Courses

ANTH B101 Introduction to Biological and Archaeological Anthropology

Fall 2024

An introduction to the place of humans in nature, evolutionary theory, living primates, the fossil record for human evolution, human variation and the issue of race, and the archaeological investigation of culture change from the Old Stone Age to the rise of early agricultural societies in the Americas, Eurasia and Africa. In addition to the lecture/discussion classes, students must select and sign up for one lab section.

Inquiry into the Past (IP)

Scientific Investigation (SI)

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ANTH B102 Introduction to Cultural Anthropology

Fall 2024, Spring 2025

This course will explore the basic principles and methods of sociocultural anthropology. Through field research, direct observation, and participation in a group's daily life, sociocultural anthropologists examine the many ways that people organize their social institutions and cultural systems, ranging from the dynamics of life in small-scale societies to the transnational circulation of people, commodities, technologies and ideas. Sociocultural anthropology examines how many of the categories we assume to be "natural," such as kinship, gender, or race, are culturally and socially constructed. It examines how people's perceptions, beliefs, values, and actions are shaped by broader historical, economic, and political contexts. It is also a vital tool for understanding and critiquing imbalances of power in our contemporary world. Through a range of topically and geographically diverse course readings and films, and opportunities to practice ethnographic methodology, students will gain new analytical and methodological tools for understanding cultural difference, social organization, and social change.

Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)

Counts Toward: Child and Family Studies; Gender Sexuality Studies.

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ANTH B204 North American Archaeology

Not offered 2024-25

For millennia, the North American continent has been home to a vast diversity of Native Americans. From the initial migration of big game hunters who spread throughout the continent more than 12,000 years ago, to the complex Pueblos of the Southwest and urban Cahokia in the East, there remains a rich archaeological record that reflects the ways of life of these cultures. This course will introduce the culture history of North America as well as explanations for culture change and diversification.

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ANTH B210 Medical Anthropology

Not offered 2024-25

This course examines the relationships between culture, society, disease and illness. It considers a broad range of health-related experiences, discourses, knowledge and practice among different cultures and among individuals and groups in different positions of power. Topics covered include sorcery, herbal remedies, healing rituals, folk illnesses, modern disease, scientific medical perceptions, clinical technique, epidemiology and political economy of medicine. Prerequisite: ANTH 102, H103 or permission of instructor.

Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)

Counts Toward: Environmental Studies; Environmental Studies; Growth and Structure of Cities; Health Studies; Health Studies.

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ANTH B213 Anthropology of Food

Spring 2025

Food is part of the universal human experience. But everyday experiences of food also reveal much about human difference. What we eat is intimately connected with who we are, where we belong, and how we see the world. In this course, we will use a socio-cultural perspective to explore how food helps us form families, national and religious communities, and other groups. We will also consider how food may become a source of inequality, a political symbol, and a subject of social discord. Examining both practical and ideological meanings of food and taste, this course will address issues of identity, social difference, and cultural experience.

Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)

Counts Toward: Child and Family Studies; Gender Sexuality Studies; International Studies; International Studies.

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ANTH B214 Becoming Unfree: Archaeology of Freedom's Ontological Status

Not offered 2024-25

Anthropological archaeologists have long taken part in wider discussions of concepts like egalitarianism, inequality, property, and political-economic stratification. Archaeologists have more rarely approached the past to consider the question of freedom. In their 2021 book The Dawn of Everything, anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow do just this - they place the question of freedom as a central concern of all (pre)history. Their interest in the past is presented as a guide to the present and future, and they search for three kinds of freedom, which they call "primordial": (1) freedom to move, (2) freedom to disobey, and (3) freedom to change one's social relationships or form of social organization. The importance of the study of the past, in this way, is not about material or social inequalities but becomes one of asking how we have found ourselves recently "stuck" in systems that deny these freedoms? In this course we will engage the long archaeological and ethnographic records, including that of hunter-gatherers as well as states, to assess the material and social conditions that have opened spaces for freedoms and closed doors on others. We will tease apart various notions of freedom and try to locate them in diverse cultural moments under varying relations of kinship, property, labor, egalitarianism, and material inequality. We will question the ontological (or "primordial") status of freedom to consider if mobility, disobedience, and social-organizational shifts could also be experienced as "unfreedoms" in the creation and enforcement of both egalitarian and inegalitarian relations. Students will be encouraged to think about the importance of the past from the vantage of their own political desires for the present and future, and we will force ourselves to consider the enduring question: can we even find our future somewhere in the past? In the background, we will also continuously return to the question of our relationship to nature/environment and what human freedom may mean at this enlarging spatial, temporal, and ecological scale.

