ANTH101 Introduction to Cultural Anthropology

This course introduces students to concepts, theories, and methods of cultural anthropology. Lectures, readings, and audiovisual materials invite critical analysis of broader themes in contemporary anthropology, such as the nature of culture, the problematic notions of social evolution and progress, and the negotiation of power within and among diverse peoples.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-ANTH
Prereq: None

ANTH101Z Introduction to Cultural Anthropology

This course introduces students to concepts, theories, and methods of cultural anthropology. Lectures, readings, and audiovisual materials invite critical analysis of broader themes in contemporary anthropology, such as the nature of culture, the problematic notions of social evolution and progress, and the negotiation of power within and among diverse peoples.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-ANTH
Prereq: None

ANTH103F Anthropology of Gifts and Giving: Selfless or Selfish? (FYS)

What is a gift? A commonplace understanding is that a gift is something given gratuitously, selflessly, and without the expectation of a return (just look the word up in any dictionary). Why, then, upon receiving a gift, do we feel indebted to the giver? And rather than free and gratuitous, isn't most gift giving compelled by socially significant events and regulated by relatively rigid rules? This FYS is an in-depth examination of gift giving as one of the most powerful forces binding individuals and groups in society into relationships of reciprocity. Students become familiar with critical anthropological and philosophical debates about the gift and consider their application to contemporary forms of giving, including traditional gift-giving events, sacrifice, philanthropy, volunteering and voluntourism, international aid, and types of giving made possible by advances in technology, such as organ donation and surrogacy. We attend to the economic, political, ethical, cultural, gender, and personal dimensions of gift giving in their remarkable power to make and break social bonds and undo or reinforce hierarchical relations at all levels of local and global society. Students draw a deeper understanding of the connection between generosity and power to inform their own ethics of gift giving, sharing of wealth, and sense of responsibility, wellbeing, and place in the world.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-ANTH
Prereq: None

ANTH111F Anthropology of Conspiracy (FYS)

This first year seminar explores the relationship between conspiracy theory and contemporary life through the discipline of anthropology. We learn how to read, discuss, and write about anthropological texts using conspiracy as a starting point. We trace the history of conspiracy theory, read ethnographies of conspiracy, and extend the concept of what counts as conspiracy to anthropological topics such as culture, class, ideology, myth, virtuality, race, affect, gender, and sexuality. We ask what the utility of conspiracy is in world-building, ritual, and belief structure inherent in both cultural cohesion and conflict.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-ANTH
Prereq: None

ANTH112F The Anthropology of Godzilla: Unconventional and Monstruous Perspectives on the Anthropocene (FYS)

In this First Year Seminar, we will use anthropology--the study of how humans make cultural, social, and political meaning in the world--in order to better understand contemporary global, ecological conditions through the lens of giant monster movies. It begins from the argument that "monstruous media" reflects our cultural worlds back at us in productive and insightful ways, and that Godzilla, in particular, helps us better understand the ways the Anthropocene is at once a product of human action and seems at the same time to totally exceed human capacities. We will combine some traditional readings with extensive film viewing in order to help students develop their academic writing and analytical skills.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-ANTH
Identical With: STS112
Prereq: None

ANTH113F Anthropology of Gender & Sexuality (FYS)

This first year seminar explores the concepts of gender and sexuality through an anthropological lens, engaging with both theoretical and ethnographic material in order to fully immerse students in the experiences of the cultures being analyzed.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-ANTH
Prereq: None

ANTH120F Indigenous Environmental Justice (FYS)

Environmental justice--as both a social movement and an area of scholarship-- emphasizes the disproportionate impact of environmental harm on human communities already marginalized because of factors like race, class, and indigeneity. While Indigenous activists and scholars have strategically mobilized under the banner of environmental justice, conventional U.S. environmental justice frameworks have not always acknowledged the status of Indigenous nations as sovereign political and legal entities or their distinctive articulations of justice and environment. Focusing primarily on North America, this First Year Seminar will explore how Indigenous land and water protectors have long put forward visions for collective futures that diverge from intertwined histories of social and ecological violence, including through multiracial collaborations and campaigns. We will engage texts from a wide range of disciplines, as well as non-academic materials and films.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-ANTH
Prereq: None

ANTH150 Indigenous Middletown: Native Histories of the Wangunk Indian People

Students will be introduced to the new field of settler colonial studies, the rapidly transforming field of critical indigenous studies, along with Native American history and historiography addressing southern New England. Taking up a decolonizing methodological approach, the class will focus on the sparsely documented history of the Wangunk Indian Tribe, the indigenous people of the place we call "Middletown," also known as Mattabesett. The Wangunk people, part of the Algonquin cultural group, historically presided over both sides of the Connecticut River in present-day Middletown and Portland, while their traditional territory reached as far north as Wethersfield and Chatham. Although regarded as "extinct" by settlers in the aftermath of King Philip's War, 1675-1678, the Wangunk continue to live into the 21st century.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: Cr/U
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Identical With: AMST150
Prereq: None

ANTH201 Key Issues in Black Feminism (FGSS Gateway)

This course surveys key issues in the historical development of black feminist thoughts and practices through readings of canonical works especially from the 1980s and '90s that contribute to this extensive body of knowledge. Our aim is to engage black feminist and womanist theorists, activists and artists from the diaspora who are exploring intersections of race, class, sexuality, religion, and other indices of identity affecting their daily lives. To that end, we will take an interdisciplinary approach to unpacking the historical tensions and politics and poetics in theory/practice, representation/self-making and expression/performance. We will also examine more recent turns in #BlackLivesMatter, #SayHerName and #BlackGirlMagic and conclude with Post-Zora Interventions-- feminist interrogations on the borders anthropology, art, and activism.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AFAM
Identical With: FGSS217
Prereq: None

ANTH203 Sex, Money, and Power: Anthropology of Intimacy and Exchange

Sex and money--intimacy and economy--are often imagined to occupy distinct and separate spheres. Sex and intimacy are located in the private or domestic realm, in spaces of leisure, feelings, care, and personal connections. Money and economy, on the other hand, are purportedly public, located in the market and tied to labor, rationality, and impersonal (non)-relations. This course brings these spheres together, focusing on the links, exchanges, and circuits between the intimate and the economic in diverse cultural contexts.



Drawing on anthropological, feminist, Marxist, queer, and critical race theory, we will build

working definitions of key concepts: intimacy, division of labor, domestic labor, sexual labor, exchange, commodity, value, neoliberalism, consumer culture, and more. We'll test, apply, critique, and expand these concepts as we work through ethnographic case studies on contemporary sex work and tourism, marketing and pornography, reproduction and domestic labor, marriage, class and sexual lifestyle, labor and care work, and sex stores and commodities. We will connect economic, cultural, and political formations with race, ethnicity, nation, sexuality, class, and gender, scaling up to consider global and transnational exchanges and down to consider how these circuits impact families and communities. Throughout, we will ask: Whose labor is valued and recognized, and why? How do bodies accrue value, and in what kinds of marketplaces? When are intimacies--sexual and social--commoditized? How is race, gender, and sexuality central to these exchanges? How do new transnational circuits constrain and/or empower people? And finally, who benefits from these relations, and who does not?
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-ANTH
Identical With: FGSS223
Prereq: None

ANTH204 Extreme Landscapes of the Anthropocene

The "Anthropocene," a term coined to categorize the current geological epoch, has become a way in which social scientists can critically and creatively engage with the impact of humanity on the ecological well-being of the Earth. The interdisciplinary and uncertain nature of this subject matter provides space for experimental writing styles, innovative approaches to storytelling, and critical discussion and debate. This course is designed to explore and challenge the term "Anthropocene," questioning how narrative and drama are entangled in the dissemination of complex truths, for better or worse.



