This class seeks to critically analyze the intersections of race, violence, and medicine in the United States. Through an interdisciplinary lens, students will examine historical and contemporary case studies to understand how violence has been medicalized, and how race plays a significant role in these processes. Discussions will also encompass slavery, structural violence, police violence, public health approaches to violence, and the role of healthcare professionals in addressing racial disparities in the experience and treatment of violence in African American, Latinx, Asian American and Indigenous contexts.

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 in 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.

While 20th c. proclamations on the death of religion were clearly ill-conceived, the concept of religion has languished in anthropology for some time. This course provides a post-mortem, while also exploring new ways of understanding the influence of mystery and divinity on social life. We begin with classic theories of religion and major critiques before exploring traditions like Orthodox Christianity, Santería/Ocha and Hinduism alongside UFO cultures and immortalist associations. Readings pair ethnography from the Mediterranean to Melanesia with new theoretical approaches, asking students to read religion and non-religion against the grain.

This seminar explores racial capitalism and the right to the city from the perspective of the housing crisis in the US. We will engage historical studies, social theory, and urban ethnography in order to understand how redlining and real estate speculation produce landscapes of housing injustice. We will also consider the ways marginalized communities mobilize to fight insecurity and to guarantee their right to housing. In collaboration with our community partner, a social impact research and design studio, we will organize urban walking tours and interviews in Trenton, and students will produce collaborative multimedia projects.

The sensation of an ocean breeze; the taste of watermelon; the smell of a familiar person: how to put such visceral experiences into words? While social scientists have focused on language as a way to communicate human experience, this course focuses on the visceral ways in which we interact with the world: through our body and our senses. Drawing on ethnographies, history, art, music, podcasts and films, we will look at how senses--touch, hearing, smell, taste, sight, movement and balance, and beyond--are experienced in different cultural, social and political contexts. We will go on mini-field trips to experience hands-on ways of knowing.

We're surrounded by narratives that AI (artificial intelligence) is rapidly learning, listening, coding, calculating, and altogether acting more like (or better than) humans. But what does it mean to be human? Which "actual" humans do "artificially" intelligent agents mimic or resemble? We will consider such questions through the lens of anthropology, a discipline dedicated to tracking the ever-changing definitions of being human. By reading and creating alternative stories about AI, we explore how race, citizenship, religion, gender, sexuality, disability, class, labor, environment and empire fundamentally shape human-machine borders.

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.

Princeton University is on the unceded ancestral lands of the Lenape people, who endure to this day. Historical and contemporary awareness of Indigenous exclusion and erasure is critically important to overcoming their effects. Moreover, Princeton was home to the first gathering in 1970 that coalesced the field known as Native American Studies. As such, this seminar engages the field of Native American and Indigenous Studies. We will address questions of settler colonialism, Indigenous knowledge, resistance, education, research, stereotypes and cultural appropriation, identity, nation (re)building, and critiques of NAIS.

Are our emotions reliable sources of moral intuition? What role do emotions play in political life? This course focuses on how humans engage with questions of morality, faith, justice, and social wellbeing, and how emotions mediate these engagements. Emotions such as anger, happiness, disgust, shame, compassion, love, and grief play an important role in shaping and challenging moral convictions and political orientations. Through ethnographic and theoretical readings, we will learn how anthropologists discern the emotional textures of our moral and political lives.

This course is an introduction to doing ethnographic fieldwork. Class sessions alternate between (1) discussions of key issues and questions in the theory and practice of ethnographic fieldwork, as well as research ethics and regulatory ethics; and (2) workshops devoted to fieldwork exercises: participant observation, interviewing, fieldnotes, archival research, oral history, multi-modal and virtual methods. Students 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.

How can dissent be a catalyst for change? What motivates people to challenge power and authority in all their myriad forms? Can acts of dissent be at once political and intimate, public and personal? What do ethnographic methods and anthropology as a discipline bring to the study of dissent? In this course we will examine these questions through an immersion in the multifaceted ways in which people dissent. We will investigate the social and historical underpinnings of dissent vis-à-vis a range of oppressive forces, be they authoritarian states, colonial power, patriarchal orders, or regimes of caste and religion.

This course treats the supernatural and the paranormal as phenomena warranting serious exploration in their entanglement with race, gender, the psyche, and the body. Texts and audio-visual materials will introduce us to ghosts, fairytales, monsters, witches, spirit possession, and many forms of enchantment. Through a series of case studies, we will investigate how several key concepts work together to create our sense of reality: nature, science, religion, magic, reason, modernity. Ultimately, the course will push students to interrogate their assumptions about what is natural, normal, rational, and real.

