Anthropology Department

ANTH 201 - Topics in Contemporary Anthropology

Anthropology of Global Health
This course is designed to be a gateway course in cultural and medical anthropology geared toward first- and second-year students. Global health presents itself as a timely intervention that redistributes the means of physical and mental well-being to those who lack it, typically in resource-poor or underserved settings. But in what sense is global health "global" if it is driven by the agendas of specific nations and institutions? How can it command such implicit recognition as a force for good and yet seem to recapitulate the imperial agendas and perspectives of the colonial era? Rather than considering global health as obvious, coherent, and necessary, we will examine its foundations: What assumptions does global health reflect about bodies, families, history, and biomedicine itself? In what ways do global health programs build upon or distinguish themselves from colonial-era medical campaigns that tied biomedical interventions to Christianity, modernization, and the demands of industrial labor? How does global health both reflect and perpetuate transnational political and economic shifts? What are the unexpected consequences of global health programs-for the individuals who compose target populations, but also for global health professionals themselves as well as local experts? In exploring answers to these questions, we will draw on recent ethnographic analyses from around the world as well as historical studies that illuminate global health's antecedents.

Bodies, Spaces, Subjectivities
This course is designed to be a gateway course in cultural-phenomenological anthropology geared toward first- and second-year students. It introduces basic concepts and methods in anthropology through a sustained attention to human bodies as the preeminent space of subject making in different cultural contexts. Drawing on phenomenology, practice theory, urban studies, performance studies, and gender theory, the course approaches culture as a form of doing rather than of being, as first and foremost a set of embodied, material practices and cultivated dispositions. It explores both how corporeality connects people with others and their environments, and how, in the process, bodies become objects of individual attention and social action. Readings connect classics in social theory (Merleau-Ponty, Schutz, Bourdieu, Simmel, Goffman) with canonical anthropological texts (Boas, Sapir, Mauss, Gluckman, Sahlins), and ethnographies focusing on particular forms of embodiment and space making in the Americas, Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and Oceania. Topics include dwelling, working, playing, learning, making, modifying, exchanging, and contesting. Students will partner to conduct small fieldwork projects in the Portland area, learning basic qualitative methods in the process.

Decolonizing Archaeology
What do archaeologists do and what questions can archaeology answer? This introduction to archaeology course reviews the history, goals, theories, and methods of the discipline. Through a study of material culture and references to case studies from all over the world, we will review periods of human history and culture ranging from prehistory to the present using a decolonizing framework. We will unpack the colonial and imperialist histories of archaeology while highlighting the positive ways in which it has been practiced. We will also discuss how paleoarchaeologists investigate ancient human histories, zooarchaeologists study animal remains, archaeobotanists examine plant remains, and bioarchaeologists investigate ancestral remains. Students will be encouraged to draw on archaeological analyses from around the world to consider the ways in which identity, technology, diet, economy, trade, race, class, and gender are investigated archaeologically.

Global Political Ecology
This course is designed to be a gateway course in the anthropology of political ecology geared toward first- and second-year students. Despite enormous scientific and political efforts, scientists and activists have found themselves unable to bring about the political changes that might reverse climate change and environmental degradation. The degradation of earth's environment has been caused by humans, but somehow humans have not been able to stop or reverse the social processes that cause this degradation. This course examines case studies of environmental degradation at multiple scales, from Superfund sites in Oregon to deforestation in the Amazon to global climate change, to three ends: to explore fundamental questions in social theory about the relationship between humans and the world, to understand why coordinated scientific and political efforts to prevent environmental degradation have tended to fail, and to think through new political and environmental interventions that might succeed. The course readings are drawn from both environmental science and anthropology, and one of the tasks of the course is to introduce students to anthropology through the multiple ways in which the discipline has dealt with knowledge produced in the natural sciences. By putting environmental science in conversation with anthropology, we will also think through ways to reconcile the disciplines in political practice.

Language, Culture, Power - Website
This course is designed to be a gateway course in linguistic anthropology geared toward first- and second-year students. Language permeates our lives, identities, and relationships, yet most of us take it for granted. This course introduces students to some of the foundational concepts, methods, and issues addressed in linguistic anthropology. Starting with the basic premise that language, thought, and culture are inextricably intertwined in practice, we take a fundamentally comparative and global perspective on the study of language. We will consider language not as a simple means of communication, but as a medium through which values, subjectivities, and sociopolitical relationships are created and transformed. We ask: How do differences in language affect how we think and act? How do people do things with language, and how does this vary across cultures, times, and places? How does linguistic communication interact with nonverbal or embodied forms of communication? What ideologies of language shape our understandings of difference and hierarchy? In exploring answers to these questions, we will draw on media resources, natural language examples, and recent ethnographic analyses from around the world to consider the ways in which language is implicated in power struggles within specific domains of social relationships (race, class, gender, sexuality) and institutions (education, medicine, law, immigration, electoral politics).

