Anthropology

This course focuses on addressing events and challenges that arise when living in a foreign cultural environment. By examining the differences between living in one's home country and living a foreign culture, the course explores effective strategies to adapt to intercultural settings. The class will provide an opportunity for students to introduce their culture; analyze the differences between their culture and Japanese culture, and present their findings. The course aims to provide the skills to live respectfully in any intercultural context, while valuing and respecting the cultures of others.

This course conveys insight into the cognitive mechanisms and representations underpinning human meaning-making. The course presents an overview of the cognitive processes and mechanisms involved in human meaning-making, including conceptual metaphor theory, image schemas, framing, and blending. The theories employed stem from cognitive science, cognitive psychology, cognitive linguistics, and semiotics. The course also provides insight into the relationship between meaning-making and perception, as well as sensory-motor experience. Additionally, it seeks to give students a general understanding of what meaning is, regardless of whether it is expressed in language, images, or speech, or manifests itself through perception. Finally, this course provides the general theoretical tools required to analyze specific cognitive and cultural phenomena. The course is adapted to accommodate the diverse backgrounds of the students.

This course examines the human being as a philosophical problem. It analyzes the most important anthropological models of Western thought in the 19th and 20th centuries, from the distinction between philosophy and science. This course explores the debate on the present and future of the human creature in the thinking and trends of the 21st century.

This course provides an in-depth exploration of Jordan’s culinary traditions and their connections to culture, history, and identity. The course combines a historical/anthropological approach with an overview of contemporary practices around food in Jordan to understand evolving notions of cuisine within its national culture (lifestyles, techniques, media, and representations). While Jordan’s cuisine once aggregated local and imported traditions as national in nature, it has seemingly undergone a reverse process since the start of the twenty-first century, diversifying into multiple contexts (and recipes) under the pressure of factors such as affordability, politics, and social media. This course fosters a comparative approach around the preparation of food and related rituals, offering direct experiences of Jordan cuisine as it is thought about, prepared, served, and received.

This course offers an in-depth exploration of cultural diversity in Oceania by analyzing the complex interplay among colonial encounters, postcolonial impacts, Indigenous epistemologies, and identity formation. It approaches these themes through the lens of the ocean, which has historically shaped connections, migration, trade, and cultural exchange across the region. Through theoretical discussions, case studies, ethnographic readings, and multimedia materials, the course examines how various colonial histories have influenced Indigenous societies and their ways of knowing, being, and relating.

The United Kingdom is not known for its great cuisines, despite this there is a rich and varied tradition of regional food, food that has been 'adopted' and adapted to the British palate. Food in the UK mirrors the history of colonialism, global trade, and immigration. There has been a rediscovery of local and regional foods with a renewed interest in the production of food, slow food, and a move against over processing. Preparation and consumption of food gives valuable insight into the local culture, history, and society.  
 

This course provides an examination of the cultural frameworks and social aspects of kinship systems, gender roles, personhood and human sexuality, analyzed through ethnographic examples from a diverse range of settings. It aims to equip students with the analytical tools to engage in theoretical debates concerning core concepts such as kinship, marriage, gender, sex, the person, and the relationship between nature and culture, as well as exploring how the experiences of kinship, sex and gender vary according to the regimes of politics, law and materiality in which they are embedded. The course charts the history of anthropological debates on kinship, relatedness, sex and gender, and familiarizes students with a range of contemporary approaches to these themes, placing ethnographic materials into a critical dialogue with recent developments in feminist theory, queer theory, the anthropology of colonialism, cognitive science, and psychoanalysis.

This course offers a range of approaches to contemporary conversations around embodiment and ideas of normativity. In particular, it familiarizes students with representations of physical and mental difference in film, social media, and literature within and beyond European and North American contexts. Featured themes include disability and identity, health and constructions of the self, mental difference, and the quest for political recognition.

The course focuses on the Scandinavian colonial expansion from 1600 to the early 20th century. Based on a number of case studies (e.g. resource colonialism in Sápmi and Greenland, plantations in the Danish West Indies, trade and consumption of colonial products), the course examines colonial discourses and practice and notice relationships between colonialism and resources/environment, economics, power, resistance and science and colonial inheritance. The course also explores the different cultural processes, such as creolisation, othering and ambivalence that takes place in colonial environments and manifests itself in material culture. The course introduces theoretical procedures for historical-archaeological studies of colonialism and presents different sources, methods and perspectives and central research questions.