and neoliberalism; and the social and cultural construction of the object, "the economy". Prerequisite: consent of instructor.
Last offered: Autumn 2020
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 324:
Political Anthropology
An anthropological approach to politics through bringing anthropological ways of thinking and modes of analysis to bear on key presuppositions of modern Western political thought. Ideas of rights, the individual, society, liberty, democracy, equality, and solidarity; ethnographic accounts used to identify the limits of conventional analytical approaches and to document the forms of politics that such approaches either ignore or misunderstand. Prerequisite: By consent of instructor. Significant work outside of class time is expected of the student for this course.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 325:
Care: A Critical Inquiry
Care: A Critical Inquiry examines ethnographic, philosophical, and social theoretical texts to understand the recent turn to care in anthropology. Topics include care as a relation; care and abandonment; the rationalization of care in law and medicine; the ethics of care; the queering of care, among others. Prerequisite: By instructor consent. Significant work outside of class time is expected of the student.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 325W:
Care and State
Care poses challenges for states around the world, as can be seen in healthcare and public childcare during the pandemic, elder care in ageing societies, and transnational care migration. While both state and care are discussed extensively in the social sciences, the literatures devoted to each tend to see them as separate ¿ or even opposed ¿ objects of research and teaching. This class brings together the two bodies of scholarship and focuses on their intersection. Topics will be: How are ideas about state care responsibilities formed, appropriated and translated into practice? How do citizens shape state configurations in negotiations of care responsibilities? Who is understood as deserving care in what situation? The answers will allow us to develop an understanding about how care negotiations shape contemporary state configurations with important consequences for diverse inequalities.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 326:
Postcolonial and Indigenous Archaeologies
The role of postcolonial and Indigenous archaeologies as emergeant disciplinary activities within contemporary society. Community based archaeologies; the roles of oral history, landscape, and memory; archaeology as political action; and history in archaeological projects. The emergence of Indigenous archaeology within N. America in relation to limitations imposed by processual or new archaeology; and NAGPRA, Kennewick, essentialism, and terminal narratives within this context. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.
Last offered: Spring 2018
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 330A:
The Archive: Form, Practice, Thought
This seminar offers a wide-ranging exploration of the `archive.' Drawing from ethnography, social theory, philosophy, photography and literature, we will examine the archive's diverse material, narratological and structural dimensions, its epistemological, political and representational functions, processes of archivisation and recuperation, and related domains of experience, memory, absence and loss. Prerequisite: consent of instructor
Last offered: Spring 2022
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 332:
Anthropology of Ethics
Recent decades have witnessed what some scholars have termed an ethical turn in anthropology. This course explores the emergence of this field of study, asking the following questions: What has motivated a renewed anthropological interest in the subject of ethics? How has a focus on ethics enabled the development of new theoretical currents in the discipline? To what extent have anthropological studies of ethics provided new understandings of traditional topics, concerning social hierarchy, power relations, embodiment, and subject-formation?
Last offered: Spring 2018
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 332B:
Tradition
A central concept in modern social theory, the notion of tradition often invokes a picture of life stressing constraint against freedom, continuity against becoming, and transmission instead of novelty. This course asks why the concept of tradition evokes these binaries and how they limit our analytical imagination. What other understandings are possible? The course brings together ethnographic and archaeological debates on tradition, examining how pasts and futures relate in the present. From these engagements, we will consider themes of virtue and embodiment, learning and conduct, and historicity and time. Prerequisite: By instructor consent. Significant work outside of class time is expected of the student for this course.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 334A:
A Family Romance: The Family in Contemporary Society
"The family" is considered one of the most universal structures of human life. The study of kinship has wandered off anthropological syllabi just as it assumes ever greater significance within contemporary (often dystopic) political debates on the societies produced by different kinds of families. This course explores, cross-culturally and historically, how particular models and ideologies of ideal family structure and form have come to dominate and reshape society. We focus particularly on the importance of ideologies of kinship and family within moral imaginations, as well as the inevitable impossible nature of the emotional and material obligations placed by such ideologies. Firstly, the course will ask whether kinship structures are distinct structures of recognition that generate their own ambivalence, anxiety, and comfort. We will focus this through discussing the relationship of kinship to gender roles and ideologies. Secondly, it will locate how talking, thinking, doing and imagining how people are 'properly' related to each other (as well as potential transgressions) are central to imaginations of the social itself. This will also initiate a larger debate on the nature of social change. Thirdly, the course will give students a precise and calibrated entry point into the debates around kinship from the perspective of three differing disciplines, social history, psychoanalysis, and anthropology. Prerequisites: By instructor consent. Significant work outside of class time is expected of the student in this course
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 337:
VOICES
This course takes an anthropological perspective on psychotic voices, voices of resistance (mad and sane), voices of authority, voices of spirit, the sense of communication from another seen or unseen. We end with the writer's voice and how students can cultivate their own voice. We read first person examples and a range of theory, including Bakhtin, Lacan, Willy Apollon, Piaget and Vygotsky, and Elyn Saks, Zora Neale Hurston, Zadie Smith and EB White. Texts may shift depending on student input.Prerequisite: Instructor approval
Last offered: Autumn 2020
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 338A:
Policing and the Carceral State
Police in the United States have come under greater public scrutiny in recent years, particularly as cell-phone videos make visible abuses by police, prompting nation-wide protests for social justice, police reform, and abolition. Increased scholarly attention to the police centers on racial profiling, `broken windows' policing strategies and mass incarceration, the surveillance state, and violent policing of political protests. While police represent state authority, ordinary policing practices are notoriously difficult to study, thereby eliding variable conditions and contradictions. This course interrogates policing and the carceral state by focusing on the purpose of the police, quotidian policing practices, and territorial control in diverse U.S. and global contexts. Course readings emphasize ethnographies of policing, along with key texts from critical geography and legal studies, to elucidate multiple topographies of policing, control, and neglect at work in governing contemporary societies. Prerequisites: By instructor consent. Significant work outside of class time is expected of the student in this course
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 338B:
History and Memory
How are history and memory important in the making of collective and public memory? This seminar draws together an interdisciplinary collection of readings with an aim to provide a foundation for seminar participants¿ projects, both historical and contemporary projects. We will explore critiques of the practice of gathering material, i.e., archival and oral histories as well as delve into experimental forms that combine improvisational approaches to history and critique in an effort to develop a methodological tool kit that allows for a push beyond established projects.
