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.

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?

Violence is simultaneously destructive and generative of social relations, individual and collective subjects, states, law and ethics, formal and informal authorities, multiple and layered sovereignties. It is inscribed into the fabric of everyday life not only through repressive means but also through the epistemic and violent production of the other enemies, criminals, terrorists. This course draws on anthropology, history, critical theory, films and documentaries, fictive and journalistic writing to explore violence, its power and meaning in its multifaceted physical, symbolic, political, moral, and cultural manifestations.

Today, over 120 million refugees, internally displaced, and stateless persons seek refuge, the most ever recorded. The contemporary refugee is a liminal figure whose being lays bare the limits of the nation-state, the supranational, and human rights. While transnational laws aim to protect those who flee their home countries, the nation-state remains the primary site of durable refuge. This course contemplates the enduring figure of the refugee and asks, Why must we live in a world of refugees? The topics we explore, the nation-state, colonialism, armed conflict, the global economy, hospitality, and camps, go towards answering that question.

This course introduces students to ethnographic engagements with some of anthropology's abiding concerns: relationality, solidarity, ethics, the everyday, agency, identity, labor, value, power, coloniality, and more. We will attend to relations -- among social actors, institutions, and orders of value. We will examine identity -- as experience, creativity, ethical becoming, political struggle, and more. Throughout, we will acquire tools to theorize social experience, develop new approaches to power, memory, evidence, 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.

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 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.

This course brings an anthropological perspective to the law and politics of justice in post-conflict institutions, including the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal, truth and reconciliation commissions, and the International Criminal Court. How do domestic and international institutions address the specific challenges of seeking accountability for human rights violations? It also evaluates international reparations programs, the gender aspects of international crimes, and the effectiveness of international courts in writing a history of mass crimes.

What does anthropology have to do with economics? How can we make sense of drastic changes in how we work, pay for things, rely on each other, and imagine the future? Taught by a former Prof. of Economics and researcher at the Federal Reserve Bank, this course shows the distinctive approach of anthropology to matters economic, and how anthropology creates such knowledge through ethnography and archival research. By reading debates about "economy" in different cultures, historical periods, and moral philosophy, this course shows the many ways people have organized economic affairs in the past and might in the future.

Anthropological theory shapes what we see, what we question, and how we write. This course examines how anthropologists have theorized the social world, tracing key intellectual traditions. We ask: What forces shape the realities we study? How do concepts like culture, social structure, power, colonialism, and racial capitalism help us analyze the conditions of our time? What is the relationship between ethnography and theory, and how does theory inform anthropological writing? This course equips students with the theoretical tools necessary to critically engage with the field today and to develop their own independent research projects.

Why do certain populations have longer life expectancies? Is it behavior, genes, structural inequalities? And why should the government care? This course unpacks taken-for-granted concepts like race, evidence-based medicine, and even the public health focus on equalizing life expectancies. From questions of racism in the clinic to citizenship and the Affordable Care Act, 'Race and Medicine' takes students on a journey of rethinking what constitutes social justice in health care.

How is memory shaped through museums and archives? What can anthropology teach us about the centrality of art, artifacts, museums, and knowledge-making in the violence of colonialism? In this course, we will read about the making of Palestine as an object of knowledge, a source of cultural production, and a field of contested memory practices. We will see what is specific about the relation of knowledge and culture to power, and what this teaches us about the workings of colonialism and resistance to it. We will also look at the various ways, means and methods that Palestine confronts colonial violence, domination, and other forms of power.

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.

This year's course focuses on a two week trip in January 2026 to the Mpala Wildlife Research Centre in Kenya, where we will visualize relationships among animals, plant life and humanity. We prepare for Mpala with critical analyses of wildlife films and their environmental impacts and then compare them to anthropological depictions. Students also learn techniques of documentary production in order to experiment with visualizing complex multispecies relations in Mpala. In that setting, we will include scientific research and Mpala itself as multispecies interventions into problems of biodiversity and the climate crisis.

