181 - 190 of 485 results for: ANTHRO

An overview of social issues in contemporary China as seen through its emerging independent documentary film movement. Topics covered include representations of history, political power and accountability in the reform era, human rights, urbanization, the environment, homelessness and inequality, sexualities, addiction, and the role of media in society. Each viewing is accompanied by readings in media theory or the anthropological/sociological study of contemporary China. Can be taken with or without research component. Films include English subtitles.

Key texts from art theory, design theory, and recent work in craft theory will be set in conversation with anthropological understandings of cultural production and creative expression in order to explore why art, design, and craft have so long been differently valued. Examines why ¿art¿ is associated with ¿vision¿, intellect, and creative expression, while ¿craft¿ is associated with ¿mere¿ skill, manual labor, and domesticity. Contemporary social and political implications are explored.

Our everyday lives are made up of multiple routines, some consciously staged and imagined and others unconscious and insidious. Anthropologists call these rituals. Rituals shape every aspect of our lives, creating our symbolic universes and governing the most minute of our practices. nnFor early anthropologists and for those interested in religious and symbolic life, rituals and rites were seen as both one of the most universal features of human existence, and, as that which enables us to reflect upon our human existence. A prominent example are that of the ¿rites de passage¿ found in every culture, from puberty initiation rites, weddings or funerals, which socially signal the change from one status to another. While initially for anthropologists, rituals marked the difference between the sacred and the profane, soon scholars began to see the ubiquity of ritual and the symbolic in shaping even the most mundane activity such as the structure of a meal and why one is not meant to eat dessert before the main course. The first half of the class examines these different debates surrounding the meaning and effects of rituals and rites. The second half of the class takes these debates to think about the question of power and politics. We return to the question of how our symbolic universes are staged and imagined by us through ritual forms such as the annual Presidential ¿pardoning the turkey¿ at Thanksgiving. The question of power however pushes us even further to ask why it is that we obey particular kinds of authority, consent to particular actions, and find ourselves doing things we haven¿t consciously decided to do. Many have argued that these kinds of political questions about how we respond and are shaped by power have something to do with our symbolic worlds and ritual, from the most obvious (the monarchy) to the most subtle (listening in a classroom). Throughout the course, these abstract questions will be grounded in cross-cultural examples and analysis.

Experiences of poverty and inequality and their relationship to gender, space development, post-socialism, and globalization. How processes of class-making in China's cities are bound up with transformations in the country's sociopolitcal landscape.

This course draws from ethnography, social theory, media and literature to examines the place of the asylum in the constitution of knowledge, politics, and populations. An ancient juridical concept, asylum has been used to describe a fundamental political right, medical and penal institutions, as well as emergent spaces of care and safety. As such, thus course invites students to think of critical issues associated with asylum, including: illness, trauma, violence, immigration, displacement, human rights, sanctuary, and testimony.

Anthropological theories and concepts as applied to Japan. Postwar demographic trends. Delayed marriage.  Declining nuclear family.  Re-structuring of education and workplace. Problems for the seniors.  Foreign laborers shaking fundamentals of Japan.

This course examines the significant role ¿drugs¿ play in shaping expressions of the self and social life; in the management populations, and in the production of markets and inequality. It engages these themes through cultural representations of drugs and drug use, analyses of scientific discourse, and social theory. Topics include: the social construction of the licit and illicit; the shifting boundaries of deviance, disease and pleasure; and the relationship between local markets and global wars.

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.

The course prepare students for the methodological and practical aspects of doing ecologically oriented, quantitative anthropological field research. The primary goal is to explore what it means to ask anthropological questions in a systematic way. We will focus on understanding what can constitute an interesting question, how to frame a question in way that facilitates investigation, and how to design methods to begin investigating a question. In turn, the course will provide a format to refine research projects in preparation for doing more extensive fieldwork.