| source Northwestern (X) |
level |
department ANTHRO Anthropology (X) |
This year we celebrate the 200th anniversary of Charles DarwinÂs birth. But what would he think of our world today? We have a sophisticated understanding of genes and the ability to trace our ancestry over generations. Yet despite this knowledge, conclusive and irrefutable proof that we have or are continuing to evolve has not been found. In this course we will address where we might have come from and where we might be going. We will cover some of the major issues in evolution ranging from those of originating in DarwinÂs time to the many questions that persist today.
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What is Medical Anthropology? How do Anthropologists understand and investigate the social and cultural contexts of health and illness? This course will examine the diverse ways in which humans use cultural resources to cope with pain, illness, suffering and healing in specific cultural contexts. In addition, we will analyze various kinds of medical practices as cultural systems, examining how disease, health, body, and mind are socially constructed, how these constructions articulate with human biology, and vice versa. The course will provide an introduction to the overall theoretical frameworks that guide anthropological approaches to studying human health-related behavior. Theory will be combined with case studies from a number of societies, from India, Japan, Brazil, and Haiti to the U.S. and Canada, enabling students to identify similarities across seemingly disparate cultural systems, while at the same time demonstrating the ways in which American health behaviors and practices are socially embedded and culturally specific. The course will emphasize the overall social, political, and economic contexts in which health behavior and health systems are shaped, and within which they must be understood.
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What was life like for the ancient Maya people who inhabited what is now Central America? This course examines one of the best-known pre-Columbian civilizations in the New World: Ancient Maya civilization. The course will focus on the achievements of the ancient Maya  considered one of the most advanced civilizations in history  prior to the Spanish conquest in ca. 1500 AD. We will look at the archaeology  from temples and cities to farmers homes and fields  to explore ancient Maya daily lives. We will explore the Maya hieroglyphic writing system which gives us insight into Maya beliefs, religion, and worldview. Major topics will include the rise of ancient Maya civilization and the ancient Maya social, economic, and political systems, subsistence, and religion.
Score: 12.281586 Details | Listing | Web page
Goals of the course: This course seeks to expose students to a variety of exploratory research methods, the confidence to be creative in improvising new ones, and a handle on evaluating field studies done by other researchers. Students will design and carry out a local field work project. The topic should be one that can lend itself to the methods at hand (open ended interviews, ethnosemantic analysis, participant observation, survey construction and analysis, etc.), and it should seek to build on, and develop, a theoretical question in anthropology. Each week will entail some reading and a small field assignment tailored to the project. Class time will be devoted to comparing methods as well as problems encountered during the week. The last assignment will be a write up of the project in a short paper. The best social science involves a combination of rigor and innovative thinking in integrating theory and methods of many sorts. A number of other courses available in the university provide training in quantitative methods and hypothesis testing. This one focuses on Âqualitative methods, though the approach to deriving credible explanations of behavior is generic to inquiry in general. We will be concerned with: 1) the distinguishing cultural characteristics of phenomena, 2) innovation and improvisation for adapting conventional methods to the specific problem at hand, 3) the often underutilized "native's wisdom" during both data collection and data analysis, 4) "iterative" efforts to derive, refine, and modify research questions, stretching them well beyond the initial proposal, rather than simply testing one hypothesis, and 5) "squeezing the evidence" (Carlo Ginzburg): wresting as much information as possible, especially by probing, irrespective of the method at hand.
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Until relatively recently, the anthropological study of religion has focused on so-called "primitive"(i.e.,non-literate) religions, leaving the study of scriptural religions to theologians (for religions at home) or orientalists (for religions abroad). Of late, anthropologists have increasingly turned their attentions towards these religions, in the first place because more and more of the people they study have been converted to one or another of them. More importantly, now that anthropologist no longer define themselves as students of "people without history", the study of the local manifestations of global religions has emerged as a critical locus of theoretical concern. The course will focus specifically on the theoretical issues involved in their anthropological description and analysis, with specific attention to issues of gender, colonialism, and the post-colonial state.
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This course is a general introduction to American cultural anthropology. Anthropology or the holistic study of social life celebrated its first centennial as an academic discipline in 2002; its core is ethnography, which literally means "writing about culture." Anthropologists produce ethnographies in the form of scholarly books, research reports and documentary films. But inside academia, the Âethnographic impulse takes many different forms. Anyone who recognizes that their culture shapes them and their experiences of the world and is moved to record and share their observations, make some kind of critical commentary about social life, or respond to it in some other analytical fashion is making ethnography. Stand-up comedians, cartoonists, performance artists, novelists, journalists, television producers, diarists and ordinary gossips all engage in distinctive forms of ethnography. Students are introduced to a wide variety of academic approaches to "writing culture," ranging from classic ethnographies to innovative recent examples. Case studies are from settings in the United States, Afghanistan and Africa. We will also read articles that focus on how anthropology can be used in the everyday workplace. Our exploration of anthropology will be based the premise that ethnographies are interesting because they are based upon a set of impossible demands: the inherent conflict between a methodology geared towards small-scale, intensive research within a bounded community and the pressing need to understand the relationship between the local group and its larger national and global setting; and anthropologyÂs uneasy but productive situation as Âthe most humanistic of the social sciences and the most scientific of the humanities, with a methodology that requires its practitioners to be at once completely subjective and rigorously objective in their thinking about research subjects.
