Anthropology

The anthropological approach to the study of culture and human society. Case studies from ethnography are used in exploring the universality of cultural categories (social organization, economy, law, belief system, art, etc.) and the range of variation among human societies.

Corequisites: ANTH UN1108 The rise of major civilization in prehistory and protohistory throughout the world, from the initial appearance of sedentism, agriculture, and social stratification through the emergence of the archaic empires. Description and analysis of a range of regions that were centers of significant cultural development: Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus River Valley, China, North America, and Mesoamerica. DO NOT REGISTER FOR A RECITATION SECTION IF YOU ARE NOT OFFICIALLY REGISTERED FOR THE COURSE.

This lecture course introduces students to key concepts and questions in the anthropological study of power and politics. What is power? How and when is it concentrated? What is authority? What are its sources? By what forms and means has rule and rulership been conceived in diverse societies? How do anthropologists think about the nation and the state distinctly from the ways in which these categories have been conceptualized in political science and political theory, or by historians of exclusively Western (post-Westphalian) polities? The course materials include anthropological texts and classic works from those adjacent disciplinary traditions, as well as texts from literary and other fields.

Introduction to the theory and practice of “ethnography”—the intensive study of peoples’ lives as shaped by social relations, cultural images, and historical forces. Considers through critical reading of various kinds of texts (classic ethnographies, histories, journalism, novels, films) the ways in which understanding, interpreting, and representing the lived words of people—at home or abroad, in one place or transnationally, in the past or the present—can be accomplished. Discussion section required.

Only the most recent chapters of the past are able to be studied using traditional historiographical methods focused on archives of textual documents. How, then, are we to analyze the deep history of human experiences prior to the written word? And even when textual archives do survive from a given historical period, these archives are typically biased toward the perspectives of those in power. How, then, are we to undertake analyses of the past that take into account the lives and experiences of all of society’s members, including the poor, the working class, the colonized, and others whose voices appear far less frequently in historical documents? From its disciplinary origins in nineteenth century antiquarianism, archaeology has grown to become a rigorous science of the past, dedicated to the exploration of long-term and inclusive social histories.

“Laboratory Methods in Archaeology” is an intensive introduction to the analysis of archaeological artifacts and samples in which we explore how the organic and inorganic remains from archaeological sites can be used to build rigorous claims about the human past. The 2022 iteration of the course centers on assemblages from two sites, both excavated by Barnard’s archaeological field program in the Taos region of northern New Mexico: (1) the Spanish colonial site of San Antonio del Embudo founded in 1725 and (2) the hippie commune known as New Buffalo, founded in 1967. Participants in ANTH BC2012 will be introduced to the history, geology, and ecology of the Taos region, as well as to the excavation histories of the two sites. Specialized laboratory modules focus on the analysis of chipped stone artifacts ceramics, animal bone, glass, and industrial artifacts.

The course only demands participation in the seminars and laboratory modules and successful completion of the written assignments, but all students are encouraged to develop specialized research projects to be subsequently expanded into either (1) a senior thesis project or (2) a conference presentation at the Society for American Archaeology, Society for Historical Archaeology, or Theoretical Archaeology Group meeting.

This course provides a comprehensive introduction to methods and theory in archaeology – by exploring how archaeologists work to create narratives about the past (and the present) on the basis on the material remains of the past. The course begins with a consideration of how archaeologists deal with the remains of the past in the present: What are archaeological sites and how do we ‘discover’ them? How do archaeologists ‘read’ or analyze sites and artifacts? From there, we will turn to the question of how archaeologists interpret these materials traces, in order to create narratives about life in the past. After a review of the historical development of theoretical approaches in archaeological interpretation, the course will consider contemporary approaches to interpreting the past.

This course focuses on some of the present, and possible future, socio-ecological conditions of life on planet earth. In particular we will work to understand the historic, economic, political, and socio-cultural forces that created the conditions we call climate change. With this we will take a particular interest in the question of how race, ethnicity, Indigeneity, class, and gender articulate with the material effects of climate change. The course also focuses on how we, as scholars, citizens, and activists can work to alter these current conditions in ways that foster social and ecological justice for all living beings. Although we will ground our scholarship in anthropology, to encourage interdisciplinary and even transdisciplinary thought, weekly readings will be drawn from across scholarly and activist canons. While becoming familiar with scholarly and activist conversations about space and place, risk and vulnerability, and ontology and epistemology, we will work through a series of recent events as case studies to understand causes, effects, affects, and potential solutions.