ANTH 211 - Introduction to Anthropology: History, Theory, Method

An introduction to the history, theory, methods, and subject matter of the field of social and cultural anthropology. Students become familiar with the conceptual framework of the discipline and with some of its techniques of research and interpretation. Anthropology is considered in its role as a social science and as a discipline with ties to the humanities and natural sciences. Emphasis is on close integration of analytic abstractions with empirical particulars.

ANTH 305 - Musical Ethnography

See MUS 305 for description.

ANTH 306 - #CentralAmericanTwitter: Continuity and Rupture in Central American Indigenous Histories

Of the 250,000 Guatemalan migrants apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border between 2018 and 2019, many Americans may be surprised to learn that at least half are Indigenous, often with little fluency in Spanish and with a distinct cultural background. Understanding the forces driving this modern-day migration, and its effects on these Indigenous migrants, requires a historically situated understanding of Central American Indigeneity itself and its unique legacy within countries like Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. This course provides that historical background, beginning with the archaeology and ancient history of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica and continuing through the conquest of the Americas to the present day. By focusing on topics such as Indigenous culture, social inequality, and religion, we will track historical currents through time and discuss what effect they continue to have today. From this framing, we will use a multimedia approach that includes films, excerpts of novels, ethnographies, photographs, and social media to access firsthand accounts of the topics discussed in class.

ANTH 320 - Social Movements, Protests, and Historical Change in South Asia

The Arab uprisings, the Black Lives Matter movement, the ongoing student movement in India, and the rise of far-right movements in the United States and elsewhere have given a new urgency to an examination of the tactics and possibilities of mass movements and protests: How and why do large groups of people come together to protest? When and how do some people and issues become political, and when and how do they not? How and when are these movements successful in achieving their aims? What social, cultural, and political effects do they have beyond their explicit aims? How, finally, do these movements interact with existing state and legal structures, whether antagonistically or through participation and engagement? By examining South Asian social movements with a focus on India, this conference analyzes current and historical attempts to reconfigure the relationships between people, laws, and states. In the process, the conference engages with challenges facing anthropology in theorizing historical change and in finding methodologies suited to large- and multi-scaled social processes. South Asia, with its vast scale and its complex and constantly shifting political landscape, is both an ideal and an important site for these inquiries. This conference also serves as an introduction to the anthropology of South Asia. It begins with a historical and theoretical consideration of the play of domination and hegemony in the colonial period, moves to a study of nationalist movements in India and Bangladesh, and then draws on the theoretical frameworks studied in the beginning of the semester to consider a range of contemporary social movements, including the Indian Maoist uprising, Dalit and anticaste movements, and the Sri Lankan Civil War. This course asks what an anthropological approach to the specific and local can bring to the study of politics, and what a study of large-scale movements can bring to anthropological understandings of historical change.

ANTH 324 - Sport and Society

Sports are deeply entangled with and imbricated in social processes, cultural institutions, and everyday life across much of the globe. The course approaches sports play as a set of embodied practices and performances, as a primary site for the reproduction and innovation of fundamental categories of gender/sex/sexuality, class, race/ethnicity, and nationality. Through case studies of situated sporting practices (notably football/soccer, cricket/baseball, basketball, bodybuilding, boxing, capoeira, skateboarding, and parkour), we will examine how colonial legacies are literally embodied in contemporary forms of urban space, nationalism, and globalization.

ANTH 330 - Decolonizing Material Culture and Museums

What is material culture? How do people relate to the world through tangible and intangible heritage? How do museums navigate meaning making in their exhibits? This course explores the various active and recursive roles of "things" in shaping social worlds and sharing public stories. The goal of the course is to attain familiarity with museology and the theoretical perspectives therein. We will discuss the various critical perspectives on materiality and its role in museum interpretation. This course also explores historic and recent developments in museum practice, including the impacts of salvage ethnography, the rise of digitization, and the recognition of the rights of Indigenous peoples in museums.

