Anthropology (ANTH)

Most people know that anthropology is the study of cultures and cultural difference around the world, but few know what anthropologists actually do. What was once the study of 'distant' and 'exotic' cultures and peoples by immersing oneself their daily lives has over the course of the 20th century developed into a critical approach to studying difference no matter how far or near it might occur. As a discipline, anthropology has studied and debated issues of race, ethnicity, language, religion, belonging, power, class, gender, and sexuality across the globe. In more recent times, it has also come to embrace the study of institutions like medicine, trade, and law. Come see how an understanding of an anthropological way of thinking can broaden your views on the world and how it works.

The role of vision and the visual in ethnographic research, anthropological scholarship, and pedagogy is easy to take for granted. Visual anthropology critically examines how we see, what we see, and why we see what we see. A prominent anthropologist of the late 20th century, Mary Douglas, noted that “in perceiving the world, we do not perceive passively. In seeing the world, we create the world.” The key ethnographic methodology of “participant observation” itself indicates the importance of watching, surveying, and searching for clues to the meaning of human interaction. “Being there” is crucially a matter of seeing there. But do we see in the same ways, or perceive the same things, that our communities of research do? Does anthropology approach the act of seeing from a different perspective than disciplines such as cognitive psychology, art history, and media studies? What is the importance of unquestioned assumptions, choice of frames, and power imbalances between the observer and the observed? This class will examine visual anthropology historically, beginning with the visual spectacles of other, exotic societies as depicted in travel literature, prints, photography, and early films. We will then survey the development of visual anthropology as a defined subfield of the discipline, the types of questions visual anthropologists have asked, how they’ve studied the visual, and how they have used new technologies of photographic and video technologies, and how these new technologies have reframed the questions we ask and the politics of research. The final project of this course will be the production of 10-minute ethnographic films

What is the role of vision in the modern discipline of anthropology? Are ways of seeing cultural? What is the relationship between seeing and knowledge production? In this course, we will explore competing cultural and political notions of vision, and learn about ‘seeing’ as a theoretical approach, a technique, as art form. What are the modern ideas behind vision and the gaze? We will look at film, photography, and museum displays alongside ethnographies that showcase these debates. Through visual and written means, we will explore how power, mutual exchange, and difference is expressed through the metaphor of the visual.

Beginning with an overview of anthropological and journalistic approaches to the Arab world over the last half century, this course will employ a cultural framework in order to understand the political, socioeconomic, media, and technological developments since just before the Arab Spring protests of 2011. We will then trace the repercussions of these developments locally, regionally, and globally. The course will focus on the multifaceted crises that have recently enveloped Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, resulting in the largest refugee crisis of the last 60 years.

Humans use myriad types of media to build our relationships, support economic and cultural exchanges, and transform our environments. Anthropologists study what people think and say about the media we create and use, but also research how established and emerging media technologies are embedded in our daily lives. This course questions universalizing assumptions about what watching TV, sharing a digital photo, or going to the movies means globally by researching the production and consumption of films and video, radio, news media, photographs, digital data and social media platforms in diverse media worlds. Humans in particular historical moments and cultural spaces creatively incorporate globally-circulating media technologies to powerfully shape their media worlds.

This course will focus on threats to heritage in times of conflict and the illicit black market trade in antiquities. The course will examine the history of looting and destruction of cultural heritage in the region and the politicization of such actions by states, regimes, and non-state actors. The course will then look at patterns of looting and trafficking including emerging new trends on social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and Tik Tok, and means to track and document them. The course will include case studies from conflict zones in the Middle East demonstrating how cultural heritage is exploited for propaganda, legitimization, and a revenue source through illicit looting and trafficking. The course will also cover existing regional patrimony laws and international conventions regarding the protection of cultural heritage.

Why are museums created? What political and cultural work that curators have in mind and what stories do they attempt to tell? What opportunities and challenges do the vast array of collections and exhibitions about slavery shape our knowledge of fraught human relations in the context of slavery? This seminar will explore key theoretical and methodological concerns over the anthropology of politics of space, race, remembrance and heritage given the significance of these museums and their ‘object of memory’. This seminar will focus on slave museums in the Indian Ocean, a sea brimming with racialized histories that involved incalculable numbers of Ports of the trade on its shores. This research seminar will address some of the most complex topics in the humanities and social sciences. It covers wide-ranging academic preoccupations and professional concerns in the act of curating and the selectivity enmeshed in the process. We will consider overlapping interests pivoting around questions of audience, material culture, politics and artistic sensibilities. This seminar will draw on the ever-shifting roles that slavery museums, monuments and houses of heritage play in selected areas of the Indian Ocean, an ocean which only recently started to attract the academic attention it deserves. The seminar’s objectives are promoting critical knowledge and analytical thought about visual exhibits as well as furthering close reading, creative thinking and communication tools through the study of the history and anthropology of these sites of memorialization in Qatar, Mauritius, Zanzibar, Le Reunion and Madagascar. These sites will also be analyzed comparatively with other slave museums in the United States

This course will look at multiple online streaming platforms as a way to explore how gender is being reproduced in popular movies and television series.

The class will involve a deep dive into human-technology interfaces, with future ethics taking a central concern as technology develops exponentially. Can regulations keep up? Do we need to consider robot ethics? Can human biases embeddedness within machine learning algorithms be understood or do they constitute black boxes? These are some of the questions this course will explore. Students will: • Understand current and future trends in AI • Develop critical thinking around ethics and philosophy of human machine enhancement • Learn how bias is encoded into algorithms • Debate how to regulate AI • Explore potential futures through literature and film • Debate robot personhood

Through a framework of multispecies ethnography, this course examines our relationships with other living beings from an historical and cross-cultural perspective. Students will gain an understanding of changing interpretations of how anthropology has theorized the plants and animals that share this world with us. Topics include extinction and conservation, domestication, zoos, seed banks, GMO, plant and animal agency, animal rights, the production of science, and indigenous knowledge.

“Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?” “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” These sensational headlines are just an example of recent popular discussions in the media about how digital technology is affecting humans and our social and intellectual skills. How have anthropologists, whose bread and butter is the study of communication and social life, studied the rise of the digital age? In this course we will explore the complex and nuanced terrain that is human-technology encounters, focusing on the intersections of race, class, and gender with digital technology.

All societies have stories of the supernatural, the afterlife, of haunted places and left-behind spirits. Violence and injustice leaves behind traces, ruins, remains, echoes, which become part of our present. However, we do not always see or hear these remainders, or choose to deny them, in making plans for our futures, individual and collective. Can anthropology offer methodological and conceptual insights by taking ghosts, spirits, and the supernatural seriously? What relationships between the past and the future can anthropology bring to light through ethnographies of the supernatural? This course will address history, memory, and the past and ask what it means to reckon with racial, religious, ethnic, and gendered violence and the collective memory they shape.

