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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
This capstone seminar combines intensive discussion and individual research. The first half of the semester will be dedicated to the discussion of a social issue central to the concerns of both anthropology and sociology. The class will meet with the instructor in spring 2010 to decide on that topic. Then, in the second half of the semester, students will pursue independent, original projects and produce a major term paper. Toward the end of the semester, students will present their projects to the seminar.
Prerequisite:
Senior Anthropology and Sociology majors or permission of instructor; students who are not senior majors in anthropology or sociology are admitted to this course only on the instructor's permission
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3.00 Credits
Is there such a thing as "human nature"? Why have human societies developed such a bewildering range of customs to deal with problems common to people everywhere? This course addresses these questions by introducing students to the comparative study of human social life and culture. Topics surveyed in the course include economics, language and thought, kinship and marriage, law and politics, and the wide variations in human belief systems, including religions. The course also considers the ways that anthropology, a discipline that was until recently practiced almost exclusively by Westerners, approaches other societies in search of insights on our own customs and values. Ethnographic descriptions of both "simple" tribal societies and complex modern ones are a prominent part of the readings. This course explores differences and similarities between cultures and societies and ways in which they have interacted and responded to one another in the past.
Prerequisite:
First-year students and sophomores
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3.00 Credits
Public health focuses on improving health at the level of individuals, communities, or populations. It seeks to understand both individual and collective behaviors that shape health outcomes in the world today. This class introduces students to core concepts and methods within the fields of public and global health. It investigates the interrelationship of individual and social choices with demographic and biological factors in producing health outcomes. We look at the pathology and epidemiology of the major diseases and health disparities in the world today, focusing as much on health equity as on the social and cultural constructions of illness, disease, and health-seeking behaviors. We explore several case studies to understand the contributing causes of and policy initiatives around the major crises in global health today including HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, and maternal mortality. The course involves multiple disciplinary perspectives including anthropology, sociology, economics, biology, bioethics, and political science. By the end of the semester, we will understand what creates effective public health policy for individuals as well as communities. How does one reconcile the competing moral, social, and human rights claims in shaping health policies and practices at a variety of levels?
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3.00 Credits
Although the term "music theater" came to prominence in the twentieth-century, expressive forms that synthesize the verbal, plastic, kinesthetic and illusionary arts have existed since antiquity. This is true across cultures worldwide. From Africa to the Americas, Europe, Asia and the Middle East, music, narrative, masquerading, puppetry, costuming, dance and, more recently, electronic media have been integrated in unique ways, giving humankind a crucial apparatus for ritual enactment, religious expression, moral instruction, entertainment and activism. This course surveys a select range of musical-theatrical traditions, including ancient Greek drama, Indian Sanskrit plays, Beijing opera, Japanese Noh theater, Yoruba alarinjo theater, Bollywood and Broadway musicals. We will investigate the role of music theater in society, giving attention to the historical, economic and political contexts that have fostered distinctive genre manifestations. As an EDI course, the overarching aims of the class will be to explore the relationship between ideology and aesthetics, and the role of performance in constructing representations of self and other.
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3.00 Credits
Over the centuries, philosophers and historians have asked how societies evolved from simple hunter-gatherer bands to complex urban civilizations. Human prehistory and history have shown the repeated cycles of the rise, expansion and collapse of early civilizations in both the Old and New World. What do the similarities and differences in the development of these first civilizations tell us about the nature of societal change, civilization and the state, and human society itself? The course will examine these issues through an introductory survey of the earliest civilizations in Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, Mesoamerica and South America. Classical and modern theories on the nature, origin, and development of the state will be reviewed in light of the archaeological evidence.
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3.00 Credits
An introduction to the indigenous cultural heritage of Central and South America. After a brief review of Latin-American prehistory, the course will consider such issues as the demographic and political impact of the Conquest; the economic, social, and religious life of contemporary Indian and peasant communities; and the dynamics of cultural redefinition and survival in the turbulent political arena of the modern Latin-American state.
Prerequisite:
Open to first-year students
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3.00 Credits
India's dramatic rise to global prominence has captured public attention. In newspapers, magazines, and popular books, we read about economic prosperity, growing cities, and new consumers. In this course, we will investigate the social issues behind these headlines by drawing on ethnographic accounts of contemporary life in India. Case studies will provide us with nuanced perspectives on issues such as migration, outsourcing, consumption, and economic development and enable us to re-consider popular and scholarly characterizations of globalization. As we explore the re-configurations of politics, power, and social life that have occurred since economic liberalization began in the early 1990s, we will tease apart the complex relationships between global economic integration and socio-cultural change. We will investigate how globalization presents possibilities for social mobility and political change as well as for exploitation along existing fault lines of inequality and exclusion. Course materials will include ethnographic case studies, documentary films, commercial films, and items from contemporary Indian media. Lectures will contextualize this material by providing background on India's history, cultural traditions, and politics.
Prerequisite:
Open to all
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3.00 Credits
This course examines the relationship between body, gender, and religion or community in South Asia, using three countries--India, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh--and three major religions--Induism, Buddhism, and Islam--as its focus. It begins by unpacking the critical theories in which the human body serves as map for society and vice versa. It then examines the South Asian discourses linking body with nation, population, or purity. It explores a South Asian sociology of the body that occasions solidarity as well as social suffering and structural violence. Along the way, it looks at a diverse set of practices that count or control bodies to produce social cohesion including yoga, sex selection, family planning, monasticism, and fundamentalism. The body emerges as a lens through which to view the production of a politics of identity as much as fragmentation or social hierarchy.
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3.00 Credits
The past decade has seen a revival of Big History in the form of studies of large-scale, persistent patterns in human cultural development. This interdisciplinary tutorial draws on the insights of Big History by bringing together evolutionary thought and complexity theory to consider the emergence of recognizably human social behavior in the distant past, the impact of such innovations as language, tool-making, and ritual on human adaptation, and the circumstances that eventually led to the domestication of plants and animals and the rise of ranked societies and social inequality. Readings will include works by the historian David Christian, the philosopher Daniel Dennett, and the physical anthropologist Barbara King, among others. Questions to be considered in the tutorial include: What is the evolutionary significance of religion? Why did human populations shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture even though farming is risky and requires much more work? What can complexity theory tell us about the trajectory of human societies as the global population increases? How plausible is that claim that digital technologies and sophisticated prosthetics are destined to transform us into a posthuman species?
Prerequisite:
But prior exposure to anthropology and evolutionary theory is desirable
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3.00 Credits
We will address two central questions with which scholars of urban life have wrestled. First, does city life engender certain kinds of social relationships? And second, can one reshape society by changing the physical spaces people inhabit? To answer the first question, we will read classic theories about urban life and compare them to ethnographic case studies, paying close attention to the question of whether urban living leads to the breakdown of traditional social ties and to the production of "modern" rationalities. To answer the second question, we will examine the politics of urban restructuring, studying struggles over urban space to understand different constellations of power from the colonial era to the globalizing present. We will tease out the moral, racial, and modernist ideologies that have underpinned both colonial and postcolonial urban projects, as well as the relationships between those ideologies and scholarly theories of the city. In the final section of the course, we will focus on the repositioning of cities as sites of capital investment, global economic integration, and elite consumption in the contemporary era. We will examine the social and aesthetic visions that have inspired attempts to produce "World Cities" as well as the implications of urban restructuring for the politics of citizenship, access to urban services, and the production of inequality.
Prerequisite:
Open to all students
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