(Offered as ANTH 318 and ASLC 318 [C].)  This course examines Chinese childrearing, focusing primarily on childrearing in mainland China. We will look at differences as well as similarities between childrearing in Chinese families of different socioeconomic status within China, as well as between childrearing in mainland China and in childrearing in Chinese and non-Chinese families worldwide.

(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.

(Offered as ANTH 241 and FAMS 378.) This course will explore and evaluate various visual genres, including photography, ethnographic film and museum presentation as modes of anthropological analysis--as media of communication facilitating cross-cultural understanding. Among the topics to be examined are the ethics of observation, the politics of artifact collection and display, the dilemma of representing non-Western “others” through Western media, and the challenge of interpreting indigenously produced visual depictions of “self” and “other.”

This course is an overview of the processes of social, economic, and cultural change in Latin America. While focusing on the present, we will discuss the impacts of the colonial encounter and the social, cultural, and economic relations established during the colonial era. We pay particular attention to the construction of racial difference, class formation, agrarian structures, ethnic identity, gender patterns, political conflict, and national and regional economic policy.

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.

This course looks at how and why people move from one country to another, what they experience as they migrate, how they are changed by what they experience, how they decide when and whether to return to their countries of origin, and how their transnational journeys affect the countries they migrate between.  We will also consider the kinds of policies and practices that might improve the experiences of transnational migrants and the people they interact with during and after their time in other countries.  We will look not only at the experiences of immigrants in the U.S., but a

This course concentrates on the role of culture in evolutionary perspective, regarding it as the distinctive adaptive mode of humanity. Drawing on the materials of primatology, paleontology, archaeology, the prehistoric record as well as cultural studies, the primary emphasis will be on the relations among biological, psychological, social, and cultural factors in human evolution and human life. The focus is primarily on the role of culture in human evolution, and aspects of culture that make humans unique.

Limited to 50 students. Spring semester. Professor Goheen.

Fall and spring semesters.

This course is designed to provide American Studies juniors (and others) with a methodological grounding in the discipline and an opportunity to write a research paper on a topic of their own choosing.  We will engage a wide range of materials and methodologies in this course in order to grasp the broad interdisciplinarity of the field of American Studies.  Through short written exercises addressing a variety of documents including manuscripts, journals, census records, images and printed books, students will gauge the utility of various methodological approaches to determine whic

(Offered as AMST 360 and ARHA 360.)  What is public art and what role does it play in public life and collective memory in the United States? In this course we will study art that is commissioned, paid for, and owned by the state as well as private works scaled to public encounter.  A focus of our study will be the evolution of public art in Washington, D.C.