Are robots as capable, autonomous, or dangerous as often depicted in the public imagination? Can robots save the world? If so, whose vision of the world do they actualize? This course provides opportunities for students from STEM, social sciences, and humanities to collaborate with Boston Dynamics' SPOT. Through in-class discussions about the potential roles, meanings, and ethics of robots in society and accompanying hands-on lab practicums manipulating a robot for generating its ethically-sound and community-engaged applications on campus, students will innovate and propose Princeton models of introducing robots in human ecology.

In combining historical and anthropological perspectives with legal studies, the course explores how law is created and enforced in diverse societies and multiple spheres, inside and outside formal juridical institutions. We will address foundational legal questions related to themes such as sovereignty, citizenship, indigeneity, property, crime, carcerality and human rights--always in comparative perspective, and probing law's controlling and transformational potentials. How can the anthropology of law help us to better understand past and present ideas of justice and be a mobilizing force in the quest for social and environmental justice?

What does it mean to be a man? Or to act like a man? By calling attention to the gendered identities/practices of men-as-men, scholars of masculinities have given diverse responses to these questions across time and space. We draw on anthropology, history, critical theory, gender studies, and media to explore the processes and relationships by which men craft gendered lives. Rather than defining masculinity as biological trait or fixed object, we examine how men's life stories and prospects are shaped by social scripts, political-economic forces, labor regimes, and ethical norms.

This course provides a hands-on introduction to the methods and theories of linguistic anthropology, a sub-field devoted to the study of language and interaction in sociocultural and political processes. We will consider language as more than a neutral conduit for exchanging information or expressing ideas. Through readings and data gathering and analysis exercises, we will explore language as a resource and a factor that shapes and is shaped by our experiences, identities, relationships with and perception of the world and the people around us. Major themes include race, citizenship, gender, disability, and interpretation and power.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, human experience has become heavily defined by our digital/virtual interactions. From Zoom calls and classes online to meeting up with friends in magical lands in video games, we have come to rely on digital technologies in ways rarely seen in the past. But how does one go about understanding our new digital condition? And how might one develop research around the many virtual worlds that have come to exist? This course is an anthropological exploration of the history of human interaction with the internet, social media, virtual worlds, and other forms of digital existence.

This course explores what we do with language and other modes of expression and how these modes shape our communicative capacities. Why do we gossip? How do we decide what communication is appropriate face-to-face or via text or email? What informs our beliefs about civility and obscenity? How do we decide what credible speech is? What happens when a culturally rooted expressive form (say, a dance) is taken up by people elsewhere for other aesthetic and political ends? We will explore such questions by studying theories and ethnographies of a range of phenomena: love-letters, gossip, poetry, asylum appeals, spoken word, and more.

Magic tricks delight us; biomedicine and other human sciences use deception in research (e.g., placeboes); and everyday politeness may obscure painful truths. With deception and disclosure as springboards, this course explores the contextual ambiguity of personal and professional ethics with special attention to knowledge control. Topics include: social fictions in daily life across cultures; the tangled histories of science, stage magic, and movies; ethically controversial practices in popular culture (reality TV, fake news), the arts (fictive memoirs), academia (sharing/plagiarizing), self presentation (racial and sexual passing), and more.

Since the 1920s, the term "gang" has been used to describe all kinds of collectives, from groups of well-dressed mobsters to petty criminals and juvenile delinquents. In nearly a century of research the only consistency in their characterization is as internal Other from the vantage of the law. This class will investigate how the category of "the gang" serves to provoke imaginaries of racial unrest and discourses of "dangerous," threatening subjects in urban enclaves. More broadly we will examine the methods and means by which liberal democratic governments maintain their sovereign integrity through the containment of threatening populations.

War is ubiquitous. This course seeks to critically understand a fundamental aspect of our increasingly interconnected global present through examining the question war. We will draw on works from different disciplines (anthropology, history, critical theory, fiction, political science, American Studies), and we will constantly move across them, as we seek to understand how war is conceptualized by different intellectual traditions and experienced by multiple actors. In doing so, we will focus primarily, but not exclusively on the US and the Middle East.

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.

The world has become datafied (measured, classified, digitized, sold, amassed as data), and visualizations are a potent public medium. They drive critical concerns like global warming and inequality, and can be used with many other disciplinary issues. We connect data vis to our challenges to intelligibly represent the complex relationships, forces, and multiple scales embedded in ethnographic settings and theories. If data vis gives us a grip on these imperceptible factors, and the datafied world, what gets filtered out of data or optics? We will critically use data vis tools alongside other modalities to enrich our anthropological vision.