<gdiv></gdiv>

This course is an introduction to the interplay between science, technology, and society. Unsettling Science invites students to: ask big questions about science and technology, interrupt preconceived ideas about what sicience is and who does it, and engage deeply with troubling social implications. By offering historical and contemporary perspectives, this course equips students with critical and methodological skills essential to exploring not only longstanding questions about the world but also urgent issues of our time. To do so, the course focuses on a series of fundamental and foundational questions (e.g., what is knowledge? what is prog that underpin the study of science, technology, and society from a variety of interdisicplinary perspectives.

As an introduction to the field of medical anthropology, this seminar addresses themes of health, affliction, and healing across sociocultural domains.  Concerns include critiques of biomedical, epidemiological and other models of disease and suffering; the entwinement of religion and healing; technocratic interventions in healthcare; and the sociomoral underpinnings of human life, death, and survival.  A 1000 level course in Anthropology is recommended as a prerequisite, although not required.  Enrollment limited to 30. 4 units

This seminar critically reexamines the ancient world from the perspective of gender archaeology. Though the seedlings of gender archaeology were first sown by of feminist archaeologists during the 70’s and 80’s, this approach involves far more than simply ‘womanizing’ androcentric narratives of past. Rather, gender archaeology criticizes interpretations of the past that transplant contemporary social roles onto the archaeological past, casting the divisions and inequalities of today as both timeless and natural. This class challenges the idea of a singular past, instead championing a turn towards multiple, rich, messy, intersectional pasts. The ‘x’ in ‘archaeolxgy’ is an explicit signal of our focus on this diversity of pasts and a call for a more inclusive field of practice today.  

Course Description This course provides an exploration of how race and racism are produced, reproduced, and resisted from a Latin American perspective. We will examine a conception of race that is often ambiguous, hybrid, and fluid, yet coexists with deeply entrenched forms of racism. We begin by tracing the origins of racial formations to the colonial period, focusing on how race and religion became intertwined. The course then investigates Latin America's role in the medicalization of racialized bodies, particularly in the context of nation-building projects. We will analyze how racism has operated during periods of political violence, authoritarian rule, and transitions to democracy. Given the region's vast heterogeneity, we will critically examine "Latin America" as a category and use representative case studies to explore how race is mediated through signifiers such as education, gender, geography, occupation, dress, language, and religion—while ultimately being inscribed on and through the body. Students will explore Indigenous ontologies and epistemologies, and reflect on how the legacies of colonial and state violence persist but are contested. The first half of this course provides an overview of historical events and theoretical debates around the study of race in Latin America. The second half is dedicated to reading ethnographic work on questions of race. The selected books present cases in Peru, Ecuador, Brazil, Puerto Rico, and of immigrants in the United States.

This seminar engages--through science fiction and speculative fiction, film, and companion readings in anthropology and beyond—a range of approaches to the notion of the “future” and to the imagination of multiple futures to come.  We will work through virtual and fictive constructions of future worlds, ecologies, and social orders “as If” they present alternative possibilites for pragmatic yet utopian thinking and dreaming in the present (and as we’ll also consider dystopian and “heterotopian” possibilities as well).  

Prerequisites: None Humans don’t just eat to live. The ways we prepare, eat, and share our food is a complex reflection of our histories, environments, and ideologies. Whether we prefer coffee or tea, cornbread or challah, chicken breast or chicken feet, our tastes are expressive of social ties and social boundaries, and are linked to ideas of family and of foreignness. How did eating become such a profoundly cultural experience? This seminar takes an archaeological approach to two broad issues central to eating: First, what drives human food choices both today and in the past? Second, how have social forces shaped practices of food acquisition, preparation, and consumption (and how, in turn, has food shaped society)? We will explore these questions from various evolutionary, physiological, and cultural viewpoints, highlighted by information from the best archaeological and historic case studies. Topics that will be covered include the nature of the first cooking, beer-brewing and feasting, writing of the early recipes, gender roles and ‘domestic’ life, and how a national cuisine takes shape. Through the course of the semester we will explore food practices from Pleistocene Spain to historic Monticello, with particular emphasis on the earliest cuisines of China, Mesoamerica, and the Mediterranean.

Semester:

What are the consequences of entrenched inequalities in the context of care? How might we (re)imagine associated practices as political projects? Wherein lie the origins of utopic and dystopic visions of daily survival? How might we track associated promises and failures as they travel across social hierarchies, nationalities, and geographies of care? And what do we mean when we speak of “care”? These questions define the scaffolding for this course. Our primary goals throughout this semester are threefold.  First, we begin by interrogating the meaning of “care” and its potential relevance as a political project in medical and other domains. Second, we will track care’s associated meanings and consequences across a range of contents, including urban and rural America, an Amazonia borderland, South Africa, France, and Mexico. Third, we will address temporal dimensions of care, as envisioned and experienced in the here-and-now, historically, and in a futuristic world of science fiction. Finally, and most importantly, we will remain alert to the relevance of domains of difference relevant to care, most notably race, gender, class, and species.

