Courses

ANTH 10100 Introduction to Anthropology. Instru.: Hanna Pickwell, T/TH 3:30 – 4:50pm
Classically defined as the ‘science of humankind’ or the ‘study of human diversity’, anthropology examines how people organize themselves into groups and relate to the environment through their cultural beliefs and practices. Students will be introduced to the types of arguments, questions, and problems that have driven anthropological thinking, and to the discipline’s unique focus on intensive fieldwork methodologies that span ethnography, archaeology, linguistics, and even biology. We will examine how anthropologists have historically studied topics like belief, kinship, ritual, politics, exchange, and material culture in the non-western world in order to unsettle western norms and assumptions. And we will explore how post-colonial critiques and indigenous perspectives have redefined the discipline in the twenty-first century. Students will learn how anthropologists are today contributing to solving complex global problems, from climate change to economic inequality, racism, violence, immigration, health disparities, political technologies, and the effects of social media. This course serves as a sampler for those curious about the field and it fulfills a basic requirement for those pursing the Anthropology major or minor. Offered at least once yearly by rotating faculty who will provide their unique take on the discipline.

ANTH 20012 Gender Archaeology. Instru.: Yao/Kearn, M/W 9:30 – 10:50am
How have archaeologists approached the study of gendered practices, and can their work contribute to theoretical and methodological discussions of gender across the social sciences and humanities? How can we use material objects and things to examine or explain gendered identities, especially in the deep past? In this course, students will engage with a range of research, from different disciplinary perspectives, to explore how gender is situated in archaeological theory and praxis and its political implications. Through multiple case studies, the course will interrogate how archaeologists study, analyze, and interpret material remains to examine gendered ideologies and material practices and their intersections with other social constructs: class, sex, race, ethnicity. Coverage is cross-cultural and aims to expose students to the diversity and variability of gendered and sexual experiences of different people across time and space. Topics include but are not limited to: embodiment and expression, gender roles, sexuality, parenthood and childhood, masculinity, biopolitics, and feminist theory.

ANTH 20013 Canine Kinship: Dogs in Human Societies. Instru.: Summerson Car, F 9:30am– 12:30pm
This course takes a four-field anthropological approach to exploring the multifaceted relationships between dogs and humans across time and space. We will read ethnographic accounts of the various ways dogs have lived and worked in human societies, some of which trouble the ideal of “best friend” with which many students may be most familiar; other readings will suggest that human societies would not be what they are today if not for myriad canine contributions. Through discussions of these texts and intermittent lectures, this seminar style class will explore how humans and dogs have worked, guarded, bonded, patrolled, communicated, stratified, lived, loved and died together. Students will produce original term papers or projects at the end of the course, as well as actively participate in and periodically co-lead weekly seminar discussions.

ANTH 20100 The Inka and Aztec States. Instru.: Alan Kolata, T/TH 9:30 – 10:50am
This course is an intensive examination of the origins, structure, and meaning of two native states of the ancient Americas: the Inca and the Aztec. Lectures and discussions are framed around an examination of theories of state genesis, function, and transformation, with special reference to the economic, institutional, symbolic, and religious bases of indigenous state development. This course is broadly comparative in perspective and considers the structural significance of institutional features that are either common to or unique expressions of these two Native American states. Finally, we consider the causes and consequences of the Spanish conquest of the Americas, and the continuing impact of the European colonial order that was imposed on and to which the Native populations adapted with different degrees of success over the course of the 16th century.

ANTH 21107 Anthropological Theory. Instru.: William Mazzarella, T/Th 2:00 – 3:20pm
Since its inception as an academically institutionalized discipline, anthropology has always addressed the relation between a self-consciously modernizing “West” and its various and changing “others.” Yet it has not always done so with sufficient critical attention to its own concepts and categories – a fact that has led, since at least the 1980s, to considerable debate about the nature of the anthropological enterprise and its epistemological foundations. This course provides a brief critical introduction to the history of anthropological thought over the course of the discipline’s “long” twentieth century, from the 1880s to the present. Although it centers on the North American and British traditions, we will review important strains of French and, to a lesser extent, German social theory in chronicling the emergence and transformation of “modern” anthropology as an empirically based, but theoretically informed practice of knowledge production about human sociality and culture.

