How might anthropology and the humanities deepen our understanding of illness, healing, and cure? This course explores the cross-cultural significance of medicine and present-day struggles for wellbeing in the U.S. and comparatively. We will interpret illness narratives and medical stories and analyze therapeutic itineraries, health disparities, and caregiving. While attending to human plasticity and the ways biosocial and medical realities shape each other, we will learn ethnographic methods, engage in critical ethical debates, and experiment with modes of expression. Students will develop community-engaged projects.

Alcohol is not just an intoxicating drink, but an "embodied material culture" embedded in our experiences of everyday life. What does our relationship with alcohol reveal about individual and collective identities? What does it say about the social and economic realities of a globalized world today? Drawing from literature in anthropology, alcohol studies, and social theory, this course asks students to think critically about the relationship between alcohol and culture in both their own lives and in the lives of others. Readings primarily focus on alcohol production and consumption in Africa.

From the accounting scandals of Enron to the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, corporations are often an object of scorn for their unethical profit-seeking behavior. However, they are also a source of contested hope and livelihood as seen in common political rhetoric that implores US automotive manufacturers to keep their factories from moving overseas, citing their responsibilities as "job creators" who provide employment for local communities. Drawing from literature in anthropology, history, and business studies, this course critiques the concept of the corporation and examines its role in and responsibilities to society.

Since the 1920s, the term "gang" has been used to describe all kinds of collectives, from groups of well-dressed mobsters to petty criminals and juvenile delinquents. In nearly a century of research the only consistency in their characterization is as internal Other from the vantage of the law. This class will investigate how the category of "the gang" serves to provoke imaginaries of racial unrest and discourses of "dangerous," threatening subjects in urban enclaves. More broadly we will examine the methods and means by which liberal democratic governments maintain their sovereign integrity through the containment of threatening populations.

This course will critically examine a variety of arguments for and against the project of human rights. After situating anthropological approaches within interdisciplinary debates concerning philosophical foundations and historical origins, we will locate contemporary anthropological approaches within the discipline's broader history of, in the words of one scholar, both "skepticism" and "embrace" of human rights. We then focus on anthropological contributions to the study of human rights, from debates over universalism and relativism to ethnographies of human rights practice "from the inside," to critiques of this moral-political project.

This course revolves around a week-long trip to Princeton's Mpala wildlife research centre in Kenya. On campus, students learn critical methods in documentary filmmaking, data visualization, and mapping. At Mpala, students collect data for visualizations that explain the complexity of scientific research and they shoot video for films that situate scientific knowledge in experiences of people at the Centre and the region. Devoted to sustainable human-wildlife coexistence, Mpala is also an ideal setting for using visual media to explore multispecies ethnography and the entanglements between human societies and the lives of animals and plants.

Second term of a year long course on sociocultural anthropology, required for first-year graduate students in anthropology, and open to graduate students in other disciplines with the permission of the instructor. The seminar focuses on debates generated and sustained by contemporary anthropology's engagements with ethnographic fieldwork and writing.

This course focuses on key issues of 20th and 21st c. Latin American art. A thematic survey and general methodological introduction, we will treat emblematic works and movements, from Mexican muralism and Indigenism to experiments with abstraction, pop, conceptualism, and performance. Questions discussed include: What is Latin American art? What is modernism in Latin America? What is the legacy of colonialism? How do Latin American artists engage transnational networks of solidarity under conditions of repression? How can postcolonial, decolonial, and feminist theory illuminate the art and criticism produced in and about Latin America?

The course addresses ethical issues in medicine, health, and health care. How are medicine and ethics shaped by cultural beliefs and social institutions? Topics include: mental illness and care; the politics of disability; notions of life and death; organ transfer; end-of-life care; citizen science; reproductive technologies; prognosis and disclosure; alcoholism and co-dependency; and health care allocation. The course explores the relationship of health care to other forms of social care (such as the family).

The pre-European history of Amerind cultures and their associated environments in the New World tropics will be studied. Topics to be covered include the peopling of tropical America; development of hunting/gathering and agricultural economies; neotropical climate and vegetation history; and the material culture and social organization of native Americans. Field and laboratory experiences will incorporate methods and problems in field archaeology, paleoenthnobotany and paleoecology, and archaeozoology.

History 306 studies all Latinos in the US, from those who have (im)migrated from across Latin America to those who lived in what became US lands. The course covers the historical origins of debates over land ownership, the border, assimilation expectations, discrimination, immigration regulation, intergroup differences, civil rights activism, and labor disputes. History 306 looks transnationally at Latin America's history by exploring shifts in US public opinion and domestic policies. By the end of the course, students will have a greater understanding and appreciation of how Latinos became an identifiable group in the US.