ANTH 331 - Archaeology of Reed

This course is an introduction to the practice and process of archaeological fieldwork. Students will learn the foundational methods of archaeological recovery: survey, mapping, documentation, excavation, artifact identification, and artifact interpretation. The fieldwork will also extend beyond the excavation, as students will become familiar with political and ethical challenges and combine historical and archaeological sources in their research. Excavations will be done on the grounds of Reed College.

ANTH 332 - Mesoamerican Archaeology

This course serves as an introduction to the field of Mesoamerican studies, focusing on the peoples and cultures of this region that includes modern-day Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Belize, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. We will explore the development of the great Olmec civilization of the Gulf Coast, the city of Teotihuacan in central Mexico, the Maya civilization in Central America and the Yucatan Peninsula, and the Aztec Empire of central Mexico. Through studying these sites and cultures, we will investigate the political organization, economy, and belief systems of these ancient people through their material culture, architecture, and texts. We will also explore the ways in which archaeology is practiced in this region, focusing in particular on the questions and techniques that have shaped our knowledge of these ancient civilizations, while also being mindful and critical of the colonial and imperialist histories of archaeology. Though this course will primarily focus on Mesoamerica's pre-Columbian history, this course will also include frequent readings from colonial documents and modern-day ethnographies to explore how this ancient past remains relevant and impactful in the present.

ANTH 333 - Local and Global Indigenous Archaeologies

Colonial perspectives about hierarchies of human worth and worldviews shaped the creation of archaeology, and modern archaeologists are grappling with this legacy. This unit encourages students to explore the impacts of colonialism on the discipline and consider how archaeologists are taking steps to decolonize their methods and theories locally and globally. In focusing on both the global legacies of colonialism and the continued sociopolitical movements of Indigenous people, this class will encourage a broad perspective on Indigenous archaeologies through the use of place-based and theoretical discussions. This course expands on foundational archaeological concepts and key theoretical approaches of Indigenous scholars from across the globe. As part of this course, students will be asked to recognize the impacts of colonialism and imperialism and how Indigenous peoples enact sovereignty and self-determination. Students will lead class activities based on relevant case studies and archaeological sites in addition to creating written or podcast-style reflections based on weekly readings.

ANTH 334 - Queer Politics and Pleasures

Queerness speaks to bodily pleasures, longing, intimacies, affects, and desires that present an outside to cis-heteronormativity. Focusing on ethnography and history, this course examines how such sensations occur towards such lofty ambitions as sexual fulfillment, self-making, political uprisings, and world making. Exploring works in anthropology, art, film, television, music, and literature, this course tackles the intersections of queer theory, activism, and practices of everyday life as shaped across a range of cultures, places, and times. Central attention to race, gender, class, and the ongoing legacies of colonialism frame the course.

ANTH 335 - Digitizing the Past: Applied Archaeological Digital Heritage

Archaeological methodologies are ever-changing in today's world. Old ways of recording and interpreting archaeological data are being replaced by digital and computational methods. This course draws on visual approaches in anthropology and media studies to understand digital heritage practices in archaeology. We will survey digital tools and methods in analyzing the past, acquire a practical skill set, and discuss the challenges and opportunities of digital heritage applications in archaeology. We will cover issues of subjectivity, marginalization, sustainability, situated knowledge, ethnographic authority, and meaning making embodied in visual forms of communication and dataset management. In this course you will learn how to use a DSLR camera to compose photographs and create 3D models.

ANTH 337 - Black Ecologies in the Americas

Since the era of the Middle Passage, the survival, fates, and fortunes of Black communities throughout the Americas have turned on contested relations to landscapes-both rural and urban. Historical and ongoing legacies of coerced forms of racialized and gendered labor, as well as extractive (e.g., plantations, mines) capitalist political-economic structures too often overshadow co-occurring material and spiritual practices of care that constitute countermanding critical ecologies. This course explores myriad Afro-diasporic cultural forms of land use, land ownership, land occupation, and the significances of the environment in their diverse manifestations across South America and North America, including the Caribbean. Particularly, we will study such elements as contemporary environmentalist social movements, small-scale rural and urban farming, conservation, gastronomy and foodways, and notions of a Black commons, as well as Afro-spiritual conceptions of nature. Primary attention to the interstices of race, gender, sexuality, class, and the ongoing legacies of colonialism frames the course.

ANTH 341 - Medical Anthropology

This course will consider the ways in which medical anthropology has historically been influenced by debates within the discipline of anthropology as well as by broader social and political movements. Particular emphasis will be placed on the importance of viewing biomedicine as one among many cultural systems of healing. Some key issues we will explore include concepts of health, healing, and illness; the political economy of disease; the role of medicine in the state and citizenship; medicine's role in the assignment and mediation of deviance; applied medical anthropology; medical anthropology as ambassador and translator for biomedicine; and contemporary global health crises, including the HIV and TB pandemics.

