This course is an introduction to anthropology and key topics in becoming and being human. Anthropology looks at the human experience through diverse lenses integrating biology, ecology, language, history, philosophy, and the day to day lives of peoples from across the globe. Anthropology has things to say about being human, it seeks to make the familiar a bit strange and the strange quite familiar. We will take critical reflexive and reflective approaches in asking about key aspects of being human (like war/peace, race/racism, sex/gender, childhood/parenting, religion and the human imagination, and human relations to other species).

From wearable devices that count our steps, to social media platforms that monetize our interactions, to iris scanners and ID cards at airports/prisons, our world is abundant with objects designed to classify, catalogue, and altogether surveil us. In this class, we apply anthropological theories and perspectives to track how systems and sites of surveillance shape what is considered normal, healthy, safe, pathological, dangerous, deviant throughout the world. In turn, we explore surveillance as a fruitful lens for thinking about the relationship between science, technology, perception, the body, cultural context, social relations, and power.

What is the relationship between 'catastrophe' and human beings, and how has 'catastrophe' influenced the way we live in the world now? This course investigates various types of catastrophes/disasters around the world by mobilizing a variety of theoretical frameworks and case studies in the social sciences. The course uses an anthropological perspective as its principal lens to comparatively observe often forgotten historical calamities throughout the world. The course is designed to explore the intersection between catastrophe and culture and how catastrophic events can be a window through which to critically analyze society and vice versa.

This seminar traces the historical roots and growth of the Black Lives Matter social movement in the United States and comparative global contexts. The movement and course are committed to resisting, unveiling, and undoing histories of state sanctioned violence against Black and Brown bodies. The course seeks to document the forms of dispossession that Black Americans face, and offers a critical examination of the prison industrial complex, police brutality, urban poverty, and white supremacy in the US.

This course draws on anthropology, history, critical theory, films and documentaries, fictive and journalistic writing to explore violence, its power and meaning. We will explore conquest and colonialism, genocidal violence, state violence and political resistance, everyday violence, gendered violence, racialization, torture, as well as witnessing and repair. Building across disciplines and working with heterodox theoretical frameworks (post-colonial/decolonial, non-Western, feminist, and indigenous approaches), this course invites us to understand violence in its multifaceted physical, symbolic, social, political and cultural manifestations.

This course introduces students to the analytical and writing skills they will need to pursue independent work in their study of anthropology. Students will learn how to develop a research question, locate and analyze relevant sources, and situate their interests in relation to anthropological debates and concepts. Students apply these skills to develop their own research proposal on a topic of their choice. This course will be structured around three key questions: How do you start a research project? What makes it anthropological? How do you contribute to a scholarly conversation?

Ethnography is a qualitative method for finding patterns in complicated field data. This course teaches students how to perform rigorous and ethical ethnographic methods for research and application. Students first learn the history and tools of anthropological methods. They are then introduced to case studies where ethnographic methods were used for business, policy development, leadership, and product design. Finally, students develop their own ethnographic research projects. This course is designed for non-anthropology majors or anthropology majors who are unable to take ANT 300 in their junior year.

This course addresses the social relations and cultural contexts in which mental health, mental illness, and medical knowledge about the psyche are entangled and produced. We engage cross-cultural approaches to mental conflicts and pathologies: psychoanalysis, biomedical psychiatry, ethnopsychiatry, transcultural psychiatry, and religious and 'alternative' practices of diagnosis and healing. Drawing on ethnographic and clinical studies as well as documentary films, we examine how lines are drawn between normal and pathological, and explore the intertwining of psyche, body, and morality in human experience and behavior.

In the U.S. and Europe, far right activists use "free speech" to justify hate speech. But haven't understandings of free speech changed over time as countries authorize speech differently? How have Western histories of racism and colonialism shaped what counts as acceptable speech, particularly if violence ensues? We use comparative studies of racist and Islamophobic hate speech to examine different cultural approaches to managing speech and how these rules are contested/challenged by popular countermobilizations. We theorize intersections of racism, liberalism, speech from scholars of post-colonialism, anti-black racism, and feminist theory.

In almost every human society, women are expected to perform different tasks than men. Was there a biological or cultural reason for this? True - women are the only sex to give birth to date, but does that mean there is no escape from traditional sex roles? In this class we will explore female behavioral biology from an evolutionary and biocultural perspective. We will pair physiology and life-history theory with cultural outcomes to engage with feminism and social and political debates. Topics include menstrual taboos, sexual differentiation and gender identity, reproduction, contraception, women's health, workplace equality, etc.

How do people apprehend signs, traces or apparitions that emanate from what we might call the spiritual, sublime or mystical realms? How does 'seeing' or otherwise sensing the mysterious register within broader regimes of knowledge, power and truth? This course explores dimensions of key enigmas that transect spirituality, consciousness and fields of vision across cultural and historical settings. It foregrounds anthropological work, but it also draws upon related work in history, philosophy, literature, psychoanalysis, and film. Topics include mysticism, vitality, dreams, presence, healing, mediums, initiations, and transcendence.

Social scientists use ethnographic methods to describe and analyze the range and variation of daily interactions in schools. Ethnographic study allows researchers the opportunity to examine power dynamics that influence the daily life of students, teachers, administrators and parents. Vivid, critical ethnography helps us discover how cultural traditions, expectations, and opportunities are passed down to the next generation and how they impact school outcomes. This class will explore educational ethnography and students will complete observation hours in local schools and prepare a descriptive, mini-ethnography of a school community.

