ANTHRO 101-6-21 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.
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 215-0-01 *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?
How do Anthropologists understand and investigate the social and cultural contexts of health and illness? This course will examine the diverse ways in which humans use cultural resources to cope with pain, illness, suffering and healing in diverse cultural contexts. In addition, we will analyze various kinds of medical practices as cultural systems, examining how disease, health, body, and mind are socially constructed, how these constructions articulate with human biology, and vice versa. The course will provide an introduction to the major theoretical frameworks that guide anthropological approaches to studying human health-related behavior. Theory will be combined with case studies from a number of societies, from India, Japan, Brazil, and Haiti to the U.S. and Canada, enabling students to identify similarities across seemingly disparate cultural systems, while at the same time demonstrating the ways in which American health behaviors and practices are socially embedded and culturally specific. The course will emphasize the overall social, political, and economic contexts in which health behavior and health systems are shaped, and within which they must be understood.
This course provides a broad overview of forensic anthropology - an applied sub-field 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 319-0-20 Material Life & Culture in Europe, 1500-1800
In this class, students will learn about the landscapes, buildings, and material culture of Europe, in its social and cultural context. The course will start at the end of the Middle Ages and close with the onset of industrialisation. Examples will cover the whole of Europe, but there will be emphasis on north-west Europe and particularly Britain and Ireland. Students will do a range of assignments including research on specific sites and artifacts as well as more general themes such as religious life, houses great and small, urban and rural landscapes, and pottery, dress and furnishings. We will read material from a variety of disciplines, including above- and below-ground archaeology, social, economic, art and architectural history, historical ethnography, and folklife.
ANTHRO 386-0-20 Lab Methods in Human Biology Research
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 final ethnographic report and oral presentation of findings. Weekly reading and listening assignments will complement fieldwork and form the basis for in-class discussions about ongoing research. Course activities center around the experience of collecting, analyzing, and presenting behavioral data using a variety of ethnographic techniques such as participant-observation, interviews, and more experimental methods.
What is money? How do people use money in the real world? How are technological innovations changing people’s perceptions of money? This course introduces anthropological perspectives on economy and society through a variety of ethnographic studies of money and finance. Topics of discussion include “primitive money,” the uses of money in religious and ritual practices, social and cultural meanings of numbers, mobile money, crypto-currency and other alternative currency systems, and the politics of central banking.
Food is a universal requirement for humans to survive, yet different cultures have developed radically divergent cuisines. In this course, we will use archaeology to explore the diversity of human foodways, and the various roles food has played throughout time. You will learn about topics like the 'real' Paleo diet, how the Incas used beer at parties to build social alliances, and how Columbus's discovery of the Americas spurred global scale shifts in food and agriculture. The course begins with an overview of how anthropologists and archaeologists study food, and then moves through time, beginning with our hunting and gathering ancestors and ending with colonialism.
How do colobus monkeys eat mostly leaves and seeds while spider monkeys specialize on fruit? Why do marmosets live in pair-bonded family groups while geladas live in multi-level societies? Within the Primate order an astounding range of behaviors and ecological strategies are represented. What processes led to this extreme diversification? What can we learn about human biology from studying it? In this course we will examine the behavior and ecology of non-human primates in a range of contexts, including nutrition, cognition, sociality, and conservation. We will begin with an overview of the Primate order that describes relationships between families of primates. We will then shift our focus to behavioral and ecological theory, integrating discussions of both classic studies and current research topics. At the end of this course, you will appreciate the abundant variation in behavior and ecology that exists across the Primate order, understand theories explaining the proximate and ultimate causes of this variation, and recognize how studies of non-human primates impact our perspectives on human behavior and ecology.
ANTHRO 390-0-24 Fire and Blood: Resources, Energy, and Society (also HUM 370-3-20 and ENVR_POL 390-0-20)
Climate crisis, directly linked to CO2 emissions from centuries of burning fossil fuels, has brought energy resources to the center of public attention. This course will survey works of anthropology, history, and geography as well as films and novels to understand how various resources and energy systems relate to sociocultural practices and politics throughout the world. Focusing on one energy resource each week, Fire and Blood will examine how uranium, wind, coal, light, oil, water, and other materials are made into sources of power—both physical and political. It will trace the movement of resources from the subsoil, atmosphere, or riverbeds to pipelines, power plants, dams, turbines, or other kinds of energy infrastructures; and finally, to the electrified streets of urban Mumbai, the wastelands of Navajo County, or the melting ice sheets of the Arctic. After discussing the toxic legacies of fossil fuels and nuclear things, we will end the course by reading texts on “energy transition” and post-carbon futures. By the end of the course, each student will have produced a research paper on an existing, past, or planned energy resource project of their choice from anywhere in the world.