Last offered: Winter 2018
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 339:
Anthropology of Religion (RELIGST 343X)
This course presents classic and contemporary work on the anthropology of religion: Durkheim Elementary Forms of the Religious Life; Levy-Bruhl; Primitive Mentality; Douglas Purity and Danger; Evans Pritchard Nuer Religion; and recent ethnographies/scholarly work by Robbins, Keane, Keller, Boyer, Barrett, and others. Prerequisite: consent of instructor
Last offered: Spring 2020
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 342W:
Whose Public Art? Monuments and Murals in a Contested Public Sphere
Public art, murals, and monuments have become a flashpoint for debate over civic values, memory, and belonging. The United States has experienced increased contestation over public symbols, particularly historic statues, with responses ranging from direct action defacement, protests, removal, and lawsuits. While public art in the twenty-first century is often considered more accessible and democratic, questions emerge about whom these projects represent in relation to changing publics, race and class dispossession, arts-led regeneration, privatization, and state oversight. Public mural projects may empower communities through self-representation and alternative historical narratives, but murals can be appropriated by commercial interests and designed to police urban space. This course aims to develop a complex understanding of monuments and public art in a contested public sphere; diverse case studies situate these projects in the symbolic and material production of place. While centering ethnography, this course includes multi-disciplinary approaches from urban studies and visual cultural studies, and draws on multimodal methodological strategies for assessing the "public" in public art.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 343:
Culture as Commodity
Cultural anthropologists have made significant contributions to studies that link culture and economy. Drawing together a range of cross-cultural debates, as these emerge in theoretical discussions and ethnographies, this graduate seminar explores themes that include value, property, cultural production, and consumption.
Last offered: Autumn 2021
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 345:
New Visions in Medical Anthropology
Recent experimental histories of the field. Emphasis is on how, working within anthropology's classic format, the ethnographic monograph, authors have innovatively responded to the challenges of representing amorphous, unspoken, and often violent relationships between the body and social change. The authors' expository techniques, and how they engage and extend theoretical debate. How to assess works within medical anthropology and its allied fields. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.
Last offered: Winter 2018
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 345A:
Race and Power: The Making of Human Difference in History, Biology and Capital
This course examines how race is made. We will pay close attention to how people engage with material, economic, scientific, and cultural forces to articulate human group difference as a given, and even natural. In this seminar, we will look at the reality of race as a literally constructed phenomenon, where historical, colonial, bodily, market, penal, and humanitarian constituent elements both circulate and sediment racial understandings. To focus our readings and discussions we will divide this vast terrain into three units: race and the colonial encounter, race and biopower, and race in systems of capital accumulation.
Last offered: Spring 2022
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 347A:
Global Heritage, Religion and Secularism
This course examines the ways in which religion and spirituality have been addressed in heritage preservation history, discourse, and practice. Readings will focus on the convergence of religious and heritage traditions at differenthistorical and cultural moments in order to chart the legacies that inform a critical study of heritage into the 1990s. This seminar prepares students to assess the instruments and ideologies that conform contemporary practices of heritagepreservation in light of recent institutional interest in religion, and highlights the obstacles that the field is yet to overcome theoretically and methodologically. Prerequisite: consent of instructor
Last offered: Autumn 2021
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 348A:
Health, Politics, and Culture of Modern China
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.
Last offered: Spring 2018
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 348B:
Bodies, Technologies, and Natures in Africa (AFRICAST 249, HISTORY 349)
This interdisciplinary course explores how modern African histories, bodies, and natures have been entangled with technological activities. Viewing Africans as experts and innovators, we consider how technologies have mediated, represented, or performed power in African societies. Topics include infrastructure, extraction, medicine, weapons, communications, sanitation, and more. Themes woven through the course include citizenship, mobility, labor, bricolage, in/formal economies, and technopolitical geographies, among others. Readings draw from history, anthropology, geography, and social/cultural theory.
