This course is an introduction to anthropology and key topics in becoming and being human. Anthropology looks at the human experience through diverse lenses integrating biology, ecology, language, history, philosophy, and the day to day lives of peoples from across the globe. Anthropology has things to say about being human, it seeks to make the familiar a bit strange and the strange quite familiar. We will take critical reflexive and reflective approaches in asking about key aspects of being human (like war/peace, race/racism, sex/gender, childhood/parenting, religion and the human imagination, and human relations to other species).

From wearable devices that count our steps, to social media platforms that monetize our interactions, to iris scanners at airports and prisons, our world is abundant with objects designed to classify, catalogue, and altogether surveil us. In this class, we apply anthropological perspectives to investigate how systems and sites of surveillance shape what is considered normal, healthy, safe, pathological, dangerous, and deviant throughout the world. In turn, we will explore surveillance as a fruitful lens for thinking about the relationship between science, technology, society, perception, identity, the body, care, control, and power.

What is the relationship between 'catastrophe' and human beings, and how has 'catastrophe' influenced the way we live in the world now? This course investigates various types of catastrophes/disasters around the world by mobilizing a variety of theoretical frameworks and case studies in the social sciences. The course uses an anthropological perspective as its principal lens to comparatively observe often forgotten historical calamities throughout the world. The course is designed to explore the intersection between catastrophe and culture and how catastrophic events can be a window through which to critically analyze society and vice versa.

Love is a deeply personal experience. Yet, powerful social, political, and economic forces determine who we love, when we love, and how we love. Looking at practices of romantic love, dating, sex, marriage, queer love, friendship, and familial love across different social and global contexts, this course explores how social and cultural factors shape our most intimate relationships. Drawing on ethnography, history, and journalism, we examine the intersections between love and technology, gender, race, the law, capitalism, colonialism, and religion. For the final project, students will use creative writing or multi-media to tell a love story.

What does "Justice" mean? What do efforts to achieve "Justice" tell us about injury, retribution, and peace? This class will explore how justice is defined and sought by looking at criminality, fights for indigenous and women's rights, post-conflict transitions, environmental catastrophe, debates about reparations, and intimate forms of repair. We will combine a global perspective with engaged local work to think about what struggles for justice look like in theory and on the ground. These debates will illuminate about how the past is apprehended, and how visions of possible utopias and dystopias are produced in the present.

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 introduces students to anthropological ways of knowing and explores how ethnography shapes social theorizing and storytelling. We will attend to relations -- among social actors, institutions, and regimes of value. We will examine identity -- as optic, object, creativity, ethical becoming, political struggle, and more. Throughout, we will acquire tools to theorize social experience, develop new approaches to power, memory, and history, and probe the potentials for decolonial and anticolonial scholarship.

Ethnography is a qualitative method for finding patterns in complicated field data. This course teaches students how to perform rigorous and ethical ethnographic methods for research and application. Students first learn the history and tools of anthropological methods. They are then introduced to case studies where ethnographic methods were used for business, policy development, leadership, and product design. Finally, students develop their own ethnographic research projects. This course is designed for non-anthropology majors or, exceptionally, for anthropology majors who are unable to take ANT 300 or ANT 301 in their junior year.

Why do development projects fail? This course examines why well-meaning development experts get it wrong. It looks closely at what anthropologists mean by culture and why most development experts fail to attend to the cultural forces that hold communities together. By examining development projects from South Asia to the United States, students learn the relevance of exchange relations, genealogies, power, religion, and indigenous law. This semester the class will focus on energy and Africa.

This course examines mental health, from the increasingly biological models espoused by psychiatric practitioners, to spiritual, social, and political understandings of psychic distress and healing. It investigates contemporary trends in mental health practice, exploring how diagnostic criteria are created and inhabited, experiments in pharmaceutical thinking, and alternative psychotherapeutic approaches across a variety of historical and social contexts. The class will explore how social worlds are shaped by mental health categories, and how identities, politics, economics, and philosophies contend, produce, and confront psychic distress.

The goal of this course is to understand what queer lifeworlds are like in diverse cultural and sociopolitical contexts. What is the relationship between queerness and larger forces such as culture, coloniality, global capitalism, religion, and the state? What counts as queer and whose recognition matters? What is the nature of the work of becoming that is involved, and what resources do they draw upon in doing so? What factors enable or curtail these possibilities? Is queer always radical and against the norm? We will answer such questions by reading ethnographies, theories, and biographies that focus on queer lifeworlds across the world.

In almost every human society, women are expected to perform different tasks than men. Was there a biological or cultural reason for this? True - women are the only sex to give birth to date, but does that mean there is no escape from traditional sex roles? In this class we will explore female behavioral biology from an evolutionary and biocultural perspective. We will pair physiology and life-history theory with cultural outcomes to engage with feminism and social and political debates. Topics include menstrual taboos, sexual differentiation and gender identity, reproduction, contraception, women's health, workplace equality, etc.

Students study the agency of media and data in human cultural life with an emphasis on the production of culture and inequality. We excavate assumptions beneath representations of reality in images, track the circulation of mass media across diverse cultures, explore the datafication of personal experience, and engage with projects by indigenous internet activists and native filmmakers. We consider the globalization of media as an agent of difference. And we study the indigenization of data and media as cultural practices and as vertices in wide networks in which native peoples are advancing social agendas in their own terms.

