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In this course, we will explore social network analysis, a set of methods and theories used in the analysis of social structure. The fundamental conceit underlying social network analysis is that social structure emerges from relationships between individuals. We will therefore concentrate in particular on the measurement of relationships, emphasizing especially practical methodology for anthropological fieldwork. This is a somewhat unusual course because of its focus on social network research coming out of anthropological and ethological traditions. While most current practitioners of social network analysis are (probably) sociologists, many of both the methodological antecedents and theoretical justifications for the field can be found in these two traditions. A major goal of this course is to understand how the methods and perspectives of social network analysis can be usefully incorporated into contemporary approaches to ethnography and other anthropological modes of investigation. Prerequisite: graduate standing or consent of instructor

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.

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.

The course will discuss how social virtues are converted into methods of research (hope, friendship, sincerity, trust, utopia), and how they affect processes of knowledge building within the humanities and social sciences in terms of revival of futurity. The concepts will be critically examined in their positive as well as negative potential for practicing prefigurative politics the creation of desirable modes of social relationships of conviviality and co-existence in the world.

Advanced graduate seminar focused on the archaeology of colonial and postcolonial contexts, both prehistoric and historic. Emphasis on intersections between archaeological research and and subaltern, postcolonial, and transnational feminist/queer theory. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.

Why do people obey others in the absence of explicit coercion? Why do people accept some leaders but not others? What does it mean to say something or someone has authority? Is authority personal or institutional? Why do people believe in the Pope? Why do people believe some objects have power and others not? Is charisma only a perfume? Can institutions wield charismatic power? These are questions that from Max Weber onwards classical and contemporary anthropologists and sociologists continue to ask.nnIn returning to (Weberian) questions of authority and legitimacy this course takes a question posed by Bourdieu ¿ what is the mystery of ministry? We will apply the question of authority broadly, not just in the explicitly political realm but also to understand, for example, how (culturally specific) charismatic and sacral authority can be fashioned through persons and through objects (eg. relics). The course will thus move between interrelated religious, moral, and political notions to try to generate some critical questions for how a contemporary anthropology that explicitly (rather than implicitly) re-addresses authority might look.

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.

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: consent of instructor.

Required of second- and third-year Ph.D. students writing the qualifying paper or the qualifying written examination. May be repeat for credit.