Topics course. This course examines the universal and science-based frameworks in which notions of risk are identified. From a cross-cultural perspective, we consider how social and cultural forces also drive identification of risk and anticipation of danger. Cases from public health, medicine, environmental and development studies are used to examine the contingency of risk theory in practice.

Topics course. Anthropological writing must convey the life-worlds of people and the textures of ethnographic encounters and fieldwork, and engage with 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 introduces students to the culture, politics and everyday life of South Asia. Topics covered include religion, community, nation, caste, gender and development, as well as some of the key conceptual problems in the study of South Asia, such as the colonial construction of social scientific knowledge, and debates over "tradition" and "modernity." In this way, we address both the varieties in lived experience in the subcontinent and the key scholarly, popular and political debates that have constituted the terms through which we understand South Asian culture.

This course uses anthropological approaches and theories to understand reproduction as a social, cultural and biological process. Drawing on cross-cultural studies of pregnancy and childbirth, new reproductive technologies, infertility and family planning, the course examines how society and culture shape biological experiences of reproduction. We also explore how anthropological studies and theories of reproduction intersect with larger questions about nature and culture, kinship and citizenship among others.

Archaeology and ethnography are combined to survey the history and cultures of indigenous South America, from the earliest settlements to contemporary communities. Topics include early migration, cultural classifications, pre-Hispanic sociopolitical patterns, native cosmologies and ecological adaptations, challenges to cultural survival and indigenous mobilizations.

This course is a general introduction to anthropological analysis of politics and the political. Through a broad survey of anthropological texts and theories, we explore what an ethnographic perspective can offer to our understandings of power and government. Special emphasis is placed on the role of culture, symbols and social networks in the political life of local communities.

Anthropology has a long and complicated relationship with the study of human rights and civic engagement, juggling our orientation of cultural relativism with social and political demands for universal rights including rights of minorities, women, children, labor and victims of conflict. This course examines the origins and development of human rights and their impact on anthropological studies of ethnicity, gender, development, and mobilization in local struggles.

Topics course. This course charts the evolution of the theme of reason and its limits in the European novel of the modern era. Beginning with an examination of humanist assumptions about the value of reason in Rabelais, the course focuses on the Central European novel of the 20th century, the age of "terminal paradoxes." Texts include Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground, Kafka's The Trial, Musil's Man Without Qualities and Kundera's The Joke, The Farewell Party and The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

Same as LSS 288. The work of certain writers -- often women and often Wharton, von Arnim and Colette -- is categorized as small in scope, narrowly focused and therefore marginal in some ways. Here are questions, based in part on readings in landscape and domestic design theory, that we can ask to help us see their work differently: When and how is it appropriate to juxtapose writers' biographies on their fiction? How do they represent domestic discord -- loss, rage, depression -- in their fiction?

This course examines the last 20 years of Latina writing in this country while tracing the Latin American roots of many of the writers. Constructions of ethnic identity, gender, Latinidad, "race," class, sexuality and political consciousness are analyzed in light of the writers' coming to feminism. Texts by Esmeralda Santiago, Gloria Anzaldua, Sandra Cisneros, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Denise Chavez, Demetria Martinez and many others are included in readings that range from poetry and fiction to essay and theatre. Knowledge of Spanish is not required, but will be useful.