Courses
Spring 2025 Offerings Course Info on SIS Archives
Course Descriptions
The list below includes descriptions of all undergraduate and graduate courses offered by the Department of Anthropology, though some courses may be taught more often than others. Descriptions for special topics seminars are updated each semester.
Visit the undergraduate page for course requirements for specific programs. For up-to-date information on course offerings, schedules, room locations and registration, please visit the Student Information System (SIS).
Undergraduate Courses
ANTH AP Ap Anthropology. Tufts equivalency awarded based upon AP exam/score. Please see Tufts Exam Equivalency Chart in Bulletin for detailed information.
ANTH 5 Freshman Seminar. Introductory-level discussion-based investigation of a selected issue in contemporary sociocultural anthropology, linguistics, physical anthropology, or archaeology. Recommendations: Freshman only.
ANTH 10 Introduction To Sociocultural Anthropology. Cross-cultural analysis of the varieties of human experience in social life. Topics include belief systems and symbolic forms, politics, warfare and social control, family and kinship, subsistence, economic production, and cultural critique. Emphasizes problems inherent in understanding unfamiliar cultures on their own terms.
ANTH 12 Gender in World Cultures. Introduces anthropological approaches to gender in diverse contexts, and to theories of gender and culture, focusing on how individuals and societies create, reproduce, and navigate systems of sex and gender. Asks how gender is defined and contested, and how it is subject to systems of power as well as creative reimagining. Takes a cross-cultural and transnational perspective.
ANTH 15 Indigenous Movements in the Americas and Beyond. (Cross-listed as ENV 15.) Analyzes Indigenous political and social movements, with a focus on the 21st century, with special attention to land, water, language, gender, and expressivity. Explores how Indigenous struggles are framed by state politics, and how those struggles may extend beyond the bounds of settler states. Focuses on the Americas and Oceania, and investigates how the indigenous identity has been used as a mobilizing strategy in Asia, Africa, and Europe.
ANTH 16 Introduction to Latinx Cultures. Ethnographic approaches to Latinx communities currently residing in the United States. Topics include a variety of important issues affecting Latinx populations such as immigration, bilingual education, criminalization, and cultural production, paying special attention to intersections of gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity.
ANTH 18 Growing Up Latino/a. Draws on ethnographic, popular culture (e.g., films, art, and music), demographic, and public policy texts to explore theories of Latino/a diversity, family structures, trends in transnational migration, and macro- and microeconomic factors influencing community resource bases and social and cultural networks. Surveys how Latinos/as interface with U.S. institutions such as labor organizations, religious institutions, political parties, the educational system, immigration, health, welfare, the military, correctional institutions, community organizations, sports and cultural organizations.
ANTH 20 Global Cities. (Cross-listed as STS 20.) Introductory-level urban anthropology class exploring cities as intersections of people, ideas, capital, and the physical environment. Themes include anthropological understandings of space and place-making; utopic and dystopic urban visions of the city; urban mobility; cities as nodes in global environments, economies, and networks of people and production; sensory experience and expressive culture in cities; urban "nature" (e.g., parks); difference and inequality in urban landscapes; the growth of urban populations and megacities; and tensions between the city as planned or conceptualized and the city as a lived experience.
ANTH 22 Anthropology of Global Racisms. Introduction to anthropological approaches to understanding race and racism. Ethnographic, linguistic, and theoretical approaches to understanding how race becomes meaningful as a category and how it shapes people’s everyday lives in ways connected to structures of global white supremacy.
ANTH 24 Anthropology of the Environment. Key issues and frameworks of environmental anthropology across the 20th and 21st centuries. Provides students with an introduction to both the discipline of anthropology and changing forms of environmental thought. Introduces students to anthropological concepts including culture, nature, ethnography, adaptation, and human exceptionalism using cross-cultural materials and case studies.
ANTH 25 Anthropology of Armed Conflict. (Cross-listed as PJS 25.) Introductory-level study of armed conflict and conflict transformation from standpoint of anthropology of violence. Critical examination of causes of conflict; gendered, ethnic, cultural, and religious dimensions; globalization of conflict through media, transnational flows of commodities, international interventions; impact of 9/11 and the global "war on terror"; intersection of local, national, and international techniques of conflict transformation. Focus in depth on experience and initiatives from the ground up.
ANTH 26 Anthropology of Socialism and Postsocialism. Anthropology of socialism and postsocialism, analyzing political, economic, and sociocultural transformations in the former Soviet Union and other socialist states. Takes a global approach; juxtaposes post-socialism with post-colonial and post-industrial processes. Explores power and resistance; ethnicity and nationalism; gender and body politics; health and illness; commodification and consumption; religion, magic, and rationality; resource extraction; environmental changes; and criminal economies. No prerequisites.
ANTH 27 Human Rights and Justice in Cultural Context. (Cross-listed as PJS 27 and CVS 57.) Examines anthropological debates about human rights and other approaches to justice. Key anthropological methods, like participant-observation, reflexivity, and cultural critique, and anthropological theories on topics like culture, the state, indigenous peoples, and globalization. Analysis of controversies about cultural relativism and universalism, approaches to both violent conflicts and the structural violence of poverty, and the relationship between anthropology and human rights. Ethnographies of human rights work and other approaches to achieving justice that elucidate how advocates strive to produce reliable knowledge and circulate it to authorities and the public in reports, documentaries, and other media.
