Anthropology (ANTH)

This course deals with the nature of anthropology as a broad and diverse area of study. The anthropological study of humankind will be approached from the perspectives of physical anthropology; prehistory and archaeology; and linguistic anthropology and socio-cultural anthropology. The diversity of humankind will be explored in all its aspects from times past to the present.

Can the secrets of the past help us solve our problems in the future? This course uncovers the clues that our ancestors left behind in ruins, abandoned cities, pyramids, and on the earth itself. We will discuss key issues facing humanity today through the lens of the past. How prone are we as a species to degrading our environment? How flexible are we in the face of environmental change? Are humans basically violent, and are we destined to keep killing each other? These are some of the big questions that can be addressed using the archaeological record. The anthropological and archaeological study of past failure (and success) can help us understand the urgent challenges our our own age.

Creole is spoken by an estimated seventeen million people. Creole is spoken on the islands of the Caribbean and the western Indian Ocean that were former or current French colonial possessions and in the countries where many of these former island residents have emigrated, including the United States, Canada, France, Dominican Republic, Bahamas and other parts of Latin America and the Caribbean. Haitians are the largest Creole speech community of approximately eleven and a half million speakers. Creole language courses provide a valuable foundation for Notre Dame faculty, staff and students working to understand and address critical issues related to Haiti and the Francophone world, from language and culture to history and education, from engineering to public health. Creole language and literature are of increasing interest in the dynamic field of Francophone studies. Creole has also become a major area in the field of linguistics, especially in areas of language evolution, sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. Students attend class with an instructor (T-TH) and work on-line (MWF). The instructor will balance both spoken and written Creole as well as exercise reading and listening.

Creole is spoken by an estimated seventeen million people. Creole is spoken on the islands of the Caribbean and the western Indian Ocean that were former or current French colonial possessions and in the countries where many of these former island residents have emigrated, including the United States, Canada, France, Dominican Republic, Bahamas and other parts of Latin America and the Caribbean. Haitians are the largest Creole speech community of approximately eleven and a half million speakers. Creole language courses provide a valuable foundation for Notre Dame faculty, staff and students working to understand and address critical issues related to Haiti and the Francophone world, from language and culture to history and education, from engineering to public health. Creole language and literature are of increasing interest in the dynamic field of Francophone studies. Creole has also become a major area in the field of linguistics, especially in areas of language evolution, sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. This is a three-credit introductory language course. The instructor will balance both spoken and written Creole as well as exercise reading and listening.

This class provides an educational and entertaining reconfiguration of the historical spread and cultural importance of the Irish as part of the 2st-century transnational world. Based on comparative perspectives with other emigrations, such as people from 19th century Italy and Germany into the New World, our study of the Irish helps students to understand the human narrative of resettlement, the national and global policies of settlement and resettlement, and the global impact of the spread of the Irish into many areas of the world. Based on lectures, films and presentations, we explore some fundamental historical questions, such as how are the Irish Famine, emigration, and economic developments of the 18-20th centuries interconnected, and how did the Irish diaspora shape the historical and cultural trajectory of America. We explore a range of themes relevant to other large-scale population migrations, such as the impact of the Irish spread on trans-Atlantic social memory and global economies across time and space.

Human beings may be classified as one species among many in biological terms, although a strict physical determination marks only the starting point for a broad inquiry into what we mean by human nature. Anthropology moves forward from this beginning to explore, in theory and by empirical investigation, the particular forms of cultural expression that characterize the development of human societies and account for their richness and their remarkable variety. This course examines the fundamental elements of this fascinating social science. It addresses the sometimes-controversial evidence related to such questions as evolution and genetics, as well as issues of ecological adaptation and the emergence of complex societies. It looks into language and other symbolic systems as central components of distinctively human behavior. It concentrates with special emphasis on the vast domain of social and cultural life, drawing upon many ethnographic examples from near and far, to illustrate how anthropologists seek to study all dimensions of human experience, from kinship to kingship and from cyborgs to shamans. Seminar format.

This course is an introduction to the methods, goals, and theoretical concepts of archaeology, with a primary focus on anthropological archaeology practiced in the Middle East, North America, and Europe. The field of archaeology is broadly concerned with material culture (at times combined with textual information) that can be employed to generate interpretations about past human societies. The challenge of this social science is to interpret past societies and anthropological behavior using the fragmentary, but nonetheless rich and complex, data base of the archaeological record. Lecture topics will include the methods and goals of archaeological excavation; analytical techniques employed in material studies; and the problems and challenges in the interpretation of past human behavior. Case studies of survey, excavation, and analytical techniques will focus on recent or on-going investigations of archaeological sites in North America, Central America, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East.

This class is designed to introduce anthropology as a lens to analyze the human condition and the diversity of human expression. We will also identify key topical themes and interests in cultural anthropology including an overview of its history and methods. Anthropology illuminates the myriad of cultural patterns and social systems throughout the world. Expressed through ethnography, anthropology reveals a vast variety of global cultural phenomena that reveal complex social patterns and the stunning vibrancy of ways we can live and view life. The course explores human action through multiple holistic lenses including culture concepts, kinship patterns, economic strategies, political practices, religious rituals, artistic performances, gender roles, ethnic identities, communicative languages, medical systems, patterns of violence, and the legacies of globalization.

Language is fully embedded in human culture and society. It has both meaning and efficacy; that is, it both means things and does things. Our goal in this course is to become aware of some of the ways language functions in social life, often below the level of awareness of its users. Students will engage in a number of practical exercises that demonstrate some of the more astonishing features of language all around us. Topics include: the nature of language, including language origins, nonverbal communication, and electronic communication; language, culture, and thought (linguistic relativity); speech acts and what we do with words; conversational analysis; language and identity (class, race, gender); and language in the world (multilingualism, language endangerment and revitalization, language and education).

Have you ever pondered how people live(d) in a world without television, YouTube, smartphones, and automobiles? Why have bellbottoms come and gone twice in the last 50 years? Will we be forced to relive the fashion mistakes of the 1970s and 1980s? What new stuff will people invent and sell next? In asking and answering these questions, we must focus on one underlying query: What does our stuff really say about who we are and who we want to be? This course combines lectures, discussions, and interactive small group activities to explore the nature and breadth of peoples' relationships with their things. We will investigate why and how people make and use different types of objects, and how the use of these material goods resonates with peoples' identities in the deep past, recent history, and today. Since everyone in the class will already be an expert user and consumer of things, we will consider how people today use material objects to assert, remake, reclaim, and create identities, and compare today's practices to those of people who lived long ago. Class members will learn about how anthropologists, including ethnographers (studying people today) and archaeologists (studying past peoples) think about and approach the material nature of our social, economic, and political lives. We will discuss why styles and technologies change through time, and why, in the end, there is very little new under the sun in terms of human behaviors and the way people produce and consume goods. The topical breadth of this workshop encompasses most social science disciplines, including history, economics, psychology, and anthropology, and resonates with classics, art history, and gender studies.

How do the technologies around us shape our lives, our bodies, and our engagements with the world—and what hidden social dynamics shape them? In this course, we will explore the fascinating intersections of science, technology, medicine, and society, focusing on how contemporary innovations—like AI, smart algorithms, and new medical technologies—are deeply intertwined with issues of social power and control. Through case studies, social theory, and discussions, students will discover how technologies are never neutral, but instead reflect and reinforce issues of inequity, ethical dilemmas, and dynamics of uneven political and economic power. This course will challenge you to think critically about the power dynamics embedded within the tools we use to heal, to communicate, and to engage with the world around us. Prepare to question everything you thought you knew about science and technology!

Illness and disease have been part of the human experience for as long as we have existed. The nature of these challenges, and how we have responded to them, has evolved over time. In this course, we will dig into evidence from the archaeological record and bioarchaeological data from skeletal remains to trace the history of human health. From prehistoric pandemics to ancient healing practices, we’ll uncover the sick and tired side of archaeology that reveals how illness and the pursuit of health have shaped—and been shaped by—human history. You’ll learn how archaeologists and bioarchaeologists reconstruct stories of past health, exploring how humans have cared for one another since our evolutionary origins and how our understanding of “health” has shifted across time.

This class will explore what anthropology can teach us about surgery, such as surgical processes, variability, and outcomes, as well as what these topics can in turn teach us about broader social issues. Questions to be addressed in class will include the history of surgery, what is surgery, how are surgeons trained, how does surgical practice vary across cultures and time-periods, outcomes and impacts of surgery, the impacts of resource scarcity, and dangerous/unnecessary/life-saving surgeries. Students will engage in questions about the aesthetics of scars, physician and patient decision-making, and how patient background (race, gender, class, identity) impacts access, experience, and outcomes. Types of surgery to be explored will include, plastic surgery, cesarean section, fistulas, organ donation, among others.

This course will examine the interactions of culture and biology within sports. The anthropology of sports can help us gain valuable insights into broader social and cultural phenomena, the role of ritual in society, and illuminate how sports have been used to bring people together, but also to exclude people. We will begin with studying the evolutionary origins and non-human examples of play. We will then move into the prehistoric and historic foundations for sport. We will also discuss how people change their bodies, in good ways and dangerous ways, for a greater chance at success, and how those bodies are often more harshly judged by society. Finally, we will explore the ways in which contemporary sporting and fan practices are culturally ordered and/or challenge social norms. Drawing on case studies from around the world, we will pay special attention to questions of gender, race, genetics, nationality, health, equality, and human variation. In addition, students will be encouraged to think critically about their own sporting experiences, both as active participants and as fans, and how sports impact their lives.

This course examines the origins, causes, environmental settings and cultural factors within which natural selective forces converged throughout human evolution to create the human infant, one of the most vulnerable, slowest developing, and energetically demanding mammal infants of all. We consider who the caregivers are, and how and why they might "share care" which was needed to keep our highly vulnerable infants and children alive, and to nurture them throughout their exceedingly long childhoods. Specifically, we trace the origins of modern parenting systems from their mammalian base paying especial attention to the transaction between infant care practices themselves and how they relate to, if not depend on, the emergence of other characteristics that define us as human. These include bipedalism, empathy, learning, food sharing, and a "theory of mind". Here we will examine not only the unique roles that mothers and fathers and other important caregivers (allomothers) play but the underlying biology that both inclines that care but also responds to it biologically. We also emphasize the manner in which social values, ideologies, cultural expectations, social roles, and economic pressures assert critical influences on caregiver physiology and behavior.

When diseases emerge in Africa, the media presents a relentless tide of infection, with AIDS and Ebola, for example, claiming thousands of hapless victims of “backward” thinking and rejection of western medicine. Western journalists express disbelief that people suffer and die because they refuse to take appropriate steps to protect themselves, whether it is taking the sick to the hospital, or wearing condoms to avoid contracting HIV. We are led to ask why treatable or even preventable diseases are claiming so many African lives. Why does popular thinking about health and disease on the African continent appear to be impervious to biomedical models? This class uses an anthropological perspective to look beyond the simple popular and medical answers to questions of sickness to examine the social and political frameworks that inform people’s understandings of the health of their bodies and communities. This course will introduce students to cultural perspectives on disease through an investigation of how people around the continent understand and experience illness, and why what appears to be simple medical knowledge is anything but simple when it is understood in its social and political context. We will investigate the recent Ebola epidemic in West Africa, examine why polio persisted in Nigeria, and compare how the HIV epidemics unfolded in South Africa and Uganda. In addition to infectious diseases, we will ask questions about the social experience of disability in Africa, investigate hospital care, and draw comparisons with western perspectives.

What are the cultures of medicine? How does belief create possibilities for healing? How do cultural, social, and political forces shape experiences of illness? When can care be a form of violence? How can histories of oppression make you sick? Medical anthropology is an expansive field of research concerned with the study of medicine, affliction, and healing in historical and cultural context. This course provides an introduction to topics in medical anthropology, from classical texts on belief, illness experience, and structural violence to contemporary work on disability, care, and critical global health. Over the course of the semester, students will gain experience in methods, critical thinking, independent research, and public communication as we collectively explore what medical anthropology can contribute to the urgent health challenges that we face in the contemporary world today.

This is not an easy topic and has no easy mode of analysis. Yet, understanding Race and racism is one of the most pressing matters for our society. In order to do this we engage contemporary issues of race and racism through the lens of anthropology. We'll tackle human diversity via biology, history and contemporary society in order to see what Race is and what it is not...demonstrating why racism matters. Examining the processes, structures and impacts of racism enables us to dive deep into the complexities of systemic violence, and engage the diverse histories and complicated issues and practices of our very problematic contemporary reality.

How is race embodied and how are bodies racialized? How do gender, sexuality, class, size, perceived beauty, and ability mutually influence embodiment? This course considers anthropological and historical studies of the body, with a critical focus on Blackness. We investigate how Black human bodies are othered, valued, dehumanized, and experienced, across time and space, with a particular focus on the United States. Euro-American philosophies have constructed Black people as transgressive, in a variety of ways, and all these ideas have been inscribed on and through their physical bodies. This normative discourse shapes how Black people interact with the social world, so we will discuss, challenge, and critique these narratives and also consider how the body can be used as a site of resistance. We will engage topics like athletic training, bodily modification and perceptions of beauty, biomedical technologies, labor, disability, and illness, through texts like academic writing, music, podcasts, essays, news media, and social media. Overall, this class demonstrates how bodies are key sites for understanding politics, power, social hierarchies, economics, and social change in our contemporary world.

The study of religious beliefs and practices in tribal and peasant societies emphasizing myths, ritual, symbolism, and magic as ways of explaining man's place in the universe. Concepts of purity and pollution, the sacred and the profane, and types of ritual specialists and their relation to social structure will also be examined.

In the anthropological study of religion, does having a religious background benefit a researcher or does it introduce bias? Where does theology belong in the anthropology of religion, and what might the two learn from each other? Can one critically study a faith and live it at the same time? This course addresses these questions through a review of the lives and work of prominent anthropologists who identified as Catholic and drew inspiration from their Catholic faith. In examining how these anthropologists shaped the discipline, students will learn about the wide breadth of the anthropological study of religion, an endeavor that stretches from the origins of our species to the high-tech world in which we now live. This disciplinary survey will also lead to questions of how, through these particular anthropologists, insights from the anthropology of religion intersect, complicate, and enrich the Catholic intellectual tradition.

This course offers an ethnographically grounded understanding of contemporary European cultures and societies. We start by presenting a brief history of the idea of Europe. Then, we define its geographical focus: where are the boundaries of Europe? Are Israel and Turkey part of Europe? Who gets to decide? Are there European Muslims? We will then read recent works focusing on selected regions and on diverse urban populations. We will explore and discuss socio-cultural facets of European everyday life; trends and challenges in technology, the environment, popular culture, demography, and politics; and the diversity of urban/rural, north/south, and more generally intra-European ways of life. The course will be of interest to students of contemporary global issues, and in particular to students who intend to spend a semester in Europe; are back from the field; or intend to write a related senior thesis.

Anthropology is a social science with a holistic perspective on the human condition. It attempts to understand any aspect of humanity in the broadest sense anywhere and anytime. Anthropological perspectives can be used to speculate on what it meant to be human in the distant past, or what it may mean in the far distant future. While we cannot travel into the past, future, or an alternative universe to visit other societies or contact alien civilizations, we can imagine what those trips would be like. In our own culture, science fiction has moved from a fringe literature to an essential part of modern art and entertainment because it allows us to imagine alternate realities, and to speculate about the past, present and future as way to learn about ourselves and others. This class will introduce you to the basic principles of anthropology as a social science using science fiction text and video to illustrate various anthropological principles. You will learn how to critically evaluate anthropology's diverse applications and how they are reflected in popular culture (sometimes accurately and sometimes not). You will also sharpen your writing skills by using anthropological principles to critique science fiction.

This class introduces students to Irish traditional Sean-nós ("old style") dancing, a vernacular solo form of dancing done to Irish traditional (folk) music. No experience is required or necessary.

Irish Music: Tin Whistle and Tunes will introduce students to playing the tin whistle (penny whistle), teaching simple, popular tunes, as well as to singing Irish traditional songs.

Anthropology, the holistic study of humans and their societies and cultures, is the focus of this seminar course. Through discussion and analysis of a variety of anthropology texts, this seminar course aims to develop writing skills among first-year students while exposing them to some central problems and issues within anthropology. Adopting an approach that reflects the four-field character of anthropology, the seminar will encourage students to explore topics such as: (1) anthropology as a way of knowing; (2) anthropology as an encounter with, and effort to explain, human diversity; (3) anthropology as a discipline that uniquely contributes to our understanding of the symbolic dimensions of human behavior and communication; (4) anthropology as a discipline that uniquely contributes to our understanding of human strategies for subsistence and survival; and (5) anthropology as a discipline that uniquely contributes to our understanding of human biological and cultural origins.

Humans deeply affect their social and natural worlds. Their impact reverberates across time and space making it difficult to understand the long-term ramifications of our daily decisions and actions. This seminar enhances our understanding of the complex web of relationships between humans, resources, and climate by exploring the concepts of sustainability and collapse from an anthropological perspective. Key questions guiding this exploration include: What do we mean by sustainability? What is it that want to sustain? How can societies be "sustained" when we know societal collapses happen time and again? Through readings, media, debates, and analysis, we will learn how our culture shapes and promotes both sustainability and collapse and assess whether they can be attained or prevent. And, we will all gain a better understanding of our place in the world around us.

In this course, you will explore major subfields of linguistics, including sociolinguistics, phonetics (the sounds of language), phonology (the sound systems of language), morphology and lexicon (structured meanings in words), morphemes (units of meaning), syntax, and semantics. You will investigate the scientific study of language (a.k.a. Linguistics), with an emphasis on developing the basic vocabulary and analytical skills associated with the major branches of linguistic research.

This interdisciplinary course explores the challenges of environmental sustainability through social, economic, scientific, and ethical lenses. Taught jointly by professors from the natural sciences, humanities, and social sciences, the course aims to instill broad, integrative and critical thinking about global environmental problems whose solutions will depend on multidisciplinary approaches. This gateway course to the Minor in Sustainability is open to all students interested in a deep exploration of these critical issues. Students considering the Minor in Sustainability are encouraged to take this course during their sophomore year.

'Irish Folk Custom and Belief' is both the title of a popular work from 1967 by Seán Ó Súilleabháin (1903-1996), archivist of the Irish Folklore Commission, and an approach to the study of rural Irish popular religion. That approach was long dominant among Irish folklorists. It tended to frame rural popular religion ahistorically and to fudge the issue of its relationship to specific social groups. At the same time it led to the recording of extraordinarily rich data, mostly from the Irish-speaking population of the West. Concentrating on the work of 19th century antiquarians and 20th century folklorists and anthropologists, the course will examine the study of rural popular religion in Ireland. It will contextualise it both in terms of historical, sociological and anthropological knowledge of Irish rural society and specifically of Irish peasant society, and in terms of the scientific study of religion. Specific topics often identified under the headings of 'folk custom and belief' will be discussed, in particular ritual, festival, magic, supernatural beings, sacred places and the oral narratives that deal with them. Specific scholarly texts, including texts by leading contemporary scholars of Irish rural popular religion, will be discussed as well as ethnographic texts recorded by the Irish Folklore Commission.

This course will discuss the 19th century concept of folklore and its application in Ireland. "Irish folklore" is usually understood in terms of three main and related domains: "folk narrative" (or oral literature), "folk belief" (or popular religion) and "material folk culture." These will be examined with special emphasis placed on narrative. Representative oral narrative texts from the Gaelic tradition will be studied in translation.

