|
|
Course Criteria
Add courses to your favorites to save, share, and find your best transfer school.
-
4.00 Credits
Introduces students to the long-standing and complex connection between religious practices and various media. Analyzes how human hearing, vision, and the performing body have been used historically to express and maintain religious life through music, voice, images, words, and rituals. Spends time on more recent electronic media such as cassette, film, television, video, and the Internet. Students should note that an anthropological/historical perspective on studying religion is pursued in the course.
-
4.00 Credits
Explores the various hypotheses offered for the evolution of language. Perspectives from different disciplines are discussed. Topics include human evolution and the study of fossil humans, animal and primate behavior and communication, anatomy of the vocal tract, neuroanatomy, language acquisition, language universals, the origins and diversification of modern languages, and the origins of writing.
-
4.00 Credits
Introduces contemporary archaeology, its theories, practices, and early societies and cultures. Examines current methodological and theoretical viewpoints of archaeological scholarship within the discipline of anthropology. Focuses on key transformations in cultural evolution, such as the origins of modern humans, the emergence of food production, and the development of complex societies, urbanism, and early states. Explores gender roles, landscapes and settlements, technologies, art, cognitive systems, urbanism, and state formation.
-
4.00 Credits
Examines the cultural nature of basic beliefs and values manifested in both simple and complex societies. Discussion of time and space, causality, myth, prophecy and divination, witchcraft and magic, and mysticism.
-
4.00 Credits
Examines witchcraft through interdisciplinary study, including how theories of causation and reality are modified by culture and society and the way that social theorists have judged witchcraft in relation to social stability, conflict, and change. Considers both nonliterate, non-Western examples and cases from Europe and New England where historians have made extensive use of anthropological techniques.
-
4.00 Credits
We spend a great deal of our time talking: whether face-to-face, on the phone, texting, or via another communicative technology, our feelings and ideas are constantly being exchanged. Investigates how conversation shapes our lives in culturally and linguistically diverse urban communities and presents the theories and methods for analyzing the roles that talk plays in medical, work, and school settings, where miscommunication frequently occurs.
-
4.00 Credits
Analyzes and assesses selected key issues in the discipline theoretically, politically, and epistemologically.
-
4.00 Credits
Human beings have always grappled with some notion of identity, asking questions about who they are, about who others distinguished from themselves are, and about the ways that perceived similarities and differences are meaningful and important (or not) in social relationships. Examines how historical, social, and cultural contexts shape the forms that identities take, looking in particular at ideas about race and racial identity. We work with two premises: (1) race must be understood in relation to other identity categories: gender, class, sexuality, ethnicity, and so on, and (2) race is expressed in both obvious and subtle ways; thus, racial identity is implicit as well as explicitly expressed. We also consider whether race must necessarily be understood as stigma; discuss nonfiction, fiction, and films; and may visit public exhibitions.
-
4.00 Credits
Critically examines and evaluates the various approaches to studying and interpreting different community formations. Examines different notions of "community" through a variety of disciplinary lenses. Readings are drawn from anthropology, history, feminist studies, cultural studies, ethnic studies, and philosophy. Students are encouraged to examine these texts both as theoretical representations of "community" as well as historically embedded artifacts that are part of the larger machinery in the production of knowledge.
-
4.00 Credits
Biological anthropology examines the evolutionary history and adaptability of humans and our ancestors. Forensic anthropology is an applied subfield of biological anthropology that provides expert analysis of the skeleton in a medicolegal setting by utilizing methods developed in skeletal biology, archaeology, and the forensic sciences. Forensic anthropologists play critical roles in identifying victims of mass fatalities (such as the World Trade Center and Oklahoma City bombings), in investigating homicides (such as identifying the Russian tsar's family), and in distinguishing cause of death. The course examines how forensic anthropologists approach modern and historic crimes in the laboratory and the field. Students are introduced to the underlying theory and the applied techniques that forensic anthropologists use to recover and identify individuals and assess cause of death.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|