DEPARTMENT OF ANTHROPOLOGY

Fall 2021 Class Schedule

Provisional schedule as of June 2021; course times and locations are subject to change.

*Starred courses required of all majors 

 Fall quarter 2021 course descriptions.

ANTHRO  101-6-21: First-Year Seminar: Law and Disorder

Anthropologists are committed to understanding other cultures in their own terms. One way of developing such an understanding is to read works that they have written or recited. This class will focus on two such works from cultures as different from each other as they are from ourselves. Njal's Saga is a medieval Icelandic story of a series of revenge killings that spins further and further out of control. Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee is a fictional account of how a real 8th century magistrate solves three mysterious Through each of these books, we will explore the different ways in which cultures understand and implement law and lawlessness, justice and injustice, loyalty and treachery.

ANTHRO  101-6-22: First-Year Seminar: Biological Thought and Action

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

ANTHRO  101-6-23: First-Year Seminar: Fantastic Archaeology: Science and Pseudoscience

Did astronauts from another planet establish ancient civilizations on Earth? Were the Americas discovered by Columbus, a Ming dynasty fleet or by Vikings much earlier? Did the Maya Aztec build their pyramids to resemble those of dynastic Egypt? Television is replete with stories of ancient aliens and archaeological mysteries. The impact of such alternative realities on society and history cannot be discounted. They have been used to support nationalistic agendas, racial biases, and religious movements, all of which can have considerable influence on contemporary society.

In this course, we will  study "fantastic" stories, puzzles, hoaxes, imaginative worlds and alternative theories. We will learn when, how and what kinds of evidence these alternative theories have used to fascinate the public and illustrate their hoaxes. We will question such theories by using critical thinking and analytical tools to diagnose what is fact and fiction. We will utilize the surviving evidence that archaeologists find to understand cultural contact and interactions.

 ANTHRO  101-6-24: First-Year Seminar: Ethnography of College Community

How do cultural anthropologists write about people and places? How can we understand community building at Northwestern University after pandemic turned the world upside-down and transformed basic social practices?  To find out, you will study and practice anthropology’s most famous method of research and writing, ethnography.  Along with weekly readings, student-run bi-weekly roundtable discussions will pair NU campus groups with Evanston organizations for discussions focusing on intersecting social and economic power structures such as race, gender, sexuality, and economic inequality.  Discussions and readings will inform your ethnographic observation of campus and local communities.  Conducting participant-observation research will empower you to 1. make sense of what’s going on around you in the current moment, 2. turn an analytical eye toward Northwestern, and 3. critically develop your new role as a college student.  Requirements include participation in class discussion and roundtables, fieldnotes exercises, and one short article presentation. These all build toward a focused final project on an aspect of college life you choose and observe throughout the quarter.  Materials include one text for purchase ($22 new), as well as book chapters, articles, and films/visuals accessible free online.

ANTHRO  214-0-1: Archaeology: Unearthing History

This course is an introduction to the anthropological subfield of archaeology, its theories and methods, and the political and social issues that arise when we study human pasts. In this course, we look at the history of the discipline and its theoretical underpinnings, as well as methodological topics including how archaeologists create research designs, discover and excavate sites, and analyze artifacts and features. We will also explore how archaeology confronts and deals with contemporary issues critical to the archaeological project and the communities that archaeologists engage with: e.g. heritage preservation and Indigenous/community rights, Black lives and Black histories, environmental degradation and sustainability, feminist archaeology and gender equality. Throughout the course, students will learn about archaeological case studies from around the globe and from a variety of historical periods.

ANTHRO  215-0-20: The Study of Culture through Language

This course offers an introduction to the foundational relationship between language and culture by examining anthropological approaches to how language reflects and transforms our ideas about the world and the people living in it. Language enables us to establish relationships with institutions, ideologies, and other human beings. We will discuss general processes of linguistic interaction in first few weeks, then turn to topics in linguistic anthropology to see if we can detect the operation of these processes in action. Case studies will illustrate how language is put to work in specific contexts students might experience on a daily basis, including listening to music, tweeting, and attending class.

