Anthropology
- AFS 322/POL 463/ANT 222/AAS 334: Contemporary African Politics and Society: Ethnographic Reading, Thinking and WritingHow 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.
- ANT 206/AFS 206: Human EvolutionHumans 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.
- ANT 232/GSS 232/HUM 232/SAS 232: Love: Anthropological ExplorationsLove 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.
- ANT 239: Science and Other Ways of KnowingThis class introduces students to anthropological approaches for understanding science and related forms of knowledge production as forms of cultural practice. Does scientific knowledge production transcend social and cultural contexts, or is it always situated in a milieu? To what extent is science shaped by its broader social contexts and how should this lead us to understand the nature of objectivity? In answering these questions, the class will equip students to produce sensitive analyses of diverse forms of knowledge production and reflect on anthropological ways of knowing.
- ANT 240/HUM 240: Medical AnthropologyMedical 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.
- ANT 256/HUM 256: Sensing PoliticsWhat roles do feelings and emotions play in our evaluations of the world? Are our emotions reliable sources of moral intuition? Can we take our feelings to be our own? This course focuses on how humans engage with issues of morality, faith, justice, collective wellbeing, and political critique, and how our feelings, emotions, and sensations mediate such engagements. Through ethnographic and theoretical readings, we will learn how anthropologists discern the affective textures of our moral and political lives.
- ANT 301: The Ethnographer's CraftThis 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.
- ANT 313/HUM 303: Language, Disability, and ScienceThis upper-level seminar examines how ideas about language, disability, and science shape each other in contexts ranging from everyday life to expert medical practice. We look at how anthropologists and historians of science and technology have (or have not) considered disability and language in their research and, conversely, how scientific and technological innovations, like new media technologies, can change practices of communication and conceptions of disability.
- ANT 335: Psychedelics, Shamanism and Plant IntelligenceThis class offers an overview of the history, pharmacology, cultural uses and changing attitudes about psychedelic and other psychoactive substances around the world. After introducing the field of ethnobotany and its role in drug 'discovery' the course surveys shamanism from various perspectives: transcultural psychiatry, altered states of consciousness, New Age spirituality and the science of 'plant intelligence.' Readings investigate the legal and scientific repercussions of the 'psychedelic revolution,' while providing a critical assessment of questions around criminalization, commodification and appropriations of Indigenous knowledge.
- ANT 342: The Anthropology of LawIn 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?
- ANT 344/GSS 419: MasculinitiesWhat 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.
- ANT 354/HUM 373: Digital Anthropology: Methods for Exploring Virtual WorldsIn 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.
- ANT 357/HUM 354: Language, Expressivity, and PowerThis course explores what we do with language and other modes of expression and how these modes shape our communicative capacities. How do we decide what communication is appropriate face-to-face or via text or email? Why do we gossip? What informs our beliefs about civility and obscenity? How do we decide what credible speech is? What happens when a culturally rooted expressive form is taken up for other aesthetic and political ends? We will explore such questions by studying theories and ethnographies of a range of phenomena: dance, gossip, poetry, asylum appeals, advertisements, protest speech, and more.
- ANT 392/STC 456: Techniques of Visual EthnographyHow can ethnographers use documentary film to convey lived experience from a person-centered perspective? How can data visualization reveal invisible concepts and structures that are imperceptible or beyond horizon of a field site? To understand what is knowable in these modes, students learn fundamental techniques of shooting, editing, and storytelling, and then data-making, structuring, and visualization. Classes entail screenings, hands-on workshops, and critical readings. Students are prepared to use film and data in their independent work and a wide range of future projects.
- ANT 424: Anthropology of Media Forms and PracticesThis seminar introduces foundational works in media theory and practice. It discusses representational strategies, technologies, ideology, and the political faculties of film, television, online, and print media. Through the ethnography of analog and digital media production and circulation, the seminar also examines various techniques that shape political contestation and social reproduction of subordinated groups.
- ANT 434/NES 434: Postcolonialism: Theories and CritiquesSubaltern 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.
- ANT 435/AMS 435/GSS 415: Decolonizing Indigenous Genders and SexualitiesThe seminar examines a variety of settler colonial contexts in North America and Oceania. After exploring a range of theoretical approaches to the study of colonialism, gender, and sexuality, the course will feature three main case studies: Maori, Oneida, Cherokee, Diné, and Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian). We will then assess how nationalist self-determination struggles negotiate gender and sexual decolonization, focusing on the growing body of work on gender liminality, contested masculinities, Native and Indigenous feminisms, debates regarding same-sex sexuality and marriage, as well as Two-Spirit, Mahu, LGBT, and `Indigiqueer' identities.
- ANT 502: Proseminar in AnthropologyThis 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.
- ANT 504A: Advanced Topics in Anthropology (Half-Term): Colonial Urbicide & Hyperprecarity: The Case of JerusalemThe notion of urbicide, the intended destruction of a city, its cultural heritage, and its built space, became increasingly prevalent after the Yugoslav wars of succession. In this course, we draw on the concepts of urbicide and what Hammami (2016) terms hyperprecarity to consider the case of Jerusalem, where settler colonial processes of 'sacralized and securitized preservation' entail remaking and rebuilding built space to rewrite past and future and destroying to replace.
- ANT 505: Field Research PracticumA practice-based introduction to ethnographic fieldwork. Students experiment with participant-observation, interviewing and conversation, taking and interpreting fieldnotes, oral and life histories, multi-modal and virtual ethnography, archival research. These methods are explored in light of ethical, political, and epistemological stakes of ethnographic research: the space of "the field," identity and identification, privacy and anonymity, regulatory ethics, collaboration, advocacy. Students design and conduct a research project while developing a critical appreciation of the possibilities and limits of ethnographic research.
- ENV 458/ANT 458: Environmental Technologies: Infrastructure, Ethics, and SocietyHow do technologies, infrastructures, and large-scale environmental interventions tangle with social, political, and ethical concerns? This course considers infrastructures like dams, canals, pipelines, power facilities, and others, in the process of creating new environments, also create new ideas of power, governance, and political economy. We think globally with the history of large-scale environmental infrastructures, from colonial landscape interventions to actual and proposed plants for generating green power, to explore how environmental technologies interact with societies across time and space.
- LAS 240/ANT 242: Ethnographies of Authoritarianism: A Feminist Reading From Contemporary Central AmericaAs authoritarianism spreads across America, this course offers a feminist reading of authoritarian politics in Central America--centered on its everyday forms of racism, sexism, and classism intensified under neoliberal politics. From an ethnographic perspective, this course excavates the intersectional memories of authoritarianism, democratic disenchantments, and radical pessimism. Then, it discusses the fascist cooptation of family, bodies, and labor, the political ecologies of authoritarianism, and the feminist forms of activism under authoritarianism.
- SPI 356/ANT 335/LAS 386: Asylum: Policy, Politics, and PracticeThis 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.
- SPI 392/ANT 363/AAS 369/URB 363: Gangsters and Troublesome PopulationsSince 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