During the decades after World War II, Japan became the world's second largest economy and a highly productive, technologized society. While Americans once regarded Japan as a land of "corporate warriors," today Japan has become known for its popular culture, critiques of environmental destruction, and gentler variety of capitalism. We explore key social issues including gender, labor, affect, sports, media, poplular culture, biopolitics, law, demography and population control.

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 explores the formation of popular music genres throughout the world -- from Johannesburg and Accra, to Mexico City, Istanbul, and Jakarta, among other places. We will analyze the relationship between global processes of music circulation, on the one hand, and highly localized musical styles, on the other. By listening carefully, we will discover that the contemporary "world system" is not always one of smooth integration, but is instead characterized by friction, distortion, and noise.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Anthropology has a long tradition of research on law, rules and norms as social and cultural practices. Since ethnographic inquiry moves easily across jurisdictions and other sorts of domains, it is well adapted to the polycentric, "hybrid" (state/non-state) and asymmetrical power relations that pervade the social fields of law today. We cover major research traditions and their critical legacies through explorations of contemporary legal situations: e.g., human rights claims, migration, social security, policing, criminalization, the judicialization of politics, finance, new forms of precarity and the regulation of personal life.

In our mediated and datafied world, how can we use both documentary film and data visualization to create ethnographies that convey lived experience as well as reveal and make sense of large-scale complexities? To pursue this goal, students learn basic filmmaking and data visualization in a workshop setting. As they sculpt visible evidence such as fieldnotes, video, big data, and geo-spatial data into narratives, students consider how the material capacities and original social contexts of evidence shape filmic and graphic forms of knowledge expression. Students are encouraged to work on or design their own independent research projects.

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.