How can we read, write, and critically think (imagine) about African politics and society? The course presents contemporary ethnography on African politics and society during the postcolonial era, emphasizing the multiplicity, complexities, and diversity of African ideas, imaginations, practices, and experiences, in along with the variety of national and international factors that either influence or are impacted by them. Upon completing the course, students will have the essential critical thinking abilities and analytical tools required to recognize and challenge reductionist and biased narratives concerning Africa.

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).

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.

This course explores anthropology's engagement with environmental questions, beyond binaries of "nature" and "culture." How do anthropologists' engagement with environment force rethinking of both the given terms of environmental politics and the anthropocentrism of "anthropology"? We explore, across international and global contexts, how anthropological work challenges contemporary environmental thinking, all while exploring new formulations of environment and politics. Topics include climate, materiality, cosmologies, more-than-human ethnography, and environmental justice.

This class aims to explore transnational issues in policing. Drawing heavily upon anthropological methods and theory, we aim neither to vindicate nor contest the police's right to use force (whether a particular instance was a violation of law), but instead, to contribute to the understanding of force (its forms, justifications, interpretations). The innovative transnational approach to policing developed during the semester will allow for a cross-cultural comparative analysis that explores larger rubrics of policing in a comprehensive social scientific framework. We hope that you are ready to explore these exciting and urgent issues with us.

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.

In this entrée to anthropology's visual modes, we explore documentary film as a way to represent experience, identity, and conflict through the senses, and we study data and visualizations to reveal the imperceptible, unexpected, and abstract structures of social life. We assess their realist truth claims and learn to see the world from indigenous media makers whose projects point beyond decolonization and toward knowing visible and invisible ties among people and with more than human species and natural forces. Our aim is to enlarge the material and cultural possibilities for making legible the complexities of critical social issues.

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.

Disabled people are the largest minority in the world. Attention to the lived experiences and discourses of disability is crucial to our understanding of what it means to be human in an ever-changing world. This course moves beyond a medicalized view of disability and develops an historical and ethnographic critique of ableism with a focus upon the diverse forms of impairment and their social, economic, and technological contexts. What are the moral and political stakes of an anthropology of disability today?

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.

Anthropology is unique in its people-centered, ethnographic approach to understanding social life and worlds. We begin with a critical eye on colonial era articulations of the method of participant observation, then explore alternative ways of knowing. Throughout, we explore the tensions, contradictions, and creative potentials of producing critical knowledge with people. Students cultivate skills for field and archival work, with forays into digital spaces. Fieldwork exercises allow students to practice ethnographic approaches and challenge more experience-distant, quantitative methodologies.

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.

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.

This course addresses the wide variety of social relations and cultural contexts in which mental health and mental illness are experienced in the twenty-first century. Our inquiry is structured around etiological/diagnostic concepts that have achieved a global presence in popular culture and clinical care: trauma, addiction, stress, depression, neurodiversity. We will learn where and how these concepts arose; how they have changed over time and place; how they operate in clinical vis-à-vis "lay" contexts of assessment and care; and how they shape our self-understanding, our social interactions, and our relation to expertise and institutions.

Student debt, credit card debt, and medical debt in the US keep rising. Debt is entangled with legacies of enslavement and internal colonialism in the US and beyond. Around the world, debt has helped build empires and to destroy them. Debt also helps people build and maintain relationships. So why is debt usually seen as "bad" and credit as "good"? How can anthropology contribute to understanding the role of debt in the making and unmaking of power and empires? This class draws on anthropology, history, and finance to explore these and other questions, sometimes with the help of guest authors of our readings.

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.

This course uses historical and anthropological methods to examine the health of Native communities. By investigating the history, social structures, and colonial forces that have shaped and continue to shape contemporary Indigenous nations, we investigate both the causes of contemporary challenges and the ways that Native peoples have ensured the vibrancy, wellness, and survival of their peoples. We will treat health as a holistic category and critically examine the myriad factors that can hinder or enable the wellbeing of Native nations.

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.

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.

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.

What does it mean to be free? From slavery to cyborgian imaginations, from anarchy to abolition, from exploration to decolonization, what would make us free? Can we be free under capitalism? Can we be free amidst persistent violence? Can we be free if our bodies are subject to state-mandated regulation? Can we be free if we cannot move across borders? What might it mean to articulate the answers to these questions via film? Will new people gain access to new conceptualizations of freedom? Can film liberate? Can the process of making these films make us free?

Social scientists use ethnographic methods to describe and analyze the range and variation of daily interactions in schools. Ethnographic study allows researchers the opportunity to examine power dynamics that influence the daily life of students, teachers, administrators and parents. Vivid, critical ethnography helps us discover how cultural traditions, expectations, and opportunities are passed down to the next generation and how they impact school outcomes. This class will explore educational ethnography and students will complete observation hours in local schools and prepare a descriptive, mini-ethnography of a school community.

