Anthropology

This is a broad introductory course covering race, language, and culture, both as intellectual concepts and as political realities. Topics include race and culture as explanations of human affairs, the relationship of language to thought, cultural diversity and cultural relativity, and cultural approaches to current crises.

Culture is the central concept that anthropologists use to understand the striking differences among human societies and how people organize the meaningful parts of their lives. In this course we explore this diversity, examine its basis in neuroplasticity and human development, and consider its implications for human nature, cognition, creativity, and identity. By learning about other cultures, we gain new understanding of ourselves.

This course explores anthropological understandings of culture and the environment, particularly with respect to the ecology of human perception, histories of colonialism and related inequalities, food production, consumerism, nature conservation, the Anthropocene concept, and pervasive environmental logics of globalizing capitalism.

This course offers an insight into the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services practiced by peoples ignored or unknown to classic Western economics. Its principle focus will open upon the obvious differences between cultural concepts of the self and the very notion of its desire. Such arguments as those which theorize on the "rationality" of the market and the "naturalness" of competition will be debunked.

Introductory course in which the concepts of culture, multiculturalism, race, racism, and nationalism are critically examined in terms of how they are used and structure social relations in American society and, by comparison, how they are defined in other cultures throughout the world.

This course examines the many ways that people have managed, shared and made claim to water¿the construction of water worlds. It also looks at waterscapes, dam projects, water in cities, and wastewater and sewage systems globally. Importantly, the course addresses conflicting notions of how to value water, including contemporary debates about the sale of water and water rights, and examines the notion that water will be the locus of future wars.

Explores the social and cultural dimensions of biomedical practice and experience in the United States. Focuses on practitioner and patient, asking about the ways in which race, gender, and socio-economic status contour professional identity and socialization, how such factors influence the experience, and course of, illness, and how they have shaped the structures and institutions of biomedicine over time.

The course introduces medical anthropology, and contextualizes bodies, suffering, healing and health. It is organized thematically around a critical humanist approach, along with perspectives from political economy and social constructionism. The aim of the course is to provide a broad understanding of the relationship between culture, healing (including and especially the Western form of healing known as biomedicine), health and political power.

This course explores anthropological writings on development and humanitarianism to better understand the historical context and contemporary practice of these distinct modes of world saving. We will attend to critiques of development and humanitarianism, and will also consider writings by anthropologists who champion the humanitarian project

How does the study of society and culture create an intellectual space for any explanation and experience of the Divine? How does anthropology deal specifically with explaining (rather than the explaining away) knowledge and understanding about divinity? Is God an American? If God has a gender and race, what are they? These and many other pertinent questions will be engaged and tackled in this cross-cultural study of the divine.

Introduces the interrelationships of linguistic, cultural, and social phenomena with emphasis on the importance of these interrelationships in interpreting human behavior. No prior knowledge of linguistics is required.

Reviews key findings in the study of language variation. Explores the use of language to express identity and social difference.

Examines the evolution of our capacity for language along with the development of human ways of cooperating in engaged social interaction. Course integrates cognitive, cultural, social, and biological aspects of language in comparative perspective. How is the familiar shape of language today the result of evolutionary and developmental processes involving the form, function, meaning and use of signs and symbols in social ecologies?

Studies how differences in pronunciation, vocabulary choice, non-verbal communication, and/or communicative style serve as social markers of gender identity and differentiation in Western and non-Western cultures. Includes critical analysis of theory and methodology of social science research on gender and language.

An introduction to the study of language relationships and linguistic structures.  Topics covered the basic elements of grammatical description; genetic, areal, and typological relationships among languages; a survey of the world's major language groupings and the notable structures and grammatical categories they exhibit; and the issue of language endangerment. Prerequisite: One year of a foreign language or permission of instructor.

Looks historically at speech and language in Hollywood movies, including the technological challenges and artistic theories and controversies attending the transition from silent to sound films. Focuses on the ways that gender, racial, ethnic, and national identities are constructed through the representation of speech, dialect, and accent. Introduces semiotics but requires no knowledge of linguistics, or film studies.

In this course, students rethink assumptions about what "language" and "environment" are. Both depend on living systems to be rendered meaningful, and together we will wrestle with how these two ideas can be brought into relation and the implications associated with different frames of understanding. There are many perspectives on the issues raised in this course, and you will receive a broad introduction to that diversity.

Covers Jewish languages Yiddish, Judeo-Arabic, Ladino, and Hebrew from historical, linguistic, and literary perspectives. Explores the relations between communities and languages, the nature of diaspora, and the death and revival of languages. No prior knowledge of these languages is required. This course is cross-listed with MEST 2470.

Topics to be announced prior to each semester, dealing with linguistics.

Topics to be announced prior to each semester covering the diversity of human cultural worlds and the field of anthropology as presented through film. A variety of ethnographic and commercial films will be viewed and discussed in conjunction with readings.

New course in the subject of anthropology.

Topics to be announced prior to each semester, dealing with archaeology.

Topics to be announced prior to each semester, dealing with social and cultural anthropology.

Examines the manner in which ideas about sexuality and gender are constructed differently cross-culturally and how these ideas give shape to other social phenomena, relationships, and practices.

Africa is commonly imagined in the West as an unproblematically bounded and undifferentiated entity. This course engages and moves beyond western traditions of story telling about Africa to explore diverse systems of imagining Africa's multi-diasporic realities. Imagining Africa is never a matter of pure abstraction, but entangled in material struggles and collective memory, and taking place at diverse and interconnected scales and locales. Prerequisite: ANTH 1010