FRS 111 Trumpland (SA)
This course will examine the areas of the United States that went heavily for Donald Trump, and the factors behind the election of 2016. We will examine the decline of the working class, the Rust Belt, conspiracy theory, the “post-fact” world, and the social construction of whiteness. Andrew A. Johnson

ANT 201 Introduction to Anthropology (SA)
This course provides an introduction to core anthropological modes of inquiry into being human across space and time. Engaging key concepts of culture as lenses on contemporary phenomena, we will explore universalism and variation across societies. How do communities express difference and identity, make meaning, transmit knowledge, circulate objects and power, live, love, wish and dream? Case-studies vary, from women’s piety movements in Cairo to the role of mosquitos, germs, and machines in making lives and worlds. We will also consider anthropology’s colonial origins, examining intersections between knowledge and domination. Nomi Stone

ANT 208 / REL 208 Religion, Ideology, and Media (SA)
This course explores how media shapes cultural and social identities. From televangelism to political talk radio, the mass marketing of faith and political ideologies is contributing to how people understand themselves as gendered, raced, and classed subjects. But are these programs helping to sustain a fragile consensus within our nation-state, or is this media threatening radical disunity? This course examines what is at stake culturally in this religious and ideological war of symbols generated within mediascapes. Carolyn Rouse

ANT 225 Debt (SA)
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. Julia Elyachar

GSS 203 /ANT 243 Introduction to Global LGBTQ Studies (SA)
This course provides an interdisciplinary and transnational introduction to the study of LGBTQ lives. We address the historical emergence of LGBTQ identities and survey how these identities are experienced among different communities around the world. Through global case studies, we examine key concepts and debates in the field, including intersectionality, human rights, homonationalism, normativity, and medicalization. We analyze how LGBTQ works as a meaningful social, political, and historical category and the ways class, race, gender, and nationality intersect with and disrupt it. Justin Perez

ANT 300A or ANT 300B  Ethnography, Evidence and Experience (SA)
This course connects ethnographic theory (e.g., about culture, relationality, context, and interpretation) to everyday experience and vice versa. Readings from academic and media sources align with weekly journal writing to cultivate students’ ethnographic awareness of their own and others’ embodied knowledge and the ethics, politics, and ritual dimensions of relationships, language, and more. Throughout we scrutinize 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. (ANT 300A is for all students other than juniors in the Anthropology major. ANT 300B is reserved for juniors in the Anthropology major, as it includes enrollment in the Junior Seminar. ANT300A and ANT300B are otherwise the same, and meet together.) Rena Lederman

ANT 309A/STC 310A Forensic Anthropology and Epigenetics in Urban America (SA)
Forensic anthropology involves medico-legal cases where human remains have lost “personhood” (an individual cannot be identified due to decomposition or destruction of unique personal features). We will explore techniques of analysis that biological anthropologists apply to forensic cases. We will blend the sub-disciplines of social and biological anthropology by tracing the intertwined psychological and social factors that shape human variation and life experience in an urban setting. We weigh and consider epigenetic mechanisms by which external variables may bring about heritable molecular changes in the expression of genetic phenotypes. ANT 309A and ANT 309B meet together for lectures. Students in ANT 309A will meet in precepts to collect and analyze social and environmental data pertaining to the physiological data studied by students in ANT 309B lab. Jeffrey Himpele, Janet Monge

ANT 309B/STC 310B Forensic Anthropology and Epigenetics in Urban America (STL)
Forensic anthropology involves medico-legal cases where human remains have lost “personhood” (an individual cannot be identified due to decomposition or destruction of unique personal features). We will explore techniques of analysis that biological anthropologists apply to forensic cases. We will blend the sub-disciplines of social and biological anthropology by tracing the intertwined psychological and social factors that shape human variation and life experience in an urban setting. We weigh and consider epigenetic mechanisms by which external variables may bring about heritable molecular changes in the expression of genetic phenotypes. ANT 309A and ANT 309B meet together for lectures. Students in ANT 309B labs will collect, interpret, and curate developmental and physiological data from real-world individual subjects (from Philadelphia); share data and results with students in ANT 309A precept. Janet Monge, Jeffrey Himpele

EAS 225/ANT 323 Japanese Society and Culture (SA)
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, popular culture, biopolitics, law, demography and population control. Amy Borovoy

