Anthropology

This course examines ecological anthropology, focusing on social and cultural adaptations to different environments, human impact on the environment, cultural constructions of the environment, management of common resources, and conflict over the use of resources.

This course examines anthropological approaches to foodways and agricultural sustainability. It considers how small-scale producers and their communities fulfill their basic needs, and how they relate to the living world, including the plants and animals that are the sources of valued foods. It also undertakes the critical analysis of food movements, food systems and the socio-economic contexts of food provisioning and food production, particularly through ethnography.

The course offers a study of the conceptual framework of cultural heritage, from the theoretical point of view and the application of national and international legislation, to the reality of the expressions present in Chile today. It uses case studies, bibliographic reviews, and practical work in the field, to discuss the problems related to initiatives to safeguard and protect the intangible, material, and natural areas of cultural heritage.

This course focuses on the basic elements of the history of anthropological research in the Americas. It provides a general overview of indigenous America and the tools to begin to undertake an ethnographic analysis of the indigenous Americas. The course is divided into two parts. In the first part, the topic of colonization is discussed, the category of “indigenous” is defined, and the issue of indigenous rights is exposed. In the second part of the course, some contemporary ethnographies are presented to understand the ethnographic analysis of the indigenous Americas.

The human body offers historians a gateway onto understanding the cultures of the past. On this course students examine several groups of objects from the visual culture of medieval Europe and the Middle East through this contemporary theoretical lens, examining how the techniques and society of the medieval craftsman at once idolized and distorted the medieval body's forms. In previous years this course has also featured a study trip to museums and galleries in London to meet with curators and handle objects.

This course provides a study on the social structure of Spain taking into account trends of social inequality, social stratification and mobility, family life, labor markets and new forms of cultural diversity. 

This course examines people and cultures. Women and men, merchants and monks, Christians and Jews all formed the cultures, classes and statuses which constituted late medieval European society. The study themes of this course focus on the means by which ideas, cultures and expectations were constructed and transmitted, and include topics such as healthcare, civic life, the body, gender and sexuality, religious beliefs and practices, otherness, death, political theory, art and architecture, travel.

American sports culture frequently serves as an example of an alleged American exceptionalism; a fact that a relative indifference towards soccer, the exceptional “big four” pro sports leagues, and collegiate sports culture (NCAA) seemingly underline. This course sets out to make sense of and (maybe) trouble the narrative of American exceptionalism by examining the history of modern sports in the United States. We will consider the aesthetic, social, cultural, and political factors that contributed to the development and practice of sports from roughly the middle of the 19th century into our current age. The class will approach sports history with a focus on the relationship between sports and society, i.e. the role that sports has played in shaping ideology and informing popular thought, for example in the context of nationhood and globalization, but also with regard to modern discourses of health and fitness. The ultimate goal of this course is to encourage critically looking at, thinking, and writing about sports as everyday practice and as a professional field, as connected to discourses of health and (the pursuit of) happiness, as media event and content, and as a prominent repository of liberal narratives of meritocracy.

This course regards autotheory, autoethnography, and autofiction as critical methods, modes of inquiry, and forms of representation in anthropological research. Against the background of debates around positionality, students will learn and explore how the self even when intimate, vulnerable and ambivalent can be a public archive; that it offers a rich mode for thinking through our affective embroilments in the world. We will discuss how writing can embrace but also respond to issues of belonging, experiences of class and queerness, racial or gendered difference, de/coloniality and so on. We will read works that call into question the sharp divides between academic and other forms of writing, theory and poetry, ethnography and fiction. The course is designed to be interactive and workshop-oriented. Participants will engage in short writing exercises in class and will be encouraged to draw on their own experiences of life and learning in research.

This course introduces theoretical and methodological debates of feminist anthropology. It addresses the (de)construction of the anthropological discipline from a feminist epistemological perspective and introduces the conceptual discussion around the gender category as a fundamental analytical tool for understanding social reality. The course also covers the research methods of feminist anthropology, encouraging the incorporation of this perspective into empirical research conducted by the students.