In this course, we will consider texts, short films, and other mixed media that investigate the everydayness of extreme landscapes, from "capitalist ruins" to the depleting seas. We will dive into the social, political, economic, and scientific power-scapes that influence narratives about the environment, from late liberal ideology to corporate influence on science and the news. Through the course materials and activities, we will question how to communicate complex information with a broad range of people, particularly surrounding issues of climate change, sustainability, and environmental justice. Each student will build their own writing portfolio of short essays for specific audiences. The class will collectively build and design a storytelling website where they can share their work. Students are encouraged to apply an ethics of care and the art of "non-judgmental attention" to their critical engagement with the Anthropocene.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SISP
Identical With: SISP204, WRCT204, ENVS204
Prereq: None

ANTH205 Borderlands in the African Mediterranean and Beyond

The past decade has seen one of the largest mobilizations of human migration in recent history. This migratory flow is usually discussed within spatial frames such as movement across borders, between countries, and across the sea. This course departs from those narratives by bringing into focus the routes, social worlds, and systems of exchange that emerge during time spent between borders, a time often eclipsed as "just waiting." The beginning of the course sets the theoretical tone for our readings and discussions by revisiting how anthropology has questioned the stability of the linkage between culture and space, and placing this into the context of scholarship on liminality and borderlands. Subsequently, we will examine ethnographic studies, as well as some literary texts, that focus on migration and immigration primarily across the African Mediterranean, with comparative examples drawn from South and North America and Western Asia. The course's goal is to trace the communal sentiments enmeshed in these routes and worlds and to inquire what they may imply for political and subjective belonging, beyond narratives centered on the anxieties that emerge once "migrants" enter into European and North American territories.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-ANTH
Prereq: None

ANTH206 Ethnography of the American Rural

The rural stands as a fraught American symbol, positioned in stark contrast to its corollary: the urban and its cosmopolitan subjects. The American rural is variously represented as vulnerable, disappearing, backwards, regressive, slow. In this course, we elucidate the texture of the American Rural by engaging with ethnographic writing from the early 20th century into the contemporary. In exploring the rural as a meeting place of working-class expressive cultures, an atmosphere of slow or strange time, a dramatic history of industry and agriculture, a notoriously tense racial zone, an icon of severity, and a place of exuberant stories and poetics, we uncover the vital ideological function of the rural as the urban's dark twin in American myth throughout history and today.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-ANTH
Identical With: AMST236
Prereq: None

ANTH208 Crafting Ethnography

This course is an introduction to the craft of ethnographic research and writing. In the first half, we will explore some of the research methodologies anthropologists use to understand, interpret, and analyze culture. Each student will choose an ethnographic field project for the semester and practice ethnographic methods (participant observation, interviewing, virtual ethnography, auto-ethnography, visual representation, and more). In the second half of the course, students will begin to write their ethnography, practicing writing in a variety of styles and genres (including realist, reflexive, dialogic, engaged, and experimental). Guided, weekly peer workshops throughout the semester will give students a chance to hash out and talk through questions of ethics, positionality, representational politics, and the improvisational felicities and challenges that arise during fieldwork and writing. This course will give students a solid grasp of ethnographic methods and how anthropologists construct ethnographies. It is ideal preparation for ethnographic theses and essays during senior year.



Spring 2021 changes: research methodologies explored will be determined in the context of our capacity to do in-person research during this time.
Offering: Host
Grading: Cr/U
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-ANTH
Prereq: ANTH101

ANTH209 Tradition & Testimony: Protecting Native American Sacred Lands, Ancestral Remains, & Cultural Items

This course will explore the historic genesis of present-day U.S. and international policies toward Native American peoples and other indigenous communities. In addition, studies will include traditional indigenous and tribal perspectives, investigate indigenous-specific origin stories and the connections these stories have with historic events and places, and take a hard look at repatriation policies. Students will investigate several case studies involving current issues Native American communities are facing in repatriation and protecting sacred places, both local and national.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-ANTH
Identical With: ARCP209
Prereq: None

ANTH210 The Technological Primate: Archaeological Approaches to Ancient Technology

Humans are reliant on technology, in one form or another, for our survival. This obligate use of technology has been a characteristic of our evolutionary history for over 2.5 million years. This course will explore how technology became central to the human way of life. We will discuss both how and why our use of technology has changed through time. This includes considerations of the adaptive roles that technology plays in our evolution, how technology is shared between individuals and cultures, and the role of technology beyond the purely utilitarian. Students will learn about the ways archaeologists analyze and think about ancient technologies. This includes a wide variety of material types, including stone, ceramic, botanicals, bone, metal, and more. In this course students will have an opportunity to handle both actual archaeological materials and replicas.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-ARCP
Identical With: ARCP210, IDEA205, STS211
Prereq: None

ANTH212 The Secrets of Ancient Bones: Discovering Ancient DNA and Archaeology

New analyses of ancient DNA preserved for millennia in bones and soils have revolutionized the field of archaeology. Suddenly, archaeologists have gained new insight into human origins, past population migrations, ancient diseases, plant and animal domestication, and even the factors that contributed to the extinctions of megafauna such as woolly mammoths. Recent genetic case studies will provide a lens for learning about the archaeology of diverse world regions and time periods, from Oceania to Mesoamerica and from the Paleolithic through recent history. Topics will include: human evolution and genetic relationships between humans, Neanderthals, and Denisovans; the peopling of the globe; extinction and de-extinction; domestication and the origins of agriculture; paleodiseases and paleodiets; and ethics in genetic research.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-ARCP
Identical With: ARCP203, ENVS203, STS203, IDEA203
Prereq: None

ANTH213 Indigenous Anthropology

In this course, we will explore what anthropology looks like from an indigenous perspective. Focusing on four significant texts by indigenous anthropologists, we will explore concepts of indigeneity, mobility, gender, DNA, and indigenous rights and sovereignty as they are articulated between anthropology and indigenous studies. At the same time, we will examine how anthropological research and writing can be conducted from the perspective of the historically colonized as opposed to the colonizers, navigating the ambiguities of anthropology's own legacy as it is rearticulated by scholars from diverse positionalities and perspectives.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-ANTH
Identical With: AMST285
Prereq: None

ANTH214 Introduction to Archaeology

What can fragments of pottery, stones, and bones reveal about the lives of people who lived thousands or even millions of years ago? What does the archaeological record reveal about human evolution, past human diets and health, ancient socioeconomic systems, and the emergence of early cities? And how can we preserve archaeological sites and artifacts for future generations? This course will introduce students to the interdisciplinary field of archaeology. We will discuss key methods and principles that archaeologists use to study the human past while covering a survey of world prehistory from the earliest stone tools to the archaeology of contemporary material culture. Students will have the opportunity to examine real archaeological artifacts--including artifacts excavated from historic Middletown--and will be encouraged to think critically about the ways that archaeology informs our understanding of both the past and the present.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-ARCP
Identical With: ARCP204, ENVS207, IDEA204
Prereq: None

ANTH215 Nature/Culture

In this course, we are going to explore--and problematize--the boundary between the so-called "natural" world and human social and cultural life. Rather than assuming that "nature" is something that already exists in the world that humans have systematically excoriated and transformed, we consider instead the idea that nature and culture are fundamentally co-constitutive concepts--that is to say, that one cannot exist without the other. As we go, we will explore pressing concerns such as the boundaries between human and non-human, the nature of the Anthropocene, the question of what it means to be "modern," and the power of ecological politics in our contemporary orders of global capitalism.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-ANTH
Identical With: ENVS218, STS255
Prereq: None

ANTH217 Anthropology of Science

What are scientific facts? How do we know what we know? In this course, students will gain an introduction to thinking about science and technology as cultural practices shaped by power, politics, race, indigeneity, gender, and sexuality. Students will explore how anthropologists, long interested in how "culture" works, have recently turned their gaze toward critically examining the cultures of people in positions of technoscientific power, including nuclear scientists, Wall Street analysts, drone weapon designers, climate scientists, molecular biologists, and more. Students will also be trained in conducting ethnographic fieldwork on a group of experts in their own communities in order to ask questions about scientific rituals, truth-making, and distributions of power and privilege. Students who received credit for SISP 265---Introduction to Science as Culture may NOT enroll in this course for credit
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SISP
Identical With: STS265
Prereq: None

ANTH220 Anthropology and (Anti)-Blackness

This course considers the intellectual and institutional developments of psychoanalysis and anthropology in the 19th and 20th centuries and the ways in which these disciplines defined a figure of the human that excluded the "African," the "Black," "the Negro" from the capacity to signify the universal. By examining these constitutive occlusions of race, the course considers the ways in which the "unthought" status of racial blackness, in particular, animates and aggravates the discipline of anthropology. The course will move from introductory readings in classical anthropology and psychoanalysis and a selection of works in Black critical thought towards contemporary scholarship that reappraises these fraught questions.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: None
Prereq: None

ANTH227 Ethnographies in Medicine

Biomedicine looks different in different places. Biotechnologies change under new moral frameworks. The same pharmaceutical pill can offer freedom to some and evoke colonialism in others. And in some contexts hunger is more pressing than curing a specific disease. How do we go about challenging our biomedical assumptions and understanding medicine in context? Medical anthropologists have relied on the art and science of ethnography to provide cross-cultural accounts of health and healing that are accessible, provocative, and timely. In this writing-intensive course, we will read exemplary ethnographies in medical anthropology to explore the intersection of medicine, culture, and narrative text. We will explore four themes that cover provocative discourses in the field: the challenges of participant observation during vulnerable encounters with sickness and disease; regimes of power; local-global encounters; and food, eating, and the gendered body.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-WRCT
Identical With: WRCT226
Prereq: None

ANTH230 Anthropology of Cities

This course is an introduction to the practice of urban anthropology. Attention is placed on the intellectual challenges recent local and global urbanization trends present to us in our attempts to think and write about cities today. We will reflect upon the production of space and place, the creation of "other spaces" through borders and limits, and the making of meaning through everyday practices and experiences in the city. We will consider how cities become foremost spaces for the exercise and contestation of power, for social cohabitation and conflict, and for cultural creation and repression. Class discussions will also focus on fieldwork methods and problems of ethnographic representation and writing in preparation for a research project that will culminate in an urban mini-ethnography.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-ANTH
Prereq: None

ANTH233 Global Queer Studies

This course explores global experiences of LGBT/Q life, bringing an explicitly transnational lens to a field too often dominated by U.S.-centered perspectives.



