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Eight or nine important ethnographies, including their construction, their impact, and their faults and virtues.

The course examines the impact of new research in epigenetics on our understanding of long-term cultural change. The course examines the various attempts that have been made over recent decades to find a synthesis between cultural and biological evolution. These approaches, often termed neo-Darwinian, include memes, dual inheritance theory, theories of cultural selection and transmission, niche construction theory and macro-evolutionary approaches. Research in all these areas will be examined, with particular reference to explanations for the origins of agriculture, but also including other transformations, and critiqued. New research in epigenetics offers an alternative non-Darwinian evolutionary perspective that avoids many of the problems and pitfalls in the neo-Darwinian approaches. Cultural evolution comes to be viewed as cumulative, directional and Lamarckian, since heritable epigenetic variation can underlie evolutionary change. Epigenetics opens the way for human cultural entanglements to become the drivers for evolutionary change, thus allowing the full range of social processes studied in the social and cultural sciences to take their place in the study and analysis of long-term change.

An introduction to numeric methods in Anthropology and related fields employing the Data Desk statistics package to test hypotheses and to explore data. Examples chosen from the instructor¿s research and other relevant projects. No statistical background is necessary, but a working knowledge of algebra is important. Topics covered include: Frequency Distributions; Measures of Central Tendency, Dispersion, and Variability; Probability and Probability Distributions; Statistical Inference, Comparisons of Sample Means and Standard Deviations; Analysis of Variance; Contingency Tables, Comparisons of Frequencies; Correlation and Regression; Principal Components Analysis; Discriminant Analysis; and Cluster Analysis. Grading based on take-home problem sets.

As regularly noted, whether historic or pre-historic, animal bones are often the most commonly occurring artefacts on archaeological sites. As bioarchaeological samples, they offer the archaeologist an insight into food culture, provisioning, trade and the social aspects of human-animal interactions. The course will be taught through both practical and lecture sessions: the `hands-on¿ component is an essential complement to the lectures. The lectures will offer grounding in the main methodological approaches developed, as well as provide case-studies to illustrate where and how the methods have been applied. The practical session will walk students through the skeletal anatomy of a range of species. It will guide students on the identification of different parts of the animal, how to age / sex individuals, as well as recognize taphonomic indicators and what these mean to reconstructing post-depositional modifications.

What is masculinity? How are masculinities invested with power and meaning in cultural contexts? How is anthropological attention to them informed by and extending inquiry across the academy in spheres such as culture studies, political theory, gender studies, history, and science and technology studies? Limited enrollment.

Waste is increasingly central as an object and medium of political contestation in the contemporary world, from struggles over garbage, labor, and dignity in Senegal; to explosive remnants of war acting as rogue infrastructure in the Korean demilitarized zone. In response, waste has also become a productive concept in the environmental humanities and humanistic social sciences. In this course we will read a selection of foundational texts focused on waste, many of which draw on case studies from different parts of the world. The case of China will be emphasized, however, since China has emerged in the last few decades as a center not only of global industrial production, but also for processing the world¿s waste, contesting pollution, and fighting for environmental justice. By pairing key theoretical texts with texts dealing with waste-related issues in China and elsewhere, we will ultimately ask how contemporary global waste politics disrupts western understandings of waste, recycling, value, and more.

Engaging the body/mind and its senses in the making of images and things has long been considered to have potentially great therapeutic significance. This course is a close examination of making as a form of therapy, as a form of communication, and, vitally, as a form of knowing. As such, it suggests new, analytically powerful possibilities for anthropological practice.

Indigenous knowledges have been traditionally treated as a field of research for anthropologists and as mistaken epistemologies, i.e., un-scientific and irrational folklore. However, within the framework of environmental humanities, current interest in non-anthropocentric approaches and epistemic injustice, animism emerged as a critique of modern epistemology and an alternative to the Western worldview. Treating native thought as an equivalent to Western knowledge will be presented as a (potentially) decolonizing and liberating practice. This course may be of interest to anthropology, archaeology and literature students working in the fields of ecocriticism and the environmental humanities/social sciences, students interested in the Anthropocene, geologic/mineral, bio-, eco- and geosocial collectives, symbiotic life-forms and non-human agencies. The course is designed as a research seminar for students interested in theory of the humanities and social sciences and simultaneously helping students to develop their individual projects and thesis.

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.