ANTHRO 390-0-26 Hope and Futurity (also ANTHRO 490-0-26)
What is hope? How is hope produced and lost? How is hope distributed in society? What is the relationship between individual and collective hopes? What role does hope play in the production of knowledge, imagination and religious belief? In this course, we will investigate these questions through a close examination of a full range of anthropological, sociological, literary, philosophical and theological explorations into hope and futurity.
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 484-0-20 Language Ideologies: Text and Talk
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, especially language in the legal system. 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 text and talk and its relationship to nation, subjectivity, aesthetics, and morality as embodied primarily in law, bureaucracy, and religion. We consider group-internal consistencies and divergences, graphic as well as sonic ideologies, and minority/indigenous language rights. Students will have ample opportunity to consider the potential value of different types of documents and interactional data to their own research.
Course materials include ethnographies, theoretical works, and primary sources.
Many (but not all) of our course readings and discussions concern the Muslim world. So long as the final paper is relevant to MENA studies and approved by Dr. Hoffman, this course counts for graduate credit toward the MENA graduate cluster or certificate.
ANTHRO 490-0-21 Primate Diversity: Foundations for Understanding
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.
ANTHRO 490-0-22 Current Developments and Debates in Human Biology
This seminar will survey current trends in the study of human biology and health, with a focus on leading edge questions, debates and controversies. Topics will include an exploration of recent developments in the field of epigenetics, including studies of the role of epigenetic processes in health disparities, novel modes of non-genetic inheritance, and the recent focus on developing epigenetic clocks that reflect various dimensions of experience and biological aging. We will also survey emerging trends in the study of the human gut microbiome, brain and cognitive development, human life history, reproduction and reproductive ecology. Throughout the quarter, we will consider what these various approaches and techniques lend to the study of human variation and health disparities. We will also lay a foundation for engagement with these literatures with readings on historical antecedents to fields like epigenetics and the microbiome.
This graduate-level course examines the philosophy and rudiments of research methods in sociocultural anthropology, and the relationship of ethnography to the construction of theory. The best science arguably involves a combination of innovative "upstream" thinking and deductive rigor, the integration of theory with practice, and strategies for eliciting and attending to voices from very different times, places, and social positions. With the goal of conveying these skills, the course will require students to design a local fieldwork project based on a theoretical question relevant to anthropology, and carry it out through ethnographic methods that bring to light conceptual issues in the week’s readings.
Each week will entail some reading and a methods assignment tailored to the project. Class time will be devoted to discussing the readings and how they might enhance or cast critical light on the field exercise. The last assignments will involve a write-up of the project in a short paper along with a class presentation.
How do scholars record, classify, understand and interpret buildings? This class will guide students through this process, from the record of buildings as revealed by both below-ground and above-ground archaeology, through the reconstruction and visualization of structures, to the cultural understanding of houses, religious buildings and other structures in their landscape context. Students will gain a holistic understanding of buildings -- how 'practical' aspects such as the properties of building materials and the logic of technical systems mesh with wider issues of social and cultural interpretation. The course will emphasize an understanding of buildings in terms of an anthropological archaeology, though we will consider and compare approaches derived from architectural history, folklife, landscape studies etc. Examples will be drawn from around the world, though my own specialism of medieval and historic Europe will be well represented.
ANTHRO 490-0-26 Hope and Futurity (also ANTHRO 390-0-26)
What is hope? How is hope produced and lost? How is hope distributed in society? What is the relationship between individual and collective hopes? What role does hope play in the production of knowledge, imagination and religious belief? In this course, we will investigate these questions through a close examination of a full range of anthropological, sociological, literary, philosophical and theological explorations into hope and futurity.
Public and scholarly interests in food have grown exponentially in recent years, but the topic has been of interest to anthropologists since the inception of our discipline. This is not surprising, since four-subfield anthropology is uniquely positioned to address the complexity of factors that define and motivate food practices. Food is at once culturally defined, biologically necessary, and historically situated. In this class, we will explore how each of the four-subfields has approached food practices and how they change over time. The goal is to understand how the multi-faceted nature of foodways demands a non-disciplinary approach, and how we might better match our methods and writing styles to this subject of study.
ANTHRO 490-0-28 Global Indigenous Histories (also HISTORY 405-0-28)
In 2007, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) following decades of negotiation. In this graduate seminar, we will examine the 20th century origins of the global movement for Indigenous rights and seek an understanding of the varied meanings of Indigeneity (along with Aboriginality and Autochthony) across time and space. We will emphasize the comparative study of Indigenous-state relations and highlight how the concept of Indigenous is a shorthand for peoples who are variously identified as original, first, tribal, local, and traditional, in addition to their own names for themselves. Our readings will draw from scholarship in history, anthropology, and Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS), spanning geographies from Hawai'i to the Russian Arctic to Cameroon.