In barely a decade, social media has transformed the world around us, the way we learn, the way we communicate, and our relationships. There is an incredible amount of discussion and speculation over the consequences of social media – for example, have we lost our right to privacy? Do new forms of social media lead to greater political freedom or perhaps political repression? Have children replaced face-to-face interactions and relationships with only screen interactions? Alongside these changes there is a whole new language emerging to describe what people do on social media, including selfies, memes and shares. Yet most claims made about social media are very general. Taking an anthropological view, this course looks at a variety of forms of social media in very different social contexts. This course concentrates on content of social media rather than platforms through which social media operates. But we will also use social media as a research method for understanding people’s lives as they converge in both online and offline spaces. We will see not only how social media has changed people’s lives but also how these people have changed social media. Interestingly, this course challenges many of the claims that are made about what social media is by showing the incredible variation in social media that emerges on different continents, among people of different class and religious backgrounds, for people with different gender identities and sexual preferences, for producers, consumers, and students. As we will find, social media can tell us much about the contemporary world at large.

Humor is human. It is art, creativity, resistance, resilience, and political commentary. It can tell us a lot about contexts, intentions, agency, power dynamics, marginalized communities, and social and cultural transformation. Humor is a distinctive human capacity, and despite being a human universal, has not figured prominently in anthropological literature. This course will begin with an overview of anthropological engagements with humor, with special attention to linguistic anthropologists’ works, before delving into the uses of humor in contemporary media and settings, such as memes, Tik Tok, YouTube, television shows, stand-up comedy acts, and everyday situations that spark laughter. The course will give special attention to “dark humor,” and the possible dangers of humor in social interaction. We will examine particular genres of American humor and their transformations over time: “ethnic” humor, feminist humor, political satire, and gendered portrayals of humor. Students will have a choice of doing a comedy skit, a stand-up performance, or producing a short comedic film or comic book that illuminates the social, cultural, and political dimensions of humor in their own lives.

This course will take an anthropological and cross-cultural look at topics related to youth culture, including: the invention of childhood; coming of age and puberty; child soldiers, refugees, and homeless children; cultural norms about gender, sexuality, and body image; political action and resistance by youth; youth and racism; global and national musical forms; and cultural concepts of the transition to adulthood.

his course examines anthropological theories of race and ethnicity, starting with approaches developed in the late 19th century and tracing them through to the present-day. It approaches race and ethnicity as culturally-constructed phenomena that articulate with historical, political, and economic forces at local, national, and international scales. In addition to examining race and ethnicity in the United States, the course emphasizes scholars and case studies from around the world to broaden students understanding of and assumptions about this complex domain of social life. The course strives to teach students practical skills to help build dialogue and community across racial and ethnic divides.

This course explores the articulations of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and nationalism in different world contexts. We will explore the conceptual frameworks of gender, race, and nationalism, then look at specific ethnographic accounts. The aim is to understand how particular historical, political, economic, and social processes influence these articulations. We will ask: How do popular conceptions of gender and race shape the ways nationalism is represented and experienced? Why is the management of gender and race important to the maintenance of the nation state? and How does nationalism become a key mode of inequality along lines of gender and race?

Representing Native Americans in texts, photographs, museum collections, and exhibits was a central impetus pushing early American anthropological activities, alongside anthropology’s broader history founded on representing ‘natives’ from around the world. This course moves from a critical history of visual anthropology beginning in the 19th century through efforts to decolonize representations in the 20th century and widespread Indigenous media movements in filmmaking, photography, museums, and research. Since the 1970s, indigenous media makers in the Americas, Oceania, and the Arctic have created visual media as forms of social action that narrate historical and contemporary inequalities and cultural survival. Some indigenous media makers have worked with non-indigenous anthropologists and other allies, and some have built transnational networks with indigenous media makers from diverse parts of the globe that support and circulate indigenous media. While this course focuses on representations of indigenous peoples, the politics of representation — or in other words, the power in creating written, visual, and audio representations of our selves and others — are important in every anthropological project, as well as in many other professional and personal activities. This course’s texts and films present some of the complexities and possibilities across the continuum of representing others, collaboration, and self-representation.

Further to its physical properties, water affects most domains of social life - religion, politics, family, law, and morality - and connects them. This level course examines contemporary water issues through a range of conceptual frameworks from political ecology, social and technology studies and law to explore ontologies of water use, hydraulic infrastructures, modes of water governance, the production of scarcity, water rights, movements and protests, water justice and climate change. Ethnography allows us to perceive how the everyday, complex relations of water users, pipelines, private companies, technicians, climatic fluctuations, ministers and NGOs and upstream countries may be intertwined at different temporal and spatial scales. As the examples traverse varying domains such as international politics, economics, law and development, we will explore these in turn.

Life is an entanglement of relations. Environmental Anthropology is the study of the relations that connect human and non-human lives to larger political, ethical and ecological processes in the world. In this course we will examine the set of debates, founding concepts and methods in Environmental Anthropology. Comments: new course description

This anthropologically grounded course examines objects, their properties, and materials through interdisciplinary lens, integrating insights from sociology, environmental studies, and science and technology studies to offer a holistic understanding of material culture. This approach will incorporate diverse perspectives and knowledge systems to explore the social, natural, and cultural connections within artifacts. Everyday life is marked by the transformation of resources sourced from the immediate environment into various objects, including food, garments, tools, furniture, houses, and weapons. These objects are inextricably linked to the specific loci, time, culture, and environment in which humans live. This phenomenon has been the focal point of extensive research in the area of social studies of science and technology. From an anthropological perspective, the objective of this course is to examine the life of artifacts as a means to understand how cultural practices influence environmental crises. With this perspective, we will explore the social life of artifacts, human and non-human agencies to modify environment, indigenous and ethnic knowledge, and sociolinguistics. Throughout the course, we will explore global examples of innovation, adaptation, and resilience through the lens of diverse identities, highlighting how cultural practices and material culture are fundamentally shaped by and reflective of identity differences. The students will gain hands-on experience through a series of learning-by-doing activities, including journal writing, group presentations on artifacts and food, and museum visits, which will be mechanisms for gathering, sharing, and learning experiences.

Maps are everywhere: embedded in your phone, marked along the roadways, subways, trains stops, mountain paths, inside of buildings, the worlds of gaming, etc. We also create maps through our lives through paths we take. From Dr. Seuss to Tolkien to R.R. Martin to N.K. Jemisin, maps tell stories. This course will focus on the way that maps shape our lives, and how we shape maps. Maps are fantastical as well as fantastic. This class will trace their histories, their power, and their realities.