ANTHRO  309-0-20: Human Osteology 

Knowledge of human osteology forms the basis of physical and forensic anthropology, bio-archaeology, 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.

ANTHRO  316-0-20: Forensic Anthropology 

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  322-0-20: Introduction to Archaeology Research Design and Methods 

This class is fundamentally about how we do archaeology: how to design an archaeological research project.  We will examine the main methods in every archaeologists’ took kit: archaeological survey, excavation, and materials analysis.  Over the course of the quarter, we will take what interests you about archaeology and turn that in to a design for an archaeological research project.  We will learn how to frame archaeological questions in terms of intellectual merit (the potential to advance knowledge) and broader impacts (the potential to benefit society).  The main goal of the course is to design an archaeological research project.  We will achieve this goal across the quarter through writing a proposal to conduct an archaeological research project designed by the student.  We will review successful proposals by archaeologists to decipher how researchers link theory, data, methods, and analysis in their archaeological research design and use these as templates for our own project designs. Upon completion of the course students should be comfortable with designing archaeological research and writing research proposals to get funding for their project, important skills to know whether you plan to continue in archaeology and academia, or not.

ANTHRO 328-0-20:  The Maya

What was life like for the ancient Maya people who inhabited what is now Central America? This course examines one of the best-known pre-Columbian civilizations in the New World: Ancient Maya civilization. The course will focus on the achievements of the ancient Maya - one of the most advanced civilizations in history - prior to the Spanish conquest in ca. 1500 AD. We will look at archaeology - from temples, cities, and hieroglyphic writing to farmers' homes and fields - to explore ancient Maya daily lives.

The course will begin with the words of the ancient Maya.  We will read excerpts from the Popol Vuh, the Sacred Book of the Quiché Maya.  We will then study and learn to decipher in a rudimentary fashion, the ancient Maya hieroglyphs, to gain insight into Maya beliefs, religion, and worldview. The course will then turn to archaeology’s material record of buildings, temples, and artifacts to learn about aspects of ancient Maya life that were not written down and types of people, like everyday people, not recorded in written texts.  Major topics will include the rise of ancient Maya civilization and the ancient Maya social, economic, and political systems, subsistence, and religion. The course concludes with an in- depth study of daily life in the ancient Maya world. We will explore what it was like to be a Maya farmer living in the small Maya farming community of Chan in Belize, and discover the lessons of sustainable lifestyles that we can learn from ancient Maya farmers.

 ANTHRO  370-0-20: Anthropology in Historical Perspective

Rather than attempting the impossible--an overview of the whole history of the discipline of anthropology-this course will focus on one particular problem: the relationship between theory and ethnographic description in cultural Anthropology. The course will attempt to survey the development of certain schools of thought in the discipline since the mid-nineteenth century: evolutionism; historical particularism; structural-functionalism; culture and personality; cultural materialism; interpretive anthropology. In order to examine the ways in which each of these theoretical approaches affects the ways in which anthropologists choose to describe what they observe, the class will read a series of ethnographies (or excerpts from larger works) written at different times from different points of view.

 ANTHRO  390-0-21: Topics In Anthropology: American Suburbias: Race, Class, and Placemaking

This course will explore American suburbia through an anthropological lens. In addition to the study of the history of suburban development and sprawl, this course examines ethnographies, film, and popular media to explore major themes related to suburban social landscapes: the construction of the American suburb in the national imaginary; the relationship between the city and the suburb; race and racial formation; class and mobility; gender and generation; and shifting demographics, politics, and labor in contemporary suburbs.

ANTHRO  390-0-22: Topics In Anthropology: Quant Mtds: Turning Numbers Into a Story

This class will provide rigorous guidance on how one moves through the scientific process, from articulating scientific questions to answering and presenting them in a way that your audience can really relate to. We will do this using data a large dataset. Specific skills to be developed include human subjects training, formal literature review, hypothesis generation, development of analytic plans, data cleaning, performing descriptive statistics, creation of figures and tables, writing up results, scientific poster creation, and oral presentation of results. This course will be a terrific foundation for writing scientific manuscripts, theses, and dissertations.