Drawing on queer ethnography and film, we will explore the contours of queer and trans life around the globe, from the lives of gay men in Indonesia to Muslim yan daudu in Nigeria, gay tourism in post-Revolutionary Cuba, queer mati work among working-class Afro-Surinamese women, lesbian activism in India, LGBT asylum claims in Canada, the queer art of Carnival in Trinidad and Tobago, the everyday lives of lalas (lesbians) in China, and and the transnational lives of Filipino gay men in New York. Our aim is to challenge and expand Western categories and concepts of sexuality, gender, identity, and desire (both hetero- and homo-normative) and to center the ways sexual/gendered identities, cultures, and politics are shaped by colonialism, imperialism, racialization, migration, transnational media, and global capitalism.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Identical With: AMST233, FGSS233
Prereq: None

ANTH240 Hipsters

This course will focus on the contemporary hipster subculture after examining a critical genealogy and racial history of the origins of the concept. From black jazz artists and zoot-suitors in the 1940s who defined "hip" and "cool," to the post-World War II burgeoning literary scene of the Beat Generation that codified the figure of the hipster as an American bohemian strangled by social conformity, there has been a cultural politics of being "in the know." Derived from the term used to describe these earlier movements, the term "hipster" reappeared in the 1990s and became especially conspicuous in the 2000s to the present. Today's hipsters are generally associated with whiteness, indie music, a vintage fashion sensibility, liberal political views, organic and artisanal foods, as well as racial gentrification in urban neighborhoods in Brooklyn and select cities such as Portland, OR and San Francisco. Perhaps curiously, members of this subculture typically disassociate themselves from this cultural category, as outsiders often use the term hipster as a pejorative. In an attempt to understand why hipsters differentiate their actions from the hipster stigma, students will study the contemporary discourse about hipsters, along with a historical analysis of the term and its use in popular culture to get a better understanding of race, class, gender, and the commodification of style. Other topics for exploration include stereotypes, authenticity debates, hipster racism, so-called "blipsters," the death of irony, hipster chic, "hipster run-off," the resentment of hipsters, and forecasts of "the end of the hipster."
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Identical With: AMST240
Prereq: None

ANTH241 Critical Interculturality and the Pedagogy of Unlearning

This course is offered by our study abroad partner, Pachaysana, online from their site in Ecuador, with local educators.



An ever-growing number of students, scholars, and activists criticize our educational institutions for upholding colonial structures, and via numerous movements are calling for "decolonization." Any effort to decolonize our education must go well beyond the content of what we teach in the classroom. In addition to what we are learning, we must explore how we learn, where we learn, and with whom we learn. We also must think about what "decolonization" means, taking into consideration the lands on which our campuses and communities are located. This course addresses decolonization through the lens of critical interculturality, referring to Catherine Walsh's critique of multiculturalism as functional or relational interculturality. Bringing in readings from Indigenous and Latin American scholars and taking part in workshops facilitated by local Ecuadorian community members, we will use interactive methods to explore some of the most challenging concepts related to decolonization, including "decolonization is not a metaphor," epistemic justice, border thinking, and embodied methodologies. Those concepts will then be examined with regards to the realities on our college campuses and our communities, and we will begin to dream about moving from the "functional" to the "critical." By the end of the course, informed by the readings and interactions with community-based educators in Ecuador, students will formulate clear questions and identify potential strategies for applying critical interculturality at their college campuses.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-CGST
Identical With: CGST341
Prereq: None

ANTH242 Other Worlds Are Possible: Life Against and Beyond Neoliberal Logics

This four-week intensive course examines radical challenges, in theory and on the ground, to mainstream neoliberal capitalism and development strategies promoted by international organizations such as World Bank and the IMF. After the 1980s, considered by many as "the lost decade" of development, some scholars and practitioners declared the development enterprise as fundamentally wrong: It was a misguided and violent neocolonial project that could never provide the answer to inequality and poverty. These radical critics argued for building a "post-development" era. In this course, we look at the conceptual history of the term "post-development" and also examine what post-development life looks like on the ground, among dispossessed communities. We will focus on lived and imagined challenges to neoliberal capitalism. We spend the first week at Wesleyan, brushing up on the critical ideas and movements that have emerged out of Mexico (and Latin America, broadly) over the past four decades in reaction to mainstream development discourse. We will then explore these ideas and lived alternatives in Oaxaca, Mexico. We will spend three weeks learning about and working with marginalized communities that are rejecting capitalist development and building and experimenting with living a "good life" (buen vivir) on their own terms.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 2.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-ANTH
Prereq: None

ANTH243 Medical Anthropology

Situated at the intersection of the clinical and social sciences, medical anthropology seeks to understand bodies, afflictions, healing, and care in cross-cultural contexts. This course serves as an introduction to the exciting field of medical anthropology. Students will begin by mastering dominant approaches within medical anthropology for studying the body as a site of meaning, a moral battleground, a biosocial entity, an object of regulation and control, and a tool of resistance and change. We will then turn our attention to different kinds of bodies in distress and to the therapeutic responses they invoke (or fail to invoke) from healers, doctors, kin groups, aid workers, and state actors. Of particular concern will be those aspects of healing that challenge commonsense notions of how therapies work and where they may fall short. Specific concepts and topics to be covered include illness narratives, idioms of distress, structural and symbolic violence, culture-bound syndromes, nature/nurture debates, ritual healing, high-tech medicine, and humanitarianism.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-ANTH
Prereq: None

ANTH244 Television: The Domestic Medium

Of all the mass media, television is the most intimately associated with domestic and familial life. Its installation in American homes over the postwar decade coincided with a revival of family life that encouraged an emphasis on private over public leisure. Most television is still watched at home, where viewing practices are interwoven with domestic routines and provide a site for negotiating family and gender relations. Television production is shaped at several levels by the images broadcasters and advertisers have of viewers' domestic lives: Broadcast schedules reflect socially conditioned assumptions about the gendered division of family roles; a common televisual mode of address uses a conversational style in which performers present themselves to viewers as friends or members of the family; and families or surrogate families figure prominently in the content of programming across a wide range of genres, including sitcoms, primetime dramas, daytime soaps, and talk shows. Sitcoms, in particular, have responded to and mediated historical shifts in family forms and gender relations over the past 50 years, and they will be a focus in this course. We will explore how television has both shaped and responded to larger cultural discourses about family and gender from the postwar era into the 21st century.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-ANTH
Identical With: FILM349, FGSS243
Prereq: None

ANTH249 From Metropolis to Megalopolis

What is the urban experience today? Are the old European metropolises, the global cities of New York or Tokyo, and the new megalopolises of the Global South commensurate entities? What are the theoretical and methodological challenges we face in thinking about "the urban" today, given the vastly different histories, trajectories, and physical and social realities of cities around the world? This course is an introductory and interdisciplinary survey of urban theory. We will critically examine "the city" as a transhistorical category of analysis and focus on issues of anthropological concern regarding the experience and epistemology of urbanization and urban life. No prior background in urban studies is expected, but an interest in theory is a must.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-ANTH
Prereq: None

ANTH250 Identity and "Pacha" (Land-Based Knowledge and Re-imagining Community) - Taught from Ecuador

This course is taught from Ecuador by our study abroad partner, Pachaysana.



