DEPARTMENT OF ANTHROPOLOGY

Spring 2022 Class Schedule

 *Starred courses required of all majors 

 Spring quarter 2022 course descriptions 

 ANTHRO 101-6-21 - Perspectives on Primates, First-Year Seminar

In the movies, lemurs dance, capuchins slap people in the face, and apes take over the world. We have a fascination with non-human primates due the many similarities we share. Beyond being constantly faced with images of our closest living relatives, however, our lives are substantially influenced by our similarities with other primates and how they are interpreted. Whether or not we think of humans as 'just another primate' or as completely unique among the primates can shape our conception of ourselves and our societies. It can also shape our attitudes toward primate research, conservation, and beyond. In this course we will explore perspectives on human-primate similarities and how they influence our understanding of human aggression, xenophobia, gender roles, sexual behavior, and more. Using writing and discussion, we will also explore how unique humans really are compared to other primates. At the end of this course you will have an appreciation for primate diversity and the complex history of primate research. You will be able to describe how different humans really are from other primates, and you will be able to pinpoint how primate research and perspectives on primates influence your daily life. Most importantly, you will be able to explain how science has broad social ramifications.

 ANTHRO 101-6-22 - Islam and Feminism, First-Year Seminar

This course examines the historical and contemporary politics of gender, sexuality, and feminism in various Muslim communities across the globe. It addresses the diversity of Muslim feminist movements, discourses, and practices through various mediums and genres (i.e., academic books and articles, fiction, poems, comics, fine arts, images, music clips, documentaries, newspaper and magazine articles, blogs, vlogs, movies, etc.). It will cover a broad range of themes including sex, gender, race, class, sexuality, female respectability, masculinity, feminism, LGBTIQ activism, domestic violence, the gendered practice of veiling, Islamic fashion, colonialism, orientalism, and nationalism. As a First-Year Seminar, this course will help students further develop critical thinking, reading, and writing skills.

 ANTHRO 213-0 - Human Origins

Anthropology is a holistic analysis of the human condition. The study of human origins, or paleoanthropology, is a sub-field 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 240-0 - Anthropology of Money

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.

 ANTHRO 290-0 - Japanese Culture and Society, Topics in Anthropology

This course offers an anthropological introduction to Japanese society and culture through a critical investigation of a wide range of films, from Yusujiro Ozu's classic films to Hayao Miyazaki's animated films and various documentary films contemporary Japan. Topics of investigation include war and peace, kinship and marriage, education, work and workplaces, gender and sexuality, nationalism and nostalgia, ethnic minorities, aging society, and techno-scientific utopia and dystopia.

 ANTHRO 309-0 - 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 312-0 - Human Population Biology

This course will provide an overview of current theory and research in human population biology. The course will focus on the influence of ecological and social factors on various aspects of human biology (e.g. metabolism, growth, nutritional status, disease patterns). The adaptation concept will first be presented, discussed, and critiqued. We will then examine how adaptation to different ecological stressors (e.g. temperature, solar radiation, high altitude, diet/nutrition) promotes human biological diversity.

 ANTHRO 315-0 - 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 325-0 - Archaeological Methods Laboratory

What kind of wine did King Midas drink? How does the health of ancient people compare to today? Where do we find the earliest evidence of domesticated plants and animals? And how have people and goods moved across long distances in the past? Archaeologists address these questions and many more through a wide array of techniques borrowed from the hard sciences. New methods can reveal surprising information and radically transform our knowledge about past societies, and as such are essential parts of every archaeologist's toolkit. In this hands-on class, we will survey a range of archaeological science techniques to understand how they work; how to do them; and what they can tell us about the past. This course will provide a basic introduction to the primary techniques of archaeological science, including the analysis of plant and animal remains, residues, human skeletons, ceramics, and more.

 ANTHRO 327-0 - Historical Archaeology, Archaeology of Ethnicity in America

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 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.