ANTH 343 - African Pasts, African Futures

This course examines the ways Africans engage the past and imagine the future. How do the slave trade, colonial rule, anticolonial resistance, the development initiatives of the Cold War era, and lingering promises of modernity figure in Africans' perceptions, experiences, and visions of the world? The first goal of the course is to attend to the conditions of possibility that make African pasts and futures thinkable and inhabitable. We will examine the conceptions of time that have shaped Africans' lived experiences of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, giving close attention to the material and symbolic structures these conceptions have reflected and reinforced. Our second goal is to interrogate Africa as a site of knowledge production. What would it mean to decolonize African studies, or to center Africa in planetary accounts? Drawn from across sub-Saharan Africa, our readings foreground the work of African scholars and engage themes such as the significance of "custom" and "tradition," transformations in intergenerational relations, the ethics and politics of remembering and forgetting, the built environment as a site of memory and resistance, and the place of Africa in the world. Topics may include the politics of race and ethnicity, the appropriation of African knowledge in the colonial encounter, the consequences of colonial and postcolonial development projects, and efforts to decolonize higher education. The syllabus pairs works of empirical research with suggested contemporary African novels.

ANTH 345 - Black Queer Diaspora

This course examines ethnographies of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people across the Black diaspora. The history of colonialism, the transatlantic slave trade, and their ongoing aftermaths have created both interlinked and locally variant lifeways across the Americas, Africa, and Europe. Black queer studies queries the creativity and variation with which Black people have been shaped by and continuously reshape these histories, undermining presupposed norms of race, gender, and sexuality. We will look at ethnographic explorations of these particulars, differences, and commonalities as documented in texts, images, and sounds across multiple disciplines. We interrogate how conceptions of race, gender, and sexuality shift across time and space and as lived by Black social actors who both participate in and defy colonial and nationalist projects.

ANTH 347 - Outbreak, Emergency, Pandemic: Anthropology of Health Systems

In the past few decades, infectious diseases such as HIV, Ebola, and COVID-19 have illuminated the urgency of health systems research. These mass infections have also highlighted the strengths and weakness of different health systems, while also illustrating just how complex and unwieldy public health interventions can be. Even in supposedly "developed" or "wealthy" countries, public health interventions in mass infections can exacerbate existing inequalities along lines of race, class, and gender, sharpen political antagonisms, prop up cronyism, erode existing health services by redirecting resources in ways that negatively impact public health in the process, and radically transform how individuals and groups regard themselves and others. Ethnographic research provides a critical vantage point for thinking about what health policy and health systems do and what they mean beyond their stated intentions and actions. Focusing on epidemics past, present, and future, this class will pose the following questions: What can ethnographic research illuminate about health systems, particularly health systems under immense strain? What do strategies implemented to respond to mass infections tell us about how public health policymakers view the world, and the historical and political contexts that give rise to these visions? In what ways must ethnographers modify their research methodologies to respond to outbreaks of infectious disease? We will also explore different ways anthropologists engage with health policy making and health systems reform, and critically examine the ramifications of these engagements.

ANTH 349 - Time and Space

Introduction to classic and contemporary anthropological literatures on the sociocultural production and experience of time and space, supported also by readings from several allied disciplines. Emphasis is on forming propositions specific enough to be relevant to interpretation of concrete ethnographic materials. Topics of major concern include memory, ritual, narrative, deixis, chronology and time reckoning, embodiment, landscape, the turn (or return) to history in anthropology, and the spatiotemporal organization of contemporary industrial societies. Narrower subproblems receiving deepest consideration will vary in different years of offering.

ANTH 357 - Comparative Fascisms

This course attempts to provincialize the category of fascism, using it to analyze moments both historically and geographically distant from mid-twentieth-century Europe. We will begin with a set of historical apologetics and critiques from European fascists, American white supremacists, intellectuals associated with European imperialism, and right-wing nationalist intellectuals from across the globe, alongside their contemporary critics. Drawing upon the analyses we build of ideologies, tactics, and historical conditions of the various political projects, we spend the second unit of the course reading ethnographic accounts of contemporary fascist and right-wing movements from India, Europe, and the United States. We end the semester with readings from contemporary antifascist movements, comparing their analyses with those that have emerged from our readings.

