Global Arc

Intermediate-level class with emphasis on communication and comprehension skills. Advanced grammar topics, speaking, and reading texts of interest to students; films.

A continuation of BCS 105. Advanced-level class with emphasis on oral and written communication; reading literary texts of interest to students; films

An introduction to anthropology and key topics in becoming and being human. Anthropology examines human experience through diverse lenses integrating biology, ecology, language, history, philosophy, and the day to day lives of peoples from across the globe. Anthropology has things to say about being human, it seeks to make the familiar a bit strange and the strange quite familiar. We will take critical reflexive and reflective approaches in asking about key aspects of being human (like war/peace; race/racism; sex/gender; childhood/parenting; religion and the human imagination; human relations to other species).Two lectures, one preceptorial.

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 more familiar academic and media sources.

Why do we drink "venti" coffee out of paper cups? Why is sugar consumed in large quantities in some parts of the world? The mundaneness of having to eat every day hides the powerful role of markets, ecologies and culture in shaping our consumption choices. From slavery to contemporary artisan and fair trade markets, food choice and food taboos offer us a way to express our ethical and cultural identities. Using several key anthropological theories, this course explores food economics, environmental sustainability, and consumption at the nexus of desire and repression.

This course explores the meaningful social contexts of objects, relationships, and values deemed "economic" in American culture. Employing anthropological, sociological, and historical strategies of interpretation, and drawing on comparative research from around the globe, participants will consider the embeddedness of the "economic" in historically specific sociocultural experience, and their mutual influences. Participants will also get an introductory feel for ethnographic "fieldwork", using their own everyday experience systematically and integrating it with other kinds of research.

This course explores how religious media in the United States shapes cultural and social identities. From televangelism to religious radio programming, the mass marketing of faith is contributing to how people understand themselves as gendered, raced, and classed subjects. But are these programs helping to sustain a fragile consensus within and between religious communities, or are they threatening religious pluralism? This course examines what is at stake politically in this religious war of symbols generated within mediascapes.

How do gendered and sexual identities, relationships, and meanings differ and how are they similar across cultural and historical contexts? This course illustrates the uses of fieldwork and other anthropological methods in answering questions about the universality or particularity of gendered experience. We draw on theories about human nature, cultural meaning, and linguistic and social structures, power, and agency to understand representations of maleness, femaleness, and other sexed/gendered distinctions, to explore how such representations are made and remade, and to relate them to other kinds of social difference and inequality.

Through visual and written ethnographies, this course will explore cross-cultural conceptions of gender. Specifically, this course will address the relationship between religion, sexuality, and social reproduction; and the salience of gender to issues of oppression, empowerment, and social change.

From wearable devices that count our steps, to social media platforms that monetize our interactions, to iris scanners and ID cards at airports/prisons, our world is abundant with objects designed to classify, catalogue, and altogether surveil us. In this class, we apply anthropological theories and perspectives to track how systems and sites of surveillance shape what is considered normal, healthy, safe, pathological, dangerous, deviant throughout the world. In turn, we explore surveillance as a fruitful lens for thinking about the relationship between science, technology, perception, the body, cultural context, social relations, and power.