Global Arc

In this course students are introduced to ethnographic, theoretical, and critical texts to ask questions such as: Why do people engage with religion? What is the force of religious worldviews in shaping people's ideas about how to live? Is justice possible within the framework of religion today? How does technology mediate religious experience? How does globalization impact religious forms, experiences, and identities? When offered, this course is taught by different members of the department and visiting faculty on various topics at the intersection of anthropology and religion. Enrollment may be repeated for different topics.

What is the relationship between "catastrophe" and human beings, and how has "catastrophe" influenced the way we live in the world now? This course investigates various types of catastrophes/disasters around the world by mobilizing a variety of theoretical frameworks and case studies in the social sciences. The course uses an anthropological perspective as its principal lens to comparatively observe often forgotten historical calamities throughout the world. The course is designed to explore the intersection between catastrophe and culture and how catastrophic events can be a window through which to critically analyze society and vice versa.

This class aims to explore transnational issues in policing. Drawing heavily upon anthropological methods and theory, we aim neither to vindicate nor contest the police's right to use force (whether a particular instance was a violation of law), but instead, to contribute to the understanding of force (its forms, justifications, interpretations). The innovative transnational approach to policing developed during the semester will allow for a cross-cultural comparative analysis that explores larger rubrics of policing in a comprehensive social scientific framework. We hope that you are ready to explore these exciting and urgent issues with us.

According to the UN, by 2050, two-thirds of the world's population will live in cities. Urban life -- whether or not that means living in close proximity to each other, interacting with infrastructure, or new experimentations with the built environment -- has an impact upon how we experience the world and our sense of place. In this class, we will discuss theory on urbanism, infrastructure, and urban anthropology, and we will conduct observations about the built environment in and around campus. This class should be of interest to those interested in urban theory, anthropology, or architecture.

We're surrounded by narratives that AI (artificial intelligence) is rapidly learning, listening, coding, calculating, and altogether acting more like (or better than) humans. But what does it mean to be human? Which "actual" humans do "artificially" intelligent agents mimic or resemble? We will consider such questions through the lens of anthropology, a discipline dedicated to tracking the ever-changing definitions of being human. By reading and creating alternative stories about AI, we explore how race, citizenship, religion, gender, sexuality, disability, class, labor, environment and empire fundamentally shape human-machine borders.

Exploration of cross-cultural constructions of sickness, disease, health, and healing interrogates our basic ethical, moral, and political positions. Our healing and disease models derive from specific cultural assumptions about society, gender, class, age, ethnicity, and race. Categories of disease from one culture can compromise ethical positions held by another. We pursue the moral implications of a critique of medical development and the political and ethical implications of treating Western medicine as ethnoscience as well as universal truth. One 90-minute lecture, one 90-minute class.

This seminar traces the historical roots and growth of the Black Lives Matter social movement in the United States and comparative global contexts. The movement and course are committed to resisting, unveiling, and undoing histories of state sanctioned violence against Black and Brown bodies. The course seeks to document the forms of dispossession that Black Americans face, and offers a critical examination of the prison industrial complex, police brutality, urban poverty, and white supremacy in the US.

How do we grapple with the lasting, unintended impacts of science, engineering and medicine in "the nation's service and the service of humanity"? What lessons can we learn from the past to conduct morally sound research and generate culturally inclusive knowledge? We explore perspectives from indigenous studies to approach the intersection of Princeton's history, nuclear science, settler colonialism and environmental racism to collectively imagine a more holistic and inclusive approach to studying science, technology and the environment. Students will conduct original research that draws from and contributes to the Nuclear Princeton project.

This course will introduce students to the comparative study of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. We will take a broad hemispheric approach instead of focusing solely on the experiences of any particular native community, allowing students to both acquaint themselves with the diversity of indigenous communities and better understand the multitude of indigenous experiences--or, what it means to be indigenous--across regional contexts. How do processes of imperial expansionism and settler colonialisms shape the conditions within which indigenous Americans now live? How do native peoples relate to settler colonial governing bodies today?

This course draws on anthropology, history, critical theory, films and documentaries, fictive and journalistic writing to explore violence, its power and meaning. We will explore conquest and colonialism, genocidal violence, state violence and political resistance, everyday violence, gendered violence, racialization, torture, as well as witnessing and repair. Building across disciplines and working with heterodox theoretical frameworks (post-colonial/decolonial, non-Western, feminist, and indigenous approaches), this course invites us to understand violence in its multifaceted physical, symbolic, social, political and cultural manifestations.