The anthropological approach to the study of culture and human society. Case studies from ethnography are used in exploring the universality of cultural categories (social organization, economy, law, belief system, art, etc.) and the range of variation among human societies.Discussion Section Required.

What makes women's migration experience different from men's in global capitalism today? The course will investigate contemporary women's transnational migration from developing countries to newly developed countries in Asia and beyond. We will discuss issues related to labor and marriage migrations, as well as trafficking in women, on both macro- and micro-levels. We are going to ask: how does the global economic restructuring shape the gendered migration today? What makes female labor different from male labor in the global labor market? What are push-and-pull factors that trigger these women to leave their hometown to be workers or wives in foreign countries? What difficulties do they experience after entering host societies and what impact would the migration flow bring to both laborer/bride receiving and sending countries? Moreover, we will explore the global market formation of transnational commodified marriages between women from developing countries and men from more developed countries. We will look at Filipina, Vietnamese and Chinese women migrating to Taiwan, Korea, Japan and the United States in particular. Throughout the semester, we will read empirical works from many disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, political economy and women's studies as well as primary source materials including news reports, online forums and watch documentaries and film clips.

This course provides a broad introduction to the anthropology of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. We will explore social and cultural formations such as caste, class, marriage and the family; as well as the organization of cultural diversity by colonial rule, nationalism and modern statehood, ethnic and religious conflict, and transnational circulations. In addition to secondary sources, students will be particularly encouraged to engage with primary sources such as treatises, speeches, poetry, music, and film. Through learning about the ethnography of the South Asia region, students will also gain an understanding of contemporary theoretical debates in anthropology, which include: the legacies of colonial rule in postcolonial societies, the social power of analytical categories, and the impact of globalization

Prerequisite: an introductory course in anthropology. Institutions of social life. Kinship and locality in the structuring of society. Monographs dealing with both literate and nonliterate societies will be discussed in the context of anthropological fieldwork methods. (This course is open to anthropology majors; others require advanced permission of the instructor)

Indigenous Australia has been of immense importance in the history of Anthropology as well as in the sociology of religion and psychoanalysis (eg. Durkheim' s Elementary Form , and Freud's Totem and Taboo). Long an icon of radical Otherness in the Western imagination (see the movie Walkabout, for instance), indigenous Australians now contest the moods and tropes of that imagination with alternative modes of memory, film, visual art, and storytelling.

Language is central to political process. While all agree that language is used to symbolize or express political action, the main focus of this course is on how language and other communicative practices contribute to the creation of political stances, events, and forms of order. Topics addressed include political rhetoric and ritual, political communication and publics, discrimination and hierarchy, language and the legitimation of authority, as well as the role of language in nationalism, state formation, and in other sociopolitical movements like feminism and diasporic communities. Since this course has the good fortune of coinciding with the 2012 U.S. Presidential election, we will make significant use of campaign rhetorics as a means of illustrating and exploring various themes.

Today localities with high incidences of genetic, species, and ecosystem diversity more often than not map directly onto localities with high incidences of human cultural and linguistic diversity. These localities are generally in parts of the world that have been, until quite recently, at the frontiers of resource extraction, human migration and resettlement, and capital expansion. Extraction, migration' and economic expansion tend to result in a decrease in both biological and cultural diversity. People living in these diverse areas often fall into the lowest categories of indicators for poverty and are often desirous of economic development. Equally often they are targeted for economic development interventions by expansionist states and resource-hungry businesses. Conservation organizations often target these localities for protection because of the various forms of diversity found in them and because they also often have high numbers of species with restricted ranges. This course examines the articulation of biological, linguistic, and cultural diversity.

