Anthropology

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.

This course studies how humans have communicated verbally, non-verbally, and across distances.

This course examines the way visual art and culture is used to express identity and its relation to changing notions of creativity and selfhood. The goal of the course is to think critically about the purpose of art: what is it, what does it do, who is it for, how is it made?

This course offers a theoretically and methodologically informed analysis of culture, art and literature drawing on sociology and anthropology. Students are introduced to key sociological and anthropological concepts which facilitate the interpretation of art-works as both reflective of society and potentially transformative – whether literary, cinematic, musical, or whatever sort – including liminality, play, and social performativity. Effectively, these suggest that by creating imaginative spaces of narrative and symbolism, art can consider elements of society, and variously re-think and re-evaluate them, or even critique them.

Drawing principally on Marxist anthropology, post-structuralism and post-colonialism, this course looks cross-culturally to explore the interrelationships between diverse forms and sources of power, the roles of colonialism and corporate globalization in configuring and sustaining local relations of inequality, and the rise of resistance movements that explicitly challenge exclusions based on class, gender, and ethnicity. Special attention will be paid to the effects of multinational corporations on local power relations and patterns of inequality throughout the world via brand marketing, legal reform, and corporate social responsibility. Case studies will be drawn from Latin America, North America, Africa, Australia, and Southeast Asia.

This course provides a deeper understanding of migrant lives, experiences, and emotions in the 20th and 21st century, to give a fuller sense of the varied comparative and transdisciplinary methodologies that can be used in the study of the subject, and to introduce students to research work with a view to thesis writing. The course incorporates varied approaches including chronological, thematic, and theoretical aspects. For example: the relationship between psy disciplines and migration experiences; the emergence of refugee psychiatry and its relationship to broader political contexts; and the politics of humanitarian psychiatry. The course centers around a group of comparative and interdisciplinary case studies. These include displaced persons and forced migration from within and outside Europe after the First and Second World War; dissidents and refugees in Europe; guest workers and post-colonial labor migrants after 1945 in Britain, France, and Germany. The course also incorporates varied methodologies and sources, including printed and unprinted sources, oral history and life-story analysis, quantitative, qualitative, and comparative methods as well as film, memoir, and visual analysis.

This course delves into labor in China through an anthropological lens and pays attention to various aspects, including skill and livelihood; institution and reform; culture and technology, and gender and family, based on relevant literature and first-hand fieldwork materials obtained through the teacher’s research. The concept of "labor" is not confined to Marxism, but it is extended by specific materials from anthropological labor studies. The course aims not only to lead students to master multiple situations of labor in the Chinese context, but also encourages a reflexive exploration of students finding their own positions in society.