Dante's Inferno Myth & History

Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy is one of world literature's foundational works. In his 700-hundred years old masterpiece, Dante poses and confronts universal questions that are still at the core of our daily existence: God, love, ethics, gender relationships, politics, social harmony, literature, the afterlife, and the relations between human and nonhuman forms of life. In this course, we will read, analyze, discuss, and enjoy Dante's great poem by focusing on the first of its three parts, the Inferno. In particular, we will be covering Dante's take on mythology and history.

Anthropology of Modern Japan

Certain keywords are crucial for understanding Japanese culture and society, words such as amae (dependence), uchi/soto (inside/outside), tatemae/honne (formality/true feeling), giri (obligation), hare/kegare (purity/pollution), seishin (spirit), and en (connection). This course will introduce seminal works that introduce some of these keywords, as well as more recent writing that examines the contexts such as the family, school, and workplace in which these cultural frameworks shape peoples' lives and are themselves reshaped.

Ethnographic Film

Anthropologists have made films since the origins of the discipline and have long debated the role of film in the production of knowledge about others. This course explores the history, evolution, critiques, and contemporary practices of ethnographic film. We will consider key works that have defined the genre, and the innovations (and controversies) associated with them; we will engage documentary, observational, reflexive, and experimental cinema; and we will consider Indigenous media as both social activism and cultural reproduction.
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