Featured Anthropology Courses

Walking and running while upright are unique aspects of being human. In this course, we will attempt to understand both how and why the human body works the way it does, by studying human anatomy and biological evolution together. We will explore the anatomical basis for activities such as running and walking, grasping and throwing, chewing and digesting, talking and breathing, and sensory perception. The focus will be on the skeletal and muscular anatomy of humans and our closest living relatives, such as chimpanzees, as well as our  fossil human relatives. Included in the course are lab sessions working directly with casts of human, ape and fossil skeletons and an introduction to analyzing 3D computer generated anatomical models.

Our futures seem increasingly digital. From politics to work, from romance to family, people around the world are grappling with how digital media technologies seep into the nooks and crannies of their everyday lives. The dominance of the digital both provokes panic about the harmful corporate and political forces they are unleashing and inspires hope about the capacity of activists to create better futures. In either case, the emphasis is on the power of technology. But how do communities and social movements around the world think and do about digital media’s promises or perils? This course goes beyond both the hysteria and the hype to examine the global social life and futures of digital technologies.

What assumptions about self and society do technology workers and corporations encode as universally valid and “culture-free”? What role do media play in shaping our collective sense of what is beautiful, true, or just? How are digital technologies implicated in shoring up racist systems or in creating space for resisting them? How is AI enabling ethno-nationalism and state violence against minorities around the world?

Each week, we answer these questions through reading about concrete case studies from a wide array of global contexts, from the Philippines to Iran to India as well as the United States, and by viewing and discussing documentaries about media worlds and experiences. Throughout, we explore what an anthropological, people-centered approach offers to understand our digital futures.

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.