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ANTH B218 Activist Imaginaries& Conflict Management

Not offered 2024-25

How do activists understand injustice, and how does this understanding inform activist efforts to imagine and build a more just future? What results from these activist efforts? In this class, we will examine how activists develop a kind of qualitative analysis, similar to anthropology, through which they understand social problems and seek solutions to those problems. In contrast to the frequent description of activist projects as "utopian," we will explore how activists rely on a grounded analysis and, as such, often contribute to change even when they fail to realize their ultimate goal. We will also reflect on our role as anthropologists, asking how we can learn from and/or contribute to activist analyses and their resulting political projects. One 100-level course in any humanities or social sciences field, or permission of the instructor.

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ANTH B223 The Global Middle East: Colonialism, Oil, the War on Terror

Fall 2024

A central premise of this course is that European colonial intervention in the Middle East did not just impact the Middle East, but mobilized social, material, and ideological projects which fundamentally transformed Europe itself, producing the modern "West" and the contemporary globe. Challenging tendencies to think of the Middle East as distant and different, students will explore the ways that Euro-American intervention in the Middle East shapes our everyday lives in the contemporary U.S. We will explore how the economy, culture, identity, and social organization of contemporary life in Europe and the U.S. builds off of, and is dependent upon, this history of intervention. We will conclude with an examination of global solidarity movements, with a focus on Black American activists' solidarity work in the Arab world, to ask how this global interconnection makes the Middle East an important site for building and imagining a more just world.

Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)

Counts Toward: Growth and Structure of Cities.

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ANTH B232 Human Diet and Nutrition

Not offered 2024-25

One of the few truly universal aspects of the human experience is our need to consume food for survival. However, while food serves to nourish our bodies, diet and food choices are deeply embedded in the cultures in which we live. This course will combine archaeological, biological, and cultural anthropology studies to explore human diet and nutrition through history. The course will cover the basics of human nutrition, the evolution of the human diet from our hominin ancestors to now, and modern nutritional and diet culture in the United States.

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ANTH B234 Forensic Anthropology

Spring 2025

Forensic anthropology is a subfield of biological anthropology that applies methods and techniques developed in skeletal biology, bioarchaeology and forensic sciences to the analysis of human skeletal remains in a medico-legal setting. The goal of this course is to introduce you to the field of forensic anthropology by examining underlying theory and a variety of applied techniques that relate to the challenges of human skeletal identification, while situating the discipline in the broader context of evolutionary theory and ethics. Through practical exercises you will learn the bones of the skeleton, how to create a biological profile of an individual (reconstruct age, sex, ancestry, stature), and identify trauma and pathology. We will also examine broader topics such as crime scene investigation, search and recovery of human remains in various contexts, estimating the postmortem interval, human rights investigations, and ethics and responsibilities of forensic anthropologists.

Scientific Investigation (SI)

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ANTH B246 The Everyday Life of Language: Field Research in Linguistic Anthropology

Not offered 2024-25

The goal of this course is to develop an awareness of how language operates in various interactional and other (eg. ritual, performance, political) contexts that we commonly experience. The focus will be on gaining hands-on experience in doing linguistic anthropological data collection and analysis, and putting the results of individual student projects together as part of initiating an ongoing, multi-year project. Topics that students explore ethnographically may include: language and gender; language, race and social indexicality; sociolinguistic variation; codeswitching; register and social stance; language and social media. Student research will involve ethnographic observation, audio-recording of spoken discourse, conducting interviews, and learning how to create a transcript to use as the basis for ethnographic analysis. Students will work in parallel on individual projects cohering around a particular topic, and class time will be used to discuss the results and synthesize insights that develop from bringing different ethnographic contexts together. For the praxis component of the course, students will use the experience they have gained to generate ideas for components of a middle school/high school language arts curriculum that incorporates linguistic anthropology concepts and student-driven research on language.

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ANTH B251 Identity, Borders, and Globalization in Southeast Asia

Not offered 2024-25

This course will explore the complexity and diversity of Southeast Asia and the ways political, economic, and environmental concerns bridge borders of countries in the region. We will examine belief systems, family systems, urbanization, economic change, politics and governance, health, and ecological change, among other topics. We will critically examine colonial, anti-colonial, nationalist, and internationalist meanings by looking at lived experiences that question what does it mean to be bound by regional designation and simultaneously participate in processes of one's own making that challenge and transcend locality. Through reading ethnographies of cultures in the region, we also will examine anthropologies and knowledge being produced outside of the Western academy in Southeast Asia, problematize area studies and the Western construction of a geopolitical region of nation-states called Southeast Asia, and examine the limits of such a designation, as well as benefits as countries in the region that engage in ASEAN contend with globalization. Prerequisite: Sophomore Standing and Above.

