Anthropology

This course explores the complex and influential connections between food, culture, self, place, and taste. Across the world, food is increasingly on the agenda, in relation to many themes: health, economy, politics, climate, famine, and obesity. There is an increased need for humanistic approaches to the understanding of how tradition, history, and cross-cultural practices influence people's eating and food choices. The course provides students with humanities-based insights into a wide array of aspects of food culture, including lifestyle; food politics; identity and the body; food and media; urban gardening; food taboos; food security; commensality; the globalization of taste; and the history of the chef.

The course introduces students to the fundamental principles of intercultural competence and ethnographic research. It proposes to develop perception and appreciation of different cultural perspectives and values. It prepares students to carry out an ethnographic project. It also guides and prepares students for the challenges of intercultural experiences and of conflict resolution by developing practical tools to be applied in a diverse cultural environment. 

This course examines the anthropology of ritual and religion including rites of passage, witchcraft, sorcery, myth, magic, spirits, death, symbols, ancestors, altered states of consciousness, and shamanism.

This course provides an introduction to memory studies, an interdisciplinary field encompassing sociology, political science, anthropology, and history, among other disciplines. The course introduces the main theoretical concepts in memory studies and the historical development of different approaches while focusing on recent debates on the relationship between memory politics and contemporary political developments (the rise of populism; nostalgia in the post-socialist world; Brexit; tearing down of colonial statues; return of looted artifacts from the Global North). The course provides an understanding of the basic notions of memory and its relation to identity formation, both individual and collective; the role of memory in institutional politics through memorialization rituals; the importance of monuments; and the role of memory and nostalgia as sites of resistance in everyday politics of contemporary world. Through lectures, selected readings, media screenings, group discussions, and student presentations, the course provides insight into the importance of power interplays of different memory and history narratives and critically engages in understanding contemporary memory discourses.

This course introduces anthropological approaches to time, temporality, and history. Ideas about time have been part of anthropology ever since anthropologists began theorizing human development, and analyzing the ways in which people conceive of time can illuminate fundamental questions about how humans make sense of their world and act within it. This course focuses on the relationship between cultural conceptions of time and power, and examines a few theoretical concepts that help to analyze this relationship The course studies ways in which time was built into core anthropological concepts of difference (particularly between the West and the rest) and then explores the relationship between time and political possibility, or how politics must make historical sense in order to be effective. In addition to the study of such uses of the past, the course examines nostalgia, identifies its cultural foundations, and shows its politics as well as its limits as a way of thinking about history.