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.