Last offered: Spring 2018
| Units: 4-5
ANTHRO 348C:
Phenomenology
The goal of this seminar is to explore the phenomenological method in ethnographic and historical research. We will discuss work by Merleau-Ponty, Husserl, Levinas, Freud, Stein, Petitmengin, Joelle Proust, James, and others in the context of ethnographic and historical work which sets out to understand subjective experiences like depression, trauma, identity, mysticism, taste and despair. Prerequisite: By instructor consent. Significant work outside of class time is expected of the student in this course.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 348P:
ProSeminar: Medical Anthropology
This seminar will focus on recent and seminal texts in Medical Anthropology, broadly construed.Prerequisite: by instructor consent
Last offered: Autumn 2021
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 349:
Anthropology of Capitalism
This advanced graduate seminar explores capitalism as an historically-situated and culturally-mediated articulation of practices rather than as an economic system or social structure governed by an internal logic. It draws on poststructural theories of culture, society and subjectivity to investigate the processes through which diverse capitalist practices are produced. Prerequisite: Graduate standing in Anthropology or permission of the instructor. Previous graduate level coursework in cultural anthropology, social theory or cultural studies is required. No auditing is permitted. Enrollment limited to 12.
Last offered: Spring 2022
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 351D:
Ideologies and Practices of Creativity
The still-robust Romantic conception of creativity as the attribute of a specific, 'gifted', individual continues to have extraordinary social and political power as an ideological apparatus that shapes and disciplines conduct, aspirations, and subjectivities. This course is a critical anthropological exploration of the following questions: How and why has a deep, naturalized individualism long been foundational to both ideals and practices of creativity? How is it raced and gendered? How have people been rethinking relational, collaborative creative practice?
Last offered: Winter 2020
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 353:
Landscape
This graduate seminar introduces interdisciplinary approaches to landscape study. The broad range of theoretical approaches includes human and non-human interactions and overlapping and divergent, spatial and temporal questions derived from the exchange between landscapes and humans. Fields such as Art history, Political Ecology, Anthropology, Geography, and Natural History draw attention to representational and non-representational ways that material and symbolic aspects of landscapes help constitute the making of place. Throughout the seminar students will development their research question or project. The requirements for this course are demanding. Prerequisite: Those not at the graduate level must seek the instructor's consent for enrollment.
Last offered: Spring 2022
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 354:
Cultural Techniques
Building on the concept of 'cultural techniques,' or 'Kulturtechniken,' that has been developing in recent German media studies, this advanced graduate seminar considers a wide range of culturally specific modes of elementary techniques, from cutting, connecting, to reading, writing, and counting, to cooking, sewing, irrigating, and so on, as ethnographic analytics. The seminar explores the epistemic shift in ethnographic methods and analysis from the symbolic sense of meaning-making to the material condition for such meaning-making. Prerequisite by instructor consent
Last offered: Winter 2022
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 356A:
The Universal and the Vernacular. The Global Life of Concepts and Social Forms
Mapping and understanding vernacular concepts and terminologies has always been central to the anthropological quest to understand societies from `a native point of view'. This has often been accompanied by a critique of universalist and Euro-centric assumptions in the social sciences and in social theory. As a result, the convention has become to treat the `universal¿ (ideas, frames, institutions) as external, often imposed by colonial powers, while the `vernacular¿ conventionally is seen as local and authentic, and the proper site of anthropology.nThis course seeks to rethink this spatial and historical distinction between the universal and the vernacular. Instead we ask: how, and when, do concepts, or practices, become embedded in a vernacular world? Reversely, instead of assuming that universals all originate in Euro-America, we ask: how do concepts and practices become both global and universal? We will trace how impactful ideologies, social forms and institutions have travelled in time to become perceived as elements of vernacular cultures. nDrawing on ethnographic and historical examples across the world, each week will trace the universal and vernacular lives of important concepts such as: `tradition¿, `the individual¿, `community¿, `the people¿; `humanity¿, `dignity¿; `equality¿, `sacrifice¿, `cosmopolitanism¿, `civility¿.
Last offered: Spring 2019
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 360A:
Archival Research for Social Science: A Practicuum
Since the 1980s, the necessity of historicizing cultural and social formations has become established as integral to anthropological research. Every ethnography and dissertation has historical sections, derived primarily from secondary sources, commentaries within other ethnographies and published historical work. Most students attempt to conduct archival research in local or national archives alongside ethnographic fieldwork, most often in an ad hoc manner, collecting and analyzing archival material on a trial and error basis. This class is conceived as a practicum that addresses students who need to and want to do archival research as part of their anthropological and sociological fieldwork, but find themselves at a loss for how to think about, begin, and, do archival work.nnThe base layer of the class is methodological and practical: students will be engaged in the practical activities of becoming acquainted with archives, developing archival research questions, learning techniques of recording, coding, and thinking historically. The second layer will be conceptual. Students will be reading and discussing concepts of the archive, reading and analyzing different styles of historical ethnographies, and thinking about how to organize and conceptualize cultural categories historically.nnStudents will be asked to conduct archival research at the archives available at Stanford Libraries and the Hoover Institution archives and write a research paper based on this archival work. We will have weekly meetings divided into two sessions. The first half will discuss set readings and intellectual concern. In the second half, we will discuss methodological concerns, problems encountered in the archives and bounce ideas off each other. We will also have regular guest speakers who will give talks and answer questions, intellectual and methodological about archival research.
