Courses
Fall 2023 Offerings Summer 2023 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 0005 Freshman Seminar. Introductory-level discussion-based investigation of a selected issue in contemporary sociocultural anthropology, linguistics, physical anthropology, or archaeology.
Recommendations: Freshman only.
ANTH 0010 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 0012 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 0015 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 0016 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 0017 Latino Music, Migration, And Identity. Analysis of the production, dissemination, and consumption of the most important forms of popular music--mambo, boogaloo, salsa, conjunto, corrido, banda, contemporary rock, and rap--listened to and danced by U.S. Latinos from World War I to the present. Readings, films, and recordings examine the historical and social contexts from which these musical forms have emerged, highlighting the intricate relationship between popular music, migration, and the formation of social and cultural identities.
ANTH 0018 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 0020 Global Cities. 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 0022 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 0024 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 0025 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 0026 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 0027 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 0028 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 0032 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 0039 Gateway Course In Sociocultural Anthropology. Introductory-level investigation of a special topic in sociocultural anthropology.
ANTH 0040 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.
ANTH 0042 Extreme Environments: Human Adaptability to Novel Habitats. Humans' biological, cultural, and technological adaptations to five environments that test the extremes of our ability to inhabit: subtropical deserts, the arctic, the high plateaus of central Asia and South America, megacities, and space. Biological adaptations, including short term, developmental, and evolutionary, to multifactorial stressors in those environments. Interplay of biological with cultural adaptations ranging from educational, media, and literary negotiation of the unfamiliar, through complex social behaviors such as optimizing energy expenditures, to technological solutions as basic as fire or as complex as space suits. How these cultural responses buffer natural selection, but may also introduce novel stresses. Recommendations: Anthropology 40 or an equivalent introductory college biology course recommended.
ANTH 0044 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.
ANTH 0049 Gateway Course In Biological Anthropology. Introductory-level investigation of a special topic in biological anthropology. May be repeated for credit.
ANTH 0050 Prehistoric 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 0051 North American Archaeology. 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 0099 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 0102 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 0117 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 0118 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 0119 Peoples Of The Middle East. Cultures, religious practices, social institutions, and political economies of contemporary Middle Eastern and North African societies. Specific contributions of Middle Eastern ethnography to the understanding of self and society; kinship and politics; tribalism and development of urban life; sexuality and gender roles; religion and worldview. Anthropological contributions to understanding contemporary social change and relationships with the West.
Recommendations: Sophomore standing or permission of instructor.
ANTH 0120 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 0121 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 0122 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 0123 Special Areas Course - Asian Societies. No description at this time.
ANTH 0124 American Diversity. Sources, range, and maintenance of human biological variation, using case studies of populations from throughout the Western hemisphere. Impact of changing fertility and mortality; biological effects of social and geographic isolation; inbreeding analyses; relations of assimilation to admixture, problems in correlating ethnicity, race, and appearance; ethnic differences in disease risk.
Recommendations: ANTH 40 or one BIO course.
ANTH 00126 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 00127 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 0128 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 0130 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.
ANTH 0131 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 0132 Myth, Ritual, And Symbol. (Cross-listed as REL 134) 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 0133 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 0134 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 0135 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 0136 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 0137 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 0138 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 0140 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 0142 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 0143 Anthropology of/and Palestinian Societies. Study of Palestinian societies through ethnographies and related materials. Examination of how these ethnographies can contribute to understandings of such topics as the colonial present, racism, feminism, incarceration, displacement, and violence. Analysis of anthropology as a practice of research, writing, publishing, and teaching that occurs within specific political contexts.
ANTH 0144 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 0145 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 0146 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 0147 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 0148 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 0149 Selected Topics. No description at this time.
ANTH 0150 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 0151 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 0152 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 0153 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 0155 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 0157 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 0159 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 0161 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.
ANTH 0162 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 0163 Latinos In The Us Cinematic Imagination. Since the inception of the American film industry, U.S. Latinos have been (mis)represented in Hollywood feature films intended primarily for non-Latino audiences. In this course, students will examine how images of Latinos and their communities have been constructed in Hollywood films produced from the silent era to the present. Students will contrast these images with those constructed by Latino filmmakers when they began making films in the 1970s, contesting Hollywood stereotypes with more accurate and nuanced constructions of their communities. Weekly film viewings illustrate how filmmakers of different ethnic/racial/national backgrounds employ cinematic images to express their views on issues relevant to the Latino experience such as immigration, language choice, changing gender roles, racial and ethnic identity, and inter-ethnic relations. Readings will familiarize students with the emergent body of Latino-produced film criticism.
ANTH 0164 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 0165 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 0166 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 0168 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 0169 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 0170 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 0172 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.
Prerequisites: Anthropology majors and minors, or instructor permission.
ANTH 0174 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 0175 Think Like an Archaeologist! 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 0176 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 0177 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 0044/BIO 0044 or consent.
ANTH 0178 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 0179 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 0180 Interventions In Africa: Violence And Technologies Of Repair. Upper-level seminar applying recent analytical frameworks within anthropology to the study of international post-conflict interventions. Class explores power dynamics of interventions in Africa, how they foster new norms, meanings, moralities, subjectivities, and forms of agency, the frictions of their local engagement, and how they are locally reworked. Focus on four mechanisms of intervention: peacekeeping; disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR); human rights programs; psychosocial trauma programs. Students develop ethnographic field projects and mock grant proposals.
Recommendations: Junior standing and one socio-cultural anthropology course or consent.
ANTH 0181 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 0182 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 0183 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 0184 Festival And Politics In Latin America. Expressions and functions of festive behavior throughout Latin America. The course will penetrate an apparently homogeneous Roman Catholic ideology and demonstrate how widely differing ethnic and political groups use public performance in a non-Western context to express their varied interests. Examples will include Carnival, Corpus Christi, San Juan, Qollur Rit'i, and Yawar Fiesta.
Recommendations: Junior standing and one sociocultural anthropology course, or permission of instructor.
ANTH 0185 Current Topics In Anthropology. Detailed analysis of a selected issue in contemporary sociocultural anthropology, linguistics, physical anthropology, or archaeology. Open to advanced undergraduate majors and qualified graduate students.
ANTH 0186 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 0187 Place, Race, Memory: The West Medford Afro-american Remembrance Project. Upper-level seminar exploring social memory and memorials through partnership with an African American community initiative in West Medford, the home of one of the oldest African American communities in the U.S. Students document lives and legacies of African American pioneers, entrepreneurs, artists, and community leaders through oral-historical research and through places and objects of memory. Drawing on anthropological perspectives, students examine how broader historical processes structured by race were experienced in specific people's lives, and the work that memories of these people and processes perform today.
Recommendations: Junior standing or permission of instructor.
ANTH 0188 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 0189 How to Pay Attention. 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 0190 Directed Reading In Anthropology. No description at this time.
Recommendations: Consent and at least one ANTH course.
ANTH 0191 Directed Reading. No description at this time.
Recommendations: Permission of instructor. Credit to be arranged.
ANTH 0193 Special Topics. No description at this time.
ANTH 0194 Special Topics. No description at this time.
ANTH 0197 Directed Research. Areas for directed research may include physical anthropology, social anthropology, and archaeology.
ANTH 0198 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 0199 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 0199 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.