As Claude Levi-Strauss once remarked, animals are “good to think with.” Starting with this observation, we will investigate how humans use animals to “think” with: -what does it mean -how are animals used as metaphors and “organizing principles” for understanding ourselves and the world around us -how we relate to animals and why. The Giant Squid will serve as a kind of “index” animal for the course, and readings about the giant squid will appear throughout the course as we examine and think about other kinds of human/animal interactions.

This course will devote considerable attention to Qatari State and Society from the remnants of the archeological records to current debates on its ethnography, politics, and society. The course will employ a variety of resources ranging from primary records (i.e. kinship charts, Qatar Records, Lorimer Persian Gulf Gazetteer to resources in possession of individuals). Current accounts of the State’s political evolution, cultural heritage, and urban life will be explored in depth. To this end, the course will examine a plethora of sociocultural and political factors, which contributed to key debates on culture, archeology, migration, comparative histories, politics, cosmopolitanism, national identities, civil society, and emerging forms of urbanisms. The work of major theorists of culture and politics in general and that of Gulf scholars in particular will provide the framework within which we situate Qatari ethnography in its proper sociopolitical context. This research course will utilize ethnographies that have stood prominently in the field of Qatari scholarship authored by Qatari sociologists, historians and urban experts’ accounts on their own society. These ethnographies have ably addressed the nuances of ethno-history as well as the State’s rising prominence on a global scale. In addition to engaging scholarship on the historiography of the Qatar, ethnographies of its diverse societies through time and space, the course will provide several modules of ethnographic fieldwork. Both historiography and ethnography will provide sufficient understanding of theories of change and social organization as well as comprehension of basic histories and principles of the construction of cultural and political subject positions in Qatar.

This course will explore the timely intersection of anthropology with urbanism as the world experiences an exponential rise of urban development and mobility of communities. Students will engage with critical themes emerging from ethnographies on Gulf cities to produce their own ethnographic research on Qatari communities by practicing fieldwork utilizing qualitative methods of research.

What is a conspiracy theory? And what distinguishes it from social theory and social theorizing? In this course, these questions will guide our exploration of the epistemological and ethical distinctions made between these allegedly different forms of knowledge by looking at different conspiracy theories from the around the world. Are conspiracy theories symptomatic expressions of paranoia and social anxiety that emerge out of an increasingly opaque and unfathomable political-economic and social order? Or are they the cultural legacy of the Cold War and clandestine statecraft? Does labeling a theory “conspiratorial” simply function as a strategy to disregard counterhegemonic ways of making sense of the world? And what do we make of the fact that political and economic conspiracies have been uncovered by journalists, law enforcement, and academic researchers?

This course examines the varieties of fascism that have existed and which exist around the world today, focusing on the interplay between fascism, culture, politics, and everyday life. We will examine the ways in which fascism shapes ideas of gender, sexuality, the body, memory, architecture, archaeology, the past, the future, medicine, and science.

This course combines anthropological concepts with recent developments in gender and queer theory to understand cultural diversity in concepts of gender, sexuality, and sex across continents. The class focuses on cultural norms, institutions, and historical processes that have influenced possibilities for gender and sexuality in different places and times.Readings approach gender and sexuality from a number of theoretical standpoints including identity, desire, practice, scientific and medical subjectivity, institutional categories, and political stance.We will consider gender and sexuality in conjunction with concepts including social construction, performativity, intersectionality, governmentality, globalization, and hegemony.Readings incorporate ethnographic examples from several continents related to masculinity, femininity, marriage, reproduction, hetro-and homo-normativities, non-binary gender categories, and queerness.These case studies will provide students a basis for understanding how theory relates to lived experience.

Medical anthropology is a fascinating and fast-developing branch of anthropology with great potential for careers in anthropology, medicine, public health, international aid and development, and environmental studies. We will examine medical systems from a cross-cultural perspective, learning about traditional theories of health and illness while keeping in mind international politics and the effects of globalization. Topics include: the cultural history of clinical medicine and medical anthropology, traditional medical practices from around the world, folk and alternative health care systems, race, class, and gender in health care and health disparities in the U.S., and the relationship of human health with environmental health. There will be an individual case study assignment on the impact of contemporary problems (such as income inequality, war, instability, gender disparities, displacement and refugee status, and others) on health and health care in majority Muslim communities.

How does the body factor into or define kinship, family structure, gender roles, medical and religious belief systems, and culture change? This course takes anthropological views of the human body as the main object of study. Focus on the body can help to sharpen students’ understanding of the history of anthropology – for example how has the field worked in the past to classify humanity into distinct races and types, and how is it working in the present to deconstruct these classifications through studying effects of racism and other topics.

This course examines the intersection of gender, health policy, and health care worldwide through an anthropological lens. We interrogate social, economic, political, and biological effects on their health. How does gender affect health across the life course? How does poverty, race, and discrimination play a role in people’s gendered well-being and health? Through a critical anthropological approach and through readings from across the sub-disciplines of anthropology, these and other topics will be addressed in this class.

Intro to Psychological Anthropology. The main objective of the course will be that of showing the students how constitutive psychological processes are to the very social and cultural fabric of any given society or human group. The course will also have the purpose of dispelling the “myth of the isolated mind”, that is, the conviction according to which psychological dynamics are universal in features and meaning, and can be investigated irrespective of the socio-cultural environment in which they develop. The material will immerse the students in examples from the ethnographic literature which discuss most vividly the points I have sketched above. I will also provide the students with sections from a textbook to help them contextualize the major theoretical and conceptual propositions that the discipline has offered throughout the decades. The main takeaway from the course should be that of becoming intellectually and ethically equipped to consider any human psychological condition (whether “normal” or “pathological”) as at least in part dependent on, and the result of, the social, cultural, economic, political context in which the individual exists.

How to go about doing psychological anthropology in the field? Because psychological anthropology entails a close, intimate relationship with the ethnographer’s interlocutors, which is often not considered strictly necessary by other subfields of the discipline, it has also developed over the decades specific techniques to establish rapport, engage in conversation with interlocutors, and analyze the material obtained. The course will discuss the way in which psychological anthropologists have managed (or failed) to engage the subjectivity and the emotional world, both conscious and unconscious, of their interlocutors, as well as their own, during the ethnographic relation. The students will be required to complete two field exercises – an observational one, and an interviewing one – which are designed to have them face similar conundrums psychological anthropologists face in the beginning of their field expe

This course will take an anthropological approach to issues of culture and identity, with a particular emphasis on the field of “Disability Studies” – which encompasses varieties of difference in physical, mental, and other forms of ability. Examples will come from around the world and close to home. Guest speakers, fieldtrips, performances, and interesting class projects are being developed for the course. Topics to be addressed will include: Deaf Culture and the issue of Ableism in the majority hearing population; Autism, Spectrum Disorders, and Neurodiversity; Disability Rights, Disability Justice; Veterans with Disabilities; Caregiving, Services, Dependency; “Supercrips,” Exceptionalism, Individualism; Visible and Invisible Identities; Stigma; and Cultures around the world -- the U.S. “normal” is not the only “normal”.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, the need to explore the historical and social contexts of epidemic disease has become an urgent issue. How have outbreaks of plague and pandemics devastated and transformed humanity throughout recorded history? In this course, we will explore rabies, bubonic plague, smallpox, polio, measles, AIDS, and COVID-19 in human society. We will identify how communities and institutions respond to crises and how social conditions may influence and impede the rate of spread of contagious diseases. Additionally, we'll examine several ethical issues concerning policies created to respond to, treat, and halt epidemic health threats, including bioterrorism, SARS, and Ebola.

