Humans have a deep history, one that informs our contemporary reality. Understanding our evolutionary history is understanding both what we have in common with other primates and other hominins, and what happened over the last 7 to 10 million years since our divergence from the other African ape lineages. More specifically, the story of the human is centered in what happened the ~2.5 million year history of our own genus (Homo). This class outlines the history of our lineage and offers an anthropological and evolutionary explanation for what this all means for humans today, and why we should care.

This class aims to explore transnational issues in policing. Drawing heavily upon anthropological methods and theory, we aim neither to vindicate nor contest the police's right to use force (whether a particular instance was a violation of law), but instead, to contribute to the understanding of force (its forms, justifications, interpretations). The innovative transnational approach to policing developed during the semester will allow for a cross-cultural comparative analysis that explores larger rubrics of policing in a comprehensive social scientific framework. We hope that you are ready to explore these exciting and urgent issues with us.

This course will introduce students to the comparative study of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. We will take a broad hemispheric approach instead of focusing solely on the experiences of any particular native community, allowing students to both acquaint themselves with the diversity of indigenous communities and better understand the multitude of indigenous experiences--or, what it means to be indigenous--across regional contexts. How do processes of imperial expansionism and settler colonialisms shape the conditions within which indigenous Americans now live? How do native peoples relate to settler colonial governing bodies today?

This course introduces students to "doing" anthropology through the study and practice of fieldwork and helps them develop toolkits needed to define/design/conduct ethnographic research projects. We discuss and put into practice ethnographic techniques, exploring how ethnographers form their topics of study and deploy theoretical resources to develop research questions. We study different approaches to engaging with people, place and things in ethnographic fieldsites and examine social, political, epistemological and ethical dimensions of research methods, interpretations, and representations of the cultures/subjects that we study.

Talk about revolt and resistance is everywhere. But what do those words mean? In this course we will think about revolt and resistance by focusing on the case of the Middle East in a global context. We will study the "Arab Spring," the history of revolt in the Middle East, Occupy Wall Street, and different perspectives on what revolt and resistance mean. Readings draw on social theory, anthropology, sociology, history and the arts.

How are anthropologists writing about Africa today? What are their theoretical and thematic preoccupations? How do they stylistically represent the everyday lives of Africans? We will do a close reading of seven full-length ethnographies that chronicle the rich diversity of cultures on the continent. From the production of shea butter by indigenous women, to the crisis in Darfur, the hope and dreams of American Visa lottery winners, the bloody conflict between the international community and Somali pirates, we will read a wide range of ethnographies that challenge prevailing Western stereotypes about what life is really like on the continent.

Recent developments have seen a resurgence in the use of the term "decolonization." This course examines the significance of decolonization, beginning with the post-World War II conjuncture and following shifts and continuities in uses of the term both in social theory and by social and political movements. Rather than studying the process country-by-country, we explore decolonization through intellectual, social and political histories of Négritude, Arab existentialism and self-determination. The latter third of the course, we explore changes to the meaning of decolonization when reconceptualized beyond a specific conjuncture, period or age.

How do humans deal with traumatic loss through memory? We focus on three major approaches to memory: psychoanalysis (Freud), social organization (Halbwachs), associative temporalities (Sebald), and explore different genres in which the memory of loss is retained or displaced. We consider the memory of traumatic events in empirical cases individually and collectively and from different cultural landscapes and theoretical perspectives. A better understanding of the memory of loss and the social forms and histories in which this memory remains active will improve our approaches to cultural observation, documentation, analysis and interpretation.

Second half of a two-semester seminar required for first-year graduate students in social-cultural anthropology. Along with ANT 501, the course introduces students to fundamentals of anthropological thought. Predominantly, the course focuses on anthropology's engagement with ethnography and writing. Through reading key texts in the discipline, we try to understand how anthropologists transition from their fieldwork to theorizing, and from their ethnography to text.

Anthropology has seen an outpouring of work on infrastructure in recent years. This course asks why and helps students identify emergent topics of inquiry for their own projects. We read theoretical antecedents, main topics of inquiry, and new emergent questions about infrastructure in anthropology and adjacent fields that have been generative for the discipline over the past twenty years.

This course explores oral traditions and oral literary genres (in English translation) of the Slavic and East European world, both past and present, including traditions that draw from the Christian, Muslim, and Jewish East European communities. Topics include traditional rituals (life-cycle and seasonal) and folklore associated with them, sung and spoken oral traditional narrative: poetry (epic and ballad) and prose (folktale and legend), and contemporary forms of traditional and popular culture. Discussion and analysis will focus on the role and meaning of Slavic and East European oral traditions as forms of expressive culture.

This course locates itself at the intersection and juxtaposition of medical and environmental anthropologies in order to perpetrate a double movement: how are bodies - human and other - implicated in processes often figured as environmental; and how can exploring a diverse range of embodiments might open ways into denaturalizing `environment' as simply what exists outside of bodies. How do we write about the environment, about bodies, and their relationship? Topics include climate change, toxic contamination, multispecies ethnography.

From the US-backed dictatorships of the Cold War, to contemporary examples of state violence, many Latin Americans have experienced grave human rights violations. At the same time however, activists in the region have propelled significant international human rights advances. Examining concepts and cases from the anthropology of human rights, this course explores questions of rights as they affect Indigenous peoples, women, gay and lesbian populations, migrants, the urban poor, and children. By analyzing these cases, we will gain a deeper understanding of the opportunities and risks facing the future of human rights in the Latin America.