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ANTH B254 Anthropology and Social Science Research Methods

Not offered 2024-25

This course is designed for students interested in learning ethnographic and qualitative social science methods, and how to analyze qualitative results. Through hands on fieldwork, students will learn and practice ethnographic field methods, for example, observation, participant observation, interviewing, use of visual media and drawing, life stories, generating and analyzing data, and ways to productively transform qualitative data into contextual information. Ethics in ethnographic research will be a central theme, as will envisioning and designing projects that protect human subjects. The purpose of this course is to provide anthropology majors and students in social sciences, humanities, as well as STEM majors with interests in multi-method research, an opportunity to learn methods in advance of their thesis proposal and research, Hanna Holborn Gray summer research, and other social science independent research opportunities during their undergraduate experience, and post-graduation.

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ANTH B259 The Creation of Early Complex Societies

Not offered 2024-25

In the last 10,000 years, humans around the world have transitioned from organizing themselves through small, egalitarian social networks to living within large and socially complex societies. This archaeology course takes an anthropological perspective to seek to understand the ways that human groups created these complex societies. We will explore the archaeological evidence for the development of complexity in the past, including the development of villages and early cities, the institutionalization of social and political-economic inequalities, and the rise of states and empires. Alongside discussion of current theoretical ideas about complexity, the course will compare and contrast the evolutionary trajectories of complex societies in different world regions. Case studies will emphasize the pre-Columbian histories of complex societies in the Americas as well as some of the early complex societies of the Old World. Counts toward Latin American, Iberian, and Latino Studies minor. Approach: Inquiry into the Past (IP) and Cross-Cultural (CC).

Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)

Inquiry into the Past (IP)

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ANTH B281 The Power in Language: Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology

Not offered 2024-25

This course provides an introduction to the concepts and methods of linguistic anthropology, which can help us understand the role language plays in constructing identities, creating social and political hierarchies, and shaping understandings and experiences of the world. The course considers topics relevant to the everyday life of language in the U.S. context, including the relationship between language and gender, race, and socioeconomic inequality, and uses ethnographic materials from a variety of cultural contexts to explore three perspectives that are central to linguistic anthropology. These are: language, power, and the linguistic market: how different languages and the ways of speaking get associated with particular social groups and become valued or devalued; linguistic ideologies and semiotic processes: how language as a system of signs becomes meaningful, to whom, and in what ways; poetics and performance: how people "do things with words" and how the non-referential (sonic, poetic) aspects of language matter.

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ANTH B283 The Living Primates: Biology, Bones, and Behavior

Spring 2025

This course provides a comprehensive review of the order Primates, focusing on morphology, biological adaptations, and behavioral diversity characterizing non-human primates. First, we will investigate the morphological traits that characterize major primate groups, and their evolutionary history. As many primate taxa are endangered or vulnerable to extinction, we will explore the approaches and challenges to primate conservation. In the second half of the course, we will focus on primate socioecology, examining how different environments influence primate distribution and social relationships. We will then delve further into primate behavior and cognition, examining interpersonal relationships, social dynamics, communication strategies, and learning modes. In doing this, we will address the questions concerning the recognition and definition of culture, self-awareness, and personhood among non-human primates using a comparative perspective. Prerequisites: ANTH B101 or permission of the instructor

Course does not meet an Approach

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ANTH B287 Sex, Gender, Biology and Culture

Fall 2024

This 200-level anthropology course is an introductory survey of topics in sex, gender, biology, and culture, approached through an intersectional feminist interdisciplinary biocultural anthropological lens. In this course, we delve into the variations of gender in the US and globally, explore the interplay between gender and sex, and examine concepts of biological sex, intersexuality, and sexuality. Students will also explore contemporary issues and research areas where anthropologists and human biologists investigate the intersection of sex and gender. This includes discussions on hormones, sports, and the brain, as well as examinations of sex and gender among non-human animals. This course offers students a unique amalgamation of biocultural anthropology, cultural anthropology, biology research, gender studies, feminist science studies, and health science. Through this course, students will develop skills to discern and assess scientific information and claims and construct a critical feminist toolkit for analyzing scientific knowledge. They will apply these skills to evaluate a diverse array of sources, ranging from peer-reviewed articles to popular media, websites, podcasts, and documentaries. Moreover, students will utilize queer feminist theories to cultivate this intersectional perspective, honing their abilities in analytical and critical thinking. Upon completion of the course, students will leave with enhanced confidence in articulating nuanced thoughts on the complex intersections of sex, gender, sexuality, science, and society.

Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)

Counts Toward: Gender & Sexuality Studies; Gender Sexuality Studies; Gender Sexuality Studies.

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ANTH B294 Culture, Power, and Politics

Not offered 2024-25

What do a country's national politics have to do with culture? Likewise, how are politics hidden below the surface of our everyday social lives? This course explores questions like these through anthropological approaches. Drawing on both classic and contemporary ethnographic studies from the U.S. and around the world, we will examine how social and cultural frameworks help us understand politics in new ways. We will investigate how people perceive the meanings and effects of the state; how nationalism and citizenship shape belonging on the one hand, and exclusion on the other; how understandings of gender, race, and difference converge with political action, ideology, and power; and how politics infuse everyday spaces including schools, businesses, homes, and even the dinner table. Prerequisite: ANTH B102, H103 or permission of the instructor.

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ANTH B303 History of Anthropological Theory

Fall 2024

A consideration of the history of anthropological theories and the discipline of anthropology as an academic discipline that seeks to understand and explain society and culture as its subjects of study. Several vantage points on the history of anthropological theory are engaged to enact an historically charged anthropology of a disciplinary history. Anthropological theories are considered not only as a series of models, paradigms, or orientations, but as configurations of thought, technique, knowledge, and power that reflect the ever-changing relationships among the societies and cultures of the world. This course qualifies as completion of the writing requirement. Prerequisite: ANTH B102/ANTH H103 and at least one additional anthropology course at the 200 or 300 level.

Writing Attentive

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ANTH B305 Anthropology in Public

Not offered 2024-25

What good is anthropology in the world today? How are anthropological perspectives relevant for understanding contemporary issues, and how can those perspectives be made accessible not only to an academic audience but to a broader public? This course explores how anthropologists use their methods, theories, and knowledge to engage in public conversations and intervene in public debates. We will read and analyze work that anthropologists have written for popular audiences, from books to other forms of media, on a range of topics including health, immigration, politics, and experiences of difference. We will attend to the writing styles that anthropologists use when writing for public readerships, and we will practice clearly and precisely applying anthropological insights through our own writing projects. Taking into consideration the ethical questions and obligations surrounding public anthropological engagement of the past and present, we will discuss how today's students might draw on their anthropological training both in their future careers and as concerned citizens.

Writing Attentive

Power, Inequity, and Justice (PIJ)

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ANTH B312 Anthropology of Reproduction

Fall 2024

This course will examine how power in everyday life shapes reproductive behavior and how reproduction is culturally constructed. Through an examination of materials from different cultures, this course will look at how often competing interests within households, communities, states and institutions (at both the local and global levels) influence reproduction in society. We will explore the political economy of reproduction cross-culturally, how power and politics shape gendered reproductive behavior and how it is interpreted and used differently by persons, communities and institutions. Topics covered include but are not limited to the politics of family planning, mothering/parenting, abortion, pregnancy, pregnancy loss, fetal testing and biology and social policy in cross-cultural comparison. Prerequisite: ANTH 8102 (or ANTH H103) recommended

Counts Toward: Child and Family Studies; Gender Sexuality Studies; Health Studies.

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ANTH B317 Disease and Human Evolution

Not offered 2024-25

Pathogens and humans have been having an "evolutionary arms race" since the beginning of our species. In this course, we will examine how natural selection and other evolutionary forces shape our susceptibility to disease, and how we have adapted to resist disease. We will also address how concepts of Darwinian medicine impact our understanding of how people might be treated most effectively. We will focus on infectious and chronic diseases, and the anthropogenic effects contributing to the observed distribution of various diseases and illnesses, such as climate change and racism, and their interactions.

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ANTH B320 Archaeological Theory and Practice

Not offered 2024-25

What is archaeological theory? Is there an archaeological theory, or only various theories used by archaeologists? This course will examine the history of theoretical approaches in the field and the practices used by archaeologists through time, including recent developments and concerns in anthropological archaeology and beyond. We will interrogate the nature of the archaeological record and question how practitioners transform materials into information about the past. Theory and methodological developments in archaeology are considered alongside broader changes in academia, culture, and politics. This course was previously taught as ANTH B220. Prerequisite: ANTH 101 or permission of instructor.

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ANTH B322 Anthropology of Bodies

Not offered 2024-25

This course examines a diversity of meanings and interpretations of the body in anthropology. It explores anthropological theories and methods of studying the body and social difference via a series of topics including the construction of the body in medicine, identity, race, gender, sexuality and as explored through cross-cultural comparison. Prerequisite: ANTH B102, ANTH H103 or permission of instructor.

