Students will learn about the human body in its social, cultural and political contexts. The framing is sociological rather than biomedical, attentive to cultural meanings, institutional practices, politics and social problems. The course explicitly discusses bodies in relation to race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, age, health, geography and citizenship status, carefully examining how social differences come to appear natural. Analyzing clinics, prisons, border zones, virtual realities and more, students develop a conceptual toolkit to analyze how society "gets under the skin", producing differential exposure to premature death.

Humans have a deep history, one that informs our contemporary reality. Understanding our evolutionary history is understanding both what we have in common with other primates and other hominins, and what happened over the last 7 to 10 million years since our divergence from the other African ape lineages. More specifically, the story of the human is centered in what happened the ~2.5 million year history of our own genus (Homo). This class outlines the history of our lineage and offers an anthropological and evolutionary explanation for what this all means for humans today, and why we should care.

This course focuses on how people wrestle with their relationships to faith, morality, ideas of justice, and conceptions of good life, and how they deal with the emotions that mediate these relationships. Emotions such as anger, happiness, disgust, kindness, and grief play an important role in shaping moral convictions and acts. We will learn some of the theoretical tools, research methods, and analytical practices that help anthropologists discern how morality can both be linked to and be separate from religious considerations, and how emotions can both ground us in a moral order and also make us question our faith and moral orientations.

Average student loan debt in the United States is $38,792. Debt collection lawsuits are a growing and unevenly distributed problem. How and why do people go into debt? Why is debt linked to "usury" in some cultures while in others not having debt is a mark of being "underleveraged"? How can "debt" sometimes be an instrument of social solidarity and other times be a source of social discord? In this course we will look at debates about "debt" in different places and times as diverse as 4th century Greece, 18th century England, 19th century Egypt, and the 2008 Financial Crisis and its aftermath around the world.

This course provides an introduction to how the ethnographic method, with its focus on empirical observation and description, intersects with and diverges from classic approaches to researching the urban, a certain kind of social formation. Drawing upon a range of examples from across different cultural and historical contexts, we will consider the political dilemmas and possibilities associated with cities shaped by industrial capitalism, histories of colonialism, and emergent, transnational processes. The final part of the course will study the relationship between the refugee camp and city.

Medical Anthropology explores how structural violence and the social markers of difference impact life chances in our worlds on edge. While addressing biosocial and therapeutic realities and probing the tenets of medical capitalism, the course articulates theoretical and practical contributions to apprehending health as both a struggle against death and a human right. We will learn ethnographic methods, engage in critical ethical debates, and experiment with modes of expression. Students will develop community-engaged and artistic projects and consider alternative forms of solidarity and care emerging alongside newfangled scales of harm.

This course draws on anthropology, history, critical theory, films and documentaries, fictive and journalistic writing to explore violence, its power and meaning. We will explore conquest and colonialism, genocidal violence, state violence and political resistance, everyday violence, gendered violence, racialization, torture, as well as witnessing and repair. Building across disciplines and working with heterodox theoretical frameworks (post-colonial/decolonial, non-Western, feminist, and indigenous approaches), this course invites us to understand violence in its multifaceted physical, symbolic, social, political and cultural manifestations.

This course is an introduction to doing ethnographic fieldwork. Class sessions alternate between discussions of key issues and questions in the theory and practice of ethnographic fieldwork and workshops devoted to fieldwork exercises: participant observation, interviewing, fieldnotes, oral history, multi-modal and virtual ethnographic methods; as well as debates over research ethics and regulatory ethics. Students will build skills to design and conduct ethnographic research projects, while developing a critical appreciation of the possibilities and limits of ethnographic research methods to help them understand and engage with the world.

This course explores the central role of food in everyday life in US and global contexts. Using a comparative global perspective, we will address key questions about histories of food production and consumption, the ways in which food production and distribution differentially affect the lives of those working in the food industry and those consuming food. We will think through how global shifts in food production and distribution impact human lives on national, local, and familial levels.

Students will be introduced to anthropological and cross-disciplinary studies of multiple, divergent ways in which the Circumpolar populations experience, perceive and respond to environmental, political and socio-economic changes from within distinct horizons of knowledge & modes of sociality. By focusing on social and historical processes as well as current/emerging practices, worlds/cosmologies, the course will analytically evaluate such notions as Anthropocene, the Fourth World, indigeneity and decolonisation as well as examine attempts of various scholars to better understand complex interconnections of climate, environment and society.

This class engages the sensorium -- our apparatus of sense perception -- to explore the worlds people make and inhabit. How can our senses become avenues of learning, imagination, and connection with others? We study ethnographic texts and multi-modal works thematizing sensory faculties and synaesthesia, as well as movement, orientation, and temporality. We consider how "sensory impairment" and neurodiversity may and should affect cultural norms of personhood and well-being. We pay special attention to synergies between medical anthropology and sensory anthropology in research on pain, addiction, psychoactive substances, and ritual healing.