This class provides an educational and entertaining reconfiguration of the historical spread and cultural importance of the Irish as part of the 2st-century transnational world. Based on comparative perspectives with other emigrations, such as people from 19th century Italy and Germany into the New World, our study of the Irish helps students to understand the human narrative of resettlement, the national and global policies of settlement and resettlement, and the global impact of the spread of the Irish into many areas of the world. Based on lectures, films and presentations, we explore some fundamental historical questions, such as how are the Irish Famine, emigration, and economic developments of the 18-20th centuries interconnected, and how did the Irish diaspora shape the historical and cultural trajectory of America. We explore a range of themes relevant to other large-scale population migrations, such as the impact of the Irish spread on trans-Atlantic social memory and global economies across time and space.

This course explores topics related to language and identity in teaching, literacy research, theory, and practice. This course specifically foregrounds issues related to the Latinx experience in American schooling contexts with a focus on gender, and other identity markers that intersect with gender such as race, class, ethnicity, and (dis)ability. From an educational perspective, Latinx student populations in schools are increasing across the nation and yet far too often school curricula, quality bilingual and dual language educational offerings, and teacher preparation programs are slow to catch up to the demographic shifts. This course will further explore how Latinx identities factor into conceptualizations and practices of children's play, literacy activities, language use, and classroom behaviors of both teachers and students. By exploring culturally sustaining pedagogies and a "funds of knowledge" approach, we will seek to answer the following questions: How might we learn approaches to language and literacy education that narrow the achievement gap as they extend to the language and literacy development of Latinx learners? Moreover, what is the impact upon students when we view identity differences not as deficit, but as resource, thus creating schooling experiences that engage students, foster growth and inform equity? This course will engage students with children's literature, ethnographic exercises, linguistic autobiographies, as well as media and film depictions of contemporary issues facing Latinx students in schools.

Design thinking has emerged as a powerful methodology to catalyze breakthrough innovation for an array of complex business, social and humanitarian challenges. Business and industry have embraced design thinking as one of the most potent drivers of innovation, growth and prosperity for its’ deeply human-centered approach to problem solving. During this fast paced, hybrid, hands-on journey through the design thinking process, students will immerse themselves in a series of overlapping modules that introduce the various phases in the design thinking process and familiarize students with the tools and techniques. This course will unleash your creativity and ingenuity in addressing problems through a human centered framework and mindset, applying this methodology to a vast array of human-centered problems, and complementing disciplines from science and engineering to business and the liberal arts. This course fulfills a Core Curriculum Liberal Arts 4 Way of Knowing (Arts) as well as the gateway to the Collaborative Innovation minor and cross-listed with other minors including: Sustainability, Computing & Digital Technologies, Education, Schooling & Society, Entrepreneurship and Anthropology.

Human ethology studies various aspects of human development, not just within our own culture, but also across diverse cultures. This science is most unique because it looks at both evolutionary processes and the behavior of monkeys and apes to more holistically understand contemporary human behavior. For example, using cross-cultural and cross-species data, this course conducts an exploration of the cultural and evolutionary origins of language, non-verbal communication, laughter, sleep, deception, morality, infant behavior, parenting, human aggression, sexual behavior, gender development, and human courtship rituals.

This course deals with the nature of anthropology as a broad and diverse area of study. The anthropological study of humankind will be approached from the perspectives of physical anthropology; prehistory and archaeology; and linguistic anthropology and socio-cultural anthropology. The diversity of humankind will be explored in all its aspects from times past to the present.

"Hacking" is one of the most pressing topics of technological and societal interest. Yet, it is one of the most misunderstood and mischaracterized practices in the public sphere, given its ethical and technical complexities. In this course we will combine anthropological and computer science methods to explore the digital tools, practices, and sociocultural histories of hacking with a focus on their context of occurrence from the late 1960s to the present. Our goal is to help students think anthropologically about computing as well as technically about the digital mediations that we depend on in our lives. Computer Science is a great partner for Anthropology: computational methods have been part of the discipline since the 1970s with the use of digital computers for the study of cultural phenomena. Likewise, archaeology is a powerful companion of computing: its approach to material culture is suitable for the study of the sociocultural aspects of tool-making that are fundamental for understanding computing expertise. One of the most important aspects of hacking today consists in creating a community around tools for the exploration of digital technologies. The interplay between social and technical aspects, however, is one of the most neglected in the existing literature on hacking and computer security. Our proposal is, therefore, to bridge a serious gap between social and technical studies of digital technologies with a focus on hacking.

Sexuality is a complex and multi-faceted suite of biological and cultural/behavioral components. It is an important part of the human existence, especially in modern day North American society. This course seeks to examine human sexuality in an anthropological context. We will review sexuality in an evolutionary perspective via a comparison of nonhuman primate sexual behavior and the theoretical constructs surrounding adaptive explanations for human sexuality. The physiology of sex and the development of the reproductive tract will also be covered. The remainder of the course will consist of the evaluation of data sets regarding aspects of human sexual practice, sexual preference, mate choice, gendered sexuality, and related issues of human sexuality.

This course approaches human evolution from a theoretical point of view that combines both biological and cultural processes into a cohesive bio-cultural model. It begins by tracing the development of modern evolutionary theory and the place of evolutionary studies in anthropology, especially in the sub-field of bioanthropology. These concepts provide the framework for understanding the many lines of evidence that anthropologists use to explore and explain human evolution. These include studies of our primate relatives, through the intricacies of the fossil record, to archaeological evidence for the invention of material culture from the simplest stone tools to the complex cultural world that we live in today. Modern human variation can only be explained as the result of evolutionary forces acting on the complex interplay of biology and culture over millions of years. We continue to be affected by these forces, and this course not only provides information about where we came from, it also provides the scientific backgrounds to help us understand where we might be going as our species continues to evolve.

This course is an introduction to the methods, goals, and theoretical concepts of archaeology, with a primary focus on anthropological archaeology practiced in the Middle East, North America, and Europe. The field of archaeology is broadly concerned with material culture (at times combined with textual information) that can be employed to generate interpretations about past human societies. The challenge of this social science is to interpret past societies and anthropological behavior using the fragmentary, but nonetheless rich and complex, data base of the archaeological record. Lecture topics will include the methods and goals of archaeological excavation; analytical techniques employed in material studies; and the problems and challenges in the interpretation of past human behavior. Case studies of survey, excavation, and analytical techniques will focus on recent or on-going investigations of archaeological sites in North America, Central America, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East.

This course introduces students to the field of social-cultural anthropology. Cultural anthropologists are primarily interested in exploring issues of human cultural diversity across cultures and through time. This course will explore key theoretical, topical, and ethical issues of interest to cultural anthropologists. We will examine diverse ways in which people around the globe have constructed social organizations (such as kinship, and political and economic systems) and cultural identities (such as gender, ethnicity, nationality, race, and class) and we will consider the impact of increasing globalization on such processes. Throughout the course we will consider how different anthropologists go about their work as they engage in research and as they represent others through the writing of ethnographies.

Language is fully embedded in human culture and society. It has both meaning and efficacy; that is, it both means things and does things. Our goal in this course is to become aware of some of the ways language functions in social life, often below the level of awareness of its users. Students will engage in a number of practical exercises that demonstrate some of the more astonishing features of language all around us. Topics include: the nature of language, including language origins, nonverbal communication, and electronic communication; language, culture, and thought (linguistic relativity); speech acts and what we do with words; conversational analysis; language and identity (class, race, gender); and language in the world (multilingualism, language endangerment and revitalization, language and education).

Have you ever pondered how people live(d) in a world without television, YouTube, smartphones, and automobiles? Why have bellbottoms come and gone twice in the last 50 years? Will we be forced to relive the fashion mistakes of the 1970s and 1980s? What new stuff will people invent and sell next? In asking and answering these questions, we must focus on one underlying query: What does our stuff really say about who we are and who we want to be? This course combines lectures, discussions, and interactive small group activities to explore the nature and breadth of peoples' relationships with their things. We will investigate why and how people make and use different types of objects, and how the use of these material goods resonates with peoples' identities in the deep past, recent history, and today. Since everyone in the class will already be an expert user and consumer of things, we will consider how people today use material objects to assert, remake, reclaim, and create identities, and compare today's practices to those of people who lived long ago. Class members will learn about how anthropologists, including ethnographers (studying people today) and archaeologists (studying past peoples) think about and approach the material nature of our social, economic, and political lives. We will discuss why styles and technologies change through time, and why, in the end, there is very little new under the sun in terms of human behaviors and the way people produce and consume goods. The topical breadth of this workshop encompasses most social science disciplines, including history, economics, psychology, and anthropology, and resonates with classics, art history, and gender studies.

This course is intended for students who have completed Beginning level Creole or who have attained equivalent competence in the language. In small-group teaching sessions, students will be prepared for conversational fluency with basic reading and writing skills, emphasizing communicative competence as well as grammatical and phonetic techniques. Our study of Kreyòl is closely linked to our exploration of how the language is tied to Caribbean society and culture. Evaluation of student achievement and proficiency will be conducted both informally and formally during and at the conclusion of the course. Those looking to develop or improve their language skills are welcome to the class. The program is designed to meet the needs of those who plan to conduct research in Haiti or in the Haitian diaspora, or who intend to work in a volunteer or professional capacity either in Haiti or with Haitians abroad.

This course is intended for students who have taken one semester of Intermediate Creole Language and Culture. In small-group teaching sessions, students will be prepared for conversational fluency with enhanced reading and writing skills, emphasizing communicative competence as well as grammatical variety and phonetic acumen. Our study of Kreyòl is integrated with an exploration of how the language is tied to Haitian society, culture, economy and politics and history. Evaluation of student achievement and proficiency will be conducted both informally and formally during and at the conclusion of the course. Those looking to develop or improve their language skills are welcome to the class. The program is designed to meet the needs of those who plan to conduct research in Haiti or in the Haitian diaspora, or who intend to work in a volunteer or professional capacity either in Haiti or with Haitians abroad.

How do the technologies around us shape our lives, our bodies, and our engagements with the world—and what hidden social dynamics shape them? In this course, we will explore the fascinating intersections of science, technology, medicine, and society, focusing on how contemporary innovations—like AI, smart algorithms, and new medical technologies—are deeply intertwined with issues of social power and control. Through case studies, social theory, and discussions, students will discover how technologies are never neutral, but instead reflect and reinforce issues of inequity, ethical dilemmas, and dynamics of uneven political and economic power. This course will challenge you to think critically about the power dynamics embedded within the tools we use to heal, to communicate, and to engage with the world around us. Prepare to question everything you thought you knew about science and technology!

Boston Celtics (baseball), Glasgow Celtic (soccer), Celtic spirituality, Celtic music, Celtic art... The word "Celtic" seems to cover a multitude, yet also has a more specific meaning. It refers to a people of the ancient world known to the Greeks and the Romans and who left their trace in many parts of Europe; it refers to rich medieval cultures in Ireland and Britain; and it refers to a group of living languages and literatures such as Irish and Scottish Gaelic, Welsh and Breton. But "Celtic" also evokes certain qualities and characteristics such as passion, sensitivity, imagination, musicality and bellicosity, which have been attributed to the Irish and the Scottish Highlanders, for example, since the Romantic period. This course gives a concise introduction to the question of who were and who are the Celts.

This class will explore what anthropology can teach us about surgery, such as surgical processes, variability, and outcomes, as well as what these topics can in turn teach us about broader social issues. Questions to be addressed in class will include the history of surgery, what is surgery, how are surgeons trained, how does surgical practice vary across cultures and time-periods, outcomes and impacts of surgery, the impacts of resource scarcity, and dangerous/unnecessary/life-saving surgeries. Students will engage in questions about the aesthetics of scars, physician and patient decision-making, and how patient background (race, gender, class, identity) impacts access, experience, and outcomes. Types of surgery to be explored will include, plastic surgery, cesarean section, fistulas, organ donation, among others.

This course will examine the interactions of culture and biology within sports. The anthropology of sports can help us gain valuable insights into broader social and cultural phenomena, the role of ritual in society, and illuminate how sports have been used to bring people together, but also to exclude people. We will begin with studying the evolutionary origins and non-human examples of play. We will then move into the prehistoric and historic foundations for sport. We will also discuss how people change their bodies, in good ways and dangerous ways, for a greater chance at success, and how those bodies are often more harshly judged by society. Finally, we will explore the ways in which contemporary sporting and fan practices are culturally ordered and/or challenge social norms. Drawing on case studies from around the world, we will pay special attention to questions of gender, race, genetics, nationality, health, equality, and human variation. In addition, students will be encouraged to think critically about their own sporting experiences, both as active participants and as fans, and how sports impact their lives.

What does it mean to be Korean? How are definitions of Korea and “Koreanness” affected by recent waves of globalization and migration? This course investigates the social construction of race and nationhood within the context of South Korea. While many believe South Korea to be ethnically and racially homogeneous, the country has increasingly opened up its borders to foreign migration to offset the adverse impact of its rapidly aging society. More than one in ten marriages in South Korea involves a foreign-born person today, and growing numbers of racially mixed people consider themselves Korean. In addition, members of the Korean diaspora have started to “return” to their country of origin in recent years, only to find that they are marginalized because of their culturally different backgrounds. This course introduces students to sociological theories of race, ethnicity, and nationhood by analyzing how South Koreans define self and Other. We will learn how racial and ethnic identities continue to evolve as the contexts of migration change. We will also learn why it is difficult for individuals of particular backgrounds to find a sense of belonging in the societies in which they live and work.

This course examines the origins, causes, environmental settings and cultural factors within which natural selective forces converged throughout human evolution to create the human infant, one of the most vulnerable, slowest developing, and energetically demanding mammal infants of all. We consider who the caregivers are, and how and why they might "share care" which was needed to keep our highly vulnerable infants and children alive, and to nurture them throughout their exceedingly long childhoods. Specifically, we trace the origins of modern parenting systems from their mammalian base paying especial attention to the transaction between infant care practices themselves and how they relate to, if not depend on, the emergence of other characteristics that define us as human. These include bipedalism, empathy, learning, food sharing, and a "theory of mind". Here we will examine not only the unique roles that mothers and fathers and other important caregivers (allomothers) play but the underlying biology that both inclines that care but also responds to it biologically. We also emphasize the manner in which social values, ideologies, cultural expectations, social roles, and economic pressures assert critical influences on caregiver physiology and behavior.

When diseases emerge in Africa, the media presents a relentless tide of infection, with AIDS and Ebola, for example, claiming thousands of hapless victims of “backward” thinking and rejection of western medicine. Western journalists express disbelief that people suffer and die because they refuse to take appropriate steps to protect themselves, whether it is taking the sick to the hospital, or wearing condoms to avoid contracting HIV. We are led to ask why treatable or even preventable diseases are claiming so many African lives. Why does popular thinking about health and disease on the African continent appear to be impervious to biomedical models? This class uses an anthropological perspective to look beyond the simple popular and medical answers to questions of sickness to examine the social and political frameworks that inform people’s understandings of the health of their bodies and communities. This course will introduce students to cultural perspectives on disease through an investigation of how people around the continent understand and experience illness, and why what appears to be simple medical knowledge is anything but simple when it is understood in its social and political context. We will investigate the recent Ebola epidemic in West Africa, examine why polio persisted in Nigeria, and compare how the HIV epidemics unfolded in South Africa and Uganda. In addition to infectious diseases, we will ask questions about the social experience of disability in Africa, investigate hospital care, and draw comparisons with western perspectives.

This course presents an introduction to the socio-technical study of knowledge infrastructures in the context of a rising quest for environmental sustainability. It examines the critical role of data in supporting scientific research, environmental action, and sustainability efforts. The goal is to critically discuss the central place of data in a changing world where the proliferation of new digital technologies supports new capabilities for sensing, sharing, processing, and visualizing rapidly accelerating environmental change. This course will bring forward the interconnected technical, cultural, historical, political, and social efforts that make environmental data possible. Applying socio-technical lenses to environmental data, we will go through the different stages of an environmental data workflow, all the way from data collection to visualization and reporting. The course will pay special attention to the local and global entities, past and present, that environmental data supports. We will focus on the implications of digital technologies for participatory and citizen sciences, open data, and data governance in the environmental space. Leaning on these critical tools, we will revise ongoing environmental struggles and data-fueled sustainability efforts to assess the implications of data in ongoing and future attempts to restore and reinvent the integrity of our planet and its life-supporting systems. The course will resort to practical examples using environmental datasets and a network of socio-environmental practitioners who will present selected topics throughout the semester.

What are the cultures of medicine? How does belief create possibilities for healing? How do cultural, social, and political forces shape experiences of illness? When can care be a form of violence? How can histories of oppression make you sick? Medical anthropology is an expansive field of research concerned with the study of medicine, affliction, and healing in historical and cultural context. This course provides an introduction to topics in medical anthropology, from classical texts on belief, illness experience, and structural violence to contemporary work on disability, care, and critical global health. Over the course of the semester, students will gain experience in methods, critical thinking, independent research, and public communication as we collectively explore what medical anthropology can contribute to the urgent health challenges that we face in the contemporary world today.

In a 1971 interview, Bruce Lee said "Martial arts has a very very deep meaning as far as my life is concerned because as an actor, as a martial artist, as a human being - all these I have learned from martial arts." By merging multiple aspects of human identity, artistic expression, and cultural activity, martial arts have a unique ability to access the human imagination. From Hong Kong cinemas, to Black Belt magazines and black light posters, to disco songs and shopping mall kiosks for ninja equipment, martial arts are intertwined with popular culture. After more than a half century of association with aesthetic violence, mystical secrets, and Orientalist mystique, the cultural phenomenon of martial arts lends itself to anthropological analysis and critique. This course synthesizes the global dissemination of martial arts with the anthropology of media and symbolic violence. By tracking the proliferation of the martial arts in popular culture, from muay thai action films to karate tournament supply catalogues and dojo iconography, students can simultaneously explore these arts' cultural origins. We will examine these origins in a range of styles from kung fu in China, to jujitsu in Japan, kali/escrima in the Philippines, pencak silat in Indonesia, and savate in France. In this way, the course crafts informative linkages between the cultural variations of martial arts, and their global influence in popular consciousness.

This course will serve as an introduction to the field of international development, with particular focus on the various disciplines that have contributed to and shaped the development discourse over the past eight decades. Readings and lectures will draw from economics, political science, sociology, anthropology, environmental and technological sciences, public health and epidemiology, area studies, ethnic studies, and gender studies. A large component of this course will focus on in-class discussions and presentations that engage the broader debates within development studies to critically evaluate the development discourse/process, as well as understand emerging critiques of international development. Required course work will include group or individual student projects that critically investigate ongoing development issues and propose engaged solutions that include restoration and social justice and human dignity.

How is race embodied and how are bodies racialized? How do gender, sexuality, class, size, perceived beauty, and ability mutually influence embodiment? This course considers anthropological and historical studies of the body, with a critical focus on Blackness. We investigate how Black human bodies are othered, valued, dehumanized, and experienced, across time and space, with a particular focus on the United States. Euro-American philosophies have constructed Black people as transgressive, in a variety of ways, and all these ideas have been inscribed on and through their physical bodies. This normative discourse shapes how Black people interact with the social world, so we will discuss, challenge, and critique these narratives and also consider how the body can be used as a site of resistance. We will engage topics like athletic training, bodily modification and perceptions of beauty, biomedical technologies, labor, disability, and illness, through texts like academic writing, music, podcasts, essays, news media, and social media. Overall, this class demonstrates how bodies are key sites for understanding politics, power, social hierarchies, economics, and social change in our contemporary world.

How and why do some of the roads taken by migrants (including refugees) lead to Rome and Italy? What are the challenges faced by migrants upon their arrival, and on their path to citizenship? How does civil society intervene to mitigate those challenges, and to facilitate mutual integration and engagement? What are the distinctive features of Roman lay and Catholic approaches to migration? The course addresses such questions, building on contemporary Rome both as a compelling case study and as a gateway to the causes, lived experiences, and consequences of global migrations. Migrants' reception and integration happens at the local level, and in interaction with residents and existing communities. Attention to the realities of the host civil society is therefore fundamental: migration is not an issue that can simply be delegated to experts, bureaucrats, and politicians. Students investigate how the experience of the city is at the same time the experience of globalization, embodied in older and new residents' everyday life in the built environment; and they appreciate situated social engagement and its potentialities.

