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.

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.

Archaeology has often been described as the discipline of 'things' or of the material traces of the past. This course seeks to enhance students' engagement with the material world as a means of complementing text-based instruction in the tradition of experimental archaeology and hands-on history. Through weekly activities, students will create and engage with ‘things’, reflect critically on differences in reading about and making things, and gain a critical understanding of material culture studies in archaeology and beyond.

Pottery is one of the most enduring products of the ancient world and among the most ubiquitous classes of artifacts recovered from archaeological sites. In many cases, pottery sherds are all that remain of past societies, making them a critical source of evidence for reconstructing ancient lifeways. Archaeologists use ceramics to investigate a wide range of questions, from the transmission of craft knowledge to cooking practices, political economies, social identities, and human responses to environmental change. This course introduces the concepts and methods used to analyze archaeological ceramics, with an emphasis on how these artifacts are evaluated and used to build evidence-based interpretations of the past. Students who wish to enroll in this course must also register for the accompanying laboratory course.

Pottery is one of the most enduring products of the ancient world and among the most ubiquitous classes of artifacts recovered from archaeological sites. In many cases, pottery sherds are all that remain of past societies, making them a critical source of evidence for reconstructing ancient lifeways. Archaeologists use ceramics to investigate a wide range of questions, from the transmission of craft knowledge to cooking practices, political economies, social identities, and human responses to environmental change. This course introduces the concepts and methods used to analyze archaeological ceramics, with an emphasis on how these artifacts are evaluated and used to build evidence-based interpretations of the past. Students who wish to enroll in this course must also register for the accompanying lecture course.

Pottery is one of the most enduring products of the ancient world and among the most ubiquitous classes of artifacts recovered from archaeological sites. In many cases, pottery sherds are all that remain of past societies, making them a critical source of evidence for reconstructing ancient lifeways. Archaeologists use ceramics to investigate a wide range of questions, from the transmission of craft knowledge to cooking practices, political economies, social identities, and human responses to environmental change. This course introduces the concepts and methods used to analyze archaeological ceramics, with an emphasis on how these artifacts are evaluated and used to build evidence-based interpretations of the past. Students who wish to enroll in this course must also register for the accompanying lecture course.

Pottery is one of the most enduring products of the ancient world and among the most ubiquitous classes of artifacts recovered from archaeological sites. In many cases, pottery sherds are all that remain of past societies, making them a critical source of evidence for reconstructing ancient lifeways. Archaeologists use ceramics to investigate a wide range of questions, from the transmission of craft knowledge to cooking practices, political economies, social identities, and human responses to environmental change. This course introduces the concepts and methods used to analyze archaeological ceramics, with an emphasis on how these artifacts are evaluated and used to build evidence-based interpretations of the past. Students who wish to enroll in this course must also register for the accompanying lecture course.

Municipal jails are one of the most impactful institutions of criminal justice in the United States; and yet many Americans do not even know the difference between a prison and a jail.  This course will investigate the conditions of mass incarceration in America by centering the municipal jail. Taking as objects of study both the jail itself and the practice of incarcerating people in local jails, this course will combine scholarly work on U.S. criminal justice with a variety of non-academic texts including legal decisions, contemporary journalism, and documentary film. The course is focused on jails writ large,  but as we are living in New York City, we will pay particular attention throughout the semester to our own municipal jail system.

This course centers disability in its many manifestations and meanings – as an embodied, social, and cultural experience, as an organizing discourse in local and global contexts, as an analytic framework, and as a position from which to approach, think about, and engage in the world. Together, we will seek to understand disability in diverse settings and contexts through ethnographic texts, autobiography, documentary film, and essays, drawing primarily from works in anthropology but also more broadly from the interdisciplinary traditions known as (Critical) Disability Studies.

Throughout the semester, we will move between considering disability in more and less specific and categorical terms. We will ask what the stakes are – intellectually, socially, politically -  for different ways of doing, thinking, and representing disability. What becomes apparent when we consider, say, the experiences of deaf young adults in India working together to learn Indian Sign Language, or physically disabled adults in the United States whose disabilities must be situated within histories of racialized poverty and urban neglect? What happens – what are the resonances and the tensions – when we put these settings into conversation? Through our engagements with materials analyzing these and many other instances, we will think together about what it means to study and think with disability from different disciplinary perspectives, different methods, and different media.

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

"Pre-Columbian Histories of Native America" is about the heritage and historical development of Indigenous North America. But it is also about storytelling and how the Native American past comes to figure in the accounts of archaeologists, descendant communities, and other concerned commentators. Lectures are structured around five core narratives: (1) the colonization of the New World, (2) the rise of (and response to) Cahokia, North America’s first monumental urban center, (3) the rise of (and response to) a religiopolitical center at Chaco Canyon in the American Southwest, (4) the stories of Western Apache places, and (5) the emergence of a Comanche equestrian empire in the 18th and 19th centuries. Our goal is to critically consider the archaeological evidence, indigenous understandings, and the political stakes that surround these narratives.

From the rise of Italian Fascism to the Siege of Sarajevo to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, politicians, media figures, and other public voices have framed the Mediterranean as a place of senseless religiosity and an inability to embrace secular rationality — often to argue for the inevitability or necessity of violent intervention. This course tells a different story. Through primary sources and close secondary commentary, we trace how the categories of religion and secularism took shape in the region, and how those who live with these categories think, reflect, inhabit, and struggle over them — not as a simple conflict between tradition and modernity, but as part of larger, shared questions about what it means to be human. Each week poses a foundational question and offers responses through both primary sources and foundational texts in anthropology, history, and religious studies.

