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This course introduces basic anthropological concepts and presents the discipline's distinctive perspective on society and culture. The power of this perspective is illustrated by exploring vividly-written ethnographic cases that show how anthropological approaches illuminate contemporary social and political issues in a range of different cultural sites.

Aims, methods, and data in the study of human society's development from early hunters through late prehistoric civilizations. Archaeological sites and remains characteristic of the stages of cultural development for selected geographic areas, emphasizing methods of data collection and analysis appropriate to each.

The world-famous landscapes of East Africa, including Serengeti National Park, Ngorongoro Conservation Area, and the Rift Valley lakes of Tanzania represent iconic national parks for which Africa is known. This course focuses on protected area conservation and its impacts on local people in the East African context. The course is designed to explore the pros and cons of parks and protected areas as they affect flora, fauna, and human inhabitants, and to address the dilemma of how to achieve conservation in a manner that creates local community benefits and promotes social justice. These issues, and the insights gained are relevant for protected area conservation worldwide.nWe will use a case study approach to ask:n(1) What approach to protected area (PA) conservation has been taken in each case? Who are the key proponents and what are their main social and ecological objectives? n(2) How successful has the protected area been at achieving its conservation goals?n(3) What are the benefits of the PA to people and who receives them?n(4) What are the costs of the PA to people and who pays them?n(5) Where benefits are not commensurate to costs, what, if anything, is being done to address the imbalance? How well is it working?nn(6) Are there alternative conservation models that would make the interests of parks and local people more compatible, and reduce the tradeoffs between them? What is needed to operationalize these alternatives, and how do they incentivize conservation behavior among local residents?nnThe class emphasizes student contributions and presentations. Students are required to read one or two books a month over the summer, and to come to campus in the fall well-prepared to discuss each one, including co-leading the discussion of one of the readings. Students are also expected to carry out literature research on a particular conservation dilemma in East Africa that is of interest to them for the final assignment of the seminar, an 8- to 10-page paper, and to present the main findings of that paper to the class during our last few meetings.

Ethnicity is one of the most compelling and most modern ways in which people - in the midst of considerable global and local uncertainty - all across the world imagine and narrate themselves. This seminar will take an anthropological look at both the modernity and the compulsions of ethnic allegiance, and, why struggles over ethnic identity are so frequently violent. Our questions will be both historical; how, why and when did people come to think of themselves as possessing different ethnic identities - and contemporary; how are these identities lived, understood, narrated, and transformed and what is the consequence of such ethnicisation. nWe follow this through anthropological perspectives which ask persistently how people themselves locally narrate and act upon their experiences and histories. Through this we will approach some of the really big and yet everyday questions that many of us around the world face: how do we relate to ourselves and to those we define as others; and how do we live through and after profound violence? The seminar will take these larger questions through a global perspective focusing on cases from Rwanda and Burundi, India, Sri Lanka, Northern Ireland, Guatemala, and the countries of Former Yugoslavia among others. These cases cover a broad canvas of issues from questions of historicity, racial purity, cultural holism, and relations to the state, to contests over religious community, indigeneity, minority identities, globalization, gender, and generation.

In this course students will engage with the anthropology of science and medicine to explore the how cultural norms shape scientific understandings. Through a series of diverse global case studies, seminar participants will assess how historical conditions yield political possibilities that inflect discoveries. Lastly, students will probe how cultural understandings of nature, human difference and national esteem influence how scientific facts come to cohere as reflections of the societies in which they emerge.

Is the middle class shrinking? How do people who live at the extremes of American society- the super rich, the working poor and those who live on the margins, imagine and experience "the good life"? How do we understand phenomena such as gang cultures, addiction and the realignment of white consciousness? This class uses the methods and modes of ethnographic study in an examination of American culture. Ethnographic materials range from an examination of the new American wealth boom of the last 20 years (Richistan by Robert Frank) to the extreme and deadlynworld of the invisible underclass of homeless addicts on the streets of San Francisco (Righteous Dopefiend by Phillipe Bourgois and Jeff Schonberg). The experiences of Hispanic immigrants and the struggle to escape gang life in Los Angeles are highlighted in the story of Homeboy Industries a job creation program initiated by a priest working in LA's most deadly neighborhoods (G-Dog and the Homeboys by Celeste Fremon). Finally in Searching for Whitopia: an improbable journeyninto the heart of White America, Rich Benjamin explores the creation on ethnic enclaves (whitopias) as fear over immigration and the shrinking white majority redefine race consciousnessnin the 21st century. Each of these narratives provides a window into the various ways in which Americans approach the subjects of wealth and the good life, poverty and the underclass, and thenconstruction of class, race, and gender in American society. Students will not be required to have any previous knowledge, just curiosity and an open mind.

The human-animal relationship is dynamic, all encompassing and durable. Without exception, all socio-cultural groups have evidenced complex interactions with the animals around them, both domesticated and wild. However, the individual circumstances of these interactions are hugely complicated, and involve much more than direct human-animal contact, going far beyond this to incorporate social, ecological and spiritual contexts.n This course delves into this complexity, covering the gamut of social roles played by animals, as well as the methods and approaches to studying these, both traditional and scientific. While the notion of `animals as social actors is well acknowledged, their use as proxies for human autecology (the relationship between a species and its environment) is also increasingly recognized as a viable mechanism for understanding our cultural and economic past. It will piece together the breadth of human-animal relationships using a wide geographic range of case studies.

This class will examine a variety of ways that the city has been represented and understood in anthropology, architecture, literature, film, and journalism in order to better understand how everyday life and experience has been read in conjunction with urban forms. Issues covered will include the co-constitution of space and identities; consumption, spectacle, and economic disparity; transportation and health; colonialism and post-colonialism. Assignments will include writing and drawing projects based on close observation and reading.

The aim in this course is to explore the archaeological evidence for long-term change with regard to 5 major questions of our time: Where do we come from? Has inequality increased? Have we become more violent? Why do we have so much stuff? What is the relationship between humans and climate change? You will be introduced to recent publications for class debate, and will also be introduced to the ways in which archaeologists use evidence in order to explore the 5 themes. We will go to Stanford¿s archaeological collections so that you can have hands-on experience of artifacts and will be able to problem solve using data from the instructor¿s own excavations. We will also visit labs (archaeological and genomic for example), local museums and local archaeological excavations.