What is college? How do students experience it? How is it structured? How does it contribute to the development of adulthood or, possibly, to the extension of childhood? How do different types of colleges differ, and how does higher education vary around the world? We’ll investigate the goals of college, student life, learning, athletics, entertainment, social and racial inequality, gender and sexuality, mental health and wellbeing, drawing on published research, our own experiences, and our own research findings.

In the anthropological study of religion, does having a religious background benefit a researcher or does it introduce bias? Where does theology belong in the anthropology of religion, and what might the two learn from each other? Can one critically study a faith and live it at the same time? This course addresses these questions through a review of the lives and work of prominent anthropologists who identified as Catholic and drew inspiration from their Catholic faith. In examining how these anthropologists shaped the discipline, students will learn about the wide breadth of the anthropological study of religion, an endeavor that stretches from the origins of our species to the high-tech world in which we now live. This disciplinary survey will also lead to questions of how, through these particular anthropologists, insights from the anthropology of religion intersect, complicate, and enrich the Catholic intellectual tradition.

This course offers an ethnographically grounded understanding of contemporary European cultures and societies. We start by presenting a brief history of the idea of Europe. Then, we define its geographical focus: where are the boundaries of Europe? Are Israel and Turkey part of Europe? Who gets to decide? Are there European Muslims? We will then read recent works focusing on selected regions and on diverse urban populations. We will explore and discuss socio-cultural facets of European everyday life; trends and challenges in technology, the environment, popular culture, demography, and politics; and the diversity of urban/rural, north/south, and more generally intra-European ways of life. The course will be of interest to students of contemporary global issues, and in particular to students who intend to spend a semester in Europe; are back from the field; or intend to write a related senior thesis.

This course offers a comprehensive understanding of digital literacy in relation to teaching and researching language acquisition. Students will learn a variety of digital writing technologies and be trained to think critically about cultural and communicative consequences of the digital media. Students will also gain the critical perspective and literacy tools needed to actively apply in language teaching and researching.

What are cities, and how do they work? How do present (and how will future) societies respond to the challenges of pollution, sustainable development, exploitation of natural resources, equal access to infrastructure, education and welfare, human rights, food production and distribution, and energy consumption? This course welcomes students to reflect on these questions and respond to these challenges through the emerging field of urban ethics. Through lectures and readings, we will ask: 1.) Can we define an “ancient urban ethics?" 2.) Which disciplines are involved in urban ethics, and what strategies—from environmental to social ethics—should inform it? 3.) What policies, planning documents, and environmental and information technologies from the past and present can we avail from around the world to understand urban ethics? To ground our discussions, we will read excerpts from classical literature, philosophy, and cross-disciplinary works. We will also engage resources including maps, drawings, art, photographs, and videos. As we will discover through discussion and participation, urban ethics is a field in which everyone is involved.

This introductory course uses popular film as a primary text/medium to explore fundamental questions in the academic study of religion. In particular, we will be concerned with the ways that faith, spirituality, religion and religious experience are constituted and defined on film as well as through film viewing. Emphasis will be placed on film's reflecting African Diaspora culture and the inclusion of religions outside of the Judeo-Christian canon for context and comparison. In discussing films from across a range of subjects and genres, we will engage in the work of mythical, theological and ideological criticism, while examining the nature, function, and value of religion and religious experience. We will also consider significant writers and traditions in the field of Diaspora Religions and develop the analytical and interpretive skills of the discipline. Given the depth and breadth of religious orthodoxies and faith-based practices existent throughout the Diaspora, students will be exposed to a variety of film genres including silent films, anime, documentary, drama, biography, comedy and horror. Based on availability, and the student cohort's familiarity or lack of material the scheduled films will include twelve to fifteen selections from the lists below. Weekly readings, writing assignments, and screening sessions are required.

Anthropology is a social science with a holistic perspective on the human condition. It attempts to understand any aspect of humanity in the broadest sense anywhere and anytime. Anthropological perspectives can be used to speculate on what it meant to be human in the distant past, or what it may mean in the far distant future. While we cannot travel into the past, future, or an alternative universe to visit other societies or contact alien civilizations, we can imagine what those trips would be like. In our own culture, science fiction has moved from a fringe literature to an essential part of modern art and entertainment because it allows us to imagine alternate realities, and to speculate about the past, present and future as way to learn about ourselves and others. This class will introduce you to the basic principles of anthropology as a social science using science fiction text and video to illustrate various anthropological principles. You will learn how to critically evaluate anthropology's diverse applications and how they are reflected in popular culture (sometimes accurately and sometimes not). You will also sharpen your writing skills by using anthropological principles to critique science fiction.

This course introduces the interdisciplinary field of science and technology studies. Our concern will be with science and technology (including medicine) as social and historical, i.e., as human, phenomena. We shall examine the divergent roots of contemporary science and technology, and the similarities and (sometimes surprising) differences in their methods and goals. The central theme of the course will be the ways in which science and technology interact with other aspects of society, including the effects of technical and theoretical innovation in bringing about social change, and the social shaping of science and technology themselves by cultural, economic and political forces. Because science/society interactions so frequently lead to public controversy and conflict, we shall also explore what resources are available to mediate such conflicts in an avowedly democratic society.

This course seeks to explore connections between environment and culture change by introducing students to the diversity of cultures living in the Southwest. We begin by learning about indigenous people living in the Southwest today including the Pueblo peoples (e.g., Hopi, Zuni, Santa Clara, Cochiti, Acoma), Navajo, Ute, and Tohono O’odham using ethnography and contemporary native histories. We will then travel back in time to learn about the complex histories of these people, particularly the ancestral Pueblo, to places like Chaco Canyon, Mesa Verde, the Rio Grande, the Mimbres Valley, and the Phoenix Basin. Our explorations will cover from the earliest Paleoindians (11,500 years ago) to the 13th century Migrations to European contact, the establishment of Spanish Missions, and the Pueblo Revolt of 1680-1692. We will then bring this discussion full circle to today. Along the way, we will explore the impact of large-scale, long-term processes such as the adoption of agriculture, village formation, religious change, migration, and warfare on the rich historical landscape of the Southwest.

This course will examine the Latino experience in the United States, including the historical, cultural, and political foundations of Latino life. We will approach these topics comparatively, thus attention will be given to the various experiences of a multiplicity of Latino groups in the United States.

This once weekly lab session is a mandatory requirement for students enrolled in the Design Thinking course. These sessions focus on practical application of the topics and materials presented in class with students working in teams to employ techniques and methodology on assigned projects. This hands-on lab will having students exploring the research, brainstorming, ideation, iterative prototyping and presentation techniques that lead to creative innovation and disruptive breakthroughs applicable to students of any discipline.

This gateway course introduces students to academic research about the nature, causes, and consequences of poverty. Throughout, the readings and lectures reveal the collaboration across the various disciplines, enhances our understanding of what it means to be poor and of the array of interlocking problems that lead to poverty, and guides the formulation of policies to prevent and alleviate poverty. Equal emphasis is given to poor citizens of the United States and developing nations.

Humans deeply affect their social and natural worlds. Their impact reverberates across time and space making it difficult to understand the long-term ramifications of our daily decisions and actions. This seminar enhances our understanding of the complex web of relationships between humans, resources, and climate by exploring the concepts of sustainability and collapse from an anthropological perspective. Key questions guiding this exploration include: What do we mean by sustainability? What is it that want to sustain? How can societies be "sustained" when we know societal collapses happen time and again? Through readings, media, debates, and analysis, we will learn how our culture shapes and promotes both sustainability and collapse and assess whether they can be attained or prevent. And, we will all gain a better understanding of our place in the world around us.

Organized violence between human communities is one of the unfortunate realities of human existence, and its causes and consequences have consequently been of great interest. Is war an inevitable outcome of human nature, or the result of specific social, historical, and environmental circumstances? Archaeology is uniquely positioned to provide concrete insights into the history of human violence through study of its direct material correlates?traumatic injuries on skeletons, fortified settlements, weaponry, and iconography. However, the archaeological record also documents the impacts of violence?reduced nutritional status and health, evidence for enslavement, cannibalism, and population decline?and can provide insights into why war occurred through examination of environment, population, and social conditions. In this course, we will explore what the archaeological record tells us about violence, human nature, and the veracity of claims for either a more violent or more peaceful past. We will examine theoretical models of war, anthropological studies of conflict, and archaeological case studies of both violent and peaceful times to understand the role that organized violence has played in human history and evolution.

Together with the United States, Mexico and the Caribbean have been among the most influential exporters of music globally since the early 20th century. This course traces these processes of musical production and consumption. Students will be introduced to important historical and stylistic musical developments as we survey various styles and genres with attention to their cultural significance - including the corrido (Mexican ballad), Caribbean-derived salsa, and cumbia, among others. Our approach, such that we are dealing with music-cultures, is at once anthropological and ethnomusicological. In order we achieve our aims, the course is organized along two axes: one chronological (so to speak), the other conceptual, neither complete. The chronological portion will allow us to survey various genres and ensembles of musical production. We dovetail this effort with a focus on important themes and concepts that aid in understanding the present and historical conditions of the terrain where performance, identity, race-ethnicity, gender, transnationalism, and commoditized publics intersect.

Content The unit focuses on how contemporary socio-economic, cultural and political transformations in the Asian region intersect with forms and practices of popular culture. Specifically, it seeks to highlight the relevance of popular culture as a lens through which to analyse social, cultural, political and economic change, to understand how globalisation, inter- and intra-regional integration, urbanisation, consumerism, and shifts in how gender and sexual identities are articulated across societies in East and Southeast Asia. The unit also considers globalisation and lobal discontinuities in the context of the production, circulation and consumption of popular culture both from the West to Asia, and increasingly from Asia to the rest of the world. The unit examines these issues with reference to various spaces and practices of popular culture including film, television, and popular music; fan cultures and social media; fashion and beauty cultures; postcolonialism and nationalism; and urban design and street culture. The unit can be counted towards a major in either Anthropology or Asian Studies. Assessment Typically this unit is assessed in the following ways: (1) tutorial participation; (2) tutorial assignment; (3) essay; and (4) examination. Further information is available in the unit outline. Supplementary assessment is not available in this unit except in the case of a bachelor's pass degree student who has obtained a mark of 45 to 49 overall and is currently enrolled in this unit, and it is the only remaining unit that the student must pass in order to complete their course. Unit Coordinator(s) Associate Professor Joanna Elfving-Hwang and Associate Professor Romit Dasgupta Unit rules Prerequisites: any Level 1 ANTH, ASIA, JAPN, CHIN, KORE or INDO unit Incompatibility: SOCS2216 Popular Culture in Asia Contact hours lectures: 20 hours; tutorials: 9 hours

What is ethnography, broadly defined? How is a scholar's ethnographic product shaped by their racialized experience? We will use books, articles, podcasts, documentaries, music, dance, and poetry for an in-depth study of the various ways that Black intellectuals in the social sciences have used ethnography to make sense of and theorize our and their everyday social worlds. We will pay special attention to questions of sexism, anti-Black racism, white supremacy, and colonialism, as these become relevant to the scholars' work, relationships to their disciplinary homes, and lived experiences. This course will also create space for students to think critically about their own positionality and subject positions, as we consider the ways that scholars take these into account when conducting research and presenting their scholarship. This course will reference texts over time and across academic disciplines, though focused in Anthropology, to consider genre, style, audience, and purpose when engaging with this social science research method. But ethnography implies a duality, as it can exist as process and as product. The term can refer to the action of conducting fieldwork and spending immersive time with a particular population in a particular place, as well as to the tangible product that the anthropologist produces after organizing and managing data collected from their fieldwork. Therefore, over the course of the semester, students will learn different ways that this theory, method, and practice is central to Anthropology and then will integrate this knowledge into their own ethnographically based final project. This project can result in a creative analytic text, like a podcast or autoethnography or curated playlist, but this product must be based in empirical information gathered and analyzed over the course of a student's own fieldwork, after they have identified a key question they would like to answer ethnographically.

What is the meaning of identity in a transnational space straddling the United States and the Caribbean? MIgration, settlement and return are central to the historical experiences and the literary and aesthetic expressions of Caribbean societies. This course combines literary and anthropological perspectives to the study of novels and historical and anthropological texts in which themes of migration, immigration and transnationalism play central roles.

One way to improve our understanding of ourselves is to compare ourselves with the animals who most resemble us, in informative, challenging and disturbing ways. In this course, we'll look at the relationship that has done most to change human self-perceptions. With a focus on Western texts and experiences, but with reference to many other cultures, we'll concentrate on the problems of how and why human attitudes to other apes have changed since the Middle Ages, and how they have influenced thinking in science, religion, politics, sociology, literature, and ethics.

This course will examine notions of history in oral cultures with special reference to Ireland. Who were those who transmitted oral traditions about historical events? Which genres shaped oral historical traditions? In which contexts were these traditions transmitted? What was the nature of the traditions? What was their content? What relationship did they have to the written record, to counter-hegemonic histories and to official histories? To what extent, if any, can they be said to articulate a national perspective? These are some of the questions that will be addressed, and case studies that illuminate special aspects of the subject such as oral traditions of the Vikings, of 1798, of the Famine and of landlords will be discussed in some detail.

This course will examine the practice, practitioners and different genres of the verbal arts: the folktale, legends, epic, proverb, riddle, etc., and will look at the different functions of these genres. It will also look at the research traditions devoted to the study of what has been variously termed folk narrative, oral literature, orature, as well as the verbal arts.

Where do regional and national identities collide? Has the rise of the internet and globalization made national borders increasingly obsolete? Or, has it ironically caused people to embrace ultra-nationalism and xenophobia? This class analyzes these questions within the context of East Asia. We will study the growing impact of cultural hybridization—and in particular, the soft power of K-Pop boy bands and Korean soap operas—on fan culture, online communities, and migratory patterns. We will then juxtapose these trends with more sobering evidence of the lingering effects of Cold War politics, the Japanese empire, and territorial disputes in Korea, China, and Japan in the past decade. By using materials from history, anthropology, and literature, students will explore the influence of colonialism, nationalism, and globalization on everyday life across the continent. All majors and backgrounds are welcome. No prior knowledge about Asian languages or topics is required.

Poverty situations differ from each other; being poor in South Bend is different from being poor in London or the Bhutanese village Chamkhar. Responses have to be context-sensitive and have to respect local particularities. They have to offer concrete solutions to social challenges; this encourages the development of social innovations, both as interventions and as creative initiatives by people challenged by poverty themselves. The course explores "good practices" and "good examples" as well as failed attempts to respond to poverty through a series of case studies. We will look at social innovations as contextual responses to poverty in a particular setting.Three questions will be pursued: 1) How can responses to poverty situations do justice to a local context? 2) Which lessons can be learnt from good and also from disturbing practices for poverty alleviation/reduction efforts in general? 3) Which concrete social innovation can be developed in the light of lessons learnt and experience on the ground? In exploring the first question we will look at what can be called "contextual ethical reasoning;" the second question will look especially at the role of social innovations; the third question indicates the ambition to make this course an interactive laboratory to develop a social innovation in cooperation with a local community partner from South Bend. The course has includes a defining community-based element.

We will examine the consequences of upholding literacy as both a "civil" and "human" right and consider what counts as literacy, who is counted among the "literate," and the ways that language and power impact schooling and education.Topics include what some reports describe as the challenges to 21st century literacy, tensions and conflicts in the teaching and learning of literacy in urban public schools, the school-to-prison pipeline, and future directions for the field of language, literacy, and culture. Ultimately, the readings, documentaries, films, and discussions will address the intersections of race, power, literacy, and equity in schools in the context of neo-liberal reforms in education. These reforms have led to increased privatization of schools, school choice, school closures, and increasing focus on standards, testing, and accountability, each fueling the school-to-prison pipeline that denies a disproportionate number of students of color from having access to a quality education. In the end, we will consider the importance of viewing educational opportunities through the lenses of human and civil rights.

This course explores the rhetorical history and dynamics of what has been called the feminization of poverty, comparing statistics and stories in scholarly and popular media that often tell conflicting narratives of who is poor and why. We will ask how the picture of poverty has evolved over time exploring such representations as: Dorothea Lange's 1936 documentary photograph of the Migrant Mother, Ronald Reagan's 1976 caricature of the Welfare Queen, the 2008 film Slumdog Millionaire, and Katherine Boo's 2012 book Behind the Beautiful Forevers. What does poverty look like in modern media (news, books, films, theatre, etc.)? Who gets to tell that story? How can we contribute to that conversation? To what extent do these representations not only reflect but shape public opinion and public policy? These questions will be grounded in theories and research on the intersection of gender, poverty, race, and rhetoric. They will also be framed by students' original community-based research supported by local community partners whose social service addresses gender and poverty. Community engagement time is limited and flexible. Final projects may be composed as traditional research or creative works.

Research for Impact is an engaging and dynamic course that investigates wicked problems through creative research methods that provide insights and opportunities for project stakeholders to produce lasting change. Students are equipped with essential quantitative and qualitative research skills and methodologies, empowering them to explore, analyze, and help confront complex design challenges. Students will craft inventive research toolkits, which they will utilize in real-world scenarios to uncover deep needs and foster opportunities for a more inclusive design and research process.

This class is dedicated to the contemplation and analysis of American (in the hemispheric sense) narratives that trace the trajectory of outbreaks of widespread illness to their subsequent mitigation. A major source of reflection and analysis will be the instructor's experience nursing in an ICU during the first and second COVID-19 surges in New York City. Drawing upon literature, film, philosophy, history, and medical science, the focus will be on medicine and healing as a hinge point between politics and life. The class will analyze medicine as power; specifically, in what Michel Foucault described as "biopower or making live and letting die". In short, we will study theories, practices and stories of healing. However, instead of focusing on European texts such as Bocaccio's The Decameron (1353), Shelley's The Last Man (1826), or Albert Camus's The Plague (1947), this class draws on the tensions between the Eurocentric canon and its deconstruction in the Americas (Machado de Assis, Bellatin, Cuarón, Poe, Cazals, Porter). These tensions manifest at the points where bare life and political life converge, where class, race, geography, and the economics of healing complicate an intervention so simple as quarantine. Nevertheless, and as the COVID-19 pandemic has shown us, some whose daily circulation provide essential goods and services to society cannot afford to quarantine, and it is their stories that fall outside the scope of Europe's literary grasp.

Native Americans have long been trapped in a betwixt and between state, caught by the forces of past and present, tradition and assimilation, romanticization and caricature. Yet through it all, Native voices have continued to speak of the Indian experience with great power and eloquence. This course will introduce Native American literature as a distinctive contribution to American and world literature. We will examine a wide range of expressive culture from the last century, including novels, poetry, graphic stories, children's literature, film, digital media, autobiographies, performances of oral literature, and music. Through the passion, creativity, and humor of Indian authors, we will learn something of the historical experience of Native men and women, and how they have reacted to massacres and mascots, racism and reservations, poverty and political oppression. Above all, we will try to understand how indigenous authors have used literature to engage crucial issues of race and culture in the United States that continue to influence their lives: identity, self-discovery, the centrality of place, cultural survival, and the healing power of language and spirituality. Class discussions will incorporate literary, historical, and ethnographic perspectives of Native expressive culture and the agency of authors as artists and activists vis-à-vis the wider American literary tradition. Authors include Sherman Alexie, Nicholas Black Elk, Louise Erdrich, D'Arcy McNickle, N. Scott Momaday, Linda Hogan, Winona LaDuke, and Leonard Peltier.

