Featured Anthropology Courses

Chirping birds, shuffling footsteps, tapping keyboards: Our lives are full of sounds, but seldom do we think about them. This course introduces students to:

• concepts and methodologies for studying sound using a team-based learning approach
• the acoustical qualities of sound alongside the cultural and historical transformations of different sounds
• how digital audio technologies shape the listening experience
• how humans and animals communicate through sound

We will learn about different approaches to the study of sound that open up innovative areas of research. This course also draws on the sonic environment of Ann Arbor and provides hands-on experience with making field recordings, designing soundscapes, and producing audio works. No experience necessary; musical training neither required nor expected.

Earth is on the brink of the Sixth extinction event, which is predicted to be more devastating than the asteroid impact in Mexico that ended the reign of the dinosaurs. Scientific evidence shows that humans are the cause. Anthropology, which seeks to understand human behavior both in the present and in the evolutionary past, can uniquely contribute to understanding how we got here and what we need to do. Course requirements will develop students’ abilities as active thinkers and problem-solvers. The students of this course, and others like it, are the leaders of tomorrow!

We all have a body. We grow and develop. We eat and drink to sustain ourselves. We modify our bodies by putting tattoos on our arms, dye in our hair, and braces on our teeth. We design clothing and jewelry to adorn our bodies. We make virtual avatars to represent our bodies in digital spaces. We sleep. We experience aging and illness. We use our bodies to dance, exercise, hug loved ones, participate in ritual, and make rude hand gestures at that guy who just cut us off in traffic. But what does it mean to inhabit a body? What are the correlations between our bodies and the ways we learn to exist within particular cultural contexts? 

From Instagram posts, nursing homes, and juice cleanses to cosmetic surgery and AI “girlfriends,” this course provides an overview of anthropological studies of the body. We will also engage sources from the social sciences and humanities more broadly, alongside visual art, film, music, and material culture. Building on a foundation of classic theoretical approaches to the body, embodiment, and bodily practices, we explore how ideas around the body are culturally constructed, reinforced, and contested. We explore how media, technology, pop culture, and commodities can shape and transform the experience we have of our bodies, our understandings of amorphous concepts like “beauty,” and how our bodies are differentiated and "read” by those around us. We also focus on the ways in which the body serves as a lens to think about topics of race, age, ability, class, gender, aesthetics, and religion.