Anthropology

This course offers a study of contemporary societies from the perspective of social and cultural anthropology. It covers the main concepts and theoretical approaches of social and cultural anthropology that contribute to the understanding of geographical reality, and introduces the methodological approaches and research techniques that anthropologists use in investigations within contemporary societies. The course also discusses political anthropology, economic anthropology, and anthropology and space.

This course equips students to understand causes, effects, framings of, and responses to climate change and related phenomena around the world, from a critical social science perspective. Building on anthropology's long-standing engagement with social transformation and human-environment relations, and more recent environmental turns across social sciences and humanities, students explore how recent identifications of climate crisis and debates around the Anthropocene are situated in longer histories of environmental change and social injustice, as well as their contemporary manifestations and politics. The course is grounded in empirical, ethnographic work that explores what environmental and social changes mean and entail for people, communities, organizations, and nations around the world - across Europe, North America, Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa, Asia and the Pacific. Its approach to questions of climate and environment emerges from sustained attention to the afterlives of empire and ongoing colonial relations between Global North and South. Through a genuine engagement with decolonial and indigenous scholarship, as well as critical studies emerging from the Global South, the course offers students a unique opportunity to engage with a diverse range of analyses and discussions pertaining to the environment and climate change. 

This course covers theoretical anthropological approaches to the study of capitalism, from early accounts of the market versus other economic forms, to recent works on salvage economies and forms of financialization. Drawing on thinkers such as Gibson-Graham, Laura Bear, Anna Tsing, Andrea Muehlebach and Evans and Reid, it critically engages with ideas about neoliberalism, diverse (or alternative) economies, nepotism, austerity, performativity and prefiguration, and the way in which "capitalocentrism" obfuscates space for critical thought.

Students learn how the scientific analysis of fossil bones and stone tools, combined with the study of modern and ancient genetic codes, can be used to unlock the hidden history of our species. In this course, students discover the relative strengths and weaknesses of different kinds of data, and the sorts of questions that a scientific approach can (and cannot) answer. Students learn to be able to explain how an understanding of our past can provide unique insights into topical issues such as diet, human health and disease, migration, "race," language and national identity.

The course is structured around five fundamental questions that have shaped anthropological inquiry and the development of the discipline: What is society? What is culture? How are societies organized? What holds societies together? What makes societies run? With these questions as a guide, the course explores the evolution of anthropological thought about its main subject matter, namely, society and culture, and the methods that should be used to understand what they are and how they work. For each question, how society, culture, and their organization and function emerged as problems for anthropology, and the methods and theories that anthropologists have employed to explain them are examined. A variety of readings, from classical anthropological texts to more recent ones are used to chart a history of anthropological thought that pays particular attention to ethnographic method and questions of ethics in fieldwork. Reading assignments will be available on Blackboard.

This course focuses on the social and cultural relations produced by resource management projects, and explores the global and local frames through a series of world-wide case studies of mining, oil, gas, and forestry projects. Resource projects have long been important sites of cultural contact, environmental impact and anthropological interest: whether first contact with prospectors, disputes with multinational companies, sustainable development initiatives or civil-society monitoring, resource exploration and extraction has long played an important part in the interface with non-western and indigenous peoples and the forces of globalization. The course also examines the potential for anthropological skills and knowledge to contribute to an industry that has increasingly to account for its social and environmental impacts to a global constituency.

This course discusses the historical-anthropological and geographic-cultural processes present in the creation of Chilean society from the pre-Hispanic era to today.

This course explores anthropology in Thailand. 

The mythologically masculine figure of the creative genius has often been employed to minimize and excuse violence against marginalized people. In exchange for great art, audiences might be more than willing to look the other way when women, people of color, queer people and children get hurt. With the arrival of social media, the violent price of art by monstrous men has become harder to ignore. Their crimes are all over the internet. When knowledge of the wrongdoings by artists spread, it becomes challenging for fans to ignore the reprehensible behavior of people like Michael Jackson, Roman Polanski, Louis CK, Woody Allen, Bill Cosby, Kevin Spacey and R. Kelly. In this course, we reflect on the dilemma this leaves for audiences: How do we deal with great art made by horrible people? Students will learn how to make use of an intersectional feminist toolbox to engage with questions like: -- Does art have to be moral? -- Can we separate art from artist? Is this dependent on the medium? -- Is the audience complicit or culpable if they continue consuming the work created by monstrous men? -- How does the art by monstrous men play into discussions around individual taste and political identity as shaped by cultural consumption? -- What do strategies of ethical cultural consumption look like? -- Can we have harmless, morally sound cultural products in patriarchal, white supremacist capitalism? -- What is “woke capitalism” and does canceling culture ever work? -- What do accountability and consequences look like? -- Can monstrous men redeem themselves through confessions, apologies and contrition?