This course looks at the cultural construction of illness through an examination of systems of diagnosis, classification and therapy in both non-Western and Western societies. Special attention is given to the role of the traditional healer, the anthropological contribution to international health care and the training of physicians in the United States. Enrollment limited to 30.

This course offers an overview of the archaeology of South America, from the earliest traces of human occupation over 10,000 years ago to the material culture of the present. We focus on how archaeologists use data collected during settlement surveys, site excavations, and artifact analysis to reconstruct households and foodways, social and political organization, and ritual and identity over the millennia. Topics also include the relevance of the past in contemporary indigenous rights movements, heritage management strategies, and nationalist projects.

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.

Topics course: In a landscape transformed by the pandemic, climate change, tightening borders, and surveillance and artificial intelligence technologies, what form will anthropology assume and what role will it play in the near future? In this seminar, we focus on three major forces – health, climate change, and technology – to show how the discipline is being transformed by them.

Anthropology vitally understands bodies as socially meaningful, and as sites for the inculcation of ethical and political identities through processes of embodiment, which break down divides between body as natural and body as socially constituted. In this class, we engage these anthropological understandings to read how bodies are invoked, disciplined and reshaped in prisons and classrooms, market economies and multicultural democracies, religious and ethical movements, and the performance of gender and sexuality, disease and disability.

This course explores the similarities and differences in the cultural patterning of human experience, compares economic, political, religious and family structures in Africa, the Americas, Asia and Oceania and analyzes the impact of the modern world on traditional societies. Several ethnographic films are viewed in coordination with descriptive case studies. Limited to first-year students and sophomores. Enrollment limited to 25.

This course explores the similarities and differences in the cultural patterning of human experience, compares economic, political, religious and family structures in Africa, the Americas, Asia and Oceania and analyzes the impact of the modern world on traditional societies. Several ethnographic films are viewed in coordination with descriptive case studies. Limited to first-year students and sophomores. Enrollment limited to 25.

Topics course. Repeatable with a different topic: This seminar engages new scholarship in American Studies, with a focus on critical disability studies, critical race studies, queer ecologies, and feminist science & technlogy studies. This course presents an occasion to rethink approaches to interdisciplinarity, intersectionality, ethnic studies, and media & cultural studies. Likely texts include works by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Theri A.

Topics course.

This seminar 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.