Anthropology

This course analyzes anthropological contributions to the interpretation of cultural diversity in Spain. It offers a study of fundamental issues of Spanish culture and society in a historical and comparative context and critically evaluates the ethnological and socio-anthropological literature written about Spain and the Spanish. 

This course explores the origin, importance, and expansion of the concept of leisure in capitalist western society and its connection to tourism. Topics include: origins and evolution of the tourism system; tourism in the context of anthropological research; symbolic and experiential aspects of tourist practice; attraction of the destination; contemporary tourism.

Despite being subjected to intense assimilation policies and persecution, European Roma and Gypsy regularly re-emerge with a remarkable revitalizing power. Who are then the Roma and Gypsies, what does it mean from their point of view? Students learn the historical social adaptations of Roma and Gypsy groups in Europe, the United states, and Central European Roma. The course draws on the latest research topics such as Romani European migration, memory building, political mobilization, survival strategies, segregation, and racism. The course newly adopts a field-trip component that complements the lecture and seminar sessions. Students visit a contested memory site of Nazi persecution and participate at a commemoration ritual; travel to a Roma ghetto and study the contours of spatial segregation and its politics; attend a performance of the “theater of the oppressed” and discuss with Roma actors how theatric language helps them express their aspirations. This course challenges mono-causal explanations of Romani society and culture and stimulates students to think about Roma in a critical holistic way that brings into consideration the societies they live in.

This course explores the field of anthropology from the perspective of health systems in diverse sociocultural contexts (global North and global South, indigenous and non-indigenous societies, etc.). The first part of the course focuses on mental health, concepts of normalcy and pathology from a transcultural perspective, representations of madness, and the social and medical institutions that objectify them. The second part of the course examines the notion of the person, how the body is conceived of culturally and physically, how it ages and how it dies. The course also considers other topics such as feminist anthropological critiques of sexuality and gender, the anthropology of transmissible diseases, profound trauma, and questions of morality and culture in biomedicine and medical technology.

This course offers an introduction to the anthropological study of science and technology. We examine how science and technology come to matter in our daily lives. Rather than considering scientific facts and technical objects as products of human progress, independent of social and cultural contexts, we ask how specific facts and objects are produced (while not others) and how those facts and objects shape the ways we understand ourselves, live our lives, and relate to one another.

The course covers the intercultural issues presented in our personal and professional life, a necessary prerequisite if we want to become global citizens.