ANTHRO 1. Introduction to Cultural and Social Anthropology. 3-5 Units.
This course introduces basic anthropological concepts and presents the discipline's distinctive perspective on society and culture. The power of this perspective is illustrated by exploring vividly-written ethnographic cases that show how anthropological approaches illuminate contemporary social and political issues in a range of different cultural sites.
Same as: ANTHRO 201
ANTHRO 100D. Chavin de Huantar Research |Seminar. 3-5 Units.
Archaeological analytical techniques appropriate for data recovered during archaeological fieldwork in Chavin de Huantar, Peru. Open to all interested students; fieldwork participants are expected to take the course. Students work on data from the previous field season to produce synthetic written reports, focusing on specific methodological issues.
Same as: ARCHLGY 100D
ANTHRO 101A. Archaeology as a Profession. 5 Units.
Academic, contract, government, field, laboratory, museum, and heritage aspects of the profession.
Same as: ARCHLGY 107A
ANTHRO 101S. Introduction to Cultural and Social Anthropology. 3-5 Units.
This course introduces basic anthropological concepts and presents the discipline's distinctive perspective on society and culture. The power of this perspective is illustrated by exploring vividly-written ethnographic cases that show how anthropological approaches illuminate contemporary social and political issues in a range of different cultural sites.
Same as: ANTHRO 1S
ANTHRO 103. The Archaeology of Climate. 3 Units.
This course reviews the long-term relationships between human societies and Earth's climatic systems. It provides a critical review of how archaeologists have approached climate change through various case studies and historical paradigms (e.g., societal `collapse,¿ resilience, historical ecology) and also addresses feedbacks between past human land use and global climate change, including current debates about the onset of the Anthropocene.
Same as: ARCHLGY 106
ANTHRO 106. Incas and their Ancestors: Peruvian Archaeology. 3-5 Units.
The development of high civilizations in Andean S. America from hunter-gatherer origins to the powerful, expansive Inca empire. The contrasting ecologies of coast, sierra, and jungle areas of early Peruvian societies from 12,000 to 2,000 B.C.E. The domestication of indigenous plants which provided the economic foundation for monumental cities, ceramics, and textiles. Cultural evolution, and why and how major transformations occurred.
Same as: ANTHRO 206A, ARCHLGY 102B
ANTHRO 107. Black Political Struggle Across the Americas. 3-5 Units.
This course orients students to the intersections between Anthropology and Black Studies through a survey of select ethnographic, historical, literary, and cinematographic materials based on Black political mobilizations across Latin America and the Caribbean. Organized by themes, the course pairs anthropological scholarship on Black political mobilizations against racialized violence and dispossession with critical Black Studies theoretical texts this scholarship is in conversation with. These pairings center what contemporary Black political struggle across the Americas teaches us about Black suffering, police terror, the problems of neoliberal multiculturalism, and the potential of transnational connections. Through case studies from Jamaica, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Colombia, and Brazil, we ask: How have understanding the conditions of life of Black communities in the Americas contributed to and/or challenged broader theorizations of the State, violence, rights, and recognition? How do contemporary mobilizations and political imaginations of Black communities push the modern nation-state into crisis through demands for Black life? And how do these struggles theorize the time and space of the conditions of Black life through transnational politics?.
Same as: AFRICAAM 137
ANTHRO 108B. Gender in the Arab and Middle Eastern City. 5 Units.
What are the components of gendered experience in the city, and how are these shaped by history and culture? How do meanings attributed to Islam and the Middle East obscure the specificity of women¿s and men¿s lives in Muslim-majority cities? This course explores gender norms and gendered experience in the major cities of Arab-majority countries, Iran and Turkey. Assigned historical and sociological readings contextualize feminism in these countries. Established and recent anthropological publications address modernity, mobility, reproduction, consumption, and social movements within urban contexts. Students will engage with some of the key figures shaping debates about gender, class, and Islam in countries of the region typically referenced as North Africa and the Middle East (MENA). They will also evaluate regional media addressing concerns about gender in light of the historical content of the course and related political concepts.
Same as: FEMGEN 108B, URBANST 108B
ANTHRO 109A. Archaeology of the Modern World. 3-5 Units.
Historical archaeology, also called the archaeology of the modern world, investigates the material culture and spatial history of the past five centures. As a discipline, historical archaeology has been characterized by (1) a methodological conjunction between history and archaeology; (2) a topical focus on the ¿three Cs¿: colonization, captivity, and capitalism ¿ forces which arguably are constitutive of the modern world; and (3) an epistemological priority to recovering the perspectives of ¿people without history.¿ Each of these three trends is widely debated yet they continue to profoundly shape the field. This seminar provides an in-depth examination of the emergence and development of this historical archaeology, with a focus on current issues in theory and method. For undergraduates, the prerequisite is ANTHRO 3 or consent of instructor.
Same as: ANTHRO 209A, ARCHLGY 109A
ANTHRO 110. Environmental Archaeology. 5 Units.
This course investigates the field of environmental archaeology. Its goals are twofold: 1) to critically consider the intellectual histories of environmental archaeology, and, 2) to survey the various techniques and methods by which archaeologists assess historical environmental conditions through material proxies. The course will include lab activities.
Same as: ANTHRO 210, ARCHLGY 110
ANTHRO 110B. Examining Ethnographies. 5 Units.
Eight or nine important ethnographies, including their construction, their impact, and their faults and virtues.
Same as: ANTHRO 210B
ANTHRO 111. Archaeology of Gender and Sexuality. 5 Units.
How archaeologists study sex, sexuality, and gender through the material remains left behind by past cultures and communities. Theoretical and methodological issues; case studies from prehistoric and historic archaeology.
Same as: ARCHLGY 129, FEMGEN 119
ANTHRO 111C. Muwekma: Landscape Archaeology and the Narratives of California Natives. 3-5 Units.
This course explores the unique history of San Francisco Bay Area tribes with particular attention to Muwekma Ohlone- the descendent community associated with the landscape surrounding and including Stanford University. The story of Muwekma provides a window into the history of California Indians from prehistory to Spanish exploration and colonization, the role of Missionaries and the controversial legacy of Junipero Serra, Indigenous rebellions throughout California, citizenship and land title during the 19th century, the historical role of anthropology and archaeology in shaping policy and recognition of Muwekma, and the fight for acknowledgement of Muwekma as a federally recognized tribe. We will visit local sites associated with this history and participate in field surveys of the landscape of Muwekma.
Same as: ARCHLGY 111B, NATIVEAM 111B
ANTHRO 112A. Archaeology of Human Rights. 5 Units.
This introductory seminar provides a critical vantage point about human rights discourse from an archaeological perspective. The seminar is organized around four main questions: (1) Is cultural heritage a human right? (2) What are archaeologists learning about how the material and temporal dimensions of power and resistance? (3) How is archaeological evidence being used in investigations of human rights violations? (4) Can research about the past shape the politics of the present? Topics to be discussed include archaeological research on mass internment, colonialism, enslavement and coerced labor, ethnic cleansing, homelessness, gender discrimination, indigenous rights, and environmental justice.
Same as: URBANST 147
ANTHRO 113. Culture and Epigenetics: Towards A Non-Darwinian Synthesis. 4-5 Units.
The course examines the impact of new research in epigenetics on our understanding of long-term cultural change. The course examines the various attempts that have been made over recent decades to find a synthesis between cultural and biological evolution. These approaches, often termed neo-Darwinian, include memes, dual inheritance theory, theories of cultural selection and transmission, niche construction theory and macro-evolutionary approaches. Research in all these areas will be examined, with particular reference to explanations for the origins of agriculture, but also including other transformations, and critiqued. New research in epigenetics offers an alternative non-Darwinian evolutionary perspective that avoids many of the problems and pitfalls in the neo-Darwinian approaches. Cultural evolution comes to be viewed as cumulative, directional and Lamarckian, since heritable epigenetic variation can underlie evolutionary change. Epigenetics opens the way for human cultural entanglements to become the drivers for evolutionary change, thus allowing the full range of social processes studied in the social and cultural sciences to take their place in the study and analysis of long-term change.
Same as: ANTHRO 213, ARCHLGY 113
ANTHRO 114. Rights and Ethics in Heritage. 5 Units.
Heritage is a human thing: made by people and mobilized for their own purposes, it has a range of effects on communities. This course focuses on the human dimension of heritage with special attention to questions of rights and ethics. Where can we locate the intersections of heritage and rights? How do communities and governing structures negotiate control over and participation in heritage, and with what impacts on people? Which ethical challenges arise and how have archaeologists, heritage managers, museums, legislators, community leaders, and others approached these issues?nnThe first half of this seminar course focuses on the theoretical and contextual basis for these discussions. We will address topics such as cultural ownership and participation as well as the global and governing contexts within which heritage is mobilized. Building on this, the second half examines cases in which different rights, needs, and goals come into conflict: museum practice, public memory, upheaval stemming from violence or disaster, and the ethics of the material world itself. Throughout, we will highlight heritage in relation to communities, rights, and responsibilities, all while thinking through ethical modes of heritage research and practice.
Same as: ANTHRO 214, ARCHLGY 114
ANTHRO 115. The Social life of Human Bones. 3-5 Units.
Skeletal remains serve a primary function of support and protection for the human body. However, beyond this, they have played a range of social roles once an individual is deceased. The processes associated with excarnation, interment, exhumation and reburial all speak to the place that the body, and its parts, play in our cultural as well as physical landscape.n This course builds on introductory courses in human skeletal anatomy by adding the social dynamics that govern the way humans treat other humans once they have died. It draws on anthropological, biological and archaeological research, with case studies spanning a broad chronological and spatial framework to provide students with an overview of social practice as it relates to the human body.
Same as: ANTHRO 215, ARCHLGY 115
ANTHRO 116. Data Analysis for Quantitative Research. 5 Units.
An introduction to numeric methods in Anthropology and related fields employing the Data Desk statistics package to test hypotheses and to explore data. Examples chosen from the instructor's research and other relevant projects. No statistical background is necessary, but a working knowledge of algebra is important. Topics covered include: Frequency Distributions; Measures of Central Tendency, Dispersion, and Variability; Probability and Probability Distributions; Statistical Inference, Comparisons of Sample Means and Standard Deviations; Analysis of Variance; Contingency Tables, Comparisons of Frequencies; Correlation and Regression; Principal Components Analysis; Discriminant Analysis; and Cluster Analysis. Grading based on take-home problem sets.
Same as: ANTHRO 216
ANTHRO 116B. Anthropology of the Environment. 5 Units.
This seminar interrogates the history of anthropology's approach to the environment, beginning with early functionalist, structuralist, and Marxist accounts of human-environment relationships. It builds towards more recent developments in the field, focusing on nonhuman and relational ontologies as well as current projects on the intersections of nature, capital, politics, and landscape histories. At the end of this class, students will be familiar with the intellectual histories of environmental anthropology and contemporary debates and tensions around questions of ethics, agency, environment, and historical causality.
Same as: ANTHRO 216B
ANTHRO 117B. Archaeologies of Religion: Belief, Ritual and Tradition. 3-5 Units.
Talking about religion and its place in modern life, inevitably appears to rest on evaluations of what religion was in the past. `Antiquated beliefs', `medieval hidebound ritual', `blind prejudice', `cultic devotion', and the constraints of tradition upon personal freedom --- such judgments abound and come readily to our minds and roll off our tongues. But what do we know of premodern religion?nIn this course we will learn more about religion, past and present, by engaging with different archaeological approaches to religion. We will start by reviewing key anthropological debates over what religion is and how (and why) it might be defined. We will pause to ask ourselves: Is religion principally immaterial or profoundly material? Is it a matter of private belief or public life? What can material remains teach us of `religion' in the past and about ourselves? We shall engage with the following debates: How has the origin of religion been understood? What is ritual and how is it studied archaeologically? How do these relate to belief? Based on these explorations we will ask: is it more valuable to try to define religion, to study its evolutionary, symbolic or performative aspects or to ask what it is that `religion' does?.
Same as: ANTHRO 217, ARCHLGY 117B
ANTHRO 117C. Global Heritage: Conflict, Reconciliation, and Diplomacy. 3-5 Units.
Archaeological studies from the 1990s framed cultural heritage as a resource that created attachments to place and to the past as a means to buttress national and cultural identities. But heritage can no longer be viewed as simply a marker of a singular, national identity. As a global era ushers in new regimes of heritage management, heritage becomes embroiled in a multitude of interactions whether acting as a fulcrum of transnational governance or functioning at the crux of community empowered utilizations and initiatives.nnThis course will trace what happens to heritage as it has been drawn into a world of global interactions while also maintaining more local forms of attachment. The class will address three themes (conflict, reconciliation, and diplomacy), all of which result from the multi-scalar relations that emerge from heritage financing, management, and preservation in a transnational arena. While the class will discuss cases that include both tangible and intangible heritage, the focus of the course will center around tangible elements of the past, including heritage sites and archaeological artifacts. Combining readings from the field of international relations, archaeology, and heritage studies, the class will question if and how heritage can be used in local settings while also producing international exchanges.
Same as: ARCHLGY 105
ANTHRO 118C. Heritage Development in the Global South. 3-5 Units.
Heritage is a site of both promise and contestation in the Global South. These nations use it for a wide range of purposes: Peru¿s thriving tourism sector rests on a basis of heritage attractions, South Africa negotiates a post-apartheid identity through heritage, and India places increasing numbers of sites on the World Heritage List. Outlining different modes of heritage production and interpretation, this class investigates heritage regimes on scales ranging from local communities and national governance to international recognition. We will examine the role of heritage in building communities and identity; the place of heritage within economic development; the efforts of Global South countries to negotiate the legacies of colonialism and global inequality through managing their pasts; and the deployment of heritage as part of international power struggles within worldwide structures like UNESCO. Drawing on anthropology, heritage studies, and archaeology, students will gain a deeper understanding of how heritage is used by Global South countries to produce identity, support development, domesticate the past, and build the future.
Same as: ARCHLGY 116
ANTHRO 119. Zooarchaeology: An Introduction to Faunal Remains. 5 Units.
As regularly noted, whether historic or pre-historic, animal bones are often the most commonly occurring artefacts on archaeological sites. As bioarchaeological samples, they offer the archaeologist an insight into food culture, provisioning, trade and the social aspects of human-animal interactions. The course will be taught through both practical and lecture sessions: the `hands-on¿ component is an essential complement to the lectures. The lectures will offer grounding in the main methodological approaches developed, as well as provide case-studies to illustrate where and how the methods have been applied. The practical session will walk students through the skeletal anatomy of a range of species. It will guide students on the identification of different parts of the animal, how to age / sex individuals, as well as recognize taphonomic indicators and what these mean to reconstructing post-depositional modifications.
Same as: ANTHRO 219, ARCHLGY 119
ANTHRO 119B. Tech Ethics and Ethnography: the human in human-computer interaction. 3-5 Units.
Do machines have culture? How do engineers write themselves into their products? Can we better anticipate the unexpected and unwanted consequences of technologies?nnTaking as its point of departure the discipline of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), which examines the design and use of computer technology, this course shifts the focus to the humans creating and utilizing the technology. It invites us to think about computer science and social science together and learn how ethnographic methods can be utilized for ethical thinking and design in technology. This course will combine rigorous theoretical thinking with hands-on in-the-field research. Students will devise and engage in their own ethnographic research projects. This course will be of interest to students from a wide range of disciplines, including: computer science, engineering, medicine, anthropology, sociology, and the humanities. Our aim is to have a truly interdisciplinary and open-ended discussion about one of the most pressing social issues of our time, while giving students skills-based training in qualitative methods.
ANTHRO 12. Anthropology and Art. 5 Units.
Modernity. How the concept of art appears timeless and commonsensical in the West, and with what social consequences. Historicizing the emergence of art. Modernist uses of primitive, child art, asylum, and outsider art.
ANTHRO 120. Bioethics and Ancient DNA. 3-5 Units.
The first ancient human genome was sequenced just 10 years ago. From a single genome in 2010 to what has been hailed as a `scientific revolution¿ today, the field of paleogenomics has expanded rapidly. 10 years on we will explore how the field is grappling with emerging issues related to ethical and responsible research, including sampling practices, collaborative community partnerships, and accessibility of research findings to the broader public. How have researchers successfully leveraged multiple voices, perspectives, and priorities engaged with ancient DNA to explore the human past? What are the possibilities of engagement beyond the practical and project-based level? How do these new alliances formed around paleogenomics inform the ethics of sampling, participation, and interpretation? In this course, we will thoughtfully and critically engage with aDNA research in the present to envision possible futures for the field.
Same as: ANTHRO 220, ARCHLGY 120A
ANTHRO 121B. Vital Infrastructures: The Foundations of Modern Life. 5 Units.
Infrastructure describes the material grids that exist beneath society, economy and culture: the foundation upon which everyday life rests and depends. While meant to remain invisible, out of sight and out of mind, diverse infrastructures have become lightning rods for political protest and demands for justice, rights, and a good life. From anti-dam activism in India, to campaigns for clean drinking water in South Africa, to transportation networks in urban Bolivia, and to the energy networks of the United States, infrastructure reveals the connections and disconnections of the globalized world. Taking an anthropological perspective, this course asks: why has infrastructure taken on vital importance to the modern nation-state? What do infrastructural histories reveal about the vital political ideals like freedom, development, equality, and nature? When does infrastructure take on a life of its own, undermining even the best laid plans? What happens when infrastructures fail? Through multi-disciplinary readings and exploratory assignments, this course challenges students see the world beneath their feet in new ways and to trace the material connections that define and sustain modern life itself.
ANTHRO 123. Ethical Life with Strangers: Sociality and Civility. 5 Units.
