2024-2025 Catalog

ANTH 10100. Introduction to Anthropology. 100 Units.

Classically defined as the 'science of humankind' or the 'study of human diversity', anthropology examines how people organize themselves into groups and relate to the environment through their cultural beliefs and practices. Students will be introduced to the types of arguments, questions, and problems that have driven anthropological thinking, and to the discipline's unique focus on intensive fieldwork methodologies that span ethnography, archaeology, linguistics, and even biology. We will examine how anthropologists have historically studied topics like belief, kinship, ritual, politics, exchange, and material culture in the non-western world in order to unsettle western norms and assumptions. And we will explore how post-colonial critiques and indigenous perspectives have redefined the discipline in the twenty-first century. Students will learn how anthropologists are today contributing to solving complex global problems, from climate change to economic inequality, racism, violence, immigration, health disparities, political technologies, and the effects of social media. This course serves as a sampler for those curious about the field and it fulfills a basic requirement for those pursing the Anthropology major or minor. Offered at least once yearly by rotating faculty who will provide their unique take on the discipline.

Instructor(s): Staff
Prerequisite(s): Designed as a first course in Anthropology

ANTH 10107. Nature and Technology in the Capitalist Mode of Production. 100 Units.

The crisis of nature and technology is at the heart of the 21st century mode of production as unprecedented planetary scale ecological destruction, climate change, and exhaustion of fossil fuels undercut the dynamics of capitalist accumulation. At the same time, novel techno-natural fixes are being designed to contain the crises immanent to the life process of capital. However, these movements are far from seamless; new tensions, contradictions, and horizons of struggles emerge making a critical inquiry of these concepts urgent to Anthropological thinking. In this course, the students will be introduced to foundational approaches to these problems. The first half of the course will intensively engage with dialectical materialist frameworks to understand the interrelationship between nature, technology, and consciousness in the capitalist mode of production. From this engagement, we will derive critical concepts that will be used to engage with the pertinent questions of planetary scale appropriation of human, non-human and more-than-human life in emergent anthropological theory and ethnographic literature. In doing so, our goal is to reflect on a series of questions: What is the place of nature and technology in the capitalist mode of production? How and if they embody limits to the workings of capital? How does anthropology allow us to develop new political and theoretical horizons that emerge in the wake of these developments?

Instructor(s): Ashima Mittal
Equivalent Course(s): HIPS 20107, CEGU 20107

ANTH 10200. Latin America in/at Chicago. 100 Units.

This course explores the city of Chicago's Latin American and Caribbean roots by considering hemispheric connections, both in the city at large and at the University of Chicago. Students will analyze 1) the ways Latin(e/x) American actors have participated in and shaped Chicago's political economy, 2) how Latin(e/x)s on both sides of the US-Mexico border have impacted and been impacted by social thought at the University of Chicago, 3) the collection and display of Latin American material culture in several of the city's museums, and 4) Latin(e/x) American civil and human rights activism in the city. The course will move through the city chronologically as well as geographically over the long twentieth century.

Instructor(s): Schwartz-Francisco, Diana     Terms Offered: Spring. Offered irregularly in Spring as part of Chicago Studies CIV sequence "Latin America/Latinx Chicago"
Note(s): This class is part of the Chicago Studies Civilizations Core sequence "Latin America/Latinx Chicago." Classes in this sequence include weekly experiential learning activities in the city, usually on Fridays.
Equivalent Course(s): CHST 10200, HIST 17910, LACS 10200, CEGU 10200

ANTH 10201. Immigrant Chicago. 100 Units.

Since the early 1900's, thousands of Latin Americans have made Chicago their home. Today, approximately one-third of Chicagoans trace their roots to Latin America. These significant demographic flows raise critical questions: Why have Latin Americans moved to Chicago? How have they adapted to the city? How have they influenced it? This course will expose students to the latest social science research on contemporary immigration with a strong focus on Latinos in Chicago. We will explore its origins, adaptation patterns, and long-term effects on our city. To explore the Latino experience in Chicago, the course will focus on three communities: Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and Venezuelans. These three groups migrated to Chicago during distinct periods, with Mexicans arriving in the early 1900s, Puerto Ricans in the 1940s, and Venezuelans in 2023. This temporal variation will enable us to investigate how the evolving social, economic, and political conditions in Chicago have influenced immigrants' experiences.

Instructor(s): Flores, René     Terms Offered: Spring. Offered irregularly in Spring as part of Chicago Studies CIV sequence "Latin America/Latinx Chicago"
Note(s): This class is part of the Chicago Studies Civilizations Core sequence "Latin America/Latinx Chicago." Classes in this sequence include weekly experiential learning activities in the city, usually on Fridays.
Equivalent Course(s): CEGU 10201, LACS 10201, CHST 10201

ANTH 10202. Latinx Arts in Chicago. 100 Units.

This course is an overview of the Latinx arts in Chicago. It explores artworks and artmaking as documents and critical fictions created in response to the social realities of urban Latinx populations in the U.S. and in Chicago in particular. It challenges students to think about (Latinx) art and the humanities under two modalities: as privileged arenas for understanding experience and exploring the values that guide a society, and as economic engines and instruments of political intervention. The course pursues these objectives though the study of the Latinx arts in Chicago, and through immersive engagements with local institutions where Latinx art operates (as historical object, as tool for social change, as fruit and seed of creative process, as instrument for economic development). Using the work of Latinx artists, curators, filmmakers, and other cultural brokers based in Chicago, the course studies artworks in the context of the social realities that gave rise to these works.

Instructor(s): Delgado Moya, Sergio     Terms Offered: Spring. Offered irregularly in Spring as part of Chicago Studies CIV sequence "Latin America/Latinx Chicago"
Note(s): This class is part of the Chicago Studies Civilizations Core sequence "Latin America/Latinx Chicago." Classes in this sequence include weekly experiential learning activities in the city, usually on Fridays.
Equivalent Course(s): CHST 10202, CEGU 10202, LACS 10202

ANTH 12800. Formations of Indigeneity. 100 Units.

Whose land are we on? What does it mean to be Indigenous, for generations past and in the twenty-first century? From debates over claims of Indigenous ancestry by political actors to the struggles of sacred lands protection against natural resource extraction, understanding the stakes of these concerns for Indigenous peoples and nations is more relevant than ever. This seminar-part of the sequence for majors in the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity-introduces students to core texts and concepts in the field of Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS). Topics will include sovereignty and governance, settler colonialism, citizenship and nationhood, blood quantum and racialization, diasporas and urban indigeneity, and relationships to land and environment. Course activities may include engagement with Indigenous films, dialogues with visiting Indigenous scholars, and field trips to Chicago-area cultural institutions.

Instructor(s): Matthew Kruer     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): RDIN 12300, CHST 12300, HIST 17800, CRES 12800

ANTH 20006. Embodiment and the Senses. 100 Units.

This course approaches bodies as points of insight into governance, the varied experiences of being governed, and efforts to evade and reconfigure institutional expressions of authority. First, we will examine bodies as targets of governance, objects to be reformed, regulated, contained, disciplined, educated, incarcerated, treated, trained, and "cared" for. Next, we will consider how bodies accrue power as sites of resistance, refusal, and critique. Certain bodies in certain places elicit discomfort, unsettling familiar divisions such as of private and public space, of developed and backward, of religious and secular, of reason and madness, of citizenship and (often racialized) non-citizenship. Finally, we will ask how bodies and sensory practices figure in ethical projects of crafting exemplary kinds of subjectivity or collectivity. In this way, the course will introduce students to anthropological approaches to embodiment as well as related questions of bio-politics, gender and race, political subjectivity, care and self-making, post/colonialism, sensory politics and the aesthetic. Along the way, students will gain a new appreciation of the political potency of bodies and bodily practices near and far-from Lenin's preserved body to Trump's "small" hands, reproductive labor to sex work, dirty protest to women's marches, indigenous eco-rituals to queer intimacies.

Instructor(s): Mareike Winchell
Equivalent Course(s): RLST 26006, GNSE 24006

ANTH 20012. Gender Archaeology. 100 Units.

How have archaeologists approached the study of gendered practices, and can their work contribute to theoretical and methodological discussions of gender across the social sciences and humanities? How can we use material objects and things to examine or explain gendered identities, especially in the deep past? In this course, students will engage with a range of research, from different disciplinary perspectives, to explore how gender is situated in archaeological theory and praxis and its political implications. Through multiple case studies, the course will interrogate how archaeologists study, analyze, and interpret material remains to examine gendered ideologies and material practices and their intersections with other social constructs: class, sex, race, ethnicity. Coverage is cross-cultural and aims to expose students to the diversity and variability of gendered and sexual experiences of different people across time and space. Topics include but are not limited to: embodiment and expression, gender roles, sexuality, parenthood and childhood, masculinity, biopolitics, and feminist theory.

Instructor(s): Alice Yao and Katie Kearns
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 30147, CLCV 23024, GNSE 20147, SIGN 20147, CLAS 33024, ANTH 30012

ANTH 20013. Canine Kinship: Dogs in Human Societies. 100 Units.

This course takes a four-field anthropological approach to exploring the multifaceted relationships between dogs and humans across time and space. We will read ethnographic accounts of the various ways dogs have lived and worked in human societies, some of which trouble the ideal of "best friend" with which many students may be most familiar; other readings will suggest that human societies would not be what they are today if not for myriad canine contributions. Through discussions of these texts and intermittent lectures, this seminar style class will explore how humans and dogs have worked, guarded, bonded, patrolled, communicated, stratified, lived, loved and died together. Students will produce original term papers or projects at the end of the course, as well as actively participate in and periodically co-lead weekly seminar discussions.

Instructor(s): E. Summmerson Carr

ANTH 20100. The Inca And Aztec States. 100 Units.

This course is an intensive examination of the origins, structure, and meaning of two native states of the ancient Americas: the Inca and the Aztec. Lectures and discussions are framed around an examination of theories of state genesis, function, and transformation, with special reference to the economic, institutional, symbolic, and religious bases of indigenous state development. This course is broadly comparative in perspective and considers the structural significance of institutional features that are either common to or unique expressions of these two Native American states. Finally, we consider the causes and consequences of the Spanish conquest of the Americas, and the continuing impact of the European colonial order that was imposed on and to which the Native populations adapted with different degrees of success over the course of the 16th century.

Instructor(s): Alan Kolata
Note(s): This course qualifies as a Discovering Anthropology selection for Anthropology Majors
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 40100, LACS 40305, LACS 20100

ANTH 20122. Mesopotamian Archaeology II: States to Empires. 100 Units.

This course explores the archaeology of the states and empires of Mesopotamia during the early 2nd through mid-1st millennia BC. We begin with the Old Babylonian and Old Assyrian territorial states and end with the collapse of the Neo-Assyrian empire and the takeover of the Neo-Babylonian empire by the Persians in the mid 1st millennium BC, which marks the end of "Mesopotamian" culture. During these centuries, the region saw many political changes, developing from a network of expansive territorial states to massive hegemonic empires. But political developments also included retraction of states and two large-scale political collapses, in part driven by climate change. These millennia in Mesopotamia are also marked by internationalism in both archaeology and politics; trade, elite communication and conquest all affected the material culture of the sub-regions of the ancient Near East. Additional topics include the archaeological evidence (or lack of it) for ethnic groups known from textual sources, symbolism and hybridization in artworks, organic versus artificial settlements and landscapes, and the archaeological signatures of empire. The geographic focus encompasses northern and southern Mesopotamia (approximately the modern countries of Iraq and Syria); reference will also be made to southeast Anatolia (Türkiye) and the eastern Mediterranean.

Instructor(s): McMahon, Augusta     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): NEAA 20001
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 30122, NEAA 30122, NEAA 20122

ANTH 20154. Class, Race and Urban Space: producing the city. 100 Units.

Class and race are through lines in the determinative processes that produce and transform urban space and inform conceptual models of urban growth and change. This lecture course examines historical geographies of class and race relations in crucial arenas of urban life like employment, housing, public space and urgently during the contemporary era, climate change. A recurring theme we will explore is how Chicago's experience has shaped the field of urban studies across a range of thematic and conceptual domains.

Instructor(s): Mary Beth Pudup     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): CEGU 20154, RDIN 20154, ENST 20154, CHST 20154

ANTH 20401. Anthropology of Healing. 100 Units.

In our world marked by pandemics, stress, chronic illness, and cancers, healing is a primary concern, with people around the world experimenting with disparate techniques, from psychotherapy to psychedelics, to energy therapies and others. In this course we will rethink what it means to heal and to disease, reimagining healing as a practice that is deeply implicated in the ways in which we come to know, inhabit, and story the world. If we imagine our contemporary forms of life, entangled as they are, in legacies of colonial violence, capitalism, and ecological disaster, as ongoing sources of collective disease; how then do we re-entangle our ways of being, in anthropology and in the world, that encourage possibilities for healing? What would it mean to think our conceptual and sensorial practices as crucial to the ways in which we heal and disease? While the course design introduces students to anthropology and its methods, it pierces its confines and shifts the canon, or the story of anthropology, from its roots in colonializations or whiteness (and its myriad burdens) to the intimacies and desires of queer, sub-altern, black, and indigenous life-worlds. What are the ways in which disease is written into contemporary ways of being and how do we refuse to partake in it? How do we articulate stories that can not only bear lives on the margin but bear health? How can we story self and world differently? And how then, can we collectively live in more joyful and healing ways?

Instructor(s): Nida Paracha
Equivalent Course(s): HLTH 20401, ANTH 30401, CHDV 30409, CHDV 20401

ANTH 20511. The Archaeology of Egypt I. 100 Units.

This course provides an overview of the archaeology of Egypt, focusing on data from the Paleolithic Period to the Second Intermediate Period, around 1,600 BCE. It introduces fundamental methods and approaches to the archaeological record, surveying significant sites, objects, art, and architecture to understand various aspects of culture, society, and history. While Egypt is well-known for its pyramids, temples and tombs, we will not only examine such constructions, but also explore how material culture can offer us insights on such themes as power and inequality, human-environment relations, urbanism, identity, cross-cultural interactions, collapse, and transformation. We will also consider the origins and legacies of Egyptology while engaging with diverse perspectives on the past, and how Egypt's rich cultural heritage continues to be valued, used, and contested.

Instructor(s): Anna-Latifa Mourad-Cizek      Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): NEAA 20511, ANTH 30511, NEAA 30511

ANTH 20537. The Global Black Panther Party. 100 Units.

In America, the Black Panther Party and its leaders, like Fred Hampton in Chicago, are famous for their revolutionary fight against white supremacy and their violent suppression by US government forces. But what does a Global Studies approach teach us about the Black Panthers? This seminar explores how the Black Panther Party's worldwide networks impacted global understandings of politics, race, and religion. Our readings examine a series of comparative case studies, including the Dalit Panther Party in India, the Mizrahi Black Panther Party in Israel, and the Polynesian Panthers in New Zealand. We analyze primary sources, such as the various Panther Parties' publications, their mainstream press coverage, and their pop cultural representations, like Ta-Nehisi Coates' Black Panther graphic novel and the film Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. In this course, students learn the global Black Panther Parties' roles in reshaping worldwide conceptions of race, caste, and religion through their encounters with the Nation of Islam, Hindu Nationalism, Zionism, and Indigenous rights. No prior knowledge or coursework is required.

Instructor(s): Andrew Kunze     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): GLST 26674, RLST 26674, RDIN 26674

ANTH 20576. Social Theory for the Digital Age. 100 Units.

Society rearranges itself, though we don't always know where it is heading. When the postmodern moment had arrived in the 1980s it perplexed social theorists, hence its characterization as simply a "post"-stage of modernity. Digitization is one answer to the question of direction of change in the last decades. In this class, we take the ongoing transformations that we attribute to digital media as a starting point to ask what challenges they provide to social theory that may force us to reconsider some of our most basic concepts and premises. We will understand the term digital age broadly to refer to the rise of algorithms, sensors, (big) data, machine learning, and computational methods, all developments that swirl in and around the Artificial Intelligence scene and intersect with and replace purely human relations. The class gives particular attention to concepts such as action and interaction, embodiment, social situations, subjectivity and autonomy, as wells as society as communication.

Instructor(s): K. Knorr     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): SOCI 30576, HIPS 20576, CHSS 30576, SOCI 20576, ANTH 30576

ANTH 20700. Global Health, Environment, and Indigenous Futures. 100 Units.