This course begins with a discussion of the current state of affairs in anthropological theory to ask what lines of thought got us to where we are today. This includes situating anthropological theory within the context of social and political theory and seeing how post-structuralism, post-colonial theory, black studies, and feminism reshaped the discipline in a variety of ways. Throughout will aim to give students sharper tools to utilize the analytic power of theory to consider problematics of the field of anthropology writ large today, and to mobilize in the writing of the independent work in anthropology.

This seminar focuses on the social institutions and symbolic meanings of gender, sexuality, family, and the household through the lenses of race, culture, and historical contexts. We will study how understandings of masculinity and femininity, the orientation of desire, sexual acts, and sexual identities impact gender roles in the household across various cultural and social contexts. We will ground our work in historical and ethnographic research on the connections between colonialism, chattel slavery, capitalism, and gender, sexual relations, and the family.

This seminar forges new ways of engaging with data as a cultural fact and for creating new forms of ethnography. As the world rapidly yet unevenly becomes experienced and ordered through data, we study how diverse data practices around the world are redefining power, personhood, and data itself. Based on critical analyses of datafication, we explore hands-on the possibilities and problems for incorporating data as a form of evidence in person-centered ethnography. Further, if data visualization has become a potent social force, we pursue its techniques as a form of analysis, knowledge expression and as a tool to confront vital social issues.

Bharatanatyam, butoh, hip hop, and salsa are some of the dances that will have us travel from temples and courtyards to clubs, streets, and stages around the world. Through studio sessions, readings and viewings, field research, and discussions, this seminar will introduce students to dance across cultures with special attention to issues of migration, cultural appropriation, gender and sexuality, and spiritual and religious expression. Students will also learn basic elements of participant observation research. Guest artists will teach different dance forms. No prior dance experience is necessary.

Japan became the first non-Western nation to industrialize and modernize in the late 19th century, determined to fend off colonization. Decades later, Japan challenged Americans to imagine alternative futures through its economic success and later its "soft power." The course will consider change and continuity in Japan and how Japan's current status as a stable, slowly growing economy informs our views of capitalism and society in the current era. Topics include gender, labor, and corporate welfare; youth socialization; marriage and divorce; race, "Japaneseness" and citizenship; diasporic identities; sub-cultures and popular culture.

This course offers an introduction to the theory, ethics, and history of the idea of international protection, while looking specifically at how Central Americans have engaged with the US asylum system over time. We will study the origins of the ideas of refugee protection, who is understood to qualify and why, how that has changed over time, and what this means for a broader understanding of human rights across borders. In collaboration with local asylum attorneys, students will get hands on experience conducting research and putting together reports to assist in real cases and, if conditions permit, we will attend immigration court.

This course examines pandemics, diseases, and other global health concerns through the lens of multispecies relations. We study knowledge production (epistemology) throughout this course, the cultural structures that make certain "ways of knowing" possible, and the shifting boundaries of knowing and being provoked by modes of inquiry centering multispecies entanglements. We consider the ongoing effects of environmental change and the world-making knowledge practices of experts that drive new perspectives on global health. Finally, we reflect critically on multispecies care and the future of planetary health. First-year students are welcome.

This course presents a cross-disciplinary and multi-modal approach to African music, dance, and culture. Co-taught by a master drummer and choreographer (Tarpaga) and an ethnomusicologist (Steingo), students will explore African and African diasporic performance arts through readings, discussions, listening, film analysis, music performance, and composition.

This course exposes students to the historical, ethnic, linguistic, and cultural factors that have shaped Indigenous Amazigh communities in Tamazgha (North Africa) and its diasporas. It examines the role that Amazigh communities have played in revitalizing their cultures in contemporary Tamazgha and makes visible the acknowledgement the Amazighity of lands in North Africa and complexities of language, cultural identity, and colonialism in the region. Many resources in the source will be taken from the instructor's talks with family members, other Indigenous scholars, and activists in the community.

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.

First term of a year-long course on sociocultural anthropology, required of first-year graduate students in anthropology and open to graduate students from other disciplines with the permission of the instructor. The seminar focuses on innovations in anthropological theorizing through writings that have historically shaped the field or revealed its shape as a distinctive discipline.

Over the course of six weeks we wrestle with, and return again and again to the following question: How do anthropologists make use of narrative forms to displace the gaze of the voyeur by addressing people and groups that are implicated in the social problems they encounter? Drawing from critical ethnographic methodologies, this class opens up a space to think about ethnography as a series of purposeful exchanges in writing. The ethnographies that we grapple with in this class are not 'of and about peoples,' but 'with and for the people who are its subjects,' a future in ethnography that Michael Fischer (2018) pushes us toward.

This seminar advances frameworks and methods of data visualization as a form of analysis and expression in anthropology. First, we reveal the disciplinary history of computation and both the fallacies and critiques of datafication. Looking forward, we explore how interactive data vis. makes relationships visible, complexities intelligible, and could re-render the enduring aporia of conveying diverse spatial and temporal scales. Participants learn to visualize and map aggregate, impersonal data together with basic methods of presence-based documentary filmmaking. Then, we experiment with synthesizing these modes in a wider ethnographic frame.

The course concerns Japan studies in the context of theories of capitalism, personhood, democracy, gender, and modernity. We consider the emergence of Japan as a place to think within the American social sciences after World War II and the development of ideas about area studies in the context of the Cold War and post Cold War conjunctures. Additionally the course considers topics in which Japan is relevant to thinking about global issues, including global capitalism, temporary labor, biopolitics, environmental consciousness, media culture and consumer culture, work-life balance, and the demographic crisis related to rapid aging.