Last offered: Spring 2018
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 361:
Life and Death in Contemporary Latin America: An Anthropological Inquiry
This seminar explores life and death in contemporary Latin America. We will address anthropological understanding of the role of colonialism, migration, violence, urbanization, democratic transition and neoliberalism as they configure the experience of, and threshold between, vital and deadly processes. This is not a standard survey course, covering the region as a whole however. Instead, we will critically engage several recent ethnographies that explore, for example: the politics and practices of memory; border thinking and living; the political economy of death and desire; state violence and social movements; the relationship between the laboring city and body. We will supplement ethnographies with contemporary Latin American critical theory, film, and literary texts. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.
Last offered: Winter 2013
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 362A:
Visual Anthropology
This course will offer ways of understanding how scholars can attend to, theorize, and use visual documents such as photographs, drawings, prints, forms, charts, etc. in ethnographic work. Prerequisite by Instructor consent.
Last offered: Winter 2022
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 363:
Queer Anthropology
Feminist and queer theory have profoundly rethought epistemologies as well as methodologies. This graduate seminar will explore the relationship between feminist and queer theory and the new directions proposed by queer anthropology in socio-cultural anthropology and archaeology. In addition, the seminar will discuss the challenges that looking at queer studies from anthropology and archaeology can bring from questions of race, global inequalities, misrecognitions as well as specific historical and cultural genealogies which offer more than simply adding diversity to questions already raised within queer studies. Students will acquire both conceptual and methodological skills. nThis year-long graduate seminar adopts a workshop-like format over the entire 2018-2019 academic year. We will meet for eleven (three hour) meetings over three quarters (4 meetings in Autumn, 3 meetings in Winter, and 4 meetings in Spring. Students are required to enroll in all three quarters. Pre-requisite: instructor consent.
Last offered: Spring 2019
| Units: 2
| Repeatable
3 times
(up to 6 units total)
ANTHRO 365A:
Emancipation: Theories and Experiences
Concepts of emancipation have been treated in a wide variety of historical, political, regional and social perspectives. In the US, emancipation and post emancipation societies are primarily understood around histories of enslavement. In the class, while taking inspiration and also covering work on enslavement and emancipation, we will endeavor to discuss theories, ideas and experiences that have been understood as potentially emancipatory from a globally and historically wide-ranging set of ideas. Issues of race, caste, class and gender are axiomatic themes within the class.Emancipation has frequently been understood as an emancipation from oppression and an impetus towards a form of freedom or new order. While theoretically this is formally understood and discussed, often with historical examples that use experiences to illustrate failures or successes, in this class we will try to understand the texture of practices as the primary means by which ideas about emancipation circulate, imagined, are discussed, are disappointed and so on. We will try and see what an anthropological and historically textured discussion can bring to theoretical discussions of emancipation. We will examine theoretical, historical, sociological and anthropological writings on emancipation, freedom, enslavement and servitude, political mobilization and revolution. Fundamentally this course tries to get students to think globally about multiple and different systems of persisting and enduring oppression and inequality through an emphasis on political thought, political imaginations and concrete political organizations and movements. Prerequisite: consent of instructor
Last offered: Spring 2020
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 366:
Material Semiotics
This seminar will focus on the emerging body of literature on the materiality of the production, circulation, and mediation of paperwork as constituitive of modern forms of governance. We will discuss specific genres of paperworks - notes, memos, files, documents, as well as archives and other mnemonic technologies - both as cultural practices and reflexive objects, and examine how they produce modern social epistemologies of accountability, evidence, the fact, and truth in the fields of law, business, and public administration, as well as in civil society generally. Readings will include works by Max Weber, Bruno Latour, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Cornelia Vismann, Ann Stoler, and others. Prerequisite: graduate standing or consent of instructor.
Last offered: Winter 2021
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 366W:
Semiotics for Ethnography (EDUC 366W)
This workshop-style seminar will introduce students to a range of semiotic and linguistic anthropological approaches and tools for ethnographic analysis. A group of (linguistic) anthropologists from other universities will be invited to offer workshops, through which students will learn 1. how to teach semiotics in anthropology courses and 2. how to use semiotic concepts for their own research projects.
Last offered: Winter 2019
| Units: 1
ANTHRO 367:
The Anthropology of Science: Global Politics and Laboratory Life
Science and technology are important cultural products that often dramatically reorganize various aspects of human life. In this course we will explore how recent innovations in the life sciences and biomedicine may reconfigure crucial elements of social institutions, lend new structures to identity politics, and often change the way we interact with and conceive of nature. We will examine these issues in various global settings to explore how everyday politics shape politics of life in different locales.nPre-requisite by instructor consent.
Last offered: Spring 2021
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 368A:
Time and Temporality
This course explores the social and political organization of time. Anthropology has long been critical of the narratives of progress that are embedded in concepts of modern politics, such as development, citizenship, secularism, and sovereignty. How do social actors respond to the perceived failures of such narratives? How do they re-articulate historical pasts to political futures in the aftermath of modernization? In this course we will read studies that examine lived experiences of the passing of time. How is memory linked to anticipation? How is consciousness of the past structured by expectations of a future to come? We will pay particular attention to the material aspects of these temporal relations, including their social, economic, and infrastructural conditions. Drawing from current debates in anthropology, queer theory, and post-colonial studies, we will critically interrogate theories of ruination, crisis, hope, and utopia.
