Global Arc

Average credit card debt of Americans is $16,000; average college loan debt $30,000. How and why do people go into debt? Why is debt negatively linked to "usury" in some cultures while in others not having debt is a mark of being "underleveraged"? How can "debt" sometimes be an instrument of social solidarity and other times be a source of social discord? In this course we will draw on history, political theory, economics, and anthropology to look at debates about "debt" in different places and times as diverse as 4th century Greece, 18th century England, 19th century Egypt, and the 2008 Financial Crisis and its aftermath around the world.

According to the UN, by 2050, two-thirds of the world's population will live in cities. Urban life -- whether or not that means living in close proximity to each other, interacting with infrastructure, or new experimentations with the built environment -- has an impact upon how we experience the world and our sense of place. In this class, we will discuss theory on urbanism, infrastructure, and urban anthropology, and we will conduct observations about the built environment in and around campus. This class should be of interest to those interested in urban theory, anthropology, or architecture.

Anthropology provides creative insights and solutions for tackling business problems often overlooked by more data-driven approaches. From the practical (e.g. how to design a user-friendly digital platform) to the ethical (e.g. what are the responsibilities of a corporation to society), this course examines how individual scholars and companies use anthropology to study, critique, and/or meet the needs of the private sector.

How might the humanities deepen our understanding of disease, healing, and care? This course draws from anthropological approaches and dialogues with history, literature, philosophy, ethics, religion, film and visual arts to understand the cross-cultural significance of medicine and present-day struggles for wellbeing in the United States and comparatively. As we inquire into the ways biosocial and medical realities actively shape each other, we will become familiarized with ethnographic research methods and critical ethical debates. Students will be encouraged to develop community-based research and to experiment with modes of expression.

We're surrounded by narratives that AI (artificial intelligence) is rapidly learning, listening, coding, calculating, and altogether acting more like (or better than) humans. But what does it mean to be human? Which "actual" humans do "artificially" intelligent agents mimic or resemble? We will consider such questions through the lens of anthropology, a discipline dedicated to tracking the ever-changing definitions of being human. By reading and creating alternative stories about AI, we explore how race, citizenship, religion, gender, sexuality, disability, class, labor, environment and empire fundamentally shape human-machine borders.

Exploration of cross-cultural constructions of sickness, disease, health, and healing interrogates our basic ethical, moral, and political positions. Our healing and disease models derive from specific cultural assumptions about society, gender, class, age, ethnicity, and race. Categories of disease from one culture can compromise ethical positions held by another. We pursue the moral implications of a critique of medical development and the political and ethical implications of treating Western medicine as ethnoscience as well as universal truth. One 90-minute lecture, one 90-minute class.

Taking both a global and a local approach, this course investigates how women around the world experience their lives and their bodies across the life cycle. We explore how not only social roles but also images, uses, and meanings of the bodies that all women inhabit are shaped in deep, though often invisible, ways by cultural values and social institutions. Through readings, films, interviews, and ethnographic exercises that compare women's experiences of their bodies in the contemporary US with those of women elsewhere across the globe, the course introduces an anthropological perspective on the gendered body.

This seminar traces the historical roots and growth of the Black Lives Matter social movement in the United States and comparative global contexts. The movement and course are committed to resisting, unveiling, and undoing histories of state sanctioned violence against Black and Brown bodies. The course seeks to document the forms of dispossession that Black Americans face, and offers a critical examination of the prison industrial complex, police brutality, urban poverty, and white supremacy in the US.

How do we grapple with the lasting, unintended impacts of science, engineering and medicine in "the nation's service and the service of humanity"? What lessons can we learn from the past to conduct morally sound research and generate culturally inclusive knowledge? We explore perspectives from indigenous studies to approach the intersection of Princeton's history, nuclear science, settler colonialism and environmental racism to collectively imagine a more holistic and inclusive approach to studying science, technology and the environment. Students will conduct original research that draws from and contributes to the Nuclear Princeton project.

This course will introduce students to the comparative study of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. We will take a broad hemispheric approach instead of focusing solely on the experiences of any particular native community, allowing students to both acquaint themselves with the diversity of indigenous communities and better understand the multitude of indigenous experiences--or, what it means to be indigenous--across regional contexts. How do processes of imperial expansionism and settler colonialisms shape the conditions within which indigenous Americans now live? How do native peoples relate to settler colonial governing bodies today?