ANTH 361 - The Middle East: Culture and Politics

The Middle East has been the focus of increased scrutiny over the past few decades in light of U.S. economic and political interests, and yet the region's internal cultural complexity is poorly understood and often overlooked. This course provides both an anthropological overview of the region's political culture and cultural politics, as well as a critical inquiry into the very anthropo-geographic categories that have historically sustained a sense of unity in the region, including tribalism, honor and shame, religious piety, and poetic practices. In the process, the course explores larger comparative issues of colonialism, nationalism, state formation, sectarianism, urbanism, and globalization.

ANTH 363 - Race and Transnational China

Debates about forms of perceived or imagined social difference have a long history among people who identify as Chinese, including negotiations of diasporic relations with a Chinese homeland, now claimed by the People's Republic of China (PRC). Those debates took on new urgency in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for Chinese intellectuals faced with the threat of Western colonialism, the imperative to establish a sovereign nation-state, and the concomitant rise of Western modernity discourses that were grounded in notions of essential biological differences hierarchizing human "races." Yet since the emergence of the PRC as global power in the 2010s and President Xi Jinping's effort to extend Chinese infrastructure development and investment programs to over 70 countries worldwide, transnational China has seen reintensified debates about social difference and the meaning of Chineseness, as well as the rise of new mass-mediated Han Chinese nationalisms. In this course we engage multimedia sources (texts, videos, images) to explore these most recent debates in historical context. We do this as a way to dialogue with critical race theory, and to delve into the high-stakes interpretive politics of "race" and "racism" transnationally. As many Chinese scholars and netizens ask: are these English language terms even applicable in the very different cultural, historical, and political economic contexts of transnational China? We start with comparative theoretical debates about the nature of "race" as historically situated perceptions and claims about biological/embodied difference. We then turn to debates in recent Chinese contexts to consider for example the relationship between discourses of "race" and "nation," the nature of "Han-ness," the status of "ethnic minorities," and the status of "Blackness" amidst increased Sino-African engagement. Our goal will be to expand our understandings of the stakes and contexts of cosmologies and ontologies of social difference and inequality transnationally.

ANTH 364 - Global Tibet through Film

Since the Dalai Lama fled to exile in India in 1959, Tibet and Tibetans have garnered emblematic status in global debates on Indigenous cultures and human rights. The widespread Tibetan unrest and subsequent military crackdown during China's "Olympic year" (2007-08) focused renewed international attention on the issue of Tibet in the face of China's rise as an important political and economic power. Meanwhile, tightening political constraints and rapid development under President Xi Jinping (2013-) have ushered in a new and complicated era for the transnational Tibetan community. Yet Tibet has long been both a cosmopolitan place and an object of translocal interest and desire. This course draws on visual and multimedia approaches in anthropology and media studies to understand the global roles of Tibet and Tibetans in specific historical and ethnographic contexts. We center the analysis and production of film and video as mediums for exploring ongoing, transnational debates about Tibetanness amidst rapid sociopolitical and economic change. The course pairs film screenings with relevant ethnographic and historical readings, as well as a variety of other media such as literature, popular songs, websites, and blogs from inside and outside of China. We focus on films, especially by Tibetan filmmakers, that address the historical and contemporary diversity among Tibetans across the Himalayan region and into the diaspora, as well as the changing political economic conditions of interethnic and Chinese-Tibetan relations. Students will propose, receive training in, and workshop a semester-long short film/video project about a film on Tibetans of their choice.

ANTH 365 - The Anthropology of Development in Post-Mao China

Website

Since the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, state leaders have struggled to chart a course to a Chinese modernity that would break with the perceived humiliations of European domination in the nineteenth century and bring China commensurate status in a newly configured world stage of nations. Since Deng Xiaoping's post-Mao reforms in the early 1980s, the PRC has been one of the fastest growing economies in the world. As such, it is poised to have major impacts globally, and especially since the PRC's entrance into the World Trade Organization in 2001, these meteoric socioeconomic changes have complex implications for its diverse 1.4 billion people, as well as for many communities abroad now impacted by the expanding reach of Chinese investment and development efforts. This course draws on anthropological theories of modernity, capitalism, globalization, and development to turn a critical eye on discourses and practices of "development" in the PRC. Drawing on theoretical, historical, and ethnographic writings, as well as on other media such as government policy papers, advertising, and documentary and feature films, we consider the contexts and contradictions of various development efforts just before, during, and after the Maoist period, focusing especially on the post-Mao era of economic reforms. The PRC thus will serve as a case study for our broader examination of theories conceptualizing the relationships among transregional capitalisms, changing forms of governance, and local communities' experiences.

