Since the mid-nineteenth century, Americans have viewed Japan as the Orient's most exotic and mysterious recess, alternately enticing and frightening in its difference. Intense economic relations and cultural exchange between Japan and the U.S. have not dispelled the image of Japanese society and culture as fundamentally different from our own. In this course, we will strive for greater understanding of shared experiences as well as historical particularities. Issues covered may vary from one semester to another, but frequently focus on work, women, minorities, and popular culture.

We shop for our food, for our clothes, for our colleges. We purchase cars, manicures, and vacations. It seems that there is little that cannot be bought or sold. But we also give and receive gifts, exchange favors, 'go dutch' in restaurants, and invite friends for potlucks. This course examines exchange systems cross-culturally, in order to understand their cultural significance and social consequences.

This course explores anthropological approaches to Human Rights - a key theme of transnational politics and international law. Anthropologists have contributed to discussions on human rights since the UN Declaration and the field has provided a vibrant platform to analyze ideologies, politics, and practices surrounding human rights. We will survey an array of anthropological studies that approach human rights from the perspective of cultural relativism, contextualization, advocacy, and practice.

The anthropology of way-finding has focused on the cognitive problems involved when people move through space. Some have suggested that people memorize sequences of vistas, while others have argued that people abstract mental maps from their experience traveling over specific itineraries. Both approaches have in common a focus on movement through space. Meanwhile, the anthropology of place has focused on the construction of culturally meaningful places out of abstract space. Way-finding is about movement; place is about dwelling.

This seminar meets to discuss practical issues in doing research in anthropology and sociology. Depending on student interest, activities could include reading field notes, narrative analysis of texts, survey design, coding and measurement of quantitative variables, and/or visual analysis. Students might think about how to develop a class paper into an independent study, how to organize research for a thesis, or how to make sense of research and internship experience off-campus or during study abroad.

Biocultural aspects of disease and healing are examined through case studies of nonindustrialized societies, including the relationship between malaria and sickle cell anemia in West Africa and ritual cannibalism, AIDS, and a degenerative nervous-system disorder (kuru) in highland New Guinea. This course surveys the cultural construction of suffering and healing, the medicalization of human social problems, and inequities in the distribution of disease and therapy.

This course covers major issues in the anthropology of reproduction, including the relationship between production and reproduction, the gendered division of labor, the state and reproductive policy, embodied metaphors of procreation and parenthood, fertility control and abortion, crosscultural reproductive ethics, and the social implications of new reproductive technologies. We examine the social construction of reproduction in a variety of cultural contexts.

In this course we go behind the scenes and behind the screens of anthropological films, museum exhibitions, 'small media' events such as television, and publications such as National Geographic Magazine, to explore the social contexts of image production, distribution, and interpretation. Focusing on visual activism and ethics, we consider how popular portrayals of our own society and of others' both shape and are shaped by hierarchies of value in the material world.

This course offers an appraisal of the core questions and theoretical frameworks of the past two decades. It covers the relationship of fieldwork to theory building, new trends in anthropological analysis, and critical examinations of the uses and abuses of anthropological data.

This course uses a sociological framework to examine the nature and structure of modern industrial societies. To identify central trends in society and culture, this course covers several basic themes, such as social inequality and social interaction, that have appeared repeatedly in the works of major social thinkers.