How do we deal with strangers in different parts of the world. What is a stranger? And to whom? Many theorists suggest that dealing with anonymous strangers is central to norms of sociality and civility. For the thinker Georg Simmel, the stranger is less concerned with norms of civility, and more with the promise of urban life, a category ripe for marginalization but also an illustration of the possibilities of ambiguous and multi-faceted life with others that reckons not only with our connections with others but our secrets. Others suggest that questions of empathy and ethics are concerned with how ¿others¿ are imagined and interacted with. However, is social life an encounter with strangers in a simple sense? Surely what it is to be a friend, enemy or a stranger is socially and historically produced? Who are the same and who are the others? Is anybody an ¿other¿ by virtue of not being oneself? What is the public and what is the private in different places, in different interactions? What is the difference between distant others, and those who are others to each other whose histories are intertwined? This class examines these questions and the complex issues around how heterogenous individuals and communities live together, by emphasizing the historical stratifications of race, class, caste, gender that comprise the stakes in any-one meeting in any space, but especially in certain spaces. We will read ethnographies and histories that teach us the ways in which structures of power, colonialism and often as a corollary exclusion and fear structure how and who meets each other, AND, also emphasize the ways in which social life can be exhilarating, complex, violent, contingent and transformative.
Same as: ANTHRO 223
ANTHRO 123B. Government of Water and Crisis: Corporations, States and the Environment. 3-5 Units.
As the Flint, Michigan water situation began to attract attention and condemnation, Michigan State Representative, Sheldon Neeley, describing the 200 troops on the ground and the Red Cross distributing water bottles, said that the Governor had ¿turned an American city into a Third World country [¿] it¿s terrible what he¿s done [¿] no fresh water.¿ Then at the first Congressional hearing, the Chairman of the House Oversight & Government Reform Committee, Jason Chaffetz, said, ¿This is the United States of America ¿ this isn't supposed to happen here. We are not some Third World country.¿nnWhat is a `third world problem¿? And is the `water problem¿ the same across the world? This course examines how water is governed in a time that is increasingly seen as one of crisis. We will examine how crises are imagined, constructed, sought to be averted, and the governance regimes they give rise to. And how does water, whether as natural resource, public good, a human right, or commodity, determine the contours of such regimes? We will focus mostly on ethnographies, but also examine texts produced by government bodies and aid and environmental organizations, as well as case law. The course will show what anthropology can contribute to the conversation on state and corporate bureaucracies, and their relation with water.
ANTHRO 123C. "Third World Problems?" Environmental Anthropology and the Intersectionality of Justice. 3-4 Units.
As the Flint, Michigan water situation began to attract attention and condemnation, Michigan State Representative, Sheldon Neeley, describing the troops on the ground and the Red Cross distributing water bottles, said that the Governor had "turned an American city into a Third World country [...] it's terrible what he's done [...] no fresh water. Then, at a Congressional hearing, the Chairman of the House Oversight & Government Reform Committee said, "This is the United States of America - this isn't supposed to happen here. We are not some Third World country."nWhat is a "third world problem?" This introductory environmental anthropology course examines how such imaginaries materialize in development programmes and literature, and bespeak charged geopolitical and racial histories; and invites reflection on what futures for working in common they enable/constrain. We will examine how crises are imagined and constructed, and the governance regimes they give rise to. How does water - as natural resource, public good, human right, need, or commodity - determine the contours of such regimes? We will also study chronic, quieter environmental problems and the responses they (do not) generate. Working through a variety of writing genres - ethnographies, policy literature, and legal and corporate publicity material - will enable students to appreciate what anthropology can contribute to the conversation on environmental justice, and state and corporate bureaucracies and their mandates. The course draws on examples from a wide range of settings. The course is offered as an introduction to environmental anthropology and takes students through key themes - infrastructure, race, class, privatization, justice, violence - by focusing on water. It requires no background in anthropology.
Same as: CSRE 123C
ANTHRO 126. Urban Culture in Global Perspective. 5 Units.
Core course for Urban Studies majors. A majority of the world's population now live in urban areas and most of the rapid urbanization has taken place in mega-cities outside the Western world. This course explores urban cultures, identities, spatial practices and forms of urban power and imagination in Asia, Africa and Latin America.nParticipants will be introduced to a global history of urban development that demonstrates how the legacies of colonialism, modernization theory and global race thinking have shaped urban designs and urban life in most of the world. Students will also be introduced to interpretative and qualitative approaches to urban life that affords an understanding of important, if unquantifiable, vectors of urban life: stereotypes, fear, identity formations, utopia, social segregation and aspirations.
Same as: URBANST 114
ANTHRO 127C. Anthropology of Sport and the Body. 3-5 Units.
What is sport? Fun? Big money? A tool for freedom... or control?nnThis course will use the work of anthropology and critical studies to probe what exactly sport is, and how it shapes the body. We will begin by looking at various ways in which social theorists have proposed studying sport, and then use these theoretical frameworks to examine contemporary sport, from individual practice to global spectacle. We will probe the social nature of sport- how it molds bodies, makes players, enraptures audiences. We will ask questions like: Is sport good? What do the Olympics Games aim to achieve? Should NCAA players be paid? In doing so we will examine the underlying social and political assumptions that undergird what we have come to think of as sport today.nnAs we think through how contemporary theorists of our time have theorized sport, we too will use their tools to form our own analyses of sport as a social and political powerhouse.nnWe will look also at how sport has historically been used as a technique of both control and resistance across the world. We will read several anthropologists' work on sport across a variety of cultures, particularly as it relates to nineteenth century European colonialism.nnWe will conclude the course with a sustained discussion of the Olympic Games, using the tools we have studied to think through this massive spectacle of global import.nnThis course is ideally suited for anyone interested in how sport can be examined as a form of culture and social exchange and, more broadly, how theory can be used to break open contemporary culture.
ANTHRO 127D. HERITAGE POLITICS. 3-5 Units.
Heritage is a matter of the heart and not the brain, David Lowenthal once said. It does not seek to explore the past, but to domesticate it and enlist it for present causes. From the drafting of the first royal decrees on ancient monuments in the 17th century, political interests have had a hand in deciding which traditions, monuments and sites best represent and best serve the needs of the nation. The sum of these domestication efforts, the laws, institutions and practices established to protect and manage heritage, is what we call heritage governance. In this seminar you will learn about the politics of 21st century heritage governance at national and international level. Students will become familiar with key conventions and learn about the functioning of heritage institutions. We will also examine the hidden practices and current political developments that impact heritage governance: how UNESCO heritage sites become bargaining tools in international relations, how EU heritage policies are negotiated in the corridors of Brussels, and how the current re-nationalization of Western politics can affect what we come to know as our common past.
Same as: ARCHLGY 127, ARCHLGY 227
ANTHRO 128. Visual Studies. 5 Units.
Drawing on anthropology, art history, cultural studies, and other fields, this course explores how and why one might want to think critically about the politics of visuality, social imagination, the politics of making and consuming images and things, iconophonia and iconophilia, the classification of people and things into ¿artists¿ and ¿art¿, and cultural production more generally.
ANTHRO 129C. A Deep Dive Into the Indian Ocean: From Prehistory to the Modern Day. 5 Units.
The Indian Ocean has formed an enduring connection between three continents, countless small islands and a multitude of cultural and ethnic groups and has become the focus of increasing interest in this geographically vast and culturally diverse region. This course explores a range of topics and issues, from the nature and dynamics of colonization and cultural development as a way of understanding the human experience in this part of the world, to topics such as religion, disease, and heritage The course guides studies in the many ways in which research in the Indian Ocean has a direct impact on our ability to compare developments in the Atlantic and Pacific.
Same as: ANTHRO 229C
ANTHRO 130D. Spatial Approaches to Social Science. 5 Units.
This multidisciplinary course combines different approaches to how GIS and spatial tools can be applied in social science research. We take a collaborative, project oriented approach to bring together technical expertise and substantive applications from several social science disciplines. The course aims to integrate tools, methods, and current debates in social science research and will enable students to engage in critical spatial research and a multidisciplinary dialogue around geographic space.
Same as: ANTHRO 230D, POLISCI 241S, URBANST 124
ANTHRO 131A. The Use and Abuse of Prehistory. 3-5 Units.
To borrow Glyn Daniel¿s phrase, the ¿Idea of Prehistory,¿ invokes notions of deep time, human origins, and mysterious monuments. While the origins of prehistoric research in the 19th century were connected to the emerging sciences of geology, evolution, and archaeology, they were just as intertwined with nation-state building, colonialism, and race science. This course examines the development of prehistory through a thematic and critical lens. How have Western conceptualizations of time and writing affected the definition and study of prehistory? What are some of the colonial legacies in both research agendas and museum collections? Do new methods always provide new answers? What role has gender played in prehistoric interpretation? Drawing from case studies in the Mediterranean, the Americas, Europe, and Africa, we will explore various archaeological approaches to prehistory from the late 19th century to the present, as well as how the idea of prehistory itself has evolved, expanded, or been abandoned altogether.
Same as: ARCHLGY 131, CLASSICS 138
ANTHRO 132. Religion and Politics in the Muslim World. 5 Units.
This course provides an ethnographic examination of religion and politics in the Muslim world. What is the role of Islam in the political life of modern Muslim societies? Conversely, how do modern political powers shape and constrain the terms of religious life? This course takes an anthropological perspective on the study of Islam: our investigations will not focus on the origins of scriptures and doctrines but rather on the use of religious texts and signs in social context and on the political significance of ritual and bodily practices. A major aim of the course is provide students with analytical resources for thinking critically about the history and politics of modern Muslim societies, with a particular focus on issues of religious authority, gender and sexuality, and the politics of secularism.
ANTHRO 132C. Technology and Inequality. 4-5 Units.
In this advanced interdisciplinary seminar we will examine the ways that technologies aimed to make human lives better (healthier, freer, more connected, and informed) often also harbor the potential to exacerbate social inequalities. Drawing from readings in the social sciences on power and ethics, we will pay special attention to issues of wealth, race, ethnicity, sex, gender, globalization and humanitarianism.
Same as: CSRE 132C
ANTHRO 132D. Thinking Technology: Anthropological Perspectives. 3 Units.
What role does technology play in society, and vice-versa? This course considers the question from an anthropological perspective, pairing different conceptual models of social-technical relations (Social Constructivism, Actor-Network Theory, Cyborg Anthropology) with real world examples. Through such technologies as factory machines, trains, Bakelite, slot machines, computers, missiles, and PET scanners, students will gain insights both on how the social suffuses the mundane objects around us, and how technologies have radically redefined how we see the world.
ANTHRO 133. Masculinity: Technologies and Cultures of Gender. 4 Units.
What is masculinity? How are masculinities invested with power and meaning in cultural contexts? How is anthropological attention to them informed by and extending inquiry across the academy in spheres such as culture studies, political theory, gender studies, history, and science and technology studies? Limited enrollment.
Same as: ANTHRO 233, FEMGEN 133M
ANTHRO 134A. Whose Ghost in the Machine? Cultures, Politics and Morals of Artificial Intelligence. 3 Units.
This course seeks to divert attention away from bleak fantasies of an impending AI apocalypse that would be unleashed by ¿the blind and irresponsible advent of oppressively dehumanizing technology¿ and instead highlight the oppressive ¿human¿ elements that structure how AI is imagined, researched, designed, produced and utilized. The aim of the course is to analyze how culture at large influences the development of AI and how, or to what extent, AI reproduces political and moral structures of human societies.nnWhat makes us, and even Silicon Valley tycoons, become afraid of science-fictional fantasies of nonhuman villains to wipe the human race, while we easily shrug off rampant racism or sexism that is reproduced and reinforced by ¿algorithms of oppression¿? What kind of political and cultural elements influence the mostly invisible political economy of how AI, machine learning and deep learning is designed, produced and utilized as a commodity by some of the most powerful corporations in contemporary global economy? In short, how does human culture at large configure within the scientific and technological research into and development of non-human intelligence?nnAnthropology has a long history of researching about human-technology interaction and often joins forces with History of Science and Science and Technology Studies. In that spirit, we will cover a wide array of literature on the historical development of academic research on cognitive science, philosophy of mind, consciousness, machine learning, deep learning, cybernetics and robotics. However, the primary aim of the course is to offer a meta-perspective on the ¿cultural aspects¿ of how these topics have been studied and practiced by entrepreneurs, research scientists, engineers, philosophers and futurists, and not the disciplinary knowledge generated by research on these topics.nnApart from ethnographic and historic researches about how AI is studied and produced, we will utilize works by theoretical cultural critics, historians and philosophers, like Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, Michel Foucault, as well as Gilbert Ryle, Daniel Dennett and David Chalmers. Furthermore, we will heavily rely on cultural images, fantasies and narratives about artificial intelligence in literature, arts and cinema. To that effect, we will watch a wide array of movies and will interactively analyze these cultural works in class, asking to what extent they represent actual research into and development of AI.
ANTHRO 135B. Waste Politics: Contesting Toxicity, Value, and Power. 3 Units.
Waste is increasingly central as an object and medium of political contestation in the contemporary world, from struggles over garbage, labor, and dignity in Senegal; to explosive remnants of war acting as rogue infrastructure in the Korean demilitarized zone. In response, waste has also become a productive concept in the environmental humanities and humanistic social sciences. In this course we will read a selection of foundational texts focused on waste, many of which draw on case studies from different parts of the world. The case of China will be emphasized, however, since China has emerged in the last few decades as a center not only of global industrial production, but also for processing the world¿s waste, contesting pollution, and fighting for environmental justice. By pairing key theoretical texts with texts dealing with waste-related issues in China and elsewhere, we will ultimately ask how contemporary global waste politics disrupts western understandings of waste, recycling, value, and more.
Same as: ANTHRO 235B, EARTHSYS 135B
ANTHRO 135C. Moving Worlds: Anthropology of Mobility and Travel. 5 Units.
This course looks at human mobility from an anthropological perspective. We will read texts that ethnographically explore the experiences of refugees, labor migrants, tourists and seafarers, among others. In particular, we will look at the intersection of physical mobility and social mobility, as people often move in order to improve their life, to increase safety or economic security, or to gain social capital. However, the mobility perspective has also been criticized for depoliticizing and celebrating movement without critical attention to its socio-political and economic context. While mobility as a term points to the ability to move, human migration is at least as often characterized by restrictions and obstacles to movement, such as borders. We will think critically about the deep inequalities that exist in terms of why and how people move, and who are able to mobilize resources to move.
ANTHRO 136B. White Identity Politics. 3-5 Units.
Pundits proclaim that the 2016 Presidential election marks the rise of white identity politics in the United States. Drawing from the field of whiteness studies and from contemporary writings that push whiteness studies in new directions, this upper-level seminar asks, does white identity politics exist? How is a concept like white identity to be understood in relation to white nationalism, white supremacy, white privilege, and whiteness? We will survey the field of whiteness studies, scholarship on the intersection of race, class, and geography, and writings on whiteness in the United States by contemporary public thinkers, to critically interrogate the terms used to describe whiteness and white identities. Students will consider the perils and possibilities of different political practices, including abolishing whiteness or coming to terms with white identity. What is the future of whiteness? n*Enrolled students will be contacted regarding the location of the course.
Same as: AFRICAAM 136B, CSRE 136
ANTHRO 137. The Politics of Humanitarianism. 5 Units.
What does it mean to want to help, to organize humanitarian aid, in times of crisis? At first glance, the impulse to help issue generis a good one. Helping is surely preferable to indifference and inaction. This does not mean that humanitarian interventions entail no ethical or political stakes or that they are beyond engaged critique. We need to critique precisely that which we value, and to ask some hard questions, among them these: What are the differences among humanitarianism, charity, and philanthropy? What of social obligations and solidarities? How does the neoliberal world order currently create structural inequalities that ensure the reproduction of poverty and violence? How does the current order of things resemble or differ from the colonial world order? This course examines the history of humanitarian sensibilities and the emergence of organized action in the ¿cause of humanity¿. In the early years of humanitarian intervention, political neutrality was a key principle; it has now come under ever greater analytical and political scrutiny. We will examine the reasons for the politicization and militarization of aid -- be it humanitarian aid in natural disasters or political crises; development programs in the impoverished south (¿the Third World¿), or peace-keeping. We will end with a critical exploration of the concept of human rights, humanity, and personhood. The overall methodological aim of the course is to demonstrate what insights an ethnographic approach to the politics, ethics, and aesthetics of humanitarianism can offer.
Same as: ANTHRO 237
ANTHRO 137A. Traditional Medicine in the Modern World. 3 Units.
This class considers "traditional medicine" in contemporary times. We will survey major systems of traditional medicine while considering their broader social, cultural, and political contexts. The class will study the symbolic uses of traditional medicine, the role of traditional medicines in early modern medical knowledge, the place of indigenous knowledge in bioprospecting, health-seeking behavior and medical pluralism, and the WHO's approach to traditional medicine and how it has affected government health policies. The class emphasizes a critical approach to the concepts of tradition and modernity, and an understanding of traditional medicine as a changing, flexible, and globalized category of healing.
ANTHRO 137D. Political Exhumations. Killing Sites Research in Comparative Perspective. 3-5 Units.
The course discusses the politics and practices of exhumation of individual and mass graves. The problem of exhumations will be considered as a distinct socio-political phenomenon characteristic of contemporary times and related to transitional justice. The course will offer analysis of case studies of political exhumations of victims of the Dirty War in Argentina, ethnic cleansing in former Yugoslavia, the Holocaust, communist violence in Poland, the Rwandan genocide, and the Spanish Civil War. The course will make use of new interpretations of genocide studies, research of mass graves, such as environmental and forensic approaches.
Same as: ARCHLGY 137, ARCHLGY 237, DLCL 237, REES 237
ANTHRO 138. Medical Ethics in a Global World: Examining Race, Difference and Power in the Research Enterprise. 5 Units.