This course explores the dynamic interplay between "signs" - as evidence, knowledge, meaning, rationality - and "wonder(s)" - as passion, affect, sensation, but also as object, phenomenon, catalyst, and event - across a plurality of sites and registers: medieval theology, early modern science, the colonial encounter; skepticism, mysticism, demonology, and fascism; psychoanalysis, art, poetry, film; digitality, virtuality, and special effects; Enlightenment Europe, Evangelical America, postcolonial Africa, and beyond. What does wonder look like at the interface of madness, terror, and the sublime? What is this passion, this pathos, that can lead both to tireless critical inquiry and to unquestioning, indeed totalitarian, discipleship? How do signs and wonders become political technologies? At the outer reaches of knowability, how have marvels, wonders, miracles, and monstrosities been constructed, sensed, mastered, and mass-mediatized in different times and places? And finally, if, as Socrates believed, philosophy begins in wonder, can we say the same for anthropology? What exactly is the sensation - the awe, curiosity, fascination, even horror - of anthropology's encounter with its worlds? Along with ethnographic and historical texts, readings will include Lévi-Strauss, Viveiros de Castro, Ingold, Lingis, Daston and Park, Greenblatt, Rubenstein, Benjamin, Freud, Tarde, Deleuze, and Canetti.

In what sense are crises productive? How is it that destruction, loss, and rupture can serve as the constituent features of a social order? We will approach these questions by revisiting and reclaiming several key texts-from within and beyond anthropology----on the intertwined problems of crisis and social reproduction.

Prerequisites: Instructor's permission required.

Enrollment limit is 15. Art has been understood and conceptualized in a variety of ways.In Western public culture, art has been commonly regarded in terms of autonomous creativity and individual genius. In former socialist countries, the state emphasized the social obligations of the artist to the collective good. Antlyopologists challenged these understandings of art as an activity separate from the everyday life by providing accounts of contexts where creativity is intrinsically connected to ritual life, and artifacts are an expression of the connection to the land and ancestry. In light of trade, colonialism, and more recently, economic globalization, there has been a lot of traffic in people and commodities between these aesthetic and socioeconomic regimes-also the subject of prolific anthropological inquiry. This course offers an exploration of all these discussions, and proposes an understanding of art as embedded in its surrounding social context rather than existing as a universal self-standing category.

Prerequisites: the instructor's permission.

Enrollment limit is 20. The first part of the course focuses on the history of the creation of the atomic bomb and the aftermath of its use during World War II. We look at the socialization of the scientists involved in the birth of the bomb; at the devastation it wrought in Hiroshima and Nagasaki; and at the physical and psychological injuries that afflicted its survivors, especially the immediate and long-term effects of radiation poisoning and trauma. The course then considers the Cold War period, examining civil defense campaigns, the cultural features of weapons laboratories, and the devastating physical and environmental contamination suffered by communities--disproportionately composed of indigenous populations-where such weapons repeatedly have been tested. The second part of the course explores the transformative cultural and psychological consequences of living with the bomb. Readings consider the evidence of spontaneous psychic adaptations to life in the nuclear age. They also examine governments' deliberate attempts to shape citizens' cognitive and emotional lives. How do states produce political subjects who comply with military imperatives? What role does the continual manufacture of foreign threats and enemies play in this process? While acknowledging the powerful forces that seek to control public perceptions of nuclear arms by minimizing their destructive potential, the course concludes by considering organized resistances to increasing nuclear proliferation and to militarism.

Through a careful exploration of the argument and style of three vivid anticolonial texts, C.L.R. James' The Black Jacobins, Aimé Césaire's Discourse on Colonialism, Albert Memmi's Colonizer and Colonized, and Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, this course aims to inquire into the construction of the image of colonialism and its projected aftermaths established in anti-colonial discourse.

This course is an examination of how postcolonial intellectuals have participated in the creation and contesting of alternative/multiple/'fugitive' modernities.

Prerequisites: the instructor's permission.

This course pursues interconnections linking text and performance in light of magic, ritual, possession, narration, and related articulations of power. Readings are drawn from classic theoretical writings, colonial fiction, and ethnographic accounts. Domains of inquiry include: spirit possession, trance states, séance, witchcraft, ritual performance, and related realms of cinematic projection, musical form, shadow theater, performative objects, and (other) things that move on their own, compellingly. Key theoretical concerns are subjectivity--particularly, the conjuring up and displacement of self in the form of the first-person singular "I"--and the haunting power of repetition. Retraced throughout the course are the uncanny shadows of a fully possessed subject.

Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor via email at: mec3. Must state year and major and why you with to join the class.

