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ANTH 201 - Topics in Contemporary Anthropology

Bodies, Spaces, Subjectivities
This course is designed to be a gateway course in cultural-phenomenological anthropology geared toward first- and second-year students. It introduces basic concepts and methods in anthropology through a sustained attention to human bodies as the preeminent space of subject making in different cultural contexts. Drawing on phenomenology, practice theory, urban studies, performance studies, and gender theory, the course approaches culture as a form of doing rather than of being, as first and foremost a set of embodied, material practices and cultivated dispositions. It explores both how corporeality connects people with others and their environments, and how, in the process, bodies become objects of individual attention and social action. Readings connect classics in social theory (Merleau-Ponty, Schutz, Bourdieu, Simmel, Goffman) with canonical anthropological texts (Boas, Sapir, Mauss, Gluckman, Sahlins), and ethnographies focusing on particular forms of embodiment and space making in the Americas, Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and Oceania. Topics include dwelling, working, playing, learning, making, modifying, exchanging, and contesting. Students will partner to conduct small fieldwork projects in the Portland area, learning basic qualitative methods in the process.

Decolonizing Archaeology
What do archaeologists do and what questions can archaeology answer? This introduction to archaeology course reviews the history, goals, theories, and methods of the discipline. Through a study of material culture and references to case studies from all over the world, we will review periods of human history and culture ranging from prehistory to the present using a decolonizing framework. We will unpack the colonial and imperialist histories of archaeology while highlighting the positive ways in which it has been practiced. We will also discuss how paleoarchaeologists investigate ancient human histories, zooarchaeologists study animal remains, archaeobotanists examine plant remains, and bioarchaeologists investigate ancestral remains. Students will be encouraged to draw on archaeological analyses from around the world to consider the ways in which identity, technology, diet, economy, trade, race, class, and gender are investigated archaeologically.

Food and Agriculture
Food and agriculture are fundamental to human existence. As such, they offer a powerful means to trace socio-cultural diversity, interaction, and circulation across space and time. In this course, we will examine the cultural, political, ecological, and material dimensions of food production, circulation, distribution, and consumption. From research on the challenges and possibilities of small-scale farming to in-depth investigations of industrialized agricultural systems, ethnographic studies of food and agriculture have been notably on the rise. Through close engagement with this growing body of work, we will consider food and agriculture as a lens through which to tackle broader issues such as labor, exploitation, migration, colonialism, race, class, corporate and state power, and multispecies relations. The course will also explore how Black and Indigenous communities, along with social movements and grassroots initiatives, engage in radically different agroecological practices and build alternative agro-food networks.

Global Political Ecology
This course is designed to be a gateway course in the anthropology of political ecology geared toward first- and second-year students. Despite enormous scientific and political efforts, scientists and activists have found themselves unable to bring about the political changes that might reverse climate change and environmental degradation. The degradation of earth's environment has been caused by humans, but somehow humans have not been able to stop or reverse the social processes that cause this degradation. This course examines case studies of environmental degradation at multiple scales, from Superfund sites in Oregon to deforestation in the Amazon to global climate change, to three ends: to explore fundamental questions in social theory about the relationship between humans and the world, to understand why coordinated scientific and political efforts to prevent environmental degradation have tended to fail, and to think through new political and environmental interventions that might succeed. The course readings are drawn from both environmental science and anthropology, and one of the tasks of the course is to introduce students to anthropology through the multiple ways in which the discipline has dealt with knowledge produced in the natural sciences. By putting environmental science in conversation with anthropology, we will also think through ways to reconcile the disciplines in political practice.

Language, Culture, Power - Website
This course is designed to be a gateway course in linguistic anthropology geared toward first- and second-year students. Language permeates our lives, identities, and relationships, yet most of us take it for granted. This course introduces students to some of the foundational concepts, methods, and issues addressed in linguistic anthropology. Starting with the basic premise that language, thought, and culture are inextricably intertwined in practice, we take a fundamentally comparative and global perspective on the study of language. We will consider language not as a simple means of communication, but as a medium through which values, subjectivities, and sociopolitical relationships are created and transformed. We ask: How do differences in language affect how we think and act? How do people do things with language, and how does this vary across cultures, times, and places? How does linguistic communication interact with nonverbal or embodied forms of communication? What ideologies of language shape our understandings of difference and hierarchy? In exploring answers to these questions, we will draw on media resources, natural language examples, and recent ethnographic analyses from around the world to consider the ways in which language is implicated in power struggles within specific domains of social relationships (race, class, gender, sexuality) and institutions (education, medicine, law, immigration, electoral politics).

