DEPARTMENT OF ANTHROPOLOGY

Summer 2021 Class Schedule

Summer quarter 2021 course descriptions

ANTHRO 211 Culture and Society

This class is an introduction to cultural anthropology - the study of cultural variation from a global perspective. Readings, lectures, and films explore this diversity through the lens of childhood and adolescence, drawing from the fieldwork of anthropologists and ethnographic research. These cross-cultural studies examine the ways children are socialized, including how childhood and adolescence are conceptualized, embodied, and experienced in different local settings. From Zambian youth delivering in-home healthcare, Senegalese youth practices on social media, to experiences of race, ethnicity, and nationality for Latinx youth in Chicago, all of these examples consider the interrelated factors - social, economic, demographic, and symbolic - that determine the organization of the family, the value and meaning of children, and the place of youth in communities, schools, and the marketplace. As much as people share beliefs and practices in common, historical and cultural constructions, like that of the life stage known as “childhood,” influence domains as varied as morality, intelligence, sexuality, and identity. In order to appreciate how qualitative research can expand understandings on these topics, course activities provide experiential learning opportunities to engage with ethnographic research methods like participant-observation and interviewing, in order to understand how fieldwork observations and interpretive analysis are context dependent.

ANTHRO 213 Human Orgins

Where have we come from? How have we gotten here? Why have we been so successful as a species? In this course, we address these questions as we explore the origins, evolution, and spread of modern humans. You will be introduced to our living primate relatives and extinct ancestors as you learn about human biological and cultural evolution, adaptation, and behavior. You will discover how people have come to populate the globe and are still evolving today in an ever-changing world. Ultimately, you will see how our evolutionary legacy impacts the human life course and has led to the incredible similarities and astonishing diversity of our species.

ANTHRO 214 Archaeology:  Unearthing History

Archaeology in popular culture often conjures up images of grand pyramids, buried treasure, and ruined cities. But what do these material remains tell us about the people who created them in the past? This course is an introduction to anthropological archaeology: the study of past people through the stuff they leave behind. Students will learn about the methods and theories of archaeology. Together, we will explore the history of the field, how archaeologists design projects to answer questions about past human lives, and how they use survey, excavation, computer programs, and analysis of buildings, bones, plants, pots, and tools to tell stories about the past. We will also cover archaeology’s relevance to contemporary political and social topics, for example, heritage preservation, Indigenous rights, Black histories, environmental justice, gender equity, and sustainability. Throughout the course, students will learn about archaeological case studies from all over the world and from various time periods, highlighting the diversity of human histories and experiences.

ANTHRO 215 The Study of Culture through Language

Next to breathing and eating, communication is fundamental to social life. This course explores how and why people talk, write, and interact in the ways that they do, in order to establish, convey, and negotiate meaning with others.  Drawing from ethnographic studies of culture through language use in different social settings, the assigned readings and films survey the  contributions of linguistic anthropology. From language socialization and storytelling, to multilingualism and language ideologies, communication performs as social action to influence dynamics of power, agency, representation, and identity. Semiotic theory is also examined – the study of signs and sign systems - as a conceptual approach to understanding the linguistic practices that structure the sociomaterial world. Cross-cultural examples include e-chat and graphic design, Marshallese and Senegalese production of age and time, landscape and memory for the Western Apache, as well as experiences of race, ethnicity, and nationality for Latinx youth in Chicago.

ANTHRO 315 Medical Anthropology

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.

ANTHRO 390 Topics in Anthropology:  Being Muslims in the West: Religion, Race, Resistance

What does it mean to be Muslim in the “West” today? Over the last two decades, the question of Islam has increasingly become the subject of heated debates in the United States and abroad, rendering Muslims at the forefront of systematically growing political, economic, and social discrimination. The resurgence of anti-Muslim racism occurs within a growing far-right nationalism and populism, leading to continuous racialization of Muslims and Islam. While focusing on the United States, this course offers a comparative perspective to illustrate how anti-Muslim racism is a global phenomenon, entwined with other forms of racism such as anti-immigrant, anti-Black, anti-Semitism, and anti-indigenous racisms. Engaging with critical race theory, postcolonial studies, and ethnographic methods, we will explore the multi-layered discourses about Islam and the diverse experiences of Muslims. Using a variety of resources, including but not limited to, ethnographies, fiction, podcasts, news media, and documentaries, we will unpack the nuanced histories of Islam in the West, the colonial legacies of racialization, and the resistance of Muslim communities. The goal of this course is to help us critically analyze how and why Islam is at the core of integration policies, security logics, and anti-immigration laws, especially in relation to questions of religion, race, secularity, class, gender, and sexuality.

ANTHRO 390 Topics in Anthropology:  Trash Archaeology

Archaeology can be a powerful tool for examining the lives of those not well-recorded in written histories, including queer and gender nonconforming people, people of color, poor and homeless communities, women, mentally ill and neurodivergent people, among many others. The course title represents two things – the literal “trash” that some archaeologists study, and the types of histories that are figuratively “trashed” or discarded from history books. In this course, we will begin by reading some theoretical discussions around archives and the project of history. What stories do we tell of the past and how do we construct these histories? Which experiences are marginalized or silenced from the pasts we tell? Then, we will examine how archaeology of trash can be used to fill in gaps in historical records. Medicine bottles tell us what ailments people faced and how they dealt with disease. Clothing remains can teach us about how people created an individual aesthetic or style. Animal bones and nut shells teach us about eating habits and how they vary across a society. Throughout the course, students will learn the basics of archaeological methods while engaging case studies to better understand how archaeologists use materials from household trash deposits to study marginalized and under-represented people in the past. This course is interdisciplinary and is relevant for students from anthropology, history, gender and sexuality studies, African American studies, and a range of other fields.