|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Course Criteria
Add courses to your favorites to save, share, and find your best transfer school.
-
3.00 Credits
How do people change the world? They organize. Social movements mobilize to change (or defend) cultural meanings and political and economic relations. This course examines movements ranging from jihadists to anti-abortionists to inner-city activists to transnational environmentalists. We compare movement origins, strategies, and effects. We ask how power and meaning are intertwined in political action and in people's understandings of themselves; how violence and other tactics work as meaningful political instruments; and why social movements are challenging formal politics around the world today. Anthropological approaches to global disjunctures between democracy and violence are at the core of our course.
-
3.00 Credits
This course is about conflicts in which violent means are deployed and moralistic terms are invoked so as to give legitimacy to such means. The code words in the title are in quotes in order to emphasize they are used in public discourses rhetorically, for political effect. When particular social situations are disputed, each side deploys moralistic claims so as to clothe their actions and viewpoint with an aura of legitimacy and to enlist popular support. But when issues are contested, similar terms can be used by opposing sides with simlar but contrary intents: one person's "terrorist" is another person's "freedom fighter"; and note that certain radical Islamist groups specifically embrace Huntington's notion of the "clash of civilizations" (formulated for Western audiences) as grounds for their anti-Western posture. Rhetorical formulae such as these are promoted or scorned, embraced or renounced, for essentially strategic reasons. In this course, we examine some notorious situations of conflict in order to identify the particular ways that disputing sides have deployed violence and moralistic forms in their own interest-as when popular movements arise and clash with state power (e.g., the Tiananmen Square incident in China) or when coalitions with radical social agendas take form and brutalize neighbors (as in Yugoslavia in the 19902; Rwanda in 1994) or when widely supported public movements develop seemingly without coordination (the 2006 demonstrations against the King of Nepal), or when movements animated by a shared ambition to establish a non-statal political entity (such as Al Qaeda for the reinstitution of the caliphate) form across state boundaries with little coordinated leadership. Our emphasis falls on the ways that human collectivities deploy cultural forms-linguistic and rhetorical, artistic and representational-to give particular "readings" to social issues and to clothe activities (often brutal) with an appearance of legitimacy.
-
3.00 Credits
Same as AMCS 442
-
3.00 Credits
Students undertake research projects centering on the most fundamental demographic processes-fertility, mortality, and migration. The first section covers basic demographic methodology so that students understand how population data is generated and demographic statistics analyzed. Then, course readings include seminal theoretical insights by anthropologists on demographic processes. Meanwhile, students work toward the completion of a term paper in which they are expected to undertake some original research on a topic of their choice (e.g., new reproductive technologies; cross-cultural adoption; ethnicity and migration). Each assignment in this course is a component of the final term paper.
-
3.00 Credits
No other commonly recorded health indicator shows such great disparities between rich and poor nations as does maternal mortality. More than 500,000 women die each year around the world from complications of pregnancy and childbirth, but 99 percent of these deaths occur in impoverished, non-industrialized countries. This course examines the reasons for this stunning discrepancy, looking at the biological, social, political, and economic factors involved in maternal death. The course is conducted as a seminar based on detailed readings of relevant journal articles, group discussion, case studies, and class presentations. Prerequisite: Anthro 3621.
-
3.00 Credits
This course is an opportunity for upper-level undergraduate and graduate students to explore theoretical and ethnographic texts, which focus on the social categories of race, class, and gender. The purpose of this course is to interrogate our understanding of the meaning of such human variables across time and space. As the course title implies, we approach race, gender, and class as processes, and this requires that we focus on their historical and cultural peculiarities. This course asks students to move conceptually from the era of European colonialism and the invention of the modern conception of "race" to the U.S. Civil War period to the ascension of negritude as well as contemporary times. In a complementary fashion, to assert that, in fact, race, gender, and class do matter, requires students to investigate the diversity and complexity in various places, such as Brazil, Argentina, Martinique, South Africa, and the United States.
-
3.00 Credits
An exploration of how the interactions between culture and environment are mediated by local, national, and global politics. Topics include "overpopulation," agricultural intensification, Green Revolution, biotechnology, corporate agriculture, green movements, and organic farming. Each student prepares an in-depth research paper that may be presented to the class. Prerequisites: graduate standing, Anthro 361, or permission of instructor.
-
3.00 Credits
This class provides an overview and examination of intentional communities over the past 2,000 years and in various regions of the world. Intentional communities are groups of people who have come together to live cooperatively and communally in pursuit of their visions of a better society. We examine intentional communities past and present, foreign and domestic through the lenses of both scholarly treatments of intentional communities and accounts written by intentional community members. We move chronologically through time, beginning with the earliest intentional communities that scholars have identified and ending with a significant section on contemporary ecovillages and other sustainability-oriented intentional community movements. We also use various theoretical frameworks to guide our growing understanding of intentional communities. The class is in seminar format but includes short lectures, occasional videos, and at least one required field trip to an intentional community in or near St. Louis. An additional ethnographic internship credit opportunity involving primary research within intentional communities in or near St. Louis is available to anthropology majors who take the class, pending final budgetary approval.
-
3.00 Credits
No course description available.
-
3.00 Credits
The history of physical (or biological) anthropology are traced from Darwin's time to the present. Factors that influenced major theories and subfields of physical anthropology are discussed along with current directions.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Privacy Statement
|
Terms of Use
|
Institutional Membership Information
|
About AcademyOne
Copyright 2006 - 2024 AcademyOne, Inc.
|
|
|