Counts Toward: Gender Sexuality Studies; Health Studies.

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ANTH B326 Sensory Ethnography

Fall 2024

Life engages all of our senses, but much of our sensory experience is filtered out when we put that experience into words. This course approaches the senses and sensory experience together as both an object of ethnographic study and as a means of ethnographic enquiry. Going beyond the notion of the senses as biologically hard-wired individual perception, we will explore how the senses are instead learned and shaped by culture and socialization, not static but changing and transforming over time. We will also examine how sensory knowledge and experience can be political: that is, shaped by and responding to structures of power. Throughout the semester, we will be asking both what can be learned from taking sensory experience seriously, and how sensory ethnography might go beyond traditional ethnographic approaches. Students will conduct projects that explore and engage taste, touch, vision, hearing, and smell, and then experiment with different ways of producing anthropological knowledge, in addition to writing; possibilities include photography, video, audio recording, curated collections of objects, or guided taste or smell experiences.

Writing Attentive

Course does not meet an Approach

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ANTH B327 Caste and Race: Analogies and Intersections

Not offered 2024-25

With the global spread of the Black Lives Matter movement, and since the publication of American journalist Isabel Wilkerson's Caste: The Origins of our Discontents, there has been a renewed interest in thinking comparatively about caste and race. This course will examine the intertwined histories and legacies of caste and race as imaginaries deployed both to create and enforce social inequality and hierarchy, and to describe and analyze it. In the first half of the course we will examine how analogies and comparisons between caste and race have been made at various moments over the long 20th century. In the second half of the course, we will explore how caste and race have intersected in lived experience, using historical sources, ethnography, and memoir. In tracking intersections of experience and the production of knowledge, our course will bring together history, anthropology, sociology, and related fields, as well as different world areas- India/South Asia and the U.S./Western hemisphere- that have traditionally been held apart in the modern academy. Prerequisite: One course in Anthropology or History or related Social Science or Humanities departments, or permission of the instructors.

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ANTH B329 The politics of belonging and exclusion in India

Not offered 2024-25

Since India's economic liberalization in the early 1990s, the globalizing dynamics of cultural and economic liberalization have been accompanied by renewed articulations of who belongs in the "New India" and who doesn't. In this context, caste, class, religious community, language, and gender have become crucial sites for claiming citizenship, articulating distinctions among people, and constructing senses of what and who can inhabit the public sphere. Using materials from different regions of India, our focus will be on how fine-grained ethnographic study can be a tool to examine the broader dynamics of belonging and exclusion and its political and social effects. This course fulfills the BMC Anthropology major/minor ethnographic area requirement.

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ANTH B331 Medical Anthro Seminar: Critical Thinking for Critical Times

Not offered 2024-25

Advanced Medical Anthropology: Critical Thinking for Critical Times explores theoretical and applied frameworks used in medical anthropology to tackle pressing problems in our world today. Coupled with topical subjects and ethnographic examples, this seminar will enable students to delve deeply into sub-specialization areas in the field of medical anthropology, including: global health inequalities, cross-border disease transmission, genomics, science and technology studies, ethnomedicine, cross-cultural psychiatry/psychology, cross-cultural bioethics, and ecological approaches to studying health and behavior, among others. No prior experience in medical anthropology is required. Prerequisite: Sophomore standing and higher.

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ANTH B339 Migrants, Refugees, and Life Across Borders

Not offered 2024-25

Borders are often taken for granted as natural divisions in the world, but they are actually the products of political, historical, and social processes. Border crossing is often framed as an aberration or even a crisis, but people have moved for as long as humans have existed. This course approaches borders from an anthropological perspective by foregrounding the experiences of the people who move across them. We explore the interconnected categories of migrants and refugees to understand how people cross borders under different kinds of circumstances: some voluntary, others fleeing conflict or persecution, and still others that seem to fall between these ideal types. We will critically examine how migrants and refugees are qualitatively described and quantitatively defined, as these discursive constructions often determine legal status and reception in host countries, and also inform governmental and humanitarian responses. We will read a selection of ethnographies examining different kinds of migrant and refugee movements in Africa, Europe, the Americas, and Asia, culminating in an extended case study of Africans in China.

Course does not meet an Approach

Counts Toward: Africana Studies; International Studies; International Studies.