Students electing to fulfill the experiential learning requirement through internships in the community (Option B) may do so by enrolling in PS 35002. Students must complete 3 credits total, but may do so in one, two, or three separate internships with corresponding credit, enrolling in PS 35002 each semester they are participating in an internship, or in the Fall semester if the internship takes place over the summer. Students will determine credit value with their internship advisor and a Poverty Studies director. For 3 credits, a student must complete 80 to 100 hours total during one semester or approximately 8 to 10 hours per week for 10 weeks, including time at the site and with the internship advisor. A 2-credit internship requires 50 to 70 total hours (or 5-7 hours for 10 weeks) and a 1-credit internship would involve 30 to 50 total hours (or 3-5 hours for 10 weeks). Students may arrange to intern for more or less than 10 weeks during the semester they are enrolled in PS 35002 and can adjust the weekly hours to correspond to the required total.

Students electing to fulfill the experiential learning requirement through internships in the community (Option B) may do so by enrolling in PS 35002. Students must complete 3 credits total, but may do so in one, two, or three separate internships with corresponding credit, enrolling in PS 35002 each semester they are participating in an internship, or in the Fall semester if the internship takes place over the summer. Students will determine credit value with their internship advisor and a Poverty Studies director. For 3 credits, a student must complete 80 to 100 hours total during one semester or approximately 8 to 10 hours per week for 10 weeks, including time at the site and with the internship advisor. A 2-credit internship requires 50 to 70 total hours (or 5-7 hours for 10 weeks) and a 1-credit internship would involve 30 to 50 total hours (or 3-5 hours for 10 weeks). Students may arrange to intern for more or less than 10 weeks during the semester they are enrolled in PS 35002 and can adjust the weekly hours to correspond to the required total.

We'll try to see the world whole - looking at genuinely global historical experiences of the last five hundred years. Our aim will be to take the broadest and most comprehensive perspective we can imagine; we'll look not only at every kind of human culture in every part of the planet, but also, for the sake of comparison, at the start and end of the course, at the societies of other, non-human cultural creatures. We'll focus on two stories: first, the mutual impact of human beings and the rest of nature; and, second, the effects human societies have had on each other in an era of accelerating world-wide contacts between cultures. The purpose of the course will be to identify and probe the main themes of the history of the world in the last half-millennium, equip students with a historically informed awareness of global connections and inter-actions in a globalizing world, and to ask whether (and, if so, how) global history relates to current problems in social policy, international relations, and ethical debate.

This course studies the intellectual origins, political developments and social and cultural manifestations of nationalism and national movements in the Middle East. We will begin with a theoretical survey of nationalism in general and then proceed to discuss specific cases of national movements (Zionist, Arab, Lebanese, Iraqi, Turkish, Iranian, Egyptian). We will use these cases to analyze themes such as historiography and nationalism, anti-colonialism, gender, religion and art as they have been manifested in these national movements.

This course will focus on exercises, research and reading from a diverse range of historical and current influential environmental writings from philosophers, economists, environmentalists, theologians, political scientists, naturalists, and practitioners. Learners will analyze the impact that human actions have on the natural world–particularly through foodways, or the social, cultural, and economic practices of producing and consuming food. This course will also explore how our understanding of race/ethnicity, nature, and the environment influences human choices around food. And it offers alternative courses of action toward viable, ethical, and antiracist solutions to questions about sustainable farming, global economic inequality, and world hunger. Throughout the semester, participants will use the lens of race and ethnicity to study and discuss how these two concepts affect access to agricultural land, foodstuffs/ foodways, environmental justice and nature. A fundamental objective will be to create podcasts focused on student’s engagement with the course themes.

This course offers an interdisciplinary survey of African-American and other African descendant women’s indigenous knowledge, development and maintenance of social structures, cultural preservation and spiritual engagement within their respective communities. Unfortunately and unconscionably Black women have been derogatorily referred to as “the mules of the world”. Valued for their work, and often not much else. They are venerated for their fertility and their central role they occupy as strong mothers and caregivers in the domestic sphere. Yet, concurrently they are often denied opportunity outside of the home. “Crossing over” occupying a position in more than one realm, much as Sister Rosetta Tharpe moved between secular and sanctified music often became the modus for survival. Maligned as jezebels, or sapphires, lazy and usury, as witches, or relegated to menial, semi-skilled labor. This course aims to interrogate and dispel some of the tropes and caricatures, by utilizing womanist and feminist theory to look closely at the role of Black women as agentive, sage and entrepreneurial. Alice Walker coined the term womanist in the 1980s. As Walker outlines it, a womanist is a person who prefers to side with the oppressed: with women, with people of color, with the poor. These are women who occupy several subject positions in society. By harnessing their “intersectionality” of race, gender, sexuality, class, and transnational identity we can interrogate the historicity and cultural specificity that they have faced in and outside of their communities. With particular emphasis placed upon the subordination that Black women face; and the effects of racism, colonialism, unequal forms of economic development, and globalization on Black Communities, the course aims to see and illustrate where and how Black women have risen above the limitations imposed upon them. To do this, students will engage in critical reading of a range of diverse texts—from memoir, essay, fiction, prose, cultural criticism and sociopolitical analysis. We will look historically and currently at black women’s roles in the home, their religious institutions and in some of the workplaces they occupy as sole proprietors, cottage industrialists, and street vendors. For an undergraduate student body this course will pull excerpts from several core texts that would tend to be read in full if offered on the graduate level.

This course will examine the U.S. Civil Rights Movement in global contexts. From the 1920s to the 1990s, Black Americans' activism, organizing, and political efforts shaped their relationship with the Black Diaspora and U.S. Foreign Affairs. This class will cover an array of topics and historical moments such as Communism and the Red Scare, WWII, the Cold War, the formation of the United Nations, African Independents Movements, and Apartheid. We will study various activists, scholars, celebrities, and Black travelers whose movements around the world transformed how they viewed the United States' treatment of its Black citizens. By the end of this semester, students will know how Black Americans understood civil and human rights on U.S. soil and abroad.

In this course we will examine how different kinds of organizations and institutions (corporations and firms, NGOs and non-profits, economic development organizations, social movement organizations) respond and adapt to cultural differences in a globalizing world. We will begin by analyzing the processes by which the children's educational television program Sesame Street is transformed and spread around the world, and how the organization that creates it builds relationships with its international partners and counterparts. We will then compare Sesame Street to other organizations that translate, locally adapt, and diffuse various kinds of innovations around the world, from products (toys and soap operas) and policies (health care and anti-discrimination laws), to norms and ideas (human rights, peace building, and democracy).

Mainstream American narratives about feminism and women's rights often assume that the varied social movements gathered under the label "feminism" first emerged in Western Europe and the United States, spreading outwards over the course of the 20th and 21st century. However, scholars have long critiqued this story. In this course, we will read texts from gender studies, history, anthropology, and women's rights activists around the world that complicate this narrative, showing that global feminisms have many roots and many branches. In turn, we will explore how these alternate genealogies complicate how we think about the concepts that have historically been central to feminism, including gender, rights, equality, independence, freedom, and agency.

The United Nations estimates that an unprecedented 71 million people around the world have been forced to flee from their respective homes. Among them are nearly 26 million refugees, half of whom are under the age of 18. Media and social science scholarship represent refugees as passive recipients of western aid and avoid critical examination of the global and historical conditions that create "refugees."This course introduces students to the interdisciplinary field of critical refugee studies (CRS) to re-conceptualize the refugee not as a problem to be solved but as a site of social and political critiques. CRS illuminates the processes of colonization, war, and displacement. This course examines militarism and migration as well as refugee voices written in their own words. We will assess a variety of sources, including oral history, ethnography, art, graphic novels, and interdisciplinary scholarship from humanities and social science.

This course provides students with a critical understanding of how South Korean society is organized, the major social issues that have dominated the contemporary era, and how systems of social inequality have changed since the postwar period. We will analyze in particular, three major periods of social change, including 1) the democratization movement of the 1970s and 1980s, 2) the Asian financial crisis and its impact on social inequality and poverty, and finally, 3) South Korea’s aging crisis and its implications for the future. No prior knowledge of Asian languages or topics is required.

This course offers a critical examination of what it means to be an immigrant or child of immigrants through scholarly works, memoirs, blogs, and popular journalism. Since the liberalization of immigration policy in 1965, immigrants from Latin America and Asia are becoming an increasing and emergent demographic of American society. In major American cities such as Los Angeles and New York, they comprise over 50% of the population. This course focuses on how immigrants and the children of immigrants experience the United States. How are immigrants changing the US racial and ethnic structure? How do their experiences differ given varying legal statuses? How is the second generation becoming American? We will explore these questions through readings that focus on family, religion, education, dating and sexuality. This course will include a community based learning component where students will work with immigrant serving organizations. Students will have the option to teach citizenship classes or to work with immigrant children. Service will be 2-3 hours per week outside of class.

How did the most divisive war in American History shape the nation's biggest church community? This course explores Catholics as both supporters and detractors of the Vietnam War. American Catholics wished to see America defeat Communism but, importantly, the power of faith motivated many to criticize the states escalation of the conflict. Students will explore the tensions and transformations of this important moment in American life. Lectures and classroom discussions will address decolonization, the global and national nature of American Catholicism, the power of the liberal state, conscientious objection, the Spirit of the Sixties, sacramental protests, the rise of human rights, geopolitics, and the Cold War. Course readings will include the latest scholarship, but also primary sources like poems, films, songs, letters, prayers, newspaper articles, and art. Students will have access to the rich materials of Catholic peace activists found in the University of Notre Dame Archives.

Introduction to Forensic Anthropology provides a broad overview of one of the applied fields of biological anthropology. Forensic anthropologists use knowledge of skeletal anatomy to answer questions of medico-legal significance, and students will gain an understanding of what this requires. This includes the identification of human skeletal remains and the interpretation of the circumstances surrounding their death. While this course does not teach laboratory proficiency in the techniques of forensic anthropology, it outlines the concepts underlying the recovery and analysis of human remains, the determination of the biological profile (including age, sex, ancestry, and stature), and the interpretation of skeletal trauma and pathology. Course material will be presented in lecture format, supplemented by videos, daily in-class discussions, team-based activities and projects, and collaborative student presentations.

Why do weight lifters wear lifting belts? How does athletic training and diet differ between endurance athletes and strength athletes? What are the sex-based differences in athletic performance? What impact do supplements and performance enhancing drugs have on athletic performance? Through the use of peer reviewed research, popular media articles, podcasts, and film we will answer these and many other questions within the field of exercise physiology. The course will be split into two broad units: 1) Powerlifters and 2) Marathoners. Topics covered will include cellular metabolism, muscle physiology, training programs, response to training, basic nutrition, body composition, some methodological exercise testing, supplements and performance enhancing drugs, recovery, fatigue, and activity in extreme environments. Through this use of mixed media, we will also discuss how the media misrepresents and misreports exercise physiology studies, making us all more discerning consumers of information.

This course will give students an understanding of primate social systems and the factors that influence their maintenance and evolution. The course will begin with a brief overview of primate natural history (taxonomy of major primate groups and primate evolution). The remainder of the course will use various primate examples to explore the core topics of primate behavior and ecology, including: diet and nutrition, predation, social structure, kinship, mating behavior, social dominance, and cognition. Students will also have the opportunity to learn some of the basic data collection techniques used when studying non-human primate behavior, and a trip to the zoo will be scheduled so that they can practice these techniques. Throughout the semester, the students will be asked to read several relevant books/articles (primate case-studies) and write reaction papers on their readings.

If you were to perform a Google image search of “human evolution,” you would see endless pictures of men linearly evolving from apes to modern humans. These overwhelmingly one-sided depictions are because much of our human evolutionary story has been written by and about men to the exclusion of women. Consequently, many of the key theories explaining the unique suite of human features seem to assume that evolutionary forces act only upon men, and women are merely passive beneficiaries. Not only is this exclusion of roughly half the population sexist, it is also bad science – bad science that to this day has been repeated and perpetuated to justify the status quo. In this class, we will explore human evolution from a feminist perspective intellectually drawing upon human biology, archaeology, cultural anthropology, primatology, exercise physiology, and reproductive health to demonstrate that women were and still are a driving force in human evolution. Using non-traditional learning methods and assignments, we will cover: 1) foundational feminist human evolutionary theory, 2) the pervasiveness of estrogen, 3) physical/athletic performance and sexual division of labor; 4) the significance and frequency of alloparenting; 5) multiple orgasms and the control of women’s sexuality; 6) cooperation and competition among women; 7) concealment (or not) of human ovulation; 8) evolutionary reasons for the difficulty of human birth; 9) the physical and mental resilience of women; and 10) the crucial role grandmothers and menopause. It is my hope that this class not only provides an alternative perspective to current thinking in human evolution, but also encourages students to bring their experiences and perspectives to bear. Because who asks the questions matters, and a greater diversity of views can only improve and enrich our holistic understanding of human evolution.

The Arctic Circle, Mount Everest, the Sahara Desert, poverty, and obesity, and even space! These are all extremes some humans experience. Using primary literature and pop culture resources, this course will explore how humans have biologically, culturally, and technologically overcome these extremes. Through this use of mixed media, we will also discuss how the media misrepresents and misreports scientific studies, making us all more discerning consumers of information. You will be expected to compare and contract different types of resources for each topic covered. You will also be expected to work within a group to explore a human extreme of your own choosing and present it to the class.

By verbal arts is understood storytelling as a practice and the various kinds of narrative -folktales, legends, heroic lays, etc. - that were usual at storytelling events.Not all genres of the verbal arts are narratives, however, but there are also such genres as lyrical songs, proverbs, riddles, etc. This course will examine the Irish verbal arts - in Irish and in English - in a comprehensive way and will study specific texts.

It has been 20+ years since the first draft sequence of the entire human genome was published, spurring development of genetic technologies that were previously impossible, such as CRISPR genome editing. These technologies carry potential to identify, treat, or even prevent genetic conditions; at the same time, they often rely on assumptions that genes determine one’s fate and are shaping contemporary ideals of health, wellness, and disability. This course will examine how genetics and genetic technologies raise a host of complicated ethical questions, such as concerns about “new” forms of eugenics and genetic determinism, the ownership and commodification of genetic material, the ethics of genetics research in marginalized communities, legislative efforts to prevent genetic discrimination, and more. We will use a case study approach, pairing examinations of the biological and technical bases of specific genetic technologies with bioethical analysis to consider costs and benefits from a variety of stakeholder perspectives. This will entail engagement with perspectives from the history of science, genetics, bioethics, genetic counseling, etc. to explore complicated questions about the relationships between genetics, research, medicine, and society.

This course will examine the global field of Indigenous Cinema. This class will utilize screenings of Indigenous film along with accompanying lecture, reading, and discussion, to examine the ways in which Indigenous filmmakers, actors, and communities are subverting genre and decolonizing the industry to tell and reclaim Indigenous stories and make room for Indigenous futures.

In the 20th century, the “Mall” was an indelible component of the American Dream. It was a social, economic, and cultural space that signified American prosperity alongside automobile and home ownership. However, in the 21st century, the mall is no longer the center of conspicuous consumption in the US. Instead, it has become a site of fiscal crisis, it has been dislodged from the cultural imagination, and it has firmly been replaced by Amazon and Instacart as the premier intermediaries of consumption. While its physical “ruins” have become a dystopic reminder of decline, stagnation, and obsolesce illustrating what happens when capital is injected and then forcibly extracted from the landscape. This course will examine the complex relationship between the “Mall” and American culture through popular culture, print media, digital media, planning and zoning ordinances, retail practices, and technological innovation. From the Mall of America in Minneapolis to The Grove in Los Angeles to The Galleria in Houston, the “Mall” will serve as an entry point to think about America at its current moment. Central to this course will be understanding the roles that technology, consumer culture, and capital accumulation and dispossession play in contemporary US culture.

What is psychic life? The word psyche has encompassed a range of definitions as it has travelled through time, from notions of mind, soul, spirit, and the conscious and unconscious mind, to a mirror, an asteroid discovered in 1852, a moth or butterfly, and anima mundi, "the animating principle of the universe" itself. Today an additional constellation of concepts may also be drawn into psyche's orbit, including brain, emotion, feeling, affect, self, subjectivity, person, ego, and experience. As opposed to terms like "mental health," the concept of psychic life provides a language with which to speak about a range of phenomena across multiple traditions, epistemologies, and histories, without prioritizing any one conceptualization over another or locating the psyche within the boundaries of an individual mind, as distinct from the body and the world. Instead, in this course we will explore psychic life through the various ways in which it is known-as lived-experience; cultural, historical, and political form; object of intervention; and site of experimentation. The approaches engaged in this course draw from psychological anthropology, ethnopsychology, critical global health, history of medicine, cultural studies, affect theory, psychoanalysis, and critical phenomenology with an overarching dedication to de-stigmatizing "mental illness," and embracing neurodiversity in all its forms. Along the way we will cover topics including madness and reason, psychopolitics, global mental health, the governance of the self, the psychic life of racism, radical mental health collectives and the psychedelic renaissance, as well as a set of phenomena that lie at the limits of experience, such as psychosomatization, solitary confinement, oceanic feeling, and dreaming.

Imagine a world stripped of magic, where cold rationality reigns supreme and the supernatural has been banished to the realm of fiction. Now consider our own world, where Silicon Valley technocrats consult AI oracles, where political ideologies inspire quasi-religious fervor, and where the “spiritual but not religious” seek transcendence in everything from meditation apps to psychedelic retreats. Which of these worlds more accurately describes our modern condition? This course challenges the notion that modernity and secularization have disenchanted our world, proposing instead that enchantment persists and even thrives in unexpected corners of contemporary life. From Weber's Protestant ethic to UFO believers in the American Southwest, commodity fetishism in South America to Islamic modernities in Lebanon, we will ask fundamental questions: How do myths and rituals shape our understanding of the world, even in ostensibly secular societies? What role does enchantment play in science, technology, and politics? How do different cultures negotiate the boundaries between the sacred and the profane, the rational and the magical? Drawing upon ethnographic studies and theoretical texts, we will explore how the categories of “religious” and “secular” are constructed, contested, and reimagined in various cultural contexts.

Illness and disease have been part of the human experience for as long as we have existed. The nature of these challenges, and how we have responded to them, has evolved over time. In this course, we will dig into evidence from the archaeological record and bioarchaeological data from skeletal remains to trace the history of human health. From prehistoric pandemics to ancient healing practices, we’ll uncover the sick and tired side of archaeology that reveals how illness and the pursuit of health have shaped—and been shaped by—human history. You’ll learn how archaeologists and bioarchaeologists reconstruct stories of past health, exploring how humans have cared for one another since our evolutionary origins and how our understanding of “health” has shifted across time.

The course provides students with a unique introduction to Asia in all its diversity, ranging from its languages, cultures, and histories to its political and economic systems and its relations with the United States. As the global balance of power continues to shift towards Asia, it is more important than ever for Notre Dame students to understand the continent's many complexities. This course provides just that: an opportunity to understand the multiple domestic and foreign forces that constitute the expanding global presence of these nations and regions (Burma, China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Philippines, Taiwan, Vietnam). Classroom sessions will be structured around a set of common assumptions about Asia as a whole or about specific Asian countries. Through reading, discussion, and lectures, students will be encouraged to reflect critically on those assumptions and consider a range of alternative interpretations. Assignments include primary work from visiting experts and will revolve around making comparative connections across the range of topics. Readings for the course will introduce perspectives gained from these experts' research and practice so that students will be able to formulate their own critical understanding of the region and its global environment.

What is the relationship between development projects, which often pursue universal goals and scalable approaches, and cultural difference? How does culture shape the impact of development projects? How are development practitioners themselves shaped by culture? In this course, we use materials from anthropology, sociology, and history to explore how development processes shape, and are shaped by, culture. Approaching culture in terms of the meanings, values, practices, and norms that shape social life in both overt and subtle ways, we will focus on how different actors in the development world create and communicate knowledge about social issues and their potential solutions. Along the way, we will draw on different theories about culture, power, and inequality to analyze mainstream development approaches to data, expertise, and social transformation.