ANTH 21108 Anthropological Archaeology. Instru.: Daniel Hansen, M/W 1:30 – 2:50pm
“Archaeology is but ethnology in the past tense,” wrote the prehistorian André Leroi-Gourhan in 1946. He expressed an idea shared by many, namely that archaeology and anthropology share a single set of aims: to investigate the workings of human society and culture, to examine particulars and illuminate universals. In this course, we will become acquainted with archaeology as a discipline of anthropology. Through readings, analysis of case studies, excursions, and practical exercises, we will learn the fundamentals of archaeological theory and method while exploring how archaeologists use them to examine anthropological questions. How do we study the development and structure of the social, political, and economic systems of the past? What can archaeology tell us about the formation of identities—self-same and other? How can the analysis of material remains shed light on the operations of culture, power, and agency? We will also look closely at “anthropological archaeology” as a historical object, from its early investments in ideas of primitive culture to contemporary issues of heritage, patrimony, and repatriation, archaeology’s material, economic, and environmental impacts, and the potential of archaeologists to pursue restorative ways of engaging the past and the present.

ANTH 21261 The Khmer. Instru.: Alan Kolata, T/TH 12:30 – 1:50pm
This course explores the history, politics and culture of Khmer civilization from the 10th century to the present. The course begins by examining the development of a distinctive Khmer social world reflected in the complex material culture, social structures, geopolitics and religious practices of the Angkor civilization. We then follow the fate of Khmer civilization from the period of the decline of Angkor through the emergence of Cambodia as a nation state. We will focus on the impact of French colonialism, the struggle for decolonization during the Vietnam War, the rise of the Khmer Rouge regime, the Cambodian Genocide, post-War reconstruction under UN auspices (UNTAC) and the current moment of globalization together with the complications of Cambodia's integration into the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). The course combines lecture, film, and discussion of core texts.

ANT 22450 Language, Gender, and Sexuality. Instru: Rafadi Hakin, T/TH 3:30 – 4:50pm
This course focuses on the relationship, in theory and in practice, between language, gender, and sexuality. We begin with a brief overview of the field and some of its major theoretical developments. Then we expand on themes of desire and identity; binaries and normativities; embodiment; “interstices”; and performativity. The practical component of the course includes critical analysis of language used to construct gender and sexuality (e.g. in drag shows, communities you belong to personally, social media, and current events). We also consider binary language reform, abolition of linguistic gender systems, and emergence of identity categories as practices of everyday relationality that contest hegemonic systems. Readings are interdisciplinary and draw from fields including Linguistics, Anthropology, Performance Studies, Literary Studies, and Queer Studies.

ANTH 22733 Marxism, Anarchism, and the Black Radical Tradition. Instru.: Ryan Jobson, T/TH 12:30 – 1:50pm
This course serves as an introduction to Black Radical Tradition as an insurgent political formation and intellectual practice. While many genealogies of Black Studies depart from the formal institutionalization of Black Studies departments and programs in the latter half of the 20th Century, this course is differently attuned to the dialectic of Black thought and Black insurgency in which the latter—what C.L.R. James describes as a history of Pan-African revolt against the plantation and its afterlives—is always a precondition of the former. As a critical survey of said histories and the ideas derived from them, this course will examine the relationship between knowledge production (theory) and material struggle (praxis) in the Black Radical Tradition alongside adjacent but distinct political traditions such as Marxism and anarchism. Born out of a protracted “state of emergency,” the Black Radical Tradition permits us to appraise, critique, and confront the alarms raised by the COVID-19 pandemic and global climate collapse alongside settler colonialism and plantation slavery in the longue duree. To this end, students will consult non-fiction, literature, art, and film from authors and creators such as James, Audre Lorde, Lizzie Borden, W.E.B. Du Bois, Josina Machel, Kimathi Mohammed, and Lorenzo Ervin.