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ANTH B354 Political Economy, Gender, Ethnicity and Transformation in Vietnam

Spring 2025

Today, Vietnam is in the midst of dramatic social, economic and political changes brought about through a shift from a central economy to a market/capitalist economy since the late 1980s. These changes have resulted in urbanization, a rise in consumption, changes in land use, movement of people, environmental consequences of economic development, and shifts in social and economic relationships and cultural practices as the country has moved from low income to middle income status. This course examines culture and society in Vietnam focusing largely on contemporary Vietnam, but with a view to continuities and historical precedent in past centuries. In this course, we will draw on anthropological studies of Vietnam, as well as literature and historical studies. Relationships between the individual, family, gender, ethnicity, community, land, and state will pervade the topics addressed in the course, as will the importance of political economy, nation, and globalization. In addition to class seminar discussions, students will view documentary and fictional films about Vietnamese culture. Prerequisite: Sophomore standing or higher or first years with ANTH 102.

Writing Attentive

Counts Toward: Environmental Studies; Gender Sexuality Studies; Growth and Structure of Cities; International Studies; International Studies.

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ANTH B355 Archaeology of Landscapes

Not offered 2024-25

Traditional archaeology has focused on the "archaeological site" in our attempts to understand past human practices. However, people in the past as with today did not live their lives within the small confines of an archaeological site but rather in the broader landscape surrounding them. In this seminar, students will gain an understanding of different theoretical and methodological approaches to studying the landscape. Using case studies from around the world, we will explore how archaeologists study the ways past people interacted with, modified, and experienced the landscapes in which they dwelt. In doing so, students will gain an appreciation for how the study of landscapes can improve our understanding of peoples lived experiences.

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ANTH B356 The Politics of Public Art

Not offered 2024-25

In this class we will explore the politics of public art. While we will look at the political messaging of public art, we will also seek to understand how public art, through its integration into a social geography, has a political impact beyond its meaning. We will see how art claims public space and structures social action, how art shapes social groups, and how art channels economic flows or government power. By tracing the ways that art is situated in public space, we will examine how art enters into urban contest and global inequality. Class activity will include exploration of public art and students will be introduced to key concepts of urban spatial analysis to help interrogate this art. One 200-level course in Social Sciences, Humanities, or Arts fields, or permission of the instructor

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ANTH B357 Narratives of Illness, Healing, and Medicine

Not offered 2024-25

This course will explore the construction of narratives around illness, healing, and medicine cross-culturally and across a variety of media including through graphic novels, video drama series, primary source diaries, audio accounts, and anthropological texts. Illness narratives have figured prominently in the study and practice of medical anthropology, and increasingly in the teaching of medicine. We will ask: What is the role of illness narratives in the healing process for patients, healers, and caregivers in cross-cultural comparison? How can illness narratives destabilize dominant discourses, and provide an avenue of expression for those who are unable to easily speak or be heard, particularly in biomedical contexts? Who gets to speak, in what ways, and who remains unheard? What does it mean to tell a story of illness? What roles do illness stories play in illuminating and complicating understandings of illness, disability, trauma, and caregiving? How do illness narratives relate to suffering, hope, and healing, and how they differ for chronic or terminal illness? What do they tell us about making and remaking the self? Students will have the opportunity to explore frameworks and cross-cultural experiences through media beyond standard text. Prerequisite: ANTH B102 or permission of instructor.

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ANTH B363 Gender and Human Evolution

Spring 2025

In this anthropology course, students will investigate the gender/sex/sexuality in the study of human ancestors and their non-human primate relatives. Students will gain familiarity with foundational texts considered to be classic in the field of biological anthropology. This course will operate with a structure of paired texts: one early work that spoke to naturalized sex differences or gender roles and a feminist science piece intervening in that space or a piece from feminist science studies or women and gender studies in conversation with the first work. This course structure allows students time to really sit with each argument. These texts will prompt students to ask questions such as- what narratives are mobilized to naturalize the evolution gender norms, sex differences, and where do they come from? How has gender has been conceived of in the study of human ancestors and our non-human primate relatives? How are scholars intervening? How effective or ineffective have these interventions been? What ideas of gender/sex/sexuality persist despite interventions, and why might that be? Students will develop skills in explaining their thoughts on those questions in both discussion and writing. This course will also involve works external to biological anthropology written by feminist or women and gender studies scholars providing a critical commentary of that feminist science intervention, with a primary focus on Donna Haraway's Primate Visions. In the end, students will find a work in the study of human variation, human ancestors, or non-human primates, write their own paired piece of commentary. Students will be supported in the develop of their own intervention. This cross-disciplinary course will leave students will skillsets they can apply outside of this course in having hard conversations around gender, sex, and sexuality and to explicate their perspectives with care and intention. Prerequisite: ANTH B101

Course does not meet an Approach

Counts Toward: Gender Sexuality Studies.