This course will explore historical as well as current market transformations of medical ethics in different global contexts. We will examine various aspects of the research enterprise, its knowledge-generating and life-saving goals, as well as the societal, cultural, and political influences that make medical research a site of brokering in need of oversight and emergent ethics.nThis seminar will provide students with tools to explore and critically assess the various technical, social, and ethical positions of researchers, as well as the role of the state, the media, and certain publics in shaping scientific research agendas. We will also examine how structural violence, poverty, global standing, and issues of citizenship also influence issues of consent and just science and medicine.
Same as: ANTHRO 238, CSRE 138
ANTHRO 139C. Anthropology of Global Health. 5 Units.
Global health has been the contested realm of theoretical debates and praxis in medical anthropology. Rationalities behind global health projects reflected the predominant mode of envisioning health in specific historical moments.nn· In this course, we will first assess the ways in which memories, materiality and institutions of the colonial past persist in the field of global health in Africa.nn· Secondly, we will explore how early medical anthropologists participated in international health projects in order to facilitate implementation of the Western biomedicine in developing countries by investigating cultural barriers under the post-war regime of international development in the efforts of controlling malaria and HIV/AIDS in Latin America. nn· Thirdly, we will examine achievements and limitations of subsequent critical medical anthropologists¿ shift of the focus of analysis on global health from culture to structure, larger political economic conditions that produced vast health inequalities around the world, including World Bank policies under the Cold War and neoliberal reforms that increased the prevalence of TB and other diseases in post-socialist contexts nn· Finally, we will question previous anthropological discourses on global health and propose potential insights by understanding moral imaginations of contemporary global health participants such as WHO or Gates Foundation and humanitarian medicine such as MSF, and continuities and discontinuities of colonial and developmental past in current global health movement.
ANTHRO 140C. Mobilizing Nature. 3 Units.
From Brazil's Landless Worker's Movement (MST) to Water Wars of Cochabamba to Standing Rock, these moments of protest have turned into movements. This seminar will examine how theoretical framings of movements have shifted from claims about political rights to environmental ones. We will address two overarching questions: How are notions of ethnicity, gender, and class constructed in relation to the environment? And how do people understand these relationships in such a way that motivates them to mobilize? Students will explore what kinds of ecological claims are being made, who is making, how, and who benefits from them. The objective is to ultimately understand how movements not only reflect, but also (re)shape political and social practices around the environment.
ANTHRO 142B. Anthropology of the Internet. 5 Units.
This course provides students with an introduction to anthropological approaches to the Internet as an object, and site, of study. Special attention is paid to the ways in which online media are changing the practices and materiality of politics. By reading recently published ethnographic analyses alongside classic anthropological and social theory texts students will come to a better understanding of the co-constitution of the Internet and contemporary social and political life.nnThough many Internet phenomena and websites are celebrated and discussed for their novelty, the questions and issues they present resonate with topics of longstanding anthropological concern. Each week of the course will be dedicated to bringing established anthropological frameworks to bear on a different aspect of the sociality and materiality of the net. How, for example, can anthropological theorizations of citizenship and publics help us make sense of ¿fake news¿ and ¿Twitter revolutions¿? How can Anderson¿s work on the role of the printing press in the emergence of the nation help us understand the ways in which blogs and online discussion boards facilitate transnational ¿imagined communities¿?.
ANTHRO 143. Title Social Change in Contemporary China: Modernity and the Middle Kingdom. 4-5 Units.
Over the last twenty years, residents of the People¿s Republic of China have experienced dramatic changes in nearly every facet of life. This undergraduate seminar introduces students to contemporary China through an examination of various types of social transformation. We will analyze how PRC residents of different backgrounds are confronting such processes as economic liberalization, migration, kinship transformation, sexual commodification, media proliferation, industrialization, and transnationalism? Priority is placed on reading, discussing and assessing research that uses qualitative methods and that situates political economy in dialogue with lived experience.
Same as: ANTHRO 243
ANTHRO 144. Art and the Repair of the Self. 3-5 Units.
Engaging the body/mind and its senses in the making of images and things has long been considered to have potentially great therapeutic significance. This course is a close examination of making as a form of therapy, as a form of communication, and, vitally, as a form of knowing. As such, it suggests new, analytically powerful possibilities for anthropological practice.
Same as: ANTHRO 244
ANTHRO 147B. World Heritage in Global Conflict. 5 Units.
Heritage is always political, it is typically said. Such a statement might refer to the everyday politics of local stakeholder interests on one end of the spectrum, or the volatile politics of destruction and erasure of heritage during conflict, on the other. If heritage is always political then one might expect that the workings of World Heritage might be especially fraught given the international dimension. In particular, the intergovernmental system of UNESCO World Heritage must navigate the inherent tension between state sovereignty and nationalist interests and the wider concerns of a universal regime. The World Heritage List has over 1000 properties has many such contentious examples, including sites in Iraq, Mali, Syria, Crimea, Palestine and Cambodia. As an organization UNESCO was born of war with an explicit mission to end global conflict and help the world rebuild materially and morally, but has found it¿s own history increasingly entwined with that of international politics and violence.
Same as: ANTHRO 247B, ARCHLGY 147B
ANTHRO 148. Health, Politics, and Culture of Modern China. 4-5 Units.
One of the most generative regions for medical anthropology inquiry in recent years has been Asia. This seminar is designed to introduce upper division undergraduates and graduate students to the methodological hurdles, representational challenges, and intellectual rewards of investigating the intersections of health, politics, and culture in contemporary China.
Same as: ANTHRO 248, CHINA 155A, CHINA 255A
ANTHRO 150. The Ordinary: The History of a Concept. 5 Units.
The ordinary has today acquired something like a cultic status in contemporary culture. `Ordinary¿ citizens are the touchstone and essence of political democracy; the holy grail of effective marketing, the byword for earthy ethical judgment. In social science, the ordinary has blended in with the `normal¿ and the statistical mean. In Anthropology, ordinary life has all but replaced `cultural practice¿ as the epistemic gold standard of evidence. But this was not always so, and the ordinary has many, varied and contradictory meanings across the world.nThis course will (a) trace the historical emergence of the ordinary as a central ideological and metaphysical concept in modern thought and practice; (b) trace how the ordinary and the everyday have acquired unprecedented authority in anthropology; (3) trace the varies meanings and connotations of `the ordinary¿ in different socio-historical contexts from Asia, Africa and Euro-America.nThe literature will consist of ethnographies, and works of philosophical and historical scholarship.
Same as: ANTHRO 250
ANTHRO 150B. Fire: Social and Ecological Contexts of Conflagration. 3 Units.
Over 1 million acres burned from California wildland fires in 2018, yet conservative estimates suggest that four times as many acres burned annually in California preceding European colonialism. In this course we will explore how climate, land management, urban development, and human social institutions contribute to contrasts in wild and prescribed (intentional anthropogenic) fire patterns worldwide. We will investigate the socio-ecological values and harms associated with different fire and land-use policies and practices, ranging from Indigenous and small-scale contexts, conservation projects, and large-scale fire suppression efforts.
Same as: EARTHSYS 150B
ANTHRO 151D. Art/Design/Craft. 3-5 Units.
Key texts from art theory, design theory, and recent work in craft theory will be set in conversation with anthropological understandings of cultural production and creative expression in order to explore why art, design, and craft have so long been differently valued. Examines why ¿art¿ is associated with ¿vision¿, intellect, and creative expression, while ¿craft¿ is associated with ¿mere¿ skill, manual labor, and domesticity. Contemporary social and political implications are explored.
ANTHRO 152A. Urban Poverty and Inequality in Contemporary China. 5 Units.
Experiences of poverty and inequality and their relationship to gender, space development, post-socialism, and globalization. How processes of class-making in China's cities are bound up with transformations in the country's sociopolitcal landscape.
ANTHRO 153. Asylum: Knowledge, Politics, and Population. 3-5 Units.
This course draws from ethnography, social theory, media and literature to examines the place of the asylum in the constitution of knowledge, politics, and populations. An ancient juridical concept, asylum has been used to describe a fundamental political right, medical and penal institutions, as well as emergent spaces of care and safety. As such, thus course invites students to think of critical issues associated with asylum, including: illness, trauma, violence, immigration, displacement, human rights, sanctuary, and testimony.
Same as: CSRE 153C
ANTHRO 154. Anthropology of Drugs: Experience, Capitalism, Modernity. 5 Units.
This course examines the significant role ¿drugs¿ play in shaping expressions of the self and social life; in the management populations, and in the production of markets and inequality. It engages these themes through cultural representations of drugs and drug use, analyses of scientific discourse, and social theory. Topics include: the social construction of the licit and illicit; the shifting boundaries of deviance, disease and pleasure; and the relationship between local markets and global wars.
Same as: ANTHRO 254B, CSRE 154
ANTHRO 154C. Animism, Gaia, and Alternative Approaches to the Environment. 3-5 Units.
Indigenous knowledges have been traditionally treated as a field of research for anthropologists and as mistaken epistemologies, i.e., un-scientific and irrational folklore. However, within the framework of environmental humanities, current interest in non-anthropocentric approaches and epistemic injustice, animism emerged as a critique of modern epistemology and an alternative to the Western worldview. Treating native thought as an equivalent to Western knowledge will be presented as a (potentially) decolonizing and liberating practice. This course may be of interest to anthropology, archaeology and literature students working in the fields of ecocriticism and the environmental humanities/social sciences, students interested in the Anthropocene, geologic/mineral, bio-, eco- and geosocial collectives, symbiotic life-forms and non-human agencies. The course is designed as a research seminar for students interested in theory of the humanities and social sciences and simultaneously helping students to develop their individual projects and thesis.
Same as: ANTHRO 254C, ARCHLGY 154, ARCHLGY 254, DLCL 254, REES 254
ANTHRO 155. Ideologies and Practices of Creativity. 3-5 Units.
'Creativity' has long been a charged cultural, political, and philosophical concept. It has been an intersectional structuring/disciplining concept in many areas of social life (art, craft professions, education, the creation of cultural capital and class formation, the naturalization of inequality under capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, etc.). The consequences of its deployment have been far-reaching.
ANTHRO 156. Japanese Anthropology. 5 Units.
This is an advanced reading seminar in the field of Japanses Anthropology. nIt will explore the historical development of the field and the contemporary issues and topics taken up by scholars of Japanese anthropology. Prior knowledge of Japanese language, history, and, society is required.
Same as: ANTHRO 256
ANTHRO 157. Japanese Popular Culture. 3 Units.
This seminar focuses on the intersection between politics and popular culture in contemporary Japan. It will survey a range of social and political implications of practices of popular culture. Topics include J-pop, manga, anime, and other popular visual cultures, as well as social media. Students will be introduced to theories of popular culture in general, and a variety of contemporary anthropological studies on Japanese popular culture in particular. Prior knowledge of cultural anthropology is required.
Same as: ANTHRO 257
ANTHRO 158. The Anthropology of Social Class. 5 Units.
Course introduces social theory concepts and paradigms for the understanding of class. It then extends and revises those concepts and paradigms by considering anthropological approaches in different cultural and historical settings that consider the entanglements of class with other social hierarchies, especially race, caste, and ideas of "civilization" and "development".
Same as: ANTHRO 258
ANTHRO 159C. Ecological Humanities. 3 Units.
What sort of topics, research questions, approaches, theories and concepts lead to an integration of various kinds of knowledges? Ecological Humanities provides a conceptual platform for a merger of humanities and social sciences with earth and life sciences, soil science and forensic sciences. The course will discuss such selected topics as the Anthropocene, geologic/mineral and exhumed subjects/personae, bio- and geosocial collectives, symbiotic life-forms, non-human agencies, and forensic landscapes as examples of this merger.
Same as: ANTHRO 259C, DLCL 259C, REES 259C
ANTHRO 16. Native Americans in the 21st Century: Encounters, Identity, and Sovereignty in Contemporary America. 5 Units.
What does it mean to be a Native American in the 21st century? Beyond traditional portrayals of military conquests, cultural collapse, and assimilation, the relationships between Native Americans and American society. Focus is on three themes leading to in-class moot court trials: colonial encounters and colonizing discourses; frontiers and boundaries; and sovereignty of self and nation. Topics include gender in native communities, American Indian law, readings by native authors, and Indians in film and popular culture.
Same as: ARCHLGY 16, NATIVEAM 16
ANTHRO 160. Visual Politics and Social Movements. 3-5 Units.
Images, the visual imagination, and visual/graphic skills have always been vitally important in the empowerment of social movements. Organized as an intensive research workshop, this course will examine the political uses of images in anti-racist movements for social justice in areas like prison abolition, anti-war activism, labor issues, and climate justice.
ANTHRO 162. Indigenous Peoples and Environmental Problems. 3-5 Units.
The social and cultural consequences of contemporary environmental problems. The impact of market economies, development efforts, and conservation projects on indigenous peoples, emphasizing Latin America. The role of indigenous grass roots organizations in combating environmental destruction and degradation of homeland areas.
Same as: ANTHRO 262
ANTHRO 166. Political Ecology of Tropical Land Use: Conservation, Natural Resource Extraction, and Agribusiness. 3-5 Units.
Seminar. The state, private sector, development agencies, and NGOs in development and conservation of tropical land use. Focus is on the socioeconomic and political drivers of resource extraction and agricultural production. Case studies used to examine the local-to-global context from many disciplines. Are maps and analyses used for gain, visibility, accountability, or contested terrain? How are power dynamics, land use history, state-private sector collusion, and neoliberal policies valued? What are the local and extra-local responses?.
Same as: ANTHRO 266
ANTHRO 166A. Semiotics for Ethnography. 3 Units.
This workshop-style seminar introduces students to core theories and concepts in linguistic and semiotic anthropology. Examining current theoretical innovations in this field of study, the course explores the multivalent relationships between language and political authority, discourse and technology, and speech and material infrastructures. Emphasis is placed on how semiotic approaches provide tools for ethnographic analysis, and students will learn how to use semiotic concepts for their own research projects.
Same as: ANTHRO 266A
ANTHRO 171. The Biology and Evolution of Language. 4-5 Units.
Lecture course surveying the biology, linguistic functions, and evolution of the organs of speech and speech centers in the brain, language in animals and humans, the evolution of language itself, and the roles of innateness vs. culture in language. Suitable both for general education and as preparation for further studies in anthropology, biology, linguistics, medicine, psychology, and speech & language therapy. Anthropology concentration: CS, EE. No prerequisites.
Same as: ANTHRO 271
ANTHRO 175. Human Skeletal Anatomy. 5 Units.
Study of the human skeleton (a. k. a. human osteology), as it bears on other disciplines, including medicine, forensics, archaeology, and paleoanthropology (human evolution). Basic bone biology, anatomy, and development, emphasizing hands-on examination and identification of human skeletal parts, their implications for determining an individual's age, sex, geographic origin, and health status, and for the evolutionary history of our species. Three hours of lecture and at least three hours of supervised and independent study in the lab each week.
Same as: ANTHRO 275, BIO 174, BIO 274, HUMBIO 180
ANTHRO 176. Cultures, Minds, and Medicine. 1 Unit.
This workshop aims to bring together scholars from the social sciences, humanities, medicine and bio-science and technology to explore the ways that health and illness are made through complex social forces. We aim for informal, interactive sessions, full of debate and good will. Dates of meetings will be listed in the notes section in the time schedule.
Same as: ANTHRO 276
ANTHRO 178B. History of Medicine. 3-5 Units.
This seminar course will examine medical successes and failures to better understand the politics, economics, and sociality of medicine as a practice and a culture. Examples will be drawn from technical developments such as vaccines; methodological innovations such as randomized control trials; and the study of specific diseases such as yellow fever, cancer, hepatitis, and HIV/AIDS.
ANTHRO 179B. Culture of Disease: The Social History of Vaccines. 5 Units.
This course will detail the history and develop of vaccines, specifically examining critical issues such as personal choice v. public health, the use of experimental subjects, population-wide medical trials, and the use of animal tissues in vaccine development.
ANTHRO 18. Peopling of the Globe: Changing Patterns of Land Use and Consumption Over the Last 50,000 Years. 3-5 Units.
Fossil, genetic and archaeological evidence suggest that modern humans began to disperse out of Africa about 50,000 years ago. Subsequently, humans have colonized every major landmass on earth. This class introduces students to the data and issues regarding human dispersal, migration and colonization of continents and islands around the world. We explore problems related to the timing and cause of colonizing events, and investigate questions about changing patterns of land use, demography and consumption. Students are introduced to critical relationships between prehistoric population changes and our contemporary environmental crisis.
Same as: ARCHLGY 12, EARTHSYS 21
ANTHRO 181. Religion and Science in the Amazon and Elsewhere. 5 Units.
The conversion of native peoples to Christianity, especially Evangelical Christianity, is today a global phenomenon. This course looks to understand the reasons for religious conversion and its consequence in the everyday and ritual practices of Amazonians and their traditional practice of shamanism. We then turn to a question seldom addressed in the literature on conversion: the relationship between religion and science. We will explore the way conversion to Christianity produces changes in conceptions of the world and the person similar to those produced by access to scientific knowledge, which occurs primarily through schooling.
Same as: ANTHRO 281, RELIGST 270X, RELIGST 370X
ANTHRO 182N. Smoke and Mirrors in Global Health. 3 Units.
A few years ago, health experts began calling out tobacco as engendering a global health crisis, categorizing the cigarette as the world's greatest weapon of mass destruction. A "global health crisis"? What merits that title if not tobacco use? A hundred million people were killed by tobacco in the 20th century, and ten times that number ¿ a billion people ¿ are predicted to die prematurely from exposure to cigarette smoke over the next hundred years. How has tobacconcome to be labeled a global health crisis over the last decade and what has been the political response? From whence does activism and ongoing complacency regarding tobacco arise? How are they created in different cultural contexts?nnThis course aims to provide students conceptual tools to tackle two specific thought projects: (1) to understand how institutional actors compete to define a situation in the world today as a problem of global health, and (2) to understand the sociocultural means by which something highly dangerous to health such as the cigarette is made both politically contentious and inert. On both fronts, special attention will be given to the ways global health activism and complacency unfold in the U.S. and China.