ANTH 211 - Introduction to Anthropology: History, Theory, Method

An introduction to the history, theory, methods, and subject matter of the field of social and cultural anthropology. Students become familiar with the conceptual framework of the discipline and with some of its techniques of research and interpretation. Anthropology is considered in its role as a social science and as a discipline with ties to the humanities and natural sciences. Emphasis is on close integration of analytic abstractions with empirical particulars.

ANTH 212 - Archaeological Practice & Interpretation

This course will examine the different kinds of methods archaeologists use and the frameworks they apply to draw interpretations about past people through archaeological evidence. As the study of human societies through material culture, archaeology takes on a variety of different approaches to understand issues such as ethnicity, health, belief, violence, environment, exchange, gender, or power in both the ancient and more recent past. We will cover standard and innovative archaeological methods to advance student understanding of how archaeology is practiced. We will discuss in depth how to create inferences about ancient worlds by interpreting archaeological materials through different frameworks including agency, political ecology, feminist & queer theories, landscape, materiality, and Black & Indigenous archaeologies. This course prepares students for more advanced coursework in archaeology and exposes students to more experiential learning by engaging with a variety of materials such as ceramics, bones, stone tools, architecture, soil, plants and seeds. 

ANTH 300 - African Technoscience

In the Global North, Africans frequently appear as the beneficiaries and consumers of global flows of science and technology or, conversely, science and technology's misusers and refusers. Rarely do they figure as its authors, producers, or animators. This course interrogates the conditions of possibility for African technoscience.ÌýWhat do the key themes of the anthropology of science - the politics of knowledge production, nature as a site of investigation, the role of the state in shaping scientific infrastructures - look like when viewed from the African continent? What is at stake in claiming a particularly African logic, or in insisting on the rationality of witchcraft? Foregrounding the work of African anthropologists and historians, this course will examine Africans'Ìýparticipation in and contestation of science as a practice of knowledge production, as a technique of colonial governance, as a site of anti-colonial resistance, as a tool of post-colonial nation-building, and as a potential instrument of decolonization. Drawn from across sub-Saharan Africa, our readings will analyze knowledge production practices such as molecular biology, geology, mathematics, and anthropology while also grappling with how the boundaries of these practices have emerged and the people, objects, and forms of knowledge that exceed those boundaries.

ANTH 305 - Musical Ethnography

See MUS 305Ìýfor description.

ANTH 320 - Social Movements, Protests, and Historical Change in South Asia

The Arab uprisings, the Black Lives Matter movement, the ongoing student movement in India, and the rise of far-right movements in the United States and elsewhere have given a new urgency to an examination of the tactics and possibilities of mass movements and protests: How and why do large groups of people come together to protest? When and how do some people and issues become political, and when and how do they not? How and when are these movements successful in achieving their aims? What social, cultural, and political effects do they have beyond their explicit aims? How, finally, do these movements interact with existing state and legal structures, whether antagonistically or through participation and engagement? By examining South Asian social movements with a focus on India, this conference analyzes current and historical attempts to reconfigure the relationships between people, laws, and states. In the process, the conference engages with challenges facing anthropology in theorizing historical change and in finding methodologies suited to large- and multi-scaled social processes. South Asia, with its vast scale and its complex and constantly shifting political landscape, is both an ideal and an important site for these inquiries. This conference also serves as an introduction to the anthropology of South Asia. It begins with a historical and theoretical consideration of the play of domination and hegemony in the colonial period, moves to a study of nationalist movements in India and Bangladesh, and then draws on the theoretical frameworks studied in the beginning of the semester to consider a range of contemporary social movements, including the Indian Maoist uprising, Dalit and anticaste movements, and the Sri Lankan Civil War. This course asks what an anthropological approach to the specific and local can bring to the study of politics, and what a study of large-scale movements can bring to anthropological understandings of historical change.