Upper level seminar; 4 points

Summer:

What do we mean when we speak of “care”? How might we (re)imagine practices of care as political and moral projects? What promises, paradoxes, or failures surface amid entrenched inequalities? And what hopes, desires, and fears inform associated utopic and dystopic visions of daily survival? These questions will serve as a scaffolding of sorts for this course, and our primary goals are fourfold. First, we will begin by interrogating the meaning of “care” and its potential relevance as a political project in medical and other domains. Second, we will track care’s associated meanings and consequences across a range of contents, communities, and geographies of care. Third, we will remain alert to the temporal dimensions of care, as envisioned and experienced historically, in the here-and-now, and in the futuristic world of science fiction. Finally, we will consider the moral underpinnings of intra-human alongside interspecies care.

Enrollment limited to 10; 4 points

Technology has long shaped our understanding of sex and gender, from stone tools to artificial intelligence. Likewise, scientific knowledge systems and practices have profoundly impacted processes of categorization and defined what is ‘natural’ and ‘normal.’ Yet, simultaneously, sociocultural conceptions of sex and gender bear upon science and technology. How might we think about this nexus in a time of fraught contestations over sex, gender, and visions of what the world ought to be like, vis-à-vis science and technology? Leveraging intersections of science and technology studies (STS) and feminist and queer studies, this seminar queries the mutually constitutive relationships between science, technology, gender, and sex across time and space.

It is no secret by now that we live in a toxic sea. Every day, in every place in this world, we are exposed to an unknown number of contaminants, including those in the places that we live, the air that we breathe, the foods that we eat, the water that we drink, the consumer products that we use, and in the social worlds that we navigate. While we are all exposed, the effects of these exposures are distributed in radically unequal patterns, and histories of racialization, coloniality, and gendered inequality are critical determinants of the risks to wellness that these toxic entanglements entail. Scientists use the term body burden to describe the accumulated, enduring amounts of harmful substances present in human bodies. In this course, we explore the global conditions that give rise to local body burdens, plumbing the history of toxicity as a category, the politics of toxic exposures, and the experience of toxic embodiment. Foregrounding uneven exposures and disproportionate effects, we ask how scientists and humanists, poets and political activists, have understood toxicity as a material and social phenomenon. We will turn our collective attention to the analysis of ethnographies, memoirs, maps, film, and photography, and students will also be charged with creating visual and narrative projects for representing body burden of their own.

In this class, we will think about the various ways in which philosophers, social theorists, historians and anthropologists have thought about war, violence, and responsibility. The course focuses on a set of themes and questions: for example, the nature of violence and the question of responsibility or accountability, shifting technologies of warfare, and the phenomenology and aftermath of warfare, for civilians and for combatants. The reading list incorporates different approaches to such questions—from historical to philosophical to ethnographic accounts.

Prerequisites: Must complete ANTH BC3871x. Limited to Barnard Senior Anthropology Majors. Offered every Spring. Discussion of research methods and planning and writing of a Senior Essay in Anthropology will accompany research on problems of interest to students, culminating in the writing of individual Senior Essays. The advisory system requires periodic consultation and discussion between the student and her adviser as well as the meeting of specific deadlines set by the department each semester.

Prerequisites: Must complete ANTH BC3871x. Limited to Barnard Senior Anthropology Majors. Offered every Spring. Discussion of research methods and planning and writing of a Senior Essay in Anthropology will accompany research on problems of interest to students, culminating in the writing of individual Senior Essays. The advisory system requires periodic consultation and discussion between the student and her adviser as well as the meeting of specific deadlines set by the department each semester.

Prerequisites: Must complete ANTH BC3871x. Limited to Barnard Senior Anthropology Majors. Offered every Spring. Discussion of research methods and planning and writing of a Senior Essay in Anthropology will accompany research on problems of interest to students, culminating in the writing of individual Senior Essays. The advisory system requires periodic consultation and discussion between the student and her adviser as well as the meeting of specific deadlines set by the department each semester.

Prerequisites: Must complete ANTH BC3871x. Limited to Barnard Senior Anthropology Majors. Offered every Spring. Discussion of research methods and planning and writing of a Senior Essay in Anthropology will accompany research on problems of interest to students, culminating in the writing of individual Senior Essays. The advisory system requires periodic consultation and discussion between the student and her adviser as well as the meeting of specific deadlines set by the department each semester.

Prerequisites: Must complete ANTH BC3871x. Limited to Barnard Senior Anthropology Majors. Offered every Spring. Discussion of research methods and planning and writing of a Senior Essay in Anthropology will accompany research on problems of interest to students, culminating in the writing of individual Senior Essays. The advisory system requires periodic consultation and discussion between the student and her adviser as well as the meeting of specific deadlines set by the department each semester.