ANTHRO 183A. Sex, Money, and Power: An Approach Through Feminist Anthropology. 3 Units.
What are the sexual politics of labor and capital? How is the global economy shaped by sex, love, and intimacy? This course will examine intimacy--gender, sexuality, kinship, and care-- as a lense for understanding and interrogating socio-political and economic systems from an anthropological perspective. By refusing the categorical separation of the private or domestic realm from the realm of politics, this course will critically interrogate the naturalization of particular intimate configurations (like the family, romantic couple, and domestic labor) in global contexts of colonialism, (neo)liberalism, and global capitalism. It will explore how domains of seemingly ¿private¿ sentiment and personal relations are connected to liberal and illiberal forms of power, inequality, exploitation and control, as well as to processes of incorporation, citizenship, and care. Finally, through selected ethnographic texts, this course will also look at the intimate as staging ground for social resistance, political refusal, economic ingenuity, and creativity.
Same as: FEMGEN 183A
ANTHRO 184A. Vital Curse: Oil As Culture. 3 Units.
Rapidly-evolving technology draws increasing amounts of petroleum from the ground, while wars and friendly agreements move it around the globe, all to occasionally-disastrous result. Pronounced environmental concerns such as fracking, pipelines, plastics, climate change are nearly synonymous with the petroleum industry. And yet, oil is integral to meeting basic human needs like food and water, and integral to meeting modern desires for mobility, energy, and consumer-products on demand. This class approaches the modern world¿s increasingly-reluctant reliance on oil¿from extraction to consumption with problems included¿as a complex cultural practice to be analyzed using anthropology, geography, and environmental studies.
ANTHRO 186. Culture and Madness: Anthropological and Psychiatric Approaches to Mental Illness. 3-5 Units.
Unusual mental phenomena have existed throughout history and across cultures. Taught by an anthropologist and psychiatrist, this course explores how different societies construct the notions of "madness": What are the boundaries between "normal" and "abnormal", reason and unreason, mind and body, diversity and disease? Optional: The course will be taught in conjunction with an optional two-unit discussion section.
Same as: ANTHRO 286, HUMBIO 146, PSYC 286
ANTHRO 186B. Culture and Madness: Anthropological and Psychiatric Approaches to Mental Illness. 3-5 Units.
Unusual mental phenomenon have existed throughout history and across cultures. Taught by an anthropologist and psychiatrist, this course explores how different societies construct the notions of "madness": What are the boundaries between "normal" and "abnormal", reason and unreason, mind and body, diversity and disease? The course will be taught in conjunction with a two unit engaged learning component which will place students in relevant settings.
Same as: ANTHRO 286B
ANTHRO 188. Matter and Mattering: Transdisciplinary Thinking about Things. 4-5 Units.
Things sit at the nexus of cross-cutting heterogeneous processes; tracing the entanglements of any prominent thing or class of things demands a transdisciplinary approach that recruits expertise from the natural sciences, social sciences and humanities. For example, carbon is a key factor in global warming for reasons that are as much socio-historical as bio-physical, and we could not begin to sketch the full significance of carbon without considering such diverse frames of reference. Our growing appreciation in the social sciences and humanities of the agency, polyvalence and catalytic role of things has given rise to The New Materialist and Post-Humanist movements, which in turn raise questions about intra-action and observational perspective that are echoed in the modern physical and life sciences. In this class we will explore these theoretical convergences in considering themes such as `things-in-themselves¿, networks and open systems, assemblages and entanglements. We will also examine specific examples such as oil, metal (guns), dams, viruses, electricity, mushrooms; each thing will be explored both in terms of its social and ethical entanglements and in terms of its material properties and affordances. There will also be hands-on encounters with objects in labs and a couple of local field trips. The key question throughout will be `why and how does matter matter in society today?.
Same as: ANTHRO 288, APPPHYS 188, ARCHLGY 188
ANTHRO 189X. Preparation for Senior Thesis. 2-3 Units.
This course is designed for juniors (majors, minors, and those seeking Interdisciplinary Honors in CSRE or FGSS) who intend to write a senior thesis in one of the CSRE Family of Programs or FGSS Interdisciplinary Honors. The course offers resources and strategies for putting together a significant and original senior thesis. Topics to be covered include: getting funding; finding an advisor; navigating the institutional review board; formulating an appropriate question; and finding the right data/medium/texts.
Same as: AFRICAAM 199X, CSRE 199, FEMGEN 199X
ANTHRO 193. Anthropology Capstone: Contemporary Debates in Anthropology. 5 Units.
Do you know what an anthropological perspective is? Can you describe some of the key assumptions and questions within the discipline? nA major in Anthropology is composed of many specialized courses in different tracks, different emphases and seemingly a never-ending multiplication of perspectives and ethnographies. However, Anthropology is also an ongoing intellectual conversation with foundational questions, some of longstanding and some new. These foundational questions have stimulated different responses and answers and thus have also led to constant renewal of the discipline in the midst of profound disagreement. In this Anthropology Capstone course students across tracks and emphases will address some of the critical debates that have been central to the discipline as it has developed. We will feature three debate questions in the class. Preparation for each debate will be through class discussion of critical readings as well as extra-mural reading and preparation with one¿s debating partners.
ANTHRO 196. Anthropology of Socialism. 3-5 Units.
This course offers an anthropological perspective on ideas and practices of socialism, past and present. It is concerned both with the anthropological study of ¿actually-existing socialism¿ and with both classical and contemporary conceptions of what socialism is, or could be.
ANTHRO 199. Senior and Master's Paper Writing Workshop. 1-2 Unit.
Techniques of interpreting data, organizing bibliographic materials, writing, editing and revising. Preparation of papers for conferences and publications in anthropology. Seniors register for 199; master's students register for 299.
Same as: ANTHRO 299
ANTHRO 1S. Introduction to Cultural and Social Anthropology. 3-5 Units.
This course introduces basic anthropological concepts and presents the discipline's distinctive perspective on society and culture. The power of this perspective is illustrated by exploring vividly-written ethnographic cases that show how anthropological approaches illuminate contemporary social and political issues in a range of different cultural sites.
Same as: ANTHRO 101S
ANTHRO 201. Introduction to Cultural and Social Anthropology. 3-5 Units.
This course introduces basic anthropological concepts and presents the discipline's distinctive perspective on society and culture. The power of this perspective is illustrated by exploring vividly-written ethnographic cases that show how anthropological approaches illuminate contemporary social and political issues in a range of different cultural sites.
Same as: ANTHRO 1
ANTHRO 206A. Incas and their Ancestors: Peruvian Archaeology. 3-5 Units.
The development of high civilizations in Andean S. America from hunter-gatherer origins to the powerful, expansive Inca empire. The contrasting ecologies of coast, sierra, and jungle areas of early Peruvian societies from 12,000 to 2,000 B.C.E. The domestication of indigenous plants which provided the economic foundation for monumental cities, ceramics, and textiles. Cultural evolution, and why and how major transformations occurred.
Same as: ANTHRO 106, ARCHLGY 102B
ANTHRO 209A. Archaeology of the Modern World. 3-5 Units.
Historical archaeology, also called the archaeology of the modern world, investigates the material culture and spatial history of the past five centures. As a discipline, historical archaeology has been characterized by (1) a methodological conjunction between history and archaeology; (2) a topical focus on the ¿three Cs¿: colonization, captivity, and capitalism ¿ forces which arguably are constitutive of the modern world; and (3) an epistemological priority to recovering the perspectives of ¿people without history.¿ Each of these three trends is widely debated yet they continue to profoundly shape the field. This seminar provides an in-depth examination of the emergence and development of this historical archaeology, with a focus on current issues in theory and method. For undergraduates, the prerequisite is ANTHRO 3 or consent of instructor.
Same as: ANTHRO 109A, ARCHLGY 109A
ANTHRO 210. Environmental Archaeology. 5 Units.
This course investigates the field of environmental archaeology. Its goals are twofold: 1) to critically consider the intellectual histories of environmental archaeology, and, 2) to survey the various techniques and methods by which archaeologists assess historical environmental conditions through material proxies. The course will include lab activities.
Same as: ANTHRO 110, ARCHLGY 110
ANTHRO 210B. Examining Ethnographies. 5 Units.
Eight or nine important ethnographies, including their construction, their impact, and their faults and virtues.
Same as: ANTHRO 110B
ANTHRO 212B. Biology, Culture and Social Justice in Latin America: Perspectives from Forensic Anthropology. 5 Units.
This course will only take place in the first 5 weeks of the quarter.nnAs forensic anthropologists, we are routinely asked to make identifications of unknown human remains and provide courtroom testimony. Latin America has become a nexus for social justice work, as we respond to the humanitarian crisis along the U.S.-México Border. To improve identification methods of the undocumented dead, we must understand the diversity in Latinx people and adopt best scientific practices. This course provides a cross-disciplinary, bio-cultural approach to Latin American variation and training in applied methods of forensic anthropology. Explore how tools of biological and cultural anthropology are used jointly in human rights investigation and social justice advancement. Discover the breadth of Latinx diversity and how historical, geographic, and socio-cultural factors shape this variation. Gain hands-on experience in case analysis, using skeletal, genetic, and recovery context information to estimate key parameters of identity. Use case studies to contextualize this work through an intersectional lens that attends to the living families and the applicable historical, geo-political and socio-cultural conditions.
Same as: CHILATST 212, CSRE 212
ANTHRO 213. Culture and Epigenetics: Towards A Non-Darwinian Synthesis. 4-5 Units.
The course examines the impact of new research in epigenetics on our understanding of long-term cultural change. The course examines the various attempts that have been made over recent decades to find a synthesis between cultural and biological evolution. These approaches, often termed neo-Darwinian, include memes, dual inheritance theory, theories of cultural selection and transmission, niche construction theory and macro-evolutionary approaches. Research in all these areas will be examined, with particular reference to explanations for the origins of agriculture, but also including other transformations, and critiqued. New research in epigenetics offers an alternative non-Darwinian evolutionary perspective that avoids many of the problems and pitfalls in the neo-Darwinian approaches. Cultural evolution comes to be viewed as cumulative, directional and Lamarckian, since heritable epigenetic variation can underlie evolutionary change. Epigenetics opens the way for human cultural entanglements to become the drivers for evolutionary change, thus allowing the full range of social processes studied in the social and cultural sciences to take their place in the study and analysis of long-term change.
Same as: ANTHRO 113, ARCHLGY 113
ANTHRO 214. Rights and Ethics in Heritage. 5 Units.
Heritage is a human thing: made by people and mobilized for their own purposes, it has a range of effects on communities. This course focuses on the human dimension of heritage with special attention to questions of rights and ethics. Where can we locate the intersections of heritage and rights? How do communities and governing structures negotiate control over and participation in heritage, and with what impacts on people? Which ethical challenges arise and how have archaeologists, heritage managers, museums, legislators, community leaders, and others approached these issues?nnThe first half of this seminar course focuses on the theoretical and contextual basis for these discussions. We will address topics such as cultural ownership and participation as well as the global and governing contexts within which heritage is mobilized. Building on this, the second half examines cases in which different rights, needs, and goals come into conflict: museum practice, public memory, upheaval stemming from violence or disaster, and the ethics of the material world itself. Throughout, we will highlight heritage in relation to communities, rights, and responsibilities, all while thinking through ethical modes of heritage research and practice.
Same as: ANTHRO 114, ARCHLGY 114
ANTHRO 215. The Social life of Human Bones. 3-5 Units.
Skeletal remains serve a primary function of support and protection for the human body. However, beyond this, they have played a range of social roles once an individual is deceased. The processes associated with excarnation, interment, exhumation and reburial all speak to the place that the body, and its parts, play in our cultural as well as physical landscape.n This course builds on introductory courses in human skeletal anatomy by adding the social dynamics that govern the way humans treat other humans once they have died. It draws on anthropological, biological and archaeological research, with case studies spanning a broad chronological and spatial framework to provide students with an overview of social practice as it relates to the human body.
Same as: ANTHRO 115, ARCHLGY 115
ANTHRO 216. Data Analysis for Quantitative Research. 5 Units.
An introduction to numeric methods in Anthropology and related fields employing the Data Desk statistics package to test hypotheses and to explore data. Examples chosen from the instructor's research and other relevant projects. No statistical background is necessary, but a working knowledge of algebra is important. Topics covered include: Frequency Distributions; Measures of Central Tendency, Dispersion, and Variability; Probability and Probability Distributions; Statistical Inference, Comparisons of Sample Means and Standard Deviations; Analysis of Variance; Contingency Tables, Comparisons of Frequencies; Correlation and Regression; Principal Components Analysis; Discriminant Analysis; and Cluster Analysis. Grading based on take-home problem sets.
Same as: ANTHRO 116
ANTHRO 216B. Anthropology of the Environment. 5 Units.
This seminar interrogates the history of anthropology's approach to the environment, beginning with early functionalist, structuralist, and Marxist accounts of human-environment relationships. It builds towards more recent developments in the field, focusing on nonhuman and relational ontologies as well as current projects on the intersections of nature, capital, politics, and landscape histories. At the end of this class, students will be familiar with the intellectual histories of environmental anthropology and contemporary debates and tensions around questions of ethics, agency, environment, and historical causality.
Same as: ANTHRO 116B
ANTHRO 217. Archaeologies of Religion: Belief, Ritual and Tradition. 3-5 Units.
Talking about religion and its place in modern life, inevitably appears to rest on evaluations of what religion was in the past. `Antiquated beliefs', `medieval hidebound ritual', `blind prejudice', `cultic devotion', and the constraints of tradition upon personal freedom --- such judgments abound and come readily to our minds and roll off our tongues. But what do we know of premodern religion?nIn this course we will learn more about religion, past and present, by engaging with different archaeological approaches to religion. We will start by reviewing key anthropological debates over what religion is and how (and why) it might be defined. We will pause to ask ourselves: Is religion principally immaterial or profoundly material? Is it a matter of private belief or public life? What can material remains teach us of `religion' in the past and about ourselves? We shall engage with the following debates: How has the origin of religion been understood? What is ritual and how is it studied archaeologically? How do these relate to belief? Based on these explorations we will ask: is it more valuable to try to define religion, to study its evolutionary, symbolic or performative aspects or to ask what it is that `religion' does?.
Same as: ANTHRO 117B, ARCHLGY 117B
ANTHRO 219. Zooarchaeology: An Introduction to Faunal Remains. 5 Units.
As regularly noted, whether historic or pre-historic, animal bones are often the most commonly occurring artefacts on archaeological sites. As bioarchaeological samples, they offer the archaeologist an insight into food culture, provisioning, trade and the social aspects of human-animal interactions. The course will be taught through both practical and lecture sessions: the `hands-on¿ component is an essential complement to the lectures. The lectures will offer grounding in the main methodological approaches developed, as well as provide case-studies to illustrate where and how the methods have been applied. The practical session will walk students through the skeletal anatomy of a range of species. It will guide students on the identification of different parts of the animal, how to age / sex individuals, as well as recognize taphonomic indicators and what these mean to reconstructing post-depositional modifications.
Same as: ANTHRO 119, ARCHLGY 119
ANTHRO 220. Bioethics and Ancient DNA. 3-5 Units.
The first ancient human genome was sequenced just 10 years ago. From a single genome in 2010 to what has been hailed as a `scientific revolution¿ today, the field of paleogenomics has expanded rapidly. 10 years on we will explore how the field is grappling with emerging issues related to ethical and responsible research, including sampling practices, collaborative community partnerships, and accessibility of research findings to the broader public. How have researchers successfully leveraged multiple voices, perspectives, and priorities engaged with ancient DNA to explore the human past? What are the possibilities of engagement beyond the practical and project-based level? How do these new alliances formed around paleogenomics inform the ethics of sampling, participation, and interpretation? In this course, we will thoughtfully and critically engage with aDNA research in the present to envision possible futures for the field.
Same as: ANTHRO 120, ARCHLGY 120A
ANTHRO 223. Ethical Life with Strangers: Sociality and Civility. 5 Units.
How do we deal with strangers in different parts of the world. What is a stranger? And to whom? Many theorists suggest that dealing with anonymous strangers is central to norms of sociality and civility. For the thinker Georg Simmel, the stranger is less concerned with norms of civility, and more with the promise of urban life, a category ripe for marginalization but also an illustration of the possibilities of ambiguous and multi-faceted life with others that reckons not only with our connections with others but our secrets. Others suggest that questions of empathy and ethics are concerned with how ¿others¿ are imagined and interacted with. However, is social life an encounter with strangers in a simple sense? Surely what it is to be a friend, enemy or a stranger is socially and historically produced? Who are the same and who are the others? Is anybody an ¿other¿ by virtue of not being oneself? What is the public and what is the private in different places, in different interactions? What is the difference between distant others, and those who are others to each other whose histories are intertwined? This class examines these questions and the complex issues around how heterogenous individuals and communities live together, by emphasizing the historical stratifications of race, class, caste, gender that comprise the stakes in any-one meeting in any space, but especially in certain spaces. We will read ethnographies and histories that teach us the ways in which structures of power, colonialism and often as a corollary exclusion and fear structure how and who meets each other, AND, also emphasize the ways in which social life can be exhilarating, complex, violent, contingent and transformative.
Same as: ANTHRO 123
ANTHRO 229C. A Deep Dive Into the Indian Ocean: From Prehistory to the Modern Day. 5 Units.