ANTH 28 The Anthropology of Capitalism. Anthropology of labor and economy examining capitalism as a complex, diverse, and historically-specific sociocultural period. Topics include industrial labor and exploitation; the development of the commodity form; exchange, debt, and the history of markets; global finance and de-industrialization; transformation and resilience of distinct cultures around the globe; environmental extraction; and post-capitalist movements and practices. Course materials are drawn from around the globe to illustrate the many forms of capitalism operating today.
ANTH 29 Kinship: Living in Relation. Gateway sociocultural anthropology course introducing basic concepts in anthropology of gender, sexuality, reproduction, and power, and feminist and queer anthropology. Explores what it means to be related to another person, what “family” is, and what that means or meant to people in different times and places. Kinship as a foundational yet diverse aspect of social life; “the family” as a site for expression of power and reparative world-making. Kinship in relation to culture, gender, law, science, politics, and activism. Topics include marriage diversity, kinship dissolutions, property, reproductive technologies, adoption, relational ecologies, activism, and ruptured and repaired kinship amid historical trauma.
ANTH 32 Introduction to the Anthropology of Science and Technology. (Cross-listed as STS 32.) An anthropological approach to the social and cultural studies of science and technology. Asks how and whether sociocultural forces shape the content of science, how to define “technology,” and how science and technology impact culture and society. Covers anthropological methods and research findings on topics such as algorithms, genetics, theoretical physics, classification, cyborgs, facts, infrastructure, and magic.
ANTH 39 Gateway Course In Sociocultural Anthropology. Introductory-level investigation of a special topic in sociocultural anthropology. Please refer to semester course guide for topic descriptions.
ANTH 40 Biological Anthropology. Human biological diversity and introduction to problems of biological diversity in living populations. Variation in genetic makeup: our size, shape, and color; our bodily responses to heat, cold, and workload; our neural responses to the world. Basic evolutionary principles applied to explain origins, mechanisms, and trends of human diversity. Topics include the interplay of biology and culture; adaptation to environmental stresses including cold, high altitude, and megacities; co-evolution of infectious disease, including STDs, smallpox, and malaria; basic Mendelian, molecular, and population genetics; primate biology and behavior; human growth; and the selective significance of contemporary behaviors such as using social media, reshaping the natural environment, taking risks in extreme sports, and online dating that meld genetic predispositions with new cultural frames. Includes a weekly lab. Typically offered in Fall semester.
ANTH 44 Primate Social Behavior. (Cross-listed as BIO 44.) Introduction to social lives of primates. Uses experimental and observational studies to teach students how to understand and engage with scientific literature and method. Covers ecological, physiological, and developmental bases of primate social behavior, with attention to evolution of social interactions among individuals of different age, sex, relatedness, and status. Topics include competition and cooperation, dominance and territoriality, sex and mating, parenting, cognition and conservation. Includes a weekly lab where students will learn primatological methods. No pre-requisites. Typically offered in Spring semester.
ANTH 49 Gateway Course In Biological Anthropology. Introductory-level investigation of a special topic in biological anthropology. May be repeated for credit. Please refer to semester course guide for topic descriptions.
ANTH 50 Introduction to Archaeology. (Cross-listed as ARCH 30.) Survey of human culture from the earliest paleolithic hunters and gatherers to the formation of states and the beginnings of recorded history. Course provides an introduction to archaeological methods, a worldwide overview of prehistoric ways of life, and a more detailed analysis of cultural development in the New World.
ANTH 51 North American Archaeology. (Cross-listed as ARCH 31.) Introduction to North American archaeology—primarily focused on pre-colonial Indigenous histories and cultures. Examines history of the field, basics of archaeological method and theory, key insights and controversies associated with North American archaeology. Includes ancient population movements, Ice Age transformations, hunter-gather-fisher societies, moundbuilders, Indigenous-colonial interactions, with special emphasis on decolonization and Indigenous archaeologies.
ANTH 78 Music in Global Perspectives I. (Cross-listed as MUS 38.) An introduction to ethnomusicology, the study of music in human life. The anthropological view of music as a response to the natural environment and social experience. Comparative methods using case studies from diverse world traditions.
ANTH 82 Soundworlds of North Africa. (Cross-listed as MUS 42.) Anthropology of music approach to North African soundworlds—the sonic spaces where music, culture, and social action intersect. Centering the voices of North African scholars, musicians, and listeners of the contemporary Maghreb region (Algeria, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Tunisia, Western Sahara, and their borderlands and diasporas). Topics may include the role of music in Amazigh rights and Sahrawi independence movements, spaces of Islamic-Jewish convergence, ritual healing and the recuperation of sub-Saharan heritages, traumas of migration, the Arab Spring, and mythmaking about North Africa by foreign and local powers. How to relate anthropological and social theory to public and “hidden” meanings embedded in the sounds of diverse musical genres.
