ANTHRO 101-6-21 First-Year Seminar: Modern Plagues
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.
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.
ANTHRO 215-0-1 *The Study of Culture Through Language
Language is universally practiced by humans, but commonsense understandings about language, its appropriate use, and its inherent qualities vary widely both between and within societies. Using the anthropological method of comparative, cross-cultural, qualitative analysis, this course looks outside our own society to ask basic questions about the relationship between language, culture, and society. We explore the dynamics of everyday talk as well as the social and political forces that shape the ways we talk and evaluate others\' speech. How does language shape collective culture and individual thought, and how do culture and thought shape language? How do adults use language to help children become culturally competent? Why have some languages disappeared altogether while others have spread? How have forces like colonialism and economic globalization brought about changes in the ways small-scale societies use language?
This course provides a broad overview of forensic anthropology - an applied subfield of biological anthropology. Forensic anthropology focuses traditional skeletal biology on problems of medicolegal significance, primarily in determining personal identity and assisting in the cause of death assessment from human remains. In this course we will discuss the full range of issues associated with human skeletal identification from trauma analysis to the identification of individuals in mass disasters. These problems will serve as a model for understanding the broader aspects of applied anthropology.
ANTHRO 322-0-20 Introduction to Archaeology Research Design and Methods
This class is fundamentally about how—and why—we do archaeology. Over the course of the quarter, we will take what interests you about archaeology and build a scaffold for how you think about these interests and how you might examine them in depth in the future. The main goal is to produce a high quality NSF proposal by the end of the course (NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program proposal for undergraduates; NSF Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant for graduate students). To that end, we will spend time reviewing successful proposals to decipher how scholars link theory, data, methods, and analysis in their research projects. We will work our way through the main methods in every archaeologists\' tool kit: regional survey, excavation, and materials analysis. Upon completion of the course, students should feel comfortable writing grant proposals and be ready to design their own independent archaeological research project.
Did you know that all the microbes on and in your body weigh as much as your brain? And they can influence your body almost as much as your brain? They can determine how much weight you gain on a certain diet or whether you develop the symptoms of an autoimmune disease, and they can even affect your mood and behavior. Although we have long known the importance of microbes in the context of disease, recent advances in technology have opened up an entirely new field of research that is transforming perspectives on human health. In this course, we will explore the human microbiome beginning with an overview of different types of microbes and the methods we use to study them. Following that, the majority of the course will be dedicated to exploring new research on the microbes of the skin, mouth, gut, and uro-genital tract and their impacts on human health. We will also consider the influence of geography, politics, social structures, and culture on global patterns in the human microbiome and health.
This course introduces the field of Psychological Anthropology - the study of the relationship between culture and the human mind. Psychological Anthropology seeks to understand the ways in which cultural and social contexts fundamentally shape psychological processes such as personality, motivation, cognition, and emotion. In this class we will operate from the assumption that explanations of psychological processes must take culture into account, and that adequate conceptions of cultural processes need to address what we know about the general functioning of the human psyche. In this context, we will explore the role of child development, socialization, and language in shaping human psychology, explore several of the main theoretical paradigms dominant in Psychological Anthropology, and finally, examine the interactions of mind and body, culture and mental health, self and narrative, language and emotion.
This course will provide an overview of the logic and method underlying empirical research in human biology and health. The course will introduce students to the scientific method, as well as the process of research design, data analysis, and interpretation. The course emphasizes hands-on laboratory experience with a range of methods for assessing human nutritional status, physical activity, growth, cardiovascular health, endocrine activity, and immune function.
This course is designed to prepare students to design and carry out an independent ethnographic research project. Students will complete several in-class and field exercises related to a collaborative ethnographic project, culminating in a short ethnographic report and presentation of findings. Weekly reading assignments will complement fieldwork and form the basis for in-class discussions about ongoing research. In addition, students will be expected to develop a short concept paper for a future independent ethnographic research project.
ANTHRO 390-0-22 Anthropology of Food Security and Sustainability
Food security is one of the wicked problems of our time, an issue so complex that it seems to defy resolution. One camp suggests that if only the world could produce more food, everyone could be fed. The other camp claims that we already produce more than enough food to feed the world's growing population, and that food insecurity arises from unequal access to resources. At the crux of these perspectives are different understandings of how we might achieve social and environmental sustainability—should we produce more or consume less? In this class, we'll approach these complex issues from a social and historical perspective rooted in anthropology. The class is divided into three parts. The first will consider the different definitions of food security, the ways hunger is measured, and the commonly discussed causes of food insecurity. We will historically situate the emergence of chronic food insecurity to show the different situations in which insecurity arises, and show how a long-term view complicates traditional understandings of the causes of food insecurity. This portion will also help students develop skills to think about long-term consequences, which is essential for evaluating the sustainability of solutions proposed to ameliorate food insecurity. The third portion of the class will review some of these proposed solutions. Finally, the last portion of the class will examine how we can achieve long-term food sustainability, ending with student-designed research proposals and ideas on how to realize that goal.
ANTHRO 390-0-23 Porous Borders: Geography, Power and Tactics of Movement with MENA 301-2-20
At the advent of increased globalization some scholars have argued that the movements of capital, commodities and people across nation-states have rendered their borders increasingly more porous. The death of the nation-state and the birth of the multinational corporation heralded this new epoch. Yet, in the epoch of offshored refugee processing centers and border walls, this assumed porosity of borders begs a reexamination of broader geographies of power and tactics of movement. In this course, we examine the historically and geographically specific constellations of borders and ask: How does the border become an architecture of regulation that extends access to mobility to some and denies it to others? What is a border? Is it the physical line drawn between two states? Who gets to draw these lines? Is a state border a given result of a natural and ethnic contract or the terrain of constant contestation or negotiation in global and international affairs? This course examines these questions by proposing to reconceptualize border as equally the product of mobile social actors, contraband commodities and fluctuating values as they are of state policies aimed at managing these movements.