ANTH 324 - Sport and Society

Sports are deeply entangled with and imbricated in social processes, cultural institutions, and everyday life across much of the globe. The course approaches sports play as a set of embodied practices and performances, as a primary site for the reproduction and innovation of fundamental categories of gender/sex/sexuality, class, race/ethnicity, and nationality. Through case studies of situated sporting practices (notably football/soccer, cricket/baseball, basketball, bodybuilding, boxing, capoeira, skateboarding, and parkour), we will examine how colonial legacies are literally embodied in contemporary forms of urban space, nationalism, and globalization.

ANTH 330 - Decolonizing Material Culture and Museums

What is material culture? How do people relate to the world through tangible and intangible heritage? How do museums navigate meaning making in their exhibits? This course explores the various active and recursive roles of "things" in shaping social worlds and sharing public stories. The goal of the course is to attain familiarity with museology and the theoretical perspectives therein. We will discuss the various critical perspectives on materiality and its role in museum interpretation. This course also explores historic and recent developments in museum practice, includingÌýthe impacts of salvage ethnography, the rise of digitization, and the recognition of the rights of Indigenous peoples in museums.

ANTH 333 - Local and Global Indigenous Archaeologies

Colonial perspectives about hierarchies of human worth and worldviews shaped the creation of archaeology, and modern archaeologists are grappling with this legacy. This unit encourages students to explore the impacts of colonialism on the discipline and consider how archaeologists are taking steps to decolonize their methods and theories locally and globally. In focusing on both the global legacies of colonialism and the continued sociopolitical movements of Indigenous people, this class will encourage a broad perspective on Indigenous archaeologies through the use of place-based and theoretical discussions. This course expands on foundational archaeological concepts and key theoretical approaches of Indigenous scholars from across the globe. As part of this course, students will be asked to recognize the impacts of colonialism and imperialism and how Indigenous peoples enact sovereignty and self-determination. Students will lead class activities based on relevant case studies and archaeological sites in addition to creating written or podcast-style reflections based on weekly readings.

ANTH 335 - Digitizing the Past: Applied Archaeological Digital Heritage

Archaeological methodologies are ever-changing in today's world. Old ways of recording and interpreting archaeological data are being replaced by digital and computational methods. This course draws on visual approaches in anthropology and media studies to understand digital heritage practices in archaeology. We will survey digital tools and methods in analyzing the past, acquire a practical skill set, and discuss the challenges and opportunities of digital heritage applications in archaeology. We will cover issues of subjectivity, marginalization, sustainability, situated knowledge, ethnographic authority, and meaning making embodied in visual forms of communication and dataset management. In this course you will learn how to use a DSLR camera to compose photographs and create 3D models.

ANTH 336 - Anthropology through Morocco

Since the 1920s, Morocco has been a repeated site for ethnographic investigation, a locus classicus for the elaboration of social theory, and a central region in what Bernard Cohn has famously termed "Anthropologyland."Ìý This course explores the conditions underwriting such centrality, examining the history of ethnographic writing on Morocco from Arab socio-geography through European travel narratives to colonial ethnology and American anthropology.Ìý Through a close reading of key ethnographies from different time periods, students will not only achieve a nuanced understanding of the culture, social structure, religion, politics, and history of Morocco, but will also review key movements in anthropological thought: structural functionalism, structuralism, symbolic anthropology, political ecology, post-structuralism, reflexive postmodernism, and globalization.