In 2007, after decades of organizing on the part of indigenous activists, the United Nations issued a Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The Declaration was the result of years of work by people from particular communities--each with its own history, culture, language, and home--who decided to call themselves, and work together as, Indigenous people. This creative step allowed indigenous peoples to work collectively for justice on a global scale, rather than individually and in confrontation with single states. This class explores the concept, and reality, of Indigeneity in both historical and contemporary perspective: we will consider the many shared struggles and opportunities of indigenous peoples around the globe today and the ways that similar (or distinct) histories have led to similar (or distinct) present realities.

What is ethnography, broadly defined? How is a scholar's ethnographic product shaped by their racialized experience? This course will reference texts over time and across academic disciplines to consider genre, style, audience, and purpose when engaging with this research method. We will read, listen to, and watch works to think through the various ways that Black intellectuals have used ethnography to make sense of our everyday social worlds.

Migration is a prevailing global phenomenon that affects millions of peoples around the world. According to the UNHCR report, at the end of 2019, there had been 79.5 million forcibly displaced people around the world. At the same time, refugees and migrants experience migration- and displacement-related physical and psychosocial stress and trauma, which may increase their vulnerability and affects their health and well-being. This course will explore, engage, and analyze contemporary migration flows - movements of people across national and international borders - and the ways human mobility shape refugees' and migrants' lived experiences, cultural meanings, social values, and health. How and why particular modes of mobility are permitted, encouraged, and enabled while others are conversely, banned, regulated, policed, and prevented? How do contemporary forms of displacement may challenge conventional understandings of who gets to be defined and accepted as a refugee? Why do we have so many different categories of people who simply seek refuge? Do these different categories indicate different treatments? How is migration associated with higher levels of mental health disorders among refugee/migrant populations? The course will engage with such questions by focusing on events that occurred in the second half of the twenty-first century in Europe, including both the EU and non-EU states. We will rely on the selected readings and documentaries as they reflect an integrative anthropological approach to migration, displacement, and refugeeness. Taking into account lived experiences, identity, social values, cultural meanings, health, and well-being, we will explore migration, borders, and displacement as a subjective experience and sites of ethical, socioeconomic, political, and cultural examinations and critiques. Topics will include transnational migration, terminology, citizenship, borders, asylum policy, health, and well-being. This course will also enrich your understanding of the fluidity of different categories, processes underlying refugees and migrants' cultural and social tuning, as well as their biosocial responses, resilience, and adaptability under conditions of migration and displacement. The course will be run in a seminar-style, and students will be expected to analyze and debate core readings in class.

This course examines the origins and development of contemporary opinions and policies concerning migrations and migrants. It does so by looking backward to the age when transoceanic mobility became more frequent and increasingly more accessible before moving forward to our own times. It is the central claim of this course that it is impossible to understand what drives policy today without first surveying the changing ideas of migration and the movement of people over time. It will therefore take students through the history of migration in the modern world, as well as studying the migrant journey, connections to home, the process and difficulties of assimilation and community creation, and the problems or opportunities that could arise for migrants from characteristics like race, religion, ethnicity, or language. Also considered will be the complex relationship between colonization and migration. In the process, Migrants and Mobility will also examine how different societies place value judgments upon migrants and analyze how and why migration/migrants have been categorized as “good” or “bad” over time. Students will also encounter and consider the effects of growing urbanization and industrialization, changing demography and global trade patterns, and, more recently, the impact of climate change. Migrants and Mobility will be primarily seminar based, placing a premium on participation and analytical discussion.

This course offers an in-depth analysis of the roles of structural and cultural violence in peace studies. Unit 1 (conceptual/theoretical) explores field-formative debates over the nature, basis, and viability of “structural violence” and “cultural violence” as analytical concepts, asking how they have shaped (or failed to, but perhaps ought to shape) the field of peace studies. We will examine their critical appropriations of early critical theory, and assess comparable theoretical approaches such as reflexive sociology (Pierre Bourdieu and Loic Wacquant), post-structural analysis (Michel Foucault), and later critical theory (Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth) while asking what advantages, if any, lenses of structural and cultural violence have vis-à-vis these resources for peace analysis and peacebuilding, and where they need to be supplemented. Unit 2 (cases/agents) studies cases in which some version of these analytical lenses have been deployed for purposes of peace analysis and peacebuilding. We examine recent uses of these lenses to examine poverty, global development, and global health in building peace (e.g. Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Paul Farmer, Peter Uvin), religious/cultural identity (Veena Das), and race, class, and gender (Joshua Price on incarceration and prison abolition in the U.S; Alex Mikulich and Laurie Cassidy on white complicity in hyper incarceration).

The rise of populism around the world, coupled with the emergence of “neo-Fascist” leaders in Europe and new authoritarianism in Latin America and Africa invite a lot of worried questioning over the state of world politics, and indeed of the stability of a world that seems to grow more tense, divided, and partisan by the moment. In this course we will delve into topics in democracy, charismatic and authoritarian leadership, human rights, and social movements to probe, fundamentally, what social and political participation actually means, and where that participation leads people around the world. If there is no single concrete definition of democracy, do we actually know it when we see it? What factors indicate that it is corrupted or endangered? What accounts for the rise of charismatic leaders, and when is charisma positive, versus a move towards authoritarianism? How do social movements form, what might they accomplish, and when and why do they fail? Finally, are “rights” universal, or are there fundamental issues within “rights” themselves that prevent people around the world from flourishing?

Creole is the quintessential language of migration. This elective explores the multidirectional interplay of Creole narrative expression and transnational migration. How do Creole texts imagine and influence the experiences of migration, long-distance belonging and immigrant settlement? How, in turn, does the changing experience of diaspora affect the evolution of the vernacular at home (lakay)? In what ways do Creole writers and performers express struggles with xenophobia and racism abroad and oppression and poverty in Haiti? We engage these questions through study of Creole fiction, poetry, theatre, story telling and music. Among the Creole works we explore are the novels and poetry of Maude Heurtelou, Felix Morriseau-Leroi, Baudelaire Pierre, Patrick Sylvain and Denizé Lauture, stories by Jean-Claude Martineau and Kiki Wainwright, musical lyrics of Emeline Michele, Beethova Obas, Ti Corn and Wyclef Jean and Rap Kreyòl groups like Barikad Crew. The class is intended for students who have completed Intermediate Creole II or have reached the equivalent level of competence in speaking, reading and writing the language.

The rate and expanse of human caused global environmental change is unmatched in our evolutionary history. It is widely argued that these actions have produced enough change that the stable conditions found in the Holocene epoch of the last 11,000 years are over and we are transitioning to a new Earth Systems trajectory and epoch dubbed the Anthropocene - the time when humans are the single largest driver of geologic change. In this course we will seek to understand what characteristics of the contemporary human niche - the myriad socio-ecological practices, policies, institutions and lifeways that comprise how humans live their everyday lives around the globe - are producing the Anthropocene and what the implications are for different groups of people. We will pay specific attention to the distribution of global environmental change and corresponding risk to human health, historical and contemporary contributions to the production of this change, and what the implications are for human health, equality, and environmental justice. The focus of this course is more towards breadth than depth - we will sample and discuss many topics but will be unable to fully dive into each in a holistic way. But, this is by design, as the point is for us to develop a mutually negotiated and understood functional language and base understanding of the topics such that after this course you are empowered to engage the topics most compelling to you and have the skills requisite to effectively dive in.

The study of religious beliefs and practices in tribal and peasant societies emphasizing myths, ritual, symbolism, and magic as ways of explaining man's place in the universe. Concepts of purity and pollution, the sacred and the profane, and types of ritual specialists and their relation to social structure will also be examined.

What do the paintings and sculptures in museums and the manuscripts and antique books in archives tell us about our collective past? What do they tell us about how value, importance, and worth have been ascribed across time? As users of these cultural collections, how might we address inequities and silences within them? This course provides an introduction to the history of cultural heritage collecting and addresses major issues and questions in the field. Students will apply a critical gaze to the collections held in our campus repositories - the Snite Museum of Art, Rare Books and Special Collections, and University Archives - and in museums and archives beyond the Notre Dame campus. Students will reflect on what they read and discuss and collaboratively will build an online exhibition around themes of diversity in our campus collections. This exhibition will be published on the Hesburgh Library's Digital Exhibitions and Collections page and students will be given curatorial credit for their work. Note: This course will include a full day of site visits tentatively scheduled for September 30, 2022.

This course examines how gender and sexuality are understood, constructed, and implicated in relations of social power in various regions of the world. It will integrate scholarship from anthropology and women and gender studies to explore how ideas of maleness, femaleness, trans, queer, and heterosexual are reproduced, contested, and transgressed within different social contexts and the everydayness of these categories. We will learn about cultural changes in conceptions of gender and sexuality in North and South America, SWANA (South West Asia/North Africa), Southeast and East Asia, Central and Southern Africa, and Europe. In the first half of this course, we will consider traditional themes in cultural anthropology, including kinship, morality, ritual, emotion, politics, and the circulation of goods and labor, to examine how different communities produce cultural knowledge about gender and sexuality. The second half of this course will address contemporary themes such as activism, violence, and gender and sexual oppression. Using our knowledge of anthropological theories developed in the first half of the course, we will take up topics of concern such as masculinity and violence, LGBTQ rights and pinkwashing, and gender and nationalism to understand how gender and sexuality are relevant to post-colonial contexts and settler-colonial resistance movements.

This course offers an ethnographically grounded understanding of contemporary European cultures and societies. We start by presenting a brief history of the idea of Europe. Then, we define its geographical focus: where are the boundaries of Europe? Are Israel and Turkey part of Europe? Who gets to decide? Are there European Muslims? We will then read recent works focusing on selected regions and on diverse urban populations. We will explore and discuss socio-cultural facets of European everyday life; trends and challenges in technology, the environment, popular culture, demography, and politics; and the diversity of urban/rural, north/south, and more generally intra-European ways of life. The course will be of interest to students of contemporary global issues, and in particular to students who intend to spend a semester in Europe; are back from the field; or intend to write a related senior thesis.

This course follows major themes and thinkers in the development of the study of language and culture in Anthropology, Linguistics, and Philosophy. The course explores the form of language as abstract structure and as practical mechanism of human communication. The course asks how linguistic forms as signs come to be meaningful in thought and in conversation. This requires attention to the principled study of signs at large: semiotics. A running current of investigation in this course is the role of semiotic theory in posing and answering questions about the connections between grammar and cognition, language diversity and cultural difference, and the production of social meaning in interaction. We ask how the anthropological study of meaning contributes to knowledge about what sorts of things are universal and what might be variable in language(s), culture(s), and mind(s). We read and discuss anthropological analysis of empirical data showing how people in different cultures using different languages actually speak. This application yields important insights into the thought and life-worlds of others and of ourselves.

Models of human communication developed in linguistic anthropology have long relied on empirical analysis and cross-cultural comparison of how people talk to other people, and to a variety of non-human “persons” as well. This course examines how anthropologists study communication between humans and non-humans, and how communication helps make persons out of non-humans. The class concerns research on seances and related scenes of spirit possession where the dead speak, talking with animals whether pets or prey, learning spiritual lessons from teacher plants, and contemporary conversations people have with artificial intelligence language models. We compare how anthropologists have asked questions about personhood when considering speech across species boundaries or across divides such as life and death. We ask how communication constructs interlocutors and makes relationships possible, and we consider the commonality and variety among communicative approaches and tactics. We ask if communication with non-humans connects people to other worlds of experience, or if it is more instructive as a projection of our own social life onto others.

This course will foster thoughtful dialogue on the importance of cultural humility in healthcare. Students will work to grow their cultural awareness and understanding of the social determinants of health by exploring the lived-experiences of individuals. Through the utilizations of skills based in the compassion science framework, students will consider how cultural humility impacts patient outcomes. An exploration of current topics in healthcare disparities will deepen classroom discussion. This course provides an added entry point into the understanding of the important place cultural humility and understanding hold in the healthcare relationship. The course is open to CCIM minors. Permission is required for those outside of the minor who are planning to pursue the health professions as space permits.

In this class we analyze the many modes of human interaction, from our original invention/discovery of spoken language, to the invention of writing, to telegraphy, telephony, radio, movies, television, and the Internet, smart phones, and social media. We examine the affordances of each medium and modality, and develop tools to understand the ones that aren't even here yet. We draw on linguistic anthropology, biological anthropology, linguistics, cognitive science, psychology, sociology, conversation analysis, media studies, and communications.

Do you want to learn how to solve problems that matter? Human Centered Design (HCD) is an empathetic tool that utilizes guided questioning related to product, service, or systems innovations to identify opportunities for sustainable, human-centered impact. For example, how might we design a cookstove that reduces the amount of smoke inhaled by a community member? How might we design a new service engaging low-income borrowers in rural communities? How might we design a system linking social innovators and their innovations to users across the globe in a manner that encourages collaboration and sharing of resources? Whether a social innovator is designing in the private, public or nonprofit sector, HCD provides a valuable framework, deeply rooted in empathy, and is an excellent methodology for social innovators who want to problem solve and design alongside communities. In this course students will be introduced to the HCD toolkit and will apply it in practice, either in a domestic or international context. This fast-paced course will take students through the HCD cycles of inspiration, ideation and implementation, and provide opportunities for student and community collaboration.

This course is designed to introduce students to a wide range of health issues affecting women globally, with particular emphasis on Africa, Asia, and the United States. The topics will focus on a woman's life, from infancy and childhood, through adolescence and reproductive years, to old age. We will examine the physiological, social, psychological, economic, cultural, political, behavioral, and environmental factors that influence women's health, and the role of poverty, discrimination, and unequal health access. Topics such as determinants of women's health, reproductive health, sexual health, cardiovascular health, maternal health, cancers of the reproductive tract, mental and emotional health, substance use and abuse, and various forms of violence against women will be discussed. At the end of the course, students should have a solid grasp of key issues affecting the health of women in different cultural contexts globally, and how women can be empowered to take actions that positively influence their health.

In many societies around the world, culture plays a major role in health and wellbeing. This course will provide a global overview of how society and culture influence the health and wellbeing of people, with discussions on strategies for health promotion and awareness that are sensitive to cultural settings. Focusing mostly on developing countries, we will examine the ways in which different aspects of culture, such as gender and social norms, values and belief systems, and religion influence health, with particular emphasis on physical health, mental & emotional health, and sexual & reproductive health.

This course seeks to explore connections between environment and culture change by introducing students to the diversity of cultures living in the Southwest. We begin by learning about indigenous people living in the Southwest today including the Pueblo peoples (e.g., Hopi, Zuni, Santa Clara, Cochiti, Acoma), Navajo, Ute, and Tohono O’odham using ethnography and contemporary native histories. We will then travel back in time to learn about the complex histories of these people, particularly the ancestral Pueblo, to places like Chaco Canyon, Mesa Verde, the Rio Grande, the Mimbres Valley, and the Phoenix Basin. Our explorations will cover from the earliest Paleoindians (11,500 years ago) to the 13th century Migrations to European contact, the establishment of Spanish Missions, and the Pueblo Revolt of 1680-1692. We will then bring this discussion full circle to today. Along the way, we will explore the impact of large-scale, long-term processes such as the adoption of agriculture, village formation, religious change, migration, and warfare on the rich historical landscape of the Southwest.

This rigorous, hands-on, interdisciplinary seminar prepares students to design and execute an independent international field research project. The course enhances your ability to conduct your own research, but also teaches techniques that will be useful for the rest of your academic studies, and for understanding research results presented to you through popular press in your life after college. This class is unique because throughout, your learning and work are geared specifically to your selected research interests. The first part of the class guides students through the steps of refining a research project and preparing a research proposal. The second part of the class will help students hone their ability to conduct research through a series of research practicums: students get hands-on experience in a variety of methodological approaches through research conducted in the local area. Because of the over-arching nature of the course, we will touch on topics of research design, such as developing a research question, a theoretical framework, and hypothesis testing, as well as analysis of data and evidence. However, we encourage students to see this course as a complement, rather than a substitute, for discipline specific research methods and analysis courses.

To understand religion, we should go to Asia: Asia boasts the majority of the world's religions and religious people. In this class, we look at what Asian religious traditions are up to today, and how they inform everyday social and political life. How might religious traditions as diverse as Zen Buddhism and Zoroastrianism inform conflict, coexistence, and cooperation? What is it to be human within worldviews that seem to depart from our own with respect to gender, sexuality, ethnicity, dis/ability, and the natural world? How might society, culture, or economy develop in Sunni Muslim, humanistic Buddhist, or atheist Maoist terms? How might we learn to "scale up" spiritual practices such as shamanism, ancestor worship, radical nonviolence, and mindfulness meditation to solve global problems? We read historians, anthropologists, and other scholars of religion to explore Asian spiritual routes and roots, from Iraq to Japan and beyond.

Food access, equity and justice should be of great importance to everyone. Consistently there has been political, economic, geographic and flawed distribution supply chains within the domestic food system. This interdisciplinary course will utilize digital humanities tools and platforms for students to express their research interests. We will analyze the impact that human actions have on foodways, or the social, cultural, and economic practices of producing and consuming food in relation to race, equity and access, historically and currently. We will explore alternative courses of action toward viable, ethical, and antiracist solutions to questions about sustainable farming, global economic inequality, and hunger. Throughout the semester, participants will use the lens of race and ethnicity to study and discuss how these two concepts affect access to agricultural land, foodstuffs /foodways, environmental justice and nature.

The applied research methods course will allow students to examine research as a driver of change in poverty studies. Throughout this course students will learn a variety of research methods that will equip them with the skills to engage research that in some way seeks to disrupt, reduce, or abolish poverty. Students will learn the foundations of applied research through qualitative and quantitative methods including sampling basics, grounded ethnographic approaches, survey design and the utilization of secondary sources. Students will also engage with experiential learning that is focused on problem-based goals and relevant applications in the area of poverty. This course will create an opportunity for students to learn practical approaches to data identification, collection, analysis and dissemination. It will include a lecture and seminar-based format where students are introduced to key concepts in research methods as well as hands-on opportunities to practice what they've learned in collaboration with community partnerships. At the end of this course, students will have the strategies, tools and confidence to handle complex data, to develop practical solutions to current challenges, and develop a clearer understanding of the varying ways knowledge can be created and accessed. The course will culminate in a group research project.

Almost 40% of the world's population is overweight or has obesity. Obesity has become a central focus in biological research as well as policy. Billions of dollars have been spent on public health interventions, biological interventions, diets, and exercise regimens. However, the obesity rate among adults and children has been steadily increasing globally. Why is this happening? How do we even define obesity? Does that definition truly reflect health? Why do we even have fat to begin with...actually what even is fat?!? Why are humans prone to obesity? These are just some of the questions we will address in this class. Using non-traditional methods and assignments, we will discuss adipose tissue and digestive physiology, the role evolution has played in the human propensity to hold onto fat, diet and exercise, food insecurity, therapeutic interventions, as well as the physical and mental health consequences of having obesity. We will use this as a basis to investigate the biological and cultural factors including stigma, race, and gender that shape our perceptions of body image and health in the midst of the obesity epidemic. Finally, this course will include occasional laboratory exercises to familiarize you with the methods used to assess body mass, body composition, metabolic rate, and point of care measures of biomarkers like glucose and cholesterol.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) has emerged as a crucial skill in the workforce, especially with the advent and accessibility of generative AI technologies. From intelligent chatbots and virtual assistants to automated content creation and sentiment analysis, NLP applications are transforming industries and redefining how we interact with technology. Mastery of NLP techniques and tools not only opens doors to careers in the technology sector but also equips students to contribute to innovations that shape our future. Language Processing in Practice is a hands-on course designed to introduce students to the fundamental theory and applications of NLP, with a special emphasis on working with large language models, generative AI, and the Hugging Face ecosystem. The course focuses on practical techniques for processing, analyzing, generating, and understanding human language data. Students will explore key topics such as text preprocessing, tokenization, part-of-speech tagging, parsing, sentiment analysis, topic modeling, machine translation, and text generation. The curriculum places a strong emphasis on modern NLP libraries and frameworks like NLTK, spaCy, and particularly Hugging Face Transformers. Through a series of projects and assignments, students will gain experience in building NLP applications, creating word embeddings with pre-trained large language models, and generating human-like text using generative AI models. Basic proficiency in Python programming is required.

