Global Arc

Language plays a crucial role in our lives, providing the thread that connects us with others, conveys meaning, encodes power relations within societies, and much more. Through and within language, poets speak, governments rule, and we conduct much of our everyday lives. Today's linguistic anthropologists have built a synthesis of approaches that draws on many disciplines. This class examines the main strands of that synthesis, learning how to bring together the analysis of micro-level linguistic patterns and the study of language in broader sociocultural contexts.

This course explores visual culture and tools for analyzing and representing culture visually. We will study ethnographic and documentary films alongside ethnographic writings to wrestle with the possibilities of image and text to communicate social life to various audiences. Students will learn to interpret, contextualize, and evaluate a repertoire of work in visual anthropology. Guiding this study is the central question: how does film convey reality, or produce the "effect" of reality? How does that effect compare with what we experience in our everyday lives and what we might access in the lives of others through ethnographic research?

This course draws on anthropology, history, critical theory, films and documentaries, fictive and journalistic writing to explore violence, its power and meaning. We will explore conquest and colonialism, genocidal violence, state violence and political resistance, everyday violence, gendered violence, racialization, torture, as well as witnessing and repair. Building across disciplines and working with heterodox theoretical frameworks (post-colonial/decolonial, non-Western, feminist, and indigenous approaches), this course invites us to understand violence in its multifaceted physical, symbolic, social, political and cultural manifestations.

This course explores the concepts self and person in anthropology, psychoanalysis, and popular culture. In many cultural traditions, from Buddhism in Asia to psychoanalysis and anthropology in the West, the "self"is an important object of speculation, analysis, and power. The course examines three questions: How is the self formed? Under what conditions can the self change? What is the self's relation to the person and the digital? It will explore these questions through written and visual material, ethnography, psychoanalysis, literature, philosophy, and film.

Alcohol is not just an intoxicating drink, but an "embodied material culture" embedded in our experiences of everyday life. What does our relationship with alcohol reveal about individual and collective identities? What does it say about the social and economic realities of a globalized world today? Drawing from literature in anthropology, alcohol studies, and social theory, this course asks students to think critically about the relationship between alcohol and culture in both their own lives and in the lives of others. Readings primarily focus on alcohol production and consumption in Africa.

This course tackles anthropological ways of knowing and explores the evidentiary power of ethnography to advance our understanding of diverse lifeworlds. As students engage classic theoretical texts and contemporary ethnographies, they are introduced to the analytical and writing skills necessary to pursue their own independent anthropological studies: how to develop a research question, locate and analyze relevant sources, situate their interests and concerns in relation to key anthropological debates and concepts, and consider the potential of ethnographic storytelling to expand ethical and political imagination.

This course is an introduction to doing ethnographic fieldwork. Class sessions alternate between discussions of key issues and questions in the theory and practice of ethnography and workshops devoted to fieldwork exercises: participant observation, interviewing, fieldnotes, oral history, multi-modal and virtual ethnographic methods; as well as debates over research ethics and regulatory ethics. Students will build skills to design and conduct ethnographic research, while developing a critical appreciation of the possibilities and limits of ethnographic research to help them understand and engage with the world.

Ethnography is a qualitative method for finding patterns in complicated field data. This course teaches students how to perform rigorous and ethical ethnographic methods for research and application. Students first learn the history and tools of anthropological methods. They are then introduced to case studies where ethnographic methods were used for business, policy development, leadership, and product design. Finally, students develop their own ethnographic research projects. This course is designed for non-anthropology majors or anthropology majors who are unable to take ANT 300 in their junior year.

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 academic sources.

A cross-cultural examination of collective action, power, authority and legitimacy. Topics will include the diversity of systems of leadership and decision making, the sociocultural contexts of egalitarianism and hierarchy, contemporary contests over power-sharing and state legitimacy, forms of power outside the state, and human rights struggles. One three-hour seminar.