This class explores the culture of the National Basketball Association through the lens of racial capitalism. The 1st Quarter (what is racial capitalism?) explores historical analyses of racial capitalism that both explain and critique the economic system as it has expanded. The 2nd & 3rd Quarters (time & space) look at real-world examples from history. The 4th Quarter (who wins?) takes the critical tools we have learned and applies them to the current NBA season, in order to practice making sense of the world that racial capitalism is determined to produce. Classes feature op-eds, Twitter threads, films, highlight clips, and music alongside course readings, with an aim toward crafting practical tools for understanding the cultures, histories, and formations of racial capitalism.

This course exams military veterans, primarily in the United States. Often portrayed as either a hero, a victim, or a threat to society, the veteran holds a simultaneously valorized but ambiguous position in political rhetoric and everyday life. Drawing from historical and contemporary perspectives, this course seeks to problematize the identities, roles, and lived experiences of veterans, their return to civilian life after military service, how they conceptualize their status as veterans, and how we think about veterans and their contributions to life and culture in the United States.

This course will explore ethnographic research that focuses on people who build alternative forms of the social (society) that are not rooted in the nation-state form.

In this course, we will move across time and space to explore the concept of solidarity. Is solidarity a metaphor for social order? A group feeling? An identity? A Movement? A fragile possibility? Course texts will consider these questions ethnographically, revealing the many forms solidarity can take, and the many ways solidarity has been conceived, as it emerges in a range of diverse social contexts and historical moments. We will find solidarity in campaigns for justice, techno raves, soccer stadiums, religious ceremonies, political rallies, workplaces, and beyond. From these different settings, the course seeks to develop a working theory of solidarity through an exploration of its possibilities, limitations, and dangers. With calls for solidarity proliferating across public life, and in response to a range of social, political, and environmental calamities, this course offers students a critical perspective for making sense of this enduring social science concept.

At a time of rising economic inequality and growing labor precarity, workers around the world are again uniting and demanding justice. In this course, we will embark on a cross-cultural exploration of labor and examine how workers in different social settings have imagined, struggled for, and at times achieved workplace justice. Drawing from a wide range of ethnographic and anthropological studies, popular media, and accounts from labor activists around the world, this course will illustrate labor’s relationship to law, political-economy, moral economy, and culture. The strike will serve as a central course theme and guiding analytic for this journey.

This course looks at mass movements & mass incarceration in tandem, exploring their many contestations, confrontations, and connections. Rather than framing mass movements strictly as responses to the U.S. police State, we will consider how groups that were deemed “ungovernable” from the perspective of the State became widely criminalized through pro-white patriarchal tropes produced and perpetuated by people with economic and political power. From this perspective, widespread imprisonment appears to be the engine, and not simply the response, of the U.S. police State. Course materials are organized such that, over the duration of the semester, we will read theories, histories, ethnographies, and journalistic endeavors alongside music, television shows, and documentaries with an aim toward crafting practical tools for understanding formations of collective life and for fighting against technologies of power and punishment in U.S. society today.

Starting from the viewpoint that war is not a natural, biological “necessity” or inevitability, this course explores the diverse connections between war and culture, how both shape and construct the other. War and militarization play key roles in the modern nation-state, and much of what we view as “normal,” “everyday,” “common sense,” or “taken for granted” is related to the military and war. Throughout the class, we will focus on militarization, warfare, gender, sexuality, the family, language, technology, torture, trauma, and resistance, to name but a few of the ways war and culture are related in everyday life and experience. We will focus on the modern nation-state, the role of the military in the state, how states create soldiers, and what states do with soldiers and civilians in the pursuit of policy objectives. Who are the victims? Who are the perpetrators? What does it mean to wage war for a nation-state and its citizens, and what does it mean to the object of war and violence? How do people resist war, militarization, violence, torture, and terror?

How have societies across time and in different places developed and practiced law? What can cross-cultural comparison and the use of ethnographic methods reveal about law, legality, and notions of justice? And how might these insights inform contemporary debates around criminal justice reform, freedom of speech, or attempts to address global economic inequality? In this course, students will embark on a critical introduction to legal anthropology. Course readings will immerse students in the ways different cultures have devised legal systems to resolve social conflict, prosecute and punish crime, create categories to organize social relations such as across gender or race, and to secure and maintain political legitimacy. We will also examine contemporary approaches to the anthropological study of law by looking at cutting-edge research underway including indigenous rights, international criminal law enforcement, transnational financial and economic regulation, migration, and the role of contemporary social movements in the United States, like Black Lives Matter, and globally, like climate change activism, to bring law closer to justice.

Introductory concepts in the Anthropology of Sound, Ethnomusicology and related disciplines with a focus on field recording methods in ethnographic research

This course exams current trends and foci of security and securitization. Engaging these areas from an anthropological perspective, we will examine questions security through the lenses of narrative, affect, political economy, and constructions of violence and “the other.” Throughout the course, we will think about what an “anthropology of security” tells us about security and conflict. We will examine the links between security and war, policing, torture, insurgency and counter-insurgency, soldiering, immigration, and drone warfare. We will examine security not just as a kind of political system, but as a cultural system as well, and how ideas of security impact everyday life. We will also look at what security officials and policy makers say and do, and how “security” is experienced by people who are the objects of security programs and systems.

Public protests against police brutality in the United States have renewed interest in questions of reform and oversight with respect to law enforcement. Numerous stakeholders, from the Department of Justice to scholars and civil rights activists have made police brutality necessary and urgent problem that needs immediate attention. Their attention has brought up again in public discussion the question of the policing function and its limits, what is the role of the police in a democratic society, what are the racial and class structures that produce the powerful inequalities between the powers of the police and the communities in which they are embedded. These important questions are not only salient in the U.S., as protests across the world in recent years have shown us. How then, are we to think about the police as a force of law and order at a time when so much of their own practices seem unlawful, or worse, unjust? In this course, we will study the police: as an institution, as a set of disciplinary practices, as an agent of state power and monopoly, and as a mode of surveillance. The course will introduce you to some foundational texts that explore the relationship of ‘police’ to notions of authority, legitimacy, violence, private property, and security. We will read texts that undertake in-depth and long-term research on the history, emergence, and contemporary role of the police; the relationship between police and race, class, and gender; and explore how activists and protesters are involved in projects of police reform and even police ban from around the world. Selected Texts: 1. Beatrice Jauregui. 2016. Provisional Authority: Police, Order, and Authority in India. University of Chicago Press. 2. Ilana Feldman. 2015. Police Encounters: Security and Surveillance in Gaza Under Egyptian Rule. Stanford University Press. 3. Ieva Jusionyte. 2015. Savage Frontier: Making News and Security on the Argentine Border. University of California Press. 4. Michelle Alexander. 2010. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. The New Press.