This course examines the intersection of gender, health policy, and health care around the world, by using an integrative anthropological approach. Gender is frequently a central contributing (though sometimes ignored) factor to people’s health. People across the gender spectrum experience their biological and social lives (social, economic, political, and biological) in unique ways, and all of these can shape their health. What causes different genders to experience different illnesses? What factors place some genders at greater risk for illness than others? How do different genders across the world experience health policies? Are they affected and constrained by similar factors? How do their work lives affect their experiences with health? How has risk changed through time? How is the body medically produced? How do poverty, race, and discrimination play a role in people’s gendered well-being? Through an inquiry-based approach, and through readings from across the sub-disciplines of anthropology, these and other topics will be addressed in this class. In this writing-intensive course you will work on a research project, you will learn to write your results and analysis, and you will receive feedback on your writing in order to understand the iterative nature of good writing.

The aim of this class is to try to understand what conquest, as we have traditionally called it, meant to the people who experienced it in some parts of the Americas that joined the Spanish monarchy in the sixteenth century. We'll concentrate on indigenous sources - documentary, pictorial, and material - and try to adopt the indigenous point of view, without neglecting sources mediated by Europeans. Although the class will concentrate on selected cases from Mesoamerica, the lecturer will try to set the materials in the context of other encounters, both within the Americas and further afield; and students will be free, if they wish, to explore case-studies from anywhere they choose in the Americas (in consultation with the lecturer and subject to his approval) in their individual projects.

The course adopts an entrepreneurial perspective in exploring the role of business in helping to address the poverty challenge in developing and developed economies. The multi-faceted nature of poverty and its implications when it comes to business and entrepreneurship are explored. Attention is devoted to venture creation as a pathway out of poverty, and to how the larger business community can be leveraged in poverty alleviation efforts. Students will examine case studies and meet low income entrepreneurs.

This lab-intensive course will explore the methods used in biological anthropology for studying individual human remains, as well as those employed to establish biocultural connections at the population level. The three objectives of the class are: 1) develop and expand your skills in the identification of human skeletal remains (bones, landmarks, forensic methods); 2) develop an understanding of how skeletal remains can be used to reconstruct past patterns of adaptation and biocultural evolution; 3) Produce a piece of original research related to one of the skeletal collections curated in the BioArchaeology Lab. During the course of the semester, you will learn the bones, as well as the major landmarks for each. You will be able to side bones, determine age & sex, reconstruct stature, and identify trauma & disease. You will also learn how these features are used for evolutionary, bioarchaeological, and comparative anatomical studies. And, you will be introduced to the potential of the integrative nature of osteological analyses through the ‘6Ds of bioarchaeology’ – Demography, Diet, Disease, Daily activities, Death, bioDistance. Ultimately, you will be able to identify fragmentary skeletal material typical of those found in many archaeological settings, and, using independent lines of evidence, establish a biocultural framework for ancient populations.

By helping us step back to see humans as primates, mammals, vertebrates, and beyond, evolutionary theory provides a framework for understanding many aspects of our day-to-day lives that shape the health and well-being, including weight gain-diet, psychosocial stress, immune function, sleep patterns, risky behavior, and child development. But, increasing evidence from the exciting field of "developmental origins of health and disease" suggests that our biological and behavioral patterns are far from being determined solely by our genes. Our early life contexts, from before birth, and possibly even the experiences of our parents and grandparents in prior generations influence how our brains and biological systems function, including how genes are expressed, and thus impact our health and behavior. This course will bring these dynamic perspectives together to answer questions regarding why we get sick, how our bodies flexibly respond to the world around us, and the inheritances we receive from our ancestors.

The relationship between health and poverty is complex and challenging. The inability of the poor to maintain adequate nutrition, shelter and have access to preventative medical care can contribute to their poor health status. But even if one isn't poor, one illness or hospitalization can test their ability to meet the financial burden of their medical care as well as their other needs. In either case, individuals have to face difficult choices between their health and other material needs. This course examines the consequences of the health risks the poor face and the difficulties that they have in obtaining medical care whether they are uninsured, seek charitable care, or utilize public programs such as Medicaid. The course will also examine the impact of the Affordable Care Act that will require all individuals to have at least a minimal level of health care coverage.

This course provides students with a unique introduction to Asia in all its diversity, ranging from its languages, cultures, and histories to its political and economic systems and its relations with the US. As the global balance of power is shifting towards Asia, it is more important than ever for Notre Dame students to have more than just basic knowledge about the continent. This course provides just that: an opportunity to take your understanding of Asia beyond the level of what you read in the newspapers, providing you with the knowledge and the tools to formulate your own critical understanding of the region and its global environment. Different types of writing about Asia – academic, journalistic, diplomatic, political, popular – will be examined alongside different ways in which Asia has been and continues to be represented in the western imagination. Asian perspectives will be accessed through English-language writings and English-language media published in Asia. Guest lecturers with specific expertise on individual Asian countries will join the class at regular intervals. Assessment methods will include both written work and classroom (group) presentations.

This course is aimed to provide a basic understanding of how Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and satellite imagery can be used to visualize and analyze environmental data. Students will learn basic techniques for analyzing, manipulating and creating geospatial data in both pixel-based (satellite imagery and digital terrain models) and vector based (point, line and polygon representation of spatial data) formats. Students will also learn how acquire high resolution satellite imagery and other GIS data from online data servers.

In Apocalypse Now (1979), a single phrase marks an iconic enemy and creates a chain of associations that separate Western Selves from Eastern Others. The story behind the phrase, "Charlie don't surf," is one of many complex narratives characterizing the Southeast Asian region that call for further critical understanding. This course is an anthropological journey through Southeast Asia, a region rich in cultural diversity, linguistic complexity and archaeological significance. Including the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, and Myanmar (Burma), students can explore the ecological, historical, and socio-cultural patterns of this ethnographic region through analyses of its societies and institutions. With a holistic approach to the cultural influences that characterize Southeast Asia, we will chart the region's indigenous, social, political, economic, artistic and religious formations over time. The course offers a broad overview of the historical factors affecting the region, including the impact of Indian, Islamic, Chinese, and European exchange, colonization, and violence. These transregional influences provide a window from which to view contemporary issues in the cultural politics and economics of Southeast Asia. The course provides an overview of the major cultural features of the region to enable students to gain a better understanding of the current developments within the region and the lives of Southeast Asians. Overall, we will contribute to the development of anthropological ideas about Asia while also providing a means to organize and analyze Asian ethnographic perspectives.

Visual anthropology involves the cross-cultural study of images in communication and the use of images as a method for doing anthropology. This course proceeds through a non-linear integration of visual themes including water, earth, light, fire, flesh and blood with analytical themes including aesthetics, poetics, violence, history, materiality and subjectivity. We explore still photography, film, and popular media in domains from ethnography, social documentary, war photojournalism, to high art. Students watch, read and write about, and generate visual products of their own in multiple media.

Have you ever pondered how people live(d) in a world without television, YouTube, iPhones, Lady GaGa, and cellphones? Why have bellbottoms come and gone twice in the last 50 years? Will we be forced to relive the fashion mistakes of the 1980s? What new stuff will people invent and sell next? In asking and answering these questions, we must focus on one underlying query: What does our stuff really say about who we are and who we want to be? This course combines lectures, discussions, and interactive small group activities to explore the nature and breadth of peoples' relationships with their things. We will investigate why and how people make and use different types of objects, and how the use of these material goods resonates with peoples' identities in the deep past, recent history, and today. Since everyone in the class will already be an expert user and consumer of things, we will consider how people today use material objects to assert, remake, reclaim, and create identities, and compare today's practices to those of people who lived long ago. Class members will learn about how anthropologists, including ethnographers (studying people today) and archaeologists (studying past peoples) think about and approach the material nature of our social, economic, and political lives. We will discuss why styles and technologies change through time, and why, in the end, there is very little new under the sun in terms of human behaviors and the way people produce and consume goods. The topical breadth of this workshop encompasses most social science disciplines, including history, economics, psychology, and anthropology, and resonates with classics, art history, and gender studies.

This course focuses on archaeological and ethnographic ceramic collections and studies to explore how people make, use, discard, and understand ceramic objects in their lives. Ceramics offer tactile and material expressions of culture, and signify and embody complex intersectional ideas about what it means to be human. Through hands-on projects with archaeological and ethnographic ceramic collections from ND professors’ research projects, students will engage in experiential learning about gender, race, class, sexuality, political power structures, and identity. All peoples’ identities are grounded in intersectional axes of difference, and ceramics offer a tangible tool for exploring how people use material culture and technology to be themselves, interact with others, and build personhood in the past and present. Because ceramic remains are abundant in many archaeological sites, the study of pottery has a long history in archaeology. Analysis and interpretation of ceramics allows archaeologists to accomplish varied ends: to establish a time scale, to document interconnections between different areas, sites, or groups of people, and to suggest what activities were carried out at particular sites. How archaeologists study the connection between ceramics and people, today and in the past, is the focus of this course, and we will be using contemporary, prehistoric and historic archaeological collections from Jordan, Ghana, and the United States to enable students to explore the linkage between people and their ceramic material culture.

How do animals relate to non-human animals across cultures? Does culture make a difference in how humans relate to animals and the natural world? What are the roles that animals play in different societies - as food, as religious figures, as companions, as kin, as laborers? From its origins as a discipline, anthropology has examined human-animal relations in a variety of social and geographic settings. This course will review some of the classic examples of cross-cultural relations with animals, and bring these examples into conversation with current debates about race and classification, animal ethics, biotechnology, and food politics. Students will engage with texts, films,and other media from anthropology as well as philosophy, history, and feminist science studies. We will approach these materials from an anthropological perspective that focuses on how our diverse and dynamic expressions of identity and culture shape, and are shaped by, how we engage with other species - whether as beings to think with, live with, love, kill, and/or consume.

How do people in immigrant-receiving countries shape their attitudes toward immigrants? What are the differences between refugees and other migrants? How is immigration related to urban "immigrant riots?" And what can anthropological studies of borders and national policies tell us about the transnational world in which we live? We will examine these and related questions, and more generally the causes, lived experiences, and consequences of migration. We will acquire a sound understanding of migration in its social, political, legal, and cultural facets. Fieldwork accounts from countries of origin and from the U.S., Europe, Australia, and Japan will enable us to appreciate both global and U.S. distinctive trends. Rather than merely learning a collection of facts about immigrants, we will address how migration intersects with gender and class, the mass media, border enforcement, racism, the economy, territory and identity formation, and religion.

The course will adopt a broad anthropological perspective to introduce students to the cultural and utilitarian contexts of justice that speak to the everyday experience – urging students to rethink issues of education, health, wage, economy, immigration, peace, environment, and spirituality, including the issue of justice itself. We will read some classic and contemporary works on justice that may have (or have not) garnered attention in a world emerging from a pandemic. By the end of the course, students will learn how to use the framework of ‘just-ness’ in things they do on the campus, at home, offices, marketplaces, and inside other social and civil arenas – and unpack their drivers as budding scholars in the humanistic social sciences.

This course provides an introduction to the emergent field of social studies of data-intensive analytics for the examination of how "things are done with data." The goal is to cover a wide range of examples and practical applications to introduce questions of design and implementation, privacy and surveillance, as well as governance and stewardship of digital tools and infrastructures. Following the performative aspect of data, we will explore social, technical, political, and economic dynamics that involve data extraction, sharing, literacy, and analysis. From little to big data practices, we will examine at the interface level the professional and institutional applications, development histories, and current political economy of data to situate ourselves as engaged technologists and researchers, not detached critics or passive users. There are no prerequisites for this course: no previous experience in statistics or programming is needed, but independent study of the supplementary materials we provide is highly encouraged.

Vengeful spirits, foxes that turn into alluring women, green and red ogres, Godzilla, and Pokémon: these are some of the monsters that have spooked and beguiled Japanese people across time. This course explores how medieval legends and local histories of monsters and gods play an important role in identifying and resolving social anxieties throughout Japan's cultural history, from the 8th to the 21st century. The materials we will examine include literature, manga, film, and anime, in addition to scholarly essays and historical texts.

As an emergent field of ethnographic theory and methods, design anthropology involves talking to people, figuring out what they want, and creating ways to improve our shared lives. These practices are focused on developing ideas and forms based on people’s needs while anticipating conscious practice and considerate use. Design anthropologists create potentials for future selves, anticipating projected needs and transcending potential limitations. This seminar introduces the emerging phenomenon and ongoing merger of the anthropology of design. It integrates sources in design anthropology, ethnographic design, cultural marketing, and other applied methodologies. We will engage with theoretical discussions, analytical approaches, practicing exercises, and portfolio development to explore the holistic depths of this nascent field.

This course considers the nature, causes, and consequences of poverty in rural areas of the US, and public policies designed to help persons and poor communities improve their well-being. We will read materials from multiple disciplines including economics, sociology, psychology, law, public policy, literature, and possibly others. We will begin by defining rural America and constructing a profile of the inhabitants with particular emphasis given to inhabitants living in poverty. Having identified the persistently poor rural population and and their communities, we will investigate the economic, political, social, and cultural systems and institutions that contribute to their poverty and obstacles that must be overcome. We will then review past and present policies, programs, and projects targeted at poverty alleviation and economic development, and consider prospects for the future. Throughout the course we will consider what we have learned that is unique about rural poverty as distinguished from poverty within metropolitan areas.The is course is open to all undergraduate students. It is strongly encouraged that you have preciously taken Introduction to Poverty Studies (PS 23000), but it is not required.

Site of the delayed 2020 Olympics, Tokyo has recently been under scrutiny as a problematic international space. Tokyo's role as a complicated space of both exclusion and inclusion has a deeper history, however, extending back to a relatively recent founding in the late 16th century. This course looks at how the imaginative figuration of Tokyo has been a battleground for contesting different ethnic, social, and gendered identities in historical documents, literature, and popular culture.

Three weeks of practical instruction in the methods and theory of archaeological field work including excavation and laboratory analysis of artifacts. The course covers topics in prehistoric and historic archaeology. You will learn about field techniques and work with artifacts collected during the field work. In addition to the basic archaeological techniques, you will also learn about geophysical survey methods, including lessons on how to use a total station (laser transit) and equipment for magnetic, soil resistivity, and ground penetrating radar surveys. There are no prerequisites for this course, but prior exposure to an introductory course in anthropology or archaeology is helpful.

In this course, we will examine the creation of "gender" and "sexuality" as objects of development practices around the world. While development projects often assume that gender and sexuality are stable, coherent categories of identity, scholars have long shown that both take socially and historically specific forms as they emerge through social practices. In this course we will read a range of critical case studies that demonstrate the complicated ways that local and transnational ideas about gender, sexuality, and development intersect in everyday life around the world. This course will help you approach "gender" and "sexuality"—two key terms in development discourse and global affairs—with an understanding of how these categories shape not just individuals but institutions, processes, and practices.

All cultures have traditional and emerging ritual responses to personal, social, and natural crises. This course will explore anthropological treatments of healing rites in traditional cultures as well as the history and theology of Roman Catholic rites meant for those who are sick and dying. In the last part of the class, we will examine contemporary ritual responses to violence and natural disaster, healing for mental and physical illness, and reconciliation after war or genocide.

This five-week course will examine forced migration from the perspective of the beliefs, teachings, and programmatic commitments of faith communities. The first week will be devoted to identifying the causes of and global trends in forced migration, as well as the categories of forced migrants. It will also explore the “law of migration”; that is, the diverse legal systems that migrants must negotiate on their journeys and that religious actors use to assess migration policies. The second week will explore the teachings of diverse faith communities on forced migration, their understanding of this immense and growing phenomenon, and their programmatic and policy responses. The third week will segue to state-centered approaches to the governance and management of migration, with a focus on the concepts of sovereignty and the rule of law. It will also consider ideologies such as nativism and exclusionary nationalism that are in tension with the beliefs, policy positions, and programs of religious actors. The fourth week will be devoted to guest speakers and student presentations on situations of protracted displacement throughout the world. Persons in protracted displacement have lived in exile for at least five years and have no viable course out of their “long lasting and intractable status of limbo.” The fifth week will be devoted to US refugee protection trends and policies.

What is structural violence, and what role does it play in shaping human lives and human interactions? In this course, we investigate the often subtle, systematic sources of harm that damage health and hinder individual and community potential, while often remaining rationalized, invisible, or simply taken for granted as the world “as it is”. Structural violence is distinguishable from “hot” forms of violence in its diffuse and seemingly agentless source, where no one person is to blame. We will target these diffuse sources—from bureaucracy to urban planning to corporations to policies meant to help the poor—in order to identify the hidden abode of violence and the consequences these hold for ordinary life. Structural violence is influenced by, and in turn influences, cultural violence, which we will also investigate as a source of persistent harm. Structural violence will emerge in this course through a diverse set of studies; from American housing policy, to medical discrimination, to toxic “sacrifice zones”; and racism in disease epidemics. Our inability to interrogate these structures hinders our ability to create a just and sustainable world, and recognizing and redressing the existence of structures can be a productive path towards healing the wounds—and ending the violence—caused by the invisible trappings of power. This form of inquiry is also productive in understanding why decades-long stand-offs—whether or not an official state of violence exists—are never resolved simply through the absence of active fighting. We will finish the course with case studies of people who actively resist or attempt to escape structures, with varying levels of success.

In this course, we will examine the particular social, cultural, and political positions occupied by children and youth in contexts of violence, and the practices in which they engage to survive. Children have inhabited a position in popular imagination as unmitigated victims of violence—as the refugees, the slaves, the kidnapped child soldiers—while youth have contrarily been portrayed as the willing perpetrators of violence: its rebels, gang members, and rioters. In this course we will investigate notions of child and youth autonomy, gendering, socialization, liminality and resistance through case studies ranging from the streets of Pakistan to the juvenile prisons of the US and the rebel camps of Sierra Leone.

The Capstone Seminar will be topic-oriented drawing on literature from multiple disciplines. The students themselves will be from different majors and will share both the perspectives of their major disciplines as well as their varied experiences in the field thus ensuring that interdisciplinary nature of the inquiry. Experts with diverse perspectives and professional experiences will join the seminar as special guests.

Special studies with one of the Minor's affiliated faculty. In this case the student will produce a product (manuscript, work or art, composition, poster board display of research results, etc.) that can be displayed, and will present this product to the members of the PSIM at a special colloquium held in the Spring Semester of each academic year.

Images of Hispañiola conjure up extreme contrasts. Romantic, sun-drenched beaches, heroic exploration and discovery, quaint relics, tourists, and happy-go-lucky natives merge in pleasing portraits of one side of the island. Rebellion and revolution, chaos and neglect coalesce menacingly at the other end. This course interrogates the taken-for-granted narrative of the antimony between the Dominican Republic versus Haiti and opens possibilities of recognizing the shared histories, politics, economies, and traditions of the two societies. In the first part of the semester, we examine how Spain’s neglected, undeveloped colony became a rising economic power, while the wealthiest “Pearl of the Antilles,” once freed of slavery and French colonial rule, confronted relentless depletion of its human and material resources. In the second part of the semester, we study the causes of the massive exodus from both countries over the past century. We focus on unanticipated consequences of diaspora, including the inspiration for those “outside” to transcend the borders dividing the “inside” of the island. We learn about innovative formations of transnational communities that span multiple sites linked by constant circulation of digital messages, videos and money, and the comings and goings of people, politicians, and spirits. We appreciate examples of the dynamic, expressive cultures of diasporan Haitians and Dominicans in prose, poetry, film, music, visual arts, and, last but never least, cuisine.