ANTH 99 Internship In Anthropology. Supervised internship in wide range of community organizations, health organizations, museums, governmental and non-governmental organizations. Twelve to fifteen hours work per week. Written assignments, with supporting readings, to place internship in critical analytical frame. Recommendations: Anthropology majors only.
ANTH 102 Children And Youth In War Zones. Introductory discussion-based sophomore seminar exploring lives of children and youth in armed conflicts in Africa, Europe, Asia, Middle East, and the Americas. Analytical frame of anthropology of children, youth, and global processes. Topics include young refugees, separated children, child and youth combatants, gender contrasts between boys and girls in war zones, challenges of demobilizing and reintegrating young soldiers, media images, international interventions. Classes consist of discussions, oral presentations, films. Recommendations: Sophomores only.
ANTH 116 Archaeological Methods, Ethics, and Dilemmas. (Cross-listed as ARCH 116.) Archaeological methods for understanding the past. Includes ethical considerations, new technologies, conceptual dilemmas, postcolonial critiques, and collaborative work. Best practices in archaeological methods and current debates about ethical dilemmas. Impact of methodology on descendant communities, stakeholders, rightsholders, and the public.
ANTH 117 Coming of Age in Contemporary Africa. Examination of the changing lives of children and youth in postcolonial Africa, approaching young people as cultural, political, and economic innovators. Topics include gendered challenges of becoming an adult in contemporary Africa; globalization and transformations in sexuality; memory and cultural production; children and youth in war zones; young people's responses to UN/NGOs; children's rights and citizenship in postcolonial states.
ANTH 118 Culture And Power In Africa. Creative reshaping of African cultural ideas and practices in new historical circumstances. How people address conditions of unequal power such as colonialism, labor migration, and globalization through the dynamic production of religion, ritual, music, art, drama, and other cultural forms. Recommendations: Sophomore standing or permission of instructor.
ANTH 119 Ethnographies of War & Displacement in MENA. Ethnographic approaches to military conflict and forced displacement in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Humanitarian responses to crises; refugees’ critiques and engagement with these responses. Refugees’ and migrants’ experiences of racialization and exclusion through displacement. Comparative analysis with concepts of race, colonialism, diaspora, and indigeneity. Environmental dimensions of conflict. Aftermaths of war on socialities and politics. Consideration of MENA refugee populations in North America and Europe. Traditional ethnographies to be complemented with multimedia and related materials.
ANTH 120 Culture, Personhood, and Subjectivity in South Asia. Introduction to cultures of South Asia through inquiry into identity, personhood and experience in everyday life. In diverse contexts, asks how concepts of self and personhood are formed, and what cultural and political structures hold people together and establish difference, considering topics including changing forms of family life, performances of gender, caste and caste-politics, and histories of community identity, with focus on ways hierarchies are maintained and challenged.
ANTH 121 The Politics Of Knowledge. Examines and extends debates about the relationship between knowledge, geography, and power in the Middle East by studying the practices involved with the production and circulation of knowledge. Students become acquainted with the field of science studies through theoretical readings and ethnographic texts. Topics include the politics of knowledge in the colonial encounter, violence as related to the production and preservation of knowledge, embodiment and knowledge, and the role of the state in knowledge production. Recommendations: One course in either Anthropology or the Middle East, or consent.
ANTH 122 Gender and Sexuality in South Asia. Explores cultural and historical formulations of gender and sexuality in
South Asia, considering ways gender and sexuality are sites of power and contestation, and asking how both intersect with identity and subjectivity. Looks at social change and continuity in following topics: gender norms and challenges to them, transgender and Third-sex identities, marriage practices, transactional sex, religion and ritual, law and activism, and media. Addresses intersection of gender and sexuality with caste and class.
ANTH 123 Technologies of Enchantment. (Cross-listed as STS 123.) Mid-level course in anthropological theory: examines technologies made to entice, lure, and persuade, in a social and cultural context. Compares the design, use, and reception of techniques ranging from animal trapping to user experience design. Topics may include hunting, machine gambling, scams, advertising, magic, art, hospitality, persuasive design, behavioral addiction, and algorithmic recommender systems. Recommendations: One prior course in cultural anthropology.
ANTH 124 Queer Anthropology. (Cross-listed as WGSS 124.) Meanings surrounding queer sexual practices and subjectivities, derived from anthropological research from throughout the world and classic works on queer theory. Counts toward the Cultural and Social Justice Anthropology minors. Prerequisite: one course in Sociocultural Anthropology or Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, or instructor permission.
ANTH 126 Food, Nutrition And Culture. Biological perspectives on human and non-human primate food systems, diet, and nutrition. Particular focus placed on the evolutionary processes and interactions between biology and culture that shape and are shaped by food. Topics include food webs, the evolution of cooking, the development of human social and foraging systems, physical and behavioral adaptations to diet, the science of nutrition, relationships between food and disease, and food sharing.
ANTH 127 Archaeology of the Modern World. Historical archaeology as the study of the last 500 years of human history. Combines archaeological remains, historical texts, and oral records to study capitalism, colonialism, and globalization. The methods, theories, and data sets of historical archaeology. Case studies to reconsider the nature of modernity and the modern world. Course materials drawn primarily from across North America with global implications.