ANTHRO 390-0-24 Ecology of Infant Feeding with GBL_HLTH 390-0-21
The first objective of this course is to introduce students to the many ways that babies are fed around the world, including breastfeeding, bottle feeding, and complementary (non-milk) foods. We will discuss the health and social consequences of each mode, and what the international recommendations, i.e. best practices are. The second objective is explore why there is such variety in infant feeding worldwide. These discussions will be guided by the socio-ecological framework, in which biological and psychosocial characteristics of the individual, household, community, and national policy are considered. Indeed, influences on infant feeding will be broadly considered; we will draw on literature in global health, ethnography, evolution, and public policy. We will also consider the representation of infant feeding in popular culture and visit a local breast milk bank. The third objective is to develop critical thinking and writing abilities, using a literature review, in-depth interviews, and other research techniques to reflect on the consequences of infant feeding have for society at large.
ANTHRO 390-0-25 Environmental Anthropology with ENVR_POL 390-0-25
Anthropology has had a long, storied relationship with questions of nature and culture, society and environment, during which time a variety of theoretical approaches have been developed. This class will review these intellectual developments and recent trends with the aim of giving students toolkits for analyzing present-day environmental concerns.
This course provides a capstone experience for senior anthropology majors working on their senior thesis. It is intended to provide students with a forum for finalizing research and writing the thesis. The course is an opportunity for you to develop your own original research on a topic of your choice within anthropology. A range of issues will be considered, including research and writing styles characteristic of all four subfields, clarifying research goals and developing research problem statements, preparing a critical literature review, data analysis and presentation and, most importantly, writing processes. The goal for this class is to produce a 20 page Capstone Paper that defines your research and presents an analysis of this problem using material from field research, laboratory work, data sets or library research.
ANTHRO 401-2-01 Logic of Inquiry in Anthropology (Archy)
In this course, students will learn about the logic of inquiry in archaeology - key theories, concepts and approaches; characteristic habits of thought; techniques and intuitions.. We will approach the subject through the basic dimensions of archaeological enquiry (and, arguably, most enquiry in the human sciences): space, time, materiality, and the relationship between present and past. Student will write a final paper applying what they have learnt to a specific topic in their research.
Raymond Williams wrote, "a definition of language is always, implicitly or explicitly, a definition of human beings in the world." This graduate seminar in linguistic anthropology explores the ways in which people conceive of and impose particular visions of human beings and their rightful relations onto language use. Language ideologies are the processes and seemingly common sense beliefs through which people make linkages between social forms and language expression, whether verbal or written. The comparative and ethnographic study of language ideologies focuses on the historical and political economic experiences that shape these mediations. This seminar considers language and its relationship to nation, subjectivity, aesthetics, and morality as embodied in religion, gender, law, politics, education, and colonialism. We consider group-internal consistencies and divergences in looking at cultural conceptions of, for instance, "pure" and "good" language, the power of writing, speech and silence, the human capacity for self-expression, and the moral imperative of perpetuating minority languages.
Imagine the scientific impact of discovering a new organ. Advances in DNA technology and big data analysis have allowed us to do just that by uncovering the complex microbial communities that live in and on our bodies. Microbiome research is transforming the natural and social sciences by revealing new mechanisms through which human physiology and health are influenced. In this course, you will learn to use two major computational tools for exploring the microbiome and its interactions with the human body. After a brief introduction to sample processing for DNA sequencing, we will use QIIME2 to describe microbiome composition and HUMANn2 to describe microbiome functional potential. Foundational microbiome research focused mainly on the gut will be discussed throughout the course, and the final product of the course will be a meta-analysis of publicly available microbiome data.
This is an intensive workshop on how to write ethnography. There are three elements to the class: (1) discussion of classic examples of good ethnographic writing and key concepts like ‘thick description'; (2) taking apart some elements of an academic ethnography, including writing vignettes, describing people and places, constructing an argument, and engaging other writers; and (3) workshopping papers, in which the class discusses a pre-circulated example of your ethnographic writing, with a focus on construction and style, not content.
In order to take this class, you must come with some ethnographic field materials of your own, that you plan to write up into either an article for journal publication or a chapter of a dissertation or book.
ANTHRO 490-0-25 Producing Territory: People, Commodities, and Value
What is territory? Is it simply the physical space (land, air or sea) over which a state exercises sovereignty? How does this presumed alignment of territory and sovereignty come about and get maintained in modern nation-states and internationally? Is territory a given and static contract or the terrain of constant contestation or negotiation in global and international affairs? This course examines these questions by proposing that territories products of mobile social actors, contraband commodities and fluctuating values as much as they are of state policies aimed at managing these movements. Through reading anthropological and historical monographs as well as theoretical essays drawn from geography and social theory more broadly, in this course we explore the spatial production of social worlds and trace how this process has come to unfold at local, national and regional scales. By the end of the course students are expected to be well versed in diverse theories of space and able to articulate what an attention to space and the relations of power inscribed in particular processes of territorial production can contribute to ethnographic and historical inquiry.