Among mammals, invested fathers are incredibly rare, and in most species mothers get no assistance when raising offspring. Thus, to the extent that many human fathers help raise their children, humans are an exceptional species. Yet we know that there is great variation within our own culture and across cultural boundaries in the way that humans cooperate to raise offspring to adulthood. This provides the opportunity to explore many important questions regarding fatherhood and the way humans raise their children from an anthropological perspective: What role did fathers play in helping to propel our species to evolutionary success (there are 6+ billion of us and our hominin relatives are extinct, with Great Apes moving towards extinction)? Or were grandmothers the key to our success, with men being more cads than dads? We know that mothers respond physiologically to pregnancy, birth, and breastfeeding, but have evolutionary processes also shaped men's biology to respond to parenthood? How does fatherhood affect men's health? Regardless of whether fathers mattered during human evolution, do they matter now, to the well-being of their children and their partners? Nearly half of all men in this country become fathers before age 45, is fatherhood considered a component of masculinity and manliness? Should it be? These questions and more will be explored through a evolutionary anthropological gaze on the world of fathers, past and present.

Why do weight lifters wear lifting belts? How does athletic training and diet differ between endurance athletes and strength athletes? What are the sex-based differences in athletic performance? What impact do supplements and performance enhancing drugs have on athletic performance? Through the use of peer reviewed research, popular media articles, podcasts, and film we will answer these and many other questions within the field of exercise physiology. The course will be split into two broad units: 1) Powerlifters and 2) Marathoners. Topics covered will include cellular metabolism, muscle physiology, training programs, response to training, basic nutrition, body composition, some methodological exercise testing, supplements and performance enhancing drugs, recovery, fatigue, and activity in extreme environments. Through this use of mixed media, we will also discuss how the media misrepresents and misreports exercise physiology studies, making us all more discerning consumers of information.

If you were to perform a Google image search of “human evolution,” you would see endless pictures of men linearly evolving from apes to modern humans. These overwhelmingly one-sided depictions are because much of our human evolutionary story has been written by and about men to the exclusion of women. Consequently, many of the key theories explaining the unique suite of human features seem to assume that evolutionary forces act only upon men, and women are merely passive beneficiaries. Not only is this exclusion of roughly half the population sexist, it is also bad science – bad science that to this day has been repeated and perpetuated to justify the status quo. In this class, we will explore human evolution from a feminist perspective intellectually drawing upon human biology, archaeology, cultural anthropology, primatology, exercise physiology, and reproductive health to demonstrate that women were and still are a driving force in human evolution. Using non-traditional learning methods and assignments, we will cover: 1) foundational feminist human evolutionary theory, 2) the pervasiveness of estrogen, 3) physical/athletic performance and sexual division of labor; 4) the significance and frequency of alloparenting; 5) multiple orgasms and the control of women’s sexuality; 6) cooperation and competition among women; 7) concealment (or not) of human ovulation; 8) evolutionary reasons for the difficulty of human birth; 9) the physical and mental resilience of women; and 10) the crucial role grandmothers and menopause. It is my hope that this class not only provides an alternative perspective to current thinking in human evolution, but also encourages students to bring their experiences and perspectives to bear. Because who asks the questions matters, and a greater diversity of views can only improve and enrich our holistic understanding of human evolution.

It has been 20+ years since the first draft sequence of the entire human genome was published, spurring development of genetic technologies that were previously impossible, such as CRISPR genome editing. These technologies carry potential to identify, treat, or even prevent genetic conditions; at the same time, they often rely on assumptions that genes determine one’s fate and are shaping contemporary ideals of health, wellness, and disability. This course will examine how genetics and genetic technologies raise a host of complicated ethical questions, such as concerns about “new” forms of eugenics and genetic determinism, the ownership and commodification of genetic material, the ethics of genetics research in marginalized communities, legislative efforts to prevent genetic discrimination, and more. We will use a case study approach, pairing examinations of the biological and technical bases of specific genetic technologies with bioethical analysis to consider costs and benefits from a variety of stakeholder perspectives. This will entail engagement with perspectives from the history of science, genetics, bioethics, genetic counseling, etc. to explore complicated questions about the relationships between genetics, research, medicine, and society.

The goal of the course is to compare the processes by which social scientists and filmmakers/photographers engage in social documentation. Students explore how global social problems such as rural and urban poverty, race and gender inequalities, immigration, and violence are analyzed across the social sciences, and depicted in a variety of documentary film and photography genres. The course also explores the role that documentary photography and film play in promoting rights and advocating for social change, particularly in the realm of human rights and global inequality. It examines the history of documentary film and photography in relationship to politics, and to the development of concerns across the social sciences with inequality and social justice. It also looks at how individual documentarians, non-profit organizations and social movements use film and photography to further their goals and causes, and issues of representation their choices raise. The course is also unique because it requires students to engage in the process of visual documentation themselves by incorporating an activity-based learning component. For their final project, students choose a human rights or social problem that concerns or interests them (and which they can document locally - no travel is required), prepare a documentary -exhibit- on the chosen topic (10-12 photographs), and write a 12-15 page paper analyzing how 2-3 social scientists construct and frame the given problem. Students also have the option to produce a short documentary film.

Service Design is an interdisciplinary course that explores the theories, methods, and practices involved in designing effective and human centered services. Students will be introduced to key concepts and frameworks used in service design, with a focus on creating seamless and customer-centric experiences at critical touch points. As a capstone course, it combines elements from design thinking, design research, visual communication, and industrial design to develop solutions that meet customer needs and create value for organizations.

What is psychic life? The word psyche has encompassed a range of definitions as it has travelled through time, from notions of mind, soul, spirit, and the conscious and unconscious mind, to a mirror, an asteroid discovered in 1852, a moth or butterfly, and anima mundi, "the animating principle of the universe" itself. Today an additional constellation of concepts may also be drawn into psyche's orbit, including brain, emotion, feeling, affect, self, subjectivity, person, ego, and experience. As opposed to terms like "mental health," the concept of psychic life provides a language with which to speak about a range of phenomena across multiple traditions, epistemologies, and histories, without prioritizing any one conceptualization over another or locating the psyche within the boundaries of an individual mind, as distinct from the body and the world. Instead, in this course we will explore psychic life through the various ways in which it is known-as lived-experience; cultural, historical, and political form; object of intervention; and site of experimentation. The approaches engaged in this course draw from psychological anthropology, ethnopsychology, critical global health, history of medicine, cultural studies, affect theory, psychoanalysis, and critical phenomenology with an overarching dedication to de-stigmatizing "mental illness," and embracing neurodiversity in all its forms. Along the way we will cover topics including madness and reason, psychopolitics, global mental health, the governance of the self, the psychic life of racism, radical mental health collectives and the psychedelic renaissance, as well as a set of phenomena that lie at the limits of experience, such as psychosomatization, solitary confinement, oceanic feeling, and dreaming.

Imagine a world stripped of magic, where cold rationality reigns supreme and the supernatural has been banished to the realm of fiction. Now consider our own world, where Silicon Valley technocrats consult AI oracles, where political ideologies inspire quasi-religious fervor, and where the “spiritual but not religious” seek transcendence in everything from meditation apps to psychedelic retreats. Which of these worlds more accurately describes our modern condition? This course challenges the notion that modernity and secularization have disenchanted our world, proposing instead that enchantment persists and even thrives in unexpected corners of contemporary life. From Weber's Protestant ethic to UFO believers in the American Southwest, commodity fetishism in South America to Islamic modernities in Lebanon, we will ask fundamental questions: How do myths and rituals shape our understanding of the world, even in ostensibly secular societies? What role does enchantment play in science, technology, and politics? How do different cultures negotiate the boundaries between the sacred and the profane, the rational and the magical? Drawing upon ethnographic studies and theoretical texts, we will explore how the categories of “religious” and “secular” are constructed, contested, and reimagined in various cultural contexts.

The concept of the "commons" has returned to the focus of socio-environmental research, politics, and theorizing with recent debates on climate crisis and justice. From the late 1960s debates on environmental degradation and overpopulation to the present concerns with social change, economic degrowth, and global warming, the "commons" has returned as a key symbol for social analysis, political organizing, and collective resource management. Since then, various currents have claimed and reclaimed the concept under the guide of "communality," "conviviality," "common-pool resources," and the "common" as concrete alternatives to public and private modes of governance. In the past two decades, the concept has been central as well for the discussion of the "digital commons" with decentralized, community-based governance of online resources. In this seminar, we will map out key definitions of the "commons" to examine socio-technical and socio-environmental alternatives to existing enclosures across a wide range of examples (including, but not limited to land, tools, forests, lakes, heirloom seeds, potable water, fish stocks, software, hardware, and much more). The seminar will be organized around presentations by students and guest speakers, followed by debate of concepts, case studies, and methodological approaches in socio-environmental and digital commons research. We welcome advanced undergraduates and graduate students working on environmental research technologies, climate change, conservation, and sustainability to join the seminar.

This course is meant to provide a relatively comprehensive introduction to Marxist theory in relation to expressive culture, or the aesthetic in social life. We begin with the writings of Marx and then move historically through various major re-readings of Marxist thought in relation to aesthetic theory.

What is ethnography, broadly defined? How is a scholar's ethnographic product shaped by their racialized experience? This course will reference texts over time and across academic disciplines to consider genre, style, audience, and purpose when engaging with this research method. We will read, listen to, and watch works to think through the various ways that Black intellectuals have used ethnography to make sense of our everyday social worlds.

Migration is a prevailing global phenomenon that affects millions of peoples around the world. According to the UNHCR report, at the end of 2019, there had been 79.5 million forcibly displaced people around the world. At the same time, refugees and migrants experience migration- and displacement-related physical and psychosocial stress and trauma, which may increase their vulnerability and affects their health and well-being. This course will explore, engage, and analyze contemporary migration flows - movements of people across national and international borders - and the ways human mobility shape refugees' and migrants' lived experiences, cultural meanings, social values, and health. How and why particular modes of mobility are permitted, encouraged, and enabled while others are conversely, banned, regulated, policed, and prevented? How do contemporary forms of displacement may challenge conventional understandings of who gets to be defined and accepted as a refugee? Why do we have so many different categories of people who simply seek refuge? Do these different categories indicate different treatments? How is migration associated with higher levels of mental health disorders among refugee/migrant populations? The course will engage with such questions by focusing on events that occurred in the second half of the twenty-first century in Europe, including both the EU and non-EU states. We will rely on the selected readings and documentaries as they reflect an integrative anthropological approach to migration, displacement, and refugeeness. Taking into account lived experiences, identity, social values, cultural meanings, health, and well-being, we will explore migration, borders, and displacement as a subjective experience and sites of ethical, socioeconomic, political, and cultural examinations and critiques. Topics will include transnational migration, terminology, citizenship, borders, asylum policy, health, and well-being. This course will also enrich your understanding of the fluidity of different categories, processes underlying refugees and migrants' cultural and social tuning, as well as their biosocial responses, resilience, and adaptability under conditions of migration and displacement. The course will be run in a seminar-style, and students will be expected to analyze and debate core readings in class.

This course provides grounding in some of the methods of qualitative analysis present in the field of anthropology. The focus of the course is on developing skills that students can use to do systematic analysis of anthropological data. The perspective guiding the course is that anthropology is an empirical, scientific approach for describing social and cultural aspects of human life, and that qualitative data can be analyzed in systematic and rigorous ways. The course will explore a range of approaches and will cover analytic skills that cut across traditions, including theme identification, code definition, and pattern recognition. Advanced topics covered will include content analysis, text analysis, and schema analysis. Students will learn techniques and protocols in data arrangement and visualization that are appropriate for different analytical methods. It is a hands-on class where students will be able to work on data provided to them as well as on their own. Collaboration will be integral to the course success.

This course examines how gender and sexuality are understood, constructed, and implicated in relations of social power in various regions of the world. It will integrate scholarship from anthropology and women and gender studies to explore how ideas of maleness, femaleness, trans, queer, and heterosexual are reproduced, contested, and transgressed within different social contexts and the everydayness of these categories. We will learn about cultural changes in conceptions of gender and sexuality in North and South America, SWANA (South West Asia/North Africa), Southeast and East Asia, Central and Southern Africa, and Europe. In the first half of this course, we will consider traditional themes in cultural anthropology, including kinship, morality, ritual, emotion, politics, and the circulation of goods and labor, to examine how different communities produce cultural knowledge about gender and sexuality. The second half of this course will address contemporary themes such as activism, violence, and gender and sexual oppression. Using our knowledge of anthropological theories developed in the first half of the course, we will take up topics of concern such as masculinity and violence, LGBTQ rights and pinkwashing, and gender and nationalism to understand how gender and sexuality are relevant to post-colonial contexts and settler-colonial resistance movements.

Anthropology attempts to make sense of an infinitely complicated world by organizing its observations, inquiries, and explanations. Some of these are grand, while others are modest. Still, all anthropological work involves some kind of analysis. All analysis stems from a view of what is basic and of what is related most centrally. This course introduces the most powerful analytic perspectives in the four subdisciplines of anthropology, preparing students to encounter and situate anthropological works of all sorts. The seminar format encourages student involvement not only in reading and writing but also in discussion and analysis of the works under consideration. Written and spoken assignments will permit students to try their hand at a wide range of anthropological practice. Required of all Anthropology majors. To provide a theoretical background for later courses, anthropology students and faculty highly recommend taking this course in Junior year.

Models of human communication developed in linguistic anthropology have long relied on empirical analysis and cross-cultural comparison of how people talk to other people, and to a variety of non-human “persons” as well. This course examines how anthropologists study communication between humans and non-humans, and how communication helps make persons out of non-humans. The class concerns research on seances and related scenes of spirit possession where the dead speak, talking with animals whether pets or prey, learning spiritual lessons from teacher plants, and contemporary conversations people have with artificial intelligence language models. We compare how anthropologists have asked questions about personhood when considering speech across species boundaries or across divides such as life and death. We ask how communication constructs interlocutors and makes relationships possible, and we consider the commonality and variety among communicative approaches and tactics. We ask if communication with non-humans connects people to other worlds of experience, or if it is more instructive as a projection of our own social life onto others.

In this class we analyze the many modes of human interaction, from our original invention/discovery of spoken language, to the invention of writing, to telegraphy, telephony, radio, movies, television, and the Internet, smart phones, and social media. We examine the affordances of each medium and modality, and develop tools to understand the ones that aren't even here yet. We draw on linguistic anthropology, biological anthropology, linguistics, cognitive science, psychology, sociology, conversation analysis, media studies, and communications.

This course will give students the opportunity to develop a research proposal and prepare for anthropological fieldwork, regardless of subfield. The class will meet for three weeks at the beginning of the semester and two weeks following Spring Break. The first section will focus on developing a research proposal, seeking approval from the Institutional Review Board, and submitting the proposal for funding. The second part will concentrate on logistical preparation for the field and examining fieldwork ethics and expectations. Students should begin the course with a concrete idea for a research project that they develop in consultation with their advisor.

This course provides an intensive introduction to statistical methods of use for anthropological research. It will examine why and when to use quantitative methods, and how such methods can be incorporated into a holistic anthropological research design. Topics covered include probability theory, and parametric, non-parametric, and Bayesian principles of hypothesis testing, data ordination, and methods of analyzing non-independent data including network analysis. All course work will be undertaken using free statistical packages available through the R programing language. No prior mathematical or programming experience is needed.

What is race? How do concepts of race change according to social, political, and historical context? Do Asian understandings of race differ from those in the West? How are concepts like "blackness" and "white privilege" interpreted in Asia? In this class, we will grapple with this set of questions by looking at how competing definitions of race and nationhood emerged in conjunction with the rise of the Japanese empire (1910-1945), and American military occupation in Asia during the Cold War. Students will investigate how this historical context has continued to affect the ways more contemporary flows of migrants from Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Africa are racialized in Asia, by analyzing sociological, anthropological, and historical texts of everyday life. No prior knowledge about Asian languages or topics is required.

Almost 40% of the world's population is overweight or has obesity. Obesity has become a central focus in biological research as well as policy. Billions of dollars have been spent on public health interventions, biological interventions, diets, and exercise regimens. However, the obesity rate among adults and children has been steadily increasing globally. Why is this happening? How do we even define obesity? Does that definition truly reflect health? Why do we even have fat to begin with...actually what even is fat?!? Why are humans prone to obesity? These are just some of the questions we will address in this class. Using non-traditional methods and assignments, we will discuss adipose tissue and digestive physiology, the role evolution has played in the human propensity to hold onto fat, diet and exercise, food insecurity, therapeutic interventions, as well as the physical and mental health consequences of having obesity. We will use this as a basis to investigate the biological and cultural factors including stigma, race, and gender that shape our perceptions of body image and health in the midst of the obesity epidemic. Finally, this course will include occasional laboratory exercises to familiarize you with the methods used to assess body mass, body composition, metabolic rate, and point of care measures of biomarkers like glucose and cholesterol.

This course engages with the concept of "deep work" to create intensive writing experiences and to develop sustained productive skillsets. Cal Newport defines deep work as "professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit... These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate." On a daily basis, Deep Work Writing Workshops (DW3) draw from a collaborative working group to develop individual writing habits through sustained shared experience. The course is organized around a series of project benchmarks to develop and hone professional skills. The DW3's interdisciplinary collaborators will work towards crafting academic essays, publishable articles, and senior theses, based on the diverse goals of its participants. This intensive journey will result in the generation of sophisticated writing projects and ingrained professional habits applicable to any chosen career path in the lifelong pursuit of fulfilling creative expression.

All human populations, from the simplest to the most complex, interact with their natural environment. Humans alter the environment, and are in turn altered by it through biological or cultural adaptations. Global environmental changes helped to create and shape our species and modern industrial societies are capable of altering the environment on scales that have never been seen before, creating many questions about the future of human-environmental coexistence. This course explores the ways that humans are altering the global environment and the ways that global environmental changes alter humans in return. Four major topics are examined: global climate change, alterations of global nutrient cycles, biodiversity and habitat loss, and ecosystem reconstruction. Students will complete the course with an understanding of the metrics and physical science associated with each type of change, their ecological implications, and the ways in which environmental changes continually reshape human biology and culture. This course is for graduate students and upper-division undergraduates. This course meets a core requirement for GLOBES students.

The GLOBES (Global Linkages of Biology, the Environment, and Society) series of courses offered each semester reflect various areas of life science relevant to multiple disciplines. Students should expect to have a different topic offered every semester under the GLOBES heading.

This course examines the intersection of gender, health policy, and health care organization around the world. Gender is frequently a central contributing (though sometimes ignored) factor to people's health. Men and women have different biologies, and it thus stands to reason that their lives—social, economic, political, and biological—would have an effect on their health. What causes men to have different illnesses than women? What places one gender at greater risk for illness than the other? How do men and women across the world experience health policies? Are they affected and constrained by similar factors? How do their work lives affect their experiences with health? How is the body medically produced? How do poverty and development play a role in people's well-being? Through an inquiry-based approach, these and other topics will be addressed in this class.

