| source Harvard (X) |
level |
department Social Analysis (X) |
How do social problems get redefined over time; why do they appear differently to various groups; and how are public policies about problematic social conditions debated, devised, and changed? Looking over modern US history, this course combines demographic data on societal trends, ethnographic data on people's everyday lives and outlooks, and evidence about changing institutional structures. This combination of approaches often pursued separately in the social sciences is used to explore recurrent yet shifting controversies about the well-being of families and children, about immigration and citizenship, and about access to health care in the US.
Score: 12.48528 Details | Listing | Web page
An inquiry into the role of health and medicine in society that demonstrates how anthropological analysis can be applied to the study of illness and care. Compares medical systems across societies to understand the experience and treatment of sickness. Analyzes how practitioners and patients construe sickness and suffering as distinctive social realities, and how those realities are organized in local cultural systems. Assesses varieties of suffering as social phenomena in order to appreciate the social sources of global social problems, the cross-cultural variety of illness experiences, the reform of services, and the global moral and political-economic crisis in health care.
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This course critically examines the assumptions of modern economics and how these assumptions mold the ideas and conclusions of the discipline. A principal question is the appropriate scope of the market. This question will be examined both theoretically and through examples drawn from both microeconomics and macroeconomics; possible examples include health care, the environment, international trade, social security, and macroeconomic stabilization.
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Food is examined for its social and cultural implications; nutritional or dietetic concerns are of secondary interest. Topics include food taboos and restrictions, gift giving and reciprocity, food symbolism and social boundaries, food panics, globalization of food industries, food security and agroterrorism, and the world standardization of food preferences. Examples are drawn from China, Japan, Korea, India, Latin America, Africa, Europe, the Pacific, and the US.
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What does our ability to acquire and use a language tell us about our essential human nature? This course examines the view of modern linguistics that knowledge of language is best characterized as an unconsciously internalized set of abstract rules and principles. Evidence is drawn from a variety of signed and spoken languages, language universals, child language acquisition, language change, language disorders, and language games. The course also addresses central issues in psychology, animal communication, computer science, and biology.
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Introduction to economic issues and basic principles and methods of economics. Fall term focuses on microeconomics: how markets work, market efficiency and market failure, firm and consumer behavior, and policy issues such as taxation, international trade, the environment, and the distribution of income. Spring term focuses on macroeconomics: economic growth, inflation, unemployment, the business cycle, the financial system, international capital flows and trade imbalances, and the impact of monetary and fiscal policy.
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Few topics in contemporary American culture have sparked as much controversy as has psychological trauma. Although clinical interest in trauma waxed and waned since the 1890s when Freud proposed that people repress memories of childhood sexual assault, interest has markedly increased since 1980 when the American Psychiatric Association ratified the diagnosis of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) to describe the problems of troubled combat veterans of the Vietnam War. The purpose of this course is to survey the clinical, historical, cultural, and political aspects of psychological trauma.
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How are racial divisions and American political structures related? Is racial/ethnic hierarchy built into American politics so deeply that the nation must change dramatically to eradicate it? Or is racial/ethnic hierarchy a flaw in an essentially fair society that we can eradicate without major dislocation? Half of the course addresses this set of questions. How do African Americans, Anglos, Latinos, and Asian Americans relate to one another? The second half of the course considers interracial coalitions, racialization and assimilation, multiracialism, and policy issues relevant to various groups. We conclude with several visions of racial and ethnic politics in America's future, and address how to get there.
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Growth and development imply a transformation in the politics and economics of nations. How does this transformation take place? What economic forces and political struggles propel it? Drawing on anthropology, political science, and economics, the course explores the process of urbanization, state formation, war-making, and development.
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A commonsensical survey of rational theories of politics, comprised of four segments: (1) individual choice, (2) group choice, (3) collective action, and (4) institutions. The underlying theme is that politics may be described and understood in terms of rational, goal-seeking behavior by citizens, politicians, bureaucrats, and interest groups in various institutional settings. Students are encouraged to think deeply and with sophistication about current events, history, and public life generally, as well as to analyze the politics of private life-in families, clubs, firms, churches, universities, even Harvard Houses-since private politics, like public politics, may be understood in terms of rational behavior.
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Examines the development and structure of the earliest state-level societies in the ancient world. Archaeological approaches are used to analyze the major factors behind the processes of urbanization and state formation in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Central Asia, the Indus Valley, and Mesoamerica. The environmental background as well as the social, political, and economic characteristics of each civilization are compared to understand the varied forces that were involved in the transitions from village to urbanized life. Discussion sections utilize archaeological materials from the Peabody Museum and Semitic Museum collections to study the archaeological methods used in the class.
Score: 12.48528 Details | Listing | Web page