According to indigenous Andean scholars, Pacha refers to the time-space continuum, or as the "everything around and inside us." This course asks students to challenge their identities by broadening their epistemological and ontological lenses to see their individual and collective lives as they relate to Pacha. To synthesize this complicated process, we ask participants to examine who they are as related to the ever-changing ecology in which they live. For this course, ecology is approached broadly, referring to the Greek origin on the word oikos, meaning home. We take advantage of our virtual exchange and examine home as an interconnection of how we relate to "place and space," exploring our ecology as the triad of our immediate territory (llakta in Kichwa), our surrounding natural environment (allpa in Kichwa), and our global and pluriversal space (pacha). Throughout the course, we use an interdisciplinary lens to examine "who we are" as related to this diverse understanding of ecology, taking into consideration that our ever-changing environment includes an ever-changing human story. Readings are transdisciplinary, coming from the fields of anthropology, sociology, human geography, gender studies, ethnic studies, history, the arts, and development studies. Toward the end of the course, after examining certain theories and case studies, we will imagine the reconstruction of our identities contextualized to pacha, space, place, ecology, oikos, and home.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-CGST
Identical With: CGST340
Prereq: None

ANTH254 Self and Other in Cross-Cultural Encounters (CLAC.50)

This course is open to students currently enrolled in ANTH101: Introduction to Cultural Anthropology or in ANTH103: Gifts and Giving. It is intended for students with an interest in improving their spoken and written Spanish through an exploration of the problems and possibilities of cultural anthropological practice. This exploration will happen via class discussion and short ethnographic research assignments. The course will be conducted in Spanish and is open to students with some level of proficiency: from intermediate to advanced and to heritage speakers of the language. Students are expected to be currently enrolled in, or to have previously taken, ANTH101 or ANTH103. Email the instructor for information about alternatives to this requirement.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 0.50
Gen Ed Area: SBS-ANTH
Identical With: CGST254
Prereq: None

ANTH256 Anthropology of the Senses

How do we know what we know? Is seeing really believing? And what about hearing, smelling, tasting, and feeling? This course explores Anna Tsing's provocation to "look around instead of ahead," asking: what kinds of participatory observation of the senses help us identify what we know about the world? Through readings, lectures, short form writing, and field trips, we examine the role of the senses in forming what we know about ourselves and others. Writing and research assignments develop tools for documenting, analyzing, and communicating our senses and work towards a critical acknowledgment of sensory hierarchies. Our course readings consist of selections from theories of affect, sound studies, and food studies, as well as key texts in cultural anthropology in order to build an appreciation of the range of sensory information available to us and the strategies we use to communicate our sensory worlds. Our goal is to probe how ethnographic work sensitive to the multidimensionality of the human sensorium can discover and propose real strategies for human vitality.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-ANTH
Prereq: None

ANTH257 Environmental Archaeology

Archaeological materials provide long-term records of how humans have modified past environments and how human societies respond to environmental change. In this course, students will learn how data from ancient plants, animals, and soils can be analyzed in order to draw interpretations about past human-environmental interactions. We will also discuss key topics in environmental archaeology, including the long-term environmental impacts of plant and animal domestication and debates over environmental causes for the "collapse" of civilizations such as the ancient Maya. The course will involve hands-on preparation and cataloging of plant and animal specimens to add to the Wesleyan Environmental Archaeology Laboratory comparative collections. Students must be available for one weekend class meeting to complete the first stage of animal skeleton preparation.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: NSM-ARCP, SBS-ARCP
Identical With: ARCP257, ENVS257, E&ES257
Prereq: None

ANTH259 Development, Disasters, and Beyond: The Global Politics of Aid

Development is one of the most important ideas of our times. It is a powerful way of reorganizing the world into the Global South and the Global North (or the Third and First Worlds) and promising modernity to "backward" places and people. It is an equally powerful way of intervening in "underdeveloped" regions in the name of progress and beneficence through aid programs. Our purpose in this course is to use the spy lens of anthropology to critically examine the global politics of development aid, whether given for poverty alleviation, infrastructure projects, disease and healthcare, or disaster relief. While development aid is certainly a potent way to exert power over and regulate Third World Others, it is also a fiercely contested space of struggle. This course approaches it as a "problematic"--an unsettled, contentious, and unpredictable formation.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-ANTH
Identical With: ENVS259
Prereq: None

ANTH267 Black Religions in the Americas

This course will focus on the African-based religious systems that cultivated traditional ways to survive slavery, white supremacy, and state violence. We will focus on Vodou in Haiti, Regla de Ocha (Santeria) and Palo Mayombe in Cuba, Obeah in Jamaica, and aspects of Black religions in the US. We will discuss questions of method and themes of political resistance, orality, secrecy, magic, "authenticity," commodification, and the ethics of representation. We will also look at the Black church and especially the rise of the Pentecostal movement in African and Afro-Caribbean spaces, as well as visionary Black religious thought.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-RELI
Identical With: RELI268, AFAM387, LAST268, AMST258
Prereq: None

ANTH274 Self & Social Transformation

Racism, sexism, and classism are deeply ingrained in our habits and feelings. It seems that in order to change objective conditions we need to change ourselves and our communities. But given that our habits and feelings are often unconscious and resistant to change, how do we philosophically go about doing this? This class tries to answer this question. It starts theoretically with ancient Greek and ancient Chinese virtue ethics as well as Foucault's later work on self-transformation. It then takes these concepts/theories and sees them in action in contemporary movements of self/community transformation. We start with a paradigmatic political activist movement of self-transformation: the Black feminist transformative justice movement with the goal of prison abolition. But as we progress, we will explore less obvious and seemingly more mundane movements of self- and community transformation such as Saba Mahmood's dawa movement from Egypt, Weight Watchers, and finally "ballroom" culture from Detroit. Anthropological ethnographies of these movements will help show how we can self-reflexively shape our own habits and transform ourselves.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-PHIL
Identical With: PHIL274, FGSS274
Prereq: None

ANTH276 Museum Collections: Ethical Considerations and Practical Applications

Serving as a broad overview of museology, this course introduces students to the principles underlying the foundations of museum work and collections stewardship. Topics covered will include the origins of museums and collecting, the rationale behind museum policies, and the legal frameworks and professional standards that guide collections management. Ethical considerations surrounding issues such as NAGPRA/repatriation, decolonization, accessibility, looted artifacts, and cultural patrimony will also be covered. Finally, students will explore the practical aspects of preventive conservation, museum documentation, and exhibition development. Although topics covered in this course will apply to a variety of museums, the primary focus will be on cultural heritage collections. Readings and class discussions will be supplemented with hands-on exercises using the Wesleyan University Archaeology & Anthropology Collection.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-ARCP
Identical With: ARCP267
Prereq: None

ANTH279 Eating Others: Histories and Cultures of Animal Edibility

For many people, animals form a significant and cherished part of their diet. Indeed, humans have used other animals as sources of nutrients for hundreds of thousands of years. What can these animal-based dietary practices tell us about humans and their relationships with other animals? Of course, these inter-species relationships have varied as radically across time and cultures as the dietary practices that have shaped them. To better understand some of these practices and the relationships they generate, this course will explore the following questions: How did animal-based food practices develop from pre-domestication to the contemporary era of industrialized animal agriculture? How have cultural categories of "edibility" developed in different cultural contexts? What is meat, and how does it differ from inedible flesh? How have gender, class, race, sexuality, and other categories of difference intersected with and shaped animal consumption practices in different times and contexts? How has animal consumption shaped and been shaped by animal ethics, philosophy, and scientific knowledge production? How has large-scale animal consumption contributed to the ecological crises of the Anthropocene, and how have these in turn affected animal consumption practices? What is the future of animal-based food?



