231 - 240 of 472 results for: ANTHRO

Mobility, whether in the form of seasonal or permanent migration, is an ancient practice necessary for many subsistence strategies, including hunting-and-gathering and pastoralism. Many new forms of mobility have emerged and now it is nearly impossible to consider a patch of human society that is not engaged in or directly impacted by habitual, patterned geographic mobility. Today, almost everywhere in the world, people can get farther, faster; urbanization, environmental degradation, and civil unrest are driving groups of people who do not have a cultural tradition of nomadic migration to adopt a mobile lifestyle¿sometimes permanently, sometimes temporarily¿in search of new economic or resource opportunities. In this seminar course, we will explore modern patterns of human mobility and migration as adaptive strategies for predictably and unpredictably changing environments. Using a framework of biological and cultural adaptation, we will discuss the major types of current human mobility (e.g. nomadism, immigration, migrant labor, displacement) and how they influence and are influenced by social systems, resource access, and health.

The puzzle of symbolic healing. How have societies without the resources of modern medicine approached healing? Why do these rituals have common features around the world? Shamanism, spirit possession, prayer, and the role of placebos in modern biomedicine. Students do ethnographic work and practical explorations along with more traditional scholarly approaches to learning.

In this course we will examine the place of Africa in global health discourses while reading in-depth histories and ethnographies of the varied causes and consequences of some of the most difficult problems facing African countries today. We will study the effects of colonialism and conflict on health, explore the military and humanitarian connections in the fight against HIV/AIDS, weigh the risks and benefits of population genetic studies on African populations, examine biomedical interventions on, and erasures of, local health problems, and query the role of violence, memory, insecurity, and power in daily life on the continent.

Race, identity, culture, biology, and political power in biomedicine. Biological theories of racial ordering, sexuality and the medicalization of group difference. Sources include ethnography, film, and biomedical literature. Topics include colonial history and medicine, the politics of racial categorization in biomedical research, the protection of human subjects and research ethics, immigration health and citizenship, race-based models in health disparities research and policy, and recent developments in human genetic variation research.

Unusual mental phenomena have existed throughout history and across cultures. Taught by an anthropologist and psychiatrist, this course explores how different societies construct the notions of "madness": What are the boundaries between "normal" and "abnormal", reason and unreason, mind and body, diversity and disease? nnOptional: The course will be taught in conjunction with an optional two-unit discussion section or engaged learning component.

Unusual mental phenomenon have existed throughout history and across cultures. Taught by an anthropologist and psychiatrist, this course explores how different societies construct the notions of "madness": What are the boundaries between "normal" and "abnormal", reason and unreason, mind and body, diversity and disease? The course will be taught in conjunction with a two unit engaged learning component which will place students in relevant settings.

This course examines the new cultural forms that arose out of the use of nuclear technology. Subjects covered will include: The Manhattan Project, nuclear activism, nuclear experimentation in medicine, pre-nuclear history, nuclear energy, and nuclear waste and trade.

As recently as the 40s, the S, Africa government labeled indigenous San people part of the animal landscape. Using the San example as a starting point, course examines socially, culturally, and politically constructed ideas about race, animality, and nature in the cultural and geographic settings of N. America, Australia, and Africa. How connections between race and nature have served as terrains of power through which people and governments have claimed territories and justified violence. Classic texts by nature writers and philosophers and current social science works that focus on race and ethnicity. Concepts such as gender, sex, and nature; environmental tourism; natural resource development; and indigeneity and animality. How ideas about race and nature have come together around concepts such as the myth of wilderness and the violence of considering certain people to be less-than-human. Issues of environmental politics and activism.

Things sit at the nexus of cross-cutting heterogeneous processes; tracing the entanglements of any prominent thing or class of things demands a transdisciplinary approach that recruits expertise from the natural sciences, social sciences and humanities. For example, carbon is a key factor in global warming for reasons that are as much socio-historical as bio-physical, and we could not begin to sketch the full significance of carbon without considering such diverse frames of reference. Our growing appreciation in the social sciences and humanities of the agency, polyvalence and catalytic role of things has given rise to The New Materialist and Post-Humanist movements, which in turn raise questions about intra-action and observational perspective that are echoed in the modern physical and life sciences. In this class we will explore these theoretical convergences in considering themes such as `things-in-themselves¿, networks and open systems, assemblages and entanglements. We will also examine specific examples such as oil, metal (guns), dams, viruses, electricity, mushrooms; each thing will be explored both in terms of its social and ethical entanglements and in terms of its material properties and affordances. There will also be hands-on encounters with objects in labs and a couple of local field trips. The key question throughout will be `why and how does matter matter in society today?¿