Over the last twenty years, anthropologists have increasingly focused on the role that scientific practices and technologies play in cultural production. From militarization to cheese-making, science and technology are in many ways foundational to our social worlds. What began as a disciplinary inquiry into the lives of scientists and their work in laboratories has evolved to examine the politics of scientific knowledge, the history of scientific objects, and the study of non-human agency. Some of the questions this course will explore include: How do you study science ethnographically?

(Offered as ANTH 253 and ASLC 270 [SA].)  This course is a survey of foundational and contemporary writing on Muslim cultures across South Asia. The approach here is anthropological, in the sense that the course focuses on material that situates Islamic thought in the making of everyday practices, imaginations, and ideologies of a very large and varied group of people. While India hosts the second largest population of Muslims in the world, Pakistan and Bangladesh, respectively, are two of the world’s largest Muslim-majority nation-states.

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.  The course is designed to engage a broad range of medical anthropology topics, theoretical approaches, and research techniques by examining case studies concerned with such issues as chronic illness and social suffering, ritual and religious forms of healing, illness and inequality, medicalization, the global AIDS crisis, the social life o

Early European explorers, modern travelers, collectors, curators, and archaeologists have contributed to the development of ancient Latin American collections in museums across the globe. This course traces the history of these collecting practices and uses recent case studies to demonstrate how museums negotiate—successfully and unsuccessfully—the competing interests of scholars, donors, local communities, and international law.

(Offered as ANTH 206 and FAMS 357.)  This course will examine ethnographic film beginning in the early twentieth century. Through a combination of critical readings and film viewings we will address issues of representation, vision, gender, film techniques, knowledge production, and our relationships with difference vis-à-vis ethnographic film. While not specifically a production course, the making of student videos is encouraged, and student-made videos will be screened in class at the end of the semester.

(Offered as ANTH 200 and ASLC 200) In what ways are the experiences and perspectives of various kinds of people in various kinds of situations in contemporary China different from those of their counterparts in other places and times, and in what ways are they similar?  What accounts for these similarities and differences? How can anthropology help us understand China? What can the study of China contribute to our understandings of the issues, processes, and systems that anthropologists study worldwide?

An examination of theory and method in social anthropology as applied in the analysis of specific societies. The course will focus on case studies of societies from different ethnographic areas.

Spring semester. Professor Fong.

(Offered as AMST 215 and ANTH 111) "The Embodied Self" in American Culture and Society is an interdisciplinary, historically organized study of American perceptions of and attitudes towards the human body in a variety of media, ranging from medical and legal documents to poetry and novels, the visual arts , film, and dance.

(Offered as AMST 215 and ANTH 111) "The Embodied Self" in American Culture and Society is an interdisciplinary, historically organized study of American perceptions of and attitudes towards the human body in a variety of media, ranging from medical and legal documents to poetry and novels, the visual arts , film, and dance.

Fall and spring semesters.