How do legal concepts and categories - such as rights, duties, obligations, liabilities, risks, injuries, evidence, redress, and even personhood - come to appear as fundamental, natural, and universal? How are seemingly essential natures of law, in fact, constructed and produced? What is the role of culture in fashioning key forms of consciousness, power, truth, freedom, violence, and justice? This course draws upon exemplary anthropological studies of law to investigate and illuminate the conceptions, operations, and transformations of law across many cultural and historical realms. The course also draws upon court cases and legal theory.

Students study the agency of media and data in human cultural and social life with an emphasis on the generation of differences and inequalities. We excavate assumptions beneath representations of reality in documentary film, track the circulation of mass media across cultures, watch indigenous filmmakers as cultural producers, and explore the datafication of media and experience. We carry out our analyses by using the tools for making media and data to break them apart. Looking closely at their individual elements, we can view media and data as cultural constructions as well as use them to produce alternative images and counter-narratives.

This seminar addresses the field of "indigenous art" to unsettle current understandings of self and alter representation. Focusing on South America and drawing parallels with the Americas and Oceania, it investigates studies of material and immaterial culture from the perspective of indigenous world-makings. Attention will be paid to how indigenous arts speak to the dilemmas of self-governance, biocultural diversity, and conservation. We will also address forms of decolonization of Amerindian arts that are at play in museums, festivals, and environmental storytelling, with indigenous artists and intellectuals as their protagonists.

Things are the staple of our lives, but they are also objects of our studies and products of our activities. We depend on things, but things also depend us. In this course, we will explore convoluted networks of relations that bring together humans, non-humans and things. Looking at things and thinking about things differently, we will try to understand why they are so irresistible to have, to use, to make, to keep, and to exchange. During the course, we will approach things as signs (semiotics), as material entities (new materialisms), as objects of affection (new materialisms), and as key agents of influence (actor-network theory).

Subaltern Studies and Postcolonial Studies showed how critiques of capitalism were based on a provincial account of western history. Postcolonial studies was based on analysis of places that were directly colonized, usually India. What are the essential elements of postcolonial theory? What are the grounds of its many critiques and what are implications for our own research problems? Readings will draw on social theory, political economy, postcolonial studies, novels, history of the Middle East, and ethnography and are appropriate for students of any region or discipline.

This seminar focuses on the social institutions and symbolic meanings of gender, sexuality, family, and the household through the lenses of race, culture, and historical contexts. We will study how understandings of masculinity and femininity, the orientation of desire, sexual acts, and sexual identities impact gender roles in the household across various cultural and social contexts. We will ground our work in historical and ethnographic research on the connections between colonialism, chattel slavery, capitalism, and gender, sexual relations, and the family.

How do global engagements with nuclear things affect latent colonization in contemporary and future ecologies and generations? How are toxic effects of nuclear things (re)presented through scientific, technological, political or cultural intervention? We explore material, technoscientific, and cultural transmutations of nuclear things (radioisotopes, bombs, medical devices, energy, waste) and the work of (re)making those transmutations (in)visible. The course draws from a variety of theoretical frameworks / case studies in science and technology studies, the social sciences, art and environmental humanities to think with nuclear things.

This is the second half of a yearlong seminar required for first-year graduate students in Sociocultural Anthropology. The course focuses on anthropology's engagement with critical theory, ethnography, and writing. Through reading key texts in the discipline, we reflect on how anthropologists transition from their fieldwork to theorizing, and from their ethnography to text and public engagement. As we seek to decolonize social thought, we attend to the ways ethnographic subjects become alternative figures of thought, redirecting our modes of expression and restoring movement to ethical and political debates.

This graduate seminar is a systematic multidisciplinary study of the theory and technique of semiotic analysis of cultural phenomena. The course explores semiotics and its elaborations in philosophy, anthropology, linguistics, communication studies, science and technology studies, and cultural studies. By focusing on pragmatic applications of semiotic theories, the students learn to approach the messiness of social, material, affective, and more-than-human lives and the complex inter-actions of signs in and through society. The students learn to apply semiotics and experiment with its potential for designing their research projects.

Donor aid has been described as a failure, a faith, and a form of neocolonialism. Which description is most apt? To understand the ethics and value of international development, this seminar explores the history of development theory and practice from the early 20th century to present. In addition, this course offers an approach to understanding what cross-cultural engagements really do by focusing on the experiences of those who participate in development, both donors and recipients. Finally, this course unpacks the language and ideology of development and how that shapes whether we think donor aid is a failure or a humanitarian achievement.

This course explores the visual and archaeological world of ancient Mesoamerica, from the first arrival of humans in the area until the era of Spanish invasion in the early 16th century. Major culture groups to be considered include Olmec, Maya, and Aztec. Preceptorial sections will consist of a mix of theoretically-focused discussions, debate regarding opposing interpretations in scholarship, and hands-on work with objects from the collections of the Princeton University Art Museum.

