161 - 170 of 199 results for: ANTHRO

This course examines how race is made. We will pay close attention to how people engage with material, economic, scientific, and cultural forces to articulate human group difference as a given, and even natural. In this seminar, we will look at the reality of race as a literally constructed phenomenon, where historical, colonial, bodily, market, penal, and humanitarian constituent elements both circulate and sediment racial understandings. To focus our readings and discussions we will divide this vast terrain into three units: race and the colonial encounter, race and biopower, and race in systems of capital accumulation.

Heritage is always political, it is typically said. Such a statement might refer to the everyday politics of local stakeholder interests on one end of the spectrum, or the volatile politics of destruction and erasure of heritage during conflict, on the other. If heritage is always political then one might expect that the workings of World Heritage might be especially fraught given the international dimension. In particular, the intergovernmental system of UNESCO World Heritage must navigate the inherent tension between state sovereignty and nationalist interests and the wider concerns of a universal regime. The World Heritage List has over 1000 properties has many such contentious examples, including sites in Iraq, Mali, Syria, Crimea, Palestine and Cambodia. As an organization UNESCO was born of war with an explicit mission to end global conflict and help the world rebuild materially and morally, but has found it¿s own history increasingly entwined with that of international politics and violence.

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 interdisciplinary course explores how modern African histories, bodies, and natures have been entangled with technological activities. Viewing Africans as experts and innovators, we consider how technologies have mediated, represented, or performed power in African societies. Topics include infrastructure, extraction, medicine, weapons, communications, sanitation, and more. Themes woven through the course include citizenship, mobility, labor, bricolage, in/formal economies, and technopolitical geographies, among others. Readings draw from history, anthropology, geography, and social/cultural theory.

This advanced graduate seminar explores capitalism as an historically-situated and culturally-mediated articulation of practices rather than as an economic system or social structure governed by an internal logic. It draws on poststructural theories of culture, society and subjectivity to investigate the processes through which diverse capitalist practices are produced. Prerequisite: Graduate standing in Anthropology or permission of the instructor. Previous graduate level coursework in cultural anthropology, social theory or cultural studies is required. No auditing is permitted. Enrollment limited to 12.

In this course we will explore contemporary issues of culture and power rooted in science, medicine, technology and futurist proposals to better the human condition with technological fixes. We will investigate anthropological and ethnographic-based theories and methods to propose alternative ethical solutions. These readings will be rooted in examining global stratification, economic metrics of progress, and the routinization of human degradation ranging from norms around sexual power, labor exploits, privacy infringements, data sharing, and automation.nnThe course will be structured as a writing workshop with frequent, short writing assignments to be shared with others in the course. The workshop format will facilitate the course goal of each student producing at least one publishable op-ed, article or other product of intervention at the end of the quarter.

The still-robust Romantic conception of creativity as the attribute of a specific, ¿gifted¿ individual continues to have extraordinary social and political power as an ideological apparatus that shapes and disciplines conduct, aspirations, and subjectivities. This course is a critical anthropological exploration of the following questions: How and why has a deep, naturalized individualism long been foundational to both ideals and practices of creativity? How is it raced and gendered? How have people been rethinking relational, collaborative creative practice?

Mapping and understanding vernacular concepts and terminologies has always been central to the anthropological quest to understand societies from `a native point of view'. This has often been accompanied by a critique of universalist and Euro-centric assumptions in the social sciences and in social theory. As a result, the convention has become to treat the `universal¿ (ideas, frames, institutions) as external, often imposed by colonial powers, while the `vernacular¿ conventionally is seen as local and authentic, and the proper site of anthropology.nThis course seeks to rethink this spatial and historical distinction between the universal and the vernacular. Instead we ask: how, and when, do concepts, or practices, become embedded in a vernacular world? Reversely, instead of assuming that universals all originate in Euro-America, we ask: how do concepts and practices become both global and universal? We will trace how impactful ideologies, social forms and institutions have travelled in time to become perceived as elements of vernacular cultures. nDrawing on ethnographic and historical examples across the world, each week will trace the universal and vernacular lives of important concepts such as: `tradition¿, `the individual¿, `community¿, `the people¿; `humanity¿, `dignity¿; `equality¿, `sacrifice¿, `cosmopolitanism¿, `civility¿.

Since the 1980s, the necessity of historicizing cultural and social formations has become established as integral to anthropological research. Every ethnography and dissertation has historical sections, derived primarily from secondary sources, commentaries within other ethnographies and published historical work. Most students attempt to conduct archival research in local or national archives alongside ethnographic fieldwork, most often in an ad hoc manner, collecting and analyzing archival material on a trial and error basis. This class is conceived as a practicum that addresses students who need to and want to do archival research as part of their anthropological and sociological fieldwork, but find themselves at a loss for how to think about, begin, and, do archival work.nnThe base layer of the class is methodological and practical: students will be engaged in the practical activities of becoming acquainted with archives, developing archival research questions, learning techniques of recording, coding, and thinking historically. The second layer will be conceptual. Students will be reading and discussing concepts of the archive, reading and analyzing different styles of historical ethnographies, and thinking about how to organize and conceptualize cultural categories historically.nnStudents will be asked to conduct archival research at the archives available at Stanford Libraries and the Hoover Institution archives and write a research paper based on this archival work. We will have weekly meetings divided into two sessions. The first half will discuss set readings and intellectual concern. In the second half, we will discuss methodological concerns, problems encountered in the archives and bounce ideas off each other. We will also have regular guest speakers who will give talks and answer questions, intellectual and methodological about archival research.