Lower Level Coursework in Anthropology

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Upper Level Coursework in Anthropology

Restrictions: None

Cultural anthropology attempts to make the diverse peoples and lifeways of the world understandable. It seeks to make the familiar strange and the strange familiar. This course introduces cultural anthropology, describing its methods, theories and research problems. While a major objective of the course it to review some of the debates and concepts central to contemporary cultural anthropology, attention also is given to the history of the discipline and its connections with Euro-American social thought.

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Courses listed as Intermediate Topics in Anthropology are sophomore-level course topics offered on a temporary basis before being added to the approved curriculum.

According to some scholars, we are living in a world where state borders are increasingly obsolete. This view holds that international borders are becoming so porous that they no longer fulfill their role as barriers to the movement of goods, ideas, people, and as markers of the extent power of the state. Yet, border build-ups and massive deportations suggest that they are all the more relevant and that the state's power has not diminished. Other social processes like the policing of black and brown bodies, the nativist political rhetoric that stigmatizes Latin migrants and privileges some refugees over others suggests that borders remain relevant at social levels, beyond the nation-state. This class provides a solid overview of the study of borders and boundaries from within anthropology and beyond. Important questions we will consider include: What are borders and borderlands? How have they been created? Do borders produce a particular kind of culture? How are borders artifiacts of history and geography? How do borders change over time and what impact does change have on the lives of people? How are border people imagined, constructed, and exploited by individuals, governments, and corporations on both sides of the border? How do citizens of the borderlands themselves resist injustice and violence? In exploring these questions, we will consider various analytical and interdisciplinary approaches.

Restrictions: None

This course introduces the themes and theories central to feminist anthropology. It illustrates the emergence and implications of feminist perspectives for cultural anthropology by examining the distrinct ways anthropologists have approached the entanglement of gender, culture, and power. It begins by considering the marginalized history of women as both anthropologists and subjects of anthropological analyses. Against this background, it devotes attention to specific problems and strategies, including the body, sexuality, the state, kinship relations and economic production. Throughout, readings, class discussions and student projects seek not only to work through the awkward relationship between feminism and anthropology, but also to address the varieties of women's experiences and identities cross-culturally. Prereq.:Introductory course in anthropology, sociology, cultural studies or instructor's consent. Counts toward SOC and ANSO theory-intensive requirements. May be used as part of Women's Studies Concentration.

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This course explores transcultural processes, movements, and exchanges. Drawing on recent scholarship in anthropology, as well as sociology and cultural studies, we address the ways in which objects, ideas, peoples, and practices have accounted for these ""travels."" Prereq.: 6 hours credit in anthropology, sociology, cultural studies and/or multicultural studies, including an introductory anthropology or sociology course or instructor's consent.

Restrictions: None

This interdisciplinary course will serve as an introduction to critical digital storytelling for social justice. Students will be introduced to narrative analysis of contemporary culture and society, exploring the uses of storytelling to foster social change. We will consider storytelling about the U.S. and the people who live here, at the individual, familial, cultural, media, and institutional levels. We will focus in particular on using personal narratives as vehicles for exploring and challenging power relations. One of our goals will be to come to a fuller understanding of ourselves and of the various communities we inhabit. We will critically explore and analyze public and personal narratives about the contemporary world, including particular attention to the stories that don’t often get told publically. During the course students will write, research, and create a short digital story focused on a contemporary social issue that will be put online for public education and engagement.

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This course will explore reproductive practices, policies, and polices in the U.S. and throughout the world. We will explore issues of fertility, contraception, pregnancy, childbirth, child rearing, and population policies legally and globally. We will consider local practices of human reproduction and production--the bearing and raising of children--in a transnational context, exploring the ways power relations shape social practices of family formation across the globe in various ways. The course will address such issues as sexuality, birth control, pregnancy, abortion, and adoption in the context of particular social and cultural traditions as they are affected by global power relations.

This course offers an overview of anthropological theory. Beginning in the mid-19th century, it traces the history of anthropological thought, contrasting distinct frameworks for making sense of cultural patterns, practices and precepts. As such it connects classical ideas with more recent innovations. Theoretical frameworks discussed include social evolution, functionalism, structuralism and a variety of post-structuralisms. Attention is given to the social and historical contexts framing anthropological theories. Prereq.: Introductory course in anthropology or sociology or instructor's consent. Counts torward SOCIOLOGY and ANSO theory-intensive requirements.

Restrictions: None

This course will explore transracial adoption as it intersects with race, gender, poverty, and reproduction in the US, focusing in particular on the adoption of Black and mixed race children into white families. We will consider this topic through a broad range of disciplinary perspectives, including racial-ethnic studies, sociology, women’s and gender studies, anthropology, history, memoir, and film/video. Transracial adoption, and adoption more generally, are typically represented in U.S. media through romantic, mythical narratives that celebrate the formation of “color-blind” “forever families.” While we will certainly consider the perspectives of people who appreciate and advocate such views, we will be actively complicating such perspectives by considering the elements often left out of public narratives. We will be exploring transracial adoption as a contemporary social issue that fundamentally requires a critical perspective in order to understand the ways it is shaped by a broad range of social interests and power relations in the United States and abroad. We will explore the ways a critical perspective on race, gender, reproduction, and power relations reframe public narratives about the transfer of children from poor mothers to middle class and wealthy families.

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These courses are upper-level course topics offered on a temporary basis before being added to the approved curriculum. Prerequisites vary.

