This course explores the often-misunderstood concept of "witchcraft," past and present. "Witchcraft" is at times used to characterize nuanced cultural systems of power and healing, which seek to explain and redress suffering. In turn, many societies experiencing environmental insecurity, health crises, and rapid economic transitions have seen the rise of "witch-hunting" movements, from the Salem witch trials to present-day global conspiracy theories.

This course offers a historical foundation for themes in contemporary social theory and ethnography. We build this foundation through readings of twentieth-century anthropological and critical theories, including historicism, interpretive anthropology, structuralism, feminism, and postcolonialism. The course encourages critical and creative responses to anthropology's history through readings that challenge the canon and through active engagement with primary documents revealing the field's social, ethical, and political contexts.

Students in this course will develop a collaborative history and ethnography of cultures of science at Mount Holyoke College. Through archival and ethnographic research carried out across the semester, we will examine scientific education and knowledge production at Mount Holyoke in cultural perspective. The collaborative project will introduce students to two broader stories: a history of feminist activist and scholarly challenges to the power of the life sciences; and a history of feminist scientists' work to reform their own institutional cultures.

Museums increasingly are called to nurture courageous conversations about the most difficult challenges of the day. This course explores strategies for museum design, exhibition development, and public programming that promote meaningful, civil debate about such topics as climate change, environmental justice, and the biodiversity crisis; race and the legacies of slavery and social violence; indigeneity and cultural diversity; gender and sexuality, and the rights of non-human beings.

This seminar focuses on anthropological studies of how power - both in its open and hidden forms - manifests itself and shapes everyday life in the contemporary Middle East. It explores how authority is established and contested in various domains including bureaucracy and the state; sexuality and the family; religion and civil society; markets and the media. We will trace how experiences of colonization, imperialism, modernization, nationalism, capitalism, occupation, war and revolt mold the conditions of living for peoples of the Middle East.

With a focus on local religious communities, this course puts into practice the research methods, modes of analysis, and writing styles that characterize ethnographic fieldwork. We first consider prominent ethnographies of religious communities in the United States in order to better understand the specific questions, debates, and ethical challenges that this literature addresses. Students then gain hands-on experience with a variety of ethnographic methods through course field trips to local places of worship.

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.

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.

How do family and kinship shape our social lives? In turn, how are family and kinship shaped by social and historical contexts? We all come to this course with individual experiences of family, kinship, and sexuality, but this course will ask you to critically engage with these concepts from a sociological perspective. In this course we will both define and use an intersectional lens to understand how class, race-ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and citizenship mutually shape our individual and collective experiences of family and kinship.

This course will focus on the relations between gender, politics, and social change to explore the gendered character of citizenship, political participation, and mobilization. We'll start by considering what makes a social movement, who mobilizes, and what resistance has, does, and can look like in practice. Students will engage with historical and contemporary cases of feminist and women's social movements to explore how gender constructs both formal political participation and activism.