This course begins with a discussion of the current state of affairs in anthropological theory to ask what lines of thought got us to where we are today. This includes situating anthropological theory within the context of social and political theory and seeing how post-structuralism, post-colonial theory, black studies, and feminism reshaped the discipline in a variety of ways. Throughout will aim to give students sharper tools to utilize the analytic power of theory to consider problematics of the field of anthropology writ large today, and to mobilize in the writing of the independent work in anthropology.

This course is an anthropological and experience-based exploration of video games. As we consider scholarship in Digital Anthropology, Game Studies, and African American Studies, we scrutinize the design of games and engage in gameplay, with a particular focus on Black experiences. Throughout the course, we probe how video games utilize and interact with race and, in doing so, we advance an intersectional approach that also accounts for class, gender, and sexuality. The course's core set of theoretical and methodological tools helps students to engage with gaming critically and to create alternative games in the future.

This course focuses on Indigenous world-makings in the Anthropocene. We will reflect on how the current climate crisis is actively being produced through the destruction of Indigenous worlds. Two key anthropological questions guide our seminar: How do Indigenous groups differently understand world endings? How are Indigenous peoples resisting neocolonial and extractivist violence? We will work mainly with ethnographic writings, films, journalistic reports, and artworks, with a focus on Indigenous perspectives. Starting in Amazonia, we will develop a comparative perspective of Indigenous worldings across the Americas.

While diseases are often imagined to be scientific or medical conditions, they are also social constructs. In the 19th century the condition of Dysaesthesia Aethiopis (an ailment that made its sufferers "mischievous") was considered nearly universal among free blacks. Today AIDS and tuberculosis are often associated with personal attributes, while the social forces at work to structure risk for acquiring these illnesses are glossed over. We will examine work from anthropologists, sociologists, historians, queer studies scholars and scientists who work on issues of disability to investigate how people challenge contemporary visions of society.

First part of a year-long course in cultural anthropology, required of first-year graduate students in anthropology and open to other graduate students with the permission of the instructor. The seminar focuses on anthropological theorizing through writings that have shaped the field or revealed its shape as a distinctive discipline. It also explores modes of contextualization that can help us understand the emergence, interconnections, and long afterlives of the texts we read.

This course lays out core theoretical and methodological frameworks for engaging in anthropologically centered multispecies approaches. By foregrounding anthropological and indigenous perspectives in the discourse on multispecies, we center the ethnographic and ecological and decenter assumptions about separation, "civilization" and domination that run through academic mythos and perspectives on human-other entanglements. The Anthropocene as context brings its own suite of distinctive pressures and connecting these politics and eco-realities to the understanding generated by multispecies approaches is the final component of the course.

The goal of the course is to problematize two things: the notion of anthropological archive and practices of ethnographic storytelling that they engender. To pursue this dual task, each week we will explore 1) how the assignment of epistemic value to a distinctive set of artifacts (e.g., objects, bodies, texts, memories, rhetorical tropes, etc.) generates a coherent source of discernable knowledge, and 2) how this knowledge is disciplined and naturalized with the help of theoretical framing, narrative conventions, and plot techniques.

Bharatanatyam, butoh, hip hop, and salsa are some of the dances that will have us travel from temples and courtyards to clubs, streets, and stages around the world. Through studio sessions, readings and viewings, field research, and discussions, this seminar will introduce students to dance across cultures with special attention to issues of migration, cultural appropriation, gender and sexuality, and spiritual and religious expression. Students will also learn basic elements of participant observation research. Guest artists will teach different dance forms. No prior dance experience is necessary.

Japan became the first non-Western nation to industrialize and modernize in the late 19th century, determined to fend off colonization. Decades later, Japan challenged Americans to imagine alternative futures through its economic success and later its "soft power." The course will consider change and continuity in Japan and how Japan's current status as a stable, slowly growing economy informs our views of capitalism and society in the current era. Topics include gender, labor, and corporate welfare; youth socialization; marriage and divorce; race, "Japaneseness" and citizenship; diasporic identities; sub-cultures and popular culture.

The is a project-oriented seminar in which students undertake original research. Previous student projects have included the school lunch program; "internet addiction"; hydroponic gardening; and alternative education in Japan. This year our theme will be the government's slogan, "Preparing for the 100-year Life." Topics will include demographic change, meaning in late life, gender roles and fertility, medicalization, and death with dignity. The course may also include visits from palliative care physicians, bioethicists, visits to local facilities, and engagement with grass roots groups encouraging planning for late life.

What constitutes the current conjuncture in global environmental governance, and in what ways and to what ends is biological life-human and non-human-made part of neoliberal environmental projects? This course will use the concept of neoliberal natures to explore the challenges rapid global environmental change pose for conservation, sustainability and ecosystem health in the contemporary era. We consider the ecological and political implications of growing efforts to enroll material nature in market-based environmental schemes, and explore how these schemes unfold across different contexts to shape social and environmental sustainability.

This course presents a cross-disciplinary and multi-modal approach to African music, dance, and culture. Co-taught by a master drummer and choreographer (Tarpaga) and an ethnomusicologist (Steingo), students will explore African and African diasporic performance arts through readings, discussions, listening, film analysis, and music performance.