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This course will be an immersion in methods of qualitative fieldwork and digital video as cultural critique. Students will be introduced to ethnographic participant-observation and interviewing methods, as well as video editing techniques. During the three-week J-term course students will work in small groups to conduct ethnographic research, document it on videotape, and produce short video essays that will be put on both the IRC web site for community outreach and the Drake Cultures of Engagement site. This course will serve as an introduction to qualitative interview-based research and critical digital storytelling. SCS: Research design course and CEL course.

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Ethnography is a methodological approach and a literary genre, literally writing about people. This course introduces the concepts, intellectual traditions, ethical issues and methodological techniques central to the ethnographic study of culture. In this methods-intensive course, students are required to conduct field research in a specific social context using techniques discussed in class. Prereq: Entry-level course in sociology, anthropology or cultural studies or consent of the instructor. Counts toward SOCIOLOGY and ANSO methods-intensive requirements.

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This methods-intensive course will introduce students to the interviewing methods associated with life history research, as well as the issues of representation involved in the writing and filming of people's lives and identities. Prereq; Entry-level sociology or anthropology course or instructor's consent.

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This course provides a critical understanding of the causes, features, and consequences of political violence as a phenomenon of the current global landscape. We ask questions about what violence is, how violence is produced and reproduced, what makes violence ""political,"" and what is its scope. We respond to these questions by looking at some of the main theoretical conceptualizations of violence (Hobbes, Hegel, Marx, Fanon, Arendt, and Bourdieu, among others) and by exploring case studies from across the globe. The course examines various forms of violence (extraordinary, discreet, structural, everyday, symbolic), their effects upon social structure and life-worlds, as well as how indviduals and communities have responded and reworked their experience of violence.

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This course is an introduction to the key concepts, theories, and methods of medical anthropology. Medical anthropology examines affliction and healing in a cross-cultural perspective. It emphasizes the understanding of how health and healing are shaped by both cultural and biological processes. It also analyzes the relations among health, illness, social institutions, power, and cultural representations. Medical anthropologists examine the ways in which global processes--health policies, epidemics, war and violence, inequalities--affect the life of individuals and communities. They take us into refugee camps, hospitals, zones of social abandonment, factories, and strees across the world and in our community. This course will focus on three broad topics. We will start by discussing how health-related issues, including disease and treatment, are far more than narrow biological phenomenon. By examining specific ethnographic cases, we will see how these processes are all heavily influenced by cultural and social factors as well. We will then grapple with the Foucauldian concept of ""biopower"" by means of specific ethnographic applications. By reading about colonial and postcolonial governance in the global South, the ""construction"" of mental illness, current national and global policies toward asylums seekers, and the use of pharmaceuticals, we will reflect upon the ways in which medicine can be an instrument of domination, discipline, and surveillance. The final section of the course discusses the contributions that medical anthropology can make to increase access to health services and to improve--i.e., humanize--health care in the U.S. and across the world.

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This theory-intensive course will draw on a broad range of disciplinary perspectives to consider questions concerning how to document, understand, and interpret the life experience of human beings, primarily in the contemporary United States. We will focus in particular on the documentation of women's lives. Documentary film, popular culture, documentary writing, ethnography, feminism, psychology, anthropology, sociology literature, and memoir will be considered in exploring how to represent the ways that such axes of difference as race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, class, age, and disability shape individual and group identities. Course materials will focus on the ways that society organizes categories of identity and treats people differently based on such categories, as well as how such aspects of identity shape individual conceptions of self. Counts toward SOC and ANSO theory-intensive requirement. May be used as part of Women's Studies Concentration.

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Myth and ritual are aspects of all human societies, ours included. What roles do myths and ritual play in human experience and everyday life? Why do we need them? Are myths and rituals ways of responding to existential questions? Or reflecting on the fact they can't be responded to? Do they reproduce or subvert social orders? This course will address these questions by drawing on readings from history, religious studies, anthropology, sociology, and film studies. We look at some specific cases of societies experiencing turmoil and violence that cannot possibly be understood except in reference to local myths and rituals. We then conclude with a look at mythical and ritual phenomena in American society, focusing on urban myths, vampire legends, and UFO stories to reflect on what these stories tell about ""us.""

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The course combines focused domestic and/or international travel and critical inquiry themed by social and cultural questions specific to the site/s visited. Student work typically includes pre-trip course assignments, in-trip lectures and discussions, and post-trip completion and submission/presentation of written work. The seminar is led by faculty who design, oversee, and direct the course and evaluate student work. Students are required to reflect on themselves as observers of the sociocultural sciences, artifacts, and peoples encountered, and they are asked to consider the implications of their presence in the inquiry for the nature of the information they produce as well as the ethics of that production and subsequent use. No prerequisites.

Directed independent study and or research in a problem area selected by the student and not otherwise provided for in a regularly scheduled course.

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The senior capstone course is a culmination of a student's study of his or her major. The semester-long course, meeting as a seminar, asks students to propose, pursue, and complete an independent project of inquiry, to be negotiated in its detail with the faculty member, that will result in a completed document and an oral presentation. The student project should draw on the practices of inquiry and analysis found in the coursework and reading common to the major area and reflect the student's academic experience in the major.

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Enrollment limited to students with a classification of Senior.

Enrollment is limited to students with an major in Anthropology/Sociology, Rhetoric Media & Social Change or Sociology.