DEPARTMENT OF ANTHROPOLOGY

ANTHO 101 Freshmen Seminar combined with WCAS BIOL_SCI 115-6-20: First-Year Seminar: Biological Thought and Action

Overview of class

Science is a process by which people make sense of the world. Scientists examine evidence from the past, work to understand the present, and make predictions about the future. Integral to this process are the methods they use to collect and analyze data, as well as the ways in which scientists work together as a community to interpret evidence and draw conclusions. In this class, we will take a multidisciplinary approach to examining biological thought and action and their social ramifications. We will seek to understand science as a social pursuit: the work of human beings with individual, disciplinary, and cultural differences, and requiring tremendous investments in training and equipment. Does it matter that participation in science is more accessible to some than to others? How do biases, assumptions, uncertainty, and error manifest in scientific work? What is the history of scientific values such as objectivity and reproducibility? The course will conclude by investigating current topics of public debate.

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.

Knowledge of human osteology forms the basis of physical and forensic anthropology, bio-archeology, paleoanthropology and clinical anatomy. This course will provide an intensive introduction to the human skeleton; particularly the identification of complete and fragmentary skeletal remains. Through this course you will be exposed to techniques for identification and classification of human skeletal anatomy through hands-on, dry laboratory sessions. Additional time outside of class is available and may be required to review practical materials.

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.

The goal of sociocultural anthropology, the largest subfield of anthropology and the core of the discipline, is to understand the dynamics of human variation in social action and cultural thought. A key question is how these variations are produced and reproduced, whether we speak of society (subsistence, ideas) or individuals (biology, psychology, social identity). Conversely, what happens when reproduction fails to occur, or does so when and how it should not. Because reproduction is so strongly associated with biology in our society, viewing it through a cultural lens poses significant challenges to some of our most basic tenets. Tensions arise in questions of agency vs. control, nature vs. culture, identity construction, reproducing under varying conditions, and so on. The study of reproduction, therefore, offers a window into the heart of anthropology itself. The goals of this course are (1) to expose students to just a few of the many sociocultural approaches to reproduction by ranging broadly across topics, time, and place; and (2) to identify and evaluate concepts and theories embedded in writings on the dynamics of reproduction. While the concept of "reproduction" can refer to societal reproduction, emphasis will be on the reproduction of children. To this end, possible topics may include fostering/adoption, AIDS orphans, fatherhood, technologies of fertility control, assisted reproduction, obstetrics, gender imbalances in Asia, debates over abortion, etc.

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 class will provide rigorous guidance on how one moves through the scientific process, from articulating scientific questions to answering them in a way that your audience can really relate to. We will do this using data from our ongoing study about if a participatory agricultural intervention can improve maternal and child nutrition in central Tanzania (Clinical trials.gov #: NCT02761876). Specific skills to be developed include human subjects training, formal literature review, hypothesis generation, developing analytic plans, data cleaning, performing descriptive statistics, creation of figures and tables, writing up results, and oral presentation of results. This course will be a terrific foundation for writing scientific manuscripts, theses, and dissertations. Prior experience with qualitative or quantitative analysis is preferred, but not required.

The objective of this course is to survey current efforts to understand the dynamic relationships among society, biology, and health. Many scholars and agencies recognize the need for interdisciplinary approaches that draw on concepts and methods from the social/behavioral sciences as well as the life/biomedical sciences, but successful linkage across levels of analysis has remained an elusive goal. What are the epistemological and methodological challenges to successful integration, particularly in an era of increasing specialization in training and the production of knowledge? What can be learned from prior attempts at integration emerging from distinct disciplinary traditions, including biocultural anthropology, bio demography, psychobiology/health psychology, social epidemiology, and psychosomatic medicine?

This course will provide a graduate level introduction to the anthropology of mind, body, and health. We will address broadly the question of how Anthropologists understand and investigate the social and cultural contexts of health and illness and the diverse ways in which humans use cultural resources to cope with pain, illness, suffering and healing. In addition, we will analyze medical practices as cultural systems, as well as the ways in which health, body, and mind are socially and politically constructed and manipulated, bodies are controlled and policed, and definitions of mind and mental processes influence and are influenced by social context. There will be a particular focus on the concepts of embodiment and trauma and their various uses and meanings in specific contexts. We will combine an examination of current theoretical paradigms with ethnographic case material from a number of societies, including Brazil, Japan, the US, and Canada. The goal of this comparative endeavor will be to analyze similarities and differences across understandings of mind and body and systems of healing, and to examine American perspectives, behaviors, and practices critically in order to illuminate the ways in which they are socially embedded and culturally specific. Open to all graduate students. No P/N.