Anthropology

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrollment is by permission of the instructor. The course provides information, in the fields of Indology, history, religious studies, and anthropology, indispensable for critically analyzing South Asian intellectual history in colonial and post-colonial times. The course provides in-depth analysis to the following themes: Discourse on religion and religious conflicts in colonial and postcolonial India; the debate on historiography in post-colonial India; the criticism of "secularism" in postcolonial India; representations of social marginality in contemporary South Asia. The course also provides high-level knowledge of intellectual transformations and history of thought in modern and contemporary South Asia, specifically during the colonial and post-colonial period. The course covers in depth the issue of religious and social reforms and the main theoretical positions emerged in the current debate on the historiographical and anthropological representation of the development of South Asian society. 

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrollment is by permission of the instructor. The course provides knowledge of a portion of the vast field of diaspora studies. The course covers diasporic cultures, imaginaries, consciousness, subjectivities, and practices across a variety of contexts and assesses the stakes of ‘diaspora’ as an analytical concept as well as lived experience. The course also covers the importance of intertwining critical race theory with ethnography in order to understand diasporic subjectivities are racialized. The course also equips students with decolonial approaches and methodologies to migration and diaspora studies, building the tools to critically engage with historical and contemporary debates around identity, nationalism, race, multiculturalism, and difference. "Diaspora" as a concept has enabled an understanding of identities and cultures beyond national, ethnic, or racial connotations. Diaspora functions as a vision to think of subjectivities and communities not as epiphenomena of nation-states but as springboard for de-territorialized and transnational cultural and political formations and political subjectivities. The first part of the course introduces anthropological and social theories of migration and looks at what Diaspora as a heuristic device has brought to studies and understandings of home, belonging, identities, and political cultures. In the second part, the course focuses on how liberal states manage Diasporas through containment, confinement, disciplining, and through a highly emotional politics of fear. Finally, the course analyzes diasporas as "cultures of resistance" effecting a dissolution of borders and boundaries in their everyday aesthetic and performative practices.

This course covers the period between the Predynastic and the Middle Kingdom and includes: reliefs, statuary, architecture, and minor arts, illustrated with images. It focuses on learning how to look at and to analyze Egyptian art and to place it in its context. This course involves a significant amount of memorization to create a mental data-bank that is useful when putting excavated material in context and in analyzing Egyptian art. It includes field trips to the museum and to Giza and Saqqara.

Students gain a systematic understanding and a critical awareness of current problems and recent insights in relation to different theoretical approaches to cookery and eating as cultural processes that are materially embedded and embodied. This contributes to the overall program aim of challenging assumptions about what makes humans similar and different across borders. The course also fosters values of social responsibility and inclusion by exploring how diverse groups of people approach food in their cultural settings.  

The technical aspects of environmental issues in Egypt are examined taking into account the cultural, social, and political dimensions upsetting the balance of the environment. Major issues such as water scarcity, global warming, desertification, urban pollution, tourism, and demographic pressures are presented and analyzed.

This course offers a study of basic linguistic and communicative skills in the indigenous language, Purepecha, for listening, speaking, reading, and writing comprehension.

This course introduces the subjects of religion, ritual, and their secular critiques from an anthropological perspective. It studies the history of theory and concepts along a range of ethnographic topics (magic, science, religion and witchcraft; religion and politics, etc). Japan-related subjects will figure occasionally as discussion topics and in possible field trips to sites of religious significance in the Tokyo area. 

This course covers the history of Egypt from the Predynastic period to the Middle Kingdom. The course focuses on the "official" history of Egypt rather than the cultural/social history which is covered in a separate course. The scope of "official" history includes: the rise of the Egyptian state, the different rulers of Egypt and their contributions to the state in terms of buildings, religious changes and foreign policy, the economy, social organization, and Egypt’s foreign relations. Literary sources are augmented by archaeological evidence. Field trips to archaeological sites in the Cairo area are an obligatory aspect of the course.

This course examines the various ways in which we can study the dead. It covers three areas: the interpretation of mortuary practices, the interpretation of past lives from skeletal remains, and the practice of burial archaeology in the southern hemisphere.

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.