ANT 326 /COM 319 Language, Identity, Power (EC)
Language determines our expressive capacities, represents our identities, and connects us with each other across various platforms and cultures. This course introduces classical and contemporary approaches to studying language, focusing on three main areas: 1) language as a system of rules and regulations (“structure”), 2) language as a symbolic mechanism through which individuals and groups mark their presence (“identity”), and 3) language as a means of communication (“sign”). In addition to this, the course examines various ways through which language molds our individual selves: from organizing dreams and desires to shaping autobiographies. Serguei Oushakine

DAN 215 /ANT 355 Introduction to Dance Across Cultures (LA)
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 experience is necessary. Judith Hamera

ANT 368/TPP 368 Ethnography of Schools and Schooling (SA)
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 observations hours in local schools and prepare a descriptive, mini-ethnography of a school community. Not open to Freshmen. Jason Klugman

GHP 350/WWS 380/ANT 380 Critical Perspectives in Global Health (SA)
Global health brings together a vast array of actors working to address urgent health issues worldwide with unprecedented financial and technological resources. This course is a critical analysis of the cultural, social, political and economic processes related to this expanding medical and humanitarian field. As we scrutinize the evidence-making practices, agendas and value systems informing global health, we will place current interventions in historical perspective and gauge their benefits and unintended consequences. Students are encouraged to find new and collaborative ways to understand and act in and through the field of global health. Open to Juniors and Seniors Only. João Biehl

EGR 385/ANT 385 Ethnography and Wicked Problems
This course introduces students to approach problems ethnographically and develop service solutions. Security/privacy will be the problem space for the course. The course will cover multiple modes of ethnography, “inventive methods” that explore the intersection of design and interpretive social science. The course will provide a tool set for students interested in entrepreneurship, design thinking, as well as new types of outcomes for research for those in the social sciences, and finally, a human-centered view on security. ken anderson

ANT 390A or ANT 390B History of Anthropological Theory (HA)
The course surveys the development of social anthropology by examining the concepts and models used by anthropologists to analyze human diversity and universals, social stability and change, and the relationship between the individual and the group. We explore theoretical debates (evolution, exchange, function, structure, culture, agency, subjectivity, history, power, and globalization) in terms of their capacity to understand human behavior, the social world and modernity. (ANT 390A is for all students other than seniors in the Anthropology major. ANT 390B is reserved for seniors in the Anthropology major, as it includes enrollment in the Senior Seminar. ANT 390A and B are otherwise the same, and meet together.) Carol Greenhouse

ANT 432 Memory, Trauma, Accountability (SA)
We focus on how humans deal with traumatic loss through three major approaches to memory: psychoanalysis (Freud), social organization (Halbwachs), associative temporalities (Sebald). We examine genres in which the memory of loss is retained or displaced. How is a traumatic past experienced individually and collectively? We consider memory 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. John Borneman

ANT 445/URB 445 The Anthropology of Ruins (SA)
We think about ruins as belonging to the past, but they do not. They are that detritus that stays with us into the present. They can be sources of melancholy, inspiration, wonder, and horror; or lingering toxins in the soil, racist legacies of colonialism, nationalistic points of collective sentiment, and the remnants of past cities bleeding through into the present-day urban landscape. This course will examine ruins anthropologically. Students should come out of this class with an introduction to the anthropology of aesthetics, the relationship between space and place, and a new appreciation for urban infrastructures and their legacies. Andrew A. Johnson

ANT 501 Proseminar in Anthropology
First 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 innovations in anthropological theorizing through writings that have historically shaped the field or revealed its shape as a distinctive discipline. Open to Graduate Students Only. Julia Elyachar

ANT 541 Topics in Social Anthropology: Temporality and Ethnography
Durkheim’s concept of social time continues to sustain a broad and varied ethnography; however, it encounters limits in his explicit distinction between social time and the personal experience of time. That disjunction vitiates the potential relevance of temporality as a critical resource – or set of resources – for ethnography. The seminar unsettles that distinction from various angles, and explores the relevance of temporality in current ethnographic writing on law, politics, labor, forms of life beyond the human, and ethnography itself. The purpose of the seminar is to bring new times to ethnographic inquiry. Graduate Students and Seniors Only. Carol Greenhouse

EAS 549/ANT 549 Japan Anthropology in Historical Perspective
The course concerns Japan studies in the context of theories of capitalism, personhood, democracy, gender, and modernity. We discuss issues of fieldwork as method and “area” as a unit of analysis. We also consider the pace of Japan in American social thought. One thematic focus is on medicine and biotechnology and their engagement with social and historical processes. Amy Borovoy