Anthropology

This advanced seminar course critically examines theories and practices of racism, racialization, ethnicity, and nationalism. The course evaluates both anthropological and wider social theoretical literatures to investigate their contributions and limitations to understanding these historically and conceptually interlinked problematics across different times and spaces. 

The course looks at anthropological contributions to the understanding of ritual and religion, starting and ending with moments of especially acute reflection on the place of religion in the contemporary world. Our starting point will be that moment in the late 19th and early 20th century when classic theorists (especially Weber and Durkheim) pondered the place of religion in an age of scientific challenge, and students explore contemporary arguments about the boundaries between religion, power, and politics. Students also investigate the intersection of religion and ritual with a range of topics (gender, material culture, the body and cognition).

This course uses ethnographic case studies to examine how interactions between people, societies, and systems generate health or illness and wellbeing or illbeing in a range of contexts. The course explores the ways in which health and wellbeing articulate with politics and inequality. 

This course provides an advanced introduction to the anthropology of health, illness, and healing. Students are introduced to key theories and current debates at the interface of anthropology and medicine through a focus on cross-cultural approaches to illness, pain, healing, the body, and care. This course explores biomedicine as one among many ways of thinking through and constituting personhood, illness, and the body. It deals with the challenges that arise when biomedical expertise meets other understandings of illness and suffering; the multiple kinds of care provided in institutional, public, religious and domestic settings; the relationship between curing and healing; and the ways in which people grapple with affliction and uncertainty through narrative, through relationships, and through action. 

This course explores urban anthropology, tracing its classical schools and the evolution of the subdiscipline to the present, and delving into the analysis of housing in urban environments. Topics include: anthropology of the city; the Chicago School; the Manchester School and the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute; urban planning and capital; space financialization; public space; gentrification; socio-spatial segregation; housing and social theory; housing systems; debt, credit, and home financing.