ANTH 22826 The Anthropology of Commodities and Consumption. Instru.: Hanna Pickwell, M/W 3:00 – 4:20pm
What is a commodity, and what does it mean to consume one? In this discussion-based, reading- and writing-intensive seminar, we will explore “consumption” and the “commodity” as objects of anthropological analysis. Drawing from a range of global ethnographic examples, as well as from popular culture, literature, and other academic fields, we will think critically about everyday practices that are so often taken for granted. We will investigate the complex relationships that people make with everyday things and the roles they play in social life; how commodities can produce and reproduce social relationships and materialize claims about identity or status; fashion and its relationships to capitalism, gender, and appropriation; political and ecological aspects of consumption; and more. In doing so, we will attend to and practice some key approaches to doing anthropology, including ethnographic interviewing, observing, media ethnography, writing field notes, and turning them into a text. Students will write three short papers, describing the “biography” of an object, analyzing consumption in a popular culture “text,” and writing up original ethnographic data. The final project, developed through these exercises, instructor feedback, and peer workshops, will be a creative analysis of a contemporary consumption phenomenon of students’ choice.

ANTH 23338 The Anthropology of Privacy. Instru.: Lake Polan, W/F 1:30 – 2:50pm
Over the past decade, increasingly invasive forms of digital surveillance have followed the internet into our phones, cars, homes, and public spaces. The uncertainties and anxieties thereby unleashed in everyday and national life include a widespread perception of privacy’s impending “death”. This course draws on history, philosophy, and anthropology to explore privacy as both object and engine of culture, and as a cultural lens on unfolding changes in contemporary American life. In the course, we will excavate the logics and historical projects that have privileged privacy as a keystone of American political cosmology, even while disavowing privacy’s ongoing complicity in structures of oppression. We will trace how privacy’s increasing entanglement with technology, speculative capital, and counter-terror imperatives shifts both the forms in which privacy appears in everyday life and its political capacities. Finally, to make sense of ongoing, technology-based reconfigurations in citizen/state/corporate relations, we will look to the public events around which privacy manifests as a social “problem” (e.g., Facebook’s secret 2014 emotional manipulation study) and analyze the relative adequacy of the legal and technical measures being deployed on privacy’s behalf.

ANTH 24002  Colonizations II. Instru.: Julie Chu, T/TH 11:00 am – 12:20pm
This quarter covers the histories of modern European and Japanese colonialism in South and East Asia and the Pacific. Themes examined include the logics and dynamics of imperial expansion and rule; Orientalist discourses; uprisings and anti-imperial movements; the rise of nationalisms; and paths to decolonization in the region.

This sequence meets the general education requirement in civilization studies. These courses can be taken in any sequence.

ANTH 24349 Human Rights and Postcolonial Politics. Instru.: Kaushik Sunder Rajan, T/TH 12:30 -1:50pm
This class focuses on the history and theory of human rights by considering it as a quintessentially postcolonial political form. We consider how Euro-American genealogies of rights intersect and interact with trajectories of colonial rule and postcolonial politics. In the process, the question of rights itself comes to be posed afresh.

Empirically, the class focuses on the histories and presents of India and South Africa. Both these countries underwent processes of constitutional decolonization. Thus, rights have a foundational place in both postcolonial polities. What does that mean? How does that create openings for the imaginations and instantiations of socially transformative policies? How does it lead to the endurance of traces and aspects of colonial government? What are the promises and limits of rights as we consider them in such historical and political contexts? In what ways are political struggles in these countries marked as being both for and against rights? In the process, how does our thinking and conceptualization of rights itself come to be at stake?

ANTH 24361 Anthropology of Art. Instru.: Emily Kuret, M/W 10:30 – 11:20am
This course offers an entry point into Anthropology of Art via a practical orientation to the ethnographic study of making and creating in our contemporary, globalized world. Pairing current foci within the subfield with methodological exercises in a series of discussion and practicum meetings, we will engage a range ethnographic works and conceptual frameworks for thinking about why and how making becomes meaningful (as Art, as social action, as therapeutic, etc.) in social context. How are persons, communities, institutions, or nations around the world today using art to accomplish social projects? How does someone become recognized as “creative” in professional contexts? How do images or media become associated with kinds of people, places, or ideas? We will reflect on how anthropologists are approaching questions like these by drawing on empirical cases like those of art schooling, media industries and the international art market; the arts-based intervention of NGOs, activists, and art therapists; DIY and indigenous communities, artist-researchers, and folkloric performance. The course begins and ends with a discussion of how disciplines of fine art and anthropology mutually produce status and knowledge with/for one another, challenging the category of “art” and rebuilding an anthropology of art concerned with the pragmatic dimensions of making and creating. 