The global coronavirus pandemic has made evident the significance of ecological (im)balances for the well-being of societies. The relationship between structural inequalities, changing environments and health, especially for historically and socio-economically marginalized communities, is now well established. At the same time, a growing body of literature links the material conditions of marginalized communities-for instance, spaces of dwelling and conditions of labor-to health status, globally. Based on a set of interdisciplinary literature arranged through anthropological theories, this course will critically engage with notions of health and well-being for indigenous communities, tracing injustices that stem histories of racial, caste- and ethnicity-based, and environmental exclusions. The readings are organized around one central question: What does it mean to be indigenous in a changing planet where social, political, and economic systems are marked by enduring legacies of systemic violence? This graduate and undergraduate level course will introduce contexts within which structural exclusions lead to ill-health and loss of well-being among indigenous communities across the globe. The aim is to develop critical thinking on the political economy and political ecologies of indigenous health as imbricated with issues of social, economic, and environmental justice.

Instructor(s): Sanghamitra Das
Equivalent Course(s): CHDV 30750, CEGU 20700, SALC 32704, SALC 26501, ANTH 30700, CHDV 20700, RDIN 20700, CEGU 30700, RDIN 30700

ANTH 20701-20702-20703. Introduction to African Civilization I-II-III.

Completion of the general education requirement in social sciences recommended. Taking these courses in sequence is recommended but not required. This sequence meets the general education requirement in civilization studies. African Civilization introduces students to African history and cultures in a three-quarter sequence.

ANTH 21107. Anthropological Theory. 100 Units.

Since its inception as an academically institutionalized discipline, anthropology has always addressed the relation between a self-consciously modernizing "West" and its various and changing "others." Yet it has not always done so with sufficient critical attention to its own concepts and categories - a fact that has led, since at least the 1980s, to considerable debate about the nature of the anthropological enterprise and its epistemological foundations. This course provides a brief critical introduction to the history of anthropological thought over the course of the discipline's "long" twentieth century, from the 1880s to the present. Although it centers on the North American and British traditions, we will review important strains of French and, to a lesser extent, German social theory in chronicling the emergence and transformation of "modern" anthropology as an empirically based, but theoretically informed practice of knowledge production about human sociality and culture.

Instructor(s): Stephan Palmie
Prerequisite(s): Preference for Anthropology majors
Equivalent Course(s): RLST 27707, CCCT 21107

ANTH 21108. Anthropological Archaeology. 100 Units.

Archaeology is but ethnology in the past tense," wrote the prehistorian André Leroi-Gourhan in 1946. He expressed an idea shared by many, namely that archaeology and anthropology share a single set of aims: to investigate the workings of human society and culture, to examine particulars and illuminate universals. In this course, we will become acquainted with archaeology as a discipline of anthropology. Through readings, analysis of case studies, excursions, and practical exercises, we will learn the fundamentals of archaeological theory and method while exploring how archaeologists use them to examine anthropological questions. How do we study the development and structure of the social, political, and economic systems of the past? What can archaeology tell us about the formation of identities-self-same and other? How can the analysis of material remains shed light on the operations of culture, power, and agency? We will also look closely at "anthropological archaeology" as a historical object, from its early investments in ideas of primitive culture to contemporary issues of heritage, patrimony, and repatriation, archaeology's material, economic, and environmental impacts, and the potential of archaeologists to pursue restorative ways of engaging the past and the present.

Instructor(s): Daniel Hansen
Equivalent Course(s): HIST 25509

ANTH 21201. Chicago Blues. 100 Units.

This course is an anthropological and historical exploration of one of the most original and influential American musical genres in its social and cultural context. We examine transformations in the cultural meaning of the blues and its place within broader American cultural currents, the social and economic situation of blues musicians, and the political economy of blues within the wider music industry.

Instructor(s): Michael Dietler     Terms Offered: Autumn
Note(s): The course qualifies as an Introductory Level selection for Anthropology majors. (Cap 30)
Equivalent Course(s): CHST 21201

ANTH 21211. Methods of Athropological Archaeology. 100 Units.

How do you practice archaeology? This course aims to explore the many answers to that question, with an emphasis on practical experience. We will study how anthropological and archaeological theory are implemented through a global survey of case studies, exercises, and readings. Along with the main question, we'll also ask: What does archaeological theory do? How do people "make" theory from artifacts? What makes it "anthropological"? Why should I care? How can I use it in my everyday life? Smuggled into those deceptively straightforward questions are critical questions of how archaeology is implicated in the project of modernity, seemingly stabilizing questions of place, time, and type; and how destabilizing these concepts can provide useful in our epistemologies and our practices both within the discipline of archaeology and outside of Haskell Hall. It is helpful if students have taken Anthropological Archaeology, but participation in Anthropological Archaeology is not required.

Instructor(s): Kelsey Rooney

ANTH 21303. Making the Natural World: Foundations of Human Ecology. 100 Units.

What's natural about nature? Humans have "made" the natural world both materially, through millennia of direct action in and on the landscape, and conceptually, through the creation of various ideas about nature, ecosystem, organism, and ecology. In this course we will consider how the conceptual underpinnings of contemporary Western notions of nature, environment, balance, power and race are intertwined. We will trace this trajectory using the lens of the historical development of the field of ecology, then broaden our view to consider worldviews and ontologies about the environment from non-Western cultures. How then do these worldviews influence attitudes and policies towards land, environment, and its stewardship? Taking examples from current environmental topics (e.g. land rights, environmental justice, park access, conservation, extinction) we will evaluate the extent and character of human entanglement with the environment. Throughout the course student voices will be prominent in the many discussion-based class sessions.

Instructor(s): Christopher Kindell     Terms Offered: Winter. Winter
Equivalent Course(s): ENST 21301, CEGU 21301

ANTH 21306. Explorations in Oral Narrative. 100 Units.

A study of storytelling in non-literate and folk societies, antecedent to the complexities of modern narrativity, itself anchored in and energized by literacy. The main objects of our study will be the vast body of folktales and collateral folklore collected by anthropologists and folklorists in traditional societies. Despite the impact of literacy on modern minds this course argues for the persistence of ancient themes, plots, characters and motifs.. A further argument is made for the foundational role of storytelling in the creation of culture and construction of society …an argument, in short, that humans are, by nature, story-telling creatures whose sapience lies primarily in the capacity to create, be entertained by, and even live by, fictions The central place of storytelling is shown in the humanistic and social sciences: anthropology, economics, history, philosophy, politics, psychoanalysis. Student story-telling and even performance, of brief stories is encouraged and reflected upon in light of the main arguments of the course.

Instructor(s): James Fernandez
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 45301

ANTH 21403. Hidden in Plain Sight: Multi-Modal Inquiry into Technical and Speculative Worlds. 100 Units.

How do people encounter phenomena that defy perception yet saturate their lives? What techniques are social scientists developing to investigate technology, the environment, and the virtual as they interrupt, exceed, or expand the human? Whether because of their monumentality (e.g., mass culture, infrastructure, disaster) or their latency (e.g., design, prognosis, information), these domains exhibit a "suprasensible" quality that can exceed bounded description. And yet, we are in constant contact with them. In response, scholars have devised "multi-modal methods" to broaden the social sciences' sensory, descriptive, and relational repertoires. This set of methods explores the analytic and ethical potential of non-linguistic description (e.g., photography, film, drawing, sound recording) and embodiment (e.g., performance, dance, role play). It also questions the possibilities and limits of reflexivity and collaboration, by revisiting the researcher-researched relationship. This course is a research practicum. We will dedicate half the week to discussing the objects, aims, and relevance of "multi-modality" to investigating technical and speculative worlds. In the second half, students will develop and workshop their original research projects incorporating multi-modal methods (whether course-specific or as part of a year-long thesis project). The course is interdisciplinary in focus and intent and fulfills the MAPSS methods requirement.

Instructor(s): Bright, Damien     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): MAPS 21403, MAPS 31403, ANTH 31403

ANTH 21405. Neoliberalism, Self and Society. 100 Units.

Drawing on ethnography and cultural theory, this course examines the profound impact of neoliberal ideology on the everyday lives of individuals and communities across the globe. We will explore the ways neoliberalism, the idea that the mechanisms of free markets naturally precipitate economic growth and thus societal progress, shapes institutions, social norms, and, most importantly, individuals' understandings of themselves and others. Students will analyze the penetration of market logics into spheres of social life far beyond what used to be understood as "the marketplace," such as education, politics and governance, healthcare, and the family. They will reflect on the effects of market logics on lived realities, both in material and ideological terms. As unfettered global markets produce growing inequality and insecurity, neoliberal tenets valorizing competition and productivity tell those who suffer from and witness such negative effects that they are unavoidable; the result of some people working harder and being better than others. This course will question neoliberalism's normative assumptions, drawing on ethnographic accounts of contemporary life in various regions and contexts across the globe. Students will end the course with an understanding of neoliberalism as an ideology and the ability to engage in discussions on neoliberalism that have emerged recently in the qualitative social sciences.

Instructor(s): Gross, Tori     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): MAPS 31405, ANTH 31405

ANTH 21420. Ethnographic Methods. 100 Units.

This course introduces students to the theory and practice of ethnographic methods. In the class, we will consider the ways ethnography works as both a mode of inquiry and a form of knowledge production. We will examine the kinds of questions anthropologists ask, as well as the relationship between research questions, methodological approaches, data analysis, and knowledge. We will examine the ways scholars marshal evidence to address their questions, and practically, how they arrive at that evidence. We will study different components of ethnographic fieldwork, such as participant observation, interviewing, photography, object analysis, archival work, digital methods, and qualitative surveys. In so doing, we will engage with the complexities surrounding ethnographic research, including how one negotiates access during fieldwork, the racialized and gendered subjectivities that inhere in fieldwork, the ethics of knowledge production, and the politics of representation. The class entails both critical engagement with scholarship, and practical exercises. The goal is to give students practical, theoretically grounded insights into fieldwork in order to help them understand how to develop and carry out a research project.

Instructor(s): Kathryn Takabvirwa
Prerequisite(s): Priority to Anthro Majors, Priority to Junior/Senior Standing

ANTH 21424. Reading and Writing Ethnographically. 100 Units.

Ethnographic renderings of spaces, surroundings, place, setting, and location have clearly always functioned as more than narrative set dressing. Critical perspectives on ethnographic research and writing have pointed out the authorization, exotification, and material conditions of mobility that undergird the 'where' in 'being there'. However, contemporary anthropologists are writing space and place in ways that push ethnographic methods and writing past prior problematics and paradigms of comparison, localization, and totalizing description. How does space become an ethnographic doorway into questions of history, power, infrastructure, and affect?

Instructor(s): Kamala Russell

ANTH 21426. More than Human Ethnography. 100 Units.

In this course we explore the fields of more-than-human and 'multispecies' ethnography. We examine theoretical antecedents promoting the inclusion of non-human actors in ethnographic analysis and read examples of such work, including foundational texts on more-than-human engagements, exploitations, and dependencies by Deborah Bird Rose, Kim Tallbear, Eduardo Kohn, and Anna Tsing among others. We consider the role other species, 'actants' and assemblages played in early social science work and contemplate recent studies of "becoming with" animals, plants, fungi, bacteria-encountering complex symbioses, examining naturalcultural borders, and querying the role of decolonial thought and queer ecologies in the 'more-than' turn. Multispecies and posthumanist approaches encourage a decentering of traditional method; we couple ethnographic examples with literature by biologists, physicists, and philosophers. The is a discussion-based seminar with significant time devoted to logistical elements of 'more than' work-to querying how such studies are conducted in practice. The final paper takes the form of an exploratory essay based on observations collected during previous weeks.

Instructor(s): Wilhoit, Mary     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): MAPS 31404, ANTH 33807, GNSE 21404, KNOW 32404, GNSE 31404

ANTH 21740. Ecology and Governance in Israel. 100 Units.

Ecological governance has emerged as an aspirational concept in recent years in political science, philosophy, and anthropology in response to concerns over the increasing likelihood of an unprecedented global ecological crisis as a result of human driven climate change. This course will trace the conceptual genealogy of ecological governance in Western and Eastern political theory and environmental history as it explores the political ecologies of Israel and the Middle East. In so doing, the course embarks from the assertion that environmental justice and the struggle for justice overall are inseparable challenges. Of central concern will be to understand how Israel's politics, culture, and history technological development together with its particular environmental conditions provide conceptual and methodological interventions into current and historical articulations of ecological governance. Note: Enrollment in this class is by consent only. Please request via the enrollment site.

Instructor(s): Michael Fisch
Equivalent Course(s): CEGU 21740

ANTH 21800. Social Life and Death in the City. 100 Units.

What sustains collective life in a city? What institutionalized and systemic processes disrupt life in the city? How do individuals, groups, and neighborhoods grapple with death and decay? In this course, students will be offered lenses to answer these questions through engagement with interdisciplinary and multimodal texts drawn from sociology, anthropology, history, and urban studies. The goal of the course is to offer an introduction to how urban life and death are shaped by processes such as inequality, segregation, displacement, placemaking, urban governance, infrastructure and built environment, surveillance and policing, migration, and spatial practices of death and dying. The scope of the course will include Chicago-specific readings and field trips as well as national and global perspectives on urban social life and death. The final assignment will involve a group project to produce a podcast-style recorded audio segment that engages with the social and spatial histories of Oak Woods Cemetery that straddles Chicago's Woodlawn and Greater Grand Crossing neighborhoods.

Instructor(s): Pranathi Diwakar     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): RDIN 21800, SOCI 20610

ANTH 21901. Race, Science and Empire. 100 Units.

The eighteenth century bore witness to the concomitant rise of scientific discovery and a modern sensibility of race hierarchy. Enlightenment pioneers-many with ties to the slave trade-who spearheaded the Age of Discovery also laid the groundwork for the "scientific" study of race. Drawing on the work of botanists, Linnaeus and Blumenbach developed taxonomic models for modern racial classifications. What had been the concern of a tiny group of physicians in the eighteenth expanded into a central focus of Euro-American scientific thought in the next. This shift into the new century marked a transition in inquiry from the origins of racial differences to their implications, accompanied by a shift from skin color to skull/body configurations as determinants of identity. Together, they gave rise to novel scientific practices such as phrenology, craniometry, anthropometry, and eugenics, enabling the quantification, with acute precision, of perceived racial differences. In this symbiosis of racial ideology and scientific method, the global expansion of the European empire found a powerful justification for the institution of slavery and the marginalization of the non-Europeans. By engaging with key texts from thinkers such as Kant, Voltaire, and Gobineau, alongside interdisciplinary critical scholarship on race science, students will examine how scientific racism was deeply intertwined with imperial ambitions and consider its lasting influence into the present day.

Instructor(s): Taimur Reza     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 31901, GLST 21900, RDIN 21900, KNOW 31900, RDIN 31900

ANTH 22079. Mass Media in Semiotic Perspective. 100 Units.

Mass media are commonly understood as channels for public information, expression, and debate. Yet, mass media technologies also serve governmental and corporate actors as instruments for shaping public opinion and behavior. In this undergraduate course, we will explore this and related problems from a semiotic perspective, with special attention to the dynamic relations between state, market, culture, and language at work in projects of mass communication. We will study several theories and empirical cases (both historical and contemporary) of mass mediation. Topics will include the role of mass media in nation-state formation and control; the role of mass media in cultural and linguistic assimilation; and group subjectivity and solidarity within media publics.

Instructor(s): Christopher Bloechl
Equivalent Course(s): LING 22079, MADD 12079

ANTH 22111. Black Death. 100 Units.

Karla FC Holloway proposes the concept of "black death," arguing that "African Americans' particular vulnerability to an untimely death in the United States intimately affects how black culture both represents itself and is represented." Whether attributable to Holloway or not, the term 'Black death' circulates in scholarship, popular media, and political discourses arguably because it apprehends a commonsensical, albeit unfortunate, understanding of the relationship between death and Black people. This seminar-style course surveys death as an object of inquiry, metaphor, political occasion, and inspiration for aesthetic creation. The course is primarily Black Studies in its frameworks and subject matter- reading texts and other materials across disciplines, genres, and media. The course recognizes that the threads of race and death are inherently global and connected to European colonial imperial expansion, racism, capitalism, and modernity. Throughout the course we ask: What is the relationship between Black people or blackness and death? Is "Black death" unique? How do we take seriously ubiquitous legacies of violence while also accounting for socio-historical specificity? What are the attendant practices, creations, and modes of thinking and being associated with Black death? At the end of the course, students will have honed skills in close reading, critical thinking, and thoughtful discussion through the study of race and death.

Instructor(s): LaShaya Howie     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): This is an advanced level course; students should have taken at least one course introductory critical race theories course prior to enrolling.
Equivalent Course(s): CRES 22111

ANTH 22165. Politics of Technoscience in Africa. 100 Units.

