Global Arc

Magic tricks delight us; biomedicine and human sciences use deception in research (e.g., placeboes); and everyday politeness may obscure painful truths. With deception and disclosure as springboards, this course explores the contextual ambiguity of personal and professional ethics, with special attention to knowledge control. Topics include: social fictions in daily life across cultures; the tangled histories of science, stage magic, and movies; ethically controversial practices in popular culture ("reality" TV, fake news), the arts (fictive memoirs), academia (sharing/plagiarizing), self presentation (racial and sexual passing), and more.

Since the 1920s, the term "gang" has been used to describe all kinds of collectives, from groups of well-dressed mobsters to petty criminals and juvenile delinquents. In nearly a century of research the only consistency in their characterization is as internal Other from the vantage of the law. This class will investigate how the category of "the gang" serves to provoke imaginaries of racial unrest and discourses of "dangerous," threatening subjects in urban enclaves. More broadly we will examine the methods and means by which liberal democratic governments maintain their sovereign integrity through the containment of threatening populations.

This seminar addresses the field of "indigenous art" to unsettle current understandings of self and alter representation. Focusing on South America and drawing parallels with the Americas and Oceania, it investigates studies of material and immaterial culture from the perspective of indigenous world-makings. Attention will be paid to how indigenous arts speak to the dilemmas of self-governance, biocultural diversity, and conservation. We will also address forms of decolonization of Amerindian arts that are at play in museums, festivals, and environmental storytelling, with indigenous artists and intellectuals as their protagonists.

Social scientists use ethnographic methods to describe and analyze the range and variation of daily interactions in schools. Ethnographic study allows researchers the opportunity to examine power dynamics that influence the daily life of students, teachers, administrators and parents. Vivid, critical ethnography helps us discover how cultural traditions, expectations, and opportunities are passed down to the next generation and how they impact school outcomes. This class will explore educational ethnography and students will complete observations hours in local schools and prepare a descriptive, mini-ethnography of a school community.

How are anthropologists writing about Africa today? What are their theoretical and thematic preoccupations? How do they stylistically represent the everyday lives of Africans? We will do a close reading of seven full-length ethnographies that chronicle the rich diversity of cultures on the continent. From the production of shea butter by indigenous women, to the crisis in Darfur, the hope and dreams of American Visa lottery winners, the bloody conflict between the international community and Somali pirates, we will read a wide range of ethnographies that challenge prevailing Western stereotypes about what life is really like on the continent.

This course contends with how shared histories are collectively made and remade in contemporary society. We will interrogate the meaning of history, memory, heritage, and "the past." What is at stake in how we represent the past? What do we mean when we make a claim on history as "ours"? What role do museums, monuments, and memorials play in the formation and maintenance of collective identities? Can practices like public history and archaeology promote collective healing?

This course explores the weather as a massively consequential complex of environmental, geophysical, political, social, engineering, and spatial processes. We think through the tensions of contemporary climate and change as sites through which political strategies, social theory, and the toolkits of humanistic anthropological thinking are reconfigured. And we explore climate as a keyword to consider nihilism, hope, new and old fantasies of engineering, and unexpected imaginaries of planetary resilience or collapse. Topics include climate change, policing, geo-engineering, climate militarism.

This course is an introduction to Muslim cultures in the United States. Each week we will draw upon texts from anthropology, sociology, history, and other fields to develop an understanding of the historical and present diversity of Muslim communities in America. The first half of the course provides a survey of Muslim communities in this country from the 17th to the 21st centuries. The second half features a thematic approach to a variety of topics: 9/11, women and gender, religious conversion, interfaith relations, youth, mosques as institutions, and Islamophobia.

This course starts with discussion of the current state of affairs in anthropological theory to ask what lines of thought and practice got us to where we are today. This includes situating anthropological theory within broader socioeconomic and political currents and exploring how poststructuralism, postcolonial theory, Black studies, and feminism reshaped the discipline in a variety of ways. Throughout the course, students will develop a critical set of skills to creatively harness the analytic power of theory as they engage pressing contemporary issues and seek to mobilize anthropological theory in the writing of their independent work.

This course examines culture's role in reproducing health inequalities in the United States. Different populations have very different levels of access to care, environmental exposures, and cultural beliefs about health and well-being. Institutional cultures also influence how different patients are treated, how evidence is used to determine treatments, and how healthcare priorities are articulated and funded. Additionally, this course explores how medical care is influenced at a national level by health policies. These factors ultimately impact population health and patients' experiences with life, death and chronic disease.