ANTH 128 Mesoamerican Archaeology. (Cross-listed as ARCH 128 and LAS 128.) An introduction to the archaeology of pre-Columbian cultures of Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico. Focus is on the origins of village life, the development of social complexity, emergence of states, ritual, religion, and culture collapse. Cultures studied include the Olmec, the Maya, the Zapotec, and the Aztec through artifacts, architecture, murals, inscribed monuments, hieroglyphs, and codices.
ANTH 129 Archaeology and Colonialism. Investigates archaeology’s many relationships with colonialism. Explores insights that archaeologists gain from studying colonial sites. Considers how the ruins of colonialism shed new light on today’s world. Investigates how histories of archaeology and museum collecting are implicated in the colonial project, asking what this means for the future of these disciplines. Studies new forms of archaeology that are increasingly aware of the discipline’s colonial legacies, placing special attention on community-based and Indigenous archaeologies.
ANTH 130 Anthropological Thought. The development of anthropological thought in American, British, and French schools of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Historical, evolutionary, materialist, functionalist, structuralist, and symbolic perspectives. Recommendations: One introductory anthropology course or permission of the instructor. Typically offered in Fall semester.
ANTH 131 Anthropology Of Religion. Mid-level course exploring how religious practice and identities are shaped in specific histories, localities, and diasporas in two or more non-western world civilizations. Topics include theories of religion, religious ideas and practices among peoples who do not use Western concepts of religion or belief, politics of religious experience, and religion in the construction of personhood, communities, and ethnic, national, and diasporic identities. Recommendations: Sophomore standing or permission of instructor.
ANTH 132 Myth, Ritual, And Symbol. (Cross-listed as REL 109.) Various approaches to myth, ritual, and symbol including how they are entwined with historical and contemporary moments of performance. Topics include how rituals are adapted, enacted, applied, and performed as well as issues of representation, authenticity, and history. Recommendations: Sophomore standing.
ANTH 133 Anthropology of Journalism. (Cross-listed as FMS 56.) Anthropological approaches to the study of journalism across cultural and political systems and at various scales. How is participation in discussions of public import regulated? How is truth publicly established within a community or society? What are the roles of different forms of media in journalism? What is the relationship between the state and modes of knowledge production? What role do various emotions and styles have in advancing discussions of issues of public concern? Theoretical approaches to the public and ethnographies of community news, foreign correspondence, and photojournalism. How certain liberal democratic norms for journalism have propagated and how geopolitical hierarchies are replicated within the field of journalism.
ANTH 134 Consuming Cultures: Travel, Tourism, and Display. Focuses on cultural production, consumption, and encounter through various modes of travel and display. Topics include tourism and its antecedents and variants; the contributions of both mobile and emplaced modes of cultural display to nationalism and modernity; colonialist legacies in experiences of mobility and representation; cultural production as a strategy for place-making and economic redevelopment; nature as a culturally-constructed attraction; the blurred line between ethnographic and touristic ways of knowing about human cultures; and the role of the digital in producing and consuming cultural display. Assignments provide opportunities for students to produce critical commentary in a variety of media based on small-scale field research.
ANTH 135 Visual Anthropology. (Cross-listed as FMS 59.) Development of visual anthropology from early travel documentary forms to more recent multivocal works on video. Relationship between written and visual documents. Viewing classic ethnographic films as well as contemporary films that challenge the classic genre of ethnographic films. Special attention to ethical issues in visual anthropology.
ANTH 136 Cultures of Computing. (Cross-listed as STS 136 and FMS 51.) Examines computers and computation as sociocultural phenomena. Questions universalizing narratives of technological progress by exploring the variety of human experience with computing. Topics include social media, postcolonial computing, the gender of artificial intelligence, the social analysis of mathematics, and the sociocultural implications of big data and contemporary algorithmic systems.
ANTH 137 Language & Culture. (Cross-listed as LING 137.) Mid-level exploration of social dynamics of interpersonal communication and interaction between language and culture. Examination of linguistic theories, structuralist and semiotic approaches, and discourse analysis. Topics may include gender, ethnicity, race, bilingualism, language acquisition, oral narrative and testimony, organization of informal speech communication, and impact of language on other areas of Anthropology. May include a fieldwork-based project on language use.
ANTH 138 The Anthropocene and the End of Nature. Cross-cultural overview of intellectual debates in Environmental Anthropology, with an emphasis on modern life, inequality, and cultural politics after the end of the Western idea of pure nature. Topics include the notion of the anthropocene and the history of anthropogenic natures, human adaptation, climate change, resource extraction and dependency, environmental scarcity, environmental racism, extinction and biodiversity, the engineering of life forms, green capitalism, and global environmental movements.
ANTH 140 Food Justice. (Cross-listed as UEP 50.) Food justice as a concept and practice, both historically and in the present. Migration and farmworker organizing; health and inequitable food distribution; finance capitalism, farm lending, and institutional racism; plantations and the under-acknowledged contributions of dispossessed peoples to agricultural development and food culture; cultural appropriation; indigenous land theft and reclamation; food sovereignty and political autonomy; agri-chemicals, toxicity, and environmental violence; and the politics of cheap food. The idea of “justice” is an open question in this class — not a pre-defined ideal: what it means to apply varied and culturally-specific notions of justice to non-human subjects such as landscapes, seeds, and animals. Readings drawn from anthropology and human geography center on the United States and Mexico.
