Anthropology
- ANT 205: Foundations in Global Health
- Course Description: An introduction to the overall field of global health, its history, methods, and key principles, with case studies illustrating the burden of disease in nations with strikingly different political-economic contexts.
- Frequently Taught By: Peter J Brown, Andrea Rissing, Tenzin Namdul, Michelle Parsons
- ANT 207: Foundation Development Studies
- Course Description: This course will introduce students to the growing field of development studies and provide a solid foundation for subsequent course work in the Minor and, eventually, possible career tracks. It will provide an overview of how scholars and practitioners research and apply their knowledge toward understanding and solving some of the world’s most challenging problems. Students will learn about several key topics related to development, including human rights, gender, environment, poverty and inequality, democratic reforms and governance, market reforms, rural development, and conflict.
- Topics Include: Development in the Post-WWII Era,
- Frequently Taught By: Kristin Phillips, Shreyas Sreenath, Sydney Silverstein
- ANT 280R: Perspectives
- Course Description: Anthropological perspectives on the people and cultures on different regions of the world. May be repeated for credit when topic varies. HSC, may be repeated when topic changes.
- Topics Include: Mediterranean, China, Africa, South-East Asia, South Asia
- Frequently Taught By: Peter J Brown, Shunyuan Zhang, Aubrey Graham, Michael Peletz, Moyukh Chatterjee, Clair-Marie Hefner, Peter Little, Sydney Silverstein, Bruce Knauft
- ANT 285: Special Topics
- Course Description: Seminar or lecture series on topics of anthropological interest at an intermediate level. Maybe repeated for credit when topic varies.
- Topics Include: Opium to Obamacare, From Pots to Palaces, Guano to Cocaine: Global Latin America, Making of Modern South Asia, Languages of the World, Anthropology of Violence
- Frequently Taught By: Elena Conis, Abigail Meert, Hilary Gopnik, Jonathan Coulis, Shatam Ray, Marjorie Pak, Moyukh Chatterjee
- ANT 328: Women, Religion & Ethnography
- Course Description: Cross-cultural ethnographic study of women’s religious lives, including ritual and leadership roles, forms and contexts of religious expression, and negotiations between dominant cultural representations and women’s self-representations.
- Frequently Taught By: Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger, Jennifer Ortegren
- ANT 352: Globalization and Transnational Culture
- Course Description: “Globalization” is a concept that has proliferated in both popular and scholarly arenas, describing the increasing intensity of flows of capital, labor, commodities, and ideologies across national borders. Electronic highways, the expansion of jet travel, satellite technology and trade liberalization have made transnational communication and cultural, political, and economic connections closer and faster than ever before. The goal of this course is to interpret these movements through an ethnographic lens and to analyze some of the meanings and implications of these global processes for people’s everyday lives. While many other disciplines have analyzed globalization at the macro level, this course aims to introduce students in particular to globalization at the local level through the medium of ethnography. We will study workers (white collar, pink collar, and blue collar), consumers, migrants and tourists, as actors on the global stage. What have these global transformations of space and time meant for local identities (nationality, gender, class, race, sexuality) and enactments/meanings of culture? We will explore particular cases in West Africa, Mexico, Thailand, India and the Caribbean. Through the reading of ethnographies from several world areas and various theoretical works we will explore the changing shape of local culture, and the gendered underpinnings of global processes as they are enacted across “first” and “third” worlds.
- Frequently Taught By: Carla Freeman
- ANT 363: Ritual: Its Nature and Culture
- Course Description: Survey of the significance and functions of ritual in human life. Ethnographic accounts of sacred ritual followed by more theoretical readings dealing with the structure and function of human ritual, viewed as a special and primitive form of communication.
- Frequently Taught By: Liv Nilsson Stutz
- ANT 369W: Anthropology of Death & Burial
- Course Description: How do people handle death? Through the different perspectives provided by biological anthropology, cultural anthropology and archaeology, this course explores the dual aspect of death, as a cultural and biological phenomenon, across cultures and through time. The themes discussed in the class range from contemporary mortuary rituals and grief to historic and prehistoric examples. We will also discuss how people deal with death in extraordinary situations, including natural disasters, war, and epidemics. From the biological perspective, we will discuss both the process of dying and the post-mortem processes of decay and decomposition. A recurrent theme of the course is the point of contact between the natural and the cultural dimensions of death.
- Frequently Taught By: Liv Nilsson Stutz, Sean Dolan
- ANT 385: Special Topics
- Course Description: (May be repeated for credit when topic varies.) Seminar or lecture series of topics of anthropological concern.
- Topics Include: Political Culture/Citizenship: Africa; Shipwrecks, Pirates Palaces; Food, Healthy Society; Hunter-Gatherers in the City; Africa/Natural Resource Curse; Love, Sex and & Globalization; Transnational Migrations and Faiths; Ethnicity and Nationalism in East Asia; Transnational Masculinities; Youth/Gender/Culture: Africa
- Frequently Taught By: Kristin Phillips, Sandra Blakely, Cassandra Quave, Melvin Joe Konner, Deanne Dunbar, Melissa Hackman, Jenny Chio, Tenzin Namdul