DEPARTMENT OF ANTHROPOLOGY

We recently celebrated the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth. But what would he think of our world today? We have a sophisticated understanding of genes and the ability to trace our ancestry over generations. Yet despite this knowledge, conclusive and irrefutable proof that we have or are continuing to evolve has not been found. In this course we will address where we might have come from and where we might be going. We will cover some of the major "issues" in biological evolution ranging from those of originating in Darwin's time to the many questions that persist today.

One way people work through trauma—understood as major ruptures in human experience such as mass violence and death, natural catastrophe, or forced displacement—is by visiting its locations and re/creating narratives about it. Representations of fear and suffering serve as forms of therapy, prevention, civic education, and even entertainment.  Memorials to traumatic human experience are often offered as symbols of hope for transformation and the future deterrence of further trauma (“never again”).  In this seminar, we analyze these sites and practices, asking whose trauma is remembered, and whose forgotten?  What power inheres in different forms of remembering through travel, and in the aesthetic and material shape of memorials?  What do culture and heritage mean to those who produce it and for those who consume it as tourists?  How can sites, objects, and histories of trauma simultaneously “belong” to a local community, a nation, and all humanity?  Topics include museums, genocide, colonialism, slavery, the Holocaust, and war, among others.  We examine tourism from an anthropological perspective, using local and global case studies such as: the representation of slavery at Colonial Williamsburg, the role of community museums in post-apartheid South Africa, visiting Holocaust sites in Europe, and genocide tourism sites in Cambodia and Rwanda. 

The Pyramids, Stonehenge, Cahokia, and Great Zimbabwe: who built these monuments, and why? They are often associated with buried treasure, lost civilizations, and a forgotten past. But archaeologists look beyond a Romantic view and ask questions about why they were built, and what they tell us about humankind. By learning about past cultures, what made them different and what made them similar, we gain a better understanding of human history and the state of the world today. People in the past were very different, but they shared one thing in common -- they left behind stones and bones, pottery fragments, great monuments and burial offerings. These fragments of the past are used by archaeologists to build an understanding of what it means to be human. In this class, you will be introduced to the questions, theories, and methods of archaeology. You will learn about how archaeologists locate, survey and excavate the great monuments of the past; how they study artifacts in the lab; and how they use the stuff they find to piece together stories about the past, and test those stories against the evidence. You will learn about the diversity of ancient and modern peoples, their cultures, and the past they inhabited. You will also learn about the place of archaeology in the modern world -- how archaeologists engage with questions such as long-term climate change and human response, sustainability, and inequality.

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This course introduces students to major themes in the anthropological study of Africa, the world area that most inspired the development of anthropology as a discipline. Examining the diversity of contemporary African societies and moments in the colonial past, we will explore in depth several related themes that derive from the classics as well as the contemporary anthropological corpus. These themes center on the creation of social ties, making a living, and managing health and uncertainty in volatile times. Specific topics will include kinship and marriage, production and exchange, health, population, economic development, corruption, political patronage, war, and the dynamics of movement and transnationalism.

This upper-level undergraduate/ graduate seminar examines relationships between language, race and ethnicity in the contemporary United States. It pairs major theoretical concepts from linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, and critical race and ethnic studies to examine ethnographic case studies about identity, subjectivity, racism, and institutions. The course will focus on language use among Asian Americans but also examine language practices by Latinos and Blacks by comparison. Topics include: language in media; bilingualism in schools and workplaces; the English Only movement; social media activism; names and naming; colonialism and postcolonialism; and transracial formations. Students will also be asked to apply course concepts to analyze relevant contemporary issues, including presidential malapropisms; controversies about place names and sports team names/ mascots; the 2018 elections; racial crossing and passing; and Yellow English today.

Rather than attempting the impossible--an overview of the whole history of the discipline of anthropology-this course will focus on one particular problem: the relationship between theory and ethnographic description in cultural Anthropology. The course will attempt to survey the development of certain schools of thought in the discipline since the mid-nineteenth century: evolutionism; historical particularism; structural-functionalism; culture and personality; cultural materialism; interpretive anthropology. In order to examine the ways in which each of these theoretical approaches affects the ways in which anthropologists choose to describe what they observe, the class will read a series of ethnographies (or excerpts from larger works) written at different times from different points of view.

Humans display great variation in many aspects of their biology, particularly in terms of physical growth and development, nutrition, and disease patterns. These differences are produced by both current ecological and environmental factors as well as underlying genetic differences shaped by our evolutionary past. It appears that many diseases of modern society, such as obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and various cancers, have resulted from change to a lifestyle that is quite different from that of our ancestors. These diseases thus reflect an imbalance between modern life conditions and those which shaped most of our evolutionary history. This course will explore the evolutionary dimensions of variation in health and disease pattern among humans. We will first review key concepts in evolutionary biology, and their application to human evolution. We will then examine bio-cultural and evolutionary models for explaining variation in specific human diseases.

This course will attempt the impossible--to survey the development of anthropological theory in a single quarter. Needless to say, it will not and cannot be exhaustive. Instead, it will focus on the careful scrutiny of a few primary sources by prominent individuals who have contributed to the development of the discipline, but who will also be taken as "representative" of various historical trends. The first part of the course will rapidly outline the prehistory of the discipline and focus more extensively on the notion of evolution central to 19th century social theory. The second part of the course will deal with the individual contributions of three "founding fathers": Marx, Durkheim and Weber. The final part of the course will cover a few of the numerous trends of 20th century cultural anthropology.

This class examines how ‘things', including commodities, precious objects and ordinary goods connected worlds and shaped the everyday life of people. The course is structured between theoretical framings of global goods that consider scale, context, and materiality and the practical considerations of tracing objects through human networks of exchange, commerce, colonialism and consumption. As such methods addressed in this class include object histories, compositional analysis, and commodity chain analysis. By focusing on material exchanges through the archaeological record, this class provides a venue to explore three interrelated questions: what systems of the world objects carry within them, how do these objects shape human circuits of commerce and trade; how objects mediate between global economic forces and the fluid identities of individuals as they are drawn into global circuits.