ANTH 338 - Archaeology of the Andes

This course traces the rich and dynamic histories of the people, societies, and cultures of the Andes. Spanning from the arid desert shores of the Pacific, across rocky, snow-capped peaks and wind-swept alpine grasslands, to the lush mist-covered slopes of Amazonian rainforest, the Andean region of South America encompasses a diversity of environments and cultures. Since time immemorial, Indigenous Andeans shaped the world around them, while the geographies and ecologies of the Andes influenced every part of human life.ÌýFollowing a chronological timeline, this course uses primarily archaeological evidence, as well as historic documents, ethnographic accounts, and descendant narratives, to introduce students to Andean cultures through a critical lens. This course provides a comprehensive overview of human histories in the Andes: we review sites dating to nearly 15,000 years ago, explore the emergence of powerful civilizations, learn of Indigenous and Afro-Andean resistance during European colonialism, and examine how ancient Andean cultural identities are celebrated today. The course is structured around key topics that are intended to expose students to 1) the chronology of Andean civilizations, 2) the diversity of cultures across the region, 3) the materials archaeologists use to understand the past, and 4) critical themes and debates specific to the field of Andean archaeology, including domestication and foodways, plant medicines and psychoactive substances, gender identities and sexual diversity, ritualized violence and warfare, body modification and mummification, the art of textiles and weaving, architecture and the build environment, biotic entities and non-human agency, among other subjects. The course is designed to offer experiential learning opportunities through mixed media assignments, where students can practice methods and apply theories to reconstruct our understanding of the Andean past through material remains. Students will create maps and recipes, analyze objects and funerary assemblages available through digital archives, interpret architectural images, and explore their own interests through an independent project on an Andean site. Visually striking lectures, videos, music, texts, among other educational materials, are interwoven to expand students' knowledge of the Andean past that moulded descendant communities across Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Bolivia, Chile and Argentina today.Ìý

ANTH 339 - Ecological Archaeology

This course will introduce students to anthropological and archaeological approaches to study human-environment relationships in the distant past. We will cover a range of topics from the reconstruction of paleoenvironments in ancient worlds to centering non-human agency in archaeological study. Methodologically, the course will focus on toolkits that allow archaeologists to examine interactions between people and the environment, such as landscape archaeology, archaeobotany, geoarchaeology, dendrology, zooarchaeology, and paleoclimatology. However, we will also weave these Eurowestern scientific approaches with Indigenous, descendant and local knowledges to understand how practices like oral histories, placenames or ethnobotany inform archaeological research. This course will allow students to grasp how past people related with biotic or geotic beings like plants, animals, mountains, minerals and waterways.

ANTH 341 - Medical Anthropology

This course will consider the ways in which medical anthropology has historically been influenced by debates within the discipline of anthropology as well as by broader social and political movements. Particular emphasis will be placed on the importance of viewing biomedicine as one among many cultural systems of healing. Some key issues we will explore includeÌýconcepts of health, healing, and illness; the political economy of disease; the role of medicine in the state and citizenship; medicine's role in the assignment and mediation of deviance; applied medical anthropology; medical anthropology as ambassador and translator for biomedicine; and contemporary global health crises, including the HIV and TB pandemics.

ANTH 342 - Language and Medicine

This course examines the intersection of language with practices of health and healing in anthropological analyses. While medical anthropologists have long pointed to healing as a cultural practice, they have given less attention to its linguistic dimensions. Within anthropological analyses, moreover, language as a tool of healing is consigned to biomedicine's suspect others (e.g., traditional healing, ritual) and to the treatment of what biomedicine frames as ephemeral phenomena (minds, emotions, selves, subjectivities) relative to the body's seeming concrete reality. This course will take a cross-cultural approach to healing, asking how linguistic anthropology can contribute to analyses of affliction broadly construed. We will also look at the history of the subdisciplinary division of labor that has made language and biomedicine seem incompatible as objects of anthropological analysis.

ANTH 343 - African Pasts, African Futures

This course examines the ways Africans engage the past and imagine the future. How do the slave trade, colonial rule, anticolonial resistance, the development initiatives of the Cold War era, and lingering promises of modernity figure in Africans' perceptions, experiences, and visions of the world? The first goal of the course is to attend to the conditions of possibility that make African pasts and futures thinkable and inhabitable. We will examine the conceptions of time that have shaped Africans' lived experiences of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, giving close attention to the material and symbolic structures these conceptions have reflected and reinforced. Our second goal is to interrogate Africa as a site of knowledge production. What would it mean to decolonize African studies, or to center Africa in planetary accounts? Drawn from across sub-Saharan Africa, our readings foreground the work of African scholars and engage themes such as the significance of "custom" and "tradition," transformations in intergenerational relations, the ethics and politics of remembering and forgetting, the built environment as a site of memory and resistance, and the place of Africa in the world. Topics may include the politics of race and ethnicity, the appropriation of African knowledge in the colonial encounter, the consequences of colonial and postcolonial development projects, and efforts to decolonize higher education. The syllabus pairs works of empirical research with suggested contemporary African novels.

