Anthropology

This course provides students with a distinctly anthropological perspective on social media. It explores how familiar themes in anthropology, from kinship and friendship networks to the relation between circulation and value, take on new forms in a world of ever-increasing social media connectivity. Combining insights from anthropology and social media studies, students will consider questions such as: Is culture becoming more homogeneous now that more than one billion people worldwide have a Facebook profile, or are there as many different Facebooks as there are local contexts? How does the circulation of online content relate to pre-existing forms of community and belonging? What are the links between algorithms and agency? Are selfies a symptom of increasing individualism? And how can ethnographic methods capture social worlds of infinite distraction, endlessly interrupted by notifications, memes, tweets and Instagram stories?

This course introduces students to two ways of making sense of public health. The first is by exploring some of the key sites that are central to the making of public health. The second is through acknowledging that whilst public health (and its sidekick, epidemiology, the study of health across populations) sounds like it would be about actually existing people, it is often about people at the aggregate. In other words, statistics. This course takes a different approach: students study the observable behavior and attitudes of actually existing people—whether in the present or the past. This course introduces students to some key research methodologies in the social sciences and humanities-doing fieldwork, using archives, and unlocking the mysteries of university libraries in order to enable students to understand and master key concepts in the anthropology, history, and social science of life, death, and illness as part of the practice of medicine; to familiarize students provide students with key debates in the anthropology, history, and social science of life, death, and illness; to familiarize students with how medical understandings of life, death, and illness have changed over time; to familiarize students with how medical practice and understanding of life, death, and illness differ across cultures.

In this course students are introduced to the anthropological study of kinship, with an added focus on gender given the close relationship between the two. The study of kinship has been foundational in social anthropology, and early anthropologists often sought to categorize and rank societies according to their kinship system. Since then, the study of kinship has moved considerably from charting "systems" to understanding the full complexity of concepts and practices of relatedness, and even questioning the universality of "kinship." While acknowledging the historical foundations of the field, this course focuses on more contemporary aspects of the study of kinship and gender. Questions about race and ethnicity also figure prominently throughout the course. Through ethnographic examples from a wide range of social contexts, students reflect on the socially constructed nature of ideas of kinship and gender and debate key social issues of contemporary relevance.

This course provides a thorough grounding in current themes and debates in Environmental Anthropology in the present period of accelerated environmental and climatic change that has been termed the Anthropocene. The course introduces a range of ideas and approaches, both historical and contemporary, in the anthropological study and theorization of human-environmental relationships. Students receive a detailed introduction to the field of Environmental Anthropology, and its place within the history of the discipline of Anthropology. The course explores classical approaches such as cultural ecology and ecological anthropology, before moving on to broach more contemporary approaches including environmental anthropology, political ecology, and the anthropology of nature, as well as recent attempts to incorporate nonhuman actors into anthropological analysis in more experimental ways. 

This course examines the history and modern advances in health and approaches to health through an anthropological lens.

The course explores food as the essential link between nature and culture, examining how food classification, production, cooking, and eating shape cultural identity, social organization, family and gender systems, and religious practices. By studying practices of commensality, students uncover how food reveals ideas about similarity, difference, politics, religion, and social hierarchies. Students also explore contemporary issues such as how food consumption ties to identity, the obesity epidemic, and the environmental challenges of sustainable food production.

This course examines how development in countries is affected by humanitarianism.