Global Arc

This course starts with discussion of the current state of affairs in anthropological theory to ask what lines of thought and practice got us to where we are today. This includes situating anthropological theory within broader socioeconomic and political currents and exploring how poststructuralism, postcolonial theory, Black studies, and feminism reshaped the discipline in a variety of ways. Throughout the course, students will develop a critical set of skills to creatively harness the analytic power of theory as they engage pressing contemporary issues and seek to mobilize anthropological theory in the writing of their independent work.

This course examines culture's role in reproducing health inequalities in the United States. Different populations have very different levels of access to care, environmental exposures, and cultural beliefs about health and well-being. Institutional cultures also influence how different patients are treated, how evidence is used to determine treatments, and how healthcare priorities are articulated and funded. Additionally, this course explores how medical care is influenced at a national level by health policies. These factors ultimately impact population health and patients' experiences with life, death and chronic disease.

Analysis of a major world region stressing the issues of cultural diversity, history, and social change. Attention will be given to the theoretical contributions of regional study, the history of regional approaches, and the internationalization of the production of anthropological research.

Study of a selected topic in anthropology; the particular choice will vary from year to year.

Analysis of classical and contemporary sources of cultural anthropology, with particular emphasis on those writers dealing with meaning and representation. The topical focus of the course will vary with the instructor. One three-hour seminar.

Anthropology has a long tradition of research on law, rules and norms as social and cultural practices. Since ethnographic inquiry moves easily across jurisdictions and other sorts of domains, it is well adapted to the polycentric, "hybrid" (state/non-state) and asymmetrical power relations that pervade the social fields of law today. We cover major research traditions and their critical legacies through explorations of contemporary legal situations: e.g., human rights claims, migration, social security, policing, criminalization, the judicialization of politics, finance, new forms of precarity and the regulation of personal life.

Things are the staple of our lives, but they are also objects of our studies and products of our activities. We depend on things, but things also depend us. In this course, we will explore convoluted networks of relations that bring together humans, non-humans and things. Looking at things and thinking about things differently, we will try to understand why they are so irresistible to have, to use, to make, to keep, and to exchange. During the course, we will approach things as signs (semiotics), as material entities (new materialisms), as objects of affection (new materialisms), and as key agents of influence (actor-network theory).

Classic and modern theories of religion relevant to anthropologists. Students will familiarize themselves with anthropological monographs dealing with a particular aspect of religion: shamanism, witchcraft, possession and ecstasy, healing. Prerequisite: instructor's permission.

This course considers how the sciences can be studied ethnographically, how they vary culturally one from another, and how scientific knowledge is generated. It develops an understanding of the values and social contexts of Western scientific practice through the comparative study of Western and non-Western systems of knowledge, and explores the implications and validity of the assumption that the sciences are culturally produced rather than objective standards transcending culture. One three-hour seminar.

Water is essential to life. How humans interact with water is a key part of us biologically/geographically/socially (irrigation systems, transportation, property rights, religion, metaphor, or all of the above). But water defies our attempts to control it. It slips through cracks in our infrastructure, flows across our borders and comes in too great (floods, storms) or too small (droughts, desertification) quantities. Looking at humanity via water allows us to address questions of ecology, rights, culture and new anthropological approaches to materialism and the implications of being biological beings in a world shared with other beings.