The Indian Ocean has formed an enduring connection between three continents, countless small islands and a multitude of cultural and ethnic groups and has become the focus of increasing interest in this geographically vast and culturally diverse region. This course explores a range of topics and issues, from the nature and dynamics of colonization and cultural development as a way of understanding the human experience in this part of the world, to topics such as religion, disease, and heritage The course guides studies in the many ways in which research in the Indian Ocean has a direct impact on our ability to compare developments in the Atlantic and Pacific.
Same as: ANTHRO 129C
ANTHRO 230D. Spatial Approaches to Social Science. 5 Units.
This multidisciplinary course combines different approaches to how GIS and spatial tools can be applied in social science research. We take a collaborative, project oriented approach to bring together technical expertise and substantive applications from several social science disciplines. The course aims to integrate tools, methods, and current debates in social science research and will enable students to engage in critical spatial research and a multidisciplinary dialogue around geographic space.
Same as: ANTHRO 130D, POLISCI 241S, URBANST 124
ANTHRO 233. Masculinity: Technologies and Cultures of Gender. 4 Units.
What is masculinity? How are masculinities invested with power and meaning in cultural contexts? How is anthropological attention to them informed by and extending inquiry across the academy in spheres such as culture studies, political theory, gender studies, history, and science and technology studies? Limited enrollment.
Same as: ANTHRO 133, FEMGEN 133M
ANTHRO 235B. Waste Politics: Contesting Toxicity, Value, and Power. 3 Units.
Waste is increasingly central as an object and medium of political contestation in the contemporary world, from struggles over garbage, labor, and dignity in Senegal; to explosive remnants of war acting as rogue infrastructure in the Korean demilitarized zone. In response, waste has also become a productive concept in the environmental humanities and humanistic social sciences. In this course we will read a selection of foundational texts focused on waste, many of which draw on case studies from different parts of the world. The case of China will be emphasized, however, since China has emerged in the last few decades as a center not only of global industrial production, but also for processing the world¿s waste, contesting pollution, and fighting for environmental justice. By pairing key theoretical texts with texts dealing with waste-related issues in China and elsewhere, we will ultimately ask how contemporary global waste politics disrupts western understandings of waste, recycling, value, and more.
Same as: ANTHRO 135B, EARTHSYS 135B
ANTHRO 237. The Politics of Humanitarianism. 5 Units.
What does it mean to want to help, to organize humanitarian aid, in times of crisis? At first glance, the impulse to help issue generis a good one. Helping is surely preferable to indifference and inaction. This does not mean that humanitarian interventions entail no ethical or political stakes or that they are beyond engaged critique. We need to critique precisely that which we value, and to ask some hard questions, among them these: What are the differences among humanitarianism, charity, and philanthropy? What of social obligations and solidarities? How does the neoliberal world order currently create structural inequalities that ensure the reproduction of poverty and violence? How does the current order of things resemble or differ from the colonial world order? This course examines the history of humanitarian sensibilities and the emergence of organized action in the ¿cause of humanity¿. In the early years of humanitarian intervention, political neutrality was a key principle; it has now come under ever greater analytical and political scrutiny. We will examine the reasons for the politicization and militarization of aid -- be it humanitarian aid in natural disasters or political crises; development programs in the impoverished south (¿the Third World¿), or peace-keeping. We will end with a critical exploration of the concept of human rights, humanity, and personhood. The overall methodological aim of the course is to demonstrate what insights an ethnographic approach to the politics, ethics, and aesthetics of humanitarianism can offer.
Same as: ANTHRO 137
ANTHRO 238. Medical Ethics in a Global World: Examining Race, Difference and Power in the Research Enterprise. 5 Units.
This course will explore historical as well as current market transformations of medical ethics in different global contexts. We will examine various aspects of the research enterprise, its knowledge-generating and life-saving goals, as well as the societal, cultural, and political influences that make medical research a site of brokering in need of oversight and emergent ethics.nThis seminar will provide students with tools to explore and critically assess the various technical, social, and ethical positions of researchers, as well as the role of the state, the media, and certain publics in shaping scientific research agendas. We will also examine how structural violence, poverty, global standing, and issues of citizenship also influence issues of consent and just science and medicine.
Same as: ANTHRO 138, CSRE 138
ANTHRO 23B. Race and the War on Drugs: Long Roots and Other Futures. 3-5 Units.
Current discussions of the war on drugs reference Richard Nixon's 1971 declaration as a starting point. This class will encourage students instead to see the war on drugs beyond seemingly self-evident margins and imaginaries. In this course, we will explore the racialized and gendered history of coca and cocaine in the Americas, and follow the war on drugs as it targets different aspects of drug production and consumption within and beyond the borders of the United States. In examining how drugs and drug policies have been used as tools of discrimination and exploitation from colonialism through to present systems of mass incarceration, we will analyze racialization as it is constructed and experienced through time and imposed onto nations and bodies. Readings and discussion will emphasize Black and Latinx feminist theories, critical race theory, and decoloniality, drawing on anthropological and interdisciplinary scholarship while incorporating other forms of writing (prose, fiction, poetry) and media (graphic novels, visual art, film clips, documentaries). Students will learn to interrogate the longstanding racialized and gendered roots of the drug war and explore critical calls towards other futures.
Same as: CSRE 23
ANTHRO 243. Title Social Change in Contemporary China: Modernity and the Middle Kingdom. 4-5 Units.
Over the last twenty years, residents of the People¿s Republic of China have experienced dramatic changes in nearly every facet of life. This undergraduate seminar introduces students to contemporary China through an examination of various types of social transformation. We will analyze how PRC residents of different backgrounds are confronting such processes as economic liberalization, migration, kinship transformation, sexual commodification, media proliferation, industrialization, and transnationalism? Priority is placed on reading, discussing and assessing research that uses qualitative methods and that situates political economy in dialogue with lived experience.
Same as: ANTHRO 143
ANTHRO 244. Art and the Repair of the Self. 3-5 Units.
Engaging the body/mind and its senses in the making of images and things has long been considered to have potentially great therapeutic significance. This course is a close examination of making as a form of therapy, as a form of communication, and, vitally, as a form of knowing. As such, it suggests new, analytically powerful possibilities for anthropological practice.
Same as: ANTHRO 144
ANTHRO 247B. World Heritage in Global Conflict. 5 Units.
Heritage is always political, it is typically said. Such a statement might refer to the everyday politics of local stakeholder interests on one end of the spectrum, or the volatile politics of destruction and erasure of heritage during conflict, on the other. If heritage is always political then one might expect that the workings of World Heritage might be especially fraught given the international dimension. In particular, the intergovernmental system of UNESCO World Heritage must navigate the inherent tension between state sovereignty and nationalist interests and the wider concerns of a universal regime. The World Heritage List has over 1000 properties has many such contentious examples, including sites in Iraq, Mali, Syria, Crimea, Palestine and Cambodia. As an organization UNESCO was born of war with an explicit mission to end global conflict and help the world rebuild materially and morally, but has found it¿s own history increasingly entwined with that of international politics and violence.
Same as: ANTHRO 147B, ARCHLGY 147B
ANTHRO 248. Health, Politics, and Culture of Modern China. 4-5 Units.
One of the most generative regions for medical anthropology inquiry in recent years has been Asia. This seminar is designed to introduce upper division undergraduates and graduate students to the methodological hurdles, representational challenges, and intellectual rewards of investigating the intersections of health, politics, and culture in contemporary China.
Same as: ANTHRO 148, CHINA 155A, CHINA 255A
ANTHRO 250. The Ordinary: The History of a Concept. 5 Units.
The ordinary has today acquired something like a cultic status in contemporary culture. `Ordinary¿ citizens are the touchstone and essence of political democracy; the holy grail of effective marketing, the byword for earthy ethical judgment. In social science, the ordinary has blended in with the `normal¿ and the statistical mean. In Anthropology, ordinary life has all but replaced `cultural practice¿ as the epistemic gold standard of evidence. But this was not always so, and the ordinary has many, varied and contradictory meanings across the world.nThis course will (a) trace the historical emergence of the ordinary as a central ideological and metaphysical concept in modern thought and practice; (b) trace how the ordinary and the everyday have acquired unprecedented authority in anthropology; (3) trace the varies meanings and connotations of `the ordinary¿ in different socio-historical contexts from Asia, Africa and Euro-America.nThe literature will consist of ethnographies, and works of philosophical and historical scholarship.
Same as: ANTHRO 150
ANTHRO 254B. Anthropology of Drugs: Experience, Capitalism, Modernity. 5 Units.
This course examines the significant role ¿drugs¿ play in shaping expressions of the self and social life; in the management populations, and in the production of markets and inequality. It engages these themes through cultural representations of drugs and drug use, analyses of scientific discourse, and social theory. Topics include: the social construction of the licit and illicit; the shifting boundaries of deviance, disease and pleasure; and the relationship between local markets and global wars.
Same as: ANTHRO 154, CSRE 154
ANTHRO 254C. Animism, Gaia, and Alternative Approaches to the Environment. 3-5 Units.
Indigenous knowledges have been traditionally treated as a field of research for anthropologists and as mistaken epistemologies, i.e., un-scientific and irrational folklore. However, within the framework of environmental humanities, current interest in non-anthropocentric approaches and epistemic injustice, animism emerged as a critique of modern epistemology and an alternative to the Western worldview. Treating native thought as an equivalent to Western knowledge will be presented as a (potentially) decolonizing and liberating practice. This course may be of interest to anthropology, archaeology and literature students working in the fields of ecocriticism and the environmental humanities/social sciences, students interested in the Anthropocene, geologic/mineral, bio-, eco- and geosocial collectives, symbiotic life-forms and non-human agencies. The course is designed as a research seminar for students interested in theory of the humanities and social sciences and simultaneously helping students to develop their individual projects and thesis.
Same as: ANTHRO 154C, ARCHLGY 154, ARCHLGY 254, DLCL 254, REES 254
ANTHRO 256. Japanese Anthropology. 5 Units.
This is an advanced reading seminar in the field of Japanses Anthropology. nIt will explore the historical development of the field and the contemporary issues and topics taken up by scholars of Japanese anthropology. Prior knowledge of Japanese language, history, and, society is required.
Same as: ANTHRO 156
ANTHRO 257. Japanese Popular Culture. 3 Units.
This seminar focuses on the intersection between politics and popular culture in contemporary Japan. It will survey a range of social and political implications of practices of popular culture. Topics include J-pop, manga, anime, and other popular visual cultures, as well as social media. Students will be introduced to theories of popular culture in general, and a variety of contemporary anthropological studies on Japanese popular culture in particular. Prior knowledge of cultural anthropology is required.
Same as: ANTHRO 157
ANTHRO 258. The Anthropology of Social Class. 5 Units.
Course introduces social theory concepts and paradigms for the understanding of class. It then extends and revises those concepts and paradigms by considering anthropological approaches in different cultural and historical settings that consider the entanglements of class with other social hierarchies, especially race, caste, and ideas of "civilization" and "development".
Same as: ANTHRO 158
ANTHRO 259C. Ecological Humanities. 3 Units.
What sort of topics, research questions, approaches, theories and concepts lead to an integration of various kinds of knowledges? Ecological Humanities provides a conceptual platform for a merger of humanities and social sciences with earth and life sciences, soil science and forensic sciences. The course will discuss such selected topics as the Anthropocene, geologic/mineral and exhumed subjects/personae, bio- and geosocial collectives, symbiotic life-forms, non-human agencies, and forensic landscapes as examples of this merger.
Same as: ANTHRO 159C, DLCL 259C, REES 259C
ANTHRO 262. Indigenous Peoples and Environmental Problems. 3-5 Units.
The social and cultural consequences of contemporary environmental problems. The impact of market economies, development efforts, and conservation projects on indigenous peoples, emphasizing Latin America. The role of indigenous grass roots organizations in combating environmental destruction and degradation of homeland areas.
Same as: ANTHRO 162
ANTHRO 266. Political Ecology of Tropical Land Use: Conservation, Natural Resource Extraction, and Agribusiness. 3-5 Units.
Seminar. The state, private sector, development agencies, and NGOs in development and conservation of tropical land use. Focus is on the socioeconomic and political drivers of resource extraction and agricultural production. Case studies used to examine the local-to-global context from many disciplines. Are maps and analyses used for gain, visibility, accountability, or contested terrain? How are power dynamics, land use history, state-private sector collusion, and neoliberal policies valued? What are the local and extra-local responses?.
Same as: ANTHRO 166
ANTHRO 266A. Semiotics for Ethnography. 3 Units.
This workshop-style seminar introduces students to core theories and concepts in linguistic and semiotic anthropology. Examining current theoretical innovations in this field of study, the course explores the multivalent relationships between language and political authority, discourse and technology, and speech and material infrastructures. Emphasis is placed on how semiotic approaches provide tools for ethnographic analysis, and students will learn how to use semiotic concepts for their own research projects.
Same as: ANTHRO 166A
ANTHRO 271. The Biology and Evolution of Language. 4-5 Units.
Lecture course surveying the biology, linguistic functions, and evolution of the organs of speech and speech centers in the brain, language in animals and humans, the evolution of language itself, and the roles of innateness vs. culture in language. Suitable both for general education and as preparation for further studies in anthropology, biology, linguistics, medicine, psychology, and speech & language therapy. Anthropology concentration: CS, EE. No prerequisites.
Same as: ANTHRO 171
ANTHRO 275. Human Skeletal Anatomy. 5 Units.
Study of the human skeleton (a. k. a. human osteology), as it bears on other disciplines, including medicine, forensics, archaeology, and paleoanthropology (human evolution). Basic bone biology, anatomy, and development, emphasizing hands-on examination and identification of human skeletal parts, their implications for determining an individual's age, sex, geographic origin, and health status, and for the evolutionary history of our species. Three hours of lecture and at least three hours of supervised and independent study in the lab each week.
Same as: ANTHRO 175, BIO 174, BIO 274, HUMBIO 180
ANTHRO 276. Cultures, Minds, and Medicine. 1 Unit.
This workshop aims to bring together scholars from the social sciences, humanities, medicine and bio-science and technology to explore the ways that health and illness are made through complex social forces. We aim for informal, interactive sessions, full of debate and good will. Dates of meetings will be listed in the notes section in the time schedule.
Same as: ANTHRO 176
ANTHRO 27N. Ethnicity and Violence: Anthropological Perspectives. 3-5 Units.
Ethnicity is one of the most compelling and most modern ways in which people - in the midst of considerable global and local uncertainty - all across the world imagine and narrate themselves. This seminar will take an anthropological look at both the modernity and the compulsions of ethnic allegiance, and, why struggles over ethnic identity are so frequently violent. Our questions will be both historical; how, why and when did people come to think of themselves as possessing different ethnic identities - and contemporary; how are these identities lived, understood, narrated, and transformed and what is the consequence of such ethnicisation. nWe follow this through anthropological perspectives which ask persistently how people themselves locally narrate and act upon their experiences and histories. Through this we will approach some of the really big and yet everyday questions that many of us around the world face: how do we relate to ourselves and to those we define as others; and how do we live through and after profound violence? The seminar will take these larger questions through a global perspective focusing on cases from Rwanda and Burundi, India, Sri Lanka, Northern Ireland, Guatemala, and the countries of Former Yugoslavia among others. These cases cover a broad canvas of issues from questions of historicity, racial purity, cultural holism, and relations to the state, to contests over religious community, indigeneity, minority identities, globalization, gender, and generation.
ANTHRO 281. Religion and Science in the Amazon and Elsewhere. 5 Units.
The conversion of native peoples to Christianity, especially Evangelical Christianity, is today a global phenomenon. This course looks to understand the reasons for religious conversion and its consequence in the everyday and ritual practices of Amazonians and their traditional practice of shamanism. We then turn to a question seldom addressed in the literature on conversion: the relationship between religion and science. We will explore the way conversion to Christianity produces changes in conceptions of the world and the person similar to those produced by access to scientific knowledge, which occurs primarily through schooling.
Same as: ANTHRO 181, RELIGST 270X, RELIGST 370X
ANTHRO 282. Medical Anthropology. 5 Units.
Emphasis is on how health, illness, and healing are understood, experienced, and constructed in social, cultural, and historical contexts. Topics: biopower and body politics, gender and reproductive technologies, illness experiences, medical diversity and social suffering, and the interface between medicine and science.
Same as: ANTHRO 82, HUMBIO 176A
ANTHRO 286. Culture and Madness: Anthropological and Psychiatric Approaches to Mental Illness. 3-5 Units.
Unusual mental phenomena have existed throughout history and across cultures. Taught by an anthropologist and psychiatrist, this course explores how different societies construct the notions of "madness": What are the boundaries between "normal" and "abnormal", reason and unreason, mind and body, diversity and disease? Optional: The course will be taught in conjunction with an optional two-unit discussion section.
Same as: ANTHRO 186, HUMBIO 146, PSYC 286
ANTHRO 286B. Culture and Madness: Anthropological and Psychiatric Approaches to Mental Illness. 3-5 Units.
Unusual mental phenomenon have existed throughout history and across cultures. Taught by an anthropologist and psychiatrist, this course explores how different societies construct the notions of "madness": What are the boundaries between "normal" and "abnormal", reason and unreason, mind and body, diversity and disease? The course will be taught in conjunction with a two unit engaged learning component which will place students in relevant settings.
Same as: ANTHRO 186B
ANTHRO 288. Matter and Mattering: Transdisciplinary Thinking about Things. 4-5 Units.
Things sit at the nexus of cross-cutting heterogeneous processes; tracing the entanglements of any prominent thing or class of things demands a transdisciplinary approach that recruits expertise from the natural sciences, social sciences and humanities. For example, carbon is a key factor in global warming for reasons that are as much socio-historical as bio-physical, and we could not begin to sketch the full significance of carbon without considering such diverse frames of reference. Our growing appreciation in the social sciences and humanities of the agency, polyvalence and catalytic role of things has given rise to The New Materialist and Post-Humanist movements, which in turn raise questions about intra-action and observational perspective that are echoed in the modern physical and life sciences. In this class we will explore these theoretical convergences in considering themes such as `things-in-themselves¿, networks and open systems, assemblages and entanglements. We will also examine specific examples such as oil, metal (guns), dams, viruses, electricity, mushrooms; each thing will be explored both in terms of its social and ethical entanglements and in terms of its material properties and affordances. There will also be hands-on encounters with objects in labs and a couple of local field trips. The key question throughout will be `why and how does matter matter in society today?.