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. While reading key texts in the discipline, we reflect on how scholars transition from fieldwork to theorizing, and from the ethnographic open to text and public engagement. Throughout, we attend to intellectual cross-pollinations and the ways ethnographic subjects become alternative figures of thought, redirecting modes of expression and restoring movement to ethical and political debates then and now.

Imprisonment has become the central form of punishment worldwide. It has given birth to multiple approaches from justification to denunciation, from description to fiction, from realism to utopia. It has mobilized multiple disciplines, notably legal studies, political science, moral philosophy, evolutionary science, anthropology, sociology, economics, literature, and journalism. The course addresses from a critical perspective the way in which these discourses apprehend punishment and incarceration, their reactionary power, their transformative potentialities and their blind spots.

This seminar explores the de-/anti-colonial project, focusing on different strains of theory and practice. While the field has developed sophisticated analyses of coloniality, we examine the praxis-oriented intellectual tradition of direct de-/anti-colonial action, drawing from Global South and Indigenous contexts. The seminar surveys various modes of praxis: the psycho-affective and material changes of direct action, decolonizing culture, skeptical entanglement with colonial institutions, politics of resurgence and refusal, and cultural/political insurgency. The seminar also foregrounds the affordances/constraints of avenues for action.

What worlds take root in war? War is often thought of as an exceptional event elsewhere. But for the inhabitants of perennial conflict zones, war is a landscape of living. This course explores war as environment and asks: what becomes of our understanding of war when we approach it as a constitutive dimension of modernity, capitalism, and the nation-state? Using landscape as a method for interrogating war as a lifeworld of the Anthropocene, we engage debates on war and militarization alongside scholarship on racial capitalism, while centering the experience of the Global South as a source for a revised theory of war.

How do artworks reflect on and affect our rapidly changing lifeworlds? While engaging traditional and contemporary debates in the anthropology of art, the seminar also draws on insurgent Indigenous arts to address the political affects and effects emerging from decolonial and anti-colonial artistic practices. As we read critical theory and analyze artworks, we will probe ideas of fetishism and animism against the backdrop of the Anthropocene and explore how ontological and new materialistic approaches capture (or not) the life and agency of images and artifacts.

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.

The course concerns Japan studies in the context of theories of capitalism, personhood, democracy, gender, and modernity. We consider the emergence of Japan as a place to think within the American social sciences after World War II and the development of ideas about area studies in the context of the Cold War and post Cold War conjunctures. Additionally the course considers topics in which Japan is relevant to thinking about global issues, including global capitalism, temporary labor, biopolitics, environmental consciousness, media culture and consumer culture, work-life balance, and the demographic crisis related to rapid aging.

This course examines the connections between climate change and longstanding processes of colonialism, slavery, and racial capitalism. We will examine the history and evolution of the climate justice movement, including its connection with the environmental justice and civil rights movement in the United States and ongoing calls for climate reparations particularly among African-descended populations. We explore the ways wider scale systems of power and domination produce unjust environmental and climatic conditions and the disproportionate ways these systems impact BIPOC communities across the globe.

This course introduces students to classic and recent theoretical debates about secularism and secularization. We will consider a range of historical-ethnographic examples, focusing particularly on the limits of secularism in its modern encounter with Islam and Muslim communities in North Africa, the Middle East, Europe and North America. By comparing the realities of everyday life in a variety of national contexts, we will ask what secularism offers as a human way of experiencing the world, a mode of legitimating norms and constructing authority, and a method of telling stories and creating myths about human values and historical progress.

"Roma (Gypsies) in Eastern Europe" treats Romani history, cultural identity, folklore, music, religion, and representations in literature and film. Roma have been enslaved, targeted for annihilation, and persecuted for centuries. Yet they have repeatedly adapted and adjusted to the circumstances surrounding them, persisting as distinctive ethnic communities while simultaneously contributing to and forming part of the dominant worlds in which they live. This course offers novel perspectives on ethnic minorities and the dynamics of culture in Slavic and East European society.

For centuries, Siberia was a transitory space for Eastern nomads and Western adventures. Colonized by the Russian empire in the 16-17th centuries, Siberia became a land of valuable commodities. Traders and hunters were followed by political dissidents, religious radicals, and criminals. Siberia became the ultimate place of exile. And yet it is much more than prison-writ-large. Using diverse sources, the course presents multiple Siberias: from the Siberia of reindeer people, indigenous storytellers, and shamans to the Siberia of the empire's Cossacks and nobility; from the Siberia of labor camps to the Siberia of today's oil and gas giants.

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.