Last offered: Autumn 2019
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 371:
Living and Dying in the Contemporary World
This seminar explores how biological, political and social conditions transform and conjoin experiences of living and dying in the world today. Engaging contemporary ethnographies and social theory, we will examine how life and death, the natural and the social, the individual and the collective, are braided together in ways that challenge conclusions about what constitutes care, community, health, rights, and violence, among other issues. We will also reflect on whether and how the braiding together of these domains leaves room for the recognition of their singularity. Thus, an abiding question for this seminar is the relation of history to the present. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.
Last offered: Autumn 2018
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 372:
Urban Ecologies
At the intersections of urbanism and environmental studies, political ecology, postcolonial theory and the new materialism, new fields are in formation. This seminar explores scholarship that connects cities with countrysides rough questions of resources and infrastructures. We will consider questions id inequality access and community as well as unexpected urban ecologies
Last offered: Autumn 2017
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 373:
Things: An Archaeology of the Relationships Between Humans and Things
This course examines a variety of approaches that claim to explore the relationships between humans and things. Some of the approaches include Marx and material culture studies; Heidegger; cognitive and phenomenological; Actor Network Theory. But there is a need also to examine behavioral and ecological and Darwinian approaches. Many of these approaches do not adequately deal with the physicality of things as objects and there is a need to seek a way to incorporate such aspects of things into social theory. Prerequisite: graduate standing or consent of instructor
Last offered: Spring 2020
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 374:
Archaeology of Colonialism/Postcolonialisms
Advanced graduate seminar focused on the archaeology of colonial and postcolonial contexts, both prehistoric and historic. Emphasis on intersections between archaeological research and subaltern, postcolonial, and transnational feminist/queer theory. Prerequisite: By consent of instructor. Significant work outside of class time is expected of the student for this course.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 376:
Archaeology: The Emergence of a Discipline
This course explores the key thinkers and practitioners who have founded the discipline of archaeology. Reaching back into the nineteenth century, the course examines in depth the key figures, their preoccupations and projects that shaped the way that archaeology grew through the 20th and into the 21st century. Global in scope, the emphasis will be on field projects and practical problems that stimulated the intellectual development of archaeology as an independent discipline closely tied to geology, history, anthropology, and the natural sciences. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.
Last offered: Winter 2018
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 378B:
Culture, Mind and Emotion : Anthropological and Psychological Approaches
How does culture shape the experience of thinking and feeling, the way humans relate to the world and to others? This graduate level course, taught by a psychologist who studies emotion (Jeanne Tsai) and an anthropologist who studies mind (Tanya Marie Luhrmann), explores the way that living in social worlds deeply shapes what seem to be basic processes. We explore what we know about the cultural variations in emotional experience, and about the effect of different representations of minds. We also what can be learned about the way culture shapes experience through different methods.
Last offered: Autumn 2017
| Units: 3-5
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 5 units total)
ANTHRO 379:
Empathy Lab
This lab-based class examines the ways in which various disciplines and art forms conceive of, and tell stories about, the experiences and stories of others. With permission of instructor.
Last offered: Spring 2021
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 381:
Archaeology of Violence
This advanced graduate seminar reflects on archaeological research on violence in relation to readings in philosophy, political anthropology, cultural studies, and gender and ethnic studies. While some forensic approaches are discussed, the emphasis is more on structural and collective violence and the role of violence in the formation of the archaeological record.
Last offered: Spring 2022
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 382J:
Disasters in Middle Eastern History (HISTORY 382J)
(History 282J is an undergraduate course offered for 5 units; History 382J is a graduate course offered for 4-5 units.) This course explores the history of disasters in the Middle East from the early modern period to the mid-20th-century. We will trace the evolving meanings of disasters and misfortunes by focusing on critical moments -- plagues, fires, earthquakes, wars -- to examine how people have responded to these events, labeled them, and devised strategies to live with or forget them. The course readings follow the evolution of policies and norms together with the articulation of new forms of knowledge and expertise in the wake of catastrophe. Additionally, particular attention will be paid to how modern conceptions of disaster relate to older understandings of apocalypse, as well as to various strands of "disaster reformism," when rethinking tragedy and time helped assert radical agendas for reforming political, economic, social, communal, racial, and gender relations while remodeling social science and intellectual life. The course focuses on various trajectories of disaster thinking in Arabic, Turkish, Greek, Armenian, and Hebrew.
Last offered: Autumn 2020
| Units: 4-5
ANTHRO 385:
Captivity
The premise for this course is that anthropology, as well as other domains of social inquiry, have unacknowledged and unredeemed debts to captivity as structure, experience, and event, from the penal colony to the slave plantation. This course is an attempt to begin to think about those debts through readings in anthropology, history, and philosophy. By instructor consent.