Same as: ANTHRO 188, APPPHYS 188, ARCHLGY 188
ANTHRO 298C. Digital Methods in Anthropology. 3-5 Units.
The course provides an introduction to a broad range of digital tools and techniques for anthropological research. It is geared towards those interested in exploring such methodologies for their research and wanting to add hands-on experience with state-of-the-art digital tools to their skill set. Students will learn to work with some of the most common tools used to collect and manage digital data, and to perform various types of analysis and visualization.nUndergraduate students register for 3-5 Units, Graduate students can register for 3-5 units.
Same as: ANTHRO 98C
ANTHRO 299. Senior and Master's Paper Writing Workshop. 1-2 Unit.
Techniques of interpreting data, organizing bibliographic materials, writing, editing and revising. Preparation of papers for conferences and publications in anthropology. Seniors register for 199; master's students register for 299.
Same as: ANTHRO 199
ANTHRO 3. Introduction to Archaeology. 3-5 Units.
Aims, methods, and data in the study of human society's development from early hunters through late prehistoric civilizations. Archaeological sites and remains characteristic of the stages of cultural development for selected geographic areas, emphasizing methods of data collection and analysis appropriate to each.
Same as: ARCHLGY 1
ANTHRO 300. Reading Theory Through Ethnography. 5 Units.
Required of and restricted to first-year ANTHRO Ph.D. students. Focus is on contemporary ethnography and related cultural and social theories generated by texts. Topics include agency, resistance, and identity formation, and discourse analysis. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.
ANTHRO 301. History of Anthropological Theory, Culture and Society. 5 Units.
Required of Anthropology Ph.D. students. The history of cultural and social anthropology in relation to historical and national contexts and key theoretical and methodological issues as these inform contemporary theory and practices of the discipline. Enrollment limited to 15. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.
ANTHRO 301A. Foundations of Social Theory. 5 Units.
The purpose of this course is to introduce key themes in social theory - the social, the modern subject, reason, autonomy, civility, interests, exchange, morality, life, the senses - through a reading of classic texts from Descartes up to psychoanalysis and phenomenology. nnEach section has original texts, commentaries, and background readings that place these texts in their deeper historical setting. Many of these commentaries trace how practical theories of 'lower' or minor selves - the subject people of the colonies, slaves, and other - were integral to the very development of ideas of the modern, autonomous and reasonable self in the western world. Prerequisite, by instructor consent.
ANTHRO 302A. Technopolitics: Materiality, Power, Theory. 4-5 Units.
This graduate readings seminar provides a lively introduction to some of the major themes and issues in the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS). How do technologies and material assemblages perform power? How are their designs and uses shaped by social, cultural, and political dynamics? How do they shape those dynamics? The course draws on an interdisciplinary body of literature in humanities and social science, mixing theoretical material with more empirically oriented studies, and classics with new scholarship.
Same as: HISTORY 302
ANTHRO 303. Introduction to Archaeological Theory. 5 Units.
The history of archaeological thought emphasizing recent debates. Evolutionary theories, behavioral archaeology, processual and cognitive archaeology, and approaches termed feminist and post-processual archaeology in the context of wider debate in adjacent disciplines. The application and integration of theory on archaeological problems and issues. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.
ANTHRO 303E. Infrastructure & Power in the Global South. 4-5 Units.
In the last decade, the field of infrastructure studies has entered into conversation with area studies, post/colonial studies, and other scholarship on the "Global South." These intersections have produced dramatic new understandings of what "infrastructures" are, and how to analyze them as conduits of social and political power. This course offers a graduate-level introduction to this recent scholarship, drawing primarily on works from history, anthropology, geography, and architecture.
Same as: AFRICAST 303E, HISTORY 303E
ANTHRO 304. Becoming Muslim: Practice, Assemblage, Tradition. 5 Units.
The growing study of material Islam broadly occupies two distinct fields: first, archaeologies of premodern Islam and material histories and second, ethnographic meditations on the distinctive relation between the materiality of practice and subjectivity in muslim societies. This intensive reading seminar brings major recent studies from both these fields into conversation. We will read archaeological, historical, and ethnographic studies to consider how debates over the materiality of practice from muslim contexts pose problems to social theory. The course will first engage with definitional and theoretical problems in understanding Islam and conversion to Islam. Subsequently, the course considers the following themes: conduct, embodiment, prayer, suffering and care. Through these engagements we will examine the relations between moral and material substance, the place of objects within ethical pursuits, and the salience of material assemblages to the in/disciplines of the body. These explorations will be situated within wider anthropological discussions of agency and volition, becoming, and theorizations of materiality, assemblages, and forms of life.
ANTHRO 306. Anthropological Research Methods. 5 Units.
Required of ANTHRO Ph.D. students; open to all graduate students. Research methods and modes of evidence building in ethnographic research. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.
ANTHRO 307. Archaeological Methods. 5 Units.
Methodological aspects of field and laboratory practice from traditional archaeological methods to the latest interdisciplinary analytical techniques. The nature of archaeological data and inference; interpretive potential of these techniques. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.
ANTHRO 308. Proposal Writing Seminar in Cultural and Social Anthropology. 5 Units.
Required of second-year Ph.D. students in the culture and society track. The conceptualization of dissertation research problems, the theories behind them, and the methods for exploring them. Participants draft a research prospectus suitable for a dissertation proposal and research grant applications. Limited enrollment. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.
ANTHRO 308A. Proposal Writing Seminar in Archaeology. 5 Units.
Required of second-year Ph.D. students in the archaeology track. The conceptualization of dissertation research problems, the theories behind them, and the methods for exploring them. Participants draft a research prospectus suitable for a dissertation proposal and research grant applications. Limited enrollment. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.
ANTHRO 308B. Interdisciplinary Research Proposals: Effective Presentation, Skills, and Styles. 5 Units.
This seminar examines the diverse skills, methods, and styles required for the development and production of interdisciplinary dissertation and grant proposals. Topical focus centers primarily on proposals with both social science and natural science elements. Proposals may include a diverse suite of methods and analyses. Throughout this course, we critique examples, assess writing styles and presentation, evaluate budgets, assess data management plans, examine tables and figures, and discuss reviews and evaluations of research proposals. Students are expected to be either in the early stages of writing their dissertation proposal or preparing applications for grants and fellowships. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.
ANTHRO 30N. Does Science Have Culture?. 3-5 Units.
In this course students will engage with the anthropology of science and medicine to explore the how cultural norms shape scientific understandings. Through a series of diverse global case studies, seminar participants will assess how historical conditions yield political possibilities that inflect discoveries. Lastly, students will probe how cultural understandings of nature, human difference and national esteem influence how scientific facts come to cohere as reflections of the societies in which they emerge.
ANTHRO 310C. Intersections. 5 Units.
Themes of materiality and visuality, aesthetic and other forms of cultural production, and the meanings of creativity and convention. Ethnographic and archaeological material and case studies from worldwide cultural contexts. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.
ANTHRO 310G. Introduction to Graduate Studies. 2 Units.
Required graduate seminar. The history of anthropological theory and key theoretical and methodological issues of the discipline. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.
ANTHRO 311G. Introduction to Culture and Society Graduate Studies in Anthropology. 2 Units.
Required graduate seminar for CS track. The history of anthropological theory and key theoretical and methodological issues in cultural anthropology. Prerequistes: this course is open only to Ph.D. students in anthropology or by permission of the instructor.
ANTHRO 312. Time Travel: Pasts, Places, and Possibilities. 5 Units.
Is the past dead or alive? Where do we find it? What possibilities emerge when we encounter it? This course explores how people think and live with history in the present, how different places can harbor different times, and how movement between them can create the effect of time travel. By combining anthropological and historical approaches to time and temporality, students will learn how to build temporally capacious perspectives that transcend and unsettle commonplace divisions such as medieval-modern, colonial-postcolonial, and imperial-national.nPre-requisite by instructor consent.
ANTHRO 313A. Fine Observation: Ways of Seeing, Forms of Fieldwork. 5 Units.
Explores possibilities for reimagining ethnography as a genre of writing and mode of knowledge production through delving into documentary and representational practices in other fields, including literature, jounalism, art history, graphic novels, documentary photography, etc. Challenges any habituated acceptance of the fiction/nonfiction opposition while insisting on the necessity of evidence in anthropology.nnPrerequisite: consent of instructor.
ANTHRO 319. South Asia: History, People, Politics. 5 Units.
The South Asian subcontinent (comprising of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan and Sri Lanka) is one of the most diverse and densely populated regions in the world and increasingly prominent in new global political and cultural economies. South Asia has also provided the inspiration for cutting edge theories about the colonial state, postcolonial studies, democracy, popular culture, and religious conflict. The course will provide an overview of major historical events and social trends in contemporary South Asia and focus on themes such as gender, religion, caste, migration and movement, new technologies, the urban and rural, the state, and new forms of consumption among others.Thus, the course will give students historically and theoretically informed perspectives on contemporary South Asia, as well as how to apply insights learned to larger debates within the political and social sciences. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.
ANTHRO 31Q. The Big Shift. 4 Units.
Is the middle class shrinking? How do people who live at the extremes of American society- the super rich, the working poor and those who live on the margins, imagine and experience "the good life"? How do we understand phenomena such as gang cultures, addiction and the realignment of white consciousness? This class uses the methods and modes of ethnographic study in an examination of American culture. Ethnographic materials range from an examination of the new American wealth boom of the last 20 years (Richistan by Robert Frank) to the extreme and deadlynworld of the invisible underclass of homeless addicts on the streets of San Francisco (Righteous Dopefiend by Phillipe Bourgois and Jeff Schonberg). The experiences of Hispanic immigrants and the struggle to escape gang life in Los Angeles are highlighted in the story of Homeboy Industries a job creation program initiated by a priest working in LA's most deadly neighborhoods (G-Dog and the Homeboys by Celeste Fremon). Finally in Searching for Whitopia: an improbable journeyninto the heart of White America, Rich Benjamin explores the creation on ethnic enclaves (whitopias) as fear over immigration and the shrinking white majority redefine race consciousnessnin the 21st century. Each of these narratives provides a window into the various ways in which Americans approach the subjects of wealth and the good life, poverty and the underclass, and thenconstruction of class, race, and gender in American society. Students will not be required to have any previous knowledge, just curiosity and an open mind.
Same as: CSRE 30Q
ANTHRO 32. Theories in Race and Ethnicity: A Comparative Perspective. 5 Units.
This undergraduate course employs an anthropological and historical perspective to introduce students to ideas and concepts of race and ethnicity that emerged primarily in Europe and the United States in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and that continue to shape contemporary racial attitudes, interactions, and inequalities. Ideas about race and ethnicity forged outside the U.S. and case studies from other nations are presented to broaden students' understanding and to overcome the limitations of an exclusive focus on the U.S. This course is geared to sophomores and juniors who have already taken at least one course on race and ethnicity, anthropology, African American Studies, Asian American Studies, Chicana/o Studies, Jewish Studies or Native American Studies.
Same as: CSRE 32
ANTHRO 320A. Race, Ethnicity, and Language: Racial, Ethnic, and Linguistic Formations. 3-5 Units.
Language, as a cultural resource for shaping our identities, is central to the concepts of race and ethnicity. This seminar explores the linguistic construction of race and ethnicity across a wide variety of contexts and communities. We begin with an examination of the concepts of race and ethnicity and what it means to be "doing race," both as scholarship and as part of our everyday lives. Throughout the course, we will take a comparative perspective and highlight how different racial/ethnic formations (Asian, Black, Latino, Native American, White, etc.) participate in similar, yet different, ways of drawing racial and ethnic distinctions. The seminar will draw heavily on scholarship in (linguistic) anthropology, sociolinguistics and education. We will explore how we talk and don't talk about race, how we both position ourselves and are positioned by others, how the way we talk can have real consequences on the trajectory of our lives, and how, despite this, we all participate in maintaining racial and ethnic hierarchies and inequality more generally, particularly in schools.
Same as: CSRE 389A, EDUC 389A, LINGUIST 253
ANTHRO 322. From Biopolitics to Necropolitics and Beyond. 5 Units.
This seminar examines scholarship produced and informed by Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben, particularly as relating to biopolitics, governmentality, subjectification, and death. Focus is given to how anthropology and related disciplines have been applying, challenging, and extending these areas of thought in order to address contemporary predicaments. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.
ANTHRO 323. Graduate Seminar in Economic Anthropology. 5 Units.
Classical and contemporary anthropological perspectives on topics such as money, markets and exchange; capitalist and non-capitalist modes of production; class and socio-economic differentiation; globalization and neoliberalism; and the social and cultural construction of the object, "the economy". Prerequisite: consent of instructor.
ANTHRO 324. Political Anthropology. 5 Units.
An anthropological approach to politics through bringing anthropological ways of thinking and modes of analysis to bear on key presuppositions of modern Western political thought. Ideas of rights, the individual, society, liberty, democracy, equality, and solidarity; ethnographic accounts used to identify the limits of conventional analytical approaches and to document the forms of politics that such approaches either ignore or misunderstand. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.
ANTHRO 326. Postcolonial and Indigenous Archaeologies. 5 Units.
The role of postcolonial and Indigenous archaeologies as emergeant disciplinary activities within contemporary society. Community based archaeologies; the roles of oral history, landscape, and memory; archaeology as political action; and history in archaeological projects. The emergence of Indigenous archaeology within N. America in relation to limitations imposed by processual or new archaeology; and NAGPRA, Kennewick, essentialism, and terminal narratives within this context. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.
ANTHRO 328. TRANSREGIONALISM. 5 Units.
This course breaks away from bounded conceptions of society by transgressing conventional spatial containers such as the village, nation, region, and empire. Drawing on selected anthropological and historical monographs, students will learn how to follow clues to get out of the container, draw spatial boundaries anew, and develop outside-in perspectives on local puzzles. The transregional as a method implies an intermediate scale of analysis between the local and the global and demands a double engagement with area studies and social sciences.
ANTHRO 330A. The Archive: Form, Practice, Thought. 5 Units.
This seminar offers a wide-ranging exploration of the `archive.' Drawing from ethnography, social theory, philosophy, photography and literature, we will examine the archive's diverse material, narratological and structural dimensions, its epistemological, political and representational functions, processes of archivisation and recuperation, and related domains of experience, memory, absence and loss. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.
ANTHRO 331. Populism. 5 Units.
This course examines the concept of populism. Course readings include works in political theory and recent ethnographies. We will ask how these texts reframe core problems in anthropology, including the affective dimensions of social life, relations of friend and enemy, and theories of language and signification.nPre-requisite by instructor consent.
ANTHRO 332. Anthropology of Ethics. 5 Units.
Recent decades have witnessed what some scholars have termed an ethical turn in anthropology. This course explores the emergence of this field of study, asking the following questions: What has motivated a renewed anthropological interest in the subject of ethics? How has a focus on ethics enabled the development of new theoretical currents in the discipline? To what extent have anthropological studies of ethics provided new understandings of traditional topics, concerning social hierarchy, power relations, embodiment, and subject-formation?.
ANTHRO 337. VOICES. 5 Units.
This course takes an anthropological perspective on psychotic voices, voices of resistance (mad and sane), voices of authority, voices of spirit, the sense of communication from another seen or unseen. We end with the writer's voice and how students can cultivate their own voice. We read first person examples and a range of theory, including Bakhtin, Lacan, Willy Apollon, Piaget and Vygotsky, and Elyn Saks, Zora Neale Hurston, Zadie Smith and EB White. Texts may shift depending on student input.nPrerequisite: Instructor approval.
ANTHRO 338B. History and Memory. 5 Units.
How are history and memory important in the making of collective and public memory? This seminar draws together an interdisciplinary collection of readings with an aim to provide a foundation for seminar participants¿ projects, both historical and contemporary projects. We will explore critiques of the practice of gathering material, i.e., archival and oral histories as well as delve into experimental forms that combine improvisational approaches to history and critique in an effort to develop a methodological tool kit that allows for a push beyond established projects.
ANTHRO 339. Anthropology of Religion. 5 Units.
This course presents classic and contemporary work on the anthropology of religion: Durkheim Elementary Forms of the Religious Life; Levy-Bruhl; Primitive Mentality; Douglas Purity and Danger; Evans Pritchard Nuer Religion; and recent ethnographies/scholarly work by Robbins, Keane, Keller, Boyer, Barrett, and others. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.
Same as: RELIGST 343X
ANTHRO 34. Animals and Us. 5 Units.
The human-animal relationship is dynamic, all encompassing and durable. Without exception, all socio-cultural groups have evidenced complex interactions with the animals around them, both domesticated and wild. However, the individual circumstances of these interactions are hugely complicated, and involve much more than direct human-animal contact, going far beyond this to incorporate social, ecological and spiritual contexts.n This course delves into this complexity, covering the gamut of social roles played by animals, as well as the methods and approaches to studying these, both traditional and scientific. While the notion of `animals as social actors is well acknowledged, their use as proxies for human autecology (the relationship between a species and its environment) is also increasingly recognized as a viable mechanism for understanding our cultural and economic past. It will piece together the breadth of human-animal relationships using a wide geographic range of case studies.
Same as: ARCHLGY 34
ANTHRO 340A. Fit: The Anthropology of Sports, Medicine, and Debility. 5 Units.
Sport has long been a domain in which everyday people, medical professionals and political authorities have interfaced with the making of institutional definitions and social norms regarding fitness and debility. This course will challenge students to reflect on that interface through consideration of recent research findings within sociocultural anthropology and allied fields.
