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In recent decades genes have increasingly become endowed with the cultural power to explain many aspects of human life: physical traits, diseases, behaviors, ancestral histories, and identity. In this course we will explore a deepening societal intrigue with genetic accounts of personal identity and political meaning. Students will engage with varied interdisciplinary sources that range from legal cases to scientific articles, medical ethics guidelines, films, and anthropological works (ethnographies). We will explore several case studies where the use of DNA markers (as proof of heritage, disease risk, or legal standing) has spawned cultural movements that are biosocial in nature. Throughout we will look at how new social movements are organized around gene-based definitions of personhood, health, and legal truth. Several examples include political analyses of citizenship and belonging. On this count we will discuss issues of African ancestry testing as evidence in slavery reparations cases, revisit debates on whether Black Freedman should be allowed into the Cherokee and Seminole Nations, and hear arguments on whether people with genetic links to Jewish groups should have a right of return to Israel. We will also examine the ways genetic knowledge may shape different health politics at the individual and societal level. On this count we will do close readings of how personal genomics testing companies operate, we will investigate how health disparities funding as well as orphan disease research take on new valences when re-framed in genetic terms, and we will see how new articulations of global health priorities are emerging through genetic research in places like Africa. Finally we will explore social implications of forensic uses of DNA. Here we will examine civil liberties concerns about genetic familial searching in forensic databases that disproportionately target specific minority groups as criminal suspects, and inquire into the use of DNA to generate digital mugshots of suspects that re-introduce genetic concepts of race.

In this course we will examine the meaning, processes, and challenges of urbanization. Through a series of targeted readings across history and geography and through the study of varied means of representation (anthropology, literature, cartography, film, etc), the class will analyze the ways in which urban forms have come into being and created, met, and/or ignored challenges such as disease, water, transport, religious and class conflict, colonialism, labor, and trade. Students will read anthropology in conjunction with other disciplines (literature, urban planning, public health, architecture, and economics) to learn the ways in which ethnographies of immigration, urban poverty, class disparity, economic development and indicators, noise, and transportation substantively augment our understandings of how people live within globalization.

Emphasis is on how health, illness, and healing are understood, experienced, and constructed in social, cultural, and historical contexts. Topics: biopower and body politics, gender and reproductive technologies, illness experiences, medical diversity and social suffering, and the interface between medicine and science.

One of the great gifts of literature is its ability to give us insight into the internal worlds of others. This is particularly true of that state clinicians call "psychosis." But psychosis is a complex concept. It can be terrifying and devastating for patients and families, and yet shares characteristics with other, less pathological states, such as mysticism and creativity. How then can we begin to make sense of it? In this course, we will examine the first-hand experience of psychosis. We will approach it from multiple perspectives, including clinical descriptions, works of art, and texts by writers ranging from Shakespeare, to the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, to patients attempting to describe their experience. This class is not only for students thinking of careers in medicine, psychology or anthropology, but also readers and writers interested exploring extraordinary texts. There are no prerequisites necessary; all that is needed is a love of language and a curiosity about the secrets of other minds.

Preference to Anthropology majors. Anthropological interpretations of other societies contain assumptions about Western societies. How underlying assumptions and implicit categories have influenced the presentation of data in major anthropological monographs. Emphasis is on Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, and anthropological analyses of non-Western societies.

Dynamics of culturally inherited human behavior and its relationship to social and physical environments. Topics include a history of ecological approaches in anthropology, subsistence ecology, sharing, risk management, territoriality, warfare, and resource conservation and management. Case studies from Australia, Melanesia, Africa, and S. America.

This course provides a broad introduction to various ways of designing anthropological questions and associated methods for collecting evidence and supporting arguments. We review the inherent links between how a question is framed, the types of evidence that can address the question, and way that data are collected. Research activities such as interviewing, participant observation, quantitative observation, archival investigation, ecological survey, linguistic methodology, tracking extended cases, and demographic methods are reviewed. Various faculty and specialists will be brought in to discuss how they use different types of evidence and methods for supporting arguments in anthropology.

Methodological issues related to the investigation of archaeological sites and objects. Aims and techniques of archaeologists including: location and excavation of sites; dating of places and objects; analysis of artifacts and technology and the study of ancient people, plants, and animals. How these methods are employed to answer the discipline's larger research questions.

Practicum. Students develop independent research projects and write research proposals. How to formulate a research question; how to integrate theory and field site; and step-by-step proposal writing.