ANTH 374 - Urban Anthropology

The course provides an introduction to urban anthropology, with a particular focus on the colonial and postcolonial metropole as an exemplary site for the reciprocal influences of global and local processes. It explores how the city functions simultaneously as a locus for the negotiation of cultural diversity and for utopian ideals of rational communication. Drawing from cases throughout the "developed" and "developing" worlds, the course examines how urban culture is produced and reproduced under regimes of industrialization, colonialism, modernism, and globalization.

ANTH 375 - Anthropology of Science

This course examines scientific practices and knowledge as cultural, social, and political phenomena. Scientific knowledge often appears to be none of these things, and so central questions of the course are how such knowledge is produced and how it is able to transcend its context. The course begins with a set of orienting texts from Kuhn, Foucault, and Latour before turning to ethnographic and historical work on science and expertise, with an emphasis on feminist and postcolonial approaches. Along the way, we ask how the questions and methods drawn from the study of science can reshape larger anthropological understandings of the political and the social.

ANTH 376 - Situating Climate Change

The latest manifestation of humanity's self-induced existential threats emerges in the form of climate change: a planetary-scale phenomenon that profoundly impacts both humans and nonhumans across the board in fundamental ways. Yet climate change, its effects, and the consequences of its mitigation strategies are experienced differently in different places and communities. As such, climate change evokes a curious moment, simultaneously reviving old inequalities, binaries, debates, tensions, divisions, and reflexes while presenting opportunities to transcend them and forge new collaborations and alliances. This course seeks to sociopolitically and spatiotemporally situate this moment by approaching climate change not as a singularity, but as a multiplicity: a complex, multifaceted, and heterogeneously distributed crisis with diverse voices and perspectives. By exploring a range of political, ecological, scientific, humanistic, and more-than-humanistic themes-such as the dichotomies of nature versus culture, facts versus fictions, science versus art, and "hard" versus "soft" sciences, as well as the concepts of post-truth, technofix, and climate change mitigation as a neocolonial practice-this course aims to develop a transdisciplinary approach to better understand the climate crisis.

ANTH 378 - Nature, Culture, and Environmentalism

Western epistemology is considered to be based on a strict separation and opposition between nature and culture. While this divide is under increasing scrutiny in the face of the climate crisis in the Anthropocene, anthropology has long been a pioneer in challenging and dismantling this binary. This course examines canonical and contemporary anthropological approaches to the concept of nature and human relations with the natural environment. We will discuss how conceptions of nature are always shaped, transformed, and produced by historically situated social relations and how such conceptions, in turn, shape environmental struggles across the globe. Course materials focus primarily on ethnographies from the global South oriented towards the intersections of political ecology and environmental justice, science and technology studies, postcolonial theory, and more-than-human perspectives. Course topics include the history of the Western nature-culture binary and its critiques and recent environmental scholarship on issues such as agro-food systems, extractive conflicts, toxicity, genetic engineering, climate change, disasters, microbial lives, and multispecies entanglements.

ANTH 379 - Resource-Making through the Mediterranean

Through the ages, the Mediterranean Sea has been a conduit of interaction rather than an obstacle, connecting continents, peoples, ecologies, resources, and politics. This course examines the interplay between power relations and natural resources in the Mediterranean region by surveying works in anthropology, history, human geography, and political ecology. Scholars have examined natural resource management from international relations, geopolitical, or political economy perspectives for decades. Recent scholarship brings other critical approaches to bear on the discussions of environment and politics in the Mediterranean region. Focusing on this rising critical scholarship, we will elaborate on how water, oil, coal, land, forests, fisheries, agriculture, and solar energy - among others - are made into sources of political power at scales ranging from everyday life to national and transnational politics. By challenging the "naturalness" of resources, we will reflect on what a natural resource is and how it connects with sociocultural practices, power relations, and historical processes. In this course, we will focus on the Mediterranean to explore themes and concepts such as colonialism, nationalism, power, resistance, access, scarcity, abundance, pollution, and temporality through the lenses of critical social studies on natural resources.

ANTH 391 - Legal Anthropology

The course examines the concept of legality as a social institution and a prominent feature of popular culture. Beginning with the emergence of legal anthropology and its history within the larger discipline, the course will focus on the relationships human actors have with the law as both an embedded social institution, and a disembodied set of authoritative doctrines. The course will orient students to productive ways of studying law and legality anthropologically. Topical areas will include Rule of Law, crime and punishment, sovereignty, alternative legal institutions, colonial and postcoloniality, environmental law, and transnationality.