This course explores the city as a product of, and a rich site for, humans’ negotiations over social and economic rights, identity, meaning, and community. Drawing on a variety of analytical, historical, geographic, and ethnographic studies, we will ask whether urban life is qualitatively distinct from rural life, and whether there are different types of urban life in different places and times. Debates over urban planning encompass moral, cultural, and personal concerns, not simply the planning schemes of economists, policymakers, and architects. Throughout the course, methodological questions regarding the city as an object of historical and ethnographic study are highlighted.

This course takes the common idiom—“money talks”—as a starting point for interrogating the relationships between people, money, and power. Drawing on foundational concepts and theories in economic anthropology, we examine how money, wealth, and affluence are understood in different social and cultural contexts. This includes concerns about “right” and “wrong” ways to acquire wealth; acceptable ways to share, redistribute, or make claims on wealth and resources; and how gender, age, race, and class structure differential access to wealth and power. Some course topics include: financial markets, Pentecostal churches, call centers, suburbs and gated communities, and multi-level marketing schemes.

Intersections of the moral and the economic have long motivated anthropological interests and inquiries. Some have viewed this relation as a binary opposition between the market and the household—drawing a distinction between economic and social/moral spheres of everyday life. Others have focused on how economic practice is shaped by moral norms, while yet others examine how different values or moral and ethical orientations influence how people think about what “the economic” is and should be. This class will begin by examining the foundations of the moral economy as a concept before tracing the ways the concept is taken up across a variety of anthropological and ethnographic writing. Some topics we will cover in the course include spiritual economies, immigration, volunteerism, state-centered social welfare, and a politics of the commons.

Spies hold a particular fascination in political life and popular culture: inhabiting a shadowy world of danger, intrigue, and adventure, the spy is to many the ideal person, career, or figure of veneration, a hero or a patriot for their country or cause. On the other hand, spies are also seen as traitors, turncoats, moles, or villains. This course will examine the worlds of spies and espionage, and how ideas about spying influence a wide variety of areas of everyday life. We will cover, amongst other things, spying, secrecy, security clearances/security classifications, surveillance, espionage, cryptography, research ethics, identities, methods, clandestine worlds and organizations, tradecraft, and fictional and real spies like James Bond, Mata Hari, Aldridge Ames, The Cambridge Five, and George Smiley (to name but a few).

Each year, thousands of hopefuls try out at high school and college levels for a shot at playing one step closer to the big league – the NFL. Over the decades since football became America’s primary entertainment money-maker, football has reflected changing ideas about race, class, gender, health, and well-being in American society. This course focuses on the social and cultural impact of American football and how it has shaped ideas around success, achievement, race, masculinity, and dreaming big. The course is targeted to teach students the broader context behind a beloved national sport but also to reflect the experiences of those who engage in the work of this dreaming every day.

Our life stories are embodied in our skeletons. Injury, illness, habitual activity, and the processes of growing up and growing old, impact skeletal tissue in ways that can be observed and analyzed scientifically and used to reconstruct how an individual—or an entire community—lived and died. Bioarchaeology is an interdisciplinary science which examines human osteology and skeletal biology within the context of the social, cultural, and environmental contexts in which people lived in the past. This course will provide an introduction to bioarchaeology and explore what researchers can learn by studying skeletons, including a person’s biological profile (approximate age, biological sex, and ancestry), health (diet, stature, healed or active infections or injuries, and indicators of stress), and social identity (funerary treatments suggesting status, cultural affinity, and spirituality). Students will learn examples of how both individual and population-wide studies of human remains influence how we understand complex topics related to health, identity, and lifeways in the premodern world. The course will overview standard methods for analyzing human remains (skeletal anatomy and paleopathology) as well as advanced methods such as stable isotope analysis, scientific imaging, and ancient DNA (aDNA).

Bodies may be used as analytical road maps, as entry- and exit- points to and from social, political, and economic processes” (Ferrandiz 2017). This course offers a cross-cultural perspective on bodily difference through the lifeworlds and afterlives of the Q Street Ancestors, the collection of 19th century remains of marginalized Georgetonians. Following an exploration of “the body” across various registers, the course will follow the standard categories of analysis for skeletal remains, introducing students to the basics of bioarchaeological analysis.

This course offers an introduction to bioarchaeology as a theoretically grounded and historically situated anthropological practice through a survey of burial sites across the African diaspora. A critical component of this class looks to the ethnographic, biohistorical, and archaeological work on the Black diaspora inform us about assumptions and interpretations concerning the race, ancestry, and human origins. Students will engage the ways that racialized difference impacts research designs within the bioarchaeology, mortuary archaeology, and forensic anthropology from a global perspective and confront current debates around research directions for current and future projects. Lectures will explore the politics of excavation, curation, and preservation across various sites of death throughout the wide geographical breadth of the African diaspora across the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans. Intersecting themes covered include gender, identity, religion, and ethics in relation to the material record. Course material will span articles, site reports, catalogs, documentary films and other multimedia sources.

What does it mean for a species to go extinct? What factors drove them to the edge of existence and which pushed them off? Each week of this transdisciplinary course is dedicated to one extinct specie - from the Spix's Macaw (extinct in the wild) to the Northern White Rhinoceros (functionally extinct) - and the ecological, historical, political, cultural, and economic factors that led to their decline. The course charts the web of relations that cradle life and examines the technical and scientific processes that come together to determine the extinction of a species.

Forensic Anthropology is an interdisciplinary approach which draws on public health, veterinary science, and ecology to addresses critical problems in global health while seeking sustainable solutions. The emerging framework of “One Paleopathology” adapts the One Health approach to integrate human, animal, and environmental health data from premodern contexts, illuminating the evolutionary pathways that shaped present-day health dynamics. The proposed course will introduce students to cross-disciplinary studies applying disease ecology, biological anthropology, veterinary science, epidemiological history, and paleoclimatology in the ancient world. Especially relevant will be the concept of syndemics and the roles that social identity and inequality play in the creation of unequal health burdens. Students will learn to incorporate evolutionary and biocultural theory into discussions of climate change, sustainability, and human health while considering how knowledge from the past, as well as indigenous local knowledge (ILK), can form a critical foundation for prediction and policy-making in the face of future uncertainty. This course will be targeted at students in anthropology as well as public health and environmental science.