This course will use ethnographies, historical and legal analyses, and philosophical inquiries to examine the histories and cultures of animal edibility. Specifically, it will focus on topics including human evolution, animal domestication, slaughter practices, industrialized animal agriculture, indigenous ecological ontologies, hunting, dairy and egg consumption, cannibalism, cultural conflicts over the edibility of specific species, and recent technological innovations that can produce animal products without animals.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-ENVS
Identical With: ENVS279, STS266
Prereq: None

ANTH285 Film and Anthropology

Film & Anthropology is an exploration of the cross-pollinating relationship between ethnographic and filmmaking methods and styles. This is, in part, an effort to understand the contributions of both to the observed and documented experience of cultural life. We will watch films weekly and discuss them, as well as respond to them individually in weekly critical précis. We will, in the course of these viewings, come to some consensus as to what we mean by ethnographic and cinematic elements. The films themselves will cross genre boundaries, running the gamut from "traditional" ethnographic films to various forms of documentary and experimental film that in some way address or explore what I consider ethnographic elements. We will cover canonical early ethnographic work (Gardner, Asch, Marshall), feminist experimental interventions in ethnographic film (Minh-Ha, Varda, Deren), and contemporary work that experiments with ethnographic elements, and we will synthesize various genres into new forms of long-form documentary, ethnofiction, and trance film (Marker, Oppenheimer, Sensory Ethnography Lab, Gonzalez, Rosi, Minervini, Kuchar). We will observe the progression of style through the 20th century into the 21st, with the various intellectual threads of post-structuralism, creating modifications of centering the experience and voice of the oppressed, narrative reflexivity/abstraction/unreliability, formal experimental editing styles, the decolonial method as filmmaking practice, and the historicization and interrogation of anthropology as a fraught discipline.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-ANTH
Identical With: FILM323
Prereq: None

ANTH286 Queer Activism and Radical Scholarship: Beyond Theory vs. Practice

This course explores the relationship between scholarship and activism, with a focus on intersectional radical queer scholarship and activism--queer left, black radical, trans, immigration, prison abolition, and sex work--in the United States. We will aim to connect the too-often bifurcated realms of academia and activism, theory and practice, research and action, so that we might think through the political stakes of knowledge-making in and outside the so-called "ivory tower," explore interdisciplinary methodologies we might use to study and learn from (and with) activists (including ethnography, oral history, and community archive), and gain insight into the histories and current realities of social justice movements, campus activisms, the work of a radical imagination, art and activism, and the impasse of the political present. To put their theory into practice, students will undertake a semester-long radical research project on a queer issue or activist organization--past or present--of their choice.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Identical With: AMST286, FGSS286
Prereq: None

ANTH290 Style and Identity in Youth Cultures

This course focuses on young people's engagements with commercially provided culture and their implications for identity formation. We begin in the postwar United States, when producers of symbolic goods, such as movies, music, and clothes, began aggressively tailoring products for young people; over the rest of the 20th century and into the 21st, new youth-oriented cultural commodities and sites of consumption have been used by young people in diverse ways to define themselves in relationships to adult society and to other young people. We will examine young people's intensifying involvement with the cultural market, with attention to both the diversity of youth-cultural formations that have emerged within the United States and to the global circulation of Euro-American youth culture. Using case studies, we will consider the ways in which young people's consumption practices have both reinforced and transgressed intersecting boundaries of class, race, gender, and nationality. An overarching concern in the course will be to assess whether or to what extent particular cultural practices may help prepare young people for positions of privilege, reconcile them to structural disadvantages, or provide them with resources to challenge the dominant society.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-ANTH
Prereq: None

ANTH290Z Style and Identity in Youth Cultures

This course focuses on young people's engagements with commercially provided culture and their implications for identity formation. We begin in the postwar United States, when producers of symbolic goods, such as movies, music, and clothes, began aggressively tailoring products for young people; over the rest of the 20th century and into the 21st, new youth-oriented cultural commodities and sites of consumption have been used by young people in diverse ways to define themselves in relationships to adult society and to other young people. We will examine young people's intensifying involvement with the cultural market, with attention to both the diversity of youth-cultural formations that have emerged within the United States and to the global circulation of Euro-American youth culture. Using case studies, we will consider the ways in which young people's consumption practices have both reinforced and transgressed intersecting boundaries of class, race, gender, and nationality. An overarching concern in the course will be to assess whether or to what extent particular cultural practices may help prepare young people for positions of privilege, reconcile them to structural disadvantages, or provide them with resources to challenge the dominant society.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-ANTH
Prereq: None

ANTH291 East Asian Archaeology

This course will introduce students to remarkable archaeological discoveries from East Asia, focusing on the archaeology of ancient China, but also including finds from Japan, Korea, and Mongolia. Beginning with "Peking Man" and Asia's earliest hominin inhabitants, we will explore the lives of Paleolithic hunter gatherers, the origins of domestic rice and pigs, the emergence of early villages and cities, the origins of writing, ancient ritual systems, long-distance interactions through land and maritime Silk Roads, and the archaeology of Chinese diaspora populations living in the 19th-century United States. We will also consider the current state of archaeological research in East Asia, focusing on site preservation, cultural heritage management, and the political roles of archaeology.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-ARCP
Identical With: ARCP291, CEAS291, ENVS291, IDEA291
Prereq: None

ANTH295A Theory in Anthropology: Anthropology and the Experience of Limits

Theory in Anthropology courses are core courses for the major, designed to elucidate historical influences on contemporary anthropological theory. While precise topics may vary from year to year, the overall goal of the courses remains the same: to familiarize students with the main traditions from which the discipline of anthropology emerged and to explore the diverse ways in which contemporary anthropological practice defines itself both with and against them.



This course considers the possibilities of an anthropology of transgression, excess, and unreason. This is an anthropology of all things cultural that work outside the logic of function and utility--that is, of actions and events that, while being eminently social, exceed reason and rational explanation. We will take as our point of departure an understanding of political economy that no longer has production and rationality as its core principles but rather consumption and waste. For this "general economy," as Georges Bataille called it in opposition to a "restricted economy" focused on utility, he drew from the anthropology of his time and its study of societies organized around complex systems of gift-giving, collective ritual, and periods of wasteful consumption (through festivals, for example). Ultimately, Bataille sought to formulate a critique of the early-20th-century European political and economic order, which emphasized individualism, rationality, and profit and which, he believed, fostered disenchantment with liberal democracy, totalitarian impulses, and war and calamity.



Class readings and discussions will be organized around topics such as profitless expenditure and the festival; gift-giving and sacrifice; taboo and transgression; formlessness and abjection; sex and erotism; and subjectivity, excess, and the experience of limits. Students will develop research projects on these and other topics of their interest, which could include theoretical and ethnographic explorations of, for example, particular festivals, games of chance, religious experience, the writing of poetry, nonreciprocal giving (organ donation, surrogate motherhood), and the experience of extreme sports and high-risk tourism.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-ANTH
Prereq: ANTH101

ANTH295B Theory in Anthropology: Anthropology of Affect

Theory in Anthropology courses are core courses for the major, designed to elucidate historical influences on contemporary anthropological theory. While precise topics may vary from year to year, the overall goal of the courses remains the same: to familiarize students with the main traditions from which the discipline of anthropology emerged and to explore the diverse ways in which contemporary anthropological practice defines itself both with and against them.



This semester, our topic is the anthropology of affect. Affect: to affect and be affected. Anthropologists and other social theorists from Durkheim onward have considered questions of bodies, sensation, emotion, and social change. In recent years, the "affective turn" in the humanities and humanistic social sciences has brought renewed attention to these dynamics. For some, affect is contrasted with emotion; it is potential or capacity, not set cultural meaning. For others, affect is contrasted with structure or form; it is bodily sensation or intensity--dynamic, energetic, mobile. And for others still, affect might enable us to grasp how it feels to inhabit a life world, a particular atmosphere, texture, sensuality, the feel of things.



This course explores the genealogy and range of theories of affect, foregrounding anthropology's distinctive contributions to and critiques of the study of affect. We'll discuss ways that centralizing affect might disrupt dichotomies of structure/agency, opening up modes of analysis that are not centered on cultural meaning-making, and enabling us to explore forms of life that exceed human subjects and socialities. Readings will tack between more theoretical essays and ethnographic representations of affect, sensuality, mobility, and emotion. Weekly experimental sensoriums, designed to attune us to the world, are a central component of the course.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-ANTH
Prereq: ANTH101

ANTH295C Theory in Anthropology: Anthropology of Conspiracy

This course explores the relationship between conspiracy theory and contemporary life through the discipline of anthropology. We trace the history of conspiracy theory, read ethnographies of conspiracy, and extend the concept of what counts as conspiracy to anthropological topics such as culture, class, ideology, myth, virtuality, race, affect, gender, and sexuality. We ask what the utility of conspiracy is in world-building, ritual, and belief structure inherent in both cultural cohesion and conflict.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-ANTH
Prereq: ANTH101

ANTH295D Theory in Anthropology: Anthropology and the Modern Media

This course considers the relations among symbolic representations, modern media, and social practices of imagination. Taking the Durkheimian theory of collective representation as a point of departure, we will first look at the role of rituals and myths in oral cultures, with emphasis on the notion that human beings add to the world through representation and inhabit the worlds they imagine. We will go on to interrogate the ways in which the formation of media industries in capitalist societies has transformed the role of imagination in social life, both within and beyond the societies where those industries emerged. Cultural forms may have always had extrinsic as well as intrinsic origins, but in a world where the products of large, centralized media industries circulate nationally and globally, the resources of imagination increasingly come from outside of local communities, from urban centers and other nations. The consequences of such national and global flows, however, are neither uniform nor predictable, as images and narratives are locally received and negotiated. In exploring the relations between media production and reception, we will look at critical theories of media in Euro-American societies, as well as ethnographic studies of the reception of Western media forms in other parts of the world, the role of media from both the host country and the home country in immigration, and the production of indigenous media. Methodologically, we will consider the relationship between anthropology and the interdisciplinary fields of cultural and media studies.



