71 - 80 of 390 results for: ANTHRO

The zombie apocalypse, affectionately known as the ¿Zombiepocalypse.¿ In this combination class on zombie history, ethnography, biology, and culture, we will explore the origins of zombie legends (or truths?) and how the undead have been represented in American culture for the past 200 years. Classes will include lectures, film clip viewings, literary analysis, medical anthropology components, and disaster survival planning.

For upper division undergraduates. The extent and pattern of variation among human genomes, the origin of these patterns in human evolution, and the social and medical impact of recent discoveries. Topics include: the Human Genome Project; human origins; ancient DNA; genetic, behavioral, linguistic, cultural, and racial diversity; the role of disease in shaping genetic diversity; DNA forensics; genes and reproductive technology.

This course is an exploration of some central themes and issues in contemporary African society through close readings of a selection of recent ethnographies. It aims to understand Africa as a place where many of the most challenging issues of a modern, globalized world are being thought about in exciting and creative ways, both by ethnographers and by the people about whom they write. Among the key issues that the course seeks to address are: the history and politics of colonial domination; the ways that medicine and government intersect; the increasing use of humanitarian frames of reference in understanding African realities; the changing meanings of HIV/AIDS, sex, and love; and the role of mass media in enabling cultural and imaginative production to take form.

Recent historical developments, including the widespread adoption of the mobile phone across Africa and Southeast Asia, the ¿Arab Spring,¿ and the rise of technology sectors in cities such as Nairobi, Bangalore, and Accra, have turned digital technology in the ¿global South¿ into a topic of growing popular interest and increasing scholarly concern. This course attempts to make sense of these developments by interrogating diverse theoretical approaches to digital technology and assessing what these approaches reveal and obscure in specific cases of technology adoption in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Students will be introduced to an overview of scholarly approaches to digital technology from anthropology, science and technology studies (STS), critical theory, geography, and communications studies. We will analyze the relative utility of these explanations through case studies of specific instances of technological production and/or use. These case studies will be drawn from both secondary texts and primary materials such as social media, digital maps, videos, blogs, and news reports. At the same time, we will examine how digital discourses and practices both draw upon and inform broader issues of context-specific political and cultural importance. Major topics to be discussed include ¿development¿ and the State, civil society and the ¿public sphere,¿ youth culture, gender politics, mobility, and globalization. Students will come away from the course with a strong understanding of the major issues at stake in the increasing digitalization of the ¿global South,¿ and the socio-cultural, political, and technical debates that frame them

Over the last twenty years, residents of the People¿s Republic of China have experienced dramatic changes in nearly every facet of life. This undergraduate seminar introduces students to contemporary China through an examination of various types of social transformation. We will analyze how PRC residents of different backgrounds are confronting such processes as economic liberalization, migration, kinship transformation, sexual commodification, media proliferation, industrialization, and transnationalism? Priority is placed on reading, discussing and assessing research that uses qualitative methods and that situates political economy in dialogue with lived experience.

"Paperwork" is an intensive reading course in a seminar format, concerning the production, circulation and mediation of "paperwork" both as a material and symbolic infrastructure for the operation of modern institutions and governance. We will explore diverse techniques and technologies of paperwork, including note-taking, memos, lists, files, and documents, and forms of paperwork such as medical record, petition, passport, ID card, immigration paper, as well as archives and other mnemonic technologies both as cultural practices and reflexive objects. The goal of the course is to understand "bureaucracy" in the fields of law, business, and public administration, as well as in civil society generally, from the vantage point of concrete inscription, circulation, and storage of papers and documents. Readings will include works by Bruno Latour, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Cornelia Vismann, Friedrich Kittler, and others.

Seminar. Shared histories of natural and cultural heritage and their subsequent trajectories into the present. How thought about archaeological sites and natural landscapes have undergone transformations due to factors including indigenous rights, green politics, and international tourism. The development of key ideas including conservation, wilderness, sustainability, indigenous knowledge, non-renewability and diversity. Case studies draw on cultural and natural sites from Africa, the Americas and Australia.

Central Asian cults, myths, and beliefs from ancient time to modernity. Life crisis rites, magic ceremonies, songs, tales, narratives, taboos associated with childbirth, marriage, folk medicine, and calendrical transitions. The nature and the place of the shaman in the region. Sources include music from the fieldwork of the instructor and the Kyrgyz epoch Manas. The cultural universe of Central Asian peoples as a symbol of their modern outlook.

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.