ANTHRO 341. Entitlement: Kinship, Property and Inheritance. 5 Units.
This graduate seminar explores anthropological approaches to property, kinship and inheritance. It approaches property and kinship as social relations among people and as such call for analyses of the dynamic and unstable processes through which they are constituted, reproduced, and changed over time. Rather than accept conventional distinctions between tangible and intangible property, private and public property, nature and commodities, this course scrutinizes the cultural and social processes through which these categories themselves are constructed and along with them relations of inequality, entitlement, and difference. It investigates the ways in which people (both individuals and communities) are constituted in relation to their claims on things. At a time when new forms and claims of property are increasingly asserted and challenged in a variety of contexts, an understanding of the different bases upon which property rights can be claimed and upon which they can be distinguished from other types of social obligation is a central component of anthropological analyses of the production of new inequalities and differentiations globally.
ANTHRO 342B. Cultural Heritage in Global Perspective. 5 Units.
This seminar will explore the ideas surrounding the theories, discourses, and practices surrounding cultural heritage. Heritage has become inscribed in the planning of urban and rural landscapes, designed as tourist destinations, and considered a universal good in global cosmopolitan society. But it would be well to ask: what kind of "culture" has been labeled as heritage? What kind of organizations, economics, and politics are necessary to sustain it? How are these put in place? By whom? For whom? How can we study this global phenomenon? Over the course of the quarter, students will engage with readings that discuss how cultural heritage is communicated to the public, the relationship between academic critique and pragmatic social engagement, and methodologies for research about heritage. nn Pre-requisite by instructor consent.
ANTHRO 345. New Visions in Medical Anthropology. 5 Units.
Recent experimental histories of the field. Emphasis is on how, working within anthropology's classic format, the ethnographic monograph, authors have innovatively responded to the challenges of representing amorphous, unspoken, and often violent relationships between the body and social change. The authors' expository techniques, and how they engage and extend theoretical debate. How to assess works within medical anthropology and its allied fields. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.
ANTHRO 345A. Race and Power: The Making of Human Difference in History, Biology and Capital. 5 Units.
This course examines how race is made. We will pay close attention to how people engage with material, economic, scientific, and cultural forces to articulate human group difference as a given, and even natural. In this seminar, we will look at the reality of race as a literally constructed phenomenon, where historical, colonial, bodily, market, penal, and humanitarian constituent elements both circulate and sediment racial understandings. To focus our readings and discussions we will divide this vast terrain into three units: race and the colonial encounter, race and biopower, and race in systems of capital accumulation.
ANTHRO 347B. World Heritage in Global Conflict. 5 Units.
Heritage is always political, it is typically said. Such a statement might refer to the everyday politics of local stakeholder interests on one end of the spectrum, or the volatile politics of destruction and erasure of heritage during conflict, on the other. If heritage is always political then one might expect that the workings of World Heritage might be especially fraught given the international dimension. In particular, the intergovernmental system of UNESCO World Heritage must navigate the inherent tension between state sovereignty and nationalist interests and the wider concerns of a universal regime. The World Heritage List has over 1000 properties has many such contentious examples, including sites in Iraq, Mali, Syria, Crimea, Palestine and Cambodia. As an organization UNESCO was born of war with an explicit mission to end global conflict and help the world rebuild materially and morally, but has found it¿s own history increasingly entwined with that of international politics and violence.
ANTHRO 348A. Health, Politics, and Culture of Modern China. 5 Units.
One of the most generative regions for medical anthropology inquiry in recent years has been Asia. This seminar is designed to introduce upper division undergraduates and graduate students to the methodological hurdles, representational challenges, and intellectual rewards of investigating the intersections of health, politics, and culture in contemporary China.
ANTHRO 348B. Bodies, Technologies, and Natures in Africa. 4-5 Units.
This interdisciplinary course explores how modern African histories, bodies, and natures have been entangled with technological activities. Viewing Africans as experts and innovators, we consider how technologies have mediated, represented, or performed power in African societies. Topics include infrastructure, extraction, medicine, weapons, communications, sanitation, and more. Themes woven through the course include citizenship, mobility, labor, bricolage, in/formal economies, and technopolitical geographies, among others. Readings draw from history, anthropology, geography, and social/cultural theory.
Same as: AFRICAST 249, HISTORY 349
ANTHRO 349. Anthropology of Capitalism. 5 Units.
This advanced graduate seminar explores capitalism as an historically-situated and culturally-mediated articulation of practices rather than as an economic system or social structure governed by an internal logic. It draws on poststructural theories of culture, society and subjectivity to investigate the processes through which diverse capitalist practices are produced. Prerequisite: Graduate standing in Anthropology or permission of the instructor. Previous graduate level coursework in cultural anthropology, social theory or cultural studies is required. No auditing is permitted. Enrollment limited to 12.
ANTHRO 349C. Religion and Madness. 3-5 Units.
In this course, a scholar of Judaism and a psychological anthropologist join forces to discuss the relationship between religion and madness. We will read scriptural and mystical texts alongside anthropological and psychiatric texts to explore the ways people distinguish the mad and the holy in different settings, whether one can infer madness from texts written for religious purposes, and indeed whether and when God can be named as mad. In the process we hope to explore the different lenses of religious, historical, anthropological and clinical interpretation.
Same as: RELIGST 349
ANTHRO 350A. Writing as Intervention: Science, Medicine, and Ethics in Today's World. 5 Units.
In this course we will explore contemporary issues of culture and power rooted in science, medicine, technology and futurist proposals to better the human condition with technological fixes. We will investigate anthropological and ethnographic-based theories and methods to propose alternative ethical solutions. These readings will be rooted in examining global stratification, economic metrics of progress, and the routinization of human degradation ranging from norms around sexual power, labor exploits, privacy infringements, data sharing, and automation.nnThe course will be structured as a writing workshop with frequent, short writing assignments to be shared with others in the course. The workshop format will facilitate the course goal of each student producing at least one publishable op-ed, article or other product of intervention at the end of the quarter.
ANTHRO 351D. Ideologies and Practices of Creativity. 5 Units.
The still-robust Romantic conception of creativity as the attribute of a specific, 'gifted', individual continues to have extraordinary social and political power as an ideological apparatus that shapes and disciplines conduct, aspirations, and subjectivities. This course is a critical anthropological exploration of the following questions: How and why has a deep, naturalized individualism long been foundational to both ideals and practices of creativity? How is it raced and gendered? How have people been rethinking relational, collaborative creative practice?.
ANTHRO 353. Landscape. 5 Units.
This seminar offers an interdisciplinary approach to the study of landscape, noting the various processes and projects that have help create them. Readings draw together a broad range of theoretical approaches that are attentive to human-non-human interactions and the overlapping and divergent spatial and temporal questions of the exchanges between landscapes and humans. The readings will also draw attention to representational and non-representational ways that material and symbolic aspects of landscapes help constitute the making of place. The aim of the seminar is to explore the various methodologies for what they offer for the study of place.
ANTHRO 356A. The Universal and the Vernacular. The Global Life of Concepts and Social Forms. 5 Units.
Mapping and understanding vernacular concepts and terminologies has always been central to the anthropological quest to understand societies from `a native point of view'. This has often been accompanied by a critique of universalist and Euro-centric assumptions in the social sciences and in social theory. As a result, the convention has become to treat the `universal¿ (ideas, frames, institutions) as external, often imposed by colonial powers, while the `vernacular¿ conventionally is seen as local and authentic, and the proper site of anthropology.nThis course seeks to rethink this spatial and historical distinction between the universal and the vernacular. Instead we ask: how, and when, do concepts, or practices, become embedded in a vernacular world? Reversely, instead of assuming that universals all originate in Euro-America, we ask: how do concepts and practices become both global and universal? We will trace how impactful ideologies, social forms and institutions have travelled in time to become perceived as elements of vernacular cultures. nDrawing on ethnographic and historical examples across the world, each week will trace the universal and vernacular lives of important concepts such as: `tradition¿, `the individual¿, `community¿, `the people¿; `humanity¿, `dignity¿; `equality¿, `sacrifice¿, `cosmopolitanism¿, `civility¿.
ANTHRO 360A. Archival Research for Social Science: A Practicuum. 5 Units.
Since the 1980s, the necessity of historicizing cultural and social formations has become established as integral to anthropological research. Every ethnography and dissertation has historical sections, derived primarily from secondary sources, commentaries within other ethnographies and published historical work. Most students attempt to conduct archival research in local or national archives alongside ethnographic fieldwork, most often in an ad hoc manner, collecting and analyzing archival material on a trial and error basis. This class is conceived as a practicum that addresses students who need to and want to do archival research as part of their anthropological and sociological fieldwork, but find themselves at a loss for how to think about, begin, and, do archival work.nnThe base layer of the class is methodological and practical: students will be engaged in the practical activities of becoming acquainted with archives, developing archival research questions, learning techniques of recording, coding, and thinking historically. The second layer will be conceptual. Students will be reading and discussing concepts of the archive, reading and analyzing different styles of historical ethnographies, and thinking about how to organize and conceptualize cultural categories historically.nnStudents will be asked to conduct archival research at the archives available at Stanford Libraries and the Hoover Institution archives and write a research paper based on this archival work. We will have weekly meetings divided into two sessions. The first half will discuss set readings and intellectual concern. In the second half, we will discuss methodological concerns, problems encountered in the archives and bounce ideas off each other. We will also have regular guest speakers who will give talks and answer questions, intellectual and methodological about archival research.
ANTHRO 361. Life and Death in Contemporary Latin America: An Anthropological Inquiry. 5 Units.
This seminar explores life and death in contemporary Latin America. We will address anthropological understanding of the role of colonialism, migration, violence, urbanization, democratic transition and neoliberalism as they configure the experience of, and threshold between, vital and deadly processes. nnThis is not a standard survey course, covering the region as a whole however. Instead, we will critically engage several recent ethnographies that explore, for example: the politics and practices of memory; border thinking and living; the political economy of death and desire; state violence and social movements; the relationship between the laboring city and body. We will supplement ethnographies with contemporary Latin American critical theory, film, and literary texts. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.
ANTHRO 362. Visual Activism and Social Justice. 5 Units.
Anthropology and the academy more generally have long valued text, language, and cognition more highly than the image, visuality, and the imagination. Yet, contemporary political movements and strategies for social justice and transformation vividly demonstrate why effective social research needs to study both.nPre-requisite by instructor consent.
ANTHRO 363. Queer Anthropology. 2 Units.
Feminist and queer theory have profoundly rethought epistemologies as well as methodologies. This graduate seminar will explore the relationship between feminist and queer theory and the new directions proposed by queer anthropology in socio-cultural anthropology and archaeology. In addition, the seminar will discuss the challenges that looking at queer studies from anthropology and archaeology can bring from questions of race, global inequalities, misrecognitions as well as specific historical and cultural genealogies which offer more than simply adding diversity to questions already raised within queer studies. Students will acquire both conceptual and methodological skills. nThis year-long graduate seminar adopts a workshop-like format over the entire 2018-2019 academic year. We will meet for eleven (three hour) meetings over three quarters (4 meetings in Autumn, 3 meetings in Winter, and 4 meetings in Spring. Students are required to enroll in all three quarters. Pre-requisite: instructor consent.
ANTHRO 364A. EcoGroup: Problems in Ecological and Evolutionary Anthropology. 2-5 Units.
Seminar; restricted to graduate students. Topics vary with instructor. How to ask appropriate questions, how to derive research hypotheses from theory, how to design methodologies for testing hypotheses, and how to present results by reading and critiquing key contemporary papers in the field. Ph.D. students enrolling in this course to fulfill the department review course requirement must enroll in 5 units. Graduate students enrolling in this course to participate in a topical forum may enroll in 2 units. Course may be repeated for 2 units. Prerequisites: by consent of instructor.
ANTHRO 365A. Emancipation: Theories and Experiences. 5 Units.
Concepts of emancipation have been treated in a wide variety of historical, political, regional and social perspectives. In the US, emancipation and post emancipation societies are primarily understood around histories of enslavement. In the class, while taking inspiration and also covering work on enslavement and emancipation, we will endeavor to discuss theories, ideas and experiences that have been understood as potentially emancipatory from a globally and historically wide-ranging set of ideas. Issues of race, caste, class and gender are axiomatic themes within the class.nEmancipation has frequently been understood as an emancipation from oppression and an impetus towards a form of freedom or new order. While theoretically this is formally understood and discussed, often with historical examples that use experiences to illustrate failures or successes, in this class we will try to understand the texture of practices as the primary means by which ideas about emancipation circulate, imagined, are discussed, are disappointed and so on. We will try and see what an anthropological and historically textured discussion can bring to theoretical discussions of emancipation. We will examine theoretical, historical, sociological and anthropological writings on emancipation, freedom, enslavement and servitude, political mobilization and revolution. Fundamentally this course tries to get students to think globally about multiple and different systems of persisting and enduring oppression and inequality through an emphasis on political thought, political imaginations and concrete political organizations and movements. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.
ANTHRO 366. Material Semiotics. 5 Units.
This seminar will focus on the emerging body of literature on the materiality of the production, circulation, and mediation of paperwork as constituitive of modern forms of governance. We will discuss specific genres of paperworks¿notes, memos, files, documents, as well as archives and other mnemonic technologies¿both as cultural practices and reflexive objects, and examine how they produce modern social epistemologies of accountability, evidence, the fact, and truth in the fields of law, business, and public administration, as well as in civil society generally. Readings will include works by Max Weber, Bruno Latour, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Cornelia Vismann, Ann Stoler, and others. Prerequisite: graduate standing or consent of instructor.
ANTHRO 366W. Semiotics for Ethnography. 1 Unit.
This workshop-style seminar will introduce students to a range of semiotic and linguistic anthropological approaches and tools for ethnographic analysis. A group of (linguistic) anthropologists from other universities will be invited to offer workshops, through which students will learn 1. how to teach semiotics in anthropology courses and 2. how to use semiotic concepts for their own research projects.
Same as: EDUC 366W
ANTHRO 367. The Anthropology of Science: Global Politics and Laboratory Life. 5 Units.
Science and technology are important cultural products that often dramatically reorganize various aspects of human life. In this course we will explore how recent innovations in the life sciences and biomedicine may reconfigure crucial elements of social institutions, lend new structures to identity politics, and often change the way we interact with and conceive of nature. We will examine these issues in various global settings to explore how everyday politics shape politics of life in different locales.nPre-requisite by instructor consent.
ANTHRO 368A. Time and Temporality. 5 Units.
This course explores the social and political organization of time. Anthropology has long been critical of the narratives of progress that are embedded in concepts of modern politics, such as development, citizenship, secularism, and sovereignty. How do social actors respond to the perceived failures of such narratives? How do they re-articulate historical pasts to political futures in the aftermath of modernization? In this course we will read studies that examine lived experiences of the passing of time. How is memory linked to anticipation? How is consciousness of the past structured by expectations of a future to come? We will pay particular attention to the material aspects of these temporal relations, including their social, economic, and infrastructural conditions. Drawing from current debates in anthropology, queer theory, and post-colonial studies, we will critically interrogate theories of ruination, crisis, hope, and utopia.
ANTHRO 371. Living and Dying in the Contemporary World. 5 Units.
This seminar explores how biological, political and social conditions transform and conjoin experiences of living and dying in the world today. Engaging contemporary ethnographies and social theory, we will examine how life and death, the natural and the social, the individual and the collective, are braided together in ways that challenge conclusions about what constitutes care, community, health, rights, and violence, among other issues. We will also reflect on whether and how the braiding together of these domains leaves room for the recognition of their singularity. Thus, an abiding question for this seminar is the relation of history to the present. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.
ANTHRO 372. Urban Ecologies. 5 Units.
At the intersections of urbanism and environmental studies, political ecology, postcolonial theory and the new materialism, new fields are in formation. This seminar explores scholarship that connects cities with countrysides rough questions of resources and infrastructures. We will consider questions id inequality access and community as well as unexpected urban ecologies.
ANTHRO 373. Things: An Archaeology of the Relationships Between Humans and Things. 5 Units.
This course examines a variety of approaches that claim to explore the relationships between humans and things. Some of the approaches include Marx and material culture studies; Heidegger; cognitive and phenomenological; Actor Network Theory. But there is a need also to examine behavioral and ecological and Darwinian approaches. Many of these approaches do not adequately deal with the physicality of things as objects and there is a need to seek a way to incorporate such aspects of things into social theory. Prerequisite: graduate standing or consent of instructor.
ANTHRO 374. Archaeology of Colonialism/Postcolonialisms. 5 Units.
Advanced graduate seminar focused on the archaeology of colonial and postcolonial contexts, both prehistoric and historic. Emphasis on intersections between archaeological research and and subaltern, postcolonial, and transnational feminist/queer theory. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.
ANTHRO 376. Archaeology: The Emergence of a Discipline. 5 Units.
This course explores the key thinkers and practitioners who have founded the discipline of archaeology. Reaching back into the nineteenth century, the course examines in depth the key figures, their preoccupations and projects that shaped the way that archaeology grew through the 20th and into the 21st century. Global in scope, the emphasis will be on field projects and practical problems that stimulated the intellectual development of archaeology as an independent discipline closely tied to geology, history, anthropology, and the natural sciences. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.
ANTHRO 378. Dynamics of Coupled Human-Natural Systems. 5 Units.
This is a graduate research seminar on the interdisciplinary approach to the study of the dynamics of what is known as "coupled human-natural systems." We will take a critical perspective on such systems, asking to what extent the idea of coupling of discrete subsystems is intellectually profitable and what defines a "human" vs. a "natural" system? We will explore concepts such as coupling, nonlinearity, threshold behavior, feedback, complexity, resilience, and catastrophes. Case studies will be drawn from the literature on human ecology, population dynamics, disease ecology, and social dynamics. Emphasis will be on developing a working knowledge of mathematical and computational models of coupled systems embedded within a rigorous empirical framework of biosocial data collection.