Euro-American discourse has often portrayed Africa as either a place without science and technology or as the home of deep and ancient wisdom. European imperialists used the alleged absence of science and technology as a justification for colonialism while pharmaceutical companies sought out African knowledge about healing plants. In addition to their practical applications, science and technology carry significant symbolic weight in discussions about Africa. In this class, we examine the politics of scientific and technical knowledge in Africa with a focus on colonialism and its aftermath. How have different people produced and used knowledge about the environment, medicine, and technology? What kinds of knowledge count as indigenous and who gets credit for innovation? How have independent African governments dealt with the imperial legacies of science? From the interpretation of archaeological ruins to the design of new medical technologies, this class will examine science and technology as political practice in Africa.

Equivalent Course(s): CRES 21410, KNOW 21410, HIPS 21410

ANTH 22202. Anthropology of Caste. 100 Units.

This seminar course explores anthropological approaches to caste. We will survey colonial ethnological accounts to structuralist, transactionalist, historical anthropological, and contemporary ethnographic accounts of forms of caste difference, identity, and violence in South and East Asia, with an eye to comparison to other forms of invidious social difference in other times and cultures.

Instructor(s): Constantine Nakassis
Equivalent Course(s): CRES 21202, SALC 32202, ANTH 32202, SALC 22202

ANTH 22367. Landscapes: More than Humans Living on a Damaged Planet. 100 Units.

This is a reboot of a course on theories of space and place (ANTH 28510), but with newfound attention to 1) the interleaving of human/nonhuman life and non-life in the making of place, and 2) the undoing of landscape arrangements created by capitalist exploitation, environmental devastation, ecological racism...

Instructor(s): Francois Richard
Prerequisite(s): Instructor Consent

ANTH 22415. Technology and the Human. 100 Units.

Technology is ubiquitous in contemporary life. Yet technological developments continue to infatuate and inspire in us feelings of excitement, hope and fear. How are we to understand the uncanny relationship between the human and technology? What does this relationship disclose about human agency and creativity? If human life is unimaginable without tools, artifacts, memory supports, and machines, how might we gain the critical distance necessary to properly assess the human-technical relation? In this course we will open up an inquiry into the question of technology by considering the ways in which technical objects, processes, and systems interrupt, challenge, and constitute human subjectivity. Readings will include texts by Martin Heidegger, Friedrich Kittler, Bernard Stiegler, Gilbert Simondon, Katherine Hayles and others.

Instructor(s): Sara-Jo Swiatek     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): RLST 27802

ANTH 22450. Language, Gender, and Sexuality. 100 Units.

This course, based primarily on insights from the field of linguistic anthropology, focuses on the relationship, in theory and in practice, between language, gender, and sexuality. We begin with a brief overview of the field and some of its major theoretical developments. Then, we expand on themes of social change, desire and identity, difference, kinship, and the significance of global, transnational and postcolonial connections in our understandings of gender and sexuality. The practical component of the course includes critical analysis of language and other signs that are used to enact gender and sexuality (e.g., in drag shows, communities you belong to personally, online communities, and current events). Throughout this course, we will emphasize the importance of ethnographic approaches to languages and communication-a hallmark of linguistic anthropology that requires a reflexive and critical attentiveness to how researchers co-participate in everyday social interactions with their interlocutors. Beyond the categories of gender and sexuality as studied in Western academic contexts, this course invites students to pay close attention to how non-normative forms of alterity are produced and circulated in the Global South under conditions of political and economic inequality.

Instructor(s): Fadi Hakim     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): LING 22450, GNSE 20119

ANTH 22531. Visual Anthropology: An Introduction to Ethnography as Film. 100 Units.

This seminar introduces students to Visual Anthropology through a survey of film as an instrument and object of ethnographic practice. Specifically, it explores ethnographic film as a genre for representing "reality," anthropological knowledge and distinct cultural lives. We will examine how ethnographic film and its proto-cinematic precedents (e.g., the panorama, the magic lantern) emerged in particular intellectual and political economic contexts as well as how subsequent conceptual and formal innovations in audiovisual production, including recent digital transformations, have shaped the genre. We will also consider social responses to ethnographic film in terms of 1) the contexts for producing and circulating these works, 2) the ethical and political concerns raised by cross-cultural representation and 3) the development of indigenous media and other practices in conversation with ethnographic film. Throughout the course, we will situate Visual Anthropology within the larger anthropological project for representing "culture," addressing the status of ethnographic film in relation to other documentary practices including written ethnography, museum exhibitions, photography, documentary film, graphic illustrations ("manga" ethnography), and new digital forms of engagement (Web 2.0, interactive gaming, augmented & virtual reality). Besides film screenings and writing exercises, students will have an opportunity to develop and "pitch" their own original Visual Anthro project.

Instructor(s): Julie Y. Chu
Note(s): Primarily for undergraduates; others only with consent of instructor
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 32531

ANTH 22547. Violence: Vigilantism, Community Defense, and Armed Resistance. 100 Units.

This course explores extralegal violence primarily in the US, from decolonial struggles to white mobs to self and community defense by marginalized peoples. How do we understand different forms of violence, defense, and resistance in relation to the violence of the state? What role does violence play in struggles for justice and freedom? This seminar surveys a range of social science approaches to these questions. In addition to reading the work of anthropologists, historians, and philosophers, we will also take up these themes as they appear in popular media and current events.

Instructor(s): Maya Singhal     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): RDIN 20900, RDIN 30900, CRES 22900, ANTH 32547, HIST 27907

ANTH 22625. Indigenous Movements in Latin America. 100 Units.

TBD

Instructor(s): Mareike Winchell

ANTH 22710. Signs and the State. 100 Units.

Relations of communication, as well as coercion, are central though less visible in Weber's famous definition of the state as monopoly of legitimate violence. This course reconsiders the history of the state in connection to the history of signs. Thematic topics (and specific things and sites discussed) include changing semiotic technologies; means; forces and relations of communication (writing, archives, monasteries, books, "the" internet); and specific states (in early historic India and China, early colonial/revolutionary Europe, especially France, Britain, and Atlantic colonies, and selected postcolonial "new nations").

Instructor(s): J. Kelly
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 41810

ANTH 22712. Socialisms in Asia. 100 Units.

Western ideas about "actually existing" socialism are dominated by the failures and tyranny of the Soviet bloc. But decolonizing Asia may have a different story to tell. Tracking revolutionary information technology, new statistical and social sciences, and cybernetic techniques for governance entering into Asia in the era of decolonization, partitions and the Bandung Conference, this course reconsiders plural possible socialisms, not based on earlier European histories in which the ends exceeded the means, but on later Asian histories. These are not so much histories of self-determination and worldmaking, as scientific and social, self and world refashioning. This course is intended to be of interest to any student interested in the applying techniques of science and technology studies to the history of social science, interested in the history of applied science outside the west, and/or in Asian decolonization, and/or in the past, present, and future of socialism.

Instructor(s): John D. Kelly
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 41812

ANTH 22716. The Mediterranean: Sea, Empires and Peoples in Flux. 100 Units.

The aftermath of World War II is marked by a series of decolonial processes. Former colonies of the European Empires claimed their independence and dozens of nation states were established throughout Asia and Africa. Yet, the decolonial momentum that gained precedence in the post-war period has not brought an end to imperialism as a global phenomenon. On the contrary, the same period witnessed the construction of new imperial alliances and rivalries, as well as the further expansion of their geographical reach in search for oil and other valuable commodities. This class focuses on the Mediterranean seascapes, lifeworlds, and fields of extraction to investigate the workings of the post-WWII imperial polities, the ways in which they are challenged, and the social economic, and humanitarian problems that they produce. First, we will explore how imperial epistemologies produced separate regional imaginaries in places like the Middle East, Southeastern Europe, and North Africa. Then we will ask whether or not the focus on the sea as a geographical force-field, a multi-species lifeworld, and a site of social and economic connectivity might help us build critical epistemological and interpretive perspectives that shift away from the imperial lens. After getting acquainted with major debates in the historical studies of the Mediterranean we will study themes such as statehood, labor, gender, citizenship, migration, wars, floods, fires, and earthquakes in order to interrogate the se

ANTH 22727. Captivity. 100 Units.

The premise for this course is that anthropology, as well as other domains of social inquiry, have unacknowledged and unredeemed debts to captivity as structure, experience, and event, from the penal colony to the slave plantation. This course is an attempt to begin to think about those debts through readings in anthropology, history, and philosophy.

Instructor(s): Darryl Li
Prerequisite(s): Open only to 3rd and 4th year students in the College, with some preference for majors in Anthropology & LLSO.
Note(s): Advanced undergraduate seminar.
Equivalent Course(s): LLSO 29703

ANTH 22733. Marxism, Anarchism, and the Black Radical Tradition. 100 Units.

This course serves as an introduction to Black Radical Tradition as an insurgent political formation and intellectual practice. While many genealogies of Black Studies depart from the formal institutionalization of Black Studies departments and programs in the latter half of the 20th Century, this course is differently attuned to the dialectic of Black thought and Black insurgency in which the latter-what C.L.R. James describes as a history of Pan-African revolt against the plantation and its afterlives-is always a precondition of the former. As a critical survey of said histories and the ideas derived from them, this course will examine the relationship between knowledge production (theory) and material struggle (praxis) in the Black Radical Tradition alongside adjacent but distinct political traditions such as Marxism and anarchism. Born out of a protracted "state of emergency," the Black Radical Tradition permits us to appraise, critique, and confront the alarms raised by the COVID-19 pandemic and global climate collapse alongside settler colonialism and plantation slavery in the longue duree. To this end, students will consult non-fiction, literature, art, and film from authors and creators such as James, Audre Lorde, Lizzie Borden, W.E.B. Du Bois, Josina Machel, Kimathi Mohammed, and Lorenzo Ervin.

Instructor(s): Ryan Jobson
Equivalent Course(s): RDIN 22733

ANTH 22750. Theoretical Approaches to Political Anthropology: Sovereignty, Authority, and Refusal. 100 Units.

This course will explore understandings of power and its production articulated by ethnographers and political theorists whose work has been influential in anthropology. We will focus on competing claims to sovereignty and authority that reveal the tentative, emergent, and contingent nature of power. Spanning various regions, the course content will elucidate the tensions between nation-states, informal/illegal networks, and the actions and aspirations of individual subjects. Some of the questions we will raise include: What are the roles of performances, narratives, and acts of exclusion and violence in the making of sovereignty and authority? How are competing de facto and de jure forms of power negotiated in various spaces ranging from the institutional to the intimate? The centrality of both physical violence and the complacency born of naturalized political institutions and economic rationality will arise in our examinations of political mobilization and possibility. This course will give students opportunities to develop conceptual understandings of various modes of power that offer insights into the forces of colonialism, global interconnectivity, and politics that shape the 21st century world. As this is a methodology course (fulfilling the MAPSS requirement), students will spend substantial class time reflecting upon the theoretical approaches of contemporary ethnographers and developing their own theoretical approaches to their thesis projects.

Instructor(s): Gross, Victoria
Equivalent Course(s): MAPS 34513, ANTH 34725

ANTH 22755. The Idea of Africa. 100 Units.

The Idea of Africa, a new interdisciplinary course, offers undergraduates students an opportunity to engage critically with key philosophical and political debates about contemporary Africa on the continent and globally. The course takes its title from V.Y. Mudimbe's 1994 book which builds on his earlier work The Invention of Africa. It asks three questions: (1) How and to what purposes has Africa been conceived as metaphor and concept. (2) How might we locate Africa as a geographic site and conceptual space to think through contemporary debates about citizenship, migration and new structures of political economy? (3) What futures and modes of futurity are articulated from the space and metaphor of Africa? This lecture course co-thought in an interdisciplinary mode will include public guest lectures, field trips, and engagement with visual arts, and film related to the themes of the course. The course will be divided into the following four sections: 1) Inventing Africa; 2) Political Trajectories; 3) Afro-Mobilities; 4) Afro-Futures.

Instructor(s): Natacha Nsabimana & Adom Getachew
Note(s): Cap 50
Equivalent Course(s): CRES 23755, PLSC 22755

ANTH 22765. Ethnographic Approaches to Power and Resistance. 100 Units.

This introductory graduate course will examine understandings of power articulated by influential political theorists and ethnographers. We will explore key theoretical concepts, including discipline, governmentality, sovereignty, hegemony, agency, and resistance, as well as their application within textured, intersubjective, and affectively oriented ethnographic texts. Seeing power grounded in tentative and unstable practices, we will focus on the tensions between nation-states, informal networks, and the actions and aspirations of individual subjects. How are attempts to consolidate power articulated in performances, narrative histories, and acts of exclusion and violence? How are competing de facto and de jure powers negotiated in various spaces ranging from the institutional to the intimate? The centrality of both physical violence and the complacency born of the naturalized hegemony of political institutions and economic rationality will arise in our examinations of political mobilization and possibility. This course will give students opportunities to develop conceptual understandings of various modes of power that offer insights into the forces of colonialism, global interconnectivity, and violence that shape the 21st century world.

Instructor(s): Victoria Gross     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 34730, MAPS 31504

ANTH 22770. Anthropology of Power, Status, and Performance. 100 Units.

This introductory graduate course examines the nature of power and status through the theoretical lens of performativity. We will engage with notions of performativity, articulated by influential theorists of linguistics, gender, and religion, that demonstrate the abilities of performances to effect change in the world. Thinking with performativity, we will interrogate practices of negotiating power and status in a broad range of social, political, and geographical contexts. How is the power made and unmade through particular acts? How is status, a particular type of power differentiation, created collectively and individually through acts of saying and doing? Such questions will animate our explorations of power and status in recent ethnographies focused on Asia, the Americas, and Europe.

Instructor(s): Victoria Gross     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 22770, ANTH 34735, MAPS 33508

ANTH 22800. An Indigenous People's History of Hawaiʻi. 100 Units.

What you know about Hawai'i is most likely untrue. An archipelago in Oceania's sea of islands, Hawai'i has been locally constructed and globally consumed as a tropical paradise for pleasure and play, attracting tourists, settlers, corporations, and military forces to its shores. It is a fantasized paradise produced through the dispossession, elimination, appropriation, and exploitation of Indigenous people, institutions, worldviews, and practices. This course tells a truer story about Hawai'i. Because ideas and narratives crafted about the history, politics, economics, law, ecology, and society of Hawai'i are dominated and often distorted by non-Indigenous writers, we turn to Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) scholars to learn from their subjugated knowledge. The course examines interdisciplinary research, from the 19th century to the present, and excavates the truths advanced through it: the development of the Hawaiian Kingdom and its government, political order, economy, and society; the illegal overthrow of the Hawaiian government and US military occupation and annexation of its territory; legal constructions of race and techniques of gender and sexuality in the territorial period; the creation of the State of Hawaii amid World War II and the Cold War; the birth and evolution of the modern Hawaiian sovereignty movement; and contemporary Kanaka Maoli struggles with federal recognition, militourism, and technoscientific development.

Instructor(s): Uahikea Maile     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): RDIN 22800, GNSE 32806, ANTH 32800, RDIN 32800, GNSE 22806

ANTH 22826. Commodities and Consumption. 100 Units.

What is a commodity, and what does it mean to consume one? In this discussion-based, reading- and writing-intensive seminar, we will explore "consumption" and the "commodity" as objects of anthropological analysis. Drawing from a range of global ethnographic examples, as well as from popular culture, literature, and other academic fields, we will think critically about everyday practices that are so often taken for granted. We will investigate the complex relationships that people make with everyday things and the roles they play in social life; how commodities can produce and reproduce social relationships and materialize claims about identity or status; fashion and its relationships to capitalism, gender, and appropriation; political and ecological aspects of consumption; and more. In doing so, we will attend to and practice some key approaches to doing anthropology, including ethnographic interviewing, observing, media ethnography, writing field notes, and turning them into a text. Students will write three short papers, describing the "biography" of an object, analyzing consumption in a popular culture "text," and writing up original ethnographic data. The final project, developed through these exercises, instructor feedback, and peer workshops, will be a creative analysis of a contemporary consumption phenomenon of students' choice.

Instructor(s): Hanna Pickwell

ANTH 22830. Indigenous Media and the Politics of Representation. 100 Units.

This undergraduate seminar explores popular representations of Indigenous nations and issues across various modes of media such as film, photography, digital platforms, and museum installations. With a particular focus on media forms produced by Indigenous artists, filmmakers, and curators we will analyze these narratives through frameworks of self-determination, resistance, visual sovereignty, and relational futures. Throughout the course, we will consider Indigenous media production(s) in relation to the broader social, historical, and cultural contexts in which they circulate in North America and beyond. The material covered in this course will acquaint students with an introduction to the contemporary debates surrounding Indigenous media and representation as they intersect with the larger fields of visual anthropology and Indigenous Studies.

Instructor(s): Teresa Montoya
Equivalent Course(s): CRES 23830, MADD 12830

ANTH 22845. Xenophobia and the Politics of Belonging. 100 Units.