ANTH 142 American Meat. History and ethnography of meat production and consumption in the United States, from 1860 to the present. Cultural, environmental, and political economic factors that underlie the breeding, raising, slaughtering, and distribution of animal bodies. Changing forms of farm structure, biological industrialization, animal well-being, and the organization of labor. Recommendations: ENV 0009 or one Anthropology course.
ANTH 143 Palestinians & Israelis: Ethnographies of Justice. Ethnographic approaches to the study of Palestinians and Israelis with various legal statuses and cultural and religious backgrounds; migrants in Israel; Palestinian refugees in the Middle East and beyond. Comparative analysis based on concepts of race, colonialism, diaspora, and indigeneity. Analysis of mobilizations for justice for Palestinians and Israelis, primarily but not exclusively in the Middle East.
ANTH 144 Media of the Middle East. (Cross-listed as ILVS 144 and FMS 57.) Examines the contemporary Middle East through a variety of media and introduces anthropological methods for studying media and media practices. Looks at media and the Arab Revolts. Themes include: (1) media such as television, music, graffiti, cartoons, or social media that may consolidate or contest state power, (2) cultural forms such as Arab hip-hop and refugee poetry that are the product of global processes and migration, (3) religious media, and (4) anthropologists as media makers. Recommendations: One course in either Anthropology or the Middle East, or consent.
ANTH 145 Power, Politics, And Protest. Anthropological perspective on power and authority, and on the economic and social bases of politics. Varieties of political forms, from societies without a formal political sphere to state systems. The colonial encounter. Nationalism in a multiethnic context. Local politics and protest in the context of overarching power systems, both national and global. Recommendations: ANTH 10 or permission of instructor.
ANTH 146 Global Feminisms. (Cross-listed as WGSS 163.) Examines feminist theory, scholarship, and activism from a global perspective. Asks how ideas and critiques emerge in different contexts and move across locales, compares concepts and strategies in different times and places, and considers debates about the intersection of feminism with race, class, caste, indigeneity, colonialism, nationalism, and sexual identities.
ANTH 147 Sex and Money: Anthropology of Sex Work. (Cross-listed as WGSS 147.) Intersections between sex (and other forms of intimacy) and money (and other forms of exchange). Reading of ethnographies about sex workers and those who seek to regulate, profit from, or “help” them. How neoliberalism has shaped ways of earning a living throughout the world in ways that changed gender roles and intimate relationships. Topics include ethical concerns with studying sex workers; their relationships with family members, pimps, and clients; moral panics about “white slavery” and “sex trafficking;” the whore stigma; sex tourism; criminalization and legalization; transactional sex; and the eroticization of perceived racial difference.
ANTH 148 Medical Anthropology. (Cross-listed as STS 148.) Cultural models of illness, health, deviance, and normality. Institutions of medicine and healing in non-Western contexts and in the contemporary U.S. Using a critical medical anthropological approach, special topics (such as AIDS, madness, and gender-related concerns) will be explored. Recommendations: Sophomore standing.
ANTH 149 Selected Topics. Current Topics in Anthropology. Please refer to semester course guide for topic descriptions.
ANTH 150 Human Evolution. Current problems in hominid evolution and adaptation. Topics include hominid origins; paleoecology; competing molecular and anatomical models of H. sapiens; relations between technology, language, and neuroanatomical evolution; range of morphological and physiological variation over time and space; and adaptation to extreme environments. Recommendations: ANTH 40, ANTH 42 or introductory biology course.
ANTH 151 Experimental Cultures. (Cross-listed as STS 149.) Analysis of different experimental logics and practices, their distinct social and historical contexts and their underlying models of knowledge production. Mid-level interdisciplinary course exploring research in anthropology and science, technology, and society (STS) on experimental practices in a global context. Topics include ethnographic approaches to laboratory life, debates on ethics and regulation, construction and contestation of expertise, and social responses to experimental regimes. Prerequisites: At least 1 ANTH or 1 STS course or permission of instructor.
ANTH 152 Biopolitics & the Body: Life, Power, Knowledge. Theories and ethnographies of biopolitics and biopower. What happens when biological life (including that of humans) becomes a site for power and management? Reading of conceptual and ethnographic texts at the intersection of science, medicine, the state, and capital. Topics include neoliberal governmentality, hegemony of interventionist biotechnologies, bioethics, biosecurity and management of risk, biocapitalism, necropolitics, logics of social abandonment and disposability, political rights, and projects of biological and social enhancement.
ANTH 153 Medicine, Bodies, and Minds in South Asia. Histories and cultures of medicine, illness, and healing in South Asia, including indigenous systems of medicine and healing, cultures of biomedicine, and contemporary health issues, as well as non-medical social and religious constructs of body and mind. Caste, class, gender, and sexuality as changing social forms in which concepts of body are diverse and integral, and on colonial, anti-colonial, and nationalist concerns with bodily practice and mental health.