Last offered: Autumn 2018
| Units: 3
ANTHRO 387:
Strangers and Intimates: Exploring Public Life
How do we encounter and read each other in public and private spaces? How are these very spaces historically constituted around such distinctions and manners of reading? What do these questions look like in dense heterogeneous cities with differentiated class, caste and ethnic communities? How might we consider the differentiation between private and public in different ethnographic contexts? What kinds of sociality might emerge from these kinds of encounters? This course will explore these questions through social theory and ethnographies. There are two major sets of concepts that will be explored and interrogated. The first is that deriving from the essays of the Georg Simmel such as 'The Face' and 'The Stranger' which explore the new forms of sociality enabled by seemingly anonymous city life, which in turn have been interpreted very differently by Zygmunt Bauman and James Siegel to understand the place of continually excluded outsiders and the high stakes of reading each other. The other is the strand of work on the emergence of the public sphere such as the work of Jurgen Habermas, Richard Sennet, Michael Warner, Nancy Fraser etc. While much of the social theory on the public, the stranger and civility emerge from studies of Euro-American mas politics and city spaces, in this course we will move some of these discussion into considering these questions in the global south and the kinds of sociality (including their historicity) that make up the dense fabric of ordinary life. How does this work out in contexts where we take into account intense social differentiation by class, race, and communitarian divisions? This could be asked of the historical and social context addressed in these theories as well as from the postcolonial world. The course will attempt to understand whether such theorizations can indeed be re-rooted and re-imagined or whether ethnographic and historical difference re-route them instead. In doing so we will also bring theories of the private and the intimate to bear on questions of the public and the stranger. Pre-Requisite by Instructor Consent. Significant work outside of class time is expected of the student.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 391:
Subjectivity
This seminar considers subjectivity as a central category of social, cultural, psychological, historical and political analysis. Through a critical and collaborative examination of ethnographic works and psychoanalytic theory, we will identify the processes by which subjectivities are produced, explore subjectivity as a locus of social change, and examine how emerging subjectivities remake social worlds. Some of the questions this seminar will pose include: what is the relation between subjectivity and subjection? How to account for the effects of the social in terms of subject formation without succumbing to social determinism? What else is the subject other than the outcome of a complex constellation of discursive, material, institutional, and historical factors?
Last offered: Autumn 2017
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 398B:
Race, Ethnicity, and Language: Writing Race, Ethnicity, and Language in Ethnography (CSRE 389B, EDUC 389B, LINGUIST 254)
This methods seminar focuses on developing ethnographic strategies for representing race, ethnicity, and language in writing without reproducing the stereotypes surrounding these categories and practices. In addition to reading various ethnographies, students conduct their own ethnographic research to test out the authors' contrasting approaches to data collection, analysis, and representation. The goal is for students to develop a rich ethnographic toolkit that will allow them to effectively represent the (re)production and (trans)formation of racial, ethnic, and linguistic phenomena.
Last offered: Autumn 2021
| Units: 3-4
ANTHRO 400:
Cultural and Social Dissertation Writers Seminar
Required of fifth-year Ph.D. students returning from dissertation field research and in the process of writing dissertations and preparing for professional employment. Prerequisite: By consent of instructor.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr
| Units: 1-3
| Repeatable
for credit
ANTHRO 401A:
Qualifying Examination: Topic
Required of second- and third-year Ph.D. students writing the qualifying paper or the qualifying written examination. May be repeated for credit one time.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr, Sum
| Units: 1-5
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 10 units total)
Instructors: ;
Bauer, A. (PI);
Curran, L. (PI);
Durham, W. (PI);
Ebron, P. (PI);
Engel, C. (PI);
Ferguson, J. (PI);
Flewellen, A. (PI);
Fullwiley, D. (PI);
Garcia, A. (PI);
Hansen, T. (PI);
Inoue, M. (PI);
Jain, S. (PI);
Klein, R. (PI);
Kohrman, M. (PI);
Luhrmann, T. (PI);
Malkki, L. (PI);
Seetah, K. (PI);
Tambar, K. (PI);
Thiranagama, S. (PI);
Trivedi, M. (PI);
Voss, B. (PI);
Wilcox, M. (PI);
Yanagisako, S. (PI);
Yolacan, S. (PI)
ANTHRO 401B:
Qualifying Examination: Area
Required of second- and third-year Ph.D. students writing the qualifying paper or the qualifying written examination. May be repeated for credit one time.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr, Sum
| Units: 1-5
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 10 units total)
Instructors: ;
Bauer, A. (PI);
Curran, L. (PI);
Durham, W. (PI);
Ebron, P. (PI);
Engel, C. (PI);
Ferguson, J. (PI);
Flewellen, A. (PI);
Fullwiley, D. (PI);
Garcia, A. (PI);
Hansen, T. (PI);
Inoue, M. (PI);
Jain, S. (PI);
Klein, R. (PI);
Kohrman, M. (PI);
Luhrmann, T. (PI);
Malkki, L. (PI);
Seetah, K. (PI);
Tambar, K. (PI);
Thiranagama, S. (PI);
Trivedi, M. (PI);
Voss, B. (PI);
Wilcox, M. (PI);
Yanagisako, S. (PI);
Yolacan, S. (PI)
ANTHRO 402D:
Materialities of Power, Part I (HISTORY 403A)
How is power made material? And how do material things--objects, commodities, technologies, and infrastructures --reflect, change, consolidate, or distribute power? This research seminar is aimed at PhD students in history, anthropology, and STS who are working on such questions. All geographic specialties welcome. A small amount of common reading will launch the course, whose main goal is to guide students towards producing a research paper draft that's close to submission-ready for a journal. Along the way, we'll also address practical topics, including how to pick and submit to a journal, how to present a paper, and more.