This course will explore death from an anthropological perspective. We will discuss mortuary ritual (including non-normative funerary treatment), the science of decomposition, spirituality and concepts of the soul and afterlife in cross-cultural perspective, and how these intersect with folkloric beliefs of vampires, zombies, and other revenants. Through reading and discussion, we will explore how the idea of the "undead" reflects our enduring fascination with--and anxieties surrounding--our own mortality.

Color prejudice presents a disturbing human paradox. Compelling anthropological works have historically engaged with cultural constructions of the social body. Terrence Turner's work is a germinal contribution in which he argues that "the surface of the body seems everywhere to be treated not only as the boundary of the individual as a biological and psychological entity but as the frontier of the social self as well” (2012:486) 486). Phenotypic prejudices and subsequently colorism as discrimination that favors people with lighter skin, especially within an ethnic or racial group—found its way into many societies in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. and in so many societies across the depth and breadth of our world. This research seminar will examine his phenomenon to understand the lived realities of colorism in everyday life. We will carry out projects to ask: why does skin color wield such considerable power in divergent cosmologies, modes of thinking, and systems of signification? Color sensibilities in this seminar will be triangulated with other subject positions in both historical and contemporary terms.

The Roma, previously referred to by the pejorative “gypsy” is an ethnic group whose genealogical origin is traced back to Northern India. These communities are mostly iterant and nomadic, a fact that contributed to their systematic absence from census records especially in the countries of Central Europe and the Balkans. The ties that bind the Roma communities across environments and cultures in and out of Europe, are strengthened by their collective memory. During the Holocaust, nearly 400.000 thousand were murdered. Today, the Roma communities continue to be stigmatized, criminalized and scapegoated wherever they live. These perceptions and representations lend legitimacy to state-sponsored actions of forcible removal, harassment and violations of human rights. This research seminar will delve into the vast array of Roma communities and life-worlds through extensive visual and textual anthropological sources. Key anthropological aspects of these complex communities will be examined through maintenance of ethnic boundaries, kinship ties, language, cultural beliefs around purity and pollution, marriage rules and finally their everyday negotiations of their subaltern, minority identity. The prevailing assumptions about Roma communities in the public culture and media reality television will be also be examined.

Colonialism, as many scholars have noted, has a long, psychic reach. The knotted fingers of empire are still curled around the exposed necks of the vulnerable, the marginalised, and the poor. This course offers an introduction to postcolonial theory and covers key texts on black scholarship, urbanism in the global south, the construction of the Other, and the neoliberal regimes that continue to shape, if not smother, the daily lives of postcolonial subjects.

Using cupcakes as our starting points, this class will examine the intersections of food and culture in the greater Washington, D.C. area and beyond. Starting with an overview of food and culture in anthropological thinking and theory, we will move on to a consideration of the cupcake and the pie as symbols of identity, political economy, gentrification, gender, and power in Washington, D.C. Through the lens of the cupcake, for example, we will investigate why cupcakes have become such popular items of consumption, and what this conspicuous consumption tells us about how people think about themselves, the city, and the meaning of food in their lives. The course will involve an examination of theoretical texts on political economy, food ways, and identity, mapping, and ethnographic fieldwork and analysis. Some seats in this class are reserved.

What is ethnography? How does it differ from journalism, literature, or travel writing? Torn between claims to scientific objectivity and universalism and accusations of being a subjective, even artistic, interpretation of the world, how can ethnography claim to be the methodological basis of a whole discipline? How does imagination play a part in how anthropologists approach writing, visualizing, recording, describing, and analyzing culture, society, and difference? Doesn’t the very notion of imagination clash with the idea of objectivity and distance in academic scholarship? This seminar will engage with all these questions by exploring ethnography as a genre in the modern history of anthropology. We will read a range of writing and watch some film ethnographies as well, cutting across classic ethnographies, experimental writing, collaborative ethnography, auto-ethnography and historical approaches to studying culture and society.

This course explores processes of power and expertise and the way they work relationally to shape people’s claims to the environment. It strives to continue environmental anthropology’s movement beyond problematic imaginaries of nature as foundational, beyond a reifying focus on subalterity, beyond unproblematized images of marginalization, and beyond the uncritical use of the savage slot. Furthermore, this project is not concerned with listing people who are the most recognizable. Instead, it promotes critical intersectionality within environmental anthropology, articulating a political stance from which to rethink environments. Intersectional Ecologies takes the field in a new direction. This course builds on scholarship that expands debates about the value of anthropology to the humanistic study of the environment. These themes are guideposts for thinking about the environment in its many dimensions. This course attempts to offer theoretical and regional breadth that pushes at the intellectual and practical boundaries of environmental anthropology.

Does the existence of what we call ‘globalization’ mean that cultures around the world are moving toward uniformity? What are the factors that sustain identity and cultural engagement, even as local areas absorb and exchange ideas with the international community about the family, the community, markets, gender equality, human rights, and the arts? Anthropologists have been concerned with the intersection of culture, power and history. What circumstances promote race/ethnic tolerance and intellectual engagement with diversity? Therefore, in this course we critically explore four themes using American, African, Asian, and European examples: 1) The dynamics of “Inequality” within globalization (especially issues of place, race, ethnicity, class, and religion); 2) Migration/immigration dynamics and crises; 3) How identity and ‘civilizational’ struggles play out today; and 4) How gender dynamics and women’s empowerment issues mediate state, local, and global power.

Soaring temperatures and increased aridity caused by climate change are predicted to make some parts of the globe virtually uninhabitable. What options remain available to policy makers, technical advisors, and citizens in the region? Carbon emissions have historically been produced by industrialized, ‘Northern’ societies, yet countries in the Global South are forced to bear the brunt, and asked to curb their emissions (affecting their economic development), is this fair? We will use anthropological perspectives and concepts with which to understand ethnocentric biases, power imbalances between ‘Northern’ and ‘Southern’ countries, and to explore Traditional Ecological Knowledge and its relationship to science. We will draw on Science Studies to analyze how scientific facts are constructed within cultural contexts, and explore how climate knowledge is constructed ordinary citizens (or not, in the case of climate change denial). Similarly, we will explore the limitations to technological progress and innovation in relation to paradigmatic behavioral change. Through ethnography, we will learn how to critique policy and development statements by taking local peoples' viewpoints seriously. Finally, as climate change is a global phenomenon, we will consider the ethical challenges associated with becoming a global citizen in an era of increasingly nationalist sentiments.

