ANTH 101-6-21 First Year Seminar: How the 99% Live
In this seminar, students will read about, discuss, write about, and thus gain the intellectual tools to begin to evaluate past and present American urban inequalities—including not only those of class, but also race/ethnicity, gender & sexuality, nationality. We will read across several different academic disciplines and journalism to become familiar with key analytic concepts, methods, and historical phenomena, such as the Great Compression, the War on Poverty, urban regimes, ethnography, political economy. Using them, we will explore arenas of inequality: employment; urban space, housing, migration, and neighborhoods; schooling, criminal justice, the public sphere. We will watch two highly relevant videos. And for one class session, we will host and read work written by noted crusading Chicago Reader journalist Ben Joravsky, an expert on many of these issues in Chicago.
ANTH 101-6-22 First Year Seminar: Anthropology of Time
This seminar for freshmen will stress critical thinking and writing. Its theme will be deriving and applying social and cultural frameworks for understanding the dynamics of time or, more generally, temporalities. Ideas about time pervade human experience. Time also provide templates for academic theory -- anthropological theory of the past, for example, depicted societies in an evolutionary continuum from primitive to modern. Among the domains in which temporal dimensions of experience loom large are bodily and farming cycles, memory, history, and ritual. The forms that time and temporalities can take, however, are immensely variant. The course will touch on these and other themes. Of particular interest will be society\'s views of the ordering and pacing of life events. The course will center on an ethnographic research project based on field notes, observations, and participant observation. Sessions and readings are designed to work toward this, focusing on ideas of time, plus skills in framing a research question, developing a bibliography of readings to accompany it, and establishing a point of view. Student projects will concern something close at hand involving time.
At the height of the 2013-2016 West African Ebola epidemic, it was often said that the fears of the disease globalized more quickly than the disease itself. These kinds of statements - and the proliferation of official efforts to control Ebola outbreak in West Africa and elsewhere - show the significance of cultural, social, political and economic dimensions of epidemics. This first-year seminar privileges a critical medical anthropology perspective on the dynamics of epidemics: from disease transmission to prevention and control. Together, we will investigate how complex interactions among social, cultural, political, economic, and environmental factors influence the natural history of infectious disease and public health efforts to understand and address them. The seminar focuses on contemporary problems and issues with the explicit purpose of addressing questions of equity and justice.
Professional wrestling is often disparaged as "fake" and its fans are seen as dim-witted, low-class rednecks. But in many ways professional wrestling reflects the society in which it is created and enjoyed. This class looks at wrestling in a variety of contexts, including the United States, Mexico, Japan, India, and Bolivia, to examine what we might learn about broader social contexts from this form of pop culture. Taking an anthropological eye to wrestling, we will examine issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, and citizenship through ethnographic accounts of various forms of exhibition wrestling. The course will teach students basic anthropological concepts, critical observation and thinking, as well as research and writing techniques.
Anthropology is a holistic analysis of the human condition. The study of human origins, or paleoanthropology, is a subfield of physical anthropology that focuses on the biological history of the human species including their evolution, emergence and radiation. We will explore the scientific method and how theories like evolution have come about and expanded over time. We will learn about our closest living relatives - primates - and how an appreciation of their life history and behavior reflect the modern human condition. Many of the principles and concepts that comprise our understanding of how humans have evolved and adapted over time involve an appreciation of ecology, genetics, physiology, adaptation and cultural development that will also be explored. Lastly we will look at modern human diversity and discuss how we are continuing to evolve today.
ANTH 215-0-1 *The Study of Culture Through Language
The scope of linguistic anthropology from the study of language as an end in itself to the investigation of cultures through the medium of human languages.
Forensic anthropology focuses traditional skeletal biology on problems of medicolegal significance, primarily in determining the personal identity and trauma analysis from human remains. Prerequisite: 200-level anthropology or biology course or consent of instructor.
ANTH 327-0-1 The Archaeology of Ethnicity in America
History of different ethnic groups in America as shown through living quarters, burials, food remains tools, jewelry, etc. How groups have been portrayed in museums claiming to depict the American past. Focus on African Americans and Native Americans.
Overview of history and present realities of American urban life, with a focus on ethnographic knowledge and stratification by class, race, ethnicity, gender, nationality, and sexuality. Prerequisite: 100- or 200-level cultural anthropology or sociology course or consent of instructor.
A laboratory-based introduction to international research in human biology and health; methods for assessing nutritional status, physical activity, growth, cardiovascular health, endocrine and immune function. Prerequisite: 362 or consent of instructor.
Philosophical and methodological problems that relate to cultural anthropology. Approaches to the analysis of cosmology, ritual and myth; comparison of scriptural and non-scriptural religions.
Presentations by departmental faculty on contemporary topics of importance to the development of anthropology. May be repeated for credit with change in topic.
Presentations by departmental faculty on contemporary topics of importance to the development of anthropology. May be repeated for credit with change in topic.
Advanced course designed to integrate topics from the four sub fields of anthropology (archaeology, biological anthropology, cultural anthropology and linguistic anthropology). May be repeated for credit.