What work does xenophobia do in the making and marking of nation-states? What does it mean to belong, in a world structured by migration? In this course, we will examine the practices and politics of exclusion, of othering and of unbelonging. Drawing on cases from North America and Sub-Saharan Africa, we will study xenophobia at different points along its spectrum of intensity - from mass atrocities to the seemingly banal ways in which othering and exclusion are baked into everyday life. We will study each case in depth in its own right, as well as how it sits within broader experiences of exclusion and violence around the world and across time. In the course, we will explore theoretical debates surrounding nativism, autochthony, and different forms of nationalism, and the ways they relate to xenophobia. Scholars of migration and belonging have long shown that collective identities are constructed in large part in relation to an external other. Does (one person's) belonging necessitate (another's) unbelonging? In this course we ask: how does the 'stranger' come to be seen as threatening or destabilizing? How does one come to be seen as a 'stranger'?

Instructor(s): Kathryn Takabvirwa
Equivalent Course(s): CRES 22845

ANTH 23000. What is Asian American Studies? 100 Units.

What is Asian American studies? Who is an Asian American? For that matter, what does it mean to be Asian? Or American? Where do we locate Asian America, and what are its relationships to Asian homelands or other diasporas? Where does Asian America fit into the US racial landscape? What does studying Asian Americans or Asian America help us understand? This course is not a traditional introduction to Asian American studies and its more canonical histories and literatures. Rather, in this course, we will interrogate the normative categories, histories, geographies, and approaches of Asian American studies to consider what it means to study Asian American populations, what we gain from these inquiries, and what the future of Asian American studies research might look like.

Instructor(s): Maya Singhal     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 33000, HIST 27703, RDIN 33001, RDIN 23000, HIST 37702

ANTH 23003. Greater Latin America. 100 Units.

What is "Latin America," who are "Latin Americans" and what is the relationship among and between places and people of the region we call Latin America, on the one hand, and the greater Latinx diaspora in the US on the other? This course explores the history of Latin America as an idea, and the cultural, social, political and economic connections among peoples on both sides of the southern and eastern borders of the United States. Students will engage multiple disciplinary perspectives in course readings and assignments and will explore Chicago as a crucial node in the geography of Greater Latin America. Some topics we will consider are: the origin of the concept of "Latin" America, Inter-Americanism and Pan-Americanism, transnational social movements and intellectual exchanges, migration, and racial and ethnic politics.

Instructor(s): Diana Schwartz Francisco     Terms Offered: Course not offered in 24-25
Equivalent Course(s): HIST 26321, RDIN 36386, CRES 26386, RDIN 26386, LACS 36386, LACS 26386, SPAN 26386, SPAN 36386

ANTH 23077. Indigenous Politics in Latin America. 100 Units.

This course examines the history of Indigenous policies and politics in Latin America from the first encounters with European empires through the 21st Century. Course readings and discussions will consider several key historical moments across the region: European encounters/colonization; the rise of liberalism and capitalist expansion in the 19th century; 20th-century integration policies; and pan-Indigenous and transnational social movements in recent decades. Students will engage with primary and secondary texts that offer interpretations and perspectives both within and across imperial and national boundaries.

Instructor(s): Diana Schwartz Francisco     Terms Offered: Course not offered in 24-25
Equivalent Course(s): GLST 26380, LACS 36380, HIST 26318, HIPS 26380, CRES 26380, RDIN 36380, RDIN 26380, LACS 26380

ANTH 23094. Development and Environment in Latin America. 100 Units.

Description: This course will consider the relationship between development and the environment in Latin America and the Caribbean. We will consider the social, political, and economic effects of natural resource extraction, the quest to improve places and peoples, and attendant ecological transformations, from the onset of European colonialism in the fifteenth century, to state- and private-led improvement policies in the twentieth. Some questions we will consider are: How have policies affected the sustainability of land use in the last five centuries? In what ways has the modern impetus for development, beginning in the nineteenth century and reaching its current intensity in the mid-twentieth, shifted ideas and practices of sustainability in both environmental and social terms? And, more broadly, to what extent does the notion of development help us explain the historical relationship between humans and the environment?

Instructor(s): Diana Schwartz Francisco     Terms Offered: Course not offered in 24-25
Equivalent Course(s): HIST 36317, GLST 26382, CEGU 26382, HIPS 26382, HIST 26317, LACS 36382, GEOG 26382, LACS 26382, ENST 26382

ANTH 23101-23102-23103. Introduction to Latin American Civilization I-II-III.

Taking these courses in sequence is not required. This sequence meets the general education requirement in civilization studies. This sequence is offered every year. This course introduces the history and cultures of Latin America (e.g., Mexico, Central and South America, and the Caribbean Islands).

ANTH 23210. Urban Core in Paris. 100 Units.

This course is both an introduction to how historians think about cities and a history of cities in France and the French Empire, with a focus on Paris, from the Middle Ages through 1968. The course is chronological in organization, but each class also focuses on a different theme, such as the place of politics, industrial development, migration, culture, and commerce in the transformation of urban forms and experiences.

Instructor(s): L. Auslander     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): Admission to the Paris: Social Sciences Urbanism program
Equivalent Course(s): RDIN 23210, HIST 23210, CEGU 23210

ANTH 23301. Religion and Psychiatry. 100 Units.

This course will investigate the many theoretical and practical problems which emerge where the domains of psychiatry and religion overlap. We will explore questions such as: What are the common realities that religious and psychiatric frameworks seek to explain? Are being "divinely inspired" and being "mad" mutually exclusive? How do religious and other cultural categories shape the development of what are called "mental disorders"? Are cognitive behavioural therapists more effective than witchdoctors at restoring people to health? We will begin with a brief overview of the history of psychiatry, before analyzing a famous case of mass demonic possession in 17th century France. We will take several weeks to explore contemporary psychiatric diagnoses, contrasting how psychiatrists and religious authors describe similar symptoms in different ways. We will compare diverse therapeutic methods, modern and traditional, to ask what makes each of them effective or ineffective. Finally, we will survey proposed alternatives to the prevailing diagnostic frameworks within psychiatry, asking which, if any, our study of the overlapping domains of religion and psychiatry might lend support.

Instructor(s): Owen Joyce-Coughlin     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): HLTH 23300, CCTS 23300, RLST 23300

ANTH 23335. Racial France. 100 Units.

Over the last two decades, questions of race, racial identity, and racial discrimination have come increasingly to the fore in France, despite (or because of) the country's prevailing rhetoric of colorblind indivisibility. These issues are becoming ever more pressing on a background of intensifying racisms and right-wing populisms in Europe. The purpose of this course is to offer analytical perspectives about these critical tensions and their ripples across the landscape of contemporary French politics. Using readings from a wide variety of fields (among others, anthropology, sociology, literature, philosophy, history, political science, and news media), we will unpack the discourses and lived experiences of race that have shaped the politics of national identity and difference in France since the late 18th century. We will see that the question of 'racial France' has been intimately bound up with the country's history of colonialism and decolonization, with its Republican ideology, with matters of law and government, with questions of citizenship, religion and sexuality, with recent debates on multiculturalism, and with white malaise and resentment stirred by the growth of right-wing extremisms. In the course of our examinations, we will also reflect on the specificity of race and racialization in France, and its differences from racecraft in the United States.

Instructor(s): Francois Richard     Terms Offered: TBD
Equivalent Course(s): FREN 23335, FREN 33335, CRES 23335, ANTH 33335

ANTH 23338. The Anthropology of Privacy. 100 Units.

Over the past decade, increasingly invasive forms of digital surveillance have followed the internet into our phones, cars, homes, and public spaces. The uncertainties and anxieties thereby unleashed in everyday and national life include a widespread perception of privacy's impending "death". This course draws on history, philosophy, and anthropology to explore privacy as both object and engine of culture, and as a cultural lens on unfolding changes in contemporary American life. In the course, we will excavate the logics and historical projects that have privileged privacy as a keystone of American political cosmology, even while disavowing privacy's ongoing complicity in structures of oppression. We will trace how privacy's increasing entanglement with technology, speculative capital, and counter-terror imperatives shifts both the forms in which privacy appears in everyday life and its political capacities. Finally, to make sense of ongoing, technology-based reconfigurations in citizen/state/corporate relations, we will look to the public events around which privacy manifests as a social "problem" (e.g., Facebook's secret 2014 emotional manipulation study) and analyze the relative adequacy of the legal and technical measures being deployed on privacy's behalf.

Instructor(s): Lake Polan

ANTH 23405. War: What's It Good For? 100 Units.

War is a destructive force, but also an incredibly productive one in the transformation and reconfiguration of social relations. This course will explore war's presences and absences in social and political thought as well as ethnographies that examine the mutually reconstitutive relationships between war and society.

Instructor(s): Darryl Li     Terms Offered: TBD

ANTH 23507. Power and Responsibility in the Anthropocene. 100 Units.

Humanity's immense impact on Earth's systems has led some scientists to claim that we have entered a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene. Humans' influence on Earth's landscape, climate system, and biodiversity inspires many to ask, in turn, What should be done about humankind's planetary powers? Some scholars and religious leaders claim that people should take responsibility and influence Earth's systems for good ends, while others argue that we should radically scale down such power. Still others suggest that the Anthropocene requires us to entirely revise our ideas of power and responsibility and even develop new religious sensibilities. Through discussions and focused writing assignments, students in this class will explore and evaluate these and additional responses to the Anthropocene, paying specific attention to how Anthropocene ethical thought wrestles with the place of religion on a changing planet. The course culminates in an extended examination of how Anthropocene discourse conceals racial antagonisms and contemporary decolonial struggles.

Instructor(s): Colin Weaver     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): RDIN 23507, RLST 23507, CEGU 23507, GLST 23507

ANTH 23510. Ethics of Ethnographic Encounter. 100 Units.

How can anthropological perspectives help us rethink issues of current global concern? We will be attending to critiques of ethnographic method: calls to decolonize the discipline, demands to make it more collaborative. At that level, we will be exploring anthropology as a distinctive way of engaging the world, and how the ethos of ethnography sits with the difference between scholarship and activism. At the same time, we will be considering what kind of light anthropology can shed on present-day problems such as the politics of indigeneity, scientific authority, environmental crisis, and interspecies relations.

Instructor(s): William Mazzarella     Terms Offered: TBD
Equivalent Course(s): RLST 23510

ANTH 23616. Central Asia Past and Present/From Alexander the Great to Al Qaeda. 100 Units.

Central Asia Past and Present serves as a multi-disciplinary course, spanning anthropology, history and political science. This course introduces students to the fluid, political-geographic concept of Central Asia as well as to the historical and cultural dimensions of this particular and oft-redefined world. My understanding of Central Asia comes from studies of ex-Soviet Central Asia, which includes five independent countries (since 1991) within central Eurasia--the former U.S.S.R. Thus the course encompasses Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan in addition to parts of northern Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and western China (Xinjiang/Sinkiang). Students will familiarize themselves with universal and divergent factors among the Central Asian peoples based on phenomena such as human migrations, cross-cultural influences, historical events, and the economic organization of peoples based on local ecology and natural boundaries. Working together and as individuals, we will study maps and atlases to gain a fuller understanding of historical movements and settlements of the Central Asian peoples.

Instructor(s): R. Zanca
Equivalent Course(s): NEHC 30160, NEHC 20160, ANTH 32206

ANTH 23700. Capitalism, Colonialism, and Nationalism in the Pacific. 100 Units.

This course compares colonial capitalist projects and their dialogic transfor­mations up to present political dilemmas, with special attention to Fiji, New Zealand, and Hawai'i, and a focus on the labor diaspora, the fates of indigenous polities, and tensions in contemporary citizenship. We will compare Wakefield's "scientific colonization" in New Zealand, Gordon's social experiments and indentured labor in Fiji, and the plantations, American annexation, tourism, and the military in Hawai'i. We will compare the colonial experiences of the Maori, Hawaiians, and indigenous Fijians, and also those of the immigrant laborers and their descendants, especially white New Zealanders, the South Asians in Fiji, and the Japanese in Hawai'i. General pro­positions about nationalism, capitalism "late" and otherwise, global cultural flows, and postcolonial subject positions will be juxtaposed with contemporary Pacific conflicts.

Instructor(s): John Kelly
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 33700, CRES 23710, CRES 33700

ANTH 23803. Magical Politics. 100 Units.

Following Donald Trump's election to the presidency in 2016, witches all over North America collaborated on spells to resist him and his politics by 'binding' his administration. Alt-right activists had already for some time been engaged in 'meme magic' against Trump's liberal critics. How can we begin to understand these magical interventions in present-day politics? Rather than presuming that 'magical politics' is a fringe or crackpot phenomenon, this class draws on activist, esoteric, and academic materials to suggest that our thinking about everyday life and ordinary politics can be fundamentally enlivened and enhanced by taking 'magic' seriously.

Instructor(s): William Mazzarella     Terms Offered: TBD
Note(s): This is a 3CT Capstone Course
Equivalent Course(s): CCCT 23803, RLST 28803

ANTH 23809. Visualization and Biology: Science, Culture, and Representation. 100 Units.

How do scientific images get made? This deceptively simple question lies at the heart of this course. Over three weeks at the MBL, we will examine the techniques, technologies, philosophies and histories of scientific image making, with a particular focus on marine biology. Rather than simply reading theories of visualization and representation, students will immerse themselves in the making of images themselves. Students will perform hands-on work with historical and contemporary theories and techniques of microscopy, taxonomy, anatomy, and specimen collecting. They will also examine the theoretical, philosophical, and ethical underpinnings of those practices. Through a combination of ethnographic (participant observation) and historical (archival) work, students will develop rich accounts of scientific visualization - from matters of objectivity and instrumentation, to problems of vision and the limits of (human) senses, to questions of aesthetics, abstraction, and representation. During the course, students will have the opportunity to work with Marine Biological Laboratory faculty, have access to laboratory and archives, and will develop new data and novel accounts of the social, cultural, and technical creation of scientific images.

Instructor(s): Michael Paul Rossi     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): Prerequisite: Consent Only.
Note(s): Prerequisite: Consent Only. Course meets for three weeks, 9/9 thru 9/27 (5-6 days/week, 8 hours per day), at Marine Biological Laboratories, in Woods Hole Massachusetts. Course will be part of Autumn quarter course load. For more information see http://college.uchicago.edu/academics/mbl-september-courses
Equivalent Course(s): ENST 25111, HIST 14904, HIPS 15100

ANTH 23816. Farms as Factories: Industrial Ideals in 'Modern' Agriculture. 100 Units.

Plants and animals are now produced in capital-intensive, factory-like settings. The industrialization of agriculture has not only transformed what we eat, but also the ecology of the globe and biology of its inhabitants. This course explores the logics, history, and consequences of an agricultural sector that simultaneously generates lagoons of pig manure, proprietary DNA, and monocropped landscapes. How does commoditizing wheat alter its value? How do pigs to change when they live their lives on concrete? What forms of care are needed to keep antibiotic-laden chickens alive? How does the industrial production of life rearrange 'modern' concepts of nature? The course situates these questions within a broader framework of capitalism and commoditization; we begin by studying the rationale of proto-industrial production on slave plantations, consider the results of agricultural 'modernization' in the 19th and 20th centuries, and analyze how social scientists have studied these processes. Then, we examine how agricultural products - plants and animals - have been physically altered to facilitate standardized production, and study how these shifts have changed the role of workers and social milieu of agrarian labor. In addition to contextualizing modern agricultural production, this class is an introduction to animal and plant studies, theories of capitalism and commodification, and environmental studies.

Instructor(s): Sandy Hunter     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): ENST 23645

ANTH 23825. Social Theory of the City. 100 Units.

This seminar explores various historical, sociological and anthropological theories of cities. The course analyzes major theoretical frameworks concerned with urban forms, institutions and experience as well as particular instances of city development from pre-modern to contemporary periods. The seminar will consist of initial orienting lectures, discussion of selected texts concerned with social theories of the city, and presentation of research projects by class participants.

Instructor(s): Alan L. Kolata
Prerequisite(s): Admission to the Paris Program
Note(s): Undergraduates only
Equivalent Course(s): CEGU 23825, HIST 23825

ANTH 23906. Magic, Science, and Religion. 100 Units.

The relationship between the categories of magic, science, and religion has been a problem for modern social science since its inception in the nineteenth century. In the first half of this course, we will critically examine some of the classical and contemporary approaches to these concepts. In the second half, we will explore a number of detailed historical and ethnographic studies about modern phenomena that call some of the fundamental assumptions behind these categories into question.

Instructor(s): Alireza Doostdar
Equivalent Course(s): RLST 28900, AASR 30501, KNOW 28900, HLTH 28900

ANTH 23908. Religion and its "Other": Secular and Post-Secular Formations. 100 Units.