ANTH 395 - Globalization

This course is an introduction from an anthropological perspective to recent theories and debates about the nature of "globalization." What is "globalization?" Why has this term become so prevalent in social theory and popular discourse in the past 20 years? What competing worldviews and political economic visions does it encompass? Beginning with influential debates outside of anthropology, we move quickly to consider the criticisms and alternatives offered by anthropologists and their interlocutors, especially since the late 1980s. Drawing on the recent spate of theoretical literature, ethnographies, and award-winning films on globalization and capitalism at a variety of scales, discussions and written assignments will address some of the most pressing and conflictual issues facing humankind today. How new are the translocal processes now labeled "globalization?" What is the nature of capitalism in a so-called "postcolonial" or "neoliberal" age? How are new forms of infrastructure, networks, economic development, and exploitation connecting different regions of the world? What forms of social and spatial mobility are emerging? What are the roles of both national states and transnational organizations and associations in these changes? How are forms of racial, ethnic, and gender difference constructed through these processes? What alternatives and resistances have been constructed? While course readings will touch on perspectives from a variety of disciplines, the course is designed to provide a specifically anthropological lens on these issues.

ANTH 397 - Media Persons Publics

The meteoric rise of new forms of digital data and social media in the past 20 years has generated, on the one hand, fantasies of utopic intimacy (the immediacy promised in a new "global village"), and on the other, moral panics about unprecedented estrangement (the hypermediation of virtual worlds and corporate or government "big data"). In this course, we challenge this dichotomy of intimacy/immediacy versus estrangement/mediation by taking an anthropological approach to the question of human communication. Drawing on interdisciplinary debates in philosophy, linguistic anthropology, and media studies, we develop tools for understanding all communication as both mediated and material, grounded in embodied practices and technological infrastructures and situated in historical events. This in turn will allow us to grasp how circulations of media forms and commodities participate in the creation of types of persons and publics across multiple scales of time and space. Bringing those theoretical and methodological debates into dialogue with ethnographic studies and other forms of media, we ask: How do people sense and interpret themselves, others, and their worlds? What is the boundary between the human and nonhuman in a digital age? What roles do states or transregional capitalisms play in the mediation of valued and devalued persons and publics? What are the possibilities for communication amidst great gaps in access to valued forms of media?

ANTH 411 - The Politics of World Making: Semiotics, Pragmatics, Performance

Anthropologists have long been interested in humans' dynamic efforts to create multidimensional social worlds amid ongoing contestation. Yet early attempts to account for this cultural politics of world making were obscured in favor of conveniently static representations of bounded "cultures" or/as "races," and dualistic understandings of sociocultural structures versus individual actions or intentions. This course considers "semiotics," "pragmatics," and "performance" to be methodological rubrics that have grouped together a wide variety of social theorists who have focused instead on the emergent and contested nature of all meanings, persons, and places as they are interpreted in everyday and ritualized speech, practice, and performance. The course brings linguistic anthropological methodologies into dialogue with critical race theories since the early twentieth century to interrogate the possibilities and limits of anthropological world making in the face of Western theorists' complicities with modernist white supremacy. Moving from key foundational texts in the science and philosophy of language, social action, and subjectivity to more recent theoretical and ethnographic work, we rethink language and semiotics as social action, the nature of context and interpretive politics, the relationships between formal events or performances and everyday life, and the precarious, often violent creation of selves and others. By directing analytic focus to the indeterminacy, ambiguity, and multiplicity inherent to social life and weaponized or erased in racialized political economic orders, the course challenges students to reconsider some of the central issues in anthropological theory, such as agency, identity, power, and resistance.

ANTH 415 - Risk and Uncertainty

Risk has become a major theme shaping our contemporary life. The climate crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic are two most recent contentious domains where the intimate and the personal are entangled with the global scale through risk. But what is risk? Is it an external reality that can be objectively calculated? Is it a subjective experience lived and assessed differently across the globe? Is it the primary qualifier of our late modernity? What are the interplays between the notions of risk, uncertainty, and danger? This course unpacks the sociopolitical worlds of risk. Through ethnographic and science and technology studies (STS)-informed accounts across the globe on various topics such as health, toxicity, disasters, economics, safety, security, and climate, we will scrutinize the multifaceted aspects of risk. By examining competing social theories of risk, ethnographic studies of culturally diverse ways of assessing and managing risks, historical analyses of how risk emerges as a techno-political domain of intervention, and STS accounts of how risk expertise is created and circulated, this course divulges the polysemous, productive, and ultimately contentious life of risk.