Last offered: Autumn 2020
| Units: 4-5
ANTHRO 402F:
Materialities of Power, Part II (HISTORY 403B)
How is power made material? And how do material things --objects, commodities, technologies, and infrastructures--reflect, change, consolidate, or distribute power? This research seminar is aimed at PhD students in history, anthropology, and STS who are working on such questions. All geographic specialties welcome. A small amount of common reading will launch the course, whose main goal is to guide students towards producing a research paper draft that's close to submission-ready for a journal. Along the way, we'll also address practical topics, including how to pick and submit to a journal, how to present a paper, and more.
Last offered: Winter 2021
| Units: 4-5
ANTHRO 440:
Graduate Teaching
Supervised experience teaching in Anthropology
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr, Sum
| Units: 1-5
| Repeatable
for credit
Instructors: ;
Bauer, A. (PI);
Bird, D. (PI);
Bird, R. (PI);
Curran, L. (PI);
Durham, W. (PI);
Ebron, P. (PI);
Engel, C. (PI);
Ferguson, J. (PI);
Flewellen, A. (PI);
Fox, J. (PI);
Fullwiley, D. (PI);
Garcia, A. (PI);
Hansen, T. (PI);
Hodder, I. (PI);
Inoue, M. (PI);
Jain, S. (PI);
Klein, R. (PI);
Kohrman, M. (PI);
Luhrmann, T. (PI);
Malkki, L. (PI);
Meskell, L. (PI);
Rick, J. (PI);
Seetah, K. (PI);
Tambar, K. (PI);
Thiranagama, S. (PI);
Trivedi, M. (PI);
Voss, B. (PI);
Wilcox, M. (PI);
Yanagisako, S. (PI);
Yolacan, S. (PI)
ANTHRO 441:
Master's Project
Supervised work for terminal and coterminal master's students writing the master's project in the final quarter of the degree program. Significant work outside of class time is expected of the student for this course.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr, Sum
| Units: 1-5
| Repeatable
5 times
(up to 5 units total)
Instructors: ;
Bauer, A. (PI);
Curran, L. (PI);
Durham, W. (PI);
Ebron, P. (PI);
Engel, C. (PI);
Ferguson, J. (PI);
Flewellen, A. (PI);
Fox, J. (PI);
Fullwiley, D. (PI);
Garcia, A. (PI);
Hansen, T. (PI);
Hodder, I. (PI);
Inoue, M. (PI);
Jain, S. (PI);
Klein, R. (PI);
Kohrman, M. (PI);
Luhrmann, T. (PI);
Malkki, L. (PI);
Meskell, L. (PI);
Rick, J. (PI);
Seetah, K. (PI);
Tambar, K. (PI);
Thiranagama, S. (PI);
Trivedi, M. (PI);
Voss, B. (PI);
Wilcox, M. (PI);
Yanagisako, S. (PI);
Yolacan, S. (PI)
ANTHRO 442:
Reading Group
Graduate student reading group on a thematic topic of interest. Intended for first or second-year cohort PhD students.
Terms: Win
| Units: 1-3
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 6 units total)
ANTHRO 443:
Medical Humanities Workshop
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 three sessions per quarter focused on scholarly or artistic presentation and professional development.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr
| Units: 1
| Repeatable
for credit
ANTHRO 444:
Anthropology Colloquium
Department Colloquia Lecture Series. Lectures presented on a variety of anthropological topics. Colloquium is intended for the Department of Anthropology's under graduate majors and graduate students. May be repeated for credit.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr
| Units: 1
| Repeatable
for credit
ANTHRO 445:
Anthropology Brown Bag Series
Current topics and trends in cultural/social anthropology, archaeology, and environmental and ecological anthropology. Enrollment in this noon-time series is restricted to the Department of Anthropology Masters students and First and Second-year PhD students.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr
| Units: 1
| Repeatable
for credit
ANTHRO 450:
Research Apprenticeship
Supervised work on a research project with an individual faculty member. May be repeated for credit.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr, Sum
| Units: 1-15
| Repeatable
for credit
Instructors: ;
Bauer, A. (PI);
Bird, R. (PI);
Curran, L. (PI);
Durham, W. (PI);
Ebron, P. (PI);
Engel, C. (PI);
Ferguson, J. (PI);
Flewellen, A. (PI);
Fox, J. (PI);
Fullwiley, D. (PI);
Garcia, A. (PI);
Hansen, T. (PI);
Hodder, I. (PI);
