Independent Reading Courses. A full course.

Fall and spring semesters. The Department.

“Disaster” and “catastrophe” are themes that have long hovered on the margins of anthropology, appearing frequently as oblique warnings of irreversible cultural and linguistic loss. Anthropologists have more recently embraced these terms with new urgency as disasters have come to attract unprecedented attention on a global scale and “disaster” has emerged as an essential idiom for conceptualizing life and survival in the contemporary world.

(Offered as History 375 [AS], ANTH 375 and ASLC 375 [SA].)  This course explores the intervention made by the Subaltern Studies Collective in the discipline of history-writing, particularly in the context of South Asia.  Dissatisfied that previous histories of Indian nationalism were all in some sense “elitist,” this group of historians, anthropologists, and literary theorists sought to investigate how various marginalized communities--women, workers, peasants, adivasis--contributed in their own terms to the making of modern South Asia.  Their project thus engaged

This course will look at the relationship between economy and society through a critical examination of Marx with particular emphasis on pre-capitalist economies. The more recent work of French structural Marxists and neo-Marxists, and the substantivist-formalist debate in economic anthropology will also be discussed. The course will develop an anthropological perspective by looking at such “economic facts” as production, exchange systems, land tenure, marriage transactions, big men and chiefs, state formation, peasant economy, and social change in the modern world.

This course is an in-depth exploration of theories and strategies of international development as they have been applied in the Global South since the second half of the twentieth century. We will discuss how the discourses and practices of development produce global inequality and construct parts of the world as underdeveloped. Development strategies will be examined from a cultural and historical perspective.

This seminar provides an analysis of male-female relationships from a cross-cultural perspective, focusing upon the ways in which cultural factors modify and exaggerate the biological differences between men and women. Consideration will be given to the positions of men and women in the evolution of society, and in different contemporary social, political, and economic systems, including those of the industrialized nations.

Limited to 20 students.  Spring semester.  Professor Gewertz. 

This seminar will examine contemporary issues in anthropology. Topics will vary from year to year but might, for instance, include anthropological and ethnographic engagements with postcolonialism, the politics of development, neoliberalism and “anti-globalization” activism, militarism, poverty and the politics of survival, institutions of confinement and care, as well as the writing of grants as a prerequisite for the writing of culture in ethnographies.

Limited to 20 students. Spring semester. Professor Chowdhury.

A general survey of writings that have played a leading role in shaping the modern fields of cultural and social anthropology. Beginning with a discussion of the impact of Darwin and the discoveries at Brixham Cave on mid-nineteenth century anthropology, the course surveys the theories of the late-nineteenth-century cultural evolutionists. It then turns to the role played by Franz Boas and his students and others in the advent and later development of cultural anthropology in the U.S.

This class is designed to provide an introduction to the field of global health. We will first acquire some historical and analytical tools, including a familiarity with social theories that will help us identify relevant issues and understand the complexity of situations we will examine over the course of the semester.

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