 ANTHRO 330-0 - Ethnography of N. Africa, Peoples of the World

While North Africa (the Maghrib) is often considered an appendage of the Muslim Middle East, this Mediterranean region merits study on its own, given its French colonial past and its connections to both sub-Saharan Africa and Europe. This course introduces students to the Maghrib region, with the primary focus on Morocco, through text and expressive culture (visual culture, music and sound, material culture). Readings draw from anthropology, literature, biography, and popular culture, and from Maghribi and Western authors and culture-makers. Students learn about everyday life in this region through thematic foci on ethnic minorities and majorities, language, gender, law, migration, natural resources, and human rights. No reading is required outside the syllabus.

 ANTHRO 383-0 - Environmental Anthropology

Environmental anthropology is a more recent outgrowth of ecological anthropology, which emerged in the 1960s and 70s as an empirically-based focus on systemic human-environment relationships, especially as they pertain to patterns of social change and adaptation. Environmental anthropology became more prominent in the 1980s, and is typically characterized by research on communities' engagements with contemporary environmental issues. Environmental anthropology has greater commitments to advocacy, critique, and application than ecological anthropology, but as we'll see in this course, the proliferation of "new ecologies" (as opposed to "new environmentalisms") denotes the continued synergy between ecological and environmental anthropologies.

This course is divided into two parts. Part I will provide an historical overview of the development of environmental anthropology. We will cover some of the most influential research trends in the field: environmental determinism, cultural ecology, systems ecology, ethnoecology, historical ecology, political ecology, and post-humanist ecology. Part II will then pivot to the application of environmental anthropology knowledge to some of the most pressing environmental issues facing the contemporary world: population pressure, capitalist consumption patterns, biodiversity conservation, sustainable agriculture, climate change, and environmental justice.

 ANTHRO 389-0 - Ethnographic Methods and Analysis

 This intensive, advanced undergraduate-graduate seminar is designed to prepare students to design and carry out an independent ethnographic research project. During the first half of the class, we will explore different approaches to doing ethnographic research by: discussing selected readings from published ethnographies; listening to professional anthropologists describing their research process; and completing in-class and field exercises that will afford students the opportunity to experiment with a variety of ethnographic methods and research tools. In the second half of the course, each student will carry out an ethnographic field project (either individually or in a group).  During class meetings, we will listen to one another’s reports about their ongoing projects, and engage in peer review, in-class free writing, and other exercises.  At the end of the quarter, students will submit individually written ethnographic reports that weave theoretical and observational insights together. In addition, graduate students in the seminar will develop a short concept paper for a future independent ethnographic research project.

 ANTHRO 390-0-21 - Biocultural Perspectives on Water Insecurity, Topics in Anthropology

The first objective of this course is to introduce students to the many ways that water impacts our world. We will discuss what the international recommendations for safely managed water are and the health and social consequences of water insecurity. The second objective is to explore why there is such variety in water insecurity worldwide. These discussions will be guided by the socio-ecological framework, in which dimensions ranging from the individual to the geopolitical are considered. Influences on access to water will be broadly considered; we will draw on literature in global health, ethnography, the life sciences, and public policy. The third objective is to develop critical thinking and writing abilities to reflect on the multi-dimensional causes and consequences of water insecurity and the appropriateness of potential solutions.

 ANTHRO 390-0-22 - Critical Cartographies and Participatory GIS, Topics in Anthropology

In recent years scholars working in a host of contexts have begun to adopt critical cartography as a toolset to expand on human experience in past and present landscapes. Critical cartography refers to an assemblage of theoretical and methodological approaches, drawn from feminist, indigenous and black geographies, that consider how space and its representation have been used to reinforce or challenge social, economic and political inequalities including but not limited to racialization, displacement, and erasure. Given these topics, it is no surprise then that techniques including countermapping and participatory GIS have found a ready audience amongst scholars working in contemporary and colonial contexts where the spatial ambitions of the powerful are often asserted through texts, while challenges to those claims can be ascertained through material and historical records. In this course we will focus on the work of scholars mapping critical cartographies in both explicit and implicit ways. While this course will pay special attention to the contemporary and relatively recent pasts, examples will also draw on ancient and less familiar contexts.

