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. Total enrollment of each section 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. Total enrollment of each section 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. Total enrollment of each section limited to 25.

Topics course: The obesity epidemic, personalized cancer treatments, and the commercialization of surrogate pregnancy represent manifestations of Foucault's conception of biopower or the regulation of the lives of individuals and populations.

Topics course: Anthropological writing must convey the life-worlds of people and the textures of ethnographic encounters and fieldwork, and refine anthropological theories. How can writing do all of this at once? And as we craft a narrative, what do we leave out? Do we really describe ethnographic “reality” or do we create anthropological fictions? Why then do we look to ethnographic accounts to understand societies and cultures? Anthropological writing has dealt with these questions and more since its inception but most profoundly since the 1980s.

This course is a general introduction to the relationship between indigenous societies and the state in Mesoamerica. Taking a broad historical perspective, we explore the rise of native state-level societies, the transformations that marked the process of European colonization, and the relationship of local indigenous communities to post-colonial states and transnational social movements. Texts used in the course place special emphasis on continuities and changes in language, social organization, cosmology and identity that have marked the historical experience of native groups in the region.

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, disclipined 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.

Same as EAS 223. What happens when states focus on their citizen’s potential productivity and discipline to serve the interests of the nation? Biopolitics or the regulation and optimization of populations relies on biomedicine, science, statistics, laws, and policies to ensure the health and future of the nation. Using an anthropological lens the course examines how trajectories of East Asian history, politics, and science intersect with health in our globally connected futures.

This course introduces students to the variety of methods of inquiry used for research in anthropology. Throughout the semester, students are introduced to methods of locating and analyzing information and sources, developing research questions and writing. Normally taken in the spring of the sophomore or junior year. Prerequisite: 130 and permission of the instructor. Enrollment limited to 20 anthropology majors.

Same as AFR 170. An introduction to the themes, issues and questions that shaped the literature of African Americans during its period of origin. Texts include poetry, prose and works of fiction. Writers include Harriet Jacobs, Frances Harper, Charles Chesnutt, Frederick Douglass, Phillis Wheatley.