Anthropology

The anthropological approach to the study of culture and human society. Using ethnographic case studies, the course explores the universality of cultural categories (social organization, economy, law, belief systems, arts, etc.) and the range of variation among human societies.

This course focuses on some of the present, and possible future, socio-ecological conditions of life on planet
earth. In particular we will work to understand the historic, economic, political, and socio-cultural forces that
created the conditions we call climate change. With this we will take a particular interest in the question of how
race, ethnicity, Indigeneity, class, and gender articulate with the material effects of climate change. The course
also focuses on how we, as scholars, citizens, and activists can work to alter these current conditions in ways
that foster social and ecological justice for all living beings. Although we will ground our scholarship in
anthropology, to encourage interdisciplinary and even transdisciplinary thought, weekly readings will be drawn
from across scholarly and activist canons. While becoming familiar with scholarly and activist conversations
about space and place, risk and vulnerability, and ontology and epistemology, we will work through a series of
recent events as case studies to understand causes, effects, affects, and potential solutions.

Practices like veiling, gendered forms of segregation, and the honor code that are central to Western images of Muslim women are also contested issues throughout the Muslim world. This course examines debates about gender, sexuality, and morality and explores the interplay of political, social, and economic factors in shaping the lives of men and women across the Muslim world, from the Middle East to Europe. The perspective will be primarily anthropological, although special attention will be paid to historical processes associated with colonialism and nation-building that are crucial to understanding present gender politics. We will focus on the sexual politics of everyday life in specific locales and explore the extent to which these are shaped by these histories and the power of representations mobilized in a global world in the present and international political interventions. In addition to reading ethnographic works about particular communities, we read memoirs and critical analyses of the local and transnational activist movements that have emerged to address various aspects of gender politics and rights.

This seminar seeks to engage with materials that question personhood. Drawing on both fictional and non-fictional accounts, we will be involved with textual and visual documents as well institutional contexts in order to revisit such notion under contemporary capitalism. We will cover topics like rites of passage and life cycle, the role of the nation state and local communities in defining a person, the relation between self and non-self, between the living and the dead. We will likewise address vicarious forms of personhood through the prosthetic, the avatar or the heteronomous. But we will also look into forms of dissipation and/or enhancement of personhood through bodybuilding, guinea-piging and pharmo-toxicities. As a whole, the course will bring to light how the question of personhood cross-culturally relates to language, performativity, religion, technology, law, gender, race, class, care, life and death.

This course is designed to train students in qualitative research methods in anthropology. Through a hands-on approach, the course is designed to prepare students to undertake research using ethnographic and intensive interview methods and deepen their appreciation of the methodological dimensions of published qualitative work. The course explores the complexities of lived experience—that is, the intensities of embodied being in relation to affective energies between living and nonliving matter, space, and place—and aims to increase attention to the felt “texture” of experience. By the end of the course, students will be able to evaluate, critically review and discuss methodological issues; apply and execute comparative analyses and anticipate the need for further knowledge.