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The purpose of this course is to explain a theory of human behavior and culture derived from evolutionary theory,to explain how such a theory can be evaluated, to assess the extent to which the theory actually has been evaluated to date, and to review some of the controversy surrounding this approach.
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Cultural anthropologists know that life is messy. Instead of separating out the different aspects of social life -- politics and culture, economics and performance, sexuality and work  and assigning each one to a different field of study, we have developed an approach that lets us look at the whole. Our goal is to understand how society works. We are interested in anything and everything that people are doing right now in the world; in 2009, for example, weÂll take a look at the personal side of credit card debt in the United States; professional wrestling in Mexico; transnational families split between New Jersey and South America; positive and negative images of body fat; and the exchange of love and money between sex workers and tourists in the Caribbean. By reading anthropological studies of these very different social settings, students will develop an appreciation of long-term qualitative research in intimate settings. Unlike journalists, who have to be satisfied with a brief visit, anthropologists work long and hard with the people they study, and develop a perspective that combines the objective perspective of a quantitative scientist with the sympathetic insights of a good novelist. Students will be expected to learn the rudiments of this approach through readings, lectures, and other materials, and to try their hands at a little anthropological work themselves by developing brief commentaries on the social life around them, as well as a final project in which they make their own anthropological analysis of a fictional society.
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The course provides an opportunity for students who have gone or will go abroad (to work, study, etc.) to reflect on that international experience using the analytical toolkit of anthropology. The goal is help students become more thoughtful observers of the social, political and cultural patterns surrounding them in their cross-cultural experiences by introducing them to some of the key concepts of anthropology. Case studies, including ethnographic films, are used to clarify anthropological styles of analysis, which can help students deepen their understanding of other societies and cultures in their international experience. Case studies emphasize techniques of both cultural and social institutional analyses as well as fieldwork techniques of participant observation. The modern concept of Âculture will be developed through a semiotic approach to the production and interpretation (and contestation) of meaning in society. The focus on social institutional analyses will include questions of social development, human rights, civil society, and debates over the so-called Âclash of civilizations. Key themes from Amartya SenÂs culture and development studies will be emphasized, such as human agency (and freedom, including womenÂs rights and agency) in the context of particular social and political institutional structures, as well as the political role (and right) of participating in the debates and discussions of global civil society.
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This course introduces life history theory as an integrated framework for understanding the biological processes underlying the human life cycle and its evolution. After constructing a solid foundation in life history theory and the comparative method, the class will address questions such as: Why do humans grow and develop much more slowly than other primate species? Why do we have so few offspring? What is the significance of puberty? What is the function of menopause? In-depth analysis of several case studies will allow the class to examine in detail the utility of life history theory for explaining aspects of human development and behavior.
Score: 12.281586 Details | Listing | Web page
What was life like for the ancient Maya people who inhabited what is now Central America? This course examines one of the best-known pre-Columbian civilizations in the New World: Ancient Maya civilization. The course will focus on the achievements of the ancient Maya  considered one of the most advanced civilizations in history  prior to the Spanish conquest in ca. 1500 AD. We will look at the archaeology  from temples and cities to farmers homes and fields  to explore ancient Maya daily lives. We will explore the Maya hieroglyphic writing system which gives us insight into Maya beliefs, religion, and worldview. Major topics will include the rise of ancient Maya civilization and the ancient Maya social, economic, and political systems, subsistence, and religion.
Score: 12.281586 Details | Listing | Web page
This course provides an entrée into the changing politics and cultures of American urban life, with a special focus on urban political economy, ethnographic knowledge, urban space and neighborhoods, recent demographic and economic trends, on key stratifications by race, class, gender, ethnicity, nationality, and sexuality, and on the shifting American public sphere. With this ethnographic, social scientific, and historical grounding, we will also view documentary films, and hear from guest speakers.
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This course introduces the field of Psychological Anthropology - the study of the relationship between culture and the human Âmind. Psychological Anthropology seeks to understand the ways in which cultural and social contexts fundamentally shape psychological processes such as personality, motivation, cognition, and emotion. In this class we will operate from the assumption that explanations of psychological processes must take culture into account, and that adequate conceptions of cultural processes need to address what we know about the general functioning of the human psyche. In this context, we will unpack the relationship between Âbrain and Âmind, explore the role of child development, socialization, and language in shaping human psychology, and examine the interactions of mind and body, culture and mental health, self and narrative, language and emotion.
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In this class we will investigate some of the musical and dance cultures of Sub-Saharan Africa. We will approach the subject by first examining a few general principles of African culture, dance, and music, then exploring several specific music cultures from the four major regions of Sub-Saharan Africa. This music and dance will come from both rural village and urban popular contexts. It is my hope that the students will begin to appreciate the richness and diversity of physical artistic expression in Africa. They should also deepen their understanding of the roles music and dance play in the culture, history, politics, social relations, rituals, and religious practices of all African peoples.