Students will engage in project design in relationship to the course readings, a series of methodological exercises, and a context of their choosing over the course of the term: every week beginning in week two we will allocate one of our two meetings to a practicum session where we will work through how to approach our empirical cases through the methodologies currently being used by anthropologists interested in the arts. These include ling anth methods (eg. Wortham and Reyes 2020), digital methods (eg. Boellstorff 2013), participatory methods (eg. photovoice and CBPR), and visual methods.

ANTH 25211 Feminism(s) and Anthropology. Instru.: Julie Chu/Jennifer Cole, T 2:00 – 4:50pm

This course examines the fraught yet generative relation between various movements of feminism and the discipline of anthropology. Both feminism(s) and anthropology emerged in the 19th century as fields invested in thinking “the human” through questions of alterity or Otherness. As such, feminist and anthropological inquiries often take up shared objects of analysis--including nature/culture, kinship, the body, sexuality, exchange, value, and power--even as they differ in their political and scholarly orientations through the last century and a half. Tracking the emergence of feminisms and anthropology as distinct fields of academic discourse on the one hand and political intervention on the other, we pursue the following lines of inquiry: (1) a genealogical approach to key concepts and problem-spaces forged at the intersection of these two fields, (2) critical analysis of the relation of feminist and postcolonial social movements to the professionalizing fields of knowledge production (including Marxist-inspired writing on women and economy, Third World feminism and intersectionality, and feminist critiques of science studies), and (3) a reflexive contemporary examination of the way these two strands of thought have come together in the subfield of feminist anthropology, and the continual frictions and resonances of feminist and anthropological approaches in academic settings and in the larger world (e.g., #MeToo, sex positive activism, queer politics, feminist economics).

ANTH 25810 Social Problems, Social Policy, and: Social Change. Instru.: Summerson Carr, W 1:30 – 2:50pm
This course is designed to provide an analytic framework that enables students to understand how social problems are socially constructed, how social policies are created in response to those identified problems, and how social change efforts both shape and respond to the policy environment. During the quarter, we will examine how social problems, policies and programs are framed, re-framed, and addressed and how individuals, organizations, and relevant constituencies take part in social change. In addition to providing an overview of the relationship between social problems, social policy, and social change efforts, the course encourages critical thought about the role of and relationship between professional elites (philanthropists, advocates, researchers, etc.) and ground-level activists (affected populations, community leaders, etc.) in constructing and contesting social problems and promoting social change

ANTH 26825 Heritage, Memory, and the Affective Turn: Performing, and consuming the Past. Instru.: Michael Dietler, T/TH 2:00 – 3:20pm
This course examines the increasingly popular trend toward privileging affective engagements with the past, especially in the domains of heritage and collective memory. It explores the ways the past is consumed and performed, and why experience has come to be prized over knowledge as a form of understanding. The course will cover a variety of contexts of practice, including "living history" museums, historical reenactment, heritage tourism, cinema, theme parks, and body modification, as well as a range of crucial concepts such as commodification, authenticity, simulacra, romanticism, primitivism, embodiment, and the imaginary.

ANTH 27430 Language Politics. Instru.: Susan Gal, T/TH 2:00 – 3:20pm
The general public has long been alarmed about the number of languages that disappear from use and are no longer spoken in the world. Their speakers shift to other languages. Linguists have long explored these situations of shift. At the same time, social groups have mobilized to document, revitalize and archive their resources of communication. That is one kind of language politics and dialectic we will explore. Others include: the choice of pronouns by youthful speakers; the standardization of languages that are indigenous or with small population of speakers; the reform of sexist and racist language; and the analysis of political speech designed to persuade in democratic and authoritarian regimes.

ANTH 28400 "Bioarchaeology and Forensic Anthropology: Approaches to the Past   and Present”. Instru.: Maria Lozada, T/TH 2:00 – 3:20pm
This course is intended to provide students with a thorough understanding of bioanthropological, osteological and forensic methods used in the interpretation of past and present behavior by introducing osteological methods and anthropological theory. In particular, lab instruction stresses hands-on experience in analyzing human remains, whereas seminar classes integrate bioanthropological theory and its application to specific archaeological and forensic cases throughout the world. At the end of this course, students will be able to identify, document, and interpret human remains from archaeological and forensic contexts. Lab and seminar-format classes each meet weekly.