Enrollment limited to 14. Priority given to upper class anthropology and music majors. Students must attend operas outside class time. Drawing on theories of Bakhtin and Eco, analyzes the production logic of three opera performances in terms of communication media utilized; the class, status and gendered perspectives mobilized; and the devices used to engage or distance the audience. Performance rather then musicological angles stressed.

Enrollment limit 25. This seminar is an introduction to the theory and methods that have been developed by anthropologists to study contemporary cities and urban cultures. Although anthropology has historically focused on the study of non-Western and largely rural societies, since the 1960s anthropologists have increasingly directed attention to cities and urban cultures. During the course of the semester, we will examine such topics as: the politics of urban planning, development and land use; race, class, gender and urban inequality; urban migration and transnational communities; the symbolic economies of urban space; and, street life. Reading will include the work of Jane Jacobs, Sharon Zukin, and Henri Lefebvre.

Prerequisite: the written permission of the staff member under whose supervision the research will be conducted.

Prerequisite: instructor's permission. Individual research and tutorial in social and cultural anthropology for advanced graduate students.

Prerequisite: instructor's permission. Individual research in all divisions of anthropology and in allied fields for advanced graduate students

An archaeological perspective on the evolution of human social life from the first bipedal step of our ape ancestors to the establishment of large sedentary villages. While traversing six million years and six continents, our explorations will lead us to consider such major issues as the development of human sexuality, the origin of language, the birth of "art" and religion, the domestication of plants and animals, and the foundations of social inequality. Designed for anyone who happens to be human.

This class explores the ways in which archaeologists use the dead body to explore past beliefs and social practices, critically assessing these approaches from the broader perspective of anthropological and sociological theories of the body's production and constitution. We'll look at the ways in which social status, gender and personhood are expressed through the dead body and through practices of body modification and display. In this context we'll also consider the social relations of archaeological exhumation, the conflict that can arise over the excavation of human remains, and their treatment as courtroom evidence in forensic archaeology.

The anthropological approach to the study of culture and human society. Case studies from ethnography are used in exploring the universality of cultural categories (social organization, economy, law, belief system, art, etc.) and the range of variation among human societies.Discussion Section Required.

Enrollment limit is 94. Susan Sontag famously wrote that: "Most serious thought in our time struggles with the feeling of homelessness". This course examines some of the classic texts that have been written about Africa as a place of "homelessness" or the place in which to search for "the self in others". The course is in two parts - the first part consists of theoretical readings on the history, uses, and abuses of anthropology as a discipline. The second part consists of texts written by African anthropologists. Rather than focus on concepts like kinship, marriage, the gift, etc. this course attempts to provide an intellectual history of the discipline and its relationship to Africa. The "kinship" links that are examined are therefore between ideas, authors, locales, and the particular space of southern Africa as a site of ethnographic and anthropological imaginings.

Enrollment is 111. This course offers a broad overview of the social, cultural, political and economic dimensions of sexuality. It focuses on the rapid transformations that are taking place globally in the early twenty-first century, and on the impact that these transformations have had on sexuality. The relationships between men, women and children are changing quickly, as are traditional family structures and gender norms. What were once viewed as private matters have become public, and an array of new social movements (transgender, intersex, sex worker, people living with HIV) have come into the open. Sexuality has become a focus for public debate and political action in important new ways that will be examined in detail in this course.

Enrollment limit is 152. This class investigates magic and witchcraft, in addition to spirit mediums and ghosts in the shadow of technology, industry, and rational science. Beginning with the simple and open-ended definition of magic as a means to control and make sense of events that cannot be explained, the course is a journey through uncanny convergences and apparitional events that are at once sensual, yet ghostly. Course material ranges from baseball players who employ magical practices to deal with mathematical uncertainties of the game, to more challenging case studies on witchcraft, spirit possession, shamanism, and other forms of magic as healing. Alongside contemporary readings on the topic, students will also read classic anthropological texts on magic and witchcraft.

This class will construct a dual perspective on the intersection between culture and finance: On the one hand, we will be concerned with finance as a culturally constituted social field; on the other, we will examine the far-reaching sociocultural consequences of financial practices. Students will write four short papers, each corresponding to one of the four thematic sections of the class-Money and Exchange; Debt, Credit, and Value; The Production and Productivity of Risk; and Cultures of Crisis.

