Anthropology

This course is a three-week intensive experiential course in Ghana, West Africa that features concentrated study, lectures, roundtables, field trips, and interactions with the people of Ghana. The course involves an in-depth examination of Ghanaian history, culture, governance, family and society, gender issues, and development challenges. The course also includes language instruction, language practice situations in the field, dance lessons, drumming lessons, and field excursions to culturally and historically significant sites in Kumasi, Cape Coast, or other areas. It also introduces a host of practical skills and information to help with adjustment to and living in Ghana. The course is comprised of 45 hours of lectures and over 30 hours of field interactions.

This course examines Japanese culture and thought from the Buddhist perspectives, making constant references to both common and different features in the ways of thinking between Chinese and Japanese peoples, and also to how Japanese Buddhism and culture including Zen Buddhism, tea ceremony, Japanese cuisine, and other cultural activities became a global phenomenon after the 19th century. T

This course provides a general introduction to medical anthropology. It first focuses on how humans have biologically adapted to diseases in their environment; then it examines the multiple ways in which medicine, illness, healing, and mental illness are conceived in different societies. The purpose of the course is to demonstrate the diversity of medical practices to understand the socio-cultural aspect of medicine in general. 

This course offers a study of Arab-Islamic culture in the context of cultural anthropology. Topics include: gender, marriage, family, and kinship; perceptions of Arab-Islamic culture; the Arabic language; myths, legends, and traditions.

This course introduces the subfield of urban anthropology through the lens of politics, protest, and collective action that claims a right to the city. It explores how urban life is the setting and substance for the production of political agency, how the city is a medium of political communication, and thus how it constitutes a repository of dynamic but unstable political possibilities. The course takes a performative approach to city-making, in which the urban—what it means, what it is—is continually brought into being through the actions and arguments of its denizens, from Ultra football fans and disenfranchised workers to favela dwellers and guerilla artists. In particular, the course explores how the urban sensorium (the sounds, smells, and sights of the city) is a site of social and political intervention.

This course explores the place of food in art in France, with a focus on the modern and contemporary periods. Throughout the course, representations of food are studied as a means to survey the evolution of French art within a global context, and as significant markers of social, ethnic, and cultural identity. The analysis of these depictions provides the opportunity to learn about dietary and dining customs, habits, and beliefs prevalent in France from the early modern period to the present. The course begins by decoding the archetypal representations of succulent food in the still life and genre painting of 16th-17th-century Holland, which established the conventions of the genre for centuries to come. It then examines how the rise of these previously minor artistic genres in 18th-century France coincided with the birth of French gastronomy. Frivolous depictions of aristocrats wining, dining, and indulging in exotic beverages like coffee and hot chocolate then give way in post-Revolutionary France to visions of austerity and “real life,” featuring potato-eating peasants. The focus then shifts to representations of food and dining in the age of modernity, when Paris was the undisputed capital of art, luxury, haute cuisine, and innovation. The course analyzes how Impressionist picnics and café scenes transgress social and artistic codes. Building on their momentum, Paul Cézanne launches an aesthetic revolution with an apple. Paul Gauguin’s depictions of mangos and guavas speak to his quest for new, “exotic” sources of inspiration, and allow discussion of questions of race, gender, and French colonialist discourse. Drawing from these pictorial and social innovations, the course subsequently observes the place of food and dining themes in the avant-garde movements of early 20th-century Paris, whose defiance of conventional society and art leads them to transform previously comforting themes into troubling ones.  It questions the place of food—or its absence—in art to capture the suffering and violence of upheavals like the Second World War and consider the place of food and dining in contemporary art: from the Pop Art movement’s calling into question postwar consumer society through its representations of mass-produced food; to contemporary creators in a plural and globalized art scene who use these traditional themes to challenge the status and roles of the artist, the spectator, and the work of art itself; to how depictions of food in visual art grapple with multiculturalism in France today.