In one of the rare accounts on the marked connectivity between Africa and the Gulf, Abusharaf and Eickelman highlighted the ways in which the two regions have interacted historically and how the emerging cultural and political landscape were transformed in the course of human circularity and circumnavigation. Africa and the Gulf: Blurred Boundaries, Shifting Ties, elucidated the paradox that marks understanding the historical and contemporary trans-regional relationships between Africa and the Gulf. Geographic propinquity and economic and cultural exchanges over millennia notwithstanding, scholars have often conceived of the Gulf and Africa as largely separate. The two regions have deep historical roots that influence both the long durée and the short-term contemporary events of policy shifts, economic flows, and political transformations. Both Africa and the Gulf, moreover, are made up of mixed populations and “creole” societies, in which spoken languages--to mention only one aspect of the societies in the region-- show a dazzling, often changing, array of borrowing and assimilation as shaped by forced and voluntary migrations, and a remarkable capacity of creativity and adaptation. Gudided by the theoretical and ethnographic questions to which the study of the two regions gives rise, in this seminar we will take a closer look at these questions by situating Africa and the Gulf region within a broader framework of the Indian Ocean world. Approaching the Gulf and Africa from an Indian Ocean perspective will provide new ways of an understanding of how to unite geography, ethnography, social history, migration and great waves of social and economic transformations. Some socio-political and cultural dynamics that inform the seminar’s approach to Gulf and African societies and the deep interconnections between them. We will trace the historical context of this project necessitates an understanding of the fact that over the past five millennia, plants, animals, people, languages, ideas, religions, technologies, and a vast array of raw and manufactured commodities have circulated along the watery highways connecting East Africa with the Persian Gulf, South Asia and the Western Indian Ocean. Moreover, this will provide a critique of the imperial and national historiographic traditions on the Indian Ocean that mitigated the ability of many to explore the multifaceted connections between distant places and peoples across the Indian Ocean rim.

"Love” is a social construct - historically, politically, and socially produced. De-centering Eurocentric notions of love, this course introduces students to 1) love as a feeling, concept, and practice through religion, activism, politics; 2) the emergence of the romantic, conjugal couple in Europe alongside the modern notion of the family, private property, and capitalism; 3) how ideas of love and autonomy are domesticated around the world and 4) the attending violence that comes with these efforts; 5) radical philosophies of love as ethical and liberatory project with new horizons.

All eyes are now on Sudan following the arrest warrant for Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir in accordance with United Nations Security Council Resolution 1593, concerning alleged war crimes in Darfur. The UN Security Council referred the case to Luis Moreno-Ocampo, prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, after the investigation of Sudan's own special prosecutor had not led to war prosecutions, suggesting the failure of institutions of justice within the country. Events of this magnitude are to be expected given the pervasive political violence that engulfed the country following its independence from British rule in January 1956. Ever since, the Sudan was converted into a theatre of atrocity that shattered lives and rendered ordinary citizens perpetual refugees and internally displaced people in a vast territory, the largest in the African continent. Within this context, this course will examine multiple topics pertaining to culture, society and politics. It will probe in depth local, national, international, and transnational responses to the devastation of the region. We will pay considerable attention to questions of representation and the production of knowledge. Since these questions are fundamental to anthropological understanding, we will cover multiple forces that heed John Hall's argument regarding "Culture of Inquiry" in which he argues that contemporary conflicts over knowledge tend to reinforce ideological oppositions when there is an opportunity to understand the complex web of uneven connections that structure the entire range of inquiry's practices (1999). In this course we will examine forces pertaining to ethnicity, militarization, banditry, border politics, diasporic activism, and marginality. Explication of these forces is essential for overcoming the rampant oversimplification of the conflict. We will probe culture and politics and trace the development of a political militancy that overwhelmed social arrangements among peoples with long histories of intermixing in a complex geography..

This community-based research seminar on migration combines anthropology and principles of activist research. With 65 million people forcibly displaced, and over 244 million more migrants living abroad worldwide, migration in its various forms is one of the most pressing human rights issues today. As an anthropology class, we will read about the lived experience of migration – spotlighting the distinctions and commonalities between migrants, refugees, asylees, and trafficked persons. And as members of a 4-credit community-based research class, students will conduct field research and create advocacy opportunities on behalf of migrants in the Metropolitan D.C. area. In this way, you will learn from the communities around you while contributing in ways that they identify.

In this course we will not only read anthropology, but also do anthropology. Students will learn about field research design and methodology, as well as conduct their own semester-long field-research projects. In order to acquire the skills necessary for participant observation, we will learn how cultural anthropologists select a research topic, survey a field site, design the study, pose theoretical questions, carry out the research, keep field notes, analyze ethnographic data, and then finally, write an ethnography. We will also read examples of ethnography and other forms of anthropological writing such as testimonials and life histories.

Anthropologists have brought to bear significant perspectives on war and political violence. Detailed ethnographies have furthered our understandings of the root causes and consequences on communities living with political upheaval and social unrest. The sustained ethnographic investigations of the unique experiences of individuals and communities living under the shadow of political violence and mass atrocities have been central to the powerful analysis of state and society. "Have humans always fought and killed each other, or did they peacefully coexist until organized states developed?" asks anthropologist Keith F. Otterbein in his compelling research on the causes of war. This fundamental question had help frame important debates on the very nature of human society. The main objective of this course is to explore the anthropology of war and peacemaking drawing on a wide variety of ethnographic examples to contextualize the major forces pertaining to the eruption of war. Topics ranging from local contexts, ethnicity, power, territorial partition, justice, domestic and international politics, collective security, justice and mediation will be examined. The course will employ major anthropological theoretical and methodological approaches grounded in cultural and political anthropology to unravel the patterns and processes through which individuals and communities begin to cope with war, and how they move on to rebuild their fractured lives. Ethnographic perspectives on violence, borders and refugees will be covered.

This community-based research seminar on migration combines anthropology and principles of community-based/activist research. With 65 million people forcibly displaced, and over 244 million more migrants living abroad worldwide, migration in its various forms is one of the most pressing human rights issues today. As an anthropology class, we will read about the lived experience of migration – spotlighting the experiences of undocumented people and mixed status families and communities throughout the world. And, as members of a 3-credit community-based research class, students will participate in community-based/activist research

Turkish Culture has exploded beyond ethnic, national, and regional boundaries due to social media, film, music, and a vast body of television serials. This course will use these genres to examine Turkish culture and also its receptions in places far beyond the Republic of Turkey. New forms of media have created hybrid sensations – such as when a Turkish mafia boss released a wildly popular weekly series of revelations about government corruption from the United Arab Emirates, or when rappers joined together to create a long-form music video taking up issues such as environmental justice and censorship. This course will examine themes such as neo-Ottomanism as portrayed in film and television and delve into the uses and abuses of social media for diplomatic outreach, surveillance, and political activism.

