Anthropology

This course offers an introduction to the history of cultural anthropology, tracing the formation of anthropological theory from its roots in the Enlightenment and European colonial expansion up to the present. Partly an intellectual history of the discipline, students explore key texts that mark critical shifts in anthropological thinking about what it means to be human. In doing so, students explore theories and critiques that have shaped, complicated, and haunted anthropological conceptions of humanity, including ideas about nature and culture, notions of race, progress, and civilization, and theories of personhood and social life.

This course considers how intrinsic war is to human nature (the Hobbes/Rousseau debate), the causes and escalation of conflict, the conduct of warfare, its physical manifestation and immediate outcomes. The focus is on small-scale societies of prehistoric and recent date, using archaeological information and ethnographies of conflict to study and define "primitive" war as an anthropological phenomenon. The course takes a comparative, evolutionary, and historical perspective, to look at the broader impact of war and conflict in a sample of early and indigenous societies.

Ethnography as both the methodology and the set of methods by which anthropologists gather our data from the field has a long and controversial history emerging during European colonial expansion. Students critically examine the early ethnographic works, particularly in relation to Ireland as well as abroad. Contemporary texts comparatively show core issues and debates in how the "other" is written. As students move through these texts we engage with different ethnographic methods developing the student's own skills in collecting and curating social data.

What is childhood? Was it invented? How has the concept of childhood differed in different historical, geographical, and socio-economic contexts? These are the questions that will preoccupy students in this course. Focusing on the 19th and 20th centuries, but with reference to earlier periods, and covering Ireland, Britain, Europe, and the wider world – including colonial settings and China – the class explores how the experience and perception of childhood changed. Students examine the hypothesis that childhood as a time of innocence, development, and play was not a natural category but had to be "invented," and they consider different periods and locations as possible candidates for its invention or adaptation. From child labor and children in war to the children of elites and youth culture, students construct a nuanced picture of male and female childhood. 

This course examines interpretations of urban legends from Hong Kong and other parts of the world using anthropological, sociological, psychological, and literary approaches accompanied with case-studies from different media and platforms. 

This course explores modern Middle East and North Africa and the societies and cultures through regionally and historically focused investigations. It continues with an exploration of historical and contemporary European and Western interventions and perspectives on the Middle East, and how these have impacted the region.

This course examines musical phenomena from an anthropological perspective. From this perspective, music is approached as a social practice and symbolic production, as a performance that produces meanings and agency for musicians and listeners. Present in all societies, music tends to be a collective and ritualized activity through which its practitioners - including listeners - reaffirm shared values ​​and a sense of belonging to local, national, and transnational communities or social groups. At the end of the course, students are expected to 1: improve their ability to deal with the experience of musical otherness and, 2: understand the implications of the cultural, social, and political context in defining the different concepts of music and meanings that are collectively attributed to it.

This course examines the field of forensic anthropology – a scientific discipline that involves the application of methods from biological anthropology and archaeology to the identification, recovery, and analysis of skeletal remains from crime scenes, mass disasters, and unexplained death. Through lectures and in-class assignments, students will learn about the methods for recognizing and recovering evidence that allows for the determination of time since death, manner and cause of death, and the identification of individuals.

This is a special studies course involving an internship with a corporate, public, governmental, or private organization, arranged with the Study Center Director or Liaison Officer. Specific internships vary each term and are described on a special study project form for each student. A substantial paper or series of reports is required. Units vary depending on the contact hours and method of assessment. The internship may be taken during one or more terms but the units cannot exceed a total of 12.0 for the year.