ANTHRO  390-0-23: Topics In Anthropology: Political Ecology

This class is an introduction to Political Ecology, a multidisciplinary body of theory and research that analyzes the environmental articulations of political, economic, and social difference and inequality. The key concepts, debates, and approaches in this field address two main questions: (1) How do humans' interactions with the environment shape power and politics? (2) How do power and politics shape humans' interactions with the environment? These questions are critical to understanding and addressing the current issues of climate change, the Anthropocene, and environmental justice. Topics discussed in this class will include environmental scarcity and degradation, sustainability and conservation, and environmental justice. Readings will come from the disciplines of geography, anthropology and archaeology. Case studies will range from the historical to the present-day. No prior background in the environmental sciences is needed to appreciate and engage in this course.

ANTHRO  390-0-26: Topics In Anthropology: Ethnography of Spain

This undergraduate seminar offers an overview of the anthropology of Spain by reading ethnographies that deal with a range of themes, including, but not limited to: race and religion, gender and sexuality, empire and (post)colonialism, migration and citizenship, exile and return, labor and class, the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath, dictatorship and democracy, linguistic and cultural difference, regionalism and nationalism, and Spain’s relationship to Europe, the Mediterranean, the Atlantic world, and modernity. We will seek to understand (a) the cultural and political practices through which Spaniards have understood themselves in relation to other peoples and places over time; and (b) how scholars have constituted “Spain” and “Spanish culture” as objects of knowledge over time. Thus, rather than attempting a comprehensive survey of “Spain” or “Spanish culture,” we will examine several key historical moments and themes that have shaped contemporary Spanish society and politics. Throughout, our focus will be trained on how knowledge about Spain is produced and consumed, and how that knowledge is mobilized in the present by a wide range of people, institutions, and projects. Although our readings will be grounded in anthropology, we will also draw on other disciplines (history, philosophy, and cultural studies) and various media (music, podcasts, and film), as well as the unpredictable unfolding of current events. Thinking together, we will discuss why and how “Spain” matters in the world and for us.

ANTHRO  390-0-27: Topics In Anthropology: Land, Identity and the Sacred: American Indian Religious and Sacred Sites

This class focuses on a cross section of religion, law, cultural preservation, land management, and ethno-ecology. We will focus on Native American sacred sites and cultural landscapes and their relationships to land, ceremony, history, and tribal/ethnic identity. Central to the class will be a focus on the sacred aspects of tribal identity and the role that landscape plays in the creation and maintenance of these identities. The class will cover laws pertaining to religious freedoms and how they are applied to Native and non-Native contexts throughout U.S. history, along with the histories and philosophies that have, and still influences these polices. The class will cover both Federal and Tribal management of sacred sites, ceremonial sites, and religious/spiritual traditions. Important to this discuss, will be the role of oral history in the preservation of culture and relationships to landscapes and how it has/is being utilized the U.S. legal system pertaining to Native American Tribes. The role of treaties and the conflicts that arise between Tribal/U.S. government to government relations and responsibilities will also be covered.

 ANTHRO  430-0-20: Integrative Seminar in Society, Biology and Health 

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?

ANTHRO  490-0-21: Topics In Anthropology: American Suburbias: Race, Class, and Placemaking

This course will explore American suburbia through an anthropological lens. In addition to the study of the history of suburban development and sprawl, this course examines ethnographies, film, and popular media to explore major themes related to suburban social landscapes: the construction of the American suburb in the national imaginary; the relationship between the city and the suburb; race and racial formation; class and mobility; gender and generation; and shifting demographics, politics, and labor in contemporary suburbs.

ANTHRO  490-0-22: Topics In Anthropology: Topics in Anthropology: Archaeology of Buildings 

 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 496-0-20 Bridging Seminar 

 The bridging seminar is designed as a forum to generate conversation across anthropology's four subfields. Intended for first year anthropology PhD students, the bridging seminar covers material across the subfields that relates to a specific theme or set of themes that rotates every year. Students are expected to complete readings, attend department colloquium talks, and be an active discussant. This year, we will focus on a mix of external speakers and readings on the hottest topics in linguistic, sociocultural, biological, and archaeological anthropology, including the impact of COVID-19 on anthropological research.