ANTH 154 Fieldwork Methods in Music, Sound, and Culture. (Cross-listed as MUS 184.) Field techniques learned by doing: participant-observation, field notes, interview audio/video documentation, project design and management, fundraising. History of fieldwork, ethics, intercultural communication, self-other relationships and awareness. Recommendations: Graduate standing or permission of instructor.
ANTH 155 Environment, Communication and Culture. (Cross-listed as ENV 150.) Explore the intersection of environmental issues, communication, and cultures. Examination of where our beliefs about environmental issues come from, how news and entertainment media cover environmental challenges, and why good coverage of critical issues is so rare. Exploration of green marketing and the relationship among politics, environmental issues, and the media, and discuss how media can be used by individuals and advocacy groups to effect social change.
ANTH 156 Music, Trance, & Consciousness. (Cross-listed as MUS 159.) Cross-cultural approaches to relationships between music and altered states of consciousness, ranging from high-arousal trance states in healing rituals to low-arousal, individual experiences of deep listening. Ethnographic case studies of music-driven spirit possession, mysticism, shamanism, rave culture, and mobile individual listening practices from Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas. Interdisciplinary approach with material from ethnomusicology, anthropology, psychology, religious studies, and neuroscience.
ANTH 157 Cities and Food. Mid-level course examining the complex interrelationship of cities and food systems. Urbanization as a socioecological process now extending beyond the boundaries of cities themselves. Changes in “urban metabolisms” and nutrient cycling with the rise of fossil fuels and industrialism. Types and functions of urban agriculture. Symbiotic, extractive, and uneven relationships between and within cities, peri-urban areas, and rural places. Labor and migration within a globally urbanized food supply. Roles of food and cities within projects of place-marketing, ecological remediation, and egalitarian social movements. No prerequisites.
ANTH 158 The Deep History of Climate Adaptation. (Cross-listed as ENV 153). Human biological, cultural, and social adaptations to changing climate and environmental conditions over the last 1 million years, considered in the context of contemporary issues such as inequality, sustainability, resilience, and food/water security. Drawing on the paleosciences (paleoecology, paleoclimatology, archaeology) to contextualize the current climate crisis.
ANTH 159 Practicing in Food Systems. (Cross-listed as ENV 190.) Project-based course designed to integrate academic learning with application in a range of food systems settings. Focused observation exercise culminating in a jointly produced useable report for a community partner. Emphasis will be on balance between process and product. Readings, discussion, and field research will be split between the specific content focus of the group project and general issues arising from planning and carrying out interdisciplinary team projects; developing productive relationships with communities, clients, and stakeholders; addressing ethical concerns in collaborative and public research. Preference will be given to students who have declared the Food Systems and Nutrition minor or the Food Systems, Nutrition and Environment major.
ANTH 160 Ethnographic Writing. Ongoing history of ethnographic writing and representation. Analysis of tropes, genres, ethics, evidence, and affect in the writing of anthropologists, sociologists, and geographers from early 20th century to the present. Concurrent focus on developing skills in writing and representation.
ANTH 161 Fieldwork Lab. A hands-on field course in ethnographic methods, the signature toolkit of cultural anthropology. Individual and collaborative small-scale projects. Students develop skills and experience in key strategies of "participant-observation"; research design; spatial, visual, and discourse analysis; formal and informal interviewing; fieldnote writing and coding; ethnographic writing. Fieldwork ethics, including IRB applications. Questions arising from the politics of difference, encounter, experience, and representation in relation to scholarly, community, and industry/client interests. Intensive but suitable for students at all levels. Typically offered in Fall semester.
ANTH 162 Art And Aesthetics. Aesthetic systems in cross-cultural perspective, including the works of art in societies often having no categories for differentiating such work. Issues of specialization, gender, embeddedness, symbolism, craft versus fine art, and representation (the invention of the "primitive") via examples from the Amazon, the American Northwest, Aboriginal Australia, and the twentieth-century avant-garde. Recommendations: Junior standing or permission of instructor.
ANTH 164 Media, The State, And The Senses. (Cross-listed as FMS 162.) States mobilize mass media to strengthen nationalism, spur development, and protect regimes. Yet, people interpret media in complex ways; they delight in media's excesses; they contextualize media within their everyday lives. We examine how people actively sense and make sense of media. People also engage in processes of media production that yield other ways of place-making, objectifying ethics, and practicing politics. We will attend to the possibilities and limitations of diverse media technologies (television, film, radio, cassette tapes, newspapers, and the Internet) due to material forms and institutional structures. Ethnographic examples from a variety of locations will be included.
ANTH 165 After Violence: Truth, Justice, And Social Repair. (Cross-listed as PJS 165.) Exploration of ways people and states deal with mass violence and approach issues of coexistence, justice, redress, and social reconstruction. Includes international and national justice mechanisms (truth commissions, tribunals, reparations, apologies), informal projects and practices, constructions of "the universal" and "the local." Focus on the negotiation of memory in politically unequal encounters. Recommendations: One sociocultural anthropology course or permission of instructor.
