Average credit card debt of Americans is $16,000; average college loan debt $30,000. How and why do people go into debt? Why is debt negatively linked to "usury" in some cultures while in others not having debt is a mark of being "underleveraged"? How can "debt" sometimes be an instrument of social solidarity and other times be a source of social discord? In this course we will draw on history, political theory, economics, and anthropology to look at debates about "debt" in different places and times as diverse as 4th century Greece, 18th century England, 19th century Egypt, and the 2008 Financial Crisis and its aftermath around the world.

This seminar takes up the connection between authority and obligation as a cultural question. We draw on diverse sources (anthropology, case studies, social theory, literature, public documents, art, etc.) to probe conceptual and real-life gray zones between individual and community, liberty and constraint, state and private sector. We consider formal and informal institutions (e.g., courts, legislatures, police, workplaces, families) and a range of formal and informal norms (from court rulings to common sense). Authority and obligation emerge as complex social relations that shape and are shaped within and across cultural contexts.

This course concerns how "experience" becomes ethnographic "evidence" and how the immediacies of participant-observation fieldwork bear on wide-angle questions about power/value hierarchies, historical and cultural context, and societal dynamics. Readings align with weekly memo and journal writing to cultivate students' ethnographic awareness of their own and others' embodied knowledge and the ethics, politics, and symbolic taken-for-granted dimensions of relationships, language, and more.

This course deals with difficult questions of how urban social justice is understood, demanded, pursued and meted out. The UN reports more than 1/2 the world's population lives in cities, a transformation esp. profound in Lat. America. We will critically assess both this urban terrain and the tools/theories we use to apprehend it, from 'environmental racism' to 'circuits of capital', and from the 'Pink Tide' to the 'postpolitical'. We will engage distinct approaches to social justice at scales ranging from hyper-local to inescapably-global, and explore justice and its antipodes through case studies of actually existing Lat. American cities.

We survey the Amazonian region as the product of dynamic historical, economic, and ecological processes, focusing on how ethnographic traditions have contributed to its construction. From accounts of shamanism to reflections on the ethics of ethnographic fieldwork, anthropological debates around Amazonian cultures have animated broader discussions about the consequences of resource exploitation, the boundaries of nature and culture, and what it means to be human. We identify some traditional themes of Amazonian anthropology and examine emerging spaces, actors, and questions that continue to make the region relevant to anthropological inquiry.

How do anthropological theories generate and critique the production of knowledge? How do diverse orientations seek to illuminate and question fundamental concepts and categories of social life, such as culture, power, agency, subjectivity, collectivity, and consciousness? This course examines key theoretical approaches that anthropologists have innovated. It also draws upon signal writings from social theory more broadly, tracing the dynamic interplays and engagements of anthropology with work in related fields. We attend throughout to the broader social and political contexts of theoretical developments.

This course introduces students to classic and recent theoretical debates about secularism and secularization. We will consider a range of historical-ethnographic examples, focusing particularly on the limits of secularism in its modern encounter with Islam and Muslim communities in North Africa, the Middle East, Europe and North America. By comparing the realities of everyday life in a variety of national contexts, we will ask what secularism offers as a human way of experiencing the world, a mode of legitimating norms and constructing authority, and a method of telling stories and creating myths about human values and historical progress.

Nothing in the lifespan of humans is as revealing on the interface of culture and biology as is death and the experience of death. This course will explore death from a bio/cultural perspective, including the evolution of life history (ageing, demography - mortality), as well as an archaeological perspective (prehistory) and early history of mortuary practices. This course is concerned not specifically with how an individual experiences death, but in the ways in which culture and biology have come to define and deal with physical death and the death experience.

Recently populist movements have gained prominence in both Europe and the USA, having inflected the political landscapes of these two regions in arguably irreversible ways. There are important differences between so-called right wing and left wing populism; the similarities, however, are equally salient: they both, appeal to a seamless "people" as the undivided source of sovereignty; draw on a a friend/enemy political logic; reject all forms of mediation in favor of the direct communication between authoritarian leaders and their followers. This course explores this emergent populism both empirically and theoretically.

What theoretical approaches are available to ethnographers for making sense of race and inequality? This class places Critical Race Theory in conversation with foundational anthropological theories of race and ethnicity. Students in this course explore the usefulness of contemporary legal theory, structuralism, pragmatism, Marxian analysis, and interpretivism for understanding and writing about race and difference.

The course considers the ethical predicaments of medicine and public health in the context of global inequality, aging, and medical entrepreneurialism. Increasingly sophisticated forms of bio-medical care shape our lives and alter social relationships, producing both harm and benefit. New medical treatments are generated continually through research and clinical trials. Topics include: ethics of population health; chronicity vs. acute disease; anthropology of capitalism; big food, big agriculture; environmental toxins; embodied health movements; citizen science; life extension; pharmaceuticalization; and moves to "demedicalize" health.