Global Arc

Nothing in the lifespan of humans is as revealing on the interface of culture and biology as is death and the experience of death. This course will explore DEATH from a bio/cultural perspective, including the evolution of life history (ageing, demography - mortality), as well as an archaeological perspective (prehistory) and early history of mortuary practices. This course is concerned not specifically with how an individual experiences death, but in the ways in which culture and biology have come to define and deal with physical death and the death experience.

We think about ruins as belonging to the past, but they do not. They are that detritus that stays with us into the present. They can be sources of melancholy, inspiration, wonder, and horror; or lingering toxins in the soil, racist legacies of colonialism, nationalistic points of collective sentiment, and the remnants of past cities bleeding through into the present-day urban landscape. This course will examine ruins anthropologically. Students should come out of this class with an introduction to the anthropology of aesthetics, the relationship between space and place, and a new appreciation for urban infrastructures and their legacies.

How do global engagements with nuclear things affect latent colonization in contemporary and future ecologies and generations? How are toxic effects of nuclear things (re)presented through scientific, technological, political or cultural intervention? We explore material, technoscientific, and cultural transmutations of nuclear things (radioisotopes, bombs, medical devices, energy) and the work of (re)making those transmutations (in)visible. The course draws from a variety of theoretical frameworks / case studies in science and technology studies, the social sciences, art and environmental and digital humanities to think with nuclear things.

What is revolutionary change today? Present discontents have been attributed to heightened inequality and worker exploitation, expanded global trade and permeable national borders, increased circulation of ideas through new media, and the undermining of forms of traditional authority. Revolutionary programs (e.g., as led by Marx, Lenin, Mao) exist as social projects of political and sexual emancipation, but they tend not to be informed by theories of ritual and everyday culture. In this course we will consider these theories as we explore revolutionary impulses from the Arab Spring, Ukraine, and the 1960's Americas.

Explores the theories and methods of ethnographic filmmaking. This seminar introduces students to the pioneering work of filmmakers including Robert Flaherty, Jean Rouch, and Fred Wiseman in order to address questions of documentary authenticity, knowledge, methods, ethics, and audience. One three-hour seminar.

Protestors against climate change increasingly identify economic growth as a key culprit of the climate crisis. But what is the alternative to economic growth? To imagine a world 'after growth' we need to consider how the imperative of growth emerged in the first place. In this course, we read strands of thought about 'alternative economies' that disappeared from the canon in order to think ethnographically, analytically, and politically about calls for a future after endless growth. We will focus on entanglements of the concept of growth with colonialism, nature, social equity, and 19th century liberal ideas of the 'perfectability of man.'

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.