2019-2020 2020-2021 2021-2022 2022-2023 2023-2024
Browse
by subject...
    Schedule
view...
 
  COVID-19 Scheduling Updates!
See Stanford's HealthAlerts website for latest updates concerning COVID-19 and academic policies.

131 - 140 of 247 results for: ANTHRO

ANTHRO 213: Culture and Epigenetics: Towards A Non-Darwinian Synthesis (ANTHRO 113, ARCHLGY 113)

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.
Last offered: Autumn 2018

ANTHRO 214: Rights and Ethics in Heritage (ANTHRO 114, ARCHLGY 114)

Heritage is a human thing: made by people and mobilized for their own purposes, it has a range of effects on communities. This course focuses on the human dimension of heritage with special attention to questions of rights and ethics. Where can we locate the intersections of heritage and rights? How do communities and governing structures negotiate control over and participation in heritage, and with what impacts on people? Which ethical challenges arise and how have archaeologists, heritage managers, museums, legislators, community leaders, and others approached these issues?nnThe first half of this seminar course focuses on the theoretical and contextual basis for these discussions. We will address topics such as cultural ownership and participation as well as the global and governing contexts within which heritage is mobilized. Building on this, the second half examines cases in which different rights, needs, and goals come into conflict: museum practice, public memory, upheaval stemming from violence or disaster, and the ethics of the material world itself. Throughout, we will highlight heritage in relation to communities, rights, and responsibilities, all while thinking through ethical modes of heritage research and practice.
Terms: Aut | Units: 5
Instructors: Bolin, A. (PI)

ANTHRO 215: The Social life of Human Bones (ANTHRO 115, ARCHLGY 115)

Skeletal remains serve a primary function of support and protection for the human body. However, beyond this, they have played a range of social roles once an individual is deceased. The processes associated with excarnation, interment, exhumation and reburial all speak to the place that the body, and its parts, play in our cultural as well as physical landscape.n This course builds on introductory courses in human skeletal anatomy by adding the social dynamics that govern the way humans treat other humans once they have died. It draws on anthropological, biological and archaeological research, with case studies spanning a broad chronological and spatial framework to provide students with an overview of social practice as it relates to the human body.
Terms: Win | Units: 3-5
Instructors: Seetah, K. (PI)

ANTHRO 216: Data Analysis for Quantitative Research (ANTHRO 116)

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.
Terms: Aut | Units: 5

ANTHRO 216B: Anthropology of the Environment (ANTHRO 116B)

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.
Last offered: Spring 2018

ANTHRO 217: Archaeologies of Religion: Belief, Ritual and Tradition (ANTHRO 117B, ARCHLGY 117B)

Talking about religion and its place in modern life, inevitably appears to rest on evaluations of what religion was in the past. `Antiquated beliefs', `medieval hidebound ritual', `blind prejudice', `cultic devotion', and the constraints of tradition upon personal freedom --- such judgments abound and come readily to our minds and roll off our tongues. But what do we know of premodern religion?nIn this course we will learn more about religion, past and present, by engaging with different archaeological approaches to religion. We will start by reviewing key anthropological debates over what religion is and how (and why) it might be defined. We will pause to ask ourselves: Is religion principally immaterial or profoundly material? Is it a matter of private belief or public life? What can material remains teach us of `religion' in the past and about ourselves? We shall engage with the following debates: How has the origin of religion been understood? What is ritual and how is it studied archaeologically? How do these relate to belief? Based on these explorations we will ask: is it more valuable to try to define religion, to study its evolutionary, symbolic or performative aspects or to ask what it is that `religion' does?
Terms: Win | Units: 3-5
Instructors: Trivedi, M. (PI)

ANTHRO 219: Zooarchaeology: An Introduction to Faunal Remains (ANTHRO 119, ARCHLGY 119)

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.
Last offered: Autumn 2018

ANTHRO 220: Bioethics and Ancient DNA (ANTHRO 120, ARCHLGY 120A)

The first ancient human genome was sequenced just 10 years ago. From a single genome in 2010 to what has been hailed as a `scientific revolution¿ today, the field of paleogenomics has expanded rapidly. 10 years on we will explore how the field is grappling with emerging issues related to ethical and responsible research, including sampling practices, collaborative community partnerships, and accessibility of research findings to the broader public. How have researchers successfully leveraged multiple voices, perspectives, and priorities engaged with ancient DNA to explore the human past? What are the possibilities of engagement beyond the practical and project-based level? How do these new alliances formed around paleogenomics inform the ethics of sampling, participation, and interpretation? In this course, we will thoughtfully and critically engage with aDNA research in the present to envision possible futures for the field.
Terms: Win | Units: 3-5
Instructors: Moots, H. (PI)

ANTHRO 222A: Decolonizing Archaeology (ANTHRO 122A, ARCHLGY 122A, ARCHLGY 222A)

What does it mean to say that archaeology is a colonial discipline? Anthropology and archaeology are rooted historically in projects of domination and extermination by colonial powers. Today many scholars, practitioners, and colonized peoples are exploring ways to recast the archaeological project--to de-colonize it. There are many approaches to such attempts and this course will explore three of them: Indigenous archaeology, community-based participatory research, and activist archaeology. There are no recipes to produce de-colonized archaeology and no clear answers to the questions that arise in the process. As a class we will explore possibilities and chart futures for a practice of archaeology that breaks from divides between researcher and subject, past and present, and scholarship and social justice. From this course you will gain an understanding of foundational critiques of archaeology from inside and outside the discipline and from Indigenous, Black, and people of color who have historically been the subject of archaeology¿s colonial practices. You will also gain an understanding of attempts to move beyond colonial frameworks and your own position within them through a series of archaeological case studies. You will not leave this course with answers, but you will leave this course with a deeper understanding of the ongoing project of decolonization.
Terms: Spr | Units: 3
Instructors: Danis, A. (PI)

ANTHRO 223: Ethical Life with Strangers: Sociality and Civility (ANTHRO 123)

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.
Terms: Spr | Units: 5
Filter Results:
term offered
updating results...
teaching presence
updating results...
number of units
updating results...
time offered
updating results...
days
updating results...
UG Requirements (GERs)
updating results...
component
updating results...
career
updating results...
© Stanford University | Terms of Use | Copyright Complaints