Prerequisites: Must complete ANTH BC3871x. Limited to Barnard Senior Anthropology Majors. Offered every Spring. Discussion of research methods and planning and writing of a Senior Essay in Anthropology will accompany research on problems of interest to students, culminating in the writing of individual Senior Essays. The advisory system requires periodic consultation and discussion between the student and her adviser as well as the meeting of specific deadlines set by the department each semester.

We explore the possibilities of an ethnography of sound through a range of listening encounters: in resonant urban soundscapes of the city and in natural soundscapes of acoustic ecology; from audible pasts and echoes of the present; through repetitive listening in the age of electronic reproduction, and mindful listening that retraces an uncanniness inherent in sound. Silence, noise, voice, chambers, reverberation, sound in its myriad manifestations and transmissions.  From the captured souls of Edison’s phonography, to everyday acoustical adventures, the course turns away from the screen and dominant epistemologies of the visual for an extended moment, and does so in pursuit of sonorous objects.  How is it that sound so moves us as we move within its world, and who or what then might the listening subject be?

While the existence of processes of anthropogenic climate change is well established, predictions regarding the future consequences of these processes are far less certain. In no area is the uncertainty regarding near and long term effects as pronounced as in the question of how climate change will affect global migration. This course will address the issue of climate migration in four ways. First, the course will examine the theoretical and empirical literatures that have elucidated the nature of international migration in general. Second, the course will consider the phenomena of anthropogenic climate change as it relates to migration. Third, the course will consider how human rights and other legal regimes do or do not address the humanitarian issues created by anthropogenic climate change. Fourth, the course will synthesize these topics by considering how migration and climate change has arisen as a humanitarian, political, and economic issue in the Pacific. Human Rights elective.

Culture, technology, and media in contemporary Japan. Theoretical and ethnographic engagements with forms of mass mediation, including anime, manga, video, and cell-phone novels. Considers larger global economic and political contexts, including post-Fukushima transformations. Prerequisites: the instructor's permission.

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. This course pursues interconnections linking text and performance in light of magic, ritual, possession, narration, and related articulations of power. Readings are drawn from classic theoretical writings, colonial fiction, and ethnographic accounts. Domains of inquiry include: spirit possession, trance states, séance, ritual performance, and related realms of cinematic projection, musical form, shadow theater, performative objects, and (other) things that move on their own, compellingly. Key theoretical concerns are subjectivity - particularly, the conjuring up and displacement of self in the form of the first-person singular I - and the haunting power of repetition. Retraced throughout the course are the uncanny shadows of a fully possessed subject --within ritual contexts and within everyday life.

Prerequisite: the written permission of the staff member under whose supervision the research will be conducted.

Prerequisite: the written permission of the staff member under whose supervision the research will be conducted.

Prerequisite: the written permission of the staff member under whose supervision the research will be conducted.

Prerequisite: the written permission of the staff member under whose supervision the research will be conducted.

Prerequisite: the written permission of the staff member under whose supervision the research will be conducted.

Prerequisite: the written permission of the staff member under whose supervision the research will be conducted.

Prerequisite: the written permission of the staff member under whose supervision the research will be conducted.

Prerequisite: the written permission of the staff member under whose supervision the research will be conducted.

Prerequisite: the written permission of the staff member under whose supervision the research will be conducted.

Prerequisite: the written permission of the staff member under whose supervision the research will be conducted.

Prerequisite: the written permission of the staff member under whose supervision the research will be conducted.

Prerequisite: the written permission of the staff member under whose supervision the research will be conducted.

Prerequisite: the written permission of the staff member under whose supervision the research will be conducted.

Prerequisite: the written permission of the staff member under whose supervision the research will be conducted.

Prerequisite: the written permission of the staff member under whose supervision the research will be conducted.

Prerequisite: the written permission of the staff member under whose supervision the research will be conducted.

Prerequisite: the written permission of the staff member under whose supervision the research will be conducted.

Prerequisite: the written permission of the staff member under whose supervision the research will be conducted.

Prerequisite: the written permission of the staff member under whose supervision the research will be conducted.

Prerequisite: the written permission of the staff member under whose supervision the research will be conducted.

Prerequisite: the written permission of the staff member under whose supervision the research will be conducted.

Prerequisite: the written permission of the staff member under whose supervision the research will be conducted.

Prerequisite: the written permission of the staff member under whose supervision the research will be conducted.

Prerequisite: the written permission of the staff member under whose supervision the research will be conducted.

