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According to Hawkes (1954), religion or ideology is the most difficult part of social life to access archaeologically. Luckily, not all scholars agree; according to Fogelin (2008) 'religion is not something people think about, but something people do¿. Thus, archaeology, an inherently multidisciplinary subject that studies material culture, is well suited to delve into religion and its underpinnings.nThis course will explore religious practices, as they can be defined and interpreted from archaeological contexts spanning the Paleolithic to historic periods. Definitions of religion differ from author to author but they mostly agree that religion is a fully integrated and thus integral part of human social life. Politics, economics, identity and social class influence religion, and religion influences how these forces play out in society. Thus, the course will also examine the significance of ritual and religion in a variety of social contexts.

This seminar will survey the archaeology of South Asia, beginning with animal and plant domestication in the early Holocene and ending with the late Medieval Period. Given its chronological breadth and spatial scope, the class will interrogate a variety of social and historical contexts that contribute to a broad range of anthropological research concerns¿including the intersections of authority, ritual, alterity and landscape¿and at the same time critically consider the epistemological bases for their analyses through archaeological remains.

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.

The landscape is a result of the action and interaction of human and natural factors. Communities have altered their landscapes for a variety of reasons, including the subsistence practices; as a consequence of economic growth; to express a social ideology, and as a consequence of political and religious drivers. Accordingly, landscapes enable physical and provide psychological sustenance to people, and the human need to relate to our surroundings is part of the way in which identities are created and disputed. Within the humanities, landscape is being conceptualized as a process, a practice and as performance, and monuments within a given landscape have an equally important role, not to mention history. They are often the most durable and well-known evidence of the ancient civilizations, and should be observed jointly with the landscape. How did the landscape predefine the monument and how did the monument complement, emphasize or devalue the landscape? What philosophy channeled the construction of the monuments within the landscapes? Whether ephemeral or permanent, the human agency left traces in the landscape; thus, both monuments and landscapes are the key indicators for understanding the ideology of a particular culture. Archaeology, through its interdisciplinary nature, provides a unique perspective, as well as tools, for examining the formation processes of all man-made elements, within both natural and cultural landscapes. nnThe course will address the multifaceted issues of the ways that people have consciously and unconsciously shaped the land around them through time. It will look into diverse, geographically and periodically influenced concepts of a monument and landscape. The course will be divided into two parts, with the first one covering the theory and methodological approaches and the second part the conceptual characteristics, modifications and changeability in various archaeological and historical periods and cultural frameworks.

Language classification and its implications for human prehistory. The role of linguistic data in analyzing prehistoric populations, cultures, contact, and migrations. Comparison of linguistic and biological classifications. Reconstruction, proto-vocabularies, and culture. Archaeological decipherment and the origins and evolution of writing. Archaeological and genetic evidence for human migrations. (DA-A; HEF II,III)

Lecture course on vocabulary and grammar as keys to peoples¿ understanding and use of the environment. Ethnobotany, ethnobiology, and ethnosemantics in the analysis of the language of place, plants and animals, the earth, the body, and disease. Terminological gaps and gluts and what they imply. Language as a strategic resource in environmental management. Language contact and conflict in the modern global environment, with particular attention to the vocabularies of capitalism and property. Language extinction and its environmental implications. Anthropology concentration: CS, EE. No prerequisites.

This multidisciplinary course combines different approaches to how GIS and spatial tools can be applied in social science research. We take a collaborative, project oriented approach to bring together technical expertise and substantive applications from several social science disciplines. The course aims to integrate tools, methods, and current debates in social science research and will enable students to engage in critical spatial research and a multidisciplinary dialogue around geographic space.

This course will explore historical as well as current market transformations of medical ethics in different global contexts. We will examine various aspects of the research enterprise, its knowledge-generating and life-saving goals, as well as the societal, cultural, and political influences that make medical research a site of brokering in need of oversight and emergent ethics.nThis seminar will provide students with tools to explore and critically assess the various technical, social, and ethical positions of researchers, as well as the role of the state, the media, and certain publics in shaping scientific research agendas. We will also examine how structural violence, poverty, global standing, and issues of citizenship also influence issues of consent and just science and medicine.

This course introduces Buddhist practices and texts of embodiment as a subject of the anthropology of the body. We draw on research in social/cultural anthropology, history, and religious studies, and examine a selection of approaches to the Buddhist body: the body of power in Buddhist charisma, the gender of the bodhisattva¿s and monastic body, the techniques of the body in meditation and martial arts, healing and cultivation, and the gift of the body in bioethics and medical education. We draw on examples in different traditions of Buddhism in a range of societies with a special focus on Chinese Buddhism.