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ANTH B364 Anthropology of Global Public Health

Spring 2025

This course will use an anthropological lens to explore the field of contemporary global public health. Through readings and ethnographic case studies in cultural anthropology, medical anthropology, applied and critical anthropology, and related social sciences, the class will examine the participants and institutions that make up the production of global health, as well as the knowledge, and value production that have shaped agendas, policies and practices in global health, both historically and in the contemporary. The course will also explore anthropology's relationship to and perspectives on the history of global health. We will examine how local communities, local knowledge and political forces intersect with, shape, and are shaped by global initiatives to impact diseases, treatments, and health care delivery. As well, what the effects are on individuals, families and children, communities, urban and rural areas, and nations. Among other topics, the course will explore health disparities, epidemics/pandemics, global mental health, climate change and infectious diseases, chronic illness, violence, and diseases such as polio, HIV/AIDS, Covid-19, Tuberculosis, etc. Prerequisite(s): ANTH B102/H103 recommended; sophomore standing or higher

Course does not meet an Approach

Counts Toward: Child and Family Studies; Environmental Studies; Growth and Structure of Cities; Health Studies.

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ANTH B366 Waves of Power: Sound in Culture, Politics, and Society

Not offered 2024-25

From the chants of protesters to the hum of engines, from the ring of church bells to the background tracks of our favorite songs, sound matters. It is not just a background to what we see, but a crucial and powerful part of social life. This course builds an understanding of sound through anthropological investigation, as a product of human creativity, human conflict, and human interaction with the material world. We will explore the ways that sound is conceptualized and endowed with meaning; how sound becomes linked to identity; and how sound can become a call to action in different cultural and historical contexts. The kinds of sounds we will encounter in this course include, but are not limited to, music and spoken language; we will also be studying environmental, industrial, and religious sounds. You will also be learning about different ways to record, document, and write about sound by engaging in your own sound-based ethnographic research. Prerequisite: Sophomore Standing or higher.

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ANTH B367 Policing the Crisis 2020: Police Narrative and Black Lives Matter

Spring 2025

The Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, sparked by the police murder of George Floyd, led to a collapse in public support for the police. Radical demands to defund or abolish the police gained prominence and public legitimacy. This course studies the ways that police and their allies have worked to reassert police authority in the years since 2020. We will draw on Stuart Hall's classic essay, "Policing the Crisis," which examined police propaganda after a similar upheaval in the 1970s. Using Hall's work as a model, we will design and conduct a research project, using archival and qualitative methods to track the reassertion of police authority since 2020. At the end of the course, we will publicize our findings.

Power, Inequity, and Justice (PIJ)

Counts Toward: Africana Studies; Africana Studies; Growth and Structure of Cities.

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ANTH B398 Senior Conference

Research design, proposal writing, research ethics, empirical research techniques and analysis of original material. Class discussions of work in progress and oral and written presentations of the analysis and results of research are important. A senior thesis proposal is the most significant writing experience in the seminar. Prerequisite: Senior Anthropology majors only.

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ANTH B399 Senior Conference

Coding research notes, discussion of ongoing field work and research. A senior's thesis is the most significant writing experience in the seminar. Senior requirement.

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ANTH B403 Supervised Work

Independent work is usually open to junior and senior majors who wish to work in a special area under the supervision of a member of the faculty and is subject to faculty time and interest.

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ANTH B425 Praxis III: Independent Study

Praxis III courses are Independent Study courses and are developed by individual students, in collaboration with faculty and field supervisors. A Praxis courses is distinguished by genuine collaboration with fieldsite organizations and by a dynamic process of reflection that incorporates lessons learned in the field into the classroom setting and applies theoretical understanding gained through classroom study to work done in the broader community. Note: Students are eligible to take up to two Praxis Fieldwork Seminars or Praxis Independent Studies during their time at Bryn Mawr.

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AFST B204 #BlackLivesMatterEverywhere

Spring 2025

#BlackLivesMatterEverywhere: Ethnographies & Theories on the African Diaspora is a interdisciplinary course closely examines political, cultural, intellectual, and spiritual mobilizations for Black Lives on local, global and hemispheric levels. We will engage an array of materials ranging from literature, history, oral histories, folklore, dance, music, popular culture, social media, ethnography, and film/documentaries. By centering the political and intellectual labor of Black women and LGBTQ folks at the forefront of the movements for Black Lives, we unapologetically excavate how #BlackLivesMatterEverywhere has a long and rich genealogy in the African diaspora. Lastly, students will be immersed in Black queer feminist theorizations on diaspora, political movements, and the multiplicities of Blackness.