How do we locate religion? What is a secular space? Are we somehow beyond secularism? This course provides an introduction to the relationship between religion and the secular as it has been conceived in the modern West. It is intended to provide students with a basic historical and theoretical framework for thinking about how these categories relate, how they have evolved, and the work they do in our contemporary society. Readings will include works by Hermann Cohen, Louis Dupré, Charles Taylor, Michel Foucault, Bruno Latour, Judith Butler, Talal Asad, and Saba Mahmood.

Instructor(s): Lisa Hedrick     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): RLST 29015

ANTH 23910. Holocaust Object. 100 Units.

In this course, we explore various ontological and representational modes of the Holocaust material object world as it was represented during World War II. Then, we interrogate the post-Holocaust artifacts and material remnants, as they are displayed, curated, controlled, and narrated in the memorial sites and museums of former ghettos and extermination and concentration camps. These sites which-once the locations of genocide-are now places of remembrance, the (post)human, and material remnants also serve educational purposes. Therefore, we study the ways in which this material world, ranging from infrastructure to detritus, has been subjected to two, often conflicting, tasks of representation and preservation, which we view through a prism of authenticity. In order to study representation, we critically engage a textual and visual reading of museum narrations and fiction writings; to tackle the demands of preservation, we apply a neo-materialist approach. Of special interest are survivors' testimonies as appended to the artifacts they donated. The course will also equip you with salient critical tools for future creative research in Holocaust studies.

Instructor(s): Bozena Shallcross     Terms Offered: TBD
Equivalent Course(s): REES 37019, ARCH 27019, ANTH 35035, HIST 23413, JWSC 29500, HIST 33413, REES 27019

ANTH 23911. Anthropology of Religion. 100 Units.

How do anthropologists study religion? This course is an introduction to classic concepts that have defined the social scientific study of religion such as ritual, taboo, transcendence, embodiment, and enchantment. To grasp how fieldwork is paired with theory, we will engage ethnographic writings on Orthodox Christianity in northern Ethiopia, Afro-Caribbean Santería in Chicago, and Islamic jinn veneration in Delhi India. We will further examine various themes in the socio-cultural inquiry of contemporary religion including asceticism, sexuality, sectarianism, and political theology.

Instructor(s): A. Heo     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): AASR 34411, RLST 27650

ANTH 23914. Whom am I to Judge? Relativism and Religious Difference. 100 Units.

How do we evaluate people who are different from us? What grounds our evaluation of human behaviors or beliefs? At the end of the 20th century, comparative analyses of religious beliefs and ethics were heavily criticized for their ethnocentric tendencies; researchers were blamed for importing their own values on the "other". More recently, however, the pendulum seems to have swung in the other direction. Comparative religious ethicists often adopt a brand of liberal moral relativism. "To each their own" is their preferred mantra. This dramatic swing within the field of comparative religious ethics opens up questions for future study: Under what conditions can we praise or blame those who are different than us? What virtues of scholarship are necessary for quality comparative work? In this course we will learn about the field of comparative religious ethics and the perils and possibilities that accompany its intellectual projects. In addition to several theoretical texts, we will read two ethnographies (Fernando 2014 and Pandian 2009) that weave in and out of comparative religious ethics. These texts focus on themes of nationalism, post-colonialism, immigration, the production and regulation of religious subjects, and the limits of our judgments on the other.

Instructor(s): Caroline Anglim     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): RLST 24160

ANTH 23915. Religion, Reason, and the State. 100 Units.

The second quarter of this sequence explores the work of key theorists on the role of religion in modern society, politics, and the state. Central questions include: How has state power transformed religious institutions, knowledge, and practice? How can we account for the persistence of religious commitments in the face of secularization? What role has religion played in revolutionary movements and in resistance against state power?

Instructor(s): Alireza Doostdar     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): No prerequisites.
Note(s): This is the second of a two-quarter sequence. Students may enroll in either one of the courses in this sequence independently of the other course. This course counts as a Gateway course for RLST majors/minors.
Equivalent Course(s): RLST 10102

ANTH 23916. Race and Religion: Theorizing Blackness and Jewishness. 100 Units.

Founded on ideals of universalism, pluralism and secularism, France and the United States are fraught with contradictions when it comes to race and religion. Which religions are accepted? Which religions are suspect? Is it minority that defines the difference-or only particular kinds of minority, such as race? To untangle the intersections of race and religion, we will examine Blackness and Jewishness as they are represented in political polemic, fiction, memoir and philosophy from the 1960s to the present. This course introduces students to the foundational concepts for the critical study of race and religion through exploring the constructions of Black and Jewish identity. We will examine the contradictions of secular politics and culture in France and the United States, and discuss how religion, race, and intersecting categories such as gender and sexuality, can become tools of critique. Readings include works by thinkers such as Césaire, Fanon, Memmi, Levinas and Foucault, along with literary classics by Nella Larsen and Sarah Kofman, and contemporary critical essays by Judith Butler, Christina Sharpe and Talal Asad. Throughout this course, we will examine how the concepts of race and religion are key components of the political, philosophical and ethical projects of these authors. No prerequisite knowledge of critical theory, or this historical period, is expected.

Instructor(s): Kirsten Collins     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): RLST 27721, GLST 27721, CRES 27721, GNSE 27721, JWSC 27721, FREN 27721, CMLT 27721

ANTH 23920. Gaming Religion. 100 Units.

Video games commonly feature religious ideas, imagery, emotions, and practices. In this course, we will take a hands-on, experimental approach to the study of religion in video games. We will play various games individually and in groups, and reflect on the design and gameplay in conversation with readings in theory.

Instructor(s): Alireza Doostdar     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): RLST 28990

ANTH 24001-24002-24003. Colonizations I-II-III.

This sequence meets the general education requirement in civilization studies. This three-quarter sequence approaches the concept of civilization from an emphasis on cross-cultural/societal connection and exchange. We explore the dynamics of conquest, slavery, colonialism, and their reciprocal relationships with concepts such as resistance, freedom, and independence, with an eye toward understanding their interlocking role in the making of the modern world.

ANTH 24101-24102. Introduction to the Civilizations of South Asia I-II.

This sequence introduces core themes in the formation of culture and society in South Asia from the early modern period until the present. This sequence meets the general education requirement in civilization studies. These courses must be taken in sequence.

ANTH 24110. Jews, Arabs, and Others: Nations from the Nile to the Jordan. 100 Units.

This course considers nationbuilding as an ongoing and recurring process in the Middle East, realigning identities and communities according to the political concerns of the time. In particular, we will examine how Arabs and Others have figured in the political imagination of both Egypt and Israel-Palestine. When can Egyptians, Palestinians, and Israelis consider themselves "Arab"--and when not? What are the stakes of naming Arab-ness or claiming it for oneself? To answer these questions, this course will include readings and popular films on Arab nationalism and minorities in Egypt, the question of Jewish versus Israeli nationalism, Arab (or Mizrahi) Jews in Israel, and the relationship of Palestinian nationalism to the borders that have been drawn within the historic land of Palestine.

Instructor(s): Callie Maidhof     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): GLST 25209, NEHC 25209

ANTH 24125. Technology and Human Rights. 100 Units.

The international human rights regime took form in the shadow of the atom bomb and WWII, a historical juncture, which for many marked the limits of techno-scientific rationality and progress. Utopian narratives of inevitable, technologically-driven social and economic progress nonetheless remain a cornerstone of American political and cultural imaginaries. In this course, we will draw on anthropology, law, and allied disciplines to explore the ambiguous intersections of technological innovation and human rights. Through a series of case studies, the course will consider how new technologies and their allied knowledge practices call into question the foundational categories of human rights law, complicating understandings of the individual, person hood, family, and life. The course will further examine how emerging developments in biotechnology, information technology, robotics, and AI variously enhance and undermine the substantive protections of human rights, including the rights to health, privacy, freedom of expression, security, and indigenous knowledge. Finally, we will consider how human rights norms and institutions can be mobilized to inform and constrain the design and application of potentially threatening new technologies.

Instructor(s): Lake Polan, Pozen Center for Human Rights Social Science Teaching Fellow     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): HMRT 34125, HMRT 24125

ANTH 24304. Talking With Animals. 100 Units.

All over the world, children have long learned the lessons of what it means to be human from what animals tell them. In addition to ventriloquizing non-human animals to socialize human ones, projects for facilitating cross-species communication abound. These projects reveal not only how people imagine their relations with other animals, but also how we conceive of the possibilities and limits of sign systems. And while many focus on talking with animals, others suggest that animals are effective communicators precisely because they lack language, raising fascinating questions about ideologies of (im)mediation. As we learn how Peruvian kids talk with llamas and American cowboys whisper to wild horses, and explore what spiders say and how apes read the human keepers who teach them to sign, this class explores how distinctions are drawn between human and non-human animals, as well as attempts to cross those divides through communicative forms and technologies.

Instructor(s): E. Summerson Carr     Terms Offered: TBD

ANTH 24314. Meaning and the Body. 100 Units.

This course examines recent (20th- and 21st-century) retrievals of the body to understand "meaning." We will analyze varying construals of nature, materiality, matter, emotion, and thought. Readings will therefore be multidisciplinary, including selections from philosophy, sociolinguistics, anthropology, and religious studies. More specifically, we will examine the relationship between meaning and embodiment by way of the following: modern philosophies of the subject; analytic philosophies of language; deconstruction and the historicization of the body; feminist theories of discourse; new materialist conceptions of matter; new animist conceptions of the subject.

Instructor(s): Lisa Landoe Hedrick     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 26116, RLST 26116

ANTH 24316. Thinking Psychoanalytically: From the Sciences to the Arts. 100 Units.

Since Freud's seminal investigation into the nature of the mind, psychoanalytic thinking has offered a unique approach to unconscious, relational, and meaningful dimensions of human experience. Despite assaults on the field from numerous quarters, psychoanalytic thinking remains central to the work of practitioners across an array of disciplines. After an introduction to key psychoanalytic concepts including the unconscious, repression, and transference, we will investigate some of the ways in which these ideas are mobilized within clinical practice, neuroscience, anthropology, education, philosophy, literary studies, and the visual arts through a series of lectures presented by specialists from these fields. Along the way, we will gain an appreciation for some of the ways in which psychoanalytic perspectives continue to inspire a variety of current scientific and humanistic projects.

Instructor(s): A. Beal, Staff     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): PQ: Third or fourth-year standing.
Equivalent Course(s): BPRO 28400

ANTH 24320. Cultural Psychology. 100 Units.

There is a substantial portion of the psychological nature of human beings that is neither homogeneous nor fixed across time and space. At the heart of the discipline of cultural psychology is the tenet of psychological pluralism, which states that the study of "normal" psychology is the study of multiple psychologies and not just the study of a single or uniform fundamental psychology for all peoples of the world. Research findings in cultural psychology thus raise provocative questions about the integrity and value of alternative forms of subjectivity across cultural groups. In this course we analyze the concept of "culture" and examine ethnic and cross-cultural variations in mental functioning with special attention to the cultural psychology of emotions, self, moral judgment, categorization, and reasoning.

Instructor(s): R. Shweder     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): Undergraduates must be in third or fourth year.
Note(s): CHDV Distribution: B, C
Equivalent Course(s): KNOW 31000, GNSE 21001, CHDV 21000, ANTH 35110, PSYC 23000, PSYC 33000, CRES 21100, GNSE 31000, CHDV 31000, AMER 33000

ANTH 24321. Psychological Anthropology. 100 Units.

This course traces the development of the field of psychological anthropology and critically reviews the various paradigms adopted by psychological anthropologists. In our discussions, we will draw examples from different cultural contexts to critically examine the relationship between culture and psychological functioning. By the end of the quarter, you will develop an insightful understanding of the cultural sources of the self, mind, behavior, and mental health as well as a substantial knowledge of the field of psychological anthropology.

Instructor(s): S. Numanbayraktaroglu     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): Grad distribution: 4*; Undergrad Distribution: 3, 4
Equivalent Course(s): HIPS 27250, CHDV 27250, CHDV 37250, HLTH 27250

ANTH 24330. Medical Anthropology. 100 Units.

This course introduces students to the central concepts and methods of medical anthropology. Drawing on a number of classic and contemporary texts, we will consider both the specificity of local medical cultures and the processes which increasingly link these systems of knowledge and practice. We will study the social and political economic shaping of illness and suffering and will examine medical and healing systems-including biomedicine-as social institutions and as sources of epistemological authority. Topics covered will include the problem of belief; local theories of disease causation and healing efficacy; the placebo effect and contextual healing; theories of embodiment; medicalization; structural violence; modernity and the distribution of risk; the meanings and effects of new medical technologies; and global health.

Instructor(s): E. Raikhel     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): PQ: Undergraduates must have completed or currently be enrolled in a SOSC sequence.  Graduate option is only open to Master's students. Grad students must enroll in the graduate discussion section only.
Note(s): CHDV Distribution: C, D; 3, 4
Equivalent Course(s): HLTH 23204, ANTH 40330, CHDV 23204, CHDV 43204, KNOW 43204, HIPS 27301

ANTH 24332. Themes in the anthropology of Islam: Debates, Tradition, Critiques. 100 Units.

The course begins by examining principal themes and debates the anthropology of Islam has engaged with in its attempt to undo Western universalist concepts such as secularism and the anthropological categories of culture and religion. We will learn to historicize these concepts and explore alternative frameworks anthropologists have offered for studying Muslim societies. We will turn an ethnographic lens towards studies on the Islamic Revival in Egypt, Turkey, Europe, and East Asia in order to study how Muslims cultivate piety, relate to the unseen, and retain cultural ties alongside their religious identities. In the process, we will learn the ways they trouble conventional notions around women's agency, ideas around modernity's "disenchantment," and secular conceptions of belief. We will then explore texts that indirectly problematize the anthropology of Islam's coordinates around orthopraxy, authority, and ritual. As we do so, we will interrogate the relationship between U.S. Blackness and Islam, religious piety and consumer capitalism, as well as transnationalism and incarceration. We will situate our readings and discussions within the broader political context of the Global War on Terror and secular governmentality, with a particular attention to questions of race, gender, and political struggle.

Instructor(s): Alexis Chavez     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): RLST 27332, RDIN 24332

ANTH 24349. Human Rights and Postcolonial Politics. 100 Units.

This class focuses on the history and theory of human rights by considering it as a quintessentially postcolonial political form. We consider how Euro-American genealogies of rights intersect and interact with trajectories of colonial rule and postcolonial politics. In the process, the question of rights itself comes to be posed afresh. Empirically, the class focuses on the histories and presents of India and South Africa. Both these countries underwent processes of constitutional decolonization. Thus, rights have a foundational place in both postcolonial polities. What does that mean? How does that create openings for the imaginations and instantiations of socially transformative policies? How does it lead to the endurance of traces and aspects of colonial government? What are the promises and limits of rights as we consider them in such historical and political contexts? In what ways are political struggles in these countries marked as being both for and against rights? In the process, how does our thinking and conceptualization of rights itself come to be at stake?

Instructor(s): Kaushik Sunder Rajan
Equivalent Course(s): HMRT 24349

ANTH 24361. Anthropology of Art. 100 Units.

This course offers an entry point into Anthropology of Art via a practical orientation to the ethnographic study of making and creating in our contemporary, globalized world. Pairing current foci within the subfield with methodological exercises in a series of discussion and practicum meetings, we will engage a range ethnographic works and conceptual frameworks for thinking about why and how making becomes meaningful (as Art, as social action, as therapeutic, etc.) in social context. How are persons, communities, institutions, or nations around the world today using art to accomplish social projects? How does someone become recognized as "creative" in professional contexts? How do images or media become associated with kinds of people, places, or ideas? We will reflect on how anthropologists are approaching questions like these by drawing on empirical cases like those of art schooling, media industries and the international art market; the arts-based intervention of NGOs, activists, and art therapists; DIY and indigenous communities, artist-researchers, and folkloric performance. The course begins and ends with a discussion of how disciplines of fine art and anthropology mutually produce status and knowledge with/for one another, challenging the category of "art" and rebuilding an anthropology of art concerned with the pragmatic dimensions of making and creating. Students will engage in project design in relationship to the course readings, a series of methodological exercis

Instructor(s): Emily Kuret

ANTH 24501. Language and Environment. 100 Units.

This seminar will explore the many ways that language influences and is influenced by the environment. Appropriate for those interested in the socio-cultural foundations of language and language-use, infrastructural dimensions of communication and interaction, and existence as semiotic.

Instructor(s): T. Edwards     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): Distributions: grad 3
Equivalent Course(s): LING 44500, CHDV 24500, CHDV 44500, ANTH 44501

ANTH 24510. Anthropology of Museums. 100 Units.