Class readings and discussions will be organized around topics such as media technologies and modern societies, the role of the media in the transformation of time and space, media and modern subjectivities, broadcasting and national identities, the organization of particular mediascapes, taste, identity, and popular media, mediated citizenship, media and cosmopolitanism, movie-going as public experience, the formation of hybrid identities through media consumption, soap opera, melodrama, and gendered subjects.



Readings by Emile Durkheim, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jean-Pierre Vernant, Pierre Bourdieu, Marshall Sahlins, Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, John Thompson, John Frow, Arjun Appadurai; as well as ethnographic studies of media consumption and production by Brian Larkin, Lila Abu-Lughod, Faye Ginsberg, Sunaina Maira, Purnima Mankekar, and others.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-ANTH
Prereq: None

ANTH295E Theory in Anthropology: Anthropology of Time

In this course, we will examine anthropology's integral (and often fraught) relationship with time. The course is divided into two major segments. In our first half, we explore the philosophical backstory as a particular--and, perhaps, foundational--category of human perception and experience. We will then trace how classic anthropology attempted to pick up these debates via core anthropological concerns with relativism, with cultural particularity, and with the social origins of perception.



With these canonical foundations in place, we will turn in our second segment to the myriad ways in which the concern with time infuses contemporary anthropology. Here we will move from questions of anthropological representation--especially the notorious critique of the "ethnographic present"--to recent anthropological attempts to discuss the cultural, social, and political work inherent in the production of different pasts, presents, and futures. As we will explore, though it may seem intimate and inherent, the production of time cannot be separated from ongoing histories of colonial domination, violence, resilience, innovation, and transformation.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-ANTH
Prereq: ANTH101

ANTH295G Theory in Anthropology: Anthropology of Semiosis

This course inquiries into the process of semiosis and traces the parallel developments of anthropology and the study of signs, symbols, and how we use language--or language uses us--to make sense of the world. As we move through the foundations of North American anthropology and the then-nascent interest in languages of Turtle Island, and the problematic invention of the category of the primitive, we will also begin to understand the development of structural linguistics around the same time and what led to the differential emergence of social and eventually symbolic and structural anthropology across the Atlantic. As anthropology began to take an interest in the language of the unconscious, social and otherwise, we will look toward how a post-structural approach to anthropology offered a radical new turn in the discipline. We will conclude by questioning if semiosis still poses a radical horizon here not there, now not then.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-ANTH
Prereq: ANTH101

ANTH301 Immigration and the Politics of Fear

This course will examine the role of fear in shaping ideas about immigrants. We start from the notion that emotions are social formations with particular histories and political significance. Therefore, we will refrain from assuming that fear is nothing more than a feeling or an automatic response and instead take it as a site that allows us to examine how psychological and legal discourses together define and dispute what is normal, reasonable, credible, plausible, real, appropriate, and timely. The seminar will cover themes such as risk and threat, race and origin, pain and injury, confession and testimony, fiction and figuration, and personhood and representation. We will look at newspaper articles, social media content, legal opinions, case law, court transcripts, and psychological evaluations, as well as texts in politics, anthropology, sociology, philosophy, literature, comics, and films. Students will write a short essay on the politics of fear. Throughout the course, they will develop their toolkit to critically reflect on an emotion of their choice.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Identical With: AMST301, STS308
Prereq: None

ANTH302 Critical Perspectives on the State

This course builds on Marxist, poststrucuturalist, feminist, anarchist, and cultural analyses to take a critical approach to the state--what it is and what it does. We will examine how the state is imagined by those who write about it and struggle against it. Where does the state begin? How do states act, and what are the consequences of these acts? How is rule consolidated and how are individuals and communities annexed to the project of rule? How do people engage with state acts and ideologies? We will read texts drawn from a variety of disciplines, including anthropology, feminist theory, political theory, philosophy, sociology, and geography, that examine the nature, everyday workings, and effects of state power. Drawing upon ethnographic examples from around the world, we will analyze how states are cultural artifacts that produce and regulate people's identities and bodies, reproduce social inequalities, and engender resistances of all sorts. Some of the topics we will discuss include bureaucracy, governmentality, the security state, the prison industrial complex, terror and militarism, law and justice, citizenship, democracy, refugees, anti-state movements, the "man" in the state, and welfare and post-welfare politics.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-FGSS
Identical With: FGSS302
Prereq: None

ANTH303 Ritual

Religion can be defined through beliefs or traditions or texts, but it always takes physical form through ritual. Ritual is the one universal in religion, but the question of how to understand ritual is possibly the most contested question in the study of religion, and not all rituals are religious. Can a ritual be read like a text? How do symbols produce effects, and how should we understand these effects? What is performative speech and how does it work? How does ritual behavior reflect and shape social relationships? This course introduces students to the major approaches to the study of ritual. The readings draw heavily, but not exclusively, on anthropological approaches to ritual, both classic texts and recent innovative approaches focusing on language and embodiment. Students will pick a ritual that they are interested in and will attend that ritual several times over the semester, conducting practical fieldwork exercises and applying the theories we read in class. The assignments culminate in a paper in which students will be required to analyze "their" ritual using the theory we read together in class. For these assignments, students are encouraged to define ritual broadly and creatively. The goal of the class is to gain an understanding of theoretical approaches to ritual by applying these theories to the social world around them.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-RELI
Identical With: RELI307
Prereq: None

ANTH304 Entangled Sounding Objects: Musical Instruments of Central Asia

Musical instruments exist at the intersection of material, cultural, and social worlds. Entangled in webs of human and non-human relationships, they are at once tangible and symbolic sounding objects that hold significant meanings for the communities they serve. This course will explore the social roles and cultural meanings of musical instruments in Central Asia, a region once traversed by the Silk Road, which extends from the borderlands of China in the east to the Caspian Sea in the west, and from Russia in the north to the frontiers of Afghanistan in the south.



Drawing on theories and ideas derived from interdisciplinary studies of material and sound culture, the course will examine how instrument making and performance are shaped by and entangled with social systems of value and cosmology, political ideology, ecology, and economy. Class meetings will focus on case studies of bowed and plucked lutes, zithers, mouth harps, end-blown flutes, and frame drums among historically nomadic and sedentary peoples of Central Asia. Through these case studies, students will learn about the origins and historical trajectories of individual musical instruments from the pre-modern period to the Soviet and post-Soviet eras; consider the social and political connotations of various performance configurations and repertoires; discuss the status of instruments in Islam and indigenous spiritual belief-systems, and the roles of musical instruments as symbols of national identity, objects of cultural heritage, and global commodities.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM304, REES204, FGSS346
Prereq: None

ANTH305 Semiotics of al-Barzakh: The Grammars of the End of Days and Horizons of Possibility

This course builds from the Islamic eschatological concept of "al-Barzakh" as it has been taken up in anthropological theories, as well as in Islamic thought more generally, with careful attention to the term's semiotic transformations and significations. It does so in order to explore both how the term describes an earthly place and an eschatological hereafter as well as a theoretical and practical alternative to the notion of the liminal personhood.



Since at least the 12th century, thinkers have explored the Islamic concept of al-Barzakh to explore the connection between the earthly present and the heavenly hereafter and the scales of judgment in between. This term, somewhat akin to Christian notion of purgatory or limbo, appears only three times in the Qur'an. It is explained as being like the productive firmament that separates salt and sweet water. In places like Morocco, this is commonly interpreted as referring to the Strait of Gibraltar and the underwater isthmus that separates and produces the waters of the Atlantic Ocean and the Strait of Gibraltar.



We will read both contemporary scholarly apprehensions of this term and its various applications in Muslim-majority contexts such as Morocco, Egypt, Sudan, and Iran--often ethnographic--as well as Islamic philosophy that attempts to bring the concept into relation with earthly personhood. In our approach, we will move through a variety of scholarly genres and epochs in order to trace the genealogies of present-day popular invocations of the term as we contrast it with other apprehensions of the eschatological and the liminal.



