Anthropology

This course examines the way people know, interact with, and care about their environment. This includes interactions with, and the meanings of, (urban) wildlife, climate change studies, biodiversity conservation, and the challenges of natural resource management. In addition, students will develop skills in ethnographic fieldwork.

The course focuses on human skeletal morphology, and the study of physical evidence as a means to resolving issues involving criminal investigations, environment analyses, and assessment. How to identify skeletal remains, both whole and fragmentary, and how to estimate the age, sex, ancestry, and stature of an individual using laboratory and imaging techniques are learned.

This course examines the social and ecological impacts of human activity in the context of a global fossil fuel civilization. Investigating problems of climate change, declining biodiversity, and environmental degradation, it provides an anthropologically
informed perspective on crucial issues at the intersection of ecology, sustainable development, and social activism.

This course examines Pacific Studies and the worlds of Te Moana-nui-ā-Kiwa (The Pacific). Through the study of taonga or cultural treasures drawn from specific cultures and societies, insights into Indigenous Pacific knowledges and practices are developed. Spanning deep history and the contemporary moment, this course provides a critical understanding of change in the Pacific over time and space.

This course introduces students to world history through material culture. The main objects and configurations of material culture, from the body as commodity to cowries as money, are analyzed in this course. Food, drinks, drugs, fabrics, dress, houses, furniture, interior decoration, urban planning, and gardens structure a diversified program. The circulation of objects around the world, in some cases under different materials and forms, opens the way to consider cultural exchange between different civilizations, meaning forms of transfer, contamination, adaptation, and refusal.

This course offers a study of the major themes, theoretical approaches, and authors of Latin American anthropology, societies, and cultures.

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.