DEPARTMENT OF ANTHROPOLOGY

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, and political economy. Using them, we will explore arenas of inequality: employment; urban space, housing, migration, and neighborhoods; schooling, criminal justice, the public sphere. You will watch two short, relevant videos on your own before the first seminar meeting.

From antiquity until today the "West" (itself a troubled concept) imagined many things in Africa. Power, weakness, wealth, poverty, beauty, savagery, knowledge, ignorance, light, darkness. We are all heirs of these incoherent visions; a bequest that appears in widely held and constantly renewed beliefs and assumptions about the "Dark Continent." Visions of Africa today revolve largely around a set of tropes developed in the 19th century - Africa as benighted, undeveloped, female, chaotic, famine-ridden, and incapable of self-governance. However, as with all instances when one position gazes at another, the result is both accurate and inaccurate. In this class, we will turn our gaze on contemporary Africa from a cultural anthropological perspective. Using the tools of anthropology, we will visit several arenas critical to contemporary African cultures - music & dance, cinema, literature, sport, the body, technology, politics and development, among others. Through these various lenses, we will attempt to better understand cultural choices and what we can say about Africa/ns from our perspective. That is, to recognize and value both internal and external views of the continent. Through these arenas and these perspectives, we will better know issues of power, gender, hierarchy, spirituality, and economics. Will you arrive at an entirely accurate view of Africa and Africans? Never. The journey, however, will take you closer.

“Historical Archaeology," is a field archaeology that focuses on the past 500 years and addresses a myriad of questions including, identity, European colonialism, resistance, capitalism, and power. This course will explore the history of different peoples in the Americas through the study of the material remains they left behind: architecture, burials, food remains, clothing and jewelry, etc. Attention will be focused on the presentation and/or exclusion of groups in depictions of history and in the creation of new identities (ethnogenesis) in different parts of the Americas. It will also consider the ways in which power and economy intersect with other forms of identity, such as class, gender, and sexuality. The course will survey a variety of communities, concentrating on Indigenous Peoples, as well as people of European, African and Asian descent in American contexts. While there will be course material which touch on French and Iberian colonial contexts, class projects will primarily draw on study of artifacts and communities in the Eastern United States and the Anglophone Caribbean.

This course concentrates on the anthropological knowledge produced on the past and present economic practices of societies around the world. Economic anthropology emerged out the critique of the taken-for-granted binary between the economic lives of so-called “primitive” societies and that of modern societies. This course will introduce those debates while at the same time questioning the premises, themes, and concepts with which we analyze economic practices. Each week is organized under one of the following themes: Gift, Commodity, Money, Labor, Market, Debt, Finance and Crisis, and The Economy. The readings involve both theoretical texts of political economy and contemporary ethnographies. Drawing on these readings, we will reflect on the social practices categorized under the umbrella term “the economy”, and question the larger systems those practices generate, reproduce, challenge, or dismantle. 

Archaeology and nationalism have been closely intertwined at least since the idea of the nation-state emerged following the French Revolution. Archaeology offers nationalist agendas the possibility of filling in national historical records and extending the past far into prehistory. Its results can be displayed in museums, occupy entire sites, and be readily accessible online —thus potentially reaching many new audiences beyond traditional print media. In turn, nationalism has contributed significantly to the development of archaeology as a modern discipline.

Drawing on new critical approaches and examples selected from a wide geographical range, this course explores the role of archaeology in the creation and elaboration of national identities from the eighteenth century to the present day. Issues include the institutionalization of archaeology; the development of museums and practices of display and interpretation; the creation of archaeological sites as national monuments and tourist destinations; cultural property legislation and repatriation of artifacts; and archaeology and monuments under totalitarian regimes.

Migration is not just a movement across borders; it is a process of becoming. By examining trajectories of intra- and inter-national migration within Latin America, this course will explore the social, cultural, economic, and political histories that reveal relationships between migration and larger global and postcolonial socio-economic forces. We will reflect on the reasons why individuals choose to become mobile, as well as the structural conditions that might compel them. Specifically, we will look at disparities between urban and rural populations, clashes over job markets in urban settings, and the formation of individual and collective migrant identities in contexts of mass displacement. The course will begin by studying how waves of migrants (within and across frontiers) after independence shaped contemporary ideologies of race and belonging in Latin America, and end with a reflection on what these trajectories can teach us about studying Latin American migrants in the "Global North" today. Furthermore, the course will investigate how migration pathways challenge accounts of a unified Latin American “identity,” yet also allow for diasporic coalitions abroad. Course materials include canonical readings from anthropology and history, along with films, memoirs, and testimonies.

This course examines theoretical and ethnographic approaches to the state, with a particular focus on the intersection of state projects and subject-making practices.  Early declarations of the state’s growing irrelevance in an era of globalization have proven to be grossly premature, as any migrant worker, prisoner, Palestinian struggling for statehood, Snowden supporter, or person in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles will tell you.  Yet many questions abound.  Is the nature of the state/subject relations changing with neoliberal globalization and if so, how?  What might be similar across different state/subject formations, and what might be different–not only in this particular historical juncture but in previous ones as well?  Do certain state/subject relations adhere to the very structure of the modern state and/or can we disrupt the universalist notion of the modern state as a Western form that takes “alternative” shape in different regions?  How can we think about the state, both ethnographically and theoretically, in ways that do not always presume the state as an agent, a monolith, or a set of always coherent projects?  What are the myriad ways that state projects shape particular (racialized, gendered, classed) subjects, and is this shaping always complete?  What fissures appear and how?  How do people engage or circumvent the state in their daily lives and in particular political struggles in ways that disrupt or collude with subject-making projects?  Key themes to be explored include governmentality, sovereignty, citizenship, rights, materiality, activism, security, law, and development. We will be especially concerned with understanding poststructuralist and neoliberal frameworks approaching states and subjects and try to think productively with and beyond them.  Finally, we will continually ask how theory informs ethnography and how ethnography informs theory.

This course is concerned with the method, theory, and practice underlying spatial analysis using tools such as GIS in understanding human landscapes in the past and present. We will focus on the kinds of data, methods of analysis, and frames of interpretation of landscapes in the past and present. In this course, students will be exposed to underlying theories of space in the interpretation of ancient and modern landscapes and gain practical experience collecting and analyzing spatial data in the context of anthropological research. While case studies will be drawn from a variety of contexts in archaeology, it is relevant to anyone who wishes to analyze data about and within the spatial and temporal contexts of the research, they are conducting.

Within the Primate order an astounding range of physiological adaptations and behaviors are represented. What processes led to this extreme diversification? How can an understanding of primate diversity inform studies of human physiology and behavior? In this course we will use both classic and recent non-human primate studies to explore topics such as nutrition, growth, disease, sociality, cognition, and communication. The course will rely heavily on reading and discussion of the primary literature, and is designed to be flexible so as to address the research interests and backgrounds of all participants. At the end of this course, students will have better insight into ecological and evolutionary theories relevant for explaining variation in a range of traits across the primate phylogeny and appreciate how studies of non-human primates impact our perspectives on human physiology and behavior.