Chinese popular religion and ritual during the late traditional period and in modern times. Popular beliefs and practices concerning the cosmos, the gods, and the ancestors; the role in popular religion of Buddhism, Taoism, and the Imperial State Cult; popular religion, social change and the modern assault on "superstition."

Enrollment is 25 with permission from instructor. Priority given to anthro majors, juniors and seniors. Politics revolves around what can be seen, felt, sensed. Political acts are encoded in medial and aesthetic forms-bodies protesting in the street, punch holes on a card, images on a television newscast, tweets about events unfolding in real time-by which the political becomes manifest in the world. How do these forms gain their force? What role do they play in shaping people as subjects and defining the terms of political possibility? How do they reinscribe particular relations of power as issues of political concern and concrete transformation? This course will explore these questions as part of our effort to trace the connections between media, aesthetics, and politics.

Prerequisites: Instructor's permission required.

Enrollment is 15. Across a range of cultural and historic contexts one encounters traces of bodies-and persons-rendered absent, invisible, or erased. Knowledge of the ghostly presence nevertheless prevails, revealing an inextricable relationship between presence and absence. This course addresses the theme of absent bodies in such contexts as war and other memorials, clinical practices, and industrialization, with interdisciplinary readings drawn from anthropology, war and labor histories, and dystopic science fiction. Enrollment is 15, instructor's permission required.

Enrollment limit is 18. This course examines the history and human impact of Chinese science and medicine in broad East Asian and transnational contexts. Using a socio-cultural approach, we will examine social, cultural, and political milieus within which various forms of science and medicine were practiced and understood across Chinese history and beyond the stereotypical "Chinese" boundary.

Enrollment linit is 20. This course examines the relationship between different forms of knowledge about Palestinians and the political and social history of the region. It explores the complex interplay of state, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and class at both local and global levels in constructing what Palestine is and who Palestinians are. The course takes up diverse areas, from graphic novels to archaeological sites, from news reporting to hiking trails, to study how Palestine is created and recreated. Students will gain a familiarity with anthropological concepts and methodological approaches to Palestine. They will become familiar with aspects of the social organization, historical developments and political events that have shaped the region over the last century. The course is also intended to develop students' skills in written and oral communication, analysis, ethnographic observation, and critical thinking.

Enrollment limit is 30. First-come, first-served basis. This course investigates contemporary Central Asia as a specific context of post-socialist and postcolonial transition to newly independent statehood in the aftermath of global Cold War politics. Drawing on cultural artifacts and scholarly analyses, this course introduces students to Central Asian politics, economy, society, and culture. We will survey the processes related to macro-political and economic structure such as democratization, market reforms, and nation-building in conjunction with the everyday life of communities. Besides scholarly accounts of Central Asia, course materials include films, artworks, and internet discussions forums.

Although polemical and demonizing visions of Africa continue to proliferate within various quarters of public discourse, scholarly characterizations are more agnostic, tending to cycle between the fatalistic and upbeat. "Africa," it seems, has become a montage of competing destinies: alongside accounts of unrelenting debt and extreme precarity, war machines and disposable populations, occult imaginaries and eviscerated states, we are given vibrant sketches of a continent to come, of novel styles of life and habits of self-creation. This course explores the contours of Africa's variegated present through engagement with its emergent social and cultural forms: the refiguring of the city through the informal and the informational, state pullback and a privatized commons, development projects and humanitarian interventions, the intoxicating efflorescence of miracles and so many prosperity gospels, new techniques of law and criminality, experimental forms of violence and warfare, newly public - and vigorously ostracized - modes of intimacy and desire. Engaging these issues from a cross-disciplinary perspective, with materials spanning the ethnographic and historical to the literary and philosophical, this course will serve as a critical introduction to the debates, concepts, and orientations through which African futures are being produced and apprehended.

