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71 - 80 of 283 results for: ANTHRO

ANTHRO 119W: Cyborg Anthropology

What does it mean to claim we are all cyborgs ¿ a hybrid of human and machine? Cyborgs have long captured the popular imagination of people around the world, appearing in various forms of media including films, books, and video games. In these instances, cyborgs are typically imagined as futuristic entities, portrayed as products of anticipated technological advancements yet to come. This course takes a different approach, employing the cyborg as a framework to understand human existence and experience across space and time, and explore the relationship between the body, culture, and technology. Drawing from anthropology and other relevant fields, this course emphasizes how humans and tools co-construct each other, blurring the boundaries between natural and artificial, human and machine. The first section of the course will present different theoretical perspectives for understanding human-machine interactions and relationships. In the second section, we will spend each week examining more »
What does it mean to claim we are all cyborgs ¿ a hybrid of human and machine? Cyborgs have long captured the popular imagination of people around the world, appearing in various forms of media including films, books, and video games. In these instances, cyborgs are typically imagined as futuristic entities, portrayed as products of anticipated technological advancements yet to come. This course takes a different approach, employing the cyborg as a framework to understand human existence and experience across space and time, and explore the relationship between the body, culture, and technology. Drawing from anthropology and other relevant fields, this course emphasizes how humans and tools co-construct each other, blurring the boundaries between natural and artificial, human and machine. The first section of the course will present different theoretical perspectives for understanding human-machine interactions and relationships. In the second section, we will spend each week examining various types of technological embodiments. Specific technologies explored include smartphones and wearables; biohacking and prostheses; virtual reality; and artificial intelligence. And in the last section, we explore the tensions between narratives of technological pessimism and optimism, comparing the ways different individuals and communities perceive and evaluate emergent technologies' consequences for society, now and in the future. This course will provide students with the opportunity to conduct limited, small-scale ethnographic fieldwork on human-machine interactions. The data collected during these ethnographic exercises will inform the in-class presentation and final paper for the course.
Terms: Aut | Units: 3 | UG Reqs: WAY-SI
Instructors: Navarro, A. (PI)

ANTHRO 120H: Introduction to the Medical Humanities (DLCL 120, FRENCH 120E, ITALIAN 120)

Medical Humanities is a humanistic and interdisciplinary approach to medicine. It explores the experience of health and illness as captured through the expressive arts (painting, music, literature), across historical periods and in different cultures, as interpreted by scholars in the humanities and social sciences as well as in medicine and policy. Its goal is to give students an opportunity to explore a more holistic and meaning-centered perspective on medical issues. It investigates how medicine is an art form as well as a science, and the way institutions and culture shape the way illness is identified, experienced and treated.
Terms: Win | Units: 4 | UG Reqs: WAY-EDP
Instructors: Wittman, L. (PI)

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 122B: What's New in Australian Archaeology (ARCHLGY 122)

New techniques, new questions, and new approaches are changing our understanding of more than 50,000 years of human life in Australia. When did people first come to Australia? How did humans adapt to the unique, and changing, environment? At the same time, public debates are pushing archaeologists and heritage professionals to be more accountable, leading to questions like, what are the best practices for community-led archaeology? How should Australians commemorate the settler past? What about repatriation? This course will introduce the archaeology of Australia by exploring the latest research and debates playing out in the academic and public spheres. No prior archaeological experience is required.
Terms: Spr | Units: 3-5
Instructors: Connor, K. (PI)

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

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

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 n more »
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 | 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.
Last offered: Autumn 2022

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.
Last offered: Winter 2023

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?
Last offered: Winter 2023
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