This course uses anthropological reflections on "objects and others" to discuss questions of collection, classification, and curation in museum spaces. Anthropological engagements with material culture define early moments in the discipline's history and frame debates about typology and the observation of difference, as well as documentation and display. Through a series of readings, museum visits, and object-centered exercises, this undergraduate seminar will foreground questions of heritage and memory, ethical concerns about the ownership of collections and their display, and the publics that museums seek to address and be accountable to.

Instructor(s): Mannat Johal     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): CHST 24510

ANTH 24702. Un/Making Citizenship: The Politics of the Intimate. 100 Units.

The state is like a gravitational force that holds people in relation to itself, tugging and turning each person to different degrees. Citizenship is the mediation of that relationship. In this course, we examine different dimensions of citizenship across the life course, considering the ways people are formed into certain kinds of subjects. We ask: how and why are intimate life events of interest not only to those involved, but also to governing authorities? From the governance of conception and birth, to the (non)conferral of legal identities, the state manages legitimacy through documents like birth certificates, whose contents or absence can shape a person's entire life trajectory. In childhood, schools work to transform children into certain kinds of future citizens. From legal adulthood's gradual accrual of rights -- to vote, to have sex, to drink, to stand trial -- to old age and long after death, citizenship extends beyond the lifecourse. Over the course of the quarter, we investigate the ways people negotiate attempts to transform them into citizens, examining in particular how citizenship is mediated in relation to religion, sexuality, migration, disability, marriage, pregnancy, old age, and death.

Instructor(s): Kathryn Takabvirwa     Terms Offered: TBD
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 24704, CHDV 24702

ANTH 24711. The Prophet Q. 100 Units.

In the wake of the January 6, 2021, storming of the United States Capitol, the QAnon phenomenon has received sustained global attention as news and government agencies scramble to understand this online movement's role in the attack, the threat it continues to pose, and why it is that one out of every six Americans believes that former President Trump is secretly battling an elite group of politicians, media moguls, and academics who are deeply involved in child sex trafficking and satanic sacrifice. This course will investigate the phenomenon of QAnon through the lens of New Religious Movements (NRMs)--seeking to understand the complex interplay of factors that incites people to become immersed in these groups. Using examples from American New Religious Movements of the 20th century such as Scientology, the Rajneesh movement, and Jonestown, we will delve into the history of these groups in order to examine the motivations that drive individuals into these "fringe" religious movements. In the process, we will interrogate the usefulness of such labels as "religion" and "cult," and ultimately hope to better understand how power, race, gender, and practices of dissimulation play active roles in both these new religious movements and within QAnon.

Instructor(s): Marielle Harrison     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): AMER 28991, RLST 28991, SOCI 20540

ANTH 24730. Religious Violence. 100 Units.

Are there "proper" or "improper" practices of religion? Is it at best a matter of private belief, to be kept separate from or protected by the state? Or is it something that at times requires the state's intervention? Does religion represent the last vestiges of the premodern world, or is it something that is integral to modern life? To answer these questions, we will call on anthropologists and other social scientists and theorists to understand, first, what is "religion," and then what is, can be, or should be its relationship to gender, the nation, and the modern state in various historical and geographical locations, with particular attention to the Middle East and South Asia.

Instructor(s): Callie Maidhof     Terms Offered: Not offered 2022-2023
Equivalent Course(s): GLST 25630, RLST 26630

ANTH 25199. Sensing Bodies, Sensing the World: Anthropology of Embodiment and Perception. 100 Units.

In this seminar, we will learn about anthropological understandings of embodiment and perception while engaging in activities that encourage us to attune to our bodies and sensory worlds. Drawing on literature and theoretical approaches from scholars including anthropologists, philosophers, and historians, we will consider questions such as: How do we use our senses to make sense of our bodies and the world around us? How do cultural and historical beliefs and practices shape sensory experiences and conceptions of the body? The readings, which will focus primarily on phenomenological, biopolitical, and posthuman approaches, will challenge divides between biology and culture, body and mind, human and nature, and self and other. As we explore these themes, we will discuss methods of sensory ethnography and work toward our own sensory ethnographies or creative projects. Throughout the course, we will relate the readings to our own embodied experiences, gaining a greater appreciation of the role of the senses (and the body) in shaping our understanding of the world and our place within it. We will use theory to think through our own embodiment and sensory perception of the world and vice versa, prioritizing creative practices and challenging assumptions at methodological as well as theoretical levels.

Instructor(s): L. Hadlock     Terms Offered: Winter
Note(s): CHDV distribution C
Equivalent Course(s): CHDV 25199, HLTH 25199

ANTH 25208. Bodies, Gifts, and Commodities. 100 Units.

This course presents a survey of anthropological theories of gifts and commodities and how they have been used to explain exchanges involving the human body. We will consider various forms of labor, including sex work and paid surrogacy, exchanges enabled by modern biotechnologies, such as organ and tissue donation, as well as other contexts where the body is objectified and fragmented, such as in the discovery and marketing of genetic materials and processes.

Instructor(s): Elham Mireshghi     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): AASR 37570, GNSE 27570, RLST 27570

ANTH 25211. Feminism(s) and Anthropology. 100 Units.

This course examines the fraught yet generative relation between various movements of feminism and the discipline of anthropology. Both feminism(s) and anthropology emerged in the 19th century as fields invested in thinking "the human" through questions of alterity or Otherness. As such, feminist and anthropological inquiries often take up shared objects of analysis--including nature/culture, kinship, the body, sexuality, exchange, value and power-even as they differ in their political and scholarly orientations through the last century and a half. Tracking the emergence of feminisms and anthropology as distinct fields of academic discourse on the one hand and political intervention on the Other, we will pursue the following lines of inquiry: 1) a genealogical approach to key concepts and problem-spaces forged at the intersection of these two fields 2) critical analysis of the relation of feminist and postcolonial social movements to the professionalizing fields of knowledge production (including Marxist inspired writing on women and economy, Third World feminism and intersectionality, and feminist critiques of science studies) and 3) a reflexive contemporary examination of the way these two strands of thought have come together in the subfield of feminist anthropology and the continual frictions and resonances of feminist and anthropological approaches in academic settings and in the larger world (e.g., #MeToo, sex positive activism, queer politics, feminist economics).

Instructor(s): Chu, Julie Cole, Jennifer     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): 3rd and 4th year undergraduates only. Graduate students must have consent of one of the instructors.
Equivalent Course(s): CHDV 22103, ANTH 32910, GNSE 20143, CHDV 32103, GNSE 32103

ANTH 25214. (Re)Producing Race and Gender through American Material Culture. 100 Units.

This course introduces students to the role of the material world in the production and reproduction of ideologies of race, gender, and their intersections. Objects around us are imbued with meaning through their design, construction, use, and disuse. Architecture, art, photography, clothing, quilts, toys, food, and even the body have all been used to define groups of people. Combining secondary literature, theory, documentary evidence, and material culture, this course guides students as they ask questions about how ideologies of race and gender are produced, how they are both historically specific and constantly in flux, and how human interaction with the material world creates, challenges, and changes their construction. The primary course objectives are to (1) provide students with an introduction to material culture as a theory and methodology and (2) teach them how to apply it to research on ideologies of gender and race in history.

Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): HIST 27414, ARTH 27530, GNSE 27530, CRES 27530

ANTH 25215. Human Rights: An Anthropological Perspective. 100 Units.

While the modern human rights regime developed largely absent input from anthropology, the discipline stakes its scholarly identity on claims to expertise over the nature of human being and the diversity of human experience. Anthropologists have long studied aspects of lived experience of central concern to human rights, including state violence, cultural difference, and structural inequality. In recent decades, they have focused increasing attention on the institutions and practices through which activists adopt and rework human rights concepts in local political and social struggles. Against this backdrop, Human Rights and the Human Experience will deploy anthropology's distinctive knowledge practices and ethical sensitivities to analyze human rights as both global force and as creative resource in local movements for dignity, security, and human flourishing.

Instructor(s): Lake Polan, Pozen Center for Human Rights Social Science Teaching Fellow     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): HMRT 26200

ANTH 25216. Gender, Sex, and Culture. 100 Units.

This introductory graduate course examines the social construction of gendered identities in different times and places. We study culturally-specific gendered experiences, 'roles,' rights and rebellions around the world, discussing the individual and social consequences of gender and the interrelationships between gender and other categories for identity including race, class and sexuality. While focusing on the global diversity of gendered experience and expectations, we also examine gender in the US, taking a critical approach to understanding gendered inequality and gender-based and sexual violence both abroad and at home. Finally, we examine the role of gendered expectations in Western science, the relationship between gender and 'globalization,' and the contemporary movements affecting change in gendered norms, especially in the arts and media. Advanced Undergraduates admitted with Instructor consent.

Instructor(s): Mary Elena Wilhoit     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): Advanced Undergraduates admitted with Instructor consent.
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 33506, GNSE 23506, ANTH 32925, MAPS 33502

ANTH 25222. Sex and the Ethnographic Tradition. 100 Units.

This course examines the role sex has played in the formation of ethnographic knowledge, with particular attention to how studies of sex have challenged static notions of identity and illuminated the complex relationship between social behavior and gendered sense of self. We will consider interest in sex as a motivating factor in the ethnographic enterprise and, reading studies on everything from desire, kink, and play to procreation, heritance and power, will examine complex and social construction of sexed, gendered, and raced selves and Others. How has ethnographic research contested the ubiquitous salience of male/female dichotomies, of patriarchy, and of the cross-cultural, trans-historical applicability of concepts like 'third gender? We will also take a methodological eye, querying how sex has moved from a supposedly 'taboo' category of social inquiry to a focal topic in ethnographic work of all kinds. This is an introductory graduate level course with select spots for advanced undergraduates.

Instructor(s): Wilhoit, Ella     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 33168, ANTH 35503, GNSE 23168, MAPS 35503

ANTH 25256. Anthropology of Borders. 100 Units.

Today, the world may seem more connected than ever. Infectious disease, data, global capital, and even "culture" seem to travel in the blink of an eye. At the same time, we're witnessing the fortification of borders, and a resurgence of rightwing ethnonationalist populism on both sides of the Atlantic. Borders take on new significance national debates and security policy, and for those who rarely come into contact with borders, they may seem like mere metaphor for how a nation positions itself with regard to immigration, public health, and trade. But beyond the party platforms of politicians in the world's capitols, borders are very real places, constituted by the practices of state and non-state actors alike, and creating new forms of life in response to the technologies that police them. In this course, we will take an anthropological view of borders in order to understand how they are created, policed, and inhabited, following and bucking trends in the micropractices of military, police, and bordercrossers both legal and illegal.

Instructor(s): Callie Maidhof     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): GLST 25701, CHST 25701

ANTH 25305. Anthropology of Food and Cuisine. 100 Units.

Contemporary human foodways are not only highly differentiated in cultural and social terms, but often have long and complicated histories. Anthropologists have long given attention to food. But, until quite recently, they did so in an unsystematic, haphazard fashion. This course explores several related themes with a view towards both the micro- and macro-politics of food by examining a range of ethnographic and historical case studies and theoretical texts. It takes the format of a seminar augmented by lectures (during the first few weeks), scheduled video screenings, and individual student presentations during the rest of the course.

Instructor(s): Stephan Palmie
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 35305, KNOW 25305, AASR 35305

ANTH 25440. Maverick Markets: Cultural Economy and Cultural Finance. 100 Units.

What are the cultural dimensions of economic and financial institutions and financial action? What social variables influence and shape 'real' markets and market activities? 'If you are so smart, why aren't you rich?' is a question economists have been asked in the past. Why isn't it easy to make money in financial areas even if one knows what economists know about markets, finance and the economy? And why, on the hand, is it so easy to get rich for some participants? Perhaps the answer is the real markets are complex social and cultural institutions which are quite different form organizations, administrations and the production side of the economy. The course provides an overview over social and cultural variables and patterns that play a role in economic behavior and specifically in financial markets. The readings examine the historical and structural embeddedness of economic action and institutions, the different constructions and interpretations of money, prices, and other dimensions of a market economy, and how a financial economy affects organizations, the art and other areas.

Instructor(s): K. Knorr     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): SOCI 20258, SOCI 30258, ANTH 35405

ANTH 25457. Topics in Contemporary Critical Theory I. 100 Units.

This class considers the question of capital, historically, comparatively and conceptually. What is capital? How is it related to value? How is it different from money? How does it work to organize social relations? In what forms, and through what institutional structures, does it materialize? How does it reflect in modes and relations of production? How is it governed, and what is its relation to the political? This course will enter into such questions, in the first instance, through a reading of Karl Marx. It will subsequently traverse a heterodox genealogy of Marxist social thought (with some emphasis on French theorists), in order to understand how a method of analysis developed to come to terms with nineteenth century European industrial capitalism might help us understand contemporary worlds of extraction, logistics and finance in comparative perspective. We will consider how capital is racialized and gendered, how it has expanded and mutated across place and over time, and what it means that we live in a time today when it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

Instructor(s): Kaushik Sunder Rajan     Terms Offered: Winter. Offered in alternating years. The program will next run in Winter 2022.
Prerequisite(s): Admission to the Paris: Social Sciences - Critical Theory study abroad program.
Note(s): This course is part of the College's Paris: Social Sciences - Critical Theory study abroad program.
Equivalent Course(s): PLSC 25457, CCCT 25457

ANTH 25458. Topics in Contemporary Critical Theory II. 100 Units.

This course investigates the central place of empires in the shaping of the modern world and understands critical theory as inextricable from its colonial context. We will read authors including Montaigne, Diderot, Tocqueville, Du Bois, Aimé Césaire, Suzanne Césaire, Fanon, Foucault, Said, and Trouillot, as well as contemporary theorists including Luce Irigaray, Achille Mbembe, David Scott, Françoise Vergès, and Joan Scott; we will pay particular but not exclusive attention to the context of French imperialism and to Paris as a site of theorizing, and critique of, the imperial global order.

Instructor(s): Kaushik Sunder Rajan and Lisa Wedeen     Terms Offered: Winter. Offered in alternating years. The program will next run in Winter 2022.
Prerequisite(s): Admission to the Paris: Social Sciences - Critical Theory study abroad program.
Note(s): This course is part of the College's Paris: Social Sciences - Critical Theory study abroad program.
Equivalent Course(s): CCCT 25458, PLSC 25458

ANTH 25459. Topics in Contemporary Critical Theory III. 100 Units.

This course examines selections from the vast literature on ideology-with attention to the political commitments and intellectual genealogies that have made the concept both important and vexed. The bulk of the course will entail examining ideology's relationship to material practice, the notion of interpellation, the usefulness of "hegemony," and the problems associated with false consciousness. We shall also analyze ideology's connection to prevailing theoretical and empirical concerns, such as those related to "subject" formation, affect, new developments in capitalism, the resurgence of populism, and the dynamics associated with contemporary "democratic" liberal, as well as authoritarian, political order

Instructor(s): Lisa Wedeen     Terms Offered: Winter. Offered in alternating years. The program will next run in Winter 2022.
Prerequisite(s): Admission to the Paris: Social Sciences - Critical Theory study abroad program.
Note(s): This course is part of the College's Paris: Social Sciences - Critical Theory study abroad program.
Equivalent Course(s): CCCT 25459, PLSC 25459

ANTH 25720. Ethnographic Writing: Practices of Research and Representation. 100 Units.

This course gives students opportunities to develop their own craft of ethnography through hands-on research and writing and in-depth explorations of recent ethnographic work. Ethnography, "the writing of a people," by definition, refers to groups of people as its object and to processes through which an ethnographer attempts to represent such groups. It also refers to academic texts that are the product of an ethnographer's representational efforts. In this course, students will engage with ethnography multivalently - as research practice, analytical generalization, and literary product. We will reflect upon processes of representation through which ethnographers apply their findings to groups (implicitly or explicitly) and the choices and interpretations they make along the way. Some questions we will ask are: How does the ethnographer deploy particular signifiers, such as modes of communication, spatial and architectural configurations, and historical contexts to make arguments? How is language used to represent experience convincingly? With these questions in mind, we will approach book and article-length ethnographies focusing on four expansive themes - migration, global interconnectivity, nation-states, and neoliberalism. Our readings will inform students' development of their own ethnographic practices. This course will be especially helpful to MA and advanced undergraduate students engaged in the production of ethnographic theses.

Instructor(s): Victoria Gross     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): MAPS 34512, ANTH 35720

ANTH 25777. Aging and the Life Course: An Intersectional Perspective. 100 Units.

