Anthropology

This course explores the intersection between food cultures and food politics, emphasizing the pivotal debates and discussions that have shaped French culinary traditions. It delves into how food serves as a medium for studying urban transformations, global interactions, and the evolution of national identity. The course examines how food has been a tool for constructing community and belonging, as well as exclusion. Through a combination of interdisciplinary readings, analytic and ethnographic writing assignments, and immersive excursions around Paris, the course considers the role of food in structuring identities, everyday practices, and political landscapes in modern France.

This seminar course will engage with key readings and positions in the wider field of anthropology of ethics and morality as they have been shaped and discussed within and beyond anthropology. We shall be engaged in critical readings of programmatic texts and different kinds of approaches, focusing in particularly on the readings of ethnographies (as articles, or key chapters). Readings will include work on the ‘ethnography of moralities’, and particularly approaches focusing on the workings of ethics in ordinary everyday life (e.g. Lambek, Das, Keane, Fassin), as well as the anthropology of Islam (e.g. Mahmood; Hirschkind; Marsden, Schielke), and overall conceptual approaches (e.g. Laidlaw; Faubion). We may also engage with earlier writings (to grasp the history of intellectual trajectories), and with particular writings on human sharing, suffering and persevering, trying to assess what we can gain from here. Critical readings of these approaches and their critical reception, particularly within the field of interpretive and existentialist anthropology, will guide our course discussions – which seek to address aspects of ethnographic description and critical conceptualization in a balanced manner. Thereby, we will also pursue recent questions about the integration of ethical perspectives and/or moral universes from the global South into theorizing (asking how much/ how far this may have been done); and we will consider decolonial demands for theory to work with and be built on concepts from the global South (e.g. Menon 2022). Which kind of concepts, and what kind of writers from there could enrich, enhance, or re-focus recent approaches and debates in an adequate manner? These are open questions, for critical and open-minded engagements in close readings.

This course examines the fundamental elements to distinguish the cultural biography of Mexican archaeology, its history, evolution, and relationship with the modern world through nationalism and the construction of collective imagination, popular stereotypes, and representations in tourism.

This course considers what makes us human by exploring the "deep history" of death from prehistory to the present. Realizing that this question goes beyond the capacity of any single academic discipline, the course turns to history, cultural anthropology, archaeology, paleontology, developmental psychology, and comparative religions to explore the universal human search for the meaning of death and seeking immortality.

We are in the midst of unprecedented global environmental change. Rising temperatures and sea levels, unpredictable and increasingly volatile weather events, plant and animal extinctions, and continued human expansion and adaptation are all pressing matters for our current and future lives. How did we get here, what are the implications for human and nonhuman life, and where do we go from here? 

This course draws on anthropological concepts and fieldwork findings to explore the complex and reciprocal relationships between humans and our environments. Students will be introduced to environmental anthropology and its potential for understanding not only nature, culture, and their relationship, but also possible solutions to issues related to life on a changed (and changing) planet. 

Students will be introduced to the past, present, and potential future diversity of human-environment relations through topics including fungal networks, human-animal relationships, nonhuman persons, environmental politics, urban development, and of course, climate change. Through this, students will gain an appreciation for the diversity of human life, the environment, and our ways of being in the world, while also developing critical analytical skills beneficial for personal, activist, and academic success. 

This course provides an introductory, holistic overview and understanding of North Korean political, ideological, cultural, and economic structures. The course will analyze principles governing these structures and their relationship to the everyday lives of its citizens and to the country's foreign relations with neighboring countries.

Throughout history, people have always worked, not only to survive, but also to create material and social conditions that allow them to recover and reproduce. However, Karl Marx (2004 [1867]) has shown that the way people work is shaped by the unequal relations of production between those who must labor to survive and those who can enjoy the labor of others. But how is work different from labor and other activities, as another German philosopher, Hannah Arendt (2013 [1958]), once noted? And what role does work play, for example, for different societies where the distinction between work and non-work is not so clear (Spittler, 2015)? This is the task of this seminar, which aims to introduce classical (Durkheim, 1984 [1893]; Godelier and Ignatieff 1980) and contemporary anthropological and non-anthropological studies of labor that incorporate a variety of issues such as gender (Narotzky, 2014), "race” (Stuesse, 2016), postcoloniality (Appel, 2019), and intimacy (Schields, 2023). The seminar aims not only to deconstruct "Western" notions of work and labor, but also to explore how these notions cannot be reduced to a physical activity, usually performed in an industrial or agricultural setting. Care work and domestic work (Amrith, 2017; Parreñas, 2011) are equally important forms of labor that have often been neglected in social theory. Moreover, with the development of new digital technologies and infrastructures, this seminar will also address new forms of digital (Gregg, 2011), post-Fordist (Hardt and Negri, 2000), affective (Muehlebach, 2011), and platform (Jones, 2021) forms of labor. It will offer methodological tools to examine the meaning of labor in people's everyday lives and its various entanglements with their environment, as well as to understand the emerging labor struggles that address past and contemporary exploitation and discrimination (Kasmir and Carbonella, 2008).

Berlin is a city layered with history: a palimpsest of ruins, reconstructions, and marks of the past, even of futuristic imaginations that are now history. These layers can seem romantic and invited the modern flaneur to imagine Berlin alongside other cosmopolitan and urban projection screens. But the multi-layered city also implies a casting aside, a covering up, digging up, and hiding. The ruins of Berlin tell a story of an injured city, whose wounds are variously exposed to lay the finger on the wound of historical reckoning, or plastered in a vain attempt to heal, or return to a state prior to injury, as artist Kader Attia put it about the city of Berlin. The city as a multi-layered palimpsest thus reveals psycho-affective and political strategies of future-making and heritage-mobilization. In this seminar, we trace and dig into the difficult, awkward, eerie, uncomfortable heritage of the city and speak to stakeholders involved in its transition: curators, activists, artists, citizens. The seminar will produce a modular book-case, which can be unpacked into a mini-exhibition, featuring students’ own profiled “difficult heritage” sites of the city with a brief problematization. These loose pages will be put together in a box to create a mobile, modular book-exhibition. Among the sites that may be visited are: Zionskirche, Gedenkstätte Berliner Mauer, Stasi Archive and headquarters, Humboldt Forum, Holocaust Memorial and the Sinti Roma Memorial, exhibition "looking back” at Museen Treptow-Köpenick. The seminar focuses on field visits with methodological exercises, which introduce students to diverse ways of doing research that they will build on to articulate their own research outcomes in a multimodal portfolio.

This course investigates the cultural and political significance of food within Paris, with a distinctive literary approach. Focusing on the lively debates and controversies surrounding French culinary culture, it explores how food acts as a gateway to understanding dynamic changes in cities, global systems, and national identity formation. The course analyzes how food has been instrumental in fostering ideas of community and belonging. Through a rich selection of interdisciplinary readings, literary analyses, writing assignments, and exploratory excursions throughout Paris, the course examines how food influences personal identities, everyday life, and the political sphere, with a special emphasis on its representation in literature and the arts.

This course explores the diverse forms of collaboration in which anthropologists are involved. Whether in working across academic disciplines, with Amazonian people to document an indigenous language, co-authoring ethnographic texts with local research assistants, or working with government officials to design public health policies, collaboration has become an ethical imperative that underscores the potential benefits and challenges of contemporary anthropology. The course involves thinking creatively about new possibilities for collaborative practice in anthropology. It also invites critical thinking about how, whether in academia, international development, artistic practice, or the business world, collaboration has become a seemingly ubiquitous regime of value in the contemporary world.