181 - 190 of 232 results for: ANTHRO

This course presents classic and contemporary work on the anthropology of religion: Durkheim Elementary Forms of the Religious Life; Levy-Bruhl; Primitive Mentality; Douglas Purity and Danger; Evans Pritchard Nuer Religion; and recent ethnographies/scholarly work by Robbins, Keane, Keller, Boyer, Barrett, and others. Prerequisite: consent of instructor

Sport has long been a domain in which everyday people, medical professionals and political authorities have interfaced with the making of institutional definitions and social norms regarding fitness and debility. This course will challenge students to reflect on that interface through consideration of recent research findings within sociocultural anthropology and allied fields.

This graduate seminar explores anthropological approaches to property, kinship and inheritance. It approaches property and kinship as social relations among people and as such call for analyses of the dynamic and unstable processes through which they are constituted, reproduced, and changed over time. Rather than accept conventional distinctions between tangible and intangible property, private and public property, nature and commodities, this course scrutinizes the cultural and social processes through which these categories themselves are constructed and along with them relations of inequality, entitlement, and difference. It investigates the ways in which people (both individuals and communities) are constituted in relation to their claims on things. At a time when new forms and claims of property are increasingly asserted and challenged in a variety of contexts, an understanding of the different bases upon which property rights can be claimed and upon which they can be distinguished from other types of social obligation is a central component of anthropological analyses of the production of new inequalities and differentiations globally.

Recent experimental histories of the field. Emphasis is on how, working within anthropology's classic format, the ethnographic monograph, authors have innovatively responded to the challenges of representing amorphous, unspoken, and often violent relationships between the body and social change. The authors' expository techniques, and how they engage and extend theoretical debate. How to assess works within medical anthropology and its allied fields. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.

This course examines how race is made. We will pay close attention to how people engage with material, economic, scientific, and cultural forces to articulate human group difference as a given, and even natural. In this seminar, we will look at the reality of race as a literally constructed phenomenon, where historical, colonial, bodily, market, penal, and humanitarian constituent elements both circulate and sediment racial understandings. To focus our readings and discussions we will divide this vast terrain into three units: race and the colonial encounter, race and biopower, and race in systems of capital accumulation.

Heritage is always political, it is typically said. Such a statement might refer to the everyday politics of local stakeholder interests on one end of the spectrum, or the volatile politics of destruction and erasure of heritage during conflict, on the other. If heritage is always political then one might expect that the workings of World Heritage might be especially fraught given the international dimension. In particular, the intergovernmental system of UNESCO World Heritage must navigate the inherent tension between state sovereignty and nationalist interests and the wider concerns of a universal regime. The World Heritage List has over 1000 properties has many such contentious examples, including sites in Iraq, Mali, Syria, Crimea, Palestine and Cambodia. As an organization UNESCO was born of war with an explicit mission to end global conflict and help the world rebuild materially and morally, but has found it¿s own history increasingly entwined with that of international politics and violence.

One of the most generative regions for medical anthropology inquiry in recent years has been Asia. This seminar is designed to introduce upper division undergraduates and graduate students to the methodological hurdles, representational challenges, and intellectual rewards of investigating the intersections of health, politics, and culture in contemporary China.

This interdisciplinary course explores how modern African histories, bodies, and natures have been entangled with technological activities. Viewing Africans as experts and innovators, we consider how technologies have mediated, represented, or performed power in African societies. Topics include infrastructure, extraction, medicine, weapons, communications, sanitation, and more. Themes woven through the course include citizenship, mobility, labor, bricolage, in/formal economies, and technopolitical geographies, among others. Readings draw from history, anthropology, geography, and social/cultural theory.

This advanced graduate seminar explores capitalism as an historically-situated and culturally-mediated articulation of practices rather than as an economic system or social structure governed by an internal logic. It draws on poststructural theories of culture, society and subjectivity to investigate the processes through which diverse capitalist practices are produced. Prerequisite: Graduate standing in Anthropology or permission of the instructor. Previous graduate level coursework in cultural anthropology, social theory or cultural studies is required. No auditing is permitted. Enrollment limited to 12.