ANTH 29920 BA Honors Seminar II. Instru.: Julie Chu, TH 12:30 – 3:30pm
This workshop is for fourth-year Anthropology majors writing a BA thesis. It will extend the writing exercises begun during the fall BA workshop with a focus on revisions and expansions of the first draft of the thesis toward a near-final version.

ANTH 20401 Anthropology of Healing. Instru.: Nida Paracha, W 3:30 – 6:20pm
In our world marked by pandemics, stress, chronic illness, and cancers, healing is a primary concern, with people around the world experimenting with disparate techniques, from psychotherapy to psychedelics, to energy therapies and others. In this course we will rethink what it means to heal and to disease, reimagining healing as a practice that is deeply implicated in the ways in which we come to know, inhabit, and story the world. If we imagine our contemporary forms of life, entangled as they are, in legacies of colonial violence, capitalism, and ecological disaster, as ongoing sources of collective disease; how then do we re-entangle our ways of being, in anthropology and in the world, that encourage possibilities for healing? What would it mean to think our conceptual and sensorial practices as crucial to the ways in which we heal and disease? 

While the course design introduces students to anthropology and its methods, it pierces its confines and shifts the canon, or the story of anthropology, from its roots in colonializations or whiteness (and its myriad burdens) to the intimacies and desires of queer, sub-altern, black, and indigenous life-worlds. What are the ways in which disease is written into contemporary ways of being and how do we refuse to partake in it? How do we articulate stories that can not only bear lives on the margin but bear health? How can we story self and world differently? And how then, can we collectively live in more joyful and healing ways?

ANTH 20010 Anthropology of the Future. Instru: Shannon Dawdy, T/TH 9:30 – 10:50am
Two major subfields of anthropology—archaeology and ethnography—have traditionally been oriented around the human past and the human present. But what about the future? Conceptions of the future and future-oriented behavior have long been understood to be a critical plane of difference between political economies, religions, and cultural groups, yet they have rarely been an explicit focus of study. When we shift the temporal frame to the future, questions that arise include: Do all cultures have theories of the future? How much about human societies is intentional? How does ideology shape future possibilities? What role do imagined futures play in political life? We will consider theories of temporality, past futures (Aztec, Polynesian, Italian), and movements such as millenarianism, messianic religions, Marxism, Dadaism, utopian communities, Afro-futurism, transhumanism, and today’s neo-futurist movements that deploy radical technology and speculative design in response to looming climate change. We will also explore the intimate relationship between speculative fiction (e.g., Ursula K. LeGuin, Kurt Vonnegut) and anthropology.

ANTH 20703 Intro to African Civ III. Instru: Kathryn Takabvirwa, M/W 1:30 – 2:50pm
TR: Samuel Daly
African Civilizations III provides a selective introduction to the interdisciplinary study of Africa in the modern era, with particular attention to Africa’s history since independence. Beginning with an exploration of African notions of spiritual and philosophical uniqueness and ending with contemporary debates on the meaning and historical viability of African integration, this course explores the meaning of “Africa” and “being African.” Along the way, we will discuss what happened in the African past, how to address the problems of the present, and what the future might look like.

MW: Ayodeji Olugbuyiro
This course is an introduction to the Luso-Afro-Brazilian world which encompasses countries like Brazil, Portugal, Angola, Mozambique, Guinea Bissau, Cabo Verde, and São Tomé and Príncipe. The interconnected histories date back to the 15th century when Portuguese explorers first stumbled upon the coasts of Africa. The next five centuries featured an intricate intersection between history, culture, economics, and geopolitics. The Portuguese established imperialist projects across these spaces and elsewhere, indelibly marking the experiences of Africans and diasporic Afro-descendants. Specific topics include the Transatlantic Slave Trade, the emergence of African diasporic communities, colonialism in Africa, Afro-Atlantic intellectual and ideological exchanges, as well as contemporary representation and mobilization of Black culture and identity.