ANTHRO 378A. History of Vaccines. 5 Units.
This graduate seminar will examine the history of vaccine development focusing on technical, political, zoonotic, and ethical issues. Readings will be drawn from history, anthropology, literature, and biology. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.
ANTHRO 378B. Culture, Mind and Emotion : Anthropological and Psychological Approaches. 3-5 Units.
How does culture shape the experience of thinking and feeling, the way humans relate to the world and to others? This graduate level course, taught by a psychologist who studies emotion (Jeanne Tsai) and an anthropologist who studies mind (Tanya Marie Luhrmann), explores the way that living in social worlds deeply shapes what seem to be basic processes. We explore what we know about the cultural variations in emotional experience, and about the effect of different representations of minds. We also what can be learned about the way culture shapes experience through different methods.
ANTHRO 379. Empathy Lab. 5 Units.
This lab-based class examines the ways in which various disciplines and art forms conceive of, and tell stories about, the experiences and stories of others. With permission of instructor.
ANTHRO 381. Archaeology of Violence. 5 Units.
This advanced graduate seminar reflects on archaeological research on violence in relation to readings in philosophy, political anthropology, cultural studies, and gender and ethnic studies. While some forensic approaches are discussed, the emphasis is more on structural and collective violence and the role of violence in the formation of the archaeological record.
ANTHRO 382J. Disasters in Middle Eastern History. 4-5 Units.
(HISTORY 282J is an undergraduate course offered for 5 units; HISTORY 382J is a graduate course offered for 4-5 units.) This course explores the history of disasters in the Middle East from the early modern period to the mid-20th-century. We will trace the evolving meanings of disasters and misfortunes by focusing on critical moments -- plagues, fires, earthquakes, wars -- to examine how people have responded to these events, labeled them, and devised strategies to live with or forget them. The course readings follow the evolution of policies and norms together with the articulation of new forms of knowledge and expertise in the wake of catastrophe. Additionally, particular attention will be paid to how modern conceptions of disaster relate to older understandings of apocalypse, as well as to various strands of "disaster reformism," when rethinking tragedy and time helped assert radical agendas for reforming political, economic, social, communal, racial, and gender relations while remodeling social science and intellectual life. The course focuses on various trajectories of disaster thinking in Arabic, Turkish, Greek, Armenian, and Hebrew.
Same as: HISTORY 382J
ANTHRO 385. Captivity. 3 Units.
The premise for this course is that anthropology, as well as other domains of social inquiry, have unacknowledged and unredeemed debts to captivity as structure, experience, and event, from the penal colony to the slave plantation. This course is an attempt to begin to think about those debts through readings in anthropology, history, and philosophy. By instructor consent.
ANTHRO 39. Sense of Place. 3 Units.
This course examines the life of places as shaped by environmental events and projects aimed towards rural or urban development. Drawing methodological insights from anthropology, cultural geography and environmental studies, we examine the forces that generate place problems for humans and nonhumans. Each encounter with place and displacement sets up a particular issue for us to grapple with: How would we address issues created by natural disasters, the seizure of land through legal means that fall under eminent domain or gentrification projects? Through a critical dialogue with interdisciplinary fields that inform the readings, the seminar aims to bring theoretical and methodological insights to inform our practical suggestions for how to address placeness and displaceness at different scales.
ANTHRO 391. Subjectivity. 5 Units.
This seminar considers subjectivity as a central category of social, cultural, psychological, historical and political analysis. Through a critical and collaborative examination of ethnographic works and psychoanalytic theory, we will identify the processes by which subjectivities are produced, explore subjectivity as a locus of social change, and examine how emerging subjectivities remake social worlds. Some of the questions this seminar will pose include: what is the relation between subjectivity and subjection? How to account for the effects of the social in terms of subject formation without succumbing to social determinism? What else is the subject other than the outcome of a complex constellation of discursive, material, institutional, and historical factors?.
ANTHRO 398B. Race, Ethnicity, and Language: Writing Race, Ethnicity, and Language in Ethnography. 3-4 Units.
This methods seminar focuses on developing ethnographic strategies for representing race, ethnicity, and language in writing without reproducing the stereotypes surrounding these categories and practices. In addition to reading various ethnographies, students conduct their own ethnographic research to test out the authors' contrasting approaches to data collection, analysis, and representation. The goal is for students to develop a rich ethnographic toolkit that will allow them to effectively represent the (re)production and (trans)formation of racial, ethnic, and linguistic phenomena.
Same as: EDUC 389B, LINGUIST 254
ANTHRO 400. Cultural and Social Dissertation Writers Seminar. 1-3 Unit.
Required of fifth-year Ph.D. students returning from dissertation field research and in the process of writing dissertations and preparing for professional employment. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.
ANTHRO 401A. Qualifying Examination: Topic. 1-5 Unit.
Required of second- and third-year Ph.D. students writing the qualifying paper or the qualifying written examination. May be repeat for credit.
ANTHRO 401B. Qualifying Examination: Area. 1-5 Unit.
Required of second- and third-year Ph.D. students writing the qualifying paper or the qualifying written examination. May be repeated for credit one time.
ANTHRO 402D. Materialities of Power, Part I. 4-5 Units.
How is power made material? And how do material things--objects, commodities, technologies, and infrastructures --reflect, change, consolidate, or distribute power? This research seminar is aimed at PhD students in history, anthropology, and STS who are working on such questions. All geographic specialties welcome. A small amount of common reading will launch the course, whose main goal is to guide students towards producing a research paper draft that's close to submission-ready for a journal. Along the way, we'll also address practical topics, including how to pick and submit to a journal, how to present a paper, and more.
Same as: HISTORY 403A
ANTHRO 402F. Materialities of Power, Part II. 4-5 Units.
How is power made material? And how do material things --objects, commodities, technologies, and infrastructures--reflect, change, consolidate, or distribute power? This research seminar is aimed at PhD students in history, anthropology, and STS who are working on such questions. All geographic specialties welcome. A small amount of common reading will launch the course, whose main goal is to guide students towards producing a research paper draft that's close to submission-ready for a journal. Along the way, we'll also address practical topics, including how to pick and submit to a journal, how to present a paper, and more.
Same as: HISTORY 403B
ANTHRO 41. Genes and Identity. 4 Units.
In recent decades genes have increasingly become endowed with the cultural power to explain many aspects of human life: physical traits, diseases, behaviors, ancestral histories, and identity. In this course we will explore a deepening societal intrigue with genetic accounts of personal identity and political meaning. Students will engage with varied interdisciplinary sources that range from legal cases to scientific articles, medical ethics guidelines, films, and anthropological works (ethnographies). We will explore several case studies where the use of DNA markers (as proof of heritage, disease risk, or legal standing) has spawned cultural movements that are biosocial in nature. Throughout we will look at how new social movements are organized around gene-based definitions of personhood, health, and legal truth. Several examples include political analyses of citizenship and belonging. On this count we will discuss issues of African ancestry testing as evidence in slavery reparations cases, revisit debates on whether Black Freedman should be allowed into the Cherokee and Seminole Nations, and hear arguments on whether people with genetic links to Jewish groups should have a right of return to Israel. We will also examine the ways genetic knowledge may shape different health politics at the individual and societal level. On this count we will do close readings of how personal genomics testing companies operate, we will investigate how health disparities funding as well as orphan disease research take on new valences when re-framed in genetic terms, and we will see how new articulations of global health priorities are emerging through genetic research in places like Africa. Finally we will explore social implications of forensic uses of DNA. Here we will examine civil liberties concerns about genetic familial searching in forensic databases that disproportionately target specific minority groups as criminal suspects, and inquire into the use of DNA to generate digital mugshots of suspects that re-introduce genetic concepts of race.
Same as: AFRICAAM 41, CSRE 41A
ANTHRO 42. Megacities. 5 Units.
In this course we will examine the meaning, processes, and challenges of urbanization. Through a series of targeted readings across history and geography and through the study of varied means of representation (anthropology, literature, cartography, film, etc), the class will analyze the ways in which urban forms have come into being and created, met, and/or ignored challenges such as disease, water, transport, religious and class conflict, colonialism, labor, and trade. Students will read anthropology in conjunction with other disciplines (literature, urban planning, public health, architecture, and economics) to learn the ways in which ethnographies of immigration, urban poverty, class disparity, economic development and indicators, noise, and transportation substantively augment our understandings of how people live within globalization.
Same as: ARTHIST 242B, LIFE 142, URBANST 142
ANTHRO 440. Graduate Teaching. 1-5 Unit.
Supervised experience teaching in Anthropology.
ANTHRO 441. Master's Project. 1-5 Unit.
Supervised work for terminal and coterminal master's students writing the master's project in the final quarter of the degree program.
ANTHRO 442. Reading Group. 1-3 Unit.
Graduate student reading group on a thematic topic of interest.nIntended for first or second-year cohort PhD students.nSections: Liisa Malkki, Sylvia Yanagisako, Thomas Hansen, Paulla Ebron, andnMiyako Inoue.
ANTHRO 444. Anthropology Colloquium. 1 Unit.
Department Colloquia Lecture Series. Lectures presented on a variety of anthropological topics. Colloquium is intended for the Department of Anthropology's under graduate majors and graduate students. May be repeated for credit.
ANTHRO 445. Anthropology Brown Bag Series. 1 Unit.
Current topics and trends in cultural/social anthropology, archaeology, and environmental and ecological anthropology. Enrollment in this noon-time series is restricted to the Department of Anthropology Master¿s students and First and Second-year PhD students.
ANTHRO 450. Research Apprenticeship. 1-15 Unit.
Supervised work on a research project with an individual faculty member. May be repeated for credit.
ANTHRO 451. Directed Individual Study. 1-15 Unit.
Supervised work for a qualifying paper, examination, or project with an individual faculty member.
ANTHRO 452. Graduate Internship. 1-10 Unit.
Provides graduate students with the opportunity to pursue their area of specialization in an institutional setting such as a laboratory, clinic, research institute, or government agency.
ANTHRO 60N. Digging for Answers: 5 Big Questions of Our Time. 3-5 Units.
The aim in this course is to explore the archaeological evidence for long-term change with regard to 5 major questions of our time: Where do we come from? Has inequality increased? Have we become more violent? Why do we have so much stuff? What is the relationship between humans and climate change? You will be introduced to recent publications for class debate, and will also be introduced to the ways in which archaeologists use evidence in order to explore the 5 themes. We will go to Stanford¿s archaeological collections so that you can have hands-on experience of artifacts and will be able to problem solve using data from the instructor¿s own excavations. We will also visit labs (archaeological and genomic for example), local museums and local archaeological excavations.
Same as: ARCHLGY 60N
ANTHRO 78A. Disruption and Diffusion: The Archaeology of Innovation. 3-5 Units.
This undergraduate seminar uses engagement with canonical archaeological topics and questions about the emergence of civilization to introduce students to critical perspectives on the nature of novelty, progress, and modernity. The first weeks of the course will be spent learning about archaeological hypotheses and debates on early human innovation (e.g. urban development, agriculture). Later weeks will focus on developing a robust theoretical framework through which to better understand and interrogate claims about the origin of innovation.
Same as: ARCHLGY 78
ANTHRO 801. TGR Project. 0 Units.
.
ANTHRO 802. TGR Dissertation. 0 Units.
.
ANTHRO 80A. Heritage and Human Rights. 3-5 Units.
What does archaeology have to say about human rights? Is there a right to cultural heritage? How can archaeology and heritage help protect rights¿or encroach upon them? Themes we will address in this course include the archaeological investigation of human rights topics; the right to heritage; conflicts of different rights regimes in heritage contexts; and ethical considerations about rights during research and heritage management. These questions will take us to cases as diverse as forensic investigation of the disappeared in Argentina, the archaeology of homelessness in the U.K., the destruction of heritage as cultural genocide in Bosnia and the Middle East, and the rights of indigenous groups in Australia and the U.S. to control cultural heritage.
Same as: ARCHLGY 80
ANTHRO 82. Medical Anthropology. 5 Units.
Emphasis is on how health, illness, and healing are understood, experienced, and constructed in social, cultural, and historical contexts. Topics: biopower and body politics, gender and reproductive technologies, illness experiences, medical diversity and social suffering, and the interface between medicine and science.
Same as: ANTHRO 282, HUMBIO 176A
ANTHRO 82P. The Literature of Psychosis. 3-5 Units.
One of the great gifts of literature is its ability to give us insight into the internal worlds of others. This is particularly true of that state clinicians call "psychosis." But psychosis is a complex concept. It can be terrifying and devastating for patients and families, and yet shares characteristics with other, less pathological states, such as mysticism and creativity. How then can we begin to make sense of it? In this course, we will examine the first-hand experience of psychosis. We will approach it from multiple perspectives, including clinical descriptions, works of art, and texts by writers ranging from Shakespeare, to the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, to patients attempting to describe their experience. This class is not only for students thinking of careers in medicine, psychology or anthropology, but also readers and writers interested exploring extraordinary texts. There are no prerequisites necessary; all that is needed is a love of language and a curiosity about the secrets of other minds.
Same as: HUMBIO 162L, PSYC 82, PSYC 282
ANTHRO 89. Undergraduate Reading Group. 1-5 Unit.
Undergraduate student reading group on a thematic topic of interest. Sections: All faculty.
ANTHRO 90B. Theory of Cultural and Social Anthropology. 5 Units.
Preference to Anthropology majors. Anthropological interpretations of other societies contain assumptions about Western societies. How underlying assumptions and implicit categories have influenced the presentation of data in major anthropological monographs. Emphasis is on Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, and anthropological analyses of non-Western societies. Priority given to ANTHRO majors.
ANTHRO 91. Method and Evidence in Anthropology. 5 Units.
This course provides a broad introduction to various ways of designing anthropological questions and associated methods for collecting evidence and supporting arguments. We review the inherent links between how a question is framed, the types of evidence that can address the question, and way that data are collected. Research activities such as interviewing, participant observation, quantitative observation, archival investigation, ecological survey, linguistic methodology, tracking extended cases, and demographic methods are reviewed. Various faculty and specialists will be brought in to discuss how they use different types of evidence and methods for supporting arguments in anthropology.
ANTHRO 91A. Archaeological Methods. 5 Units.
Methodological issues related to the investigation of archaeological sites and objects. Aims and techniques of archaeologists including: location and excavation of sites; dating of places and objects; analysis of artifacts and technology and the study of ancient people, plants, and animals. How these methods are employed to answer the discipline's larger research questions.
Same as: ARCHLGY 102
ANTHRO 92A. Undergraduate Research Proposal Writing Workshop. 2-3 Units.
Practicum. Students develop independent research projects and write research proposals. How to formulate a research question; how to integrate theory and field site; and step-by-step proposal writing.
ANTHRO 92B. Undergraduate Research Proposal Writing Workshop. 2-3 Units.
Practicum. Students develop independent research projects and write research proposals. How to formulate a research question; how to integrate theory and field site; and step-by-step proposal writing.
ANTHRO 93. Prefield Research Seminar. 5 Units.
For Anthropology majors only; non-majors register for 93B. Preparation for anthropological field research in other societies and the U.S. Data collection techniques include participant observation, interviewing, surveys, sampling procedures, life histories, ethnohistory, and the use of documentary materials. Strategies of successful entry into the community, research ethics, interpersonal dynamics, and the reflexive aspects of fieldwork. Prerequisites: two ANTHRO courses or consent of instructor.
ANTHRO 93B. Prefield Research Seminar: Non-Majors. 5 Units.
Preparation for anthropological field research in other societies and the U.S. Data collection techniques include participant observation, interviewing, surveys, sampling procedures, life histories, ethnohistory, and the use of documentary materials. Strategies for successful entry into the community, research ethics, interpersonal dynamics, and the reflexive aspects of fieldwork. Service Learning Course (certified by Haas Center).
ANTHRO 94. Postfield Research Seminar. 5 Units.
Goal is to produce an ethnographic report based on original field research gathered during summer fieldwork, emphasizing writing and revising as steps in analysis and composition. Students critique classmates' work and revise their own writing in light of others' comments. Ethical issues in fieldwork and ethnographic writing, setting research write-up concerns within broader contexts.
ANTHRO 95. Research in Anthropology. 1-10 Unit.
Independent research conducted under faculty supervision, normally taken junior or senior year in pursuit of a senior paper or an honors project. May be repeated for credit.
ANTHRO 95B. Independent Study for Honors or Senior Paper Writing. 1-5 Unit.
Required of Anthropology honors or senior paper candidates. Taken in the final quarter before handing in the final draft of the Honors or Senior Paper and graduating. This independent study supports work on the honors and senior papers for students with an approved honors or senior paper application in Anthropology. Prerequisite: consent of Anthropology faculty advisor.nnTerms: Aut, Win, Spr, Sum Units: 1-5nn(not repeatable for credit).
ANTHRO 96. Directed Individual Study. 1-10 Unit.
Prerequisite: consent of instructor.
ANTHRO 97. Internship in Anthropology. 1-10 Unit.
Opportunity for students to pursue their specialization in an institutional setting such as a laboratory, clinic, research institute, or government agency. May be repeated for credit. Service Learning Course (certified by Haas Center).
ANTHRO 98C. Digital Methods in Anthropology. 3-5 Units.
The course provides an introduction to a broad range of digital tools and techniques for anthropological research. It is geared towards those interested in exploring such methodologies for their research and wanting to add hands-on experience with state-of-the-art digital tools to their skill set. Students will learn to work with some of the most common tools used to collect and manage digital data, and to perform various types of analysis and visualization.nUndergraduate students register for 3-5 Units, Graduate students can register for 3-5 units.
Same as: ANTHRO 298C
