Global Arc

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.

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 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.

Analysis of a major world region stressing the issues of cultural diversity, history, and social change. Attention will be given to the theoretical contributions of regional study, the history of regional approaches, and the internationalization of the production of anthropological research.

Study of a selected topic in anthropology; the particular choice will vary from year to year.

Analysis of classical and contemporary sources of cultural anthropology, with particular emphasis on those writers dealing with meaning and representation. The topical focus of the course will vary with the instructor. One three-hour seminar.

Things are the staple of our lives, but they are also objects of our studies and products of our activities. We depend on things, but things also depend us. In this course, we will explore convoluted networks of relations that bring together humans, non-humans and things. Looking at things and thinking about things differently, we will try to understand why they are so irresistible to have, to use, to make, to keep, and to exchange. During the course, we will approach things as signs (semiotics), as material entities (new materialisms), as objects of affection (new materialisms), and as key agents of influence (actor-network theory).