ANTH 166 Historical Anthropology. Upper-level seminar examining key works in historical anthropology, with focus on methods, theories, ethics, and writing strategies to explore how historical anthropological works integrate with and provide context for present conditions.
ANTH 168 Anthropology of Colonialism / Decolonizing Anthropology. (Cross-listed as CST 168.) Anthropological tools to analyze colonialism and to evaluate anthropology’s complex historical and contemporary relationship to colonialism and decolonization. How do colonial states and societies maintain dominance? What identities and subjectivities are created by colonialism? When and how does colonialism end? Examination of European-style colonialism as it has operated across several regions. Study of modes of colonial resistance. What constitutes decolonization or the “unsettling” of settler colonialism? When and how has anthropology been complicit with colonial projects and how have anthropologists engaged in anti- and decolonizing practice? Counts toward “Critical Geographies” requirement in Anthropology. Prerequisites: Course in Colonialism Studies or cultural anthropology.
ANTH 169 Anthropology of the State: Subject, Citizen, Sovereignty. Anthropological approaches to the state, sovereignty, and citizenship. State power as a product of performances or paperwork, of violence, state services, or linguistic norms. State-shaped conceptions of rights and identity that influence both everyday lives and moments of crisis. Key theoretical approaches to the state alongside ethnographies. Key modalities of the state, including the colonial state, the authoritarian state, and the democratic state. Ethnographic approaches to popular confrontation of state power.
ANTH 170 Colonizing Time. Upper-level seminar that examines the relationship among time, power, and social difference. How modern time, colonial rule, and capitalism co-developed; how we engage ideas of time through race, kinship, sexuality; globalizing temporalities of work and unemployment; anticipatory projects such as peacebuilding, technoscience, science fiction; alternative temporalities through postcolonial critique and indigenous futurism. Prerequisites: Junior standing. One sociocultural anthropology course or consent.
ANTH 171 Death, Mourning, Afterlives: Global Perspectives. (Cross-listed as REL 137.) Cross-cultural study of social, religious, and bioethical dimensions of death. Medical and legal aspects of dying, mourning, funeral and mortuary rites and their social transformation, activism in the aftermath of death, and comparative cosmological and religious concepts of afterlife and their social and political implications.
ANTH 174 Thinking with Plants: Plants, People, and Society. Explores use of plants as material resources (food, medicines, licit/illicit drugs, infrastructure) and as symbolic resources. Topics include circulation of plants; colonial cultivation, extraction, and power; place of plants in different lived environments and symbolic ecologies; plants, capitalism, and commodity chains; indigenous knowledge, tourism, and biopiracy; commercialization, criminalization and legality; multi-species approaches to living with and among botanicals.
ANTH 175 Think Like an Archaeologist! (Cross-listed as STS 175.) Seminar in archaeological theory, covering the history of the archaeological thought and key theoretical approaches in contemporary archaeology. Natural science-focused positions, postmodern inquiries into meaning and representation, postcolonial and Indigenous critiques, and recent challenges to anthropocentrism. Connections between archaeological narratives about the past and different understandings of humanity, personhood, history, nature, power, and more. Prerequisite: one course in Archaeology or permission of instructor. Recommended: Junior or Senior standing
ANTH 176 Advanced Topics in Medical Anthropology. Advanced concepts in medical anthropology, using ethnographic and theoretical texts beyond the introductory level. Current debates and recent advances in medical anthropological theory. Prerequisite: Medical Anthropology (ANTH 148) or instructor permission.
ANTH 177 Chimpanzee Behavioral Ecology. (Cross-listed as BIO 182.) Advanced seminar on current topics in behavioral research of chimpanzees and bonobos. Topics may include foraging, dominance, cooperation, adolescence, reproduction, culture, ranging, cognition, molecular ecology, and social relationships. Discuss behavioral flexibility of chimpanzees among different communities across Africa. Learn to collect and analyze behavioral data. Compare the behavior of chimpanzees and bonobos with that of humans and examine how these species might serve as models for human evolution. Prerequisite: ANTH 44/BIO 44 or consent.
ANTH 178 Animals and Posthuman Thought. Marshals animal rights, and other attempts to create a social contract across species lines, as a lens to examine changing forms of Western politics and consciousness about life, nature, and the idea of the human. Intensive reading of works by Haraway, Foucault, Derrida, and Latour. Topics include the concept of the animal, domestication, anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism, biopolitics, factory farming, consumption of food and clothing, experiences of life and death, genetic engineering and lively technologies, and non-human agency.
ANTH 179 Building Babies and the Evolution of Childhood. Advanced seminar on human and primate development from an evolutionary perspective. Life history theory, conception, pregnancy, childbirth, lactation, developmental programming, growth, the role of parents and others, the acquisition of social and language skills, and adolescence. Comparison of humans and non-human primates to understand the evolution of uniquely human patterns of development. Assignments through the semester focus on developing presentation skills. Prerequisites: ANTH 0040 or ANTH/BIO 0044 or consent.
