Global Arc

This seminar engages the sensorium -- our apparatus of sense perception -- to explore the worlds people make and inhabit. How can our senses become avenues of learning, imagination, and connection with others? We study ethnographic texts and multi-modal works thematizing sensory faculties and synaesthesia, as well as movement, orientation, and temporality. We consider how "sensory impairment" and neurodiversity may and should affect cultural norms of personhood and well-being. We pay special attention to synergies between medical anthropology and sensory anthropology in research on pain, addiction, psychoactive substances, and ritual healing.

This course explores the entanglements of culture, science, and politics in China, with a concentration on "China's short 20th Century," especially the cultural, technological, and political worlds of Reform China, from 1978 to present. Topics include debates over Chinese modernity and international relation, population politics, minority governance, environmental concerns, and China's diasporas.

Every culture has norms around speaking and policing speech. This class focuses on what anthropologists call language ideologies and how they legitimate institutional forms such as law, medicine, kinship, and exchange. Rules around language also shape who can speak, how they can speak, and how their speech is received based on identities such as race, gender, sexuality, and/or social status. Students in the course will learn why language is far more than words alone which is why people are able to call out disingenuous speech or BS.

The significant impact of peoples of particular regions on the development of anthropological theory, method, and sensibility. Special attention to the dynamic precolonial history of the region and to political and religious movements in the contemporary context of rapid socioeconomic change.

The goal of this course is to understand what queer lifeworlds are like in diverse cultural and sociopolitical contexts. What is the relationship between queerness and larger factors like culture, coloniality, global capitalism, religion, and the state? What counts as queer and whose recognition matters? How do people carve queer spaces for themselves and what resources do they draw upon in doing so? What factors influence and curtail these possibilities? Is queer always radical and against the norm? We will answer such questions by reading ethnographies, theories, and biographies that focus on queer lifeworlds across the world.

In almost every human society, women are expected to perform different tasks than men. Was there a biological or cultural reason for this? True - women are the only sex to give birth to date, but does that mean there is no escape from traditional sex roles? In this class we will explore female behavioral biology from an evolutionary and biocultural perspective. We will pair physiology and life-history theory with cultural outcomes to engage with feminism and social and political debates. Topics include menstrual taboos, sexual differentiation and gender identity, reproduction, contraception, women's health, workplace equality, etc.

A course taught by different members of the department or visiting faculty on various subjects that connect student interests in the humanities with the sub-field of medical anthropology.

Comparative perspectives on sexual divisions of labor, sex-based equality and inequality, and the cultural construction of "male'' and "female.'' Analysis of gender symbolism in myth and ritual, and of patterns of change in the political participation and power of the sexes. Two 90-minute lectures with discussion.

What does it mean to be a man? Or to act like a man? By calling attention to the gendered identities/practices of men-as-men, scholars of masculinities have given diverse responses to these questions across time and space. We draw on anthropology, history, critical theory, gender studies, and media to explore the processes and relationships by which men craft gendered lives. Rather than defining masculinity as biological trait or fixed object, we examine how men's life stories and prospects are shaped by social scripts, political-economic forces, labor regimes, and ethical norms.

How do people apprehend signs, traces or apparitions that emanate from what we might call the spiritual, sublime or mystical realms? How does "seeing" or otherwise sensing the mysterious register within broader regimes of knowledge, power and truth? This course explores dimensions of key enigmas that transect spirituality, consciousness and fields of vision across cultural and historical settings. It foregrounds anthropological work, but it also draws upon related work in history, philosophy, literature, psychoanalysis and film. Topics include sacrifice, magic, vitality, dreams, presence, temporality, mediums, possession and transcendence.