ANTH 21201 Chicago Blues. Instru: Michael Dietler, T/TH 2:00 – 3:20pm
This course is an anthropological and historical exploration of one of the most original and influential American musical genres in its social and cultural context. We examine transformations in the cultural meaning of the blues and its place within broader American cultural currents, the social and economic situation of blues musicians, and the political economy of blues within the wider music industry.

ANTH 21270 Material Worlds Across Asia. Instru: Alice Yao, W 11:00 am – 11:20am
China, Korea, and Japan are recognized as key players in the globalized world. Together they figure East Asia as a region of dynamic growth where consumers and producers create new goods and tastes at an unprecedented pace. East Asia however perplexes in that liberal ideology and politic does not appear to be a condition of liberal economy. This course examines the topic of materialism in East Asia in its pre-capitalist formations (1000 BC-1500 AD) through the lens of consumption and production in China, Korea, and Japan. In particular we explore how things become goods within the framework of autocratic states, how rituals create consumers and temptations, as well as the conditions which entertain popular panregional forms such as manga, martial arts, and mafia. The course draws on anthropology, archaeology, mixed media materials, and museum visits.

ANTH 21306 Explorations in Oral Narrative. Instru: James Fernandez, Info forthcoming
A study of storytelling in non-literate and folk societies, antecedent to the complexities of modern narrativity, itself anchored in and energized by literacy. The main objects of our study will be the vast body of folktales and collateral folklore collected by anthropologists and folklorists in traditional societies. Despite the impact of literacy on modern minds this course argues for the persistence of ancient themes, plots, characters and motifs.. A further argument is made for the foundational role of storytelling in the creation of culture and construction of society …an argument, in short, that humans are, by nature, story-telling creatures whose sapience lies primarily in the capacity to create, be entertained by, and even live by, fictions The central place of storytelling is shown in the humanistic and social sciences: anthropology, economics, history, philosophy, politics, psychoanalysis. Student story-telling and even performance, of brief stories is encouraged and reflected upon in light of the main arguments of the course.

ANTH 21420 Ethnographic Methods. Instru.: Lake Polan,  W/F 1:30 – 2:50pm
This course is a theoretical and practical introduction to ethnographic research. It will provide you with (i) a background in the key epistemological, ethical and representational issues raised by fieldwork, and (ii) a collaborative forum for practicing and critically interrogating ethnographic methods, including participant observation, fieldnote writing, interviewing, multimedia, and Internet-based research. With the help of instructor and peer feedback, you will design and execute a short fieldwork-based research project over the course of the quarter. Readings and discussions will guide you through the process of developing research questions, choosing and gaining access to a field site, generating data, and re-presenting that field site in writing. We will pay particular attention to questions of knowledge, location, evidence, ethics, power, translation, and experience, and to the nature of the theoretical and social claims that can be pursued through ethnographic research.  

ANTH Anthropological Perspectives on. Instru.: Lake Polan, TBA

While the modern human rights regime developed largely absent input from anthropology, the discipline stakes its scholarly identity on claims to expertise over the nature of human being and the diversity of human experience. Anthropologists have long studied aspects of lived experience of central concern to human rights, including state violence, cultural difference, and structural inequality. In recent decades, they have focused increasing attention on the institutions and practices through which activists adopt and rework human rights concepts in local political and social struggles. Against this backdrop, Human Rights and the Human Condition will deploy anthropology’s distinctive knowledge practices and ethical sensitivities to analyze human rights as both global force and as creative resource in local movements for dignity, security, and human flourishing. In so doing, we will subject human rights’ universalist ideals to ethnographic scrutiny, and unpack tensions between these ideals and the relativistic anthropological concept of “culture.” Through ethnographic studies of women’s rights, undocumented immigration, genocide, and transitional justice, we will consider the ambiguities, contradictions, and unintended lived effects of human rights ideals and practice. Finally, given ongoing intensifications in capitalist destruction and changing understandings of the nature of human being, we will question the continuing viability of the human rights regime as ‘the final utopia.’

