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.

This course asks why nationalist movements so often take reform of women's roles as central to their political projects. By focusing on gender, the course explores the consequences of Partition for the subcontinent, and examines the cases of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, and Sri Lanka to understand what role Hinduism, Islam, and Buddhism have played in the genesis of nationalist ideologies and ethnic conflict.

Humans have always been in multispecies relationships---to study the human effectively we need to recognize this. We will lay out the core theoretical and methodological frameworks for engaging in anthropologically centered multispecies approaches to the human. We will familiarize ourselves with relationships in the Anthropocene, pushing against (and/or reconceptualizing) nature/culture and human/nonhuman boundaries. Foregrounding anthropological perspectives in the discourse on multispecies we center the ethnographic and ecological and decenter assumptions that run through much majority mythos and perspectives on human-other entanglements.

Two major myths-about race and sex-have a negative impact on our society and inhibit an accurate understanding of what it means to be human. These myths create a false set of societally accepted "truths" that in turn cause a range of problems. Busting deeply ingrained myths about human nature requires some effort. It means breaking the stranglehold of simplicity in our view of what is natural and forcing ourselves to realize that being human is very complicated. It means challenging common sense and our reliance on generalities and popular perception, and actually delving into the gritty details of what we know humans actually are and do.

Indigenous peoples have been both pathologized and endowed with mystical abilities, cast in timeless Noble Savage fantasies, and mourned as teetering on the brink of extinction. These representational extremes have political consequences, and fail to do justice to the lived experience of indigenous peoples, who are actively crafting futures for themselves and their communities amid real political, economic, and environmental challenges. This course examines the politics, theories, and conditions of indigeneity from an anthropological perspective, covering issues ranging from settler colonialism and sovereignty to environmental movements.

An examination of the interactions of evolution, biology and culture in human health and sickness. The course will emphasize the influence of pathogens and other environmental selective agents in the evolution of human biology and behavior. The action of cultural factors in the spread and containment of disease and other abnormal conditions will also be integrated. Discussions will focus on the patterns of health and disease over time and in a cross-cultural perspective.

Explores issues surrounding the relation of individual memory to collective trauma, the social forms of redress to trauma, and attempts to establish accountability for harm. Takes up three major approaches to memory: social organization (Halbwachs), psychoanalysis (Freud), and associative temporalities (Sebald). Examines various genres in which the memory of loss is retained or displaced, and the landscapes and histories in which such memories are recalled and losses repaired. A better understanding of such memories will improve our approaches to cultural observation, documentation, analysis, and interpretation. One three-hour seminar.

From Brazilian capoeira, Japanese dance, and American jazz piano, to glassblowing, lawyering, and navigating a warship: how do people acquire the skills necessary to perform expert activities in different cultural settings? What kinds of knowledge can anthropologists gain as apprentices, and how does it translate into writing? This course focuses on apprenticeship as a subject and method for anthropological research. We examine theories of learning and their application to case studies of wide-ranging domains of expertise. Students conduct ethnographic and experiential activities, generating original data for discussion and analysis.