This course reviews the major theoretical approaches and directions in cultural anthropology from the late 19th century to the present. These approaches include social organization and individual agency; adaptation and evolution of human culture; culture and personality, economic behavior, human ecology; the anthropology of development and change; and postmodern interpretation. The works of major anthropologists are explored, including Franz Boas, Bronislaw Malinowski, Margaret Mead, Evans-Pritchard, Claude Levi-Strauss, Marvin Harris, Eric Wolf, Clifford Geertz, Sherry Ortner and others.

In Western discourses, African environments are defined by violence, famine and degradation. These characteristics are depicted as symptoms of an African resistance to Western values such as private property, democracy and environmentalism. This course encourages students to think critically about such portrayals by learning about specific environments in Africa and how humans have interacted with them across time.

This course surveys the social and cultural contexts of languages throughout the world. It examines the ways in which a human language reflects the ways of life and beliefs of its speakers, contrasted with the extent of language's influence on culture. The course focuses on topics such as identity, social factors of language use, language vitality, language politics and issues of globalization. Each language is a repository of history and knowledge, as well as the culture, of a group of speakers.

This course features case studies from across the globe to explore the diversity of theoretical approaches to studying the past, the field, and lab methods used to analyze material culture, and the ethical considerations of archaeological practice. Students develop a solid foundation for evaluating and contextualizing archaeological research using insights from the humanities, social sciences, and STEM fields.

There are many ways to love plants. Home gardeners design with them, healers study their properties to treat patients with them, field botanists learn ornate vocabularies to identify them, poets sound their symbolic depths. What do these different forms of botanophilia say about the human condition and its interspecies intimacies? Living amidst our planet’s sixth mass extinction event, more botanophilia is needed and needed yesterday.

This course examines the material culture of everyday life in New England from the earliest colonial settlements to the Victorian era. It introduces students to the growing body of material culture studies and the ways in which historic landscapes, architecture, furniture, textiles, metalwork, ceramics, foodways and domestic environments are interpreted as cultural documents and as historical evidence.