Popular culture is an arena in which Latin Americans make cultural offerings their own through both creativity and reappropriation. Pop culture forms can be key sites for the formation of identities, for the ways in which people make sense of the world, and understanding their location within it. This course looks at pop culture forms throughout Latin America, including music, dance, sport, media, art, beauty, and consumer products. Taking an anthropological approach, we will explore the ways that pop culture draws from, comments upon, and at times resists political issues, notions of authenticity, social problems, and inequalities.

This experiential course investigates the interconnections between sound ecology, environmental field recording, and experimental music practice. Students will explore how acoustic ecosystems shape our understanding of place while developing creative approaches to sound documentation and composition. The course combines historical study of experimental music - from musique concrète through John Cage, David Tudor, and contemporary sound artists - with an introduction to the emerging field of sound ecology. Students will engage with R. Murray Schafer's foundational work on acoustic environments while examining current research in sound preservation and acoustic habitat protection.

Through hands-on workshops, students will master field recording techniques, sound manipulation methods, and composition approaches. Regular recording expeditions and listening sessions will develop critical awareness of both natural and human-made soundscapes. Technical sessions will cover professional recording equipment, acoustic measurement tools, and both analog and digital sound processing. The course culminates in a final sound piece demonstrating engagement with sound ecological principles while exploring experimental music approaches. This work will be accompanied by documentation of recording sites, methodology, and creative process. No prior musical training is required, though students should be prepared to engage with both technical and conceptual aspects of sound ecology and experimental practice.

This course tackles the intertwined issues of settler state formation, capitalist dispossession, mobility, and bodily sovereignty. We will read about native people's refusal of state-imposed borders, enslaved individuals' survival strategies through forced migration, contemporary migrants' resistance to being criminalized, and the human toll of militarized borders. As a community-based learning class, students will work with community-based organizations that fight for migrant and racial justice. They also will help build an oral history archive on experiences with migration -- and being separated from loved ones -- in the COVID era.

How are ways of life changing on a rapidly heating planet? Drought, extreme heat, and wildfires are transforming food systems, exposing communities to toxins, and forcing people to migrate. This course highlights indigenous land management, the class and racial implications of "climate adaptation," and the ever-increasing exploitation of the most vulnerable workers -- including "disaster workers," those who clean up after devastating floods and fires. As a community-based research course, students will have a chance to roll up their sleeves and work alongside climate activists.

The coastal regions of Kerala and Goa in India provide a rich environment for the study of divergences and convergences in their historical and cultural experiences, and relations between India and the wider Indian Ocean. In this intensive research seminar, we will examine the histories that have shaped these regions by researching their maritime trade, colonization, literary explorations, and ethnographic narratives. Through an interdisciplinary lens, the seminar will allow the students to delve deeper into the intricacies of human experiences while considering the specificities of each community’s culture, art and literary imagination. Admission is by departmental approval (send the professor an account of why you want to take this class, along with any related experiences, skills, or classes). Students in the class will travel to Kerala and Goa (exact dates TBC, costs covered by GU) in March or April 2026 as part of the class. This course is co -taught with ENGL4219 and HIST4219 courses in Washington DC with Professors Parsons and Chakravarthy.

With half the world’s population living within fifty miles of its shores, the Indian Ocean has borne witness to remarkable circulations of people, goods, and ideas for millennia. As part of a new series of interdisciplinary courses on the Indian Ocean, we will cover literary, historical, and anthropological approaches to studying the Indian Ocean, introducing students to a wide range of texts and approaches, and focusing on South Asia. The class will be taught in the Global Classroom (with students based in DC and Doha), and will be co-taught by Profs. Ananya Chakravarti, Rogaia Abusharaf, and Cóilín Parsons. This course will be the first of a two-course sequence focused specifically on the South Asian hub of the Indian Ocean world, and will include a trip to Kerala and Goa for enrolled students in the Spring 2025 course. Students who enroll in the fall are not required to take the Spring course but may wish to consider committing to the full two-semester sequence, including the study trip. Enrollment in Spring 2025 is subject to available space and resources.

Significant anthropological research has revealed widely different ideas of conception, pregnancy, childbirth, and infant care in cultures around the world. The history of childbirth in the US includes a clear trend of increasing medicalization and periods of eugenic population manipulation including forced sterilization. Scriptural traditions, poetry, and fiction can give us culturally-diverse visions of the meaning of childbirth. Cultural tropes and metaphors can be found in discussions or taboos around conception, pregnancy, abortion, birth, infant and maternal death, and infant feeding.

How have societies across time and in different places developed and practiced law? What can cross-cultural comparison and the use of ethnographic methods reveal about law, legality, and notions of justice? And how might these insights inform contemporary debates around criminal justice reform, freedom of speech, or attempts to address global economic inequality? In this course, students will embark on a critical introduction to legal anthropology. Course readings will immerse students in the ways different cultures have devised legal systems to resolve social conflict, prosecute and punish crime, create categories to organize social relations such as across gender or race, and to secure and maintain political legitimacy. We will also examine contemporary approaches to the anthropological study of law by looking at cutting-edge research underway including indigenous rights, international criminal law enforcement, transnational financial and economic regulation, migration, and the role of contemporary social movements in the United States, like Black Lives Matter, and globally, like climate change activism, to bring law closer to justice.

This course will examine the role of anthropology and anthropologists in the history of the contact that Europe and the U.S.A. have had with the Muslim World. Examples will include anthropological writing produced both during and following the period of British, French, and Russian colonialism in places such as Afghanistan, North Africa, and in the Caucasus and Central Asia (all readings are in English). The intellectual lineage assignment will allow students to trace “schools” of anthropologists who study Muslim cultures. In order to learn about the everyday lives of Muslims in different places, ethnographic studies of Indonesia, Bosnia, Turkey and Uzbekistan will be examined. Students will form groups to take up and present an ethnographic study from Kenya, Syria, Los Angeles, or another Muslim context. A study of Muslims in Germany and an examination of global musical trends among Muslim youth will round out the course. Talal Asad’s critique of the Anthropology of Islam will inform course readings and discussions exploring the history of academic orientalism and the theoretical challenge to it as elucidated by Edward Said. Intellectual engagement with both primary anthropological texts and critical responses will be required. This course is open to both upper-level undergraduates and graduate students. The assignments for graduate students will have longer page limits and should be done in close consultation with the professor.

This seminar surveys major social theories and debates that inspire and inform anthropological analysis. Over the course of the semester, we will investigate a range of theoretical propositions concerning such topics as agency, structure, ecology, subjectivity, history, technology-social change, power, culture, and the politics of representation. Ultimately, all theories can be read as statements about what it means to be human and the worlds that people come to inhabit and create. We will approach each theoretical perspective or proposition on three levels: (1) in terms of its analytical or explanatory power for understanding human behavior and the cultural and natural world; (2) in the context of the social and historical circumstances in which they were produced; and (3) as contributions to ongoing dialogues and debate.