We will work to understand how this term contains space for both an imagination of everyday life as well as the boundary-generating difference marking here and there, then and now, by looking at how the term is evoked by artists, scholars, religious adherents, psychoanalysts, and border crossers. As we go along, we will pay special attention to the languages of belonging and difference evoked by this term and attend to how an anthropological approach to semiotics might elucidate new grammars of community and horizons of possibility that exist alongside notions of the liminal, uncanny, dreaming, the hereafter, and the imagination of the end of days.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM305, RELI300
Prereq: None

ANTH306 Mobilizing Dance: Cinema, the Body, and Culture in South Asia

This course focuses on questions of "mobility"--cultural, social, and political--as embodied in two major cultural forms of South Asia, namely "classical" dance and cinema. Using Tamil cinema and Bharatanatyam dance as case studies, the course focuses on issues of colonialism and history, class, sexuality and morality, and globalization. The course places the notion of "flows of culture" at its center and examines historical, social, and aesthetic shifts in these art forms over the past 150 years.



The course is both studio- and lecture-based. It includes learning rudimentary Bharatanatyam technique, watching and analyzing film dance sequences, and participating in guest master classes in ancillary forms such as Bollywood dance and Kathak (North Indian classical dance). The studio portion of this course is for beginners, and no previous dance experience is necessary.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-DANC
Identical With: DANC307, FGSS307, GSAS307
Prereq: None

ANTH307 LAND BACK! Indigenous Sovereignty Politics

This advanced research seminar will feature a look at the contemporary LAND BACK movement through current case studies with a focus on tracing the historical and legal genealogies of settler colonial land dispossession, indigenous land title, and self-governance issues bounded to territory (recognized and otherwise). We will examine different historical periods, moments, geographical sites, and case studies to explore the complexities of life for Indigenous peoples in the Pacific Islands and North America subject to the authority of the United States in relation to land as a central part of exercising sovereignty. In relation to these themes, the course will also examine: Indigenous peoples' varied political statuses in settler colonial context; self-determination; structures of domination and resistance; Indigenous agency; Native nationalism and decolonization. Readings will focus on the recognition and assertion of collective land rights, treaty rights, as well as land claims, land recovery, and land reclamation.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Identical With: AMST307
Prereq: None

ANTH308 Television Storytelling: The Conditions of Narrative Complexity

This course examines the industrial and cultural conditions for the development of relatively complex forms of storytelling in commercial U.S. television. Narrative complexity is a cross-generic phenomenon that emerged over the 1980s and has proliferated within an increasingly fragmented media environment. In class discussions and individual research projects, students will analyze particular programs in-depth, with attention to their industrial and social conditions of production, their aesthetic and ideological appeals, and the cultural tastes and viewing practices they reflect and promote. We will also consider how television studies has responded and contributed to the increased prestige of certain types of programs.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-ANTH
Identical With: AMST316, FILM319
Prereq: None

ANTH309 Reading Ethnography: Toward an Otherwise Anthropology

In this advanced reading-centered seminar, we will consider the challenges and potentials of ethnography as a way of knowing, form of argument, and genre of writing. We will take up contemporary interventions and critical turns including: decolonizing and abolitionist anthropology, the complex politics of witnessing and ethnographic refusal, approaches to more-than-human anthropologies and queer/ing anthropology, and the craft of ethnographic storytelling and experiments in ethnographic poetry, prose, and fiction. Our seminar is structured around collaborative close reading and discussion of a range of cutting-edge ethnographies that challenge the boundaries of disciplinary practice and seek to open up a transformative, otherwise anthropology.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-ANTH
Prereq: None

ANTH310 Un/Settled: The Anthropology of Displacement, Migration, Borders, and Refuge

How does one account for the ever-present and growing phenomenon of displaced people on the move in a world of bounded nation-states and citizens? How does one make sense of temporary encampments and refuge in a world of stable home/lands, and exile and fugitivity in a world of legal belonging?



As key political figures, refugees and migrants contest and transect our normative ideas about the national and the global. They force us to reckon with the hardened and profoundly consequential legal categories of borders and citizenship around which our world is organized. This course takes a deep dive into the modern experience of displaced people to understand their predicament and how it unsettles our fundamental notions of the political, nation-states, freedom, home, crises, violence, human rights, and humanitarian care.



Texts: Hannah Arendt, Zora Neale Hurston, Lori Allen, Julie Peteet, Urvashi Butalia, Giorgio Agamben, Amitav Ghosh, Saida Hodzic, Miriam Ticktin, Liisa Malkki, Judith Butler, Justin Hoseby, Simone Browne, Neil Roberts, and others.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-ANTH
Prereq: None

ANTH311 Migration and Movement in/between Muslim Worlds

The spectacular migrant crisis across the Mediterranean Sea since 2014 has frozen a particular racialized understanding of migration and flight out of the Middle East and North Africa. This course looks to trouble this singular narrative of movement out of the Middle East and Africa by looking at the multiethnic and transnational flows of workers, capital, fighters, and aid workers in and out of the region since the late 1990s. We read ethnographies of development, war, exile, investment, and activism in order to better understand exchange, change, and fluid continuities in overlapping theaters between Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-ANTH
Prereq: None

ANTH312 Eat, Grow, Heal: The Anthropology of Food and Justice

This course uses the lens of justice to examine the politics of food. We will look at the cultural and political-economic dynamics of food production and consumption, considering questions of taste, class, labor, marketing, and food sovereignty. We will also examine the environmental and social impact of food production and the consumption choices we make, from organic, to vegan, to animal proteins, to foraging and hunting. We will use a range of texts, including ethnographies, theory, film/documentary/TV shows, creative nonfiction, fiction, cookbooks, blogs, and magazine articles.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-ANTH
Identical With: ENVS315
Prereq: None

ANTH313 Producing and Performing Anthropology

This course examines the various modes through which anthropology can and has been performed and produced. Partially exploring the historical relationship between film, museum curation, and ethnography, while also looking toward how anthropology has verged into other media such as the audiovisual and digital, this class pairs reading ethnographies with practical projects, which could take performance, written, audiovisual, or even web forms. What does it mean to make an ethnographic website, for instance, or write a performative ethnographic text? How does this differ from a museum, and how are the history and practices of curation related to anthropology? This course draws from theoretical positions in the discipline as well as performance and artistic production, and includes in-class/virtual visits from figures in this field across the U.S., Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East, aimed at fostering opportunities for more long-term mentorship and collaborations.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-ANTH
Prereq: None

ANTH314 Curating Religion: Museums, Monuments, and Memorials

Museums, monuments, and memorial sites have long been important sites for public reckoning with the past. But they are not only about the past, they represent present struggles about the meaning of history and the possibility of imagining different futures. In this multidisciplinary class, we will work as a group to examine diverse case studies in which religion and memorial culture intersect in acts such as curation, representation, conservation, and repatriation. Visiting exhibitions and working with Wesleyan's collections, some of the questions we will ask include: What are the ethics of the treatment of objects in museums and of repatriation? How does space shape religious experience in an arguably secular setting? How do monuments invoke religious imagery and symbolism in their construction of history? In what ways does placing something behind a glass case give it a religious aura, and in what ways does it drain an object of its sacrality?
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-RELI
Identical With: RELI313, CJST314
Prereq: None

ANTH315 Cultural Politics of the Body

In this course, we will consider 'the body' as both material and symbolic, imbued with meaning, politicized and expansive. We will ask ourselves: what is a body, where does it begin and end, what does it do? Recognizing the ongoing relations of power that seek to control and exploit different types of bodies (both human and nonhuman), it is critical that we ask ourselves how the body comes into being and how it subverts colonial domination. Accordingly, we will read and discuss texts that examine these themes through many different lenses, including science and technology studies, medical anthropology, environmental studies, disability studies, posthumanism and multispecies ethnography, queer studies, and Black studies.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-ANTH
Prereq: None

ANTH316 Critical Global Health

What does it mean to approach global health as not an applied science but an ethnographic object? This course will explore this question by bringing critical, social science perspectives to bear on global health issues and interventions. This course covers three areas of scholarship. First, we will examine the processes by which social inequalities produce patterns of health and disease in globalizing contexts. This will be followed by an interrogation of the term "global health," in which we will trace its emergence as a discourse and enterprise and unpack its contested meanings. While some view global health as a clinical practice, others conceptualize it as a business, security concern, charitable duty, or human right; yet another camp probes the term's ideological construction. We will consider how such vantage points are underpinned by cultural assumptions and ethical agendas that, in turn, can determine how, and to whom, care is delivered. As a third area of inquiry, we will investigate the implications and unintended effects of doing global health by probing such questions as, When are good intentions not good enough? How useful is biomedicine for alleviating locally defined problems? Under what conditions does global health exacerbate the social inequalities it seeks to overcome?
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-ANTH
Identical With: STS318
Prereq: None