Prerequisites: The instructors permission. Students must have declared a major in Anthropology prior to registration. Students must have a 3.6 GPA in the major and a preliminary project concept in order to be considered. Interested students must communicate/meet with thesis instructor in the previous spring about the possibility of taking the course during the upcoming academic year. Additionally, expect to discuss with the instructor at the end of the fall term whether your project has progressed far enough to be completed in the spring term. If it has not, you will exit the seminar after one semester, with a grade based on the work completed during the fall term. This two-term course is a combination of a seminar and a workshop that will help you conduct research, write, and present an original senior thesis in anthropology. Students who write theses are eligible to be considered for departmental honors. The first term of this course introduces a variety of approaches used to produce anthropological knowledge and writing; encourages students to think critically about the approaches they take to researching and writing by studying model texts with an eye to the ethics, constraints, and potentials of anthropological research and writing; and gives students practice in the seminar and workshop formats that are key to collegial exchange and refinement of ideas. During the first term, students complete a few short exercises that will culminate in a substantial draft of one discrete section of their senior project (18-20 pages) plus a detailed outline of the expected work that remains to be done (5 pages). The spring sequence of the anthropology thesis seminar is a writing intensive continuation of the fall semester, in which students will have designed the research questions, prepared a full thesis proposal that will serve as a guide for the completion of the thesis and written a draft of one chapter. Only those students who expect to have completed the fall semester portion of the course are allowed to register for the spring; final enrollment is contingent upon successful completion of first semester requirements. In spring semester, weekly meetings will be devoted to the collaborative refinement of drafts, as well as working through issues of writing (evidence, voice, authority etc.). All enrolled students are required to present their project at a symposium in the late spring, and the final grade is based primarily on successful completion of the thesis/ capstone project. Note: The senior thesis seminar is open to CC and GS majors in Anthropology only. It requires the instructor’s permission for registration. Students must have a 3.6 GPA in the major and a preliminary project concept in order to be considered. Interested students should communicate with the thesis instructor and the director of undergraduate study in the previous spring about the possibility of taking the course during the upcoming academic year. Additionally, expect to discuss with the instructor at the end of the fall term whether your project has progressed far enough to be completed in the spring term. If it has not, you will exit the seminar after one semester, with a grade based on the work completed during the fall term. Enrollment limit is 15. Requirements: Students must have completed the requirements of the first semester of the sequence and seek instructor approval to enroll in the second.

What tools does anthropology acquire to examine questions about time, and whose time do anthropologists often study? In this course, we will read ethnographic work spanning different moments in the history of the discipline of Anthropology in which the problem of writing about time, and particularly the time of others, is posed. By understanding key concepts through which anthropologists have captured the richness of temporal experiences, we will explore the magic and elusiveness of time in the life of people and cultures, all while telling a particular story about anthropology’s own experience with time.

In our weekly readings, we will bring together ethnography and theory, complemented by materials such as short films and novel excerpts. Each week will attend to a specific temporal phenomenon, which will help us further explore the relationship between time, ethnography, and critique. Throughout the semester, we will also engage in a series of “fieldnote-taking” exercises. These short entries will serve as a way to connect the readings on the syllabus with your own attempts to write about time and will contribute to the development of your midterm paper and form the foundation of your final paper.

In the face of “post-liberal” political realignments, particular varieties of Christian conservatism and reactionism have ascended as consequential forces in and beyond the United States.  This seminar interrogates these realignments through practices of  conversion, coalition-making, and the kinds of belongings, extensions, departures, and excisions such practices make thinkable and tangible.  We will focus on inter-denominational and intra-Christian dynamics particularly within the United States to ask questions about the contradictions, costs, and potentials of such new or newly energized Christian movements. Our interdisciplinary readings draw from political theory, public theology, and anthropological and historical studies.  This course emerges from ongoing discussions among two anthropologists; in the spirit of modeling collaboration, students of the  in-person seminar will have the opportunity for remote engagement with counterparts elsewhere.

“Laboratory Methods in Archaeology” is an intensive introduction to the analysis of archaeological artifacts and samples in which we explore how the organic and inorganic remains from archaeological sites can be used to build rigorous claims about the human past. In 2023, this course will focus on pre-contact and post-contact assemblages from the New York-metro area, including materials from the legacy collections of Ralph Solecki. Participants will be introduced to the history, geology, and ecology of the New York area and specialized laboratory modules focus on the analysis of chipped stone artifacts, ceramics, animal bone, glass, and a range of post-contact artifacts.

The course only demands participation in the seminars and laboratory modules and successful completion of the written assignments, but all students are encouraged to develop specialized research projects to be subsequently expanded into either (1) a thesis project or (2) a conference presentation at the Society for American Archaeology, Society for Historical Archaeology, or Theoretical Archaeology Group meeting.

