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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
An examination of anthropologically-oriented archaeology. Specific subjects to be considered will include the history of the subdiscipline, theoretical developments, field techniques, substantive contributions for the prehistoric and historic subareas and recent developments in theory and methodology. Bell.
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3.00 Credits
This course considers the emergence and evolution of Homo sapiens from fossil, archaeological, and genetic evidence. The class focuses on evolutionary mechanisms; selective pressures for key human biological and behavioral patterns, such as bipedalism, intelligence, altruism, learned behavior, and expressive culture; relations among prehuman species; the human diaspora; and modern human diversity, particularly “racial” variation. The course also examines theories from sociobiology and evolutionary psychology about motivations for modern human behaviors. Bell.
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3.00 Credits
This course addresses the fundamentals of cultural anthropology, including an exploration of the techniques of fieldwork and ethnography. Students examine the issues central to the anthropological study of culture: ritual, kinship, gender, sexuality, economic and political systems, and globalization and social change. Goluboff.
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3.00 Credits
Scholars still debate the appropriate relationship between social science and religion, with the two most extreme positions assuming the impossibility of a social science of religion, on the one hand, and denial of the validity of religious claims, on the other. Beginning with an examination of the fundamental debates regarding the nature and goals of social scientific inquiry, we examine classical and contemporary analyses of religion in psychology, sociology, and anthropology. The major social scientific paradigms - materialist, functionalist, and phenomenological - differ in their implications for understanding and explaining religious phenomena; they provide the context for consideration of questions of reductionism, explanation vs. understanding, insider vs. outsider orientations, and the nature and limits to truth claims made both by social scientists and religious devotees and scholars. Markowitz.
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3.00 Credits
Drawing on a combination of scholarly essays, native accounts, videos, guest lectures, and student presentations, this seminar examines the religious assumptions and practices that bind American Indian communities to their traditional homelands. The seminar elucidates and illustrates those principles concerning human environmental interactions common to most Indian tribes; focuses on the traditional beliefs and practices of a particular Indian community that reflected and reinforced the community’s understanding of the relationship to be maintained with the land and its creatures; and examines the moral and legal disputes that have arisen out of the very different presuppositions which Indians and non-Indians hold regarding the environment. Markowitz.
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3.00 Credits
An exploration of the human geography, demography, and social and cultural organization of East Asian societies, intended to help students develop a synoptic view of this important region. Readings include both classics of East Asian anthropology and recent scholarship; films and music add visual and aural dimensions. In addition to work with local library resources and traditional tools of scholarship, students use Geographic Information System (GIS) software to create maps, and develop and publish Web projects expressive of their particular interests. Staff.
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3.00 Credits
This course explores issues within historic American communities that ethnographers often investigate among living groups, including cultural values, religious ideologies, class structures, kinship networks, gender roles, and interethnic relations. Although the communities of interest in this course ceased to exist generations ago, many of their characteristic dynamics are accessible through such means as archaeology, architectural history, and the study of documents. Case studies include early English settlement in Plymouth, Massachusetts; the 18th-century plantation world of Virginia and South Carolina; the post-Revolutionary Maine frontier; and 19thcentury California. Bell.
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3.00 Credits
This course surveys anthropological approaches to understanding the intersections among language, culture and society. Topics include non-human communication systems, the origins of human language, and methods of establishing historical relationships among languages. Formal linguistic analysis receives some attention, but the greatest part of the course concerns language in sociocultural contexts. Examples of linguistic phenomena in ethnographic perspective are drawn from people around the world, including the Gullah, the Apache, and the Bedouin of Egypt. Bell.
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3.00 Credits
This course investigates violence and terror in historical and contemporary societies. We discuss the various causes, methods, and effects of violence and terror, and then look at how anthropologists have documented, challenged, and even condoned such processes. Goluboff.
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3.00 Credits
In this course, students learn how to apply anthropology and a wide range of other disciplinary techniques to understand and attempt to solve post-socialist problems. Students do independent research on issues relevant to their main areas of course work. We explore how ethnographic fieldwork and cultural theory provide key information about how people in Eurasia relate to daily conflicts through common past socialist experiences and new interactions with globalization, transnational movements, and the world market. Throughout the term, we discuss differences and similarities, advantages and disadvantages of various disciplinary approaches to key conflicts in the region. Topics include crime, the emerging marketplace, poverty, health, gender, and ethnic conflict. We study Eurasia via issues rather than geography, and we focus intensely on the transnational effects of wars in Chechnya and Afghanistan. The class reads material from anthropology and other disciplines and watches several documentaries. Goluboff.
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