Global Arc

Refusal of a debt, said anthropologist Marcel Mauss, was a declaration of war. Debt, politics, violence, and power have always been intertangled. Empires long used debt to maintain power and trade across Africa and the Middle East. Debt was later seen as a "trap" for many postcolonial states. In the United States, debt crises are entangled with legacies of enslavement and internal colonialism. In this course, students will analyze the role of debt in their lives by drawing on history, economics, literature, film and, of course, anthropology.

Forensic anthropology involves medico-legal cases where human remains have lost "personhood" (an individual cannot be identified due to decomposition or destruction of unique personal features). We will explore techniques of analysis that biological anthropologists apply to forensic cases. We will blend the sub-disciplines of social and biological anthropology by tracing the intertwined physiological and social factors that shape human variation and life experience in an urban setting. We weigh and consider epigenetic mechanisms by which external variables may bring about heritable molecular changes in the expression of genetic phenotypes.

Forensic anthropology involves medico-legal cases where human remains have lost "personhood" (an individual cannot be identified due to decomposition or destruction of unique personal features). We will explore techniques of analysis that biological anthropologists apply to forensic cases. We will blend the sub-disciplines of social and biological anthropology by tracing the intertwined physiological and social factors that shape human variation and life experience in an urban setting. We weigh and consider epigenetic mechanisms by which external variables may bring about heritable molecular changes in the expression of genetic phenotypes.

A survey of current data and debates in evolutionary theory, molecular anthropology, primate biology and behavior, primate and human evolution, and modern human biology and adaptation. One three-hour seminar.

This course explores the central role of food in everyday life in US and global contexts. Using a comparative global perspective, we will address key questions about histories of food production and consumption, the ways in which food production and distribution differentially affect the lives of those working in the food industry and those consuming food. We will think through how global shifts in food production and distribution impact human lives on national, local, and familial levels.

Why do development projects fail? This course examines why well-meaning development experts get it wrong. It looks closely at what anthropologists mean by culture and why most development experts fail to attend to the cultural forces that hold communities together. By examining development projects from South Asia to the United States, students learn the relevance of exchange relations, genealogies, power, religion, and indigenous law.

This course works through Asian American writings, criticism, ethnography, and cultural production, to explore the persistent identification of Asian American people with nonhuman, disembodied, and dangerous entities. It explores both how Asian American racialization has developed in tandem with figures of contagion, animality, and machinery that undergird and pre-figure the explosion of Covid-era anti-Asian hate crimes; and also how Asian American and other thinkers, ethnographers, and artists chart spaces outside of conventional human-ness through reappropriation of non-human and dehumanizing tropes.

Talk about revolt and resistance is everywhere. But what do those words mean? In this course we will think about revolt and resistance by focusing on the case of the Middle East in a global context. We will study the "Arab Spring," the history of revolt in the Middle East, Occupy Wall Street, and different perspectives on what revolt and resistance mean. Readings draw on social theory, anthropology, sociology, history and the arts.

Students will be introduced to anthropological and cross-disciplinary studies of multiple, divergent ways in which the Circumpolar populations experience, perceive and respond to environmental, political and socio-economic changes from within distinct horizons of knowledge & modes of sociality. By focusing on social and historical processes as well as current/emerging practices, worlds/cosmologies, the course will analytically evaluate such notions as Anthropocene, the Fourth World, indigeneity and decolonisation as well as examine attempts of various scholars to better understand complex interconnections of climate, environment and society.

Language determines our expressive capacities, represents our identities, and connects us with each other across various platforms and cultures.This course introduces classical and contemporary approaches to studying language, focusing on three main areas: 1) language as a system of rules and regulations ("structure"), 2) language as a symbolic mechanism through which individuals and groups mark their presence ("identity") and 3) language as a means of communication ("sign"). In addition to this, the course examines various ways through which language molds our individual selves: from organizing dreams and desires to shaping autobiographies.