Anthropology

This course provides an opportunity to rediscover one of the classic fields of anthropology, economic anthropology. It explores both classic and contemporary economic culture and allows for experimental use of economic anthropology in analysis of the student’s own empirical data, planned fieldwork, or theoretical discussions. The course explores issues such as forms of value, work, consumption, distribution and welfare society, spheres of exchange, spirits of capitalism, financialization, precarization, market fantasies, and economic cosmologies. The course consists of lectures, group discussions, presentations, and feedback sessions where students read and comment on each other’s writing.

Using ethnography from Asia, Africa, USA, Latin America, and Europe, you will examine globalization from the perspective of global elites, the middle classes, and the poor. By engaging with real-world scenarios students unpack the effect of globalization on social and cultural identities, family life, social mobility, and political movements. 

Ranging from work in the nineteenth century to contemporary anthropological studies, this course analyzes evolutionary, psychological, materialist, structuralist, socio-linguistic, and reflexive approaches to understanding gender behavior and gender stratification. The course explores how anthropological data from around the world is crucial for questioning widely held assumptions about men and women in contemporary societies. Therefore, it examines the processes and practices of the construction of the categories of “woman” and “man” in different cultural and historical contexts. By presenting ethnographic and historical accounts of gender variations and how they are currently understood and displayed, the course reveals the social and cultural forces that have created changes in sex/gender systems. It pays particular attention to the ways in which categories of gender/sexuality are deployed in various discursive regimes such as nationalism, modernism, colonialism, and globalization.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale program. The course is intended for advanced level students only. Enrollment is by consent of the instructor. The course focuses on the political, economic, and cultural European – mainly Iberian – expansion in America during the 16th and 17th centuries as one of the key phenomena that ignited the process of early modern globalization. Early modern globalization is analyzed from the perspective of historical anthropology, stressing how the global dimension of early modern colonialism, characterized by the worldwide circulation of goods, people, and ideas, fostered unprecedented processes of cultural interaction and hybridization as well as the creation of new political and cultural identities. A proper historical and anthropological understanding of such processes requires one to go beyond traditional Eurocentric notions of acculturation and westernization in order to adequately recognize the active role played by indigenous groups and individuals in the shaping of the emerging global world. The course contextualizes the European conquest of America within a global historical and cultural framework and provides a critical analysis of historical sources and early ethnographic records. The course includes notions linked to the popularization and public use of historical and anthropological knowledge. A section of the course is devoted to the analysis of the textual sources produced in the context of European/indigenous interactions in the New World, with a special focus on how indigenous voices can be glimpsed in those incipient forms of ethnographic records that, in turn, witness the early emergence of anthropology as a constitutive facet of early modern European colonial experience. Specific attention is devoted to the early circulation of ethnographic artifacts and how their observation and description by different social actors generated diverse discourses regarding the relationship between cultural difference and shared humanity.

The aim of this course is to provide basic knowledge about current racialized formations of gender, citizenship, and migration. Social, economic, political as well as cultural dimensions of citizenship and migration are addressed. The course engages with key theoretical debates in the field, in particular postcolonial and feminist conceptual investigations of citizenship, (non)belonging, and migration.

This is the second of a three-module course on qualitative research methods. This module builds on what students have learned in part I and is designed to guide them through the steps of data collection for their qualitative study. Students work on gaining access to their research site and begin the interview process and/or their observations and conversations with their research participants as participant observers. Students are introduced to the process of transcribing the interviews, coding the data, and memo writing. All three steps are part of qualitative data analysis. As students develop their research projects, they are challenged to link their specific research questions to larger processes and forces. They also are asked to consider who might find their research useful and how the results of their investigations might be utilized to promote social change. In-depth analysis of the intricacies underlying contemporary social, cultural, and political discourses and practices, provides the basis for good social research. This is a time and labor-intensive skills training, especially once data collection has begun. Most of the required work occurs outside of the class setting. Students are expected to work independently and should count on having to invest an extra two to four hours per week in interviewing, transcribing the interviews, and working on the data collection.

This course analyzes the identity projects that have sought to define "being Mexican." It begins with the arrival of Europeans in the 16th century and their political and cultural attempt to homogenize the diverse cultural identities of the territory under the category of "Indian." The course examines the history of ideas as well as the epistemic, ontological and phenomenal frameworks that have accompanied this process of identity construction and its consequences throughout the history of Mexico. 

This course introduces the area of Czech fairytales as a genre within its broader historical, geographical, and cultural context. Furthermore, it describes and surveys the changes in the approach to fairytales within the development of scholarship about them. The course presents historical, psychoanalytical, and philosophical interpretations, as well as anthropological and religious types of theories, and biological and gender or feminist methods of their interpretation. The course respects the connection of the fairytale to other folklore narrative forms like legends, fables, and myths; however, it defines the fairytale as a specific genre. It includes topics such as ethical and moral principles in fairytales, gender and social roles, and historical and political influences on fairytale adaptations.