How can we understand social realities that transcend territorial boundaries? How is the study of the region itself part of the region's story? This course explores these and related questions through Inner Northeast Asia, the borderland region that stretches between Russia, China, Mongolia, and Korea. Through selections from English language scholarship and translations of primary sources, this introduction to a region shaped by multiple legacies of imperial rule offers a chance to reflect on the limits of nation-states. No background knowledge or languages other than English are required.

This course is a combination of lectures, seminar participation, and group practicums which probes the possibility of a decolonial art research practice. This course introduces students to western approaches to politics and art through a sustained engagement with critical Indigenous and anticolonial theories of human relations to the more-than-human world. It is a mixture of lectures, class discussion, and individual practicums which lead to final projects that combine image and text.

This course is an interdisciplinary survey of the literature and issues that comprise Native American and Indigenous Studies. Readings for this course are organized around the concepts of indigeneity, coloniality, power and resistance and concomitantly interrogate these concepts for social and cultural analysis. The syllabus is derived from some of the classic and canonical works in Native American Studies such as Custer Died for Your Sins but will also require an engagement with less canonical works such as Red Mans Appeal to Justice in addition to historical, ethnographic and theoretical contributions from scholars that work outside of Native American and Indigenous Studies. This course is open to graduate students and advanced undergraduates.

 This new course aims to provide advanced undergraduate and graduate students with a critical history of Palestine-related archaeology from the mid-19th century to the present, and (b) an examination of how archaeological narratives relating to Palestine have been impacted by state nationalism, colonialism and conflicting local, regional and global religious interests from the "Classical World" to the 21st century.

Prerequisites: 2ND YEAR PHD STATUS IN GOOD STANDING Corequisites: ANTH G6205 Within this seminar, one will master the art of research design and proposal writing, with special emphasis on the skills involved in writing a dissertation prospectus and research proposals that target a range of external funding sources. Foci include: bibliography development; how one crafts and defends a research problem; the parameters of human subjects research - certification; and the key components of grant proposal design. Required of, and limited to, all Second Year PHD anthropology students.

This course examines language and its limits from the perspective of practice and theory, drawing on linguistic and sociocultural anthropology, semiotics, and deaf and disability studies. The first weeks focus on foundational texts and frameworks for language, semiotics, and communication, paying attention to the placement, and theorization, of boundaries that separate language from not-language and to the work such boundaries (are intended to) do. The second part of the course explores materials where the subjects and objects of study approach or even cross those boundaries, asking what kinds of ethical, intellectual, and relational demands these materials make in both social and analytic contexts. Focal topics may include linguistic relativity; semiotics; modality (signed, spoken, written languages); disability; trauma and colonialism; human-nonhuman communication; and gender. Please email for instructor permission. 

This advanced interdisciplinary seminar brings anthropological perspectives into conversation with those from political theory, literary criticism, and art history, to consider the ways in which political power and especially rulership is produced, mediated, concentrated and/or dispersed. It is especially concerned with the cultural/aesthetic forms in which the rule of the one is valorized, and granted legitimacy. The course is subtended by three main themes, which include: 1) monarchy, tyranny and/or the rule of one; 2) mediation, including the space of the court and practices of the media; 3) the force of massification as regression. These topics are woven together, rather than treated chronologically, and will be addressed with respect to three several sites of inquiry: Europe, the US, Latin America and Africa. The historical range of material runs from the early modern era to the present, and the rise of what some have called a “new Medievalism.”  

Death is the great universal, but the practices and discourses surrounding it are profoundly particular. As such, death is an ideal subject for anthropological inquiry. Over time, older questions persist as new topics and ways of approaching the study of death emerge with the potential to illuminate how individuals and groups understand fundamental notions of the body, personhood, kinship, temporality, and the spirit within contemporary contexts. This seminar will explore death through its relationships with race, technology, humor, violence, climate, and other attendant topics. By reading texts in the anthropology of death, Black Studies, and other fields, consulting various media, and engaging memorial sites, the course will consider the ethics and aesthetics of studying and writing about death, the politics of memorialization, and more. “The new death” is a theoretical and ethnographic provocation to interrogate how the contemporary inflections of death shape the questions and intensify the stakes of social life.  

This course critically examines some of the moral and historical arguments for the justification of reparations for New World slavery. We explore the state of the debate about such historical injustices -- inquiring into questions of cultural trauma, memory, and generations. Our main concern will be to connect a moral claim about repair to an understanding of the injury of slavery in the Americas.  Open to graduate students only.  Permission is required.   