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This seminar explores the depth and diversity of the sub-field political anthropology. Beginning with a discussion of some classic writings in social anthropology and political thought, the seminar poses questions about what we understand by politics, power, and authority. Subsequent discussions focus on several themes in order to examine the changing nature of anthropological preoccupations with political issues, among them, nationalism and citizenship; FoucaultÂs discursive power; the Âstate and its discontents; and violence, corruption, and Âpay-to-play politics. Engaging different theoretical perspectives, this seminar offers rich insights into the changing anthropological involvement with the political domain.
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After several decades of linked scholarly and activist work, the academy is awash with race and gender discourse and analysis. But much of the work flying under the flag of feminist and race theory lacks intellectual-historical depth. In this seminar, we will be reading key texts by ten under-taught late-18th to mid-20th century Western theorists whose work on race, gender, class and/or nationality divisions has had a major impact on subsequent thought globally. We will also read a selection of recent work in these areas, with an emphasis on key common theoretical antinomies--resistance/consent, sameness/difference, etc, and on the racing and gendering of historical political-economic analysis across the disciplines and around the world. Finally, each student will read and present on recent scholarship relevant to her or his own research.
Score: 12.281586 Details | Listing | Web page
For Anthropology graduate students instructing as a TA for the first time.
Score: 12.281586 Details | Listing | Web page
Anthropology is an attempt to answer two basic questions about human beings: (1) How did they come to exist? (2) What is their basic nature? This course provides an overview of anthropology emphasizing the theory of biological evolution as the primary unifying theme. Anthropology is both a scientific and a humanistic discipline. This course emphasizes the scientific side of anthropology. Some of the views presented are controversial.
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This course will provide an overview of current theory and research in human population biology. The course will focus on the influence of ecological and social factors on various aspects of human biology (e.g. metabolism, growth, nutritional status, disease patterns). The adaptation concept will first be presented, discussed, and critiqued. We will then examine how adaptation to different ecological stressors (e.g. temperature, solar radiation, high altitude, diet/nutrition) promotes human biological diversity. Carries science credit.
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The religion of Islam is widely practiced, not only in the Middle East and in Arabic-speaking countries, but also in East and South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and increasingly in Europe and North America. Anthropologists in the last few decades have turned increasingly to the study of Islamic communities around the world, specifically paying attention to the ways in which a global religion has been adapted to the particular circumstances of local communities. This class will explore some common features of Muslim societies, but also crucial ways in which they may differ, as well as Muslim reactions to the advent of ÂmodernityÂ.
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This year we celebrate the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwins birth. But what would he think of our world today? We have a sophisticated understanding of genes and the ability to trace our ancestry over generations. Yet despite this knowledge, conclusive and irrefutable proof that we have or are continuing to evolve has not been found. In this course we will address where we might have come from and where we might be going. We will cover some of the major issues in evolution ranging from those of originating in Darwins time to the many questions that persist today.
Score: 12.281586 Details | Listing | Web page
This writing-intensive class introduces students to the ethnographic literature on the dramatic transformations China underwent in the past three decades under the market reforms. Students will read closely four ethnographies and one monograph from cultural history to learn about the mass migration of Chinas floating population to the cities which has transformed urban China and contributed to turning China into an economic powerhouse; the effects of commodification and consumption on village life; the often painful presence of the past under Mao in rural China today, and the effects of ethnic policies on Chinas minority nationalities. With the monograph from cultural history, we encounter one specific example of how historians have adopted the culture concept from anthropology. We will explore based on this example how ethnography and historical narrative can be integrated.
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Anthropology has a long-standing interest in the interaction of humans with their environments. Traditionally, ecological anthropologists have focused upon how humans adjusted to their environments through cultural and biological adaptation. However, because of pressing contemporary environmental issues, this course focuses upon how humans have changed the natural environment in the past, how humans are currently changing it, and what can be done to halt environmental deterioration. Topics to be considered include traditional subsistence patterns, population stability and growth, food supplies, consumerism, environmental regulation, and the impact that heightened ecological awareness (deep ecology, ecofeminism, etc.) might have on contemporary human behavior.
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This course examines the relationship between language and race/ethnicity in the contemporary United States. It will cover major theoretical concepts about language use, race, ethnicity, and identity, and examine a number of ethnographic case studies about these issues. The course will focus primarily on language use among Asian Americans but also examine language practices by Latinos, Blacks, and Native Americans by comparison. Topics to be examined include: How languages and their speakers are regarded by institutions such as schools and workplaces; how public discourse about languages other than English affect the lives of those speakers; how language use mediates interethnic and interracial relations; why particular languages have been stigmatized while others are celebrated; the ways in which socioeconomic factors such as social class, immigration status, and educational background affect language use; and how youth use language to construct racial identities, often in ways that cross racial boundaries in other to pass for categories other than ones own.
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