Global Arc

How does cinema convey difference and experience across cultures? This course examines anthropology's ambivalent relationship to visuality and documentary film, focusing on the particular case of ethnographic film. We begin with classic works that raise questions of documentary realism, colonialism and anthropological knowledge, and then widen our view with works that surface questions of embodiment, performance and identity, including works by Native peoples who had been the subjects of documentary films. Throughout, we remain in touch with the material properties of film as a signifying practice and the wider role of documentary in society.

In our mediated and datafied world, how can we use both documentary film and data visualization to create ethnographies that convey lived experience as well as reveal and make sense of large-scale complexities? To pursue this goal, students learn basic filmmaking and data visualization in a workshop setting. As they sculpt visible evidence such as fieldnotes, video, big data, and geo-spatial data into narratives, students consider how the material capacities and original social contexts of evidence shape filmic and graphic forms of knowledge expression. Students are encouraged to work on or design their own independent research projects.

This seminar forges new ways of engaging with data as a cultural fact and for creating new forms of ethnography. As the world rapidly yet unevenly becomes experienced and ordered through data, we study how diverse data practices around the world are redefining power, personhood, and data itself. Based on critical analyses of datafication, we explore hands-on the possibilities and problems for incorporating data as a form of evidence in person-centered ethnography. Further, if data visualization has become a potent social force, we pursue its techniques as a form of analysis, knowledge expression and as a tool to confront vital social issues.

While diseases are often imagined to be scientific or medical conditions, they are also social constructs. In the 19th century the condition of Dysaesthesia Aethiopis (an ailment that made its sufferers "mischievous") was considered nearly universal among free blacks. Today AIDS and tuberculosis are often associated with personal attributes, while the social forces at work to structure risk for acquiring these illnesses are glossed over. We will examine work from anthropologists, sociologists, historians, queer studies scholars and scientists who work on issues of disability to investigate how people challenge contemporary visions of society.

Comparing ethnography (anthropologists' signature form) with related nonfiction genres (history, journalism, memoir), we focus on questions about truth and "truthiness": about evidence, expertise, credibility, and authority and about literary form (e.g., voice, metaphor, and technical jargon). We consider how different genres are recognized as such in acts of evaluation by expert and lay readers; and what their distinctive evaluative standards allow or disallow. Throughout, we seek fresh ways of thinking about the ethical dilemmas of ethnography and related genres by juxtaposing them to the ethical dilemmas of fiction-writing.

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.