The international border looms large over current national and international political debates. While this course will consider borders across the world, it will focus on the U.S.-Mexico border, and then on the Guatemala-Mexico and U.S.-Canada border. This course examines the history of the formation of the U.S. border from the colonial period to the present. Borders represent much more than just political boundaries between nation states. The borderlands represents the people who live between two cultures and two nations. This course will also study those individuals who have lived in areas surrounding borders or crossed them.

The need to think "contextually" is a basic premise shared by many scholarly practices of interpretation, including cross-cultural comparison and translation in anthropology, comparative literature, and beyond. But what exactly does context mean in these practices, how does it work, and where does it end? How does context help us frame particularity and generality, periphery and center, past and present? How does it support normative positions of relativism or universalism? In this seminar, we explore context as a concept and tool, through readings in a variety of disciplines as well as specific research projects, including our own.

In this lecture course we will analyze key 20th century Latin American revolutions within their regional and global context, focusing on the ideologies that motivated insurgents and the legacies left in the wake of national transformation. We will read broadly across the literature on Latin American revolutions, analyzing historical arguments, comparing and contrasting existing narratives, and building our own arguments about revolutionary processes. Crucially, we will consider how revolutionary dreams met with violent counterrevolution in the crucible of cold war.

This course focuses on the Brazilian Amazon, the world's largest tropical forest and the ancestral home of over one million indigenous peoples, now threatened by deforestation and fires. Further degradation will have disastrous consequences for its peoples, biodiversity, rainfall and agriculture, and global climate change. Combining perspectives from the social sciences and the humanities, we will critically examine projects to colonize, develop, and conserve the Amazon over time and reflect on the cultural wisdoms of its guardians. Students will work together to develop alternative visions to safeguard the forest for Brazil and the planet.

The course will discuss research on poverty, social mobility and income inequality among persons in Latin America in the last two decades. We will look at empirical results and the theories used to explain them. While we are mainly interested in results, every section of the course will deal with the underlying theories used in different studies and their implicit or explicit policy recommendations. The course combines History, Political Economy, Economics and Sociology. Previous knowledge of statistics, economics or quantitative sociology is not necessary.

How do emotion and movement appear in Brazilian music? While music is a form of translation and dialogue everywhere, the song in Brazil is an especially porous form, capable of daily reinvention of languages, traditions and habits, thus questioning history and politics. How are identity, sexuality, orality and writing worked out in musical genres such as samba, hip hop, rock? How is the African Diaspora cyphered in Brazilian music? How does that process differ from other diasporic communities? Is Brazilian music really Brazilian? These are some of the questions the seminar will address through listening and scholarly discussion.

The purpose of the course is to examine key texts of the twentieth century that established the fundamental connection between language structures and practices on the one hand, and the formation of selfhood and subjectivity, on the other. In particular, the course focuses on theories that emphasize the role of formal elements in producing meaningful discursive and social effects. Works of Russian formalists and French (post)-structuralists are discussed in connection with psychoanalytic and anthropological theories of formation.

This seminar grapples with the question of authorship and meaning in the literature of Jorge Luis Borges, the legendary Argentine writer whose convoluted fictions continue puzzling readers. Borges is a foundational figure. Gabriel García Márquez and Paul Auster, and philosophers such as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, are all indebted to Borges. Using different perspectives, from philosophy and aesthetics to politics and cultural analysis, we will study Borges's thematic and formal obsessions: time and memory; labyrinths; reading as a form of writing; and the universality of Argentine local traditions such as tango and gaucho culture.

The figure of the drag king has been practically absent from Latinx American critical analysis. Taking what we call "spectacular masculinity" as our starting point, a hyperbolic masculinity that without warning usurps the space of privilege granted to the masculinity of men, this course revises the staging of spectacular masculinities as a possibility of generating a crisis in heterosexism. We will highlight notable antecedents of the contemporary DK show, and study the hegemonic masculinity and its exceptional models through a critical technology that turns up the volume on its dramatization and its prosthetic/cosmetic conditions.

This course will offer a cultural history of how Havana evolved from a sleepy colonial city in 1900 to rising as one of the cultural and architectural capitals of Latin America and the world by the 1950s. We will study the urban development of the early 20th century, the adoption of modernism and International Style in architecture, and the tensions between private enterprise and public projects.