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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
Native North American art existed for thousands of years and continues to be created today. Its original context was often sacred (both public and private) and/or political or decorative. Contact with Western Europeans and their art traditions along with the art traditions of Africans, Asians and South Americans beginning about A.D. 1600 and thereafter modified form, technique, and context of Native North American art. However, traditional form, techniques, and context continued through the centuries since 1600. The perception of this art also changed. Most frequently, until into the 20th century, the art of Native North Americans was viewed as craft by non-native North Americans and Europeans, but during the 20th century that view was modified. Native American artists also began to view their own art differently. This change occurred among artists working in traditional mediums as well as those producing art using non-traditional mediums. The collections of Native North American art curated at the Snite Museum exemplify the changing content, techniques, and contexts of this art. This course will allow students to work with our collections under direct supervision. The use of our collections will permit students to observe some of the changes in art which have occurred in the last hundred and fifty years. The students' final projects will include a visual presentation of a particular change in material, context, or technique which they have determined through research and direct examination of selected pieces from our collections. For this reason the course will be limited to 15 students and will be sometimes held in the Snite Museum, during hours when the museum is not usually open to the public. The culminating activity will be to create a small exhibit that will be displayed at the Snite opening sometime at the end of the semester.
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3.00 Credits
This class will explore the human capacity for war and for peace. The course will explore the many forms of war, from tribal conflicts through guerrilla warfare to conventional and nuclear war. It will also study societies without war, the place of war and peace in human society, whether violence is inherent in human nature or learned, and what the future of war and peace is likely to be on our planet.
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3.00 Credits
As the world of the 21st century globalizes, so too does crime. Millions of people and trillions of dollars circulate in illicit economies worldwide. This represents power blocks larger and more powerful than many of the world's countries. This class will look at what constitutes the illegal today, who is engaged in crime and corruption, and what kinds of economic, political and social powers they wield. It will also look at the societies and cultures of "outlaws." For example, internationalization has influenced crime in much the same ways that it has multinationals and nongovernmental organizations: criminal networks now span continents, forge trade agreements and hone foreign policies with other criminal organizations, and set up sophisticated systems of information, exchange, and control. Anthropology - with its studies of cultures - provides a dynamic approach to the illegal: what customs inform law abiders and criminals, what values guide their actions, what behaviors shape their worlds? The course will explore the many kinds and levels of criminality and corruption: how do we consider the differences (or similarities) among, for example, drug and arms smugglers, white collar corruption, gem runners or modern day slavers, and governmental or multinational corporate crime? What impact does each have on our world and in our lives? What solutions exist? Class is interactive in nature, and in addition to the normal reading and writing, students will do an anthropological class project on a topic of their choice concerning global crime and corruption.
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3.00 Credits
Anthropology enters a 21st century filled with far-reaching possibilities and dangerous new problems. To meet these challenges, to stay relevant, and to offer new understandings and solutions, anthropology needs to both assess its classic approaches and develop new innovative ones. Globalization. New forms of political and economic power and poverty. Changing patterns and crises of health, environment, and development. Violence, and novel ways of belonging. Transformations in our very sense of identity (from gender through belief to ethnicity), and perhaps our thinking, our epistemes. Sheer complexity. Theoretical breakthroughs. Scheper-Hughes calls for an engaged anthropology, Paul Farmer for a meaningful one. Bourgois delves into the raw realities of life with dignity, and Mbembe into emerging values of self and society. Das calls for vibrant theory - one that senses as well as has sense, and Rabinow and Marcus for an anthropology of the contemporary - how do we as anthropologists best meet the changing terrains of self and world unfolding today?
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3.00 Credits
The ultimate goal of this course is for students, together, to produce a book on the culture and student life of Notre Dame. In doing this project, students will learn all the core skills of a practicing anthropologist: ethnography/research, analysis, exploration of theory, professional writing, and the production of a polished work of anthropology worthy of being in a library. This work will be done as a group - while each student will be responsible for developing a particular topic for the book, the class as a whole will decide how the book should be developed and produced.
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3.00 Credits
This course looks at some of the ways humans do things with words. Topics include religious language; silence; politeness and sincerity; truth, deception, lying, and cheating; linguistic variety, identity, and stereotypes; moral evaluations made of language; and language used for power and solidarity.
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3.00 Credits
While archaeology is most famous for investigating the temples and tombs of "lost civilizations," the vast majority of the archaeological record encompasses the material traces of ordinary people in their everyday lives. In this course, students will explore the archaeological remains of peoples' houses, daily tasks, deaths, jobs, communities, and religions. We will pay particular attention to how archaeologists reconstruct the social, economic, ritual, and political fabric of daily life in the archaeological past, and thus will be drawing on anthropological frameworks for understanding issues of identity, gender, sexuality, race, mortuary practices, constructing communities, and social differentiation.
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3.00 Credits
In this course, we will explore human relationships to the built environment and the complex ways in which people consciously and unconsciously shape the world around them. Cultural landscapes are not empty spaces, but rather places we imbue with meaning and significance. We are particularly interested in the ways in which the built environment has worked as an agent of cultural power as well as how social relations (notably class, gender, and ethnicity) have been codified and reproduced through landscapes. We will examine how people perceive, experience, and contextualize social spaces at the intersection of symbolic processes, senses of place, memory, and identity formation as well as how these change through time and across space. As an interdisciplinary endeavor, we will draw from history, geography, art, environmental science, architecture, landscape studies, anthropology, and urban planning, among other disciplines. Students will undertake a significant original research project that investigates the human experience through space, place, and landscape.
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3.00 Credits
An introduction to the history, philosophy, and professional practices of museums. It includes an examination of the ethical and practical issues of museum work, including current controversies, through readings, discussions, and hands-on experience. Emphasis is on the role of anthropologists in museums and the exhibition of non-Western European art in museums, which focus on art, ethnography, or history. Students will work individually and collaboratively on projects, including an exhibition for display within the anthropology department.
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3.00 Credits
This will be an archaeology lab class that will provide an activity-based setting to explore the meanings and interpretations of archaeological artifacts. It will provide an in-depth introduction to basic laboratory methods for the organization, curation, and analysis of artifacts such as pottery, stone tools, metals, soil samples, and floral and faunal remains. Lab exercises will introduce course concepts that students will use to analyze a small collection of artifacts from an archaeological site.
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