Global Arc

An assessment and understanding of the evolutionary history and processes in our lineage over the last 7 to 10 million years, with a focus on the ~2.5 million year history of our own genus (Homo).This outline of the history of our lineage offers an anthropological and evolutionary context for what it means to be human today. Two lectures, one preceptorial.

This seminar addresses the social relations in which mental health, mental illness, and psycho-medical knowledge are entangled and produced. We will engage various cross-cultural approaches to mental conflicts and pathologies: psychoanalysis, ethnopsychology, biomedical psychiatry, transcultural psychiatry, and religious and "alternative" practices of diagnosis and healing. Drawing on ethnographic and clinical studies from Greek and other contexts, we will examine the role of culture in determining lines between normal and pathological, and consider the intertwining of psyche and body in human experience and behavior.

A course taught by different members of the department and visiting faculty on various subjects not normally taught in regular courses.

This course draws upon core anthropological studies of law to investigate conceptions, operations, and transformations of law across Western and non-Western societies. The course also draws upon legal theory and exemplary court cases to probe diverse forms of judicial reasoning and activism. How do legal concepts and categories--such as rights, duties, obligations, liabilities, risks, injuries, evidence, redress, and even personhood--come to appear as fundamental, natural, or universal? How are seemingly essential natures of law, in fact, constructed and produced and to which social and political effect?

An introduction to anthropology and key topics in becoming and being human. Anthropology examines human experience through diverse lenses integrating biology, ecology, language, history, philosophy, and the day to day lives of peoples from across the globe. Anthropology has things to say about being human, it seeks to make the familiar a bit strange and the strange quite familiar. We will take critical reflexive and reflective approaches in asking about key aspects of being human (like war/peace; race/racism; sex/gender; childhood/parenting; religion and the human imagination; human relations to other species).Two lectures, one preceptorial.

This course explores the social and cultural contexts of economic experience in the US and around the world. It considers how the consumption, production, and circulation of goods--today and in times past--become invested with personal and collective meanings. It pays special attention to symbolic and political dimensions of work, property (material, intellectual, and cultural), wealth, and "taste" (i.e., needs and wants). Additionally, course participants do a bit of anthropological fieldwork by learning to draw everyday experiences systematically into conversation with more familiar academic and media sources.

Why do we drink "venti" coffee out of paper cups? Why is sugar consumed in large quantities in some parts of the world? The mundaneness of having to eat every day hides the powerful role of markets, ecologies and culture in shaping our consumption choices. From slavery to contemporary artisan and fair trade markets, food choice and food taboos offer us a way to express our ethical and cultural identities. Using several key anthropological theories, this course explores food economics, environmental sustainability, and consumption at the nexus of desire and repression.

This course explores the meaningful social contexts of objects, relationships, and values deemed "economic" in American culture. Employing anthropological, sociological, and historical strategies of interpretation, and drawing on comparative research from around the globe, participants will consider the embeddedness of the "economic" in historically specific sociocultural experience, and their mutual influences. Participants will also get an introductory feel for ethnographic "fieldwork", using their own everyday experience systematically and integrating it with other kinds of research.

This course explores how religious media in the United States shapes cultural and social identities. From televangelism to religious radio programming, the mass marketing of faith is contributing to how people understand themselves as gendered, raced, and classed subjects. But are these programs helping to sustain a fragile consensus within and between religious communities, or are they threatening religious pluralism? This course examines what is at stake politically in this religious war of symbols generated within mediascapes.

How do gendered and sexual identities, relationships, and meanings differ and how are they similar across cultural and historical contexts? This course illustrates the uses of fieldwork and other anthropological methods in answering questions about the universality or particularity of gendered experience. We draw on theories about human nature, cultural meaning, and linguistic and social structures, power, and agency to understand representations of maleness, femaleness, and other sexed/gendered distinctions, to explore how such representations are made and remade, and to relate them to other kinds of social difference and inequality.