Featured Anthropology Courses

This course examines energy practices and its relationship to natural resource extraction in vulnerable communities around the world. In this era of both climate change and high mass consumption, our world faces enormous challenges to our systems of producing, consuming, distributing, and transitioning energy. While we often think of these challenges as technological, they are bound up in questions of culture, racial inequality, economic order, political power, social organization, and ethics. This course draws upon historical, anthropological, and environmental sources to examine the infrastructures – the constructed networks of ideas, technologies, people, and goods – that constitute energy systems. We will consider how energy both constitutes and bears upon our social worlds, our physical well-being, our economic and political relations, and our everyday lives. The course will focus on the close examination and comparison of discourses and practices concerned with resource extraction, resource distribution, energy security, and politics of modernization in the energy world. Emphasis will be on ethnographic case studies on renewable and non-renewable natural resources and how its extraction has contributed to reshaping livelihoods, energy security while creating spaces of violence as well as the possibilities for ‘development’.

In this course we will take an in-depth look at the origins and diversification of the human lineage over the past 7-8 million years. The course will focus on evolutionary processes, the hominin fossil record, and reconstructions of changing behavior as our species evolved. Early lectures will introduce the basics of evolutionary theory, paleontology, phylogenetic analyses, genetics, and functional morphology. As we develop a view of the evolution of the earliest members of our lineage, we will also review the fossil apes that provide significant insights into the nature of early human evolution. We will then carefully examine the nature of the hominin fossil record itself. The laboratory section will provide hands-on opportunities to study replicas of human and hominin fossils. The goal of this course is to develop an understanding of the life histories, social behavior, ecology, biogeography, toolkits, and diets of the diverse hominins in our lineage and discern the potential evolutionary relationships between them. We will touch on some of the major debates in paleoanthropology and provide a critical examination of some of the historical perspectives that have influenced our interpretation of the hominin fossil record.

This course provides an introductory overview of the field of medical anthropology, engaging recent literature on health, care, and illness, and exploring the intersections these topics have with understandings of class, gender, race, religion, and the body. We will discuss what medical anthropology is (in terms of its history, scope, methods, and goals) and the roles anthropologists can play within the practice of medicine. We will explore how terms like "health," “knowledge,” “belief,” “healing,” “medicine,” “wellbeing,” “suffering,” and “disease” might seem fixed, objective, and unchanging, but instead are socially constructed and changeable. By interrogating the cultural dimensions of healing and how systems of healing can differ by context, we will use these discussions to unpack and complicate the amorphous concept of “culture” itself.

Corporations have emerged as the dominant governance institutions on the planet, with the largest among them reaching into virtually every country in the world and exceeding most governments in size and power. While corporations are major economic actors, this class will focus on the corporation as a political and legal institution and its relation to democracy. We will discuss corporate activities in Asia, North America, and Europe. How did early corporations contribute to democratic concepts and practices? What rights and responsibilities do corporations have? How are they controlled and by whom? How do they act as government-like regulators? Under what circumstances do they exercise military force? How do they structure markets? How do they arrange themselves across national jurisdictions?