ANTH 425 - Marx from the South

This course engages with a long history of Marx and political economic thought in relation to the global South. The course is organized around key concepts, such as labor, value, capital, property, and class. We examine these concepts through readings of foundational texts in political economy including Marx, Locke, and Smith and the historical context of empire in which these texts were written. Alongside this historical context, we examine these concepts as they have been drawn upon analytically by anthropologists working on and politically by social movements working in the global South.

ANTH 432 - Archaeological Method and Theory

This course is a survey of the aims, methodology, theory, and practice of archaeology with a focus on the key questions of contemporary archaeological research. We will begin the semester by considering the broad goals of the discipline and review the diverse kinds of data that can help address questions about the past. We will then turn towards reviewing various archaeological approaches that investigate those data, focusing on methods for 1) understanding the sediment and stratigraphy of sites, 2) the materials and artifacts found therein, and 3) the contextualization of those remains within the broader landscape. In addressing these various methods, we will explore how theoretical approaches influence the kinds of questions that are asked in archaeology and the kinds of interpretations that are made. By doing so, we will emphasize throughout the semester the interdisciplinary nature of archaeology and the broad kinds of issues and topics to which it can be applied.

ANTH 442 - Ontological Politics

This course offers a critical examination of anthropology's recent "ontological turn," notable for the influence of such scholars as Philippe Descola and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. Challenging universalist assumptions that posit an inert and inanimate world of objects as a backdrop to human action, the study of the cultural and historical specificity of ontologies presents alternative views about the nature of what exists. Observing the things that populate, and the processes that make, the lived and known experience of anthropology's ethnographic subjects draws attention to contrasting knowledge regimes. Consideration of alternate ontologies allows Euro-modernity's "others" articulation of their own bases of knowledge, logics of practice, and courses of action. However, how anthropologists approach such considerations entails its own sets of political terms and stakes in knowledge production. This seminar examines anthropological debates about how to analyze and address the political tensions that arise in settings where nonmodern beings and forces are recognized and addressed by "other" political actors.

ANTH 461 - Theories of Practice

Social theorists have long struggled with delineating the precise relationship between social structure and human agency in the explanation of extant cultural forms and their transformations over time. This course explores one set of proposed solutions generally classified under the rubric of "practice theory." Building from the social philosophies of Elias, Bourdieu, Giddens, and de Certeau, the course examines how practice theory has informed anthropological inquiry and constituted a response to seemingly determinist theories of human behavior associated with structuralism and structural functionalism. Contemporary anthropological work by Marshall Sahlins, Sherry Ortner, and the Comaroffs, among others, will be read in light of earlier disciplinary engagement with the structure-agency question, including by Manchester School ethnographers.

ANTH 465 - Suffering, Narrative, and Subjectivity

"The subject living in pain, in poverty, or under conditions of violence or oppression," Joel Robbins contended a decade ago, "now very often stands at the center of anthropological work." This course examines the emergence of what Robbins calls "the suffering slot," that is, the displacement of difference in late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century anthropology as the discipline's organizing principle, and a reorientation toward universal human vulnerability. Our concern is with how this turn has shaped both the substantive and ethical contours of anthropological investigation and ethnographic writing: What can, and ought, anthropologists know and say about the world and those who inhabit it? What can, and ought to, be the relationship between anthropologists and their objects of study? We will give particular attention to philosophical arguments that emphasize the ineffability of suffering-that is, the ways that suffering defies narrative-and the implications of these arguments for theories of subjectivity. Of particular interest is how these ideas have shaped the generic conventions that have emerged in anthropological studies of suffering, and how these conventions in turn reflect a particular moment in anthropology's self-understanding as a discipline.

ANTH 470 - Thesis

ANTH 481 - Independent Reading

ANTH 548 - Sport and Social Life

Sports are a central aspect of ritual form and everyday life in a large number of societies across the globe. The course approaches sports play as a fundamental practice of modern social formation and social reproduction. Through case studies of situated sports practices (notably football/soccer, cricket/baseball, basketball, bodybuilding, boxing, and skateboarding/parkour) in a variety of societies (U.S., Europe, Caribbean, South America, Africa, and South Asia), it examines key issues in the cultural study of modernity: gender/sexuality, race/ethnicity, class/stratification, violence, (post-)colonialism, nationalism, and globalization. The course introduces students to phenomenological approaches to social life, approaching culture as an embodied mode of practice rather than only or primarily a cognitive field of knowledge.