101 - 110 of 271 results for: ANTHRO

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.