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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
Climate change has been occurring throughout Earth's history. Inherent processes such as the planet's tectonic activity, the Earth's relationship to the Sun and other extraterrestrial bodies, as well as atmospheric and hydrological processes have dictated an ever-changing climate pattern over a variety of time scales. However, the relatively recent evolution and expansion of humans around the globe has cast climate change in a new light. Humans are altering the atmosphere in an unprecedented manner, and stand to suffer greatly from even relatively minor alterations in climate. This course will examine several historical and recent examples of how human modification of an environment and/or climate led to the collapse of cities to civilizations. In addition to the cultural examples, students will be introduced to the methods and review the evidence used to study climate changes of the past, and will examine the data being used to forecast climate change into the future.
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3.00 Credits
A cross-cultural investigation of women's lives in hunter-gatherer, nomadic, horticultural, agricultural, industrial, and developing societies. Examines the wide variation in: marriage (polygamy, polyandry), reproduction (menstrual taboos, breast feeding), religion (shaman, witches, goddesses), and the sexual division of labor. Explores current topics, including female circumcision, honor killings, dowry murders, female infanticide, and cultural relativism vis-a-vis human rights.
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3.00 Credits
This course studies change and continuity in the cultures and histories of North America's First Nations from the fifteenth century until modern times.
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3.00 Credits
What makes a good friend? Why do we become friends with some people but not others? Do people in all societies make friends in the same way? Will the Internet change how friendship function? Despite the importance of friendship in human social life (it is equally important as kinship and gender for structuring relationship), the concept has received little attention from anthropologists. This course introduces students to the diversity and similarities of friendship styles found throughout the world.
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3.00 Credits
This course examines contemporary life in the Mediterranean region with an emphasis on communication and flow of goods, people, and ideas across the Mediterranean Sea. Using an anthropological perspective informed by history, the course analyzes such issues as kinship and family, politics, ethnicity, labor migration, and religious beliefs in Mediterranean cultures.
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3.00 Credits
Within the last two decades, Europe has seen the end of the Cold War, civil wars, the rise of new nation-states, and an enlargement of the European Union, all of which resulted in large movements of people across national boundaries as well as across the borders of Europe. Taking an anthropological perspective informed by history, this course examines how political, economic, and cultural processes have impacted the lives of the people in contemporary Europe.
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3.00 Credits
This course is an introduction to the ethnography of the Andean region. The lives of its people, following the continuity of their cultures from the past to the present, will be studied. Andean family life, economy, religion, politics and art will be explored.
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3.00 Credits
How does the mind shape culture? How does culture shape the mind? An introduction to language and symbolism, and to human concepts -- of space and time, of living things and supernatural beings, of mind and emotion -- across cultures.
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3.00 Credits
Additional work required of graduate students. This course reviews the classic theories, models, and ethnographies in anthropology as well as the recent findings on symbolic communication in anthropology, archaeology, linguistics, and cognitive studies with examples ranging from prehistory to the contemporary Western culture. Course examines the symbolism of colors, food, animals, human body, gender, art, myth, ritual, and politics across cultures, as well as the symbolic meanings in the worldviews of the native Pueblos of the American Southwest, China, India, Mexico, central and South Africa, Iceland, Jewish culture, Polynesia, and Western cultures.
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3.00 Credits
Murder, war, capital punishment, human sacrifice: why people resort to violence, and how they avoid it, in societies ranging from tribunal New Guinea to the modern United States.
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