Archaeology is a sprawling, messy discipline and the role that theory does, should, and might play in the process of archaeological data collection, analysis, and interpretation has been highly contested. Archaeologists argue over whether there is such a thing as a stand-alone ‘archaeological theory’ and what kinds of theory from other disciplines should (or should not!) be imported. This course explores a range of recent theoretical conversations, orientations, and interventions within archaeology, with an eye to understanding what is currently at stake – and what is contested – in how archaeologists think about making archaeological knowledge in the contemporary moment. In doing so, this course encourages students to think about theory in archaeology as an important form of “practical knowledge” or “know how” for archaeologists (cf. Lucas 2018).

Prerequisites: ANTH G6352 Museum Anthropology: history and theory / ANTH G6353 Politics and Practice of Museum Exhibitions; G9110, G9111 and the instructors permission. Corequisites: ANTH G6353. This course addresses the practical challenges entailed in the process of creating a successful exhibition. Developing an actual curatorial project, students will get an opportunity to apply the museum anthropology theory they are exposed to throughout the program. They will be given a hands-on approach to the different stages involved in the curation of a show, from the in-depth researching of a topic to the writing, editing and design of an exhibition that will be effective for specific audiences.

Prerequisites: ANTH G4201 Principles and Applications of Social and Cultural Anthropology and the instructors permission. Focus on research and writing for the Masters level thesis, including research design, bibliography and background literature development, and writing. Prerequisites: ANTH G4201 Principles and Applications of Social and Cultural Anthropology

What can we learn from anthropological and ethnographic research in and about a damaged world, a world confronted by the violence and effects of war, climate change, transnational migration, post-industrial abandonment, and the lives and afterlives of colonialism and slavery? What are the ethnographic debates that address the catastrophes produced by capitalism and the lifeforms that emerge out of its ruins? What types of anthropological critique emerge in times enunciated as ‘the end of the world’? And what comes after this end? Ethnographies at the End of the World addresses these questions by paying close attention to some of the most relevant debates in contemporary anthropological theory and anthropological critique. These debates include, among others, discussions on violence and trauma, the politics of life and death, the work of memory and oblivion, and the material entanglements between human and non-human forms of existence. The aim of this seminar is to generate a discussion around the multiple implications of these theoretical arrangements and how anthropologists deploy them in their ethnographic understandings of the world we live in. In doing so, this course provides students with a fundamental understanding and conceptual knowledge about how anthropologists use and produce theory, and how this theoretical production is mobilized as a social critique. This course is reading intensive and operates in the form of a seminar. It is intended, primarily, for MA students in the department of anthropology and graduate students in other departments.

Ruling powers of various shapes and sizes tend to prosecute those people whom they fear because of their identity, class, craft, or convictions. Often, the object of accusation, inquiry, prosecution, and persecution includes not just one (or more) individual persons, but a set of relationships that these ruling powers see as anathema to the social order they seek to establish or maintain, and on which their power depends. Specters can personify residuals of antediluvian political or cosmological order (heretics and witches, officers of toppled regime, Catholics after the reformation, idolatry trials in the new world, mafiosi after their criminalization, Bundists in Soviet Russia) or emergent forms (emancipated Jews, dissidents, or anarchists). All share that role in social dramas that cast them as enemies of The State, The Church, The People, or Humanity. In this seminar we will begin to explore the array of social rituals, routinized practices (like rumors and media-oriented lynching) and institutions that have been developed specifically in order to name such specters and summon them publicly. We will examine, among others: trials, conspiracy theories (as a mode of recounting a presence that is constantly putting the specter back in), investigative committees, inquisitorial tribunals. We will examine how such social rituals and routinized practices and institutions give us unique opportunities to examine what conceptions of society, of relationships good and evil, and of justice underlie political orders, how they codify and pursue them, and what historical processes these enactments trigger or shape. We’ll focus on cases from early modern and modern societies, with an eye towards the emergence and stabilization of republican order.

Laurel Kendall. This course is a continuation of Museum Anthropology G6352 (not a prerequisite). Through the study of museum exhibitions, this course explores a series of debates about the representation of culture in museums, the politics of identity, and the significance of objects. We will consider the museum as a contemporary and variable form, as a site for the expression of national, group, and individual identity and as a site of performance and consumption. We will consider how exhibits are developed, what they aim to convey, what makes them effective (or not), and how they sometimes become flashpoints of controversy. Because the work of museums is visual, enacted through the display of material forms, we will also consider the transformation of objects into artifacts and as part of exhibitions, addressing questions of meaning, ownership, value, and magic. We will look at this range of issues from the point of view of practitioners, critics, and audiences. G6365 works in tandem with the exhibition project that will be developed in “Exhibition Practice in Global Culture” to produce a small exhibit at AMNH.

