The aim of this course is to introduce the ways that medical anthropologists understand illness, suffering, and healing as taking shape amidst a complex interplay of biological, psychological, social, political-economic, and environmental processes.
(Offered as ANTH 238 and SWAG 238) This course concerns the reproductive health experiences, including those focused on sexuality, birth, and motherhood, of women in the United States. It explores the relationship between these experiences and the fact of having a black female body (as was first constructed under slavery). It also explores the complex relationship between women’s reproductive experiences and their contemporary racial and socioeconomic locations in American society.
This course begins with a brief overview of the African societies from which people were taken and enslaved. It then focuses on the dispersal of slaves throughout the world, asking “What is the African Diaspora?" Using ethnographies, documentaries, and novels, as well as critical theory emanating from Anthropology and beyond, the course explores the racial, political, and social similarities and differences within and between the communities constituting the African Diaspora, opening the category up to a non-essentializing, sociohistorical nuance.
How can anthropology help us understand life stories? How can life stories illustrate, challenge, or extend theoretical claims? How can the life stories of anthropologists help us understand their perspectives and research methods? This class will teach students how to answer such questions.
How do various kinds of people in various societies worldwide define and pursue happiness? How do they deal with aspects of everyday life that affect their physical and psychological health? How does one’s gender, age, country, sociocultural background, and socioeconomic status shape the ways in which one might pursue health and happiness?
An examination of theory and method in sociocultural anthropology as applied in the analysis of specific societies. The course will focus on case studies of societies from different ethnographic areas.
Fall semester. Professor Gewertz.
Independent reading course.
Fall and spring semesters. The Department.
Independent reading course.
Fall and spring semesters. The Department.
This seminar examines six major events that fundamentally impacted the history of Asians in the United States. Several of them involved egregious actions by the US government that prompted official apologies from later administrations, the only such cases in American history: the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1893, and the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans in 1942. The others include Asian Americans and the Cold War, the Asian American Movement of the 1960s and 70s, and the Model Minority Paradigm, 1960s to the Present.
(Offered as HIST 359 [US] and AMST 359) When calling for the nation’s first public school systems, Horace Mann described common schools as the “great equalizer of the conditions of men” and “the balance wheel of the social machinery.” This basic idea, that formal education can reduce poverty by “leveling the playing field” or providing a “fair start in life” is among the most cherished ideals in American social and political thought.
