Global Arc

The course introduces the media as an arena for anthropological work on the relationships among culture, power and society. Our lives are "saturated" by images and new communications technologies but so too are the media saturated with social practices open to anthropological investigation. In this course, we will emphasize how the idea of reality has framed representations of cultural difference in documentary and mass media. Students will use anthropological concepts to analyze uses of technological media around the globe in order to better understand how cultures are both empowered and excluded through media.

We usually think of anthropology as a translation across different cultures and languages, but encounters between different professions and academic disciplines also call for translation. In this course, we treat interdisciplinary and cross-professional exchanges as ethnographic sites, using methods from linguistic anthropology to examine the challenges of translating expertise across professional fields. We also explore different approaches to interdisciplinary translation, in the process developing our understanding of the broader interaction between language and culture.

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At this polarizing moment of global war and migration, understanding tolerance is vital. This course explores the social, political, and religious facets of tolerance as it has developed in the Mediterranean world, from Ottoman pluralism to modern European multiculturalism. How is tolerance promoted in state policies, legal principles, moral virtues, cultural traditions, and economic practices? How is "culture clash" mediated in conflicts over minority rights, immigration, labor, citizenship, marriage, and education? This course traces the complex boundaries of identity, community, and polity at the historical crossroads of east and west.

This course provides a hands-on introduction to the methods and theories of linguistic anthropology, a sub-field devoted to the study of language and interaction in sociocultural and political processes. We will consider language as more than a neutral conduit for exchanging information or expressing ideas. Through readings and data gathering and analysis exercises, we will explore language as a resource and a factor that shapes and is shaped by our experiences, identities, relationships with and perception of the world and the people around us. Major themes include race, citizenship, gender, disability, and interpretation and power.

Explores the constitution of the body politic in Greece and Cyprus, from the end of the Ottoman Empire to the ongoing formation of the European Union. Through ethnographies and films, we will trace conflict and conciliation between Greek and Turkish peoples, focusing on two historical case studies: the Asia Minor Catastrophe of the 1920s, and the invasion of Cyprus in the 1970s. Topics will include: statehood, nationalism, and empire; war and peace-making; violence and health; migration and patriation; gender, community, and identity; social trauma and generational transmission; archival and bodily memory; and the modern uses of history.

This course explores what we do with language and other modes of expression and how these modes shape our communicative capacities. Why do we gossip? How do we decide what communication is appropriate face-to-face or via text or email? What informs our beliefs about civility and obscenity? How do we decide what credible speech is? What happens when a culturally rooted expressive form (say, a dance) is taken up by people elsewhere for other aesthetic and political ends? We will explore such questions by studying theories and ethnographies of a range of phenomena: love-letters, gossip, poetry, asylum appeals, spoken word, and more.

Magic tricks delight us; biomedicine and human sciences use deception in research (e.g., placeboes); and everyday politeness may obscure painful truths. With deception and disclosure as springboards, this course explores the contextual ambiguity of personal and professional ethics, with special attention to knowledge control. Topics include: social fictions in daily life across cultures; the tangled histories of science, stage magic, and movies; ethically controversial practices in popular culture ("reality" TV, fake news), the arts (fictive memoirs), academia (sharing/plagiarizing), self presentation (racial and sexual passing), and more.

Since the 1920s, the term "gang" has been used to describe all kinds of collectives, from groups of well-dressed mobsters to petty criminals and juvenile delinquents. In nearly a century of research the only consistency in their characterization is as internal Other from the vantage of the law. This class will investigate how the category of "the gang" serves to provoke imaginaries of racial unrest and discourses of "dangerous," threatening subjects in urban enclaves. More broadly we will examine the methods and means by which liberal democratic governments maintain their sovereign integrity through the containment of threatening populations.

This seminar addresses the field of "indigenous art" to unsettle current understandings of self and alter representation. Focusing on South America and drawing parallels with the Americas and Oceania, it investigates studies of material and immaterial culture from the perspective of indigenous world-makings. Attention will be paid to how indigenous arts speak to the dilemmas of self-governance, biocultural diversity, and conservation. We will also address forms of decolonization of Amerindian arts that are at play in museums, festivals, and environmental storytelling, with indigenous artists and intellectuals as their protagonists.