Inoue, M. (PI);
Jain, S. (PI);
Klein, R. (PI);
Kohrman, M. (PI);
Luhrmann, T. (PI);
Malkki, L. (PI);
Meskell, L. (PI);
Rick, J. (PI);
Seetah, K. (PI);
Tambar, K. (PI);
Thiranagama, S. (PI);
Trivedi, M. (PI);
Voss, B. (PI);
Wilcox, M. (PI);
Yanagisako, S. (PI);
Yolacan, S. (PI)
ANTHRO 451:
Directed Individual Study
Supervised work for a qualifying paper, examination, or project with an individual faculty member.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr, Sum
| Units: 1-15
| Repeatable
for credit
Instructors: ;
Bauer, A. (PI);
Curran, L. (PI);
Durham, W. (PI);
Ebron, P. (PI);
Engel, C. (PI);
Ferguson, J. (PI);
Flewellen, A. (PI);
Fullwiley, D. (PI);
Garcia, A. (PI);
Hansen, T. (PI);
Hodder, I. (PI);
Inoue, M. (PI);
Jain, S. (PI);
Klein, R. (PI);
Kohrman, M. (PI);
Luhrmann, T. (PI);
Malkki, L. (PI);
Meskell, L. (PI);
Rick, J. (PI);
Seetah, K. (PI);
Tambar, K. (PI);
Thiranagama, S. (PI);
Trivedi, M. (PI);
Voss, B. (PI);
Wilcox, M. (PI);
Yanagisako, S. (PI);
Yolacan, S. (PI)
ANTHRO 452:
Graduate Internship
Provides graduate students with the opportunity to pursue their area of specialization in an institutional setting such as a laboratory, clinic, research institute, or government agency. F-1 international students enrolled in this course cannot start working without first obtaining a CPT-endorsed I-20 from Bechtel International Center (enrolling in the CPT course alone is insufficient to meet federal immigration regulations).
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr, Sum
| Units: 1-10
| Repeatable
for credit
Instructors: ;
Bauer, A. (PI);
Curran, L. (PI);
Durham, W. (PI);
Ebron, P. (PI);
Engel, C. (PI);
Ferguson, J. (PI);
Flewellen, A. (PI);
Fox, J. (PI);
Fullwiley, D. (PI);
Garcia, A. (PI);
Hansen, T. (PI);
Hodder, I. (PI);
Inoue, M. (PI);
Jain, S. (PI);
Jones, J. (PI);
Klein, R. (PI);
Kohrman, M. (PI);
Luhrmann, T. (PI);
Malkki, L. (PI);
Meskell, L. (PI);
Rick, J. (PI);
Seetah, K. (PI);
Tambar, K. (PI);
Thiranagama, S. (PI);
Trivedi, M. (PI);
Voss, B. (PI);
Wilcox, M. (PI);
Yanagisako, S. (PI);
Yolacan, S. (PI)
ANTHRO 457A:
Theory and Method in Linguistic Anthropology (CSRE 267, EDUC 457, LINGUIST 267)
This course introduces students to central concepts and approaches in linguistic anthropology, with a specific focus on the role of educational institutions, processes, and ideologies in shaping language use and vice versa. Students will learn practical skills for conducting linguistic anthropological fieldwork, including strategies for recording, editing, transcribing, analyzing, and archiving multimodal discourse data. The overarching goal is for students to gain a theoretical and methodological toolkit for examining and understanding how semiotic processes structure and transform sociocultural life.
Terms: Win
| Units: 4
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr, Sum
| Units: 0
| Repeatable
for credit
Instructors: ;
Bauer, A. (PI);
Bird, R. (PI);
Curran, L. (PI);
Durham, W. (PI);
Ebron, P. (PI);
Engel, C. (PI);
Ferguson, J. (PI);
Flewellen, A. (PI);
Fox, J. (PI);
Fullwiley, D. (PI);
Garcia, A. (PI);
Hansen, T. (PI);
Hodder, I. (PI);
Inoue, M. (PI);
Jain, S. (PI);
Jones, J. (PI);
Klein, R. (PI);
Kohrman, M. (PI);
Luhrmann, T. (PI);
Malkki, L. (PI);
Meskell, L. (PI);
Rick, J. (PI);
Seetah, K. (PI);
Tambar, K. (PI);
Thiranagama, S. (PI);
Trivedi, M. (PI);
Voss, B. (PI);
Wilcox, M. (PI);
Yanagisako, S. (PI);
Yolacan, S. (PI)
ANTHRO 802:
TGR Dissertation
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr, Sum
| Units: 0
| Repeatable
for credit
Instructors: ;
Bauer, A. (PI);
Bird, R. (PI);
Curran, L. (PI);
Durham, W. (PI);
Ebron, P. (PI);
Engel, C. (PI);
Ferguson, J. (PI);
Flewellen, A. (PI);
Fox, J. (PI);
Fullwiley, D. (PI);
Garcia, A. (PI);
Hansen, T. (PI);
Hodder, I. (PI);
Inoue, M. (PI);
Jain, S. (PI);
Jones, J. (PI);
Klein, R. (PI);
Kohrman, M. (PI);
Luhrmann, T. (PI);
Malkki, L. (PI);
Meskell, L. (PI);
Rick, J. (PI);
Seetah, K. (PI);
Tambar, K. (PI);
Thiranagama, S. (PI);
Trivedi, M. (PI);
Voss, B. (PI);
Wilcox, M. (PI);
Yanagisako, S. (PI);
Yolacan, S. (PI)