ANTH 346 - Property: Owning the world

This class studies property and its influence on the modern world. Property undergirds multiple ways in which we relate to one another and the world around us, and yet it is often hard to see. It is naturalized in everyday life, and it falls outside or in between the analytic frames of many disciplines. This course attempts to bring it into focus by looking at four broad categories over which property claims have been asserted: property in land, property in other people, property in the self, and property in possible futures. The course will analyze the legal, political, and cultural forms through which these claims are made, legitimated, and contested. We will also analyze modes of relating to the world that do not fit neatly into property regimes and their interactions with law and the state.

ANTH 348 - Anthropology of Curanderismo in Latin America

This course will explore the origins, practices and significance of curanderismo, a syncretic form of healing and care related to Indigenous lifeways in Latin America with African and European influences. As specialized healers, curanderxs serve important roles in their communities and can provide different practices, such as hueseros (chiropractors), parteras (midwives) or brujxs (witches). Some draw on powerful plants like ayahuasca/yagé, peyote, San Pedro or vilca. Curanderismo resisted and adapted to European colonialization, maintaining a critical role in health, wellness and spiritual care among Latin American communities. Today, the practice of curanderismo is facing a popularized resurgence, especially among decolonialization and revitalization movements. However, like many traditional practices, capitalist-driven pharmaceuticals and New Age spiritualism pose threats to Latin American curanderismo. Drawing on an array of archaeological materials, ethnographic studies, historical accounts, oral narratives, and lived experiences, we will trace curanderismo and related, diverse shamanistic practices in Latin America from precolonial times. Case studies extending from the high mountains to arid deserts to the lush rainforests will illustrate myriad ways that people engage with their environments through interactions with plants, animals and other non or super humans. Topics will include herbalism and medicinal plants, psychoactive substances, sorcery and curses, everyday cures and spells, ailments like mal de ojo or susto, supernatural creatures and shapeshifting, sacrifice, tourism and trustafarians. By applying an anthropological approach in this course, we will unravel the nuances of the curanderx identity and practice in relation to current discussions of decolonization and appropriation, Indigeneity and mestizaje, sustainability and extraction, care and restoration. As such, curanderismo provides lens to examine issues of gender, race, colonialism and environmental relations throughout Abya Yala (Latin America).Ìý

ANTH 361 - The Middle East: Culture and Politics

The Middle East has been the focus of increased scrutiny over the past few decades in light of U.S. economic and political interests, and yet the region's internal cultural complexity is poorly understood and often overlooked. This course provides both an anthropological overview of the region's political culture and cultural politics, as well as a critical inquiry into the very anthropo-geographic categories that have historically sustained a sense of unity in the region, including tribalism, honor and shame, religious piety, and poetic practices. In the process, the course explores larger comparative issues of colonialism, nationalism, state formation, sectarianism, urbanism, and globalization.