 ANTHRO 390-0-23 - Ancient Cities of the Americas, Topics in Anthropology

When colonial empires invaded the Americas in the 16th century, Europeans marveled at the Indigenous cities distributed across the continent. This course examines the ancient cities of the Americas: their origins, their configurations, and their operations. It considers how archaeologists define urbanism among ancient societies, and why not every human settlement qualifies as a city. In this class, you will learn about the attributes of pre-modern urbanism in the Americas.

 We will begin this course by studying the earliest experiments with settlement nucleation in the world. Then, we will review scholarship on ancient cities in North, Central, and South America. Topics will include urban configurations, everyday life in ancient cities, how inequality was built into urban space, providing for city dwellers, population and migration in cities, urban institutions, and cosmology. We will discuss the characteristics of ancient Indigenous cities such as Cahokia in Illinois, Tenochtitlan in Mexico, Tikal in Guatemala, and Machu Pichu in Peru, among others. This class will provide you a general understanding of the ancient civilizations of the Americas through the characteristics of its major cities.

 ANTHRO 390-0-24 - Violence, Ruins, and the Politics of the Past, Topics in Anthropology

How do histories of violence shape the present and the material world? How are some histories remembered, memorialized, erased, or forgotten? Why do certain places come to signify past events and become sites of political conflict in the present? This class will address histories of state and intercommunal violence, how these histories are remembered and politicized today, and how they are reflected and negotiated through the material world. The course will begin with an introduction to questions of violence, memory, the politics of history, place, landscape, and monuments. It will continue by examining a variety of case studies from different geographical areas. The various examples and contexts will exemplify these themes of how violent pasts and the spaces and objects associated with them become sites of political contestation in the present. The class will then focus particularly on the example of Turkey as a case study through which to approach questions of memory, place, and histories of state violence against minority groups. We will examine in depth the case of the violent transformation of the Ottoman Empire into the contemporary Republic of Turkey with a focus on the 1915 Genocide of Ottoman Armenians and the ongoing war between the Turkish state and the Kurdish minority, in the context of a long history of state violence against minority communities. Throughout the course students will engage with various and competing narratives of histories of violence, including state denial, memories of survivors, and attempts to resurrect the memories of repressed events. Students will engage with theoretical debates relating to memory, state violence, materiality, and space and place, and will design an individual research project relating to the themes of the course.

 ANTHRO 390-0-25 - Jews and Muslims in Contemporary Spain, Topics in Anthropology

This undergraduate seminar examines the shifting place of Jews and Muslims in contemporary Spain. Together, we will explore several interrelated questions: (1) How have "Spain" and "Europe" variously been defined as modern, white, Christian, or secular by figuring Jews and Muslims as others? (2) How have these terms and the forms of life and history that they purport to represent changed over time? (3) What are the similarities and differences between the "Jewish Question" and the "Muslim Problem"? (4) How do Jews and Muslims understand themselves in relation to Spain, Europe, and to each other? At a time when racism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, and right-wing populist movements are ascendant in Spain and across Europe, we will work collaboratively to not only answer these questions, but to formulate new ones. To do so, we will consult scholarship in anthropology, history, cultural theory, and philosophy as well as on fiction, film, and journalism as resources. Throughout the term, we will be especially attuned to the forms of inclusion and exclusion that have affected Jews and Muslims in Spain, always with an eye toward how such abstractions come to matter in everyday life.

