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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
This class will introduce students to the diversity, distribution, and abundance of nonhuman primates and explore the impact that human behavior can have on non-human primate populations. We will begin by discussing the top 25 most endangered primates; their behavior and ecology, biogeography, and reasons why it is classified as endangered. At this point, each student will be assigned one of these species as their 'focus' for the rest of the semester. The course will then examine the various threats facing primate populations today, the ways that scientists define and monitor threatened/endangered populations, and the steps that are being taken to increase likelihood of their survival. For each topic addressed, each student will be responsible for reporting on how this topic specifically relates to their focal species. At the end of the semester, students will write a term paper discussing the current conservation status of their focal species and the programs being implemented to prevent/delay its extinction.
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3.00 Credits
While issues of race and racism are pervasive in our society, most people know surprisingly little about the social, biological, political, and historical factors at play. Race is simultaneously a very real social construct and a very artificial biological one. How can this be? Why do we care so much about classifications/divisions of humanity? This course will tackle what race is and what it is not from an anthropological perspective. We will learn about the biology of human difference and similarity, how societies view such similarities and differences, how our social and scientific histories create these structures, and why this knowledge is both extremely important and too infrequently discussed.
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3.00 Credits
In this course, students will explore central questions within biological anthropology from a genetic perspective. The class will cover basic principles of molecular and population genetics. Additionally, students will learn how molecular and population genetics are applied to anthropological issues. Topics to be covered include: human origins, peopling of world, and human genetic diversity and disease.
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3.00 Credits
As humans populated the earth they were exposed to a variety of environmental pressures that forced people to adapt in order to survive. Many of these adaptations were behavioral or cultural changes. However, some adaptations were biological changes. While a number of these biological adaptations were advantageous, other biological adaptations have actually led to disease. This course will use an evolutionary perspective to focus on biological adaptations. Students will learn basic principles of genetics and epidemiology and will examine disease resistance/susceptibility in addition to infectious and chronic disease. Overall, this course will explore how human genetic variation has contributed to both our survival and demise.
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3.00 Credits
Explores aspects of infant biology and socio-emotional development in relationship to western childcare practices and parenting. Western pediatric approaches to infancy and parenting are evaluated in light of western cultural history and cross-cultural, human evolutionary and developmental data. A variety of mammals are included as a comparative background to explore the relationships between infant physiology, mental and physical health and contemporary infant care giving concepts.
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3.00 Credits
This class considers three closely related genres of human behavior: play, sport and ritual. The class will begin by considering the concept of blurred genres -- forms of behavior which are considered quite distinct, but which have a strong family resemblance. We then consider child's play as a genre of performance, reading essays on play by noted psychologists and anthropologists. Weeks three and four will turn to key essays about games and sports, considering not only what makes sporting games a distinct genre of activity, but what features link games to child's play and eventually to ritual. Finally, we turn to the kind of performances we call ritual, once again considering them as distinctive variations on many of the themes we saw in both play and sports. The course includes several more general readings linking all three genres, and ends with Victor Turner's seminal essay which attempts to tie all three genres together using his famous concept of liminality.
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3.00 Credits
This course offers a survey of the major groups with an emphasis on their forms of social organization, their political and economic patterns, and their technological, religious, and artistic realms. Beginning with archaeological and linguistic evidence that traces the process by which the American Indians came to occupy the continent, the presentation of material will then follow the classical "culture area" paradigm. This overview recognizes a set of 11 basic divisions such as Eastern Woodlands, the Great Plains, and the Northwest Coast.
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3.00 Credits
What is our environment? What is our role within our surroundings? How do our actions affect ecological landscapes, and people's livelihoods across the globe? How does our reliance of fossil fuels lead to catastrophes such as Hurricane Katrina? What - if anything - does it mean to be "green?" This course will address these and other questions through the use of critically applied anthropology. We will explore the interaction of local peoples and cultures with natural and man-made ecosystems. We will focus equally on traditional environmental knowledge held by small-scale communities as on the usage of the environment by the industrial world. This course will focus on theory and major environmental questions, problems, and possible solutions illustrated by various case studies from different parts of the world. Topics to be discussed include intellectual property rights, poverty and environmental health and justice, economic development, health and emerging disease, and ethno- and eco-tourism. Through readings, films, discussions, and independent research students will be able to critically understand the complexity surrounding humans' place within the environment.
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3.00 Credits
The study of religious beliefs and practices in tribal and peasant societies emphasizing myths, ritual, symbolism, and magic as ways of explaining man's place in the universe. Concepts of purity and pollution, the sacred and the profane, and types of ritual specialists and their relation to social structure will also be examined.
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3.00 Credits
Surveys Islamic civilization, the most important cultural influence in the Middle East, as context for discussion of the life of Middle Eastern peoples. Topics include the foundations of Islam, Muslim ethics, Sunni-Shi'a split, religious pilgrimage, ethnicity, ecological adaptations, religious brotherhoods and sisterhoods, Sufism, and concepts of the state.
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