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)

Power, Inequity, and Justice (PIJ)

Counts Toward: Africana Studies; Anthropology; General Studies; Growth and Structure of Cities; Latin American Iberian Latinx; Museum Studies.

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ARCH B260 Daily Life in Ancient Greece and Rome

Not offered 2024-25

The often-praised achievements of the classical cultures arose from the realities of day-to-day life. This course surveys the rich body of material and textual evidence pertaining to how ancient Greeks and Romans -- famous and obscure alike -- lived and died. Topics include housing, food, clothing, work, leisure, and family and social life.

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BIOL B236 Evolution

Spring 2025

A lecture/discussion course on evolutionary biology. This course will cover the history of evolutionary theory, population genetics, molecular and developmental evolution, paleontology, and phylogenetic analysis. Lecture three hours a week.

Scientific Investigation (SI)

Counts Toward: Anthropology; Biochemistry & Molecular Bio; Biochemistry Molecular Biology; Geology.

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CITY B185 Urban Culture and Society

Fall 2024

Examines techniques and questions of the social sciences as tools for studying historical and contemporary cities. Topics include political-economic organization, conflict and social differentiation (class, ethnicity and gender), and cultural production and representation. Philadelphia features prominently in discussion, reading and exploration as do global metropolitan comparisons through papers involving fieldwork, critical reading and planning/problem solving using qualitative and quantitative methods.

Course does not meet an Approach

Power, Inequity, and Justice (PIJ)

Counts Toward: Anthropology; International Studies.

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CITY B229 Topics in Comparative Urbanism

Section 001 (Spring 2025): Post-Conflict Urbanism
Section 002 (Spring 2025): Post-Conflict Urbanism

Spring 2025

This is a topics course. Course content varies.

Writing Intensive

Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)

Inquiry into the Past (IP)

Counts Toward: Anthropology; International Studies; Latin American Iberian Latinx.

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CITY B365 Topics: Techniques of the City

Section 001 (Spring 2025): Urban Renewal

Spring 2025

This is a topics course. Course content varies.

Counts Toward: Anthropology.

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HIST B200 The Atlantic World 1492-1800

Not offered 2024-25

The aim of this course is to provide an understanding of the way in which peoples, goods, and ideas from Africa, Europe. and the Americas came together to form an interconnected Atlantic World system. The course is designed to chart the manner in which an integrated system was created in the Americas in the early modern period, rather than to treat the history of the Atlantic World as nothing more than an expanded version of North American, Caribbean, or Latin American history.

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INST B201 Themes in International Studies

Not offered 2024-25

This is a topics course. Course content varies.

Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)

Counts Toward: Anthropology; Environmental Studies.

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INST B220 Political Ecology and Environmental Justice

Spring 2025

This course is an introduction to the fields of Political Ecology and Environmental Justice. Through ethnographic accounts, documentary film, graphic novels, photography and other multimedia, students will be introduced to ethnographic case studies of environmental justice struggles, conflicts over resources, and the impacts of extractive industries on indigenous and other frontline communities across the Global South and North. How, we will ask, do environmental problems, such as climate change, pollution and toxicity, biodiversity loss and extinctions, and struggles over resource extraction intersect with questions of identity and inequality, such as race, ethnicity, nation, indigeneity, and gender? Students will make use of the theoretical and methodological tools offered by environmental justice and political ecology to critically examine: processes of globalization, development, and the racialized postcolonial geographies of resource extraction; the problem of environmental racism, and social movements for indigenous sovereignty and climate justice; and science and technology studies inquiries into the relations between humans and non-humans. Together, we will trace the historical roots, colonial logics, and contemporary effects of extractive capitalism and learn from the legacies of movements social and environmental justice in order to interrogate our own positionality within the global political ecology of resource extraction and consumption. Prerequisite: Intro to International Studies recommended as preparation

Writing Attentive

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)

Counts Toward: Anthropology; Environmental Studies; Latin American Iberian Latinx.

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INST B315 Humans & Non-Humans

Not offered 2024-25

Anthropology is the study of humans, but the idea of the "human" always implies the category of the "non-human." Humanity is defined in its relation to "non-humans": ranging from tools and technology, to domesticated (and undomesticated) animals, to agricultural crops, our local ecologies, and the global environment. What does it mean to be human? What is the agency of non-humans in human worlds? Do forests think? Do dogs dream? What is the agency of a mountain? What are the rights of a river? What is the cultural significance of DNA? This course will trace Anthropological debates over the "human" and "non-human" in contexts ranging from Amerindian cosmology, to political ecology, and science and technology studies.

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