Societies across the world are ordered by age. In this course, we will examine how age is imagined and constructed according to biological, historical, and cultural perspectives. Drawing upon a life course model, we will study how different cultures and social groups seek to structure the individual's life in relation to the wider society by creating socially constructed stages, age cohorts, and generations. We will consider how different social factors including gender, sexuality, race, and socioeconomic status may disrupt an individual's ability to follow an idealized life course. An examination of the cultural assumptions surrounding aging in the United States will illustrate how ageism and age-stratification affect social relations across society and make certain lives more "successful" than others. The course will focus on older age and later life as a method for exploring how individuals make sense of their life experiences through narrative construction, the accumulation of disadvantage over the life course, and how historical and cultural shifts are disrupting established roles and relationships for the elderly across the world. The course will draw heavily on texts from gender and sexuality studies as a means for illustrating and understanding concepts. Students will have the opportunity to learn basic ethnographic and interviewing research techniques by conducting a life course narrative interview.

Instructor(s): G. Steffen     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): CHDV undergrad: B
Equivalent Course(s): CHDV 25777, HLTH 25777, GNSE 25777

ANTH 25810. Social Problems, Social Policy, and Social Change. 100 Units.

This course is designed to provide an analytic framework that enables students to understand how social problems are socially constructed, how social policies are created in response to those identified problems, and how social change efforts both shape and respond to the policy environment. During the quarter, we will examine how social problems, policies and programs are framed, re-framed, and addressed and how individuals, organizations, and relevant constituencies take part in social change. In addition to providing an overview of the relationship between social problems, social policy, and social change efforts, the course encourages critical thought about the role of and relationship between professional elites (philanthropists, advocates, researchers, etc.) and ground-level activists (affected populations, community leaders, etc.) in constructing and contesting social problems and promoting social change.

Instructor(s): J. Mosley     Terms Offered: TBD
Equivalent Course(s): SSAD 25810

ANTH 25908. Balkan Folklore. 100 Units.

Vampires, fire-breathing dragons, vengeful mountain nymphs. 7/8 and other uneven dance beats, heart-rending laments, and a living epic tradition. This course is an overview of Balkan folklore from historical, political, and anthropological perspectives. We seek to understand folk tradition as a dynamic process and consider the function of different folklore genres in the imagining and maintenance of community and the socialization of the individual. We also experience this living tradition firsthand through visits of a Chicago-based folk dance ensemble, "Balkan Dance."

Instructor(s): Angelina Ilieva     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 35908, REES 29009, NEHC 30568, REES 39009, NEHC 20568, CMLT 33301, CMLT 23301

ANTH 25945. Settler Colonialism: From the US to Palestine. 100 Units.

In this course, we will consider settler colonialism as a contemporary, ongoing process as it unfolds in both North America and the Middle East, thinking through the problems of state formation, citizenship, land expropriation, and the law in these two contexts. While US and the state of Israel share a (tentative) commitment to liberal democracy, this has hinged on the erasure of indigenous populations even as the states expanded to envelop greater swaths of territory. In the process, settler and indigenous peoples have been moved, as well as transformed, producing new subjectivities in relation to both the state and international law. Over the quarter, we will examine the transformations of space and subjects effected by the settler colonial project, drawing on historical, anthropological, and theoretical literature.

Instructor(s): Callie Maidhof     Terms Offered: Not offered 2022-2023
Equivalent Course(s): CRES 25945, GLST 25945, RLST 26945

ANTH 26011. Intro to Archaeology: Thinking like an Archaeologist. 100 Units.

This course introduces students to archaeological method and theory, and engages them with data-based exercises to engage with archaeological problems so they can learn to think like an archaeologist. Archaeology forms one of the four component subdisciplines of Anthropology, and has developed its own body of method and theory revolving around the data left behind by people in the past. This Archaeological data - whether created by survey, excavation, or laboratory analysis - provides a unique lens for viewing the remnants of societies and social organization. This course examines how archaeologists investigate material remains, how they consider research problems, how they make interpretations, and some of the ethical questions that arise as well as ties this to the history of the discipline from its inception into the present. After this course, students should have a background to understand archaeological reasoning and consider the ways that material can be used to interpret human behavior.

Instructor(s): Adrian Chase

ANTH 26040. Archaeological Field Methods: Monuments, Memory, and the Chicago Landscape. 100 Units.

In this hands-on course students learn the techniques of archaeological research design, archival research, surface survey, excavation, mapping, photography, and/or analysis as appropriate to the selected site(s) for the academic year. Sites will include monuments and historic markers found across Chicago, with a focus on the Southside. Students will complete directed field exercises in cemeteries, city parks, and on campus to investigate the role of monuments and historic markers in urban life. The aims of the course are: (1) to learn archaeological methods of documentation; (2) to learn about how past, present, and future interact in the Chicago landscape; and (3) to explore theoretical approaches to the changing politics of commemoration, from iconoclasm in antiquity to Black Lives Matter.

Instructor(s): Shannon Dawdy & Alice Yao

ANTH 26043. The Aesthetics of Artificial Intelligence. 100 Units.

With the emergence of generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, DALL-E, and Midjourney, the production of computer-generated content has become accessible to a wide range of users and use cases. Knowledge institutions are particularly challenged to find adequate responses to changing notions of authorship as the mainstreaming of 'artificial' texts, audio-visual artifacts, and code is transforming our paradigms of communication in real-time. This course offers a survey of scholarship from the nascent field of critical AI studies to investigate the impact of AI, machine learning, and big data on knowledge production, representation, and consumption. In addition to theoretical discussions, we will conduct research-creation experiments aimed at documenting and evaluating emerging methods of AI-augmented content creation across text, image, and sound. Prospective students should demonstrate a substantial interest in media art and design and its connections to digital humanities, critical theory, and pedagogy. Experience with artistic and/or engineering practice is a plus. Please submit a 300 word max statement of interest to uhl@uchicago.edu by12/22 in order to be considered for enrollment.

Instructor(s): Andre Uhl     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): CHSS 36043, HIPS 26043, CMST 26043, MACS 36043, KNOW 36043, MADD 12043, CMST 36043, ANTH 36043, KNOW 26043

ANTH 26330. Making the Maya World. 100 Units.

What do we know about the ancient Maya? Pyramids, palaces, and temples are found from Mexico to Honduras, texts in hieroglyphic script record the histories of kings and queens who ruled those cities, and painted murals, carved stone stelae, and ceramic vessels provide a glimpse of complex geopolitical dynamics and social hierarchies. Decades of archaeological research have expanded that view beyond the rulers and elites to explore the daily lives of the Maya people, networks of trade and market exchange, and agricultural and ritual practices. Present-day Maya communities attest to the dynamism and vitality of languages and traditions, often entangled in the politics of archaeological heritage and tourism. This course is a wide-ranging exploration of ancient Maya civilization and of the various ways archaeologists, anthropologists, linguists, historians, and indigenous communities have examined and manipulated the Maya past. From tropes of long-hidden mysteries rescued from the jungle to New Age appropriations of pre-Columbian rituals, from the thrill of decipherment to painstaking and technical artifact studies, we will examine how models drawn from astrology, ethnography, classical archaeology and philology, political science, and popular culture have shaped current understandings of the ancient Maya world, and also how the Maya world has, at times, resisted easy appropriation and defied expectations.

Instructor(s): Sarah Newman     Terms Offered: TBD
Equivalent Course(s): CEGU 26330, LACS 36330, ANTH 36330, LACS 26330

ANTH 26368. Environmental Transitions and Unnatural Histories. 100 Units.

The course considers changes wrought in the natural landscape of the greater Calumet region beginning with indigenous Potawatomi and their forced removal. Students will examine how the Calumet's natural environment became collateral damage of the industrial capitalism that transformed the region into an economic powerhouse and explore efforts to rehabilitate the Calumet's rich biodiversity, identifying the challenges and achievements of this most recent environmental transition.

Instructor(s): Mary Beth Pudup     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): This course is part of the Chicago Studies Quarter:Calumet. This course includes required field trips every Friday from 9am-3pm.
Equivalent Course(s): CEGU 26368, CHST 26368, PBPL 26368, HIST 27315, ENST 26368

ANTH 26455. Empires and Colonies of the Atlantic World. 100 Units.

This graduate-level reading colloquium explores classic and emerging scholarship that examines the rise and consolidation of European overseas empires and colonies in the early modern Atlantic world (c.1400-1850). While we will analyze transatlantic European imperial structures, the course will pay particular attention to the perspectives of the colonized peoples (such as enslaved and freed people of African descent, creole populations, and Indigenous peoples) and places (such as the Caribbean, West Africa, Latin America, and North America) in the Atlantic World. Among the thematic topics we will discuss include: colonization; the rise of slavery and the slave trade; cross-cultural and political connections; the consolidation of race; gender, sexuality, and the family; the environment; the plantation complex; work and economy; social life; anti-colonial and anti-slavery struggles, revolution; abolition; and the reconstitution of colonial and imperial structures after slave emancipation. Upper-level undergraduates may enroll with instructor consent.

Instructor(s): Lyons, Deirdre     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): HIST 29107, ANTH 46455, MAPS 33555, HIST 39107

ANTH 26612. Field Archaeology. 100 Units.

Students will learn the basics of survey, mapping, excavation techniques, and excavation recording relevant to the project; they will supervise work in one or more trenches, including daily decision making, managing local workforce, and recording. They will work on one or more type of material culture or other collections (e.g., archaeozoological materials) as part of the team, recording, weighing, measuring, illustrating, photographing and/or describing, as needed. They will also be expected to become familiar with the history of excavation of the relevant site and the project aims. Assessment will be based on the student's field notebook, trench summary and other records, and a critical evaluation of the projects aims and methods.

Instructor(s): Derek Kennet - Augusta McMahon     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): NEAA 20091, CLCV 20091, HIST 20091, CLAS 30091

ANTH 26636. Liberatory Violence. 100 Units.

From 18th century slave rebellions in the Americas to 20th and 21st century anticolonial revolutions, oppressed peoples' struggles for liberation have often incorporated violent tactics, even against non-combatants. This course examines anticolonial violence in light of the work of the Martiniquan revolutionary Frantz Fanon and some of his interlocutors. We study specific freedom movements: Nat Turner's slave rebellion, the Haitian and Algerian revolutions against French colonialism, Malcolm X and the Black Panthers' mobilization against white supremacy and police violence, and the ongoing Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid. Throughout, we will pay attention to how revolutionaries evaluated the place of violence in their own movements, including religious criteria for justifiable and unjustifiable use of force.

Instructor(s): Alireza Doostdar     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): Graduate student enrollment by permission only. Please send one or two paragraphs explaining your interest and prior preparation.
Note(s): This course meets the SCSR Committee distribution requirement for Divinity students.
Equivalent Course(s): AASR 46635, RLST 26635, GLST 26635, RDIN 46635, ANTH 36635, SSAD 26635, RDIN 26635

ANTH 26701. Capitalism and the State. 100 Units.

What can historical ethnography teach us, about the origins of capitalism, sovereignty and corporations, and the past and future of planning? This course will examine transformative events: the advent and the abolition of British empire slavery. Whaling and its consequences. The "7 Years War" in India and America. The Mongol conquests. Also, twentieth century (c20) stock market crashes. The late c20 rise of global cities. China's c21 "Belt and Road Project." Cognizance of global warming. We will use transformative events to track the emergent assemblage of state and capitalist institutions, including money, markets and taxation, banks and stock markets, accounting and budgets. Like Weber, we will seek causal patterns in between determinism and serendipity. Following Veblen, we will focus on corporations and "New Deals."

Instructor(s): John Kelly
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 63701

ANTH 26710-26711. Ancient Landscapes I-II.

This is a two-course sequence that introduces students to theory and method in landscape studies and the use of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) to analyze archaeological, anthropological, historical, and environmental data. Course one covers the theoretical and methodological background necessary to understand spatial approaches to landscape and the fundamentals of using ESRI’s ArcGIS software, and further guides students in developing a research proposal. Course two covers more advanced GIS-based analysis (using vector, raster, and satellite remote sensing data) and guides students in carrying out their own spatial research project. In both courses, techniques are introduced through the discussion of case studies (focused on the archaeology of the Middle East) and through demonstration of software skills. During supervised laboratory times, the various techniques and analyses covered will be applied to sample archaeological data and also to data from a region/topic chosen by the student.

ANTH 26715. The Rise of the State in the Ancient Near East. 100 Units.

This course introduces the background and development of the first urbanized civilizations in the Near East in the period from 9000 to 2200 BC. In the first half of this course, we examine the archaeological evidence for the first domestication of plants and animals and the earliest village communities in the "fertile crescent" (i.e., the Levant, Anatolia, and Mesopotamia). The second half of this course focuses on the economic and social transformations that took place during the development from simple, village-based communities to the emergence of the urbanized civilizations of the Sumerians and their neighbors in the fourth and third millennia BC.

Instructor(s): G. Stein     Terms Offered: Winter
Note(s): This course fulfills the requirements of a survey course in Ancient Near Eastern civilizations as defined by the Ancient PhD programs in NELC and the MA program in the CMES.
Equivalent Course(s): NEAA 20030, NEAA 30030, ANTH 36715

ANTH 26765. Archaeology of Anyang: Bronzes, Inscriptions, and World Heritage. 100 Units.

Anyang is one of the most important archaeological sites in China. The discoveries of inscribed oracle bones, the royal cemetery, clusters of palatial structures, and industrial-scale craft production precincts have all established that the site was indeed the last capital of the Shang dynasty recorded in traditional historiography. With almost continuous excavations since the late 1920s, work at Anyang has in many ways shaped and defined Chinese archaeology and the study of Early Bronze Age China. This course intends to examine the history of research, important archaeological finds, and the role of Anyang studies in the field of Chinese archaeology. While the emphasis is on archaeological finds and the related research, this course will also attempt to define Anyang in the modern social and cultural contexts in terms of world heritage, national and local identity, and the looting and illegal trade of antiquities.

Instructor(s): Y. Li     Terms Offered: Winter
Note(s): Open to undergraduates with consent of instructor
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 36765, EALC 28010, EALC 48010

ANTH 26900. Archaeological Data Sets. 100 Units.

This course focuses on the methodological basis of archaeological data analysis. Its goals are twofold: (1) to provide students with an opportunity to examine research questions through the study of archaeological data; and (2) to allow students to evaluate evidential claims in light of analytical results. We consider data collection, sampling and statistical populations, exploratory data analysis, and statistical inference. Built around computer applications, the course also introduces computer analysis, data encoding, and database structure.

Instructor(s): Alice Yao
Prerequisite(s): Advanced standing and consent of instructor for undergraduates
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 46900

ANTH 26910. Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology. 100 Units.

How do we use language when we interact with others (and ourselves)? What lies beyond semantic meaning, or the presupposed function of language to deliver "information"? In this introductory course to the field of linguistic anthropology, we explore how power, inequality, and difference are enacted through various communicative features of human interaction-features that include, but are not limited to, what we refer to as "language." We ask how the things that we say (and how we say them) signal and shape our identities (such as race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, religion, and class). Furthermore, we investigate how language enacts forms of human relationality-forms that, among others, encompass solidarity, conflict, and hierarchy in face-to-face interactions as well as in mass-mediated productions. Through this course, student will engage with and analyze linguistic features of human interaction in their cultural and political contexts.

Instructor(s): Fadi Hakim
Equivalent Course(s): CHDV 26910, LING 26910

ANTH 27001. Intro To Linguistics-1. 100 Units.

TBD

Equivalent Course(s): LING 20100, SOSC 21700, ANTH 37001, LING 30100

ANTH 27010. It's Not What You Say, It's How You Say It": Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology. 100 Units.

Coming soon

Instructor(s): Constantine Nakassis
Note(s): This is considered as an "Introductory-Level" course for Anthropology Majors.

ANTH 27032. Bodies, Objects, Cognition. 100 Units.

This course explores the differences between objects and embodiment as examined in varied historical periods and artistic genres. We will probe the ontological indeterminacy of embodied beings versus machines in terms of agency, autonomy, subjectivity, and artificiality. Our main operative mode is a visual-verbal comparison and its perception. Through discussions of such visual strategies as pareidolia, abstraction, bodyscape, as well as the scientific phenomena of cloning and humanoid robotics, the course will destabilize once fundamental epistemologies to present a cognitive moment when the traditionally stable object-body dichotomy is understood anew as a dynamic site of affective, biological, representational, and mechanical relations. Visual artists, writers and critics studied will include Leonardo da Vinci, Hans Holbein, Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, Tadeusz Borowski, Stanislaw Lem, Allan Teger, Magdalena Abakanowicz, W.T.J. Mitchell and others. All readings are in English.

Instructor(s): Bozena Shallcross     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): REES 37032, KNOW 27032, REES 27032, ARTH 27032, KNOW 37032, ANTH 37032, ARTH 37032

ANTH 27116. Language and Migration: Individual, Social and Institutional Perspectives. 100 Units.