ANTH 21424 Reading and Writing Ethnography. Instru.: Kamala Russell, T/TH 9:30 – 10:50am
Ethnographic renderings of spaces, surroundings, place, setting, and location have clearly always functioned as more than narrative set dressing. Critical perspectives on ethnographic research and writing have pointed out the authorization, exotification, and material conditions of mobility that undergird the 'where' in 'being there'. However, contemporary anthropologists are writing space and place in ways that push ethnographic methods and writing past prior problematics and paradigms of comparison, localization, and totalizing description. How does space become an ethnographic doorway into questions of history, power, infrastructure, and affect?

In this course, we will work through a series of contemporary ethnographies (and some ethnography adjacent works) that employ space and place in creative ways. In class, we will help each other read sideways through texts that center on themes of infrastructure, revolution, love, capital, movement, and apartheid governance among others in order to see how ethnographic writing and research can push conceptual and political arguments about space and place. We will also help each other develop as ethnographic writers, and students (particularly thesis-writers) will have the option of producing ethnography for some course assignments.

ANTH 22726 Against the Law. Instru.: Darryl Li, TBD
Much of what happens in society occurs against, outside, or otherwise in contravention of formal legal structures. This course will explore the mutually structuring relationship between the realms of the lawful and unlawful. Through a series of ethnographic readings, we will also probe how legal categories and notions of lawfulness shape assumptions in social theory, political philosophy, and anthropological scholarship. Finally, we will discuss methodological and ethical issues that arise in research "against the law."

ANTH 22735 The Collective Self and its Others In Contemporary Political Communities. Instru.: Natacha Nsabimana, M/W 1:30 – 2:50pm
In this seminar, we think about the relationships between violence and the formation of contemporary political communities. Focusing on different geographical spaces from Africa (Rwanda), the Americas (Haiti, Canada and the U.S.) and Australia, we ask questions such as: is violence essential to the founding of political communities? How do different societies construct ideal notions of membership and exclusion, effect a sense of belonging? How are these narratives contested by diverse segments of society? Primarily using ethnographic monographs, a principal aim of the course is to think through the relationships between the present and the constituted past. We consider how this past structures our understanding of the political present, the sense of belonging and the anticipated future.

ANTH 23803 Magical Politics. Instru: William Mazzarella, T/TH 2:00 – 3:20pm, Foster 3CT Sem. Room
Following Donald Trump’s election to the presidency in 2016, witches all over North America collaborated on spells to resist him and his politics by ‘binding’ his administration. Alt-right activists had already for some time been engaged in ‘meme magic’ against Trump’s liberal critics. How can we begin to understand these magical interventions in present-day politics? Rather than presuming that ‘magical politics’ is a fringe or crackpot phenomenon, this class draws on activist, esoteric, and academic materials to suggest that our thinking about everyday life and ordinary politics can be fundamentally enlivened and enhanced by taking ‘magic’ seriously.

ANTH 24001 Colonization 1. Instru: Sarah Newman, T/TH 3:30 – 4:50pm
This quarter examines the making of the Atlantic world in the aftermath of European colonial expansion. Focusing on the Caribbean, North and South America, and western Africa, we cover the dynamics of invasion, representation of otherness, enslavement, colonial economies and societies, as well as resistance and revolution.

Approved Specialized Attribute

ANTH 24002 Colonizations II. Instru.: Alice Yao, T 11:00 am – 12:20pm
This quarter covers the histories of modern European and Japanese colonialism in South and East Asia and the Pacific. Themes examined include the logics and dynamics of imperial expansion and rule; Orientalist discourses; uprisings and anti-imperial movements; the rise of nationalisms; and paths to decolonization in the region.

ANTH 26910 Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology. Instru.: Rafadi Hakim, T/TH     3:30 - 4:50pm
How do we use language when we interact with others (and ourselves)? What lies beyond semantic meaning, or the presupposed function of language to deliver “information”? In this introductory course to the field of linguistic anthropology, we explore how power, inequality, and difference are enacted through various communicative features of human interaction—features that include, but are not limited to, what we refer to as “language.” We ask how the things that we say (and how we say them) signal and shape our identities (such as race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, religion, and class). Furthermore, we investigate how language enacts forms of human relationality—forms that, among others, encompass solidarity, conflict, and hierarchy in face-to-face interactions as well as in mass-mediated productions. Through this course, student will engage with and analyze linguistic features of human interaction in their cultural and political contexts.