11 - 20 of 58 results for: ANTHRO

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.

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.

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 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.nThis 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.

An introduction to music ethnography through student research on musical life in the Bay Area. Focus is on the intersections of music, social life, and cultural practice by engaging with people as they perform music and culture in situ. Techniques taught include participant-observation, interviewing and oral history, writing field-notes, recording, transcription, analysis, and ethnographic writing. Pre-/co-requisite (for music majors): MUSIC 22. (WIM at 4 units only.)

One of the most generative regions for medical anthropology inquiry in recent years has been Asia. This seminar is designed to introduce upper division undergraduates and graduate students to the methodological hurdles, representational challenges, and intellectual rewards of investigating the intersections of health, politics, and culture in contemporary China.

This 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.

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.