ANTH 363 - Race and Transnational China

Debates about forms of perceived or imagined social difference have a long history among people who identify as Chinese, including negotiations of diasporic relations with a Chinese homeland, now claimed by the People's Republic of China (PRC). Those debates took on new urgency in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for Chinese intellectuals faced with the threat of Western colonialism, the imperative to establish a sovereign nation-state, and the concomitant rise of Western modernity discourses that were grounded in notions of essential biological differences hierarchizing human "races." Yet since the emergence of the PRC as global power in the 2010s and President Xi Jinping's effort to extend Chinese infrastructure development and investment programs to over 70 countries worldwide, transnational China has seen reintensified debates about social difference and the meaning of Chineseness, as well as the rise of new mass-mediated Han Chinese nationalisms. In this course we engage multimedia sources (texts, videos, images) to explore these most recent debates in historical context. We do this as a way to dialogue with critical race theory, and to delve into the high-stakes interpretive politics of "race" and "racism" transnationally. As many Chinese scholars and netizens ask: are these English language terms even applicable in the very different cultural, historical, and political economic contexts of transnational China? We start with comparative theoretical debates about the nature of "race" as historically situated perceptions and claims about biological/embodied difference. We then turn to debates in recent Chinese contexts to consider for example the relationship between discourses of "race" and "nation," the nature of "Han-ness," the status of "ethnic minorities," and the status of "Blackness" amidst increased Sino-African engagement. Our goal will be to expand our understandings of the stakes and contexts of cosmologies and ontologies of social difference and inequality transnationally.

ANTH 364 - Global Tibet through Film

Since the Dalai Lama fled to exile in India in 1959, Tibet and Tibetans have garnered emblematic status in global debates on Indigenous cultures and human rights. The widespread Tibetan unrest and subsequent military crackdown during China's "Olympic year" (2007-08) focused renewed international attention on the issue of Tibet in the face of China's rise as an important political and economic power. Meanwhile, tightening political constraints and rapid development under President Xi Jinping (2013-) have ushered in a new and complicated era for the transnational Tibetan community. Yet Tibet has long been both a cosmopolitan place and an object of translocal interest and desire. This course draws on visual and multimedia approaches in anthropology and media studies to understand the global roles of Tibet and Tibetans in specific historical and ethnographic contexts. We center the analysis and production of film and video as mediums for exploring ongoing, transnational debates about Tibetanness amidst rapid sociopolitical and economic change. The course pairs film screenings with relevant ethnographic and historical readings, as well as a variety of other media such as literature, popular songs, websites, and blogs from inside and outside of China. We focus on films, especially by Tibetan filmmakers, that address the historical and contemporary diversity among Tibetans across the Himalayan region and into the diaspora, as well as the changing political economic conditions of interethnic and Chinese-Tibetan relations.ÌýStudents will propose, receive training in, and workshop a semester-long short film/video project about a film on Tibetans of their choice.

ANTH 371 - Race and Caste

This course examines caste and race together across three axes: as enduring but shifting forms of social hierarchy, as grounds of political mobilization, and as potent metaphors for each other. Drawing on historical, sociological, and anthropological work from South Asia, the Caribbean, and the United States, we will examine the incorporation and transformation of these forms of hierarchy through imperialism, settler-colonialism, capitalist development, and democratic politics. We will also trace a parallel history, through which observers and activists have sought to think caste in terms of race and race in terms of caste, from European colonists to twentieth-century anti-caste activists in India and anti-racist activists in the United States. We ask what these forms of comparison have made visible and what they have erased, what solidarities and politics they have enabled, and what the stakes have been of refusing to think of them together.Ìý

ANTH 374 - Urban Anthropology

The course provides an introduction to urban anthropology, with a particular focus on the colonial and postcolonial metropole as an exemplary site for the reciprocal influences of global and local processes. It explores how the city functions simultaneously as a locus for the negotiation of cultural diversity and for utopian ideals of rational communication. Drawing from cases throughout the "developed" and "developing" worlds, the course examines how urban culture is produced and reproduced under regimes of industrialization, colonialism, modernism, and globalization.

ANTH 375 - Anthropology of Science

This course examines scientific practices and knowledge as cultural, social, and political phenomena. Scientific knowledge often appears to be none of these things, and so central questions of the course are how such knowledge is produced and how it is able to transcend its context. The course begins with a set of orienting texts from Kuhn, Foucault, and Latour before turning to ethnographic and historical work on science and expertise, with an emphasis on feminist and postcolonial approaches. Along the way, we ask how the questions and methods drawn from the study of science can reshape larger anthropological understandings of the political and the social.