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 in a global age. We consider scholarship in Digital Anthropology, Game Studies, and African American Studies to scrutinize the design of games and engage in gameplay, with a particular focus on Black experiences within U.S. and Japanese media. Throughout the course, we probe how video games utilize race, advancing an intersectional approach that accounts for class, gender, and sexuality. To achieve this, attendees of this course will take a mandatory trip to Tokyo, Japan, to better understand how Black culture appears and influences video games.

This course will study borders, literal and imagined, and those who contest and enforce them. We will review anthropological approaches to bordering logics, focusing on how bordering and its violences creeps into everyday life far from nation-state boundaries and exploring insurgent mobilities. Drawing heavily from bordering processes in the Americas while also exploring parallels around the globe, this course asks: who do borders serve? How are they maintained? What does transgressing borders mean for those in power and for those who do the crossing?

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.

This course explores the weather as a massively consequential complex of environmental, geophysical, political, social, engineering, and spatial processes. We think through the tensions of contemporary climate and change as sites through which political strategies, social theory, and the toolkits of humanistic anthropological thinking are reconfigured. And we explore climate as a keyword to consider nihilism, hope, new and old fantasies of engineering, and unexpected imaginaries of planetary resilience or collapse. Topics include climate change, policing, geo-engineering, climate militarism.

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 seminar introduces students to the theoretical and methodological concerns of different professors in the department. It hones their craft as writers, thinkers and field workers, to critically reflect on social worlds and their assumptions about them, and to gain new insights into what constitutes the project of literary anthropology. It considers literary ethnography as a distinctive genre of writing, knowing, and relation.

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.

Writing grant proposals is a crucial skill for anthropologists, not only because grants facilitate the long-term immersive field research distinctive of the discipline, but also because formulating research plans for a variety of audiences and ensuring their feasibility foster a robust sense of purpose in fieldwork as well as critical reflection on the ethics of research in context. In this practice-based course, students study the grant proposal as a genre of anthropological writing, paying special attention to audience, feasibility, and ethics, while drafting and revising a complete grant proposal in weekly workshop sessions.

This course brings together writings on slavery, colonialism, and genocide to explore the epistemological, necropenological, and politico-economic conditions mobilized to render a condition of 'non-humanity' of those 'otherized' by colonizers. This course explores what it means to inhabit a Fanonian 'zone of nonbeing' as well as to practice anti-colonial feminist resistance that invests in life and livability against the permanence of otherness.

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.

This course examines the diversity of life on earth across its different manifestations (biological, cultural, linguistic) and how that diversity is interrelated within a complex and adaptive social-ecological system. Through case studies, students will explore the complexity underlying conservation issues and learn to identify and critique policy and management interventions that aim to explicitly center the social-ecological contexts of biodiversity conservation. Topics include biological and cultural diversity patterns and threats, biocultural approaches to conservation, social-ecological systems theory, feedbacks, and telecouplings.

This interdisciplinary course examines the cultural and political significance of Puerto Rican mega star Bad Bunny who has transcended musical genres to become a global phenomenon. Through an interdisciplinary lens, students will engage in a critical analysis of his music, lyrics, aesthetics, activism, gender non-conforming performances, and savvy business strategies. We will examine how Bad Bunny/Benito uses his platform and artistry to negotiate the complexities of being both a global Latinx icon and a child of Puerto Rico's colonial context.

This course examines Hurricane Maria's impact on Puerto Rico and the push for a resilient, equitable future. We will explore the disaster's effects on infrastructure, economy, and communities, and the role of colonialism and environmental injustice in setting the stage. Through research projects, students will have the opportunity to investigate specific aspects of Puerto Rico's post-Maria recovery and to propose innovative solutions that prioritize equity, sustainability, and community empowerment.

Central America resurfaced with El Salvador's war on gangs, arresting over 75,000 people in the past two years. This course will examine the history and politics of carceral logics around crime and race in Central America through an intersectional and ethnographic perspective. Starting with a historical excavation, we'll focus on Central America's war on gangs from a transnational perspective, including the role of the U.S. in the making of a "gang crisis", and we will examine the policing of black and indigenous populations. Throughout the course, we will discuss how carceral politics shape forms of intimacy, especially in the family realm.

This course exposes students to the historical, ethnic, linguistic, and cultural factors that have shaped Indigenous Amazigh communities in Tamazgha (North Africa) and its diasporas. It examines the role that Amazigh communities have played in revitalizing their cultures in contemporary Tamazgha and makes visible the acknowledgement the Amazighity of lands in North Africa and complexities of language, cultural identity, and colonialism in the region. Many resources in the source will be taken from the instructor's talks with family members, other Indigenous scholars, and activists in the community.

The purpose of the course is to examine key texts of the twentieth century that established the fundamental connection between language structures and practices on the one hand, and the formation of selfhood and subjectivity, on the other. In particular, the course focuses on theories emphasizing the role of formal elements in producing meaningful discursive and social effects. Works of Russian formalists and French (post)-structuralists are discussed in connection with psychoanalytic and anthropological theories of formation.