This graduate level seminar will explore the philosophical, theoretical, and ethical underpinnings for inclusive and collaborative practices in anthropology, particularly research that combines approaches from more than one anthropological subfield. Taking a global approach, students will examine a wide range of case studies in community-based and collaborative anthropology, aiming to identify best practices and develop skills which students can then apply to their own projects. Attention will be paid to the importance of context, including geography, colonial histories and decolonization, war and conflict, economy, and environment, that shape engaged approaches to working for and serving communities instead of working on or studying communities with an extractive approach.

Our species is unique because it is the only species that deliberately buries its dead. Mortuary analysis (the study of burial patterns) is a powerful approach that archaeologists use for the study of prehistoric social organization and ideology. This course explores the significance of prehistoric human mortuary behavior, from the first evidence of deliberate burial by Neanderthals as an indicator of the evolution of symbolic thought, to the analysis of the sometimes spectacular burial patterns found in complex societies such as ancient Egypt and Megalithic Europe. We will also examine the theoretical and practical aspects of the archaeology of death, including the applications of various techniques ranging from statistics to ethnography, and the legal and ethical issues associated with the excavation and scientific study of human remains.

The 12th and 13th centuries were a dynamic period in world history as civilizations across the globe experienced significant growth, reorganization, and even collapse. Trade, wars, missionary work, and exploration fostered extensive and far-reaching interactions among neighboring and more distant cultures. Genghis Khan, the Crusades, the Khmer Empire, the end of the Toltec Empire, and the peak of the ancestral Pueblo occupation of the Mesa Verde cliff dwellings are but a few of the forces and civilizations shaping the world at A.D. 1200. Traditionally, these civilizations and events are studied diachronically and in relative isolation from contemporaneous global developments. This course departs from tradition and adopts a synchronic analysis of the dramatic changes experienced across the globe during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. By examining these cultural shifts in light of simultaneous transitions in other areas of the world, new questions and answers can be generated concerning the activities and processes that shape people's lives in past and present civilizations.

Students, in a structured format, are involved in assessing, prioritizing and creatively solving problems encountered by low-income and other disadvantaged South Bend entrepreneurs. A process consulting approach is employed and a number of useful tools and frameworks are introduced. Students work with both for-profit and non-profit enterprises, producing tangible deliverables that help clients launch, grow and sustain their ventures. In addition to class time, students will meet with clients on a weekly basis at a Notre Dame facility located downtown. Assistance with transportation will be available for students needing it. Class will meet on Tuesdays. On Thursdays, students will consult with local entrepreneurs in one hour blocks during the hours of 5p to 9p at the Center for Civic Innovation. This consulting time is flexible with students' schedules and based on appointments made by local entrepreneurs.

The Culture of Medicine Lab is open to students with a committed interest in anthropological methods applied to questions of health. In this Lab, students work on the arc of research (project design, data organization, data analysis, and presentation) in projects such as medical decision-making around cesareans, the role of art-based methods in understanding motherhood, or the effect of crises on medical practice. This Lab is by instructor permission only.

This course will begin with reading David Lancy’s work, The Anthropology of Childhood, in order to form a good intellectual background in this sub-discipline of anthropology. Then, at Notre Dame’s Shaw Center for Children and Families, students will participate in practicum through one hour of childcare a week of the children of single mothers in addiction recovery while the mothers are in addiction recovery group. The class will then arrange times to discuss the childcare in light of the anthropology of childhood.

This course is a hands-on opportunity to work with a team on an ongoing project—School Story Lab—about people's experiences of being in school, and to amplify the work via social media. School Story Lab builds on both interviews and crowdsourced stories. The goal of the project is to collect and disseminate personal experiences of people (especially students and teachers) involved in schools at all levels, and internationally. Experience-near accounts of school should always be considered by policy makers and those charged with designing schools, but they are often overlooked in favor of simpler standardized measures. These experiences are affective, bodily, social, economic, medical, and more, not just cognitive. Stories provide it all. The course meets weekly for an hour, and students spend another 1-2 hours weekly working on the project: conducting and analyzing interviews, contributing to the website, and bringing their own experiences.

This is a lab-intensive course that explores the methods used in physical anthropology for studying individual human skeletal remains, as well as those employed to establish biocultural connections at the population level. Forensic techniques utilized in individual identification will be developed in the first third of the course.

Bioarchaeology is the study of human skeletal remains for reconstructing the biology and cultures of past peoples. We will use the three large ancient Near Eastern collections housed in the Anthropology department to explore theoretical and methodological issues related to: paleopathology (violence, infection, & nutrition indicators in particular), population mobility (migration & pilgrimage), subsistence (chemical analysis of diet & weaning), paleodemography, childhood health and adaptability, mortuary analysis, daily activities (musculo-skeletal indicators), bimolecular genetics, and ethical issues faced when working with human remains. We will explore the archaeological and/or historical records associated with each collection as well, for an holistic understanding of ancient life at these sites. This will be a very hand-on class requiring active participation.

By helping us step back to see humans as primates, mammals, vertebrates, and beyond, evolutionary theory provides a framework for understanding many aspects of our day-to-day lives that shape the health and well-being, including weight gain-diet, psychosocial stress, immune function, sleep patterns, risky behavior, and child development. But, increasing evidence from the exciting field of "developmental origins of health and disease" suggests that our biological and behavioral patterns are far from being determined solely by our genes. Our early life contexts, from before birth, and possibly even the experiences of our parents and grandparents in prior generations influence how our brains and biological systems function, including how genes are expressed, and thus impact our health and behavior. This course will bring these dynamic perspectives together to answer questions regarding why we get sick, how our bodies flexibly respond to the world around us, and the inheritances we receive from our ancestors.

In this course, students will explore the potential for studying and reconstructing a prehistory of people through archaeology. We will consider the historical and theoretical foundations of creating an engendered past, the methodological and practical aspects of "doing" engendered archaeology, and the intersection between political feminism, archaeological knowledge production, and the politics of an engendered archaeology. Topics for consideration include feminist perspectives on science, anthropology, and archaeology; concepts of gender in prehistory and the present; women's and men's relations to craft production, state formation, and space; and the complex relationship between feminism, archaeology, and the politics of women and men in archaeology and the archaeological past. Under the broad theoretical, political and historical umbrella of feminism, archaeologists today are negotiating their own paths toward an engendered past from multiple directions, and this course will explore the diversity of these approaches toward creating a prehistory of people.

Visual Anthropology provides a powerful and engaging means of sharing historical and anthropological stories. This new course is based on the assumption that people think in terms of images, movement and sound and that film can be used to create powerful and important human narratives. This class is designed to train students in how to research, design, manage and produce short documentary film projects using both state of the art production equipment and accessible forms of media capture such as iPhones and GoPros. As a graduate/undergraduate elective, this course thematically focuses on understanding and documenting the historical, social, economic and personal stories centered on 19th through 20th century Indiana local barns, and placing these in a meaningful cultural and historical context. Students will work in teams of two to research an assigned farmstead, focusing on the barn as a material setting and documenting the past through the integration of historical research, oral history and digital video.Students will develop 2 minute videos for inclusion in a video book (as seen here https://islandplacesislandlives.com/) that touches on local history as well as a longer 8 minute video that explores the life, history and social context of the barn. The result will be a collaborative effort that creates a body of work by the class exploring local history and linking Anthropology with filmmaking to tell stories.

The human experience is a social and spatialized one. Ever since we appeared on the planet, humans have intentionally and unintentionally shaped the land and spaces around them for a variety of reasons including subsistence, economic, social, political, and spiritual activities. Thus, landscapes and spaces not only reflect, order, and create our cultural identities and worldview, but also they enable and constrain us. In this seminar-style course, we will explore how the way people live and their culture shapes our relationships the natural and constructed environment and each other. The goal is to provide students with a strong foundation in current landscape theory, analysis, and interpretation. We will cover a range of topics that intersect with landscape, including social order, settlement, cosmography and ideology, political landscapes, boundaries, natural places and resources, sense of place, and memory-making. Course organization draws heavily on the instructor's expertise, but emphasizes a broad and integrative engagement with the anthropological literature.

Visual anthropology involves the cross-cultural study of images in communication and the use of images as a method for doing anthropology. This course proceeds through a non-linear integration of visual themes including water, earth, light, fire, flesh and blood with analytical themes including aesthetics, poetics, violence, history, materiality and subjectivity. We explore still photography, film, and popular media in domains from ethnography, social documentary, war photojournalism, to high art. Students watch, read and write about, and generate visual products of their own in multiple media.

What is the relation between life and politics? In the late 18th century, a new technology of governance emerged. This technology, armed with a new science of statistics, focused on the management of life and death within the population-its rates of fertility, mortality, and illness. How could life expectancy be increased? How could rates of mortality be lowered? How could biological threats be eliminated? These questions of life and death were not only biological; life itself had emerged as a political problem. Michel Foucault called this new technology of power biopolitics. Since Foucault's formulation, the concept of biopolitics has demarcated an object of inquiry that has been taken up by scholars in a wide range of academic fields, including anthropology, sociology, literature, philosophy, and history. Through the lens of biopolitics, we will study a number of contemporary issues in which the politics of life and death are at stake, including humanitarianism, new medical technologies, public health interventions, disaster, incarceration, and global pandemics. In class, we will think through these topics together using examples drawn from visual and print media including film, journalism, literature, and photography.

In Apocalypse Now (1979), a single phrase marks an iconic enemy and creates a chain of associations that separate Western Selves from Eastern Others. The story behind the phrase, "Charlie don't surf," is one of many complex narratives characterizing the Southeast Asian region that call for further critical understanding. This course is an anthropological journey through Southeast Asia, a region rich in cultural diversity, linguistic complexity and archaeological significance. Including the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, and Myanmar (Burma), students can explore the ecological, historical, and socio-cultural patterns of this ethnographic region through analyses of its societies and institutions. With a holistic approach to the cultural influences that characterize Southeast Asia, we will chart the region's indigenous, social, political, economic, artistic and religious formations over time. The course offers a broad overview of the historical factors affecting the region, including the impact of Indian, Islamic, Chinese, and European exchange, colonization, and violence. These transregional influences provide a window from which to view contemporary issues in the cultural politics and economics of Southeast Asia. The course provides an overview of the major cultural features of the region to enable students to gain a better understanding of the current developments within the region and the lives of Southeast Asians. Overall, we will contribute to the development of anthropological ideas about Asia while also providing a means to organize and analyze Asian ethnographic perspectives.

We usually think of field work and excavation as being the essence of archaeology, but much of what we know about the past is learned in the laboratory, where we study the artifacts brought in from the field. A rough rule of thumb states that two hours of lab time are needed for every hour spent in the field, so in reality, lab work may be even more important than field work in archaeology. This course is a laboratory class that will use many different activities to teach you about how archaeologists organize, preserve, and study archaeological artifacts to learn about the past. This class provides an in-depth introduction to basic laboratory methods for the organization, curation, and analysis of pottery, stone tools, metals, soil samples, and floral and faunal remains. By the end of the semester, you will engage in a hands-on application of course principles by conducting a research project on materials from Notre Dame's archaeological collections.

Prehistoric stone tools represent the oldest form of human technology. Much of human prehistory worldwide and throughout ancient times is decipherable primarily through stone tools. Experimental replication of stone technologies is viewed as an essential method to understanding past technologies. Organized as a series of practical laboratory exercises, in this class we deal with a broad survey of the fundamental concepts of stone tool technology, including mechanical properties of tool stone, stone heat treatment, prehistoric quarrying and mining strategies and elementary concepts of flaking stone. Students gain familiarity with these topics in a laboratory context by participating in flint knapping practice and working intensively with several archaeological collections. In addition to the laboratory exercises, students will present the results of a team project based on hands-on manufacture of tools, or analysis of materials from archaeological collections.

This course provides an anthropological approach to the dynamic interaction between transnational police practices and the cultural role of police. Since nation-states are routinely defined by their capacity for the legitimate use of force within their borders, police cultures are an evocative lens to examine the interplay of state security and social order. Police and social order are entwined in the cultural contexts of the regions where they historically emerge. In addition to examining US and European police contexts, this course also highlights the region of Southeast Asia, from the Thai and Filipino police forces "professionalized" by the United States, to the Burmese military government's contemporary transformations, to the ongoing state consolidations in Cambodia. An understanding of local and regional social control is critical to the understanding police cultures whether looking at the history of colonialism through the development of local constabularies or international campaigns against crime, drugs, and terrorism. In this course, we will identify global patterns of police practice, while exploring case studies of local police cultures. Examining these regional police cases will promote a greater understanding of state security, cultural orders, violence, police-based media, and a myriad of other phenomena illuminated through the "police" concept.

How are identities important in a world of frictions and connections? How do different societies deal with cultural, linguistic, religious, gendered, embodied, intergenerational, and racialized diversities (and related injustice or inequality)? How are these accommodated within (more or less) democratic regimes? How do democracies change as a result? What are the differences between multiculturalism, relativism, and pluralism? The course addresses such questions by focusing on issues including but not limited to police violence and urban riots; Arab Uprisings; Muslim-Christian-Jewish relationships (conflict and coexistence) in Egypt and Iran; gendered practices and embodied aesthetics; the experience of refugees, and the crafting of identities, in the journey between Somalia and the US. We will also use news/magazine articles, as sources of information and as artifacts to be analyzed.

How do animals relate to non-human animals across cultures? Does culture make a difference in how humans relate to animals and the natural world? What are the roles that animals play in different societies - as food, as religious figures, as companions, as kin, as laborers? From its origins as a discipline, anthropology has examined human-animal relations in a variety of social and geographic settings. This course will review some of the classic examples of cross-cultural relations with animals, and bring these examples into conversation with current debates about race and classification, animal ethics, biotechnology, and food politics. Students will engage with texts, films,and other media from anthropology as well as philosophy, history, and feminist science studies. We will approach these materials from an anthropological perspective that focuses on how our diverse and dynamic expressions of identity and culture shape, and are shaped by, how we engage with other species - whether as beings to think with, live with, love, kill, and/or consume.

Concepts of human growth vary extraordinarily across time and space. When children become full-fledged persons, when they can reason, when or whether they should be independent from their parents, and how all this happens are variable and illuminating. Education - either formal or informal - reflects and also constitutes a society's view of childhood. This course provides a selective cross-cultural survey of childhood and education, looking at stages from pregnancy and infancy to late adolescence. Students will devise and conduct projects of their own.

How do people in immigrant-receiving countries shape their attitudes toward immigrants? What are the differences between refugees and other migrants? How is immigration related to urban "immigrant riots?" And what can anthropological studies of borders and national policies tell us about the transnational world in which we live? We will examine these and related questions, and more generally the causes, lived experiences, and consequences of migration. We will acquire a sound understanding of migration in its social, political, legal, and cultural facets. Fieldwork accounts from countries of origin and from the U.S., Europe, Australia, and Japan will enable us to appreciate both global and U.S. distinctive trends. Rather than merely learning a collection of facts about immigrants, we will address how migration intersects with gender and class, the mass media, border enforcement, racism, the economy, territory and identity formation, and religion.

This course provides an introduction to the emergent field of social studies of data-intensive analytics for the examination of how "things are done with data." The goal is to cover a wide range of examples and practical applications to introduce questions of design and implementation, privacy and surveillance, as well as governance and stewardship of digital tools and infrastructures. Following the performative aspect of data, we will explore social, technical, political, and economic dynamics that involve data extraction, sharing, literacy, and analysis. From little to big data practices, we will examine at the interface level the professional and institutional applications, development histories, and current political economy of data to situate ourselves as engaged technologists and researchers, not detached critics or passive users. There are no prerequisites for this course: no previous experience in statistics or programming is needed, but independent study of the supplementary materials we provide is highly encouraged.

Indigenous people often appear to be people without property. Whether it is outside observers who presume that they never had a "proper" economy of individual possessions, or whether it is indigenous representatives who define themselves as having lost their property—their land, their traditions, their languages—what and who is indigenous is defined by an absence. In contemporary contexts of globalization, however, indigenous traditional knowledge as intellectual property has become a lightning rod of political action. There has been a corresponding redefinition of the indigenous from the criterion of autochthony or priority to relations of dispossession or appropriation. Anthropology has continued comparative study of the variety of theories of, or knowledge about, property and its place in the construction of individuals and collectivities in indigenous societies. This course connects cultural categories of property with ethnographic scenes of its alienation to explore the emerging role of culture as emblem, itself a kind of property. We ask how indigenous appropriation of the culture concept and colonial appropriation of the environmental knowledge, art, language, and land of indigenous cultures furthers the cycle of symbolic and material exchange that defines indigeneity.

What makes human beings the way we are? How do our very beings-subjective, social, biological, or biopsychosocial-get created? What's universal and what varies around the world? We shake up commonsense understandings of these four primary building blocks of experience, ultimately coming up with our own theories and applying them to real-world topics of students' choice. Topics include Spirit Possession | Morality | Rights and Responsibilities | Emotion | Authenticity, Masks, Performance | Embodiment | Theory of Mind | Disabilities | Learning and Socialization | Humans-and-Others | Body Image and Beauty

All humans eat, but the variations in what, how, and why we eat are dazzling. This course examines the many roles that food plays in a variety of cultures. We consider food choices and taboos, religious and symbolic meanings of food, dining and social interactions, obesity and thinness, and the political and industrial issues of fast food and the slow food movement. We address ethical issues and the relationship between food and sustainability. There will be practical and field studies associated with the course.

This course provides a broad approach to technical skills and strategic information for developing a career with anthropology. It focuses on honing tools for careers that are informed by anthropological and ethnographic issues in a variety of institutions and settings. The course is a vehicle from which students can explore professional techniques that augment their career goals and academic interests.

All humans eat, but the variations in what, how, and why we eat are dazzling. This course examines the many roles that food played in a variety of cultures. We consider food choices and taboos, religious and symbolic meanings of food, dining and social interactions, obesity and thinness, and the political and industrial issues of fast food and the slow food movement. There will be practical and field studies associated with the course.

Intensive independent readings on a special problem area in biological anthropology about which the student will be expected to produce a detailed annotated bibliography and write a scholarly paper.

Intensive independent readings on a special problem area in medical anthropology about which the student will be expected to produce a detailed annotated bibliography and write a scholarly paper.

Intensive independent readings on a special problem area in sociocultural anthropology about which the student will be expected to produce a detailed annotated bibliography and write a scholarly paper.

Intensive independent readings on a special problem area in linguistic anthropology about which the student will be expected to produce a detailed annotated bibliography and write a scholarly paper.

Intensive independent readings on a special problem area in archaeology about which the student will be expected to produce a detailed annotated bibliography and write a scholarly paper.

Intensive independent readings on a special problem area in anthropology about which the student will be expected to produce a detailed annotated bibliography, write a scholarly paper, or research report.

This course provides undergraduate students in the Department of Anthropology with advanced teaching roles beyond traditional laboratory positions. It will also provide undergraduate students with a mentored teaching experiences that mimic teaching done by a professor.

Intensive independent research on a special problem area in biological anthropology, about which the student will be expected to produce a detailed annotated bibliography and write a scholarly paper.

Intensive independent research on a special problem area in medical anthropology, about which the student will be expected to produce a detailed annotated bibliography and write a scholarly paper.

Intensive independent research on a special problem area in socio-cultural anthropology, about which the student will be expected to produce a detailed annotated bibliography and write a scholarly paper.

Intensive independent research on a special problem area in linguistic anthropology, about which the student will be expected to produce a detailed annotated bibliography and write a scholarly paper.

Intensive independent research on a special problem area in archaeology, about which the student will be expected to produce a detailed annotated bibliography and write a scholarly paper.

Intensive independent research on a special problem area in anthropology, about which the student will be expected to produce a detailed annotated bibliography, write a scholarly paper, or research report.

This course is for undergraduate students conducting zero-credit independent summer research.

This course provides the student with the opportunity for independent study and the development of skills in research and writing. The effort is the student's own, from the choosing of a topic to the conclusion presented in the final paper. A thesis director is chosen to guide the student and provide assistance.