ANTH 376 - Situating Climate Change

The latest manifestation of humanity's self-induced existential threats emerges in the form of climate change: a planetary-scale phenomenon that profoundly impacts both humans and nonhumans across the board in fundamental ways. YetÌýclimate change, its effects, and the consequences of its mitigation strategies are experienced differently in different places and communities. As such, climate change evokes a curious moment, simultaneously reviving old inequalities, binaries, debates, tensions, divisions, and reflexesÌýwhile presenting opportunities to transcend them and forge new collaborations and alliances. This course seeks to sociopolitically and spatiotemporally situate this moment by approaching climate change not as a singularity, but as a multiplicity: a complex, multifaceted, and heterogeneously distributed crisis with diverse voices and perspectives. By exploring a range of political, ecological, scientific, humanistic, and more-than-humanistic themes-such as the dichotomies of nature versus culture, facts versus fictions, science versus art, and "hard" versus "soft" sciences, as well as the concepts of post-truth, technofix, and climate change mitigation as a neocolonial practice-this course aims to develop a transdisciplinary approach to better understand the climate crisis.

ANTH 378 - Nature, Culture, and Environmentalism

Western epistemology is considered to be based on a strict separation and opposition between nature and culture. While this divide is under increasing scrutiny in the face of the climate crisis in the Anthropocene, anthropology has long been a pioneer in challenging and dismantling this binary. This course examines canonical and contemporary anthropological approaches to the concept of nature and human relations with the natural environment. We will discuss how conceptions of nature are always shaped, transformed, and produced by historically situated social relations and how such conceptions, in turn, shape environmental struggles across the globe. Course materials focus primarily on ethnographies from the global South oriented towards the intersections of political ecology and environmental justice, science and technology studies, postcolonial theory, and more-than-human perspectives. Course topics include the history of the Western nature-culture binary and its critiquesÌýand recent environmental scholarship on issues such as agro-food systems, extractive conflicts, toxicity, genetic engineering, climate change, disasters, microbial lives, and multispecies entanglements.

ANTH 379 - Power, Resources, Extractivism

This course examines the interplay between power relations and natural resources through key works in anthropology, history, human geography, and political ecology. We will engage with critical scholarship on extractivism and environmental justice to analyze how materials such as minerals, oil, coal, crops, forests, fisheries, land, wind, and solar energy are transformed into sources of economic inequality, ecological degradation, and political domination across multiple spatio-temporal scales. Together, we will denaturalize the concept of resources and investigate how they come into being. In particular, we will explore how the materialities of resources entangle with power relations to participate in colonial processes-past and present-as well as in the production of future imaginaries. Anchored primarily in the Mediterranean region, the course will explore key themes and concepts such as extraction, resource-making, scarcity, property, commons, toxicity, and pollution.

ANTH 397 - Media Persons Publics

The meteoric rise of new forms of digital data and social media in the past 20 years has generated, on the one hand, fantasies of utopic intimacy (the immediacy promised in a new "global village"), and on the other, moral panics about unprecedented estrangement (the hypermediation of virtual worlds and corporate or government "big data"). In this course, we challenge this dichotomy of intimacy/immediacy versus estrangement/mediation by taking an anthropological approach to the question of human communication. Drawing on interdisciplinary debates in philosophy, linguistic anthropology, and media studies, we develop tools for understanding all communication as both mediated and material, grounded in embodied practices and technological infrastructures and situated in historical events. This in turn will allow us to grasp how circulations of media forms and commodities participate in the creation of types of persons and publics across multiple scales of time and space. Bringing those theoretical and methodological debates into dialogue with ethnographic studies and other forms of media, we ask: How do people sense and interpret themselves, others, and their worlds? What is the boundary between the human and nonhuman in a digital age? What roles do states or transregional capitalisms play in the mediation of valued and devalued persons and publics? What are the possibilities for communication amidst great gaps in access to valued forms of media?