Although the course draws on specialized scholarship, no previous coursework in anthropology, religious studies, or the languages of the region is required or presumed; all readings are in English or English translation, and necessary background will be provided in class.

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).  

An interdisciplinary seminar exploring the new science of plant intelligence alongside the colonial, racial, and ecological histories that have shaped human-plant relations. Drawing on plant biology, Indigenous knowledge systems, Black botanical legacies, critical race studies, and multispecies anthropology, the course asks what plants know, who has always known them, and what they have been made to do in the service of empire. Students purchase and maintain a living plant throughout the semester. Readings range from bench science to postcolonial theory to Caribbean literature.

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?

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.

This course examines specific debates in the history and philosophy of science, and in science and technology studies (STS), with a view towards exploring the relationships among science, technology and society. The first half of the course engages methodological questions and theoretical debates concerning the nature of epistemology, and the significance of social interests, material agency, laboratory and social practices, and “culture(s)” in the making of scientific knowledge.  The second half delves more specifically into the ways in which sciences and technologies are both embedded in and shape contemporary social and political practices and imaginaries

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.

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.

Research projects and internships are planned in consultation with members of the department and work is supervised by the major’s adviser.

This course examines space, place, and war in Ukraine and other postsocialist countries in Eastern Europe through anthropological and interdisciplinary perspectives. Students will examine how spatial practices speak to personal identity, imperial histories, nationalism, and the brutal needs and consequences of war. Students will tackle how space is made and remade in the postsocialist context. They will also examine how war shapes space in everyday life by engaging with key texts in the ethnography of war. At the end of the semester, the course will focus on wartime reconstruction in Ukraine, inviting practitioners from Ukraine to share their experiences. This course will be conducted in partnership with “Housing, Local Knowledge, and Urban Practice in Ukraine,” a practicum course in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning. The final project will be a collaborative exhibit between students in the two courses and will be presented to a jury of Ukrainian stakeholders.

This course provide an in-depth examination of the formation, nature, and fall of the Inca empire, the most complex polity of the Americas before the European invasions. It draws on early Spanish colonial accounts, modern anthropology, and archaeology as sources of information. Among the topics covered are politics, social order, economics, gender roles, militarism, and the ideas about humanity's place in the landscape and the cosmos.

This course is a comparative study of the role of information technologies in the formation of modern Empires and modern postcolonial states. It examines these processes historically and their afterlives in contemporary societies. Drawing heavily on media theory and theories of information we will examine how these forces operate in countries as diverse as France, Palestine, India, Paraguay.

 

 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.

This seminar examines the "vegetal turn" in the humanities through the lens of Black studies, Indigenous studies, and  feminist/queer studies approaches to science and technology. Beginning with Suzanne Césaire's 1942 definition of Caribbean being as fundamentally vegetal, the course reads across plant science, multispecies ethnography, critical race theory, queer ecologies, and plantation studies to ask what plants know, who knows them, and what vegetality offers as an analytic for thinking about racialized and gendered life in the Anthropocene. Students produce an annotated bibliography, a vegetal fieldwork exercise, and a seminar paper suitable for development toward publication. They also maintain a living plant throughout the semester.

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 asks what thinking from and with South Asia can offer anthropological theory and what an anthropological approach can offer the study of South Asia. Keeping the troubled history of area studies in focus, we attend to how the “region” has been formed as a distinct object of study. In other words, this course simultaneously takes South Asia as its subject and its vantage point, while also problematizing what, where, and to whom this phrase refers. We consider a series of texts and films - largely but not exclusively within the tradition of contemporary anthropology - that explore people and places in and across the nation-states known as South Asia. 

Our aim is two-fold: One, we hope to moor anthropological theory in geopolitics. By this, we mean that we are interested in how “regions” come to be exemplary sites of particular theories instead of points of grounded departure for disciplinary-wide conversations. On a related note, we want to understand the conditions under which “region” can be productively invoked in anthropological conversations and when we are advised to leave it behind. Second, we aim to attend to the specificities of the places and people imperfectly referenced by the phrase South Asia. We will touch on classic themes associated with the anthropology of South Asia, including criss-crossing formations of caste, class and gender, and we will put them in conversation with contemporary work on disability, Indigeneity, queerness, and race. 

What constitutes ethnographic work and how do we know if we are doing it well? This course considers the many ways that question has been answered within the history of the discipline of anthropology and gives students the tools to answer the question for their own graduate-level work. The course combines close reading of ethnographic texts, methodological interventions, and disciplinary critiques with hands-on practice in a variety of research methods commonly understood as ethnographic. The practical element will at times require a fairly substantial investment of time outside of class.

Ethnography is often taught as a method of observation. This course begins from a different  premise: ethnography is a political technology of knowledge production shaped by empire, race,  capital, gender, and disciplinary power. It is also a fragile and unfinished writing practice that  scholars continually remake. This seminar treats ethnography as a site of struggle over these  questions: Who can produce knowledge? Whose worlds become legible? Which archives  endure? What research should refuse to know? And, how writing itself organizes relations of  power? 

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 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 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

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.