The senior thesis (498-499) is a year-long project in which students complete a substantial piece of research and scholarship under the supervision and advisement of a Princeton faculty member. While a year-long thesis is due in the student's final semester of study, the work requires sustained investment and attention throughout the academic year. Required works-in-progress submissions, their due dates, as well as how students' grades for the semester are calculated are outlined below.

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.

The seminar focuses on the reciprocal process of people making houses and houses making people. Taking the house as at once a built shelter, a collection of relations and sensoria, and a lively nexus within communities and larger political-economic and ecological regimes, we move across a range of archives, landscapes, and epistemes to ask how lifeworlds and imaginations are made and remade in relation to the quest for dwelling. How does the ethnography of the unhoused and the housed retrain perceptions and detonate abstractions? What comes into view when the praxis of house-ing is the subject of ethnography and critical theory?

Grant writing is a critical skill for anthropologists, not only because grants facilitate the long-term, immersive fieldwork that characterizes the discipline, but also because formulating research plans for different audiences and ensuring their feasibility fosters a robust sense of purpose in fieldwork as well as critical reflection on the ethics of research in context. In this hands-on course, students will study the grant proposal as a genre of anthropological writing, paying attention to hypothesis formulation, theoretical framing, methodology, and ethics, while drafting and revising a complete grant proposal in weekly workshop sessions.

This seminar provides a programmatic overview of anthropological and feminist science and technology studies (STS) approaches to the exploration of AI, computing, automation, and related technologies as key touchstones through which categories of the human and matrices of power are reproduced, reformulated, or otherwise pressed into tension. Through a genealogical lens, we review how feminist STS scholars, anthropologists, and others have theorized and ethnographically studied the social life of "human-like" technologies, forwarding considerations of labor, political economy, gender, sexuality, race, disability, nation, and empire.

How does ethnographic writing illuminate movements for justice, rights, and social belonging? Ethnographies of justice trace struggles and setbacks in movements for rights, narrate hopes and strategies of activists, and reveal the scope of conceivable claimants and interests. Contemporary ethnographies call attention to the limits of liberal values upon which movements for justice rest and shed light on wider debates about the kind of world we live in. By centering the innovative approaches of recent monographs, the course asks how ethnographic writing enriches studies of movements for justice and resistance to the infringements of rights.

In the late 19th-early 20th centuries, Japan became the first non-Western nation to industrialize and modernize. But it did not wholly embrace the American example. More recently, Japan has challenged observers to imagine alternative modernities through its high standard of living, soft power, and gentler forms of capitalism. The course considers the merits of this system, including social equality, mom and pop stores, close communities, investments in youth socialization, universal health care, and public safety. It also considers their trade-offs, including social pressures, gendered labor, low fertility, and restricted immigration.

Puerto Rico occupies a paradoxical place in the American imagination: denied both statehood and sovereignty, yet not formally recognized as a colony. This course examines Puerto Rico as a case study in U.S. colonialism, tracing how its ambiguous political status, economic struggles, and cultural resistance reveal the structures of American empire. Through interdisciplinary readings in history, political science, law, anthropology, and cultural studies, students will analyze debates over statehood, independence, and sovereignty, asking what true decolonization would require in Puerto Rico and beyond.

As carceral systems expand across the Americas, this course articulates two feminist traditions for the abolition of the prison-industrial complex in the U.S. and against punitive systems in Latin America to explore how communities theorize and organize under carceral systems, envisioning and rehearsing diverse forms of justice. Building on abolitionist, feminist, and anthropological literature in dialogue with grassroots organizers, this course introduces students to theories on the carceral state, interrelated forms of violence, and organizing for justice under carceral states, including the U.S., but with a special focus on Latin America.

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 that emphasize 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.

This course will study the system of international protection, who is understood to qualify and why, how the system has changed over time, and what these developments mean for a broader understanding of human rights across borders. We will also take a critical look at asylum, examine ideas of deservingness and innocence and their intersection with categories of race, class, and gender, and question what it means for certain people to be constructed as victims and others to be seen as not eligible for protection. This class will also collaborate with a New York organization to work directly on ongoing asylum claims.