This class offers a broad range of perspectives on issues regarding language in the context of migration. For instance we analyze the ways in which language has been instrumentalized by Nation-States to regiment and restrain the mobility of targeted populations. We deconstruct the straightforward correlation between socio-economic integration and language competence in discourse produced by politicians and some academics alike. We also analyze how different types of mobility (e.g., slavery, colonization, and free individual migration) produce, at different times, differing sociolinguistic dynamics.

Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 37116, CHDV 30249, LING 30249

ANTH 27170. Verbal Art. 100 Units.

This course introduces linguistic patterns of speech play and verbal art (SPVA), including parallelism, jokes, language games, sound symbolism, puns, ideophones, poetry, and other expressive strategies. We examine how speakers of indigenous and minority languages around the world use these strategies in everyday speech, and discuss how native intuitions and interpretations of SPVA data provide a key to understanding epistemologies, social identities, power and inequalities, and language ideologies. Through a humanistic and scientific lens, we will theorize how SPVA pushes the boundaries of iconicity, creativity, and variation. The everyday use of SPVA becomes central to understanding the language, culture, society, and individual nexus.

Instructor(s): Natalia Bermudez     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): LING 27170

ANTH 27202. Language in Culture II. 100 Units.

This is the second part of a two-quarter sequence on the role of language in social life. This class is intended to explore current and emerging conversations in linguistic anthropology that exemplify, elaborate, extend, and trouble the terms, methods, and frameworks set out in the Language and Culture I. In this way, we will gain a greater facility in not only using these concepts and methods, but in thinking how to extend them into new empirical problem spaces. This quarter, our main themes will be: grammar, reference, and relativity; the acting and affected body; politics beyond identity; and digital life. By considering how linguistic anthropology has and has not been able to expand into these areas, we add to our semiotic toolkit and get a handle on what it means to do semiotic analysis. How are long-persistent problematics (the body) and contemporary transformations (screens, algorithms, and AI) inspiring innovative approaches to anthropologies of language and communicative interaction?

Instructor(s): Kamala Russell
Prerequisite(s): Language in Culture-1
Note(s): CHDV Distribution: 5*
Equivalent Course(s): LING 31200, CHDV 37202, PSYC 47002, ANTH 37202

ANTH 27216. Linguistic Anthropology of Education. 100 Units.

Students in this course will learn to think critically about the entangled roles of language and education in processes of sociocultural (re)production, that is, in how forms of social organization and collective meaning-making are produced and/or reproduced. Students will learn to analyze language use as a social activity: not merely as a code for referencing events in the world, but as a way of managing social relations. In reading about language in educational contexts, students will come to see how collectively held beliefs about language and language users inform moral, political, and often (de)racializing evaluations of better and worse ways of speaking, writing, teaching and learning, leading to differential educational opportunities, access, and outcomes. Education will be treated broadly, though there will be a focus on formal educational contexts. Nonetheless, the class will always challenge students to think about "the classroom," including our own, as continuous and contiguous with "the real world."

Instructor(s): Lily (Shenghe) Ye     Terms Offered: Spring. Offered Spring 2023
Equivalent Course(s): EDSO 23012, CHDV 23012

ANTH 27445. Whose Hybridity?: "Mixing" Language, Race, and Identity. 100 Units.

Throughout the modern world, members of racial, ethnic, and other groups perform their identities, in part, through the use of multiple languages or linguistic sub-varieties. It is a commonplace assumption that some of these performed identities-and their linguistic modes of expression-are "hybrid" or "mixed." Whether viewed as a cause for celebration or alarm, such assumptions often rely on the idea of previously "pure" things that were later made "hybrid." In various accounts in a range of media, "hybridity" spells the end of desirable ways of life, even the "natural order of things." In other accounts, "hybridity" is celebrated for producing novel relations between discrete categories, practices, and identifications. Yet upon closer inspection, even such supposedly "pure" categories themselves frequently turn out to be anything but "pure." This course will critically explore how "hybridity" is constructed as a matter of concern across a range of intellectual-, geopolitical-, cultural-, and media contexts. It focuses on language as a privileged marker of and resource in identity-construction, both self and other. This class uses theories and methods from anthropology, sociolinguistics, history, and sociology to explore how "hybridity" can be-and has been-used to construct social boundaries, exclusions, and erasures as much as solidarities, inclusions, and recognitions. The class focuses also on the material media in which these inclusions and exclusions are produced.

Instructor(s): Joshua Babcock     Terms Offered: TBD
Equivalent Course(s): CRES 27535

ANTH 27511. Writing Space, Ethnographically. 100 Units.

Ethnographic renderings of spaces, surroundings, place, setting, and location have clearly always functioned as more than narrative set dressing. Critical perspectives on ethnographic research and writing have pointed out the authorization, exotification, and material conditions of mobility that undergird the 'where' in 'being there'. However, contemporary anthropologists are writing space and place in ways that push ethnographic methods and writing past prior problematics and paradigms of comparison, localization, and totalizing description. How does space become an ethnographic doorway into questions of history, power, infrastructure, and affect?

Instructor(s): Kamala Russel

ANTH 27657. Rethinking Pilgrimage: Pop-culture Tourism and Religious Travel. 100 Units.

The term pilgrimage is usually associated with journeys to ancient religious sites such as the Vatican or Mecca. But why do superfans who travel to Disney World often describe this in terms of a pilgrimage? Why is it that when anime fans visit real-life sites from their favorite shows, this is frequently called a "journey to sacred sites" (seiichi junrei)? In this course we will discuss these and other questions about pilgrimage in its religious and secular forms. We will consider examples such as the Islamic Hajj, the Crusades, and a 750-mile Buddhist pilgrimage in Japan, alongside journeys to Platform 9¾ at King's Cross, Elvis's Graceland, and the sets of Hobbiton. After first exploring theories of travel, tourism, and pilgrimage through a global array of examples, the second half of the course consists of a deep dive into connections between anime tourism, religious travel in Japan, and the worldwide boom of Japanese pop culture. At the end of the course students will present a small research project on a pilgrimage/tourist destination of their own choosing. No prior coursework on religion required.

Instructor(s): Bruce Winkelman     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): RLST 27657, EALC 27657

ANTH 27910. Virtual Ethnography: Encounters in Mediation. 100 Units.

From everyday social media platforms like Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, and WeChat, to more complex real-time immersive social and gaming sites, virtual realms are propagating at a fantastic rate while transforming what it means to live and interact in the physical world. As such virtual world, communities, and spaces increasingly command our attention, time, and money, scholars from various fields have begun to tackle questions concerning the ethics, logics, patterns, and social specificity of the virtual through experimental forms of virtual ethnography. This advanced undergraduate course introduces students to some these recent ethnographies and corresponding theoretical interventions into the nature of collective techno-life within virtual realms. Students will build on this material in order to develop an ethnographic inquiry into a virtual world of their choosing. In so doing, they will work individually and as a class through the processes of pre-field planning, fieldwork, and post-field analysis and writing.

Instructor(s): Thomas Lamarre and Michael Fisch      Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): Consent of instructor required; email Professors Fisch and Lamarre a paragraph long description about what you bring and what you hope to get out of this seminar.
Note(s): Enrollment limit: 25
Equivalent Course(s): CDIN 27910, MADD 12910, EALC 27910, CMST 27910

ANTH 28110. Human Origins: Milestones in Human Evolution and the Fossil Record. 100 Units.

This course aims at exploring the fundamentals of human origins by tracking the major events during the course of human evolution. Starting with a laboratory based general introduction to human osteology and muscle function, the latest on morphological and behavioral evidence for what makes Homo sapiens and their fossil ancestors unique among primates will be presented. Our knowledge of the last common ancestor will be explored using the late Miocene fossil record followed by a series of lectures on comparative and functional morphology, adaptation and biogeography of fossil human species. With focus on the human fossil record, the emergence of bipedalism, advent of stone tool use and making, abandonment of arboreality, advent of endurance walking and running, dawn of encephalization and associated novel life histories, language and symbolism will be explored. While taxonomic identities and phylogenetic relationships will be briefly presented, the focus will be on investigating major adaptive transitions and how that understanding helps us to unravel the ecological selective factors that ultimately led to the emergence of our species. The course will be supported by fresh data coming from active field research conducted by Prof. Alemseged and state of the art visualization methods that help explore internal structures. By tracing the path followed by our ancestors over time, this course is directly relevant to reconnoitering the human condition today and our place in nature.

Instructor(s): Z. Alemseged. L.     Terms Offered: Autumn. Will be offered Autumn 2025. Offered every other year.
Prerequisite(s): Three quarters of a Biological Sciences Fundamentals Sequence, or consent of Instructor.
Note(s): E.
Equivalent Course(s): ORGB 33265, BIOS 22265

ANTH 28400. Bioarchaeology and Forensic Anthropology: Approaches to the Past. 100 Units.

This course is intended to provide students with a thorough understanding of bioanthropological, osteological and forensic methods used in the interpretation of past and present behavior by introducing osteological methods and anthropological theory. In particular, lab instruction stresses hands-on experience in analyzing human remains, whereas seminar classes integrate bioanthropological theory and its application to specific archaeological and forensic cases throughout the world. At the end of this course, students will be able to identify, document, and interpret human remains from archaeological and forensic contexts. Lab and seminar-format classes each meet weekly.

Note(s): This course qualifies as a Methodology selection for Anthropology majors.
Equivalent Course(s): LACS 38400, BIOS 23247, ANTH 38800, LACS 28400

ANTH 28929. Cabal, Cult, and Crisis: Religion and Contemporary Conspiracy Theory. 100 Units.

We live in an age of crisis for liberal democracy, and conspiracy theories are often said to be at the heart of this crisis. While Alex Jones, Infowars, and QAnon have become household names, there is still no consensus on what makes a "conspiracy theory" or how scholars should approach these topics. Are "New World Order"-style conspiracy beliefs irrational or false on their face? Can liberal-democratic regimes which pride themselves on their ability to accommodate diverse religious viewpoints successfully integrate conspiracy believers? In this course, we will approach the subject of conspiracy theory by engaging with theorists in their own words, videos, and images, while sampling a range of academic and public-facing literature on new religious movements, religion and politics, and epistemology. In so doing, we will apply critical lenses of diverse sorts to mixed media, as we collectively develop methodologies for carrying out original research on "low-status" subjects using un-curated archives. No prior acquaintance with conspiracy-oriented materials required.

Instructor(s): Justin Smolin     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): MADD 10929, RLST 28929

ANTH 29003. Islam Beyond the Human: Spirits, Demons, Devils, and Ghosts. 100 Units.

This seminar explores the diverse spiritual and sentient lifeforms within Islamic cosmology that exist beyond the human-from jinn, angels, and ghosts to demons and devils. We will focus on theological, scientific, philosophical, anthropological, and historical accounts of these creatures across a variety of texts, as well as their literary and filmic afterlives in contemporary cultural representations. In so doing, we consider the various religious, social, and cultural inflections that shape local cosmological imaginaries. We ask how reflecting on the nonhuman world puts the human itself in question, including such concerns as sexuality and sexual difference, the boundaries of the body, reason and madness, as well as the limits of knowledge.

Instructor(s): Alireza Doostdar and Hoda El Shakry     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): Enrollment by Consent Only (for both grads and undergrads). Students should send the instructors a paragraph explaining their interest and prior preparation or familiarity with the themes in the course.
Note(s): This course meets the LMCS or SCSR Committee distribution requirement for Divinity students.
Equivalent Course(s): ISLM 49003, KNOW 49003, ANTH 49003, NEHC 49003, RLST 29003, CMLT 29003, NEHC 29003, GNSE 29003, AASR 49003, CMLT 49003, GNSE 49003

ANTH 29024. The Election Race of 2024: Ethics, Religion, and the American Polity. 100 Units.

This course will follow the ongoing Presidential election of 2024 as it unfolds in real time during this quarter. We will read, as primary texts, newspapers from across the political spectrum and consider the claims therein. In parallel, we will explore theoretical and historical writing about democracy and its challenges. We will consider how religion and culture affect the American political process and critically examine social the competing truth claims and values that structure these processes.

Instructor(s): Laurie Zoloth     Terms Offered: Autumn
Note(s): Graduates can petition to enroll.
Equivalent Course(s): RLST 29024, AMER 29024

ANTH 29030. Islam, Race and Decoloniality. 100 Units.

This course explores western perspectives, attitudes and representations of Muslims and Islam from medieval European thought, through liberal colonial encounters to contemporary media and political discourses. Students will examine the intersection of race and religion as it applies to the construction of Muslim identity and alterity in the Western imagination. We will explore the remarkable consistency across centuries of the threatening, menacing, barbaric and uncivilized Muslim "Other". The course centers around these Orientalist constructions and will explore the power structures, colonial modalities, epistemological frameworks, and ideological assumptions that perpetuate the racialization of Islam and Muslims within the United States and abroad. This course ultimately aims to uncover potentials for resistance, recovery and renewal through the politics and praxis of decoloniality. Students will gain familiarity with decolonial theory and practices, as well as the important project of 'epistemic delinking' as it is framed by contemporary scholars intent on challenging, possibly undoing and remapping the Muslim experience within global liberal political modernity.

Instructor(s): Maliha Chishti     Terms Offered: Winter
Note(s): This course meets the SCSR Committee distribution requirement for Divinity students.
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 39030, RLST 29030, ISLM 39030, KNOW 39030, NEHC 39030, NEHC 29030, RDIN 39030, RDIN 29030

ANTH 29068. Christianity and Consumer Culture in the United States. 100 Units.

In the United States, everything is for sale-including religion. Religious books, objects, and films are produced and marketed to recruit converts and to entertain and edify adherents. Churches can be seen as commodities as people "shop" for a new congregation or sect. Some scholars have suggested that consumption itself has become a religious act, with its own rites, rituals, and promises of salvation. In this course we will explore the intersecting histories of Christianity and consumer culture in the US from the late nineteenth century to the present day. Reading classic texts in history and sociology, as well as more contemporary scholarship on American consumer culture, we will attend to the questions that consumer culture poses for American Christians and for scholars of religion. Has consumer culture contributed to the secularization of American society? Has Christianity been corrupted by consumer culture? Can Christians redeem the marketplace? How can the study of religion help us understand our culture of consumption, and how can consumerism help us understand religion?

Instructor(s): Hannah Ozmun     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): HIST 27721, AMER 29068, RLST 29068

ANTH 29109. Sex, Gender, and Kinship: Colonial Perspectives. 100 Units.

This course analyzes the contested relationships between gender, sexuality, kinship, and western colonialism from the early modern period through the twentieth century. Drawing on historical case studies, feminist theory, and postcolonial studies, this course will cover a broad range of empires and colonies to explore the mutually constitutive relationship between colonization and ideologies and practices of gender, sex, and kinship. Analyzing case studies predominately from the Atlantic World (with attention to colonies elsewhere), we will explore topics such as the emergence of colonial gender ideologies, gender and colonial governance, family life and kinship strategies, the intersectionality of gender and sexuality with race and class, queerness and queer lives, the politics of sex work and reproduction, and gendered migrations across empires.

Instructor(s): Lyons, Deirdre     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): RDIN 29109, HIST 39109, GNSE 23174, ANTH 39109, SOCI 30346, HIST 29109, RDIN 39109, GNSE 39109, MAPS 39109

ANTH 29900. Preparation of Bachelor's Essay. 100 Units.

Reading and Research course for Anthropology majors preparing to write a BA Essay.

Instructor(s): Select section from pull-down list under ANTH 29900 in the Time Schedule
Prerequisite(s): Consent of instructor and Director of Undergraduate Studies
Note(s): Students are required to submit the College Reading and Research Course Form. At the discretion of the instructor, this course is available for either a quality grade or for P/F grading. For honors requirements, see Honors section under Program Requirements.

ANTH 29910. BA Honors Seminar I. 100 Units.

This seminar is designed to prepare fourth-year Anthropology majors to write a compelling BA thesis. To that end, the course is structured as a writing workshop that addresses three key issues: First, we will focus on formulating a viable research question that can be interrogated in a 35-40 page paper; second, we will examine core anthropological research methods, paying particular attention to the relationship between questions and evidence; finally, we will consider the writing process (including aspects such as planning, outlining, and drafting) and modes of argumentation. In the first quarter, participants will work toward producing a 20-page first draft.

Instructor(s): Staff     Terms Offered: Autumn Winter
Prerequisite(s): Open only to fourth year anthropology students currently writing BA Essays
Note(s): Open only to students currently writing BA honors papers.

ANTH 29920. BA Honors Seminar II. 100 Units.

This workshop is for fourth-year Anthropology majors writing a BA thesis. It will extend the writing exercises begun during the fall BA workshop with a focus on revisions and expansions of the first draft of the thesis towards a near-final version.

Instructor(s): Staff