 ANTHRO 390-0-26 - Queer Belonging, Topics in Anthropology

In this seminar, we will explore queer forms of belonging, particularly through differing understandings of kinship, intimacy, and what it means to be together. Moving within and beyond queer as a form of selfhood, this course will explicitly consider what queer means in relation to others and as embedded in social worlds. Together, we will engage texts and materials that push back on normative understandings of belonging, especially through contemporary conversations of race, gender, class, and sexuality. Drawing from the literature of anthropology and queer theory, as well as psychoanalysis, critical race theory, feminist studies, and the broader social sciences, we will question and reenvision themes such as the family, reproduction, friendship, monogamy, community, and home. We will consider "queer" in different formations such as self, dyads/other, groups, communities, worlds, and absences; and we will consider queer belonging with different endurances and temporalities such as fleeting intimacies, long-term attachments, and digital encounters

 ANTHRO 390-0-27 - Global Im/Mobilities: Borders, Migration, and Citi, Topics in Anthropology

This seminar asks the following questions about borders, migration, and citizenship: (1) What are the forces—political, cultural, and environmental—that facilitate or inhibit human circulation? (2) How do governments, NGOs, scholars, and wider publics draw distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate forms of human mobility (e.g., "economic migrants" versus "refugees")? (3) How are migrants affected by efforts to regulate their movement, and what alternative forms of citizenship and belonging have they created? We will draw on a broad range of geographical examples and read widely across disciplines. Collectively, we will explore the ways that global im/mobilities have been lived, and how they shape our world today.

 ANTHRO 401-1 - Logic of Inquiry in Anthropology (Bio)

This course will provide an overview of key theories and concepts in biological anthropology. Specific attention will be given to how biological anthropology articulates with the other sub-disciplines of anthropology. General principles from evolutionary biology will first be discussed, examining how they can be applied to look at human biological and behavioral variation. Alternative approaches for explaining human variation are then explored and considered within a historical context. Third, we will examine the material (i.e., fossil) evidence for human evolution, focusing on the interplay between biological and cultural/behavioral evolutionary trends. Finally, we will examine how several aspects of modern human variation (eg., growth, nutritional status, morbidity and mortality) are shaped by the interplay between genetic, ecological and socio-cultural factors. Throughout we will highlight the utility of the bio-cultural framework for explaining human diversity.

ANTHRO 484-0 - Seminar in Linguistic Anthropology

 This graduate seminar examines the intersection of language and law, taking legal institutions, structures, and ideologies as important sites for the creation, negotiation, and reformulation of social and cultural norms and practices. We consider the ways in which culture and language shape law, and the ways in which law conditions and constrains culture and language. The legal anthropological texts we read pay close attention to spoken and written language. The linguistic anthropological readings take disputes as their objects of analysis. We consider in cross-cultural perspective such matters as testimony, evidence, persuasion, performance, and linguistic rights as human rights. Throughout, questions of power, agency, and inequality (especially around gender, race/ethnicity, and legality/illegality) animate our investigations. Course materials include ethnographies and theoretical works. 

ANTHRO 485-0 - Seminar in Mind, Body, & Health

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.

 ANTHRO 490-0 - Archaeol, Communities, Publics, Topics in Anthropology

Who owns the past? Why and for whom do we study the past? Archaeology is performed in a variety of political and economic settings and for a variety of reasons. In this class, we will examine the multiple stakeholders involved in the archaeological enterprise, and the often conflicting demands they place on archaeologists as academics and citizens, with the goal of developing tools and strategies that can improve diversity in the subfield and communication to non-academic groups. We will consider calls for diverse "archaeologies" which incorporate alternate models and experiences of the past, but sometimes challenge our basic notions about the field. We will also consider the responsibilities that archaeologists have to communities, and how we might envision future, collaborative community archaeologies. Finally, we will focus on the different publics at home and abroad that impact and consume archaeological research, and how we might better reach diverse audiences.

 ANTHRO 496-0 - 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. Readings will be articles that will be made available as pdfs. There is no paper or exam for this class.

 Classes will meet approximately three times each quarter, beginning in the fall.