This course is an opportunity to reimagine engineering as a liberatory and collective practice that challenges systems of domination, inequality and environmental exploitation in cities. Interdisciplinary readings and films on topics ranging from urban water systems to algorithmic policing will examine how social and environmental injustices in cities have been produced or reinforced through engineering designs while also exploring new frameworks for designing just cities. Students will put these frameworks into practice by participating in a conceptual design studio, focused on the radical redesign of urban infrastructures and technologies.

The course explores issues in medicine and global health with a focus on ethics. We address both ethics in the context of clinical decision-making and also the social, cultural, and economic "ethical field" of health care. Ever-expanding technological possibilities re-shape our social lives, extending them, giving greater control but taking it away. Treatments such as living donor organ transplantation, stem cell therapies, and physician-assisted suicide transform our understandings of life, death and what we expect from one another. Technologies such as glucometers bring new inequalities.

This course locates itself at the intersection and juxtaposition of medical and environmental anthropologies in order to perpetrate a double movement: how are bodies - human and other - implicated in processes often figured as environmental; and how can exploring a diverse range of embodiments might open ways into denaturalizing `environment' as simply what exists outside of bodies. How do we write about the environment, about bodies, and their relationship? Topics include climate change, toxic contamination, multispecies ethnography.

From the US-backed dictatorships of the Cold War, to contemporary examples of state violence, many Latin Americans have experienced grave human rights violations. At the same time however, activists in the region have propelled significant international human rights advances. Examining concepts and cases from the anthropology of human rights, this course explores questions of rights as they affect Indigenous peoples, women, gay and lesbian populations, migrants, the urban poor, and children. By analyzing these cases, we will gain a deeper understanding of the opportunities and risks facing the future of human rights in the Latin America.

In this class we will trouble the idea of "The Northern Triangle" by prying apart that grouping, examining each country's unique stories, and taking a nuanced look at shared phenomena. We will cover: the history and legacy of US intervention, the evolution of state and criminal violence, resistance struggles and Indigenous movements, and the varied and complex reality of drug cartels and street gangs. The course will touch on themes of transparency, impunity, and corruption in the democratic, post-war present and also focus on the emergence of and challenges to attempts to hold the post-dictatorial governments to account.

This course invites students to study Teotihuacan, Mexico, the largest urban development of American antiquity. It considers this city's art history and archaeology over six weeks, to culminate in a 1-week fieldtrip to view the city's ruins, if possible. We will then examine those major pre-Hispanic polities with which Teotihuacan interacted, including Tikal, Guatemala, or upon which it exerted historical influence, such as Tenochtitlan, Mexico City. The final two weeks will consider comparative settlement and architectural data from the Mississippian, Puebloan, and Inka cultures of Indigenous North and South America.

This course explores transnational and diasporic formations of race in the Americas. Drawing on Ethnic Studies, Latin American Studies, and anthropological and historical approaches, we explore racial formations in Latin America and its transnational communities. A central goal for this course is to understand race and racial formations as culturally contextualized and situated within the politics of difference. How are U.S. racial-ethnic categories embraced, contested, or reconfigured across the Americas, and vice versa? Topics include multiculturalism, mestizaje, border thinking, transnationalism, and racial democracy among others.

Amazonia is a vital nexus for planetary survival. This course focuses on the world's largest tropical forest and the ancestral home of over one million indigenous peoples, now threatened by deforestation and megafires. Further degradation will have disastrous consequences for its peoples, biodiversity, rainfall and agriculture, and global climate change. Combining perspectives from the social sciences and the humanities, we will critically examine projects to colonize, develop, and conserve the Amazon over time and reflect on the agency of indigenous peoples, maroon and riverbank communities and their creative modes of existence.

The seminar will draw on Anibal Quijano's work to explore three major themes: the intertwined notions of race and gender in Latin America; the understanding of gender and patriarchy in the work of contemporary decolonial feminist theory; and the oppressive intersectional inequalities introduced by the Conquest and colonization that continue to shape our world. Although Quijano's scholarship tends to be read in a disjointed and disconnected way, this course will take a more unified approach. This seminar will be taught by PLAS fellow Rita Segato, an internationally acclaimed anthropologist and feminist thinker.

This seminar will consider the modern South Asian coastline to understand the past, present, future of coasts in an era of climate change. Historical maritime trade routes, massive development projects, and rising influence of environmental change all shape the South Asian coast as a new frontier of resource control. Students will explore the cultural political desires and discontents that become entangled in coastlines, search for alternative imaginations of life that people mark out on the coastline. In doing so, we move towards an environmental justice perspective of the South Asian coastline.

A hands-on approach to this interdisciplinary field. We will apply key readings in performance theory to space and time-based events, at sites ranging from theatre, experimental art, and film, to community celebrations, sport events, and restaurant dining. We will observe people's behavior in everyday life as performance and discuss the "self" through the performativity of one's gender, race, class, ability, and more. We will also practice ethnographic methods to collect stories to adapt for performance and address the role of the participant-observer, thinking about ethics and the social responsibilities of this work.