ANTH 411 - The Politics of World Making: Semiotics, Pragmatics, Performance

Anthropologists have long been interested in humans' dynamic efforts to create multidimensional social worlds amid ongoing contestation. Yet early attempts to account for this cultural politics of world making were obscured in favor of conveniently static representations of bounded "cultures" or/as "races," and dualistic understandings of sociocultural structures versus individual actions or intentions. This course considers "semiotics," "pragmatics," and "performance" to be methodological rubrics that have grouped together a wide variety of social theorists who have focused instead on the emergent and contested nature of all meanings, persons, and places as they are interpreted in everyday and ritualized speech, practice, and performance. The course brings linguistic anthropological methodologies into dialogue with critical race theories since the early twentieth century to interrogate the possibilities and limits of anthropological world making in the face of Western theorists' complicities with modernist white supremacy. Moving from key foundational texts in the science and philosophy of language, social action, and subjectivity to more recent theoretical and ethnographic work, we rethink language and semiotics as social action, the nature of context and interpretive politics, the relationships between formal events or performances and everyday life, and the precarious, often violent creation of selves and others. By directing analytic focus to the indeterminacy, ambiguity, and multiplicity inherent to social life and weaponized or erased in racialized political economic orders, the course challenges students to reconsider some of the central issues in anthropological theory, such as agency, identity, power, and resistance.

ANTH 415 - Risk and Uncertainty

Risk has become a major theme shaping our contemporary life. The climate crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic are two most recent contentious domains where the intimate and the personal are entangled with the global scale through risk. But what is risk? Is it an external reality that can be objectively calculated? Is it a subjective experience lived and assessed differently across the globe? Is it the primary qualifier of our late modernity? What are the interplays between the notions of risk, uncertainty, and danger? This course unpacks the sociopolitical worlds of risk. Through ethnographic and science and technology studies (STS)-informed accounts across the globe on various topics such as health, toxicity, disasters, economics, safety, security, and climate, we will scrutinize the multifaceted aspects of risk. By examining competing social theories of risk, ethnographic studies of culturally diverse ways of assessing and managing risks, historical analyses of how risk emerges as a techno-political domain of intervention, and STS accounts of how risk expertise is created and circulated, this course divulges the polysemous, productive, and ultimately contentious life of risk.

ANTH 425 - Marx from the South

This course engages with a long history of Marx and political economic thought in relation to the global South. The course is organized around key concepts, such as labor, value, capital, property, and class. We examine these concepts through readings of foundational texts in political economy including Marx, Locke, and Smith and the historical context of empire in which these texts were written. Alongside this historical context, we examine these concepts as they have been drawn upon analytically by anthropologists working on and politically by social movements working in the global South.

ANTH 461 - Theories of Practice

Social theorists have long struggled with delineating the precise relationship between social structure and human agency in the explanation of extant cultural forms and their transformations over time. This course explores one set of proposed solutions generally classified under the rubric of "practice theory." Building from the social philosophies of Elias, Bourdieu, Giddens, and de Certeau, the course examines how practice theory has informed anthropological inquiry and constituted a response to seemingly determinist theories of human behavior associated with structuralism and structural functionalism. Contemporary anthropological work by Marshall Sahlins, Sherry Ortner, and the Comaroffs, among others, will be read in light of earlier disciplinary engagement with the structure-agency question, including by Manchester School ethnographers.

ANTH 465 - Suffering, Narrative, and Subjectivity

"The subject living in pain, in poverty, or under conditions of violence or oppression," Joel Robbins contended a decade ago, "now very often stands at the center of anthropological work." This course examines the emergence of what Robbins calls "the suffering slot," that is, the displacement of difference in late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century anthropology as the discipline's organizing principle, and a reorientation toward universal human vulnerability. Our concern is with how this turn has shaped both the substantive and ethical contours of anthropological investigation and ethnographic writing: What can, and ought, anthropologists know and say about the world and those who inhabit it? What can, and ought to, be the relationship between anthropologists and their objects of study? We will give particular attention to philosophical arguments that emphasize the ineffability of suffering-that is, the ways that suffering defies narrative-and the implications of these arguments for theories of subjectivity. Of particular interest is how these ideas have shaped the generic conventions that have emerged in anthropological studies of suffering, and how these conventions in turn reflect a particular moment in anthropology's self-understanding as a discipline.

ANTH 470 - Thesis

ANTH 481 - Independent Reading