While historically important, indigenous identity or indigeneity has become an increasingly powerful idiom for reimagining collective action and remaking sociopolitical demands in the Andes. Many scholars, activists, and politicians go so far as to speak of a "return of the ayllu," referring to the traditional unit of social, political and economic organization among highland Aymara and Quechua peoples. With good reason, they point to recent social mobilizations (like the "gas war" in the "indigenous city" of El Alto, Bolivia) and a sea-change in national politics (the ascendancy of Evo Morales and Ollanta Humala to the presidency in Bolivian and Peru, both of whom claim indigenous affiliations, Aymara and Quechua, respectively) as evidence of the crucial role indigeneity now plays, as a structure for making sociopolitical demands, in Andean societies. Through a range of historical and ethnographic readings, this course will explore the past and present of "claiming indigeneity" in the Andes. Special emphasis will be placed upon the Quechua and Aymara peoples of what is now highland Peru and Bolivia, seeing how indigenous cultural practices and understandings of indigeneity emerged and changed, from the Spanish Conquest to the colonial period to the modernization and multiculturalist projects of the nation-state.

Reading theories of media and of religion we will examine how transformations in media technology shift the ways in which religion is encoded into semiotic forms, how these forms are realized in performative contexts and how these affect the constitution of religious subjects and religious authority. Topics include word, print, image, and sound in relation to Islam, Pentecostalism, Buddhism and animist religions.

Scientific inquiry has configured race and sex in distinctive ways. This class will engage critical theories of race and feminist considerations of sex, gender, and sexuality through the lens of the shifting ways in which each has been conceptualized, substantiated, classified and managed in (social) science and medicine.

Prerequisite: the written permission of the staff member under whose supervision the research will be conducted.

An introductory survey of the history and contents of the Shari'a combined with a critical review of Orientalist and contemporary scholarship on Islamic law. In addition to models for the ritual life, we will examine a number of social, economic and political constructs contained in Shari`a doctrine, including the concept of an Islamic state, and we also will consider the structure of litigation in courts. Seminar paper.

Prerequisite: instructor's permission. Individual research and tutorial in social and cultural anthropology for advanced graduate students.

Prerequisite: instructor's permission. Individual research in all divisions of anthropology and in allied fields for advanced graduate students

DO NOT REGISTER FOR A RECITATION SECTION IF YOU ARE NOT OFFICIALLY REGISTERED FOR THE COURSE. The rise of major civilization in prehistory and protohistory throughout the world, from the initial appearance of sedentism, agriculture, and social stratification through the emergence of the archaic empires. Description and analysis of a range of regions that were centers of significant cultural development: Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus River Valley, China, North America, Mesoamerica.Lab Required.

This course provides a comprehensive introduction to archaeology. We start with a critical overview of the origins of the discipline in the 18th and 19th centuries, and then move on to consider key themes in current archaeological thinking. These include ?time and the past: what is the difference? What are archaeological sites and how do we 'discover' them? How is the relationship between the living and the dead negotiated through archaeological practice? What are the ethical issues? How do we create narratives from archaeological evidence? Who gets written in and out of these histories? Archaeology, film and media.

This course explores 10,000 years of the North American archaeological record, bringing to light the unwritten histories of Native Americans prior to European contact. Detailed consideration of major pre-Columbian sites is interwoven with the insight of contemporary native peoples to provide both a scientific and humanist reconstruction of the past. Enrollment limit is 40.

Controversial issues that exist in current biological/physical anthropology, and controversies surrounding the descriptions and theories about particular fossil hominid discoveries, sANTH V3897 Occupy the Field: Global Finance, Inequality, Social Movement uch as the earliest australopithecines, the diversity of Home erectus, the extinction of the Neandertals, the evolution of culture, language, human cognition. Prerequisite: Instructor's permission and introductory biological/physical anthropology course.

Recommended for archaeology and physical anthropology students, pre-meds, and biology majors interested in the human skeletal system. Intensive study of human skeletal materials using anatomical and anthropological landmarks to assess sex, age, and ethnicity of bones. Other primate skeletal materials and fossil casts used for comparative study.

Recommended for archaeology and physical anthropology students, pre-meds, and biology majors interested in the human skeletal system. Intensive study of human skeletal materials using anatomical and anthropological landmarks to assess sex, age, and ethnicity of bones. Other primate skeletal materials and fossil casts used for comparative study (Enrollment limit 12 and Instructor's Permission required)