This course surveys the historical relationships between anthropological thought and its generic inscription in the form of ethnography. Readings of key ethnographic texts will be used to chart the evolving paradigms and problematics through which the disciplines practitioners have conceptualized their objects and the discipline itself. The course focuses on several key questions, including: the modernity of anthropology and the value of primitivism; the relationship between history and eventfulness in the representation of social order, and related to this, the question of anti-sociality (in crime, witchcraft, warfare, and other kinds of violence); the idea of a cultural world view; voice, language, and translation; and the relationship between the form and content of a text. Assignments include weekly readings and reviews of texts, and a substantial piece of ethnographic writing. Limited to PhD students in Anthropology only.

How are bodies in the world? How is the world in bodies? Building from these deceptively simple questions, ours will be an interdisciplinary reading seminar on how bodies (mostly human, but sometimes nonhuman) are made and remade in and through their environments and via their relationships to the material world. Privileging porosity as a rubric, we consider the ever-permeable boundaries between bodies and the other beings (be they viral, chemical, microbial or otherwise) with which they become entangled. Alongside the monographs under study, we will tackle article-length engagements with theories of new feminist/queer materialisms, decolonial and critical science studies. Further, a key aim of this course is to provide students the opportunity to hone some of the most important skills we have in our toolbox as academics, relative to our teaching, our public voice/s as critics, and to our own research.

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research and tutorial in social and cultural anthropology for advanced graduate students.

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research and tutorial in social and cultural anthropology for advanced graduate students.

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research and tutorial in social and cultural anthropology for advanced graduate students.

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research and tutorial in social and cultural anthropology for advanced graduate students.

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research and tutorial in social and cultural anthropology for advanced graduate students.

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research and tutorial in social and cultural anthropology for advanced graduate students.

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research and tutorial in social and cultural anthropology for advanced graduate students.

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research and tutorial in social and cultural anthropology for advanced graduate students.

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research and tutorial in social and cultural anthropology for advanced graduate students.

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research and tutorial in social and cultural anthropology for advanced graduate students.

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research and tutorial in social and cultural anthropology for advanced graduate students.

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research and tutorial in social and cultural anthropology for advanced graduate students.

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research and tutorial in social and cultural anthropology for advanced graduate students.

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research and tutorial in social and cultural anthropology for advanced graduate students.

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research and tutorial in social and cultural anthropology for advanced graduate students.

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research and tutorial in archaeology for advanced graduate students.

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research and tutorial in archaeology for advanced graduate students.

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research and tutorial in archaeology for advanced graduate students.

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research and tutorial in archaeology for advanced graduate students.

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research and tutorial in archaeology for advanced graduate students.

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research and tutorial in archaeology for advanced graduate students.

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research and tutorial in archaeology for advanced graduate students.

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research and tutorial in archaeology for advanced graduate students.

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research in all divisions of anthropology and in allied fields for advanced graduate students

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research in all divisions of anthropology and in allied fields for advanced graduate students

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research in all divisions of anthropology and in allied fields for advanced graduate students

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research in all divisions of anthropology and in allied fields for advanced graduate students

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research in all divisions of anthropology and in allied fields for advanced graduate students

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research in all divisions of anthropology and in allied fields for advanced graduate students

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research in all divisions of anthropology and in allied fields for advanced graduate students

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research in all divisions of anthropology and in allied fields for advanced graduate students

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research in all divisions of anthropology and in allied fields for advanced graduate students

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research in all divisions of anthropology and in allied fields for advanced graduate students

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research in all divisions of anthropology and in allied fields for advanced graduate students

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research in all divisions of anthropology and in allied fields for advanced graduate students

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research in all divisions of anthropology and in allied fields for advanced graduate students

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research in all divisions of anthropology and in allied fields for advanced graduate students

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research in all divisions of anthropology and in allied fields for advanced graduate students

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research in all divisions of anthropology and in allied fields for advanced graduate students

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research in all divisions of anthropology and in allied fields for advanced graduate students

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research in all divisions of anthropology and in allied fields for advanced graduate students

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research in all divisions of anthropology and in allied fields for advanced graduate students

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research in all divisions of anthropology and in allied fields for advanced graduate students

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Individual research in all divisions of anthropology and in allied fields for advanced graduate students

An internship arranged through the Museum Anthropology program of 10 hrs/week (for 3 credits) or 20 hrs/week (for 6). Involves meaningful work, requires keeping a journal and writing a paper at the completion of the semester. Not to be taken without permission of the program directors, usually after completing the Museum Anthropology core courses.

An internship arranged through the Museum Anthropology program of 10 hrs/week (for 3 credits) or 20 hrs/week (for 6). Involves meaningful work, requires keeping a journal and writing a paper at the completion of the semester. Not to be taken without permission of the program directors, usually after completing the Museum Anthropology core courses.

All anthropology graduate students are required to attend. Reports of ongoing research are presented by staff members, students, and special guests.