ANTH 180 Primate Conservation. (Cross-listed as BIO 177.) Advanced seminar on primate conservation exploring primate vulnerability to extinction and threats to primate populations around the globe. How aspects of primate life history, small population sizes, increased disease vulnerability, and the behavioral flexibility of large-brained organisms all interact with the unique conservation problems of forest loss, poaching, and the pet trade. Research, national parks, ecotourism, and zoos play a role in improving outcomes for primate populations. Open discussion of primary literature, policy papers and different types of media. Final project involves developing a science-based primate conservation action plan incorporating the perspectives of real-world stakeholders from interviews conducted throughout the semester. Prerequisite: ANTH 40 or ANTH/BIO 44 or BIO 144.
ANTH 181 Anthropology And Feminism. Implications of feminist perspectives for anthropological studies of ritual and symbolism, work and exchange, "development," the environment, self and personhood, colonialism, apartheid, class, and sexuality. Relationship between feminist anthropology, postmodernism, and experiments in anthropological fieldwork and writing. Critiques of dominant forms of Western feminism by Third-World feminists. Recommendations: Junior standing and one sociocultural anthropology course, or permission of instructor.
ANTH 182 Human Physique. Our bodies as adaptive biological landscapes. Growth from conception to adulthood. Genetic and intrauterine determinants of prenatal growth and birth size; impact of extreme environments, undernutrition, and disease on size and shape; sexual dimorphism; quantitative assessment of body composition; interplay between biological and cultural bodies. Recommendations: One previous course in biological anthropology or biology, or consent.
ANTH 183 Urban Borderlands. (Cross-listed as AMER 183.) Analysis of the impact of changing patterns of immigration from Latin America to the U.S. on interethnic relations, using as case studies three major U.S. cities (Los Angeles, New York, and Miami). Readings introduce a variety of approaches used for interpreting the increasingly complex ethnic diversity characterizing contemporary urban areas. Students conduct ethnographic field research in selected Latino communities in Boston, documenting their articulation with and contributions to Boston's changing ethnic landscape. Recommendations: Junior standing, plus either one sociocultural anthropology course or one Latin American or Latino studies course.
ANTH 185 Current Topics In Anthropology. Detailed analysis of a selected issue in contemporary sociocultural anthropology, linguistics, physical anthropology, or archaeology. Please refer to semester course guide for topic descriptions. Open to advanced undergraduate majors and qualified graduate students.
ANTH 186 Place and Placemaking. Project-oriented seminar exploring the social production of place and its role in creating a sense of inclusion or exclusion at local, national, and other levels of belonging. Exploration of symbolic meanings and charged activities enabled by specific built environments (such as campus, park, theater, monument, market). Guidance in ethnographic methods serves as foundation for student fieldwork projects. Recommendations: Junior standing or permission of instructor.
ANTH 188 Culture, Psychiatry, And The Politics Of Madness. Intersections of culture, power, and mental illness by examining experiences of suffering and its management, the history of psychiatry, and the relationship of culture to concepts of mental and emotional disorder. Cross-cultural approach examining non-Western as well as Western settings, and varied forms and histories of psychiatry. Models for medical structure of care, and affliction and healing beyond the clinic, in contexts of religion, ritual, and everyday life. Topics include diagnostic processes and the creation of categories, stigma and models of clinical care, hysteria, spirit possession, pharmaceuticals, and the relationship of trauma to political structures. Source material includes ethnographic and historical writing, clinical studies, fiction, film, and art. We will engage anthropological and historical theories that emerge from the study of mental illness and critical readings of "madness," including considerations of social suffering, biosociality, political subjectivity, and postcolonial disorder. Recommendations: One ANTH course or consent.
ANTH 189 How to Pay Attention. (Cross-listed as STS 189.) Collective investigation of attention as a sociocultural phenomenon. Reading-, writing-, and discussion-intensive seminar, supplemented by experimental exercises in and out of class. Topics include information overload, distraction, boredom, enchantment, expertise, social media, attention economies and ecologies, attention deficits and surpluses, and ideologies of attention in politics, education, and ethnographic fieldwork. Recommendations: Junior standing and one sociocultural anthropology course, or permission of instructor.
ANTH 190 Directed Reading In Anthropology. Directed Reading in Anthropology. Recommendations: Consent and at least one ANTH course.
ANTH 191 Directed Reading. Directed Reading. Recommendations: Permission of instructor. Credit to be arranged.
ANTH 193 Special Topics. Special topics. Please refer to semester course guide for topic descriptions.
ANTH 194 Special Topics. Special topics. Please refer to semester course guide for topic descriptions.
ANTH 197 Directed Research. Areas for directed research may include physical anthropology, social anthropology, and archaeology. Recommendations: Permission of instructor.
ANTH 198 Apprenticeship In Anthropological Research. An intensive application of research techniques to projects currently under way with direct supervision. Recommendations: Permission of instructor. Credit to be arranged.
ANTH 199 Senior Honors Thesis A. Senior Honors Thesis. This is a yearlong course. Each semester counts as 4 credits towards a student’s credit load. Students will earn 8 credits at the end of the second semester.
ANTH 199 Senior Honors Thesis B. Senior Honors Thesis. This is a yearlong course. Each semester counts as 4 credits towards a student’s credit load. Students will earn 8 credits at the end of the second semester.