ANTH317 Culture and Consumption

This seminar examines the formation, development, and contemporary forms of cultures of consumption in EuroAmerican societies and their gobal exportation and adaptation to diverse local situations. The course is premised on the idea that the spectacular and continuous rise of commodity consumption that began in the late 17th century is as much a cultural as an economic process, one that both shaped and was shaped by shifts in ideas about personal and social development. Once associated with negative meanings of waste, excess, and depletion, consuming, especially of clothes, domestic goods, new foods and beverages, and artistic forms, came to be seen as a critical dimension of self-fashioning and sociability. While the course situates these developments in the context of expanding markets and new modes of distribution, it will emphasize the post-purchase moments of consumption, that is, the ways in which consumers incorporate goods into their everyday lives. Among the themes we will consider are the gendering of consumption, the social dynamics of taste, commodity consumption and ideologies of authenticity, consumption and social inequality, the consequences of consumption, and the emergence of the ethical consumer.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-ANTH
Prereq: None

ANTH318 Global Indigeneities

This course focuses on theories of indigeneity in examining indigenous peoples' lives, cultural practices, resistance and activism. The term "indigenous" has had varied and contested genealogies across time, geography, political contexts, and fields of study. Although dominant societies tend to claim that indigenous peoples are either entirely extinct due to genocide or diluted due to racial and cultural mixing, indigenous refers to the wide range of relations to region and nation of the more than 370 million indigenous people who are spread across 70 countries worldwide. Some indigenous peoples define themselves by their historical continuity with precolonial and presettler societies; others by ties to territories and surrounding natural resources; others in relation to distinct social, economic, or political systems; and still others by their distinct languages, cultures, and beliefs. Attempts at the historical erasure and subsequent memorialization of indigenous peoples serve the colonial goals of refuting indigenous claims to land and rights and have been the primary means by which dominant populations asserted their own modernity while denying it to putatively "primitive" indigenous peoples. Today, nation-states continue to impose this notion of the "pre-modern" savage as a mechanism of control in their negotiations with indigenous peoples' legal status and land rights. This course will focus on a range of cases studies including indigenous peoples in North America contending with the states of Canada, the United States, and Mexico; Indigenas encompassed by select countries in South America; Aboriginal peoples in Australia, the Sami (across various countries in Scandinavia), the Ainu (Japan), the Maori (New Zealand), and Palestinians (Israel-Palestine). Topics will include indigenous peoples' struggles for autonomy and survival; self-determination and political status under international law; the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples; the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues; land struggles and the protection of natural resources; cultural resurgence and revival of select traditions; and varied forms of political resistance and decolonization.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-ANTH
Prereq: None

ANTH319 Toxic Sovereignties: Life after Environmental Collapse

What politics emerge at the borders of life and nonlife? Representations of the human species as being on the brink of environmental collapse have become increasingly common, as the specters of climate change and cataclysmic environmental disaster seem to bear down ever more heavily upon us. At the same time, the increasing entanglement of human bodies with various forms of chemical and otherwise man-made pollutants presage a slightly different future, one in which, if the human species does not outright disappear, it will be fundamentally transformed. This course explores different forms of political and social action that have emerged in response to these seemingly epochal shifts with a particular emphasis on the ever-mutating concept of sovereignty. Our goal is to explore the ways in which the shifting borders between human life and its artificially produced absence can serve as productive sites of new political forms and transformations of older ones, even as they also generate tremendous social and cultural anxiety.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-ANTH
Identical With: STS319
Prereq: None

ANTH324 Politics of Reproduction

This course will examine the landscape of fertility through the lenses of pregnancy, fetal and embryonic personhood, genetic testing, surrogacy, adoption, abortion, assisted reproductive technology, and reproductive justice. We will consider how the pregnant and in/fertile body is politicized and enmeshed in transnational circuits of labor and capital. We will consider these themes by bringing together perspectives in medical anthropology, science and technology studies, sociology of medicine, disability studies, gender studies, Black studies, Latinx studies, Indigenous studies, and environmental studies.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-ANTH
Identical With: STS324
Prereq: None

ANTH330 Economies of Erasure: Exploring the Violence Concealed by the Liberal Promise of Care

This course will aid students in understanding and recognizing the processes of erasure that maintain ongoing regimes of domination. In particular, we will attempt to understand how the twinned promises of equity and tolerance made by seemingly liberal, multicultural democracies work to conceal the ongoing--and specifically targeted--violence that in fact constitute and continue to subtend these nation-states. How, we will ask, do these regimes make violence disappear through the promise to "care" for their citizens, even as they wield spectacular violence to maintain domination? How are we as subjects of these regimes conditioned to pay attention to certain events, ideas, and systems, and what is made to disappear through such selective forms of attention? What communities, bodies, and individuals are sacrificed by the liberal promise of care? To answer these questions, the course will juxtapose readings in philosophy and social theory with ethnographic and historical case studies, giving students both the conceptual tools to analyze erasure and a set of examples through which to understand how these forms of erasure operate in the world. Crucial to our tool kit is the concept of disavowal, best understood as an active deflection from attending to the obligations of what one knows or should know. Disavowal, as we will see, makes it possible for subjects to imagine the political, social, and cultural spaces in which they live as moral, legitimate, and ethical, taking violence as an aberration rather than as the normative maintenance of an order of domination. This disavowal, the course contends, grounds itself in the ideologically charged embrace of a liberal sense of care that is, in turn, abstracted away from actual and ongoing histories of power and domination. In order to manage the potential scale of this exploration, we will primarily examine examples from North America, examining how white supremacy, patriarchy, and settler colonial domination operate in tandem in order to legitimize regimes of power by disavowing their violence.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM330, AMST330
Prereq: None

ANTH331 Race, Colonialism, and the Nonhuman

This course responds to growing scholarly attention to the entwinement of racial slavery and settler colonialism as foundational forces in U.S. society as well as to the relationships between colonial, racial, and ecological violence. Through materials from anthropology, Black studies, Indigenous studies, environmental history, and critical animal studies, this class will explore the entanglement of human and nonhuman difference--primarily in North America--both historically and in the present. Students will become familiar with conversations about racialization, settler colonialism, and the figures of the human/nonhuman that are increasingly prominent in anthropology as well as adjacent fields in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: None
Identical With: ENVS331, AMST333
Prereq: None

ANTH337 Missionary Mysteries: the Objects and Archives of Wesleyan's Missionary Past

This course examines the history of Wesleyan University's connections to missionary work in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as seen through the university's archival and object collections. Students will spend the bulk of classroom time in hands-on learning as they engage with the archives of the Wesleyan Missionary Lyceum and cultural heritage collections obtained by missionaries and brought back to the University. Beginning with an overview of historical, archival, and museum methods, the course then will examine objects and written records from the Americas, West Africa, East Asia and the South Pacific. Students will be challenged to consider the ways in which Wesleyan has been engaged in colonialism, imperialism, and global evangelism. Topics of investigation will include: gender, linguistics, museum ethics and repatriation, the use of objects as educational tools.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST337, AMST337, RELI337
Prereq: None

ANTH355 Social Movements Lab

What can we learn from social justice activists about the economic, political, and environmental struggles facing us today, including mass incarceration, immigration, economic precarity, and the violence of the state? Where are the critical sites of queer, trans, left, feminist, black, indigenous, disability, and environmental struggle? How do these movements converge, and where do they diverge? This participatory, interdisciplinary research seminar enables you to embark on an independent, semester-long research project on the social movement or activism of your choice. We'll start with some foundational reading on multidisciplinary social movement research; archival, ethnographic, and participatory methodologies; and histories of social justice struggles in the U.S. The remainder and majority of the seminar is laboratory style, taking shape around your particular projects. Each week, we will collaboratively analyze one or two projects, mapping out and comparing methods, goals, visions, struggles, and contexts of the movements under study. Our goal is to understand a range of social justice activisms in their economic, political, and historical context, with an eye toward integrating activist scholarship and social change. The activism you research can be contemporary or historical; local, national, or global; and can take any shape: direct action, community organizing, activist philanthropy, art as activism, etc. You do not need previous experience or activist contacts for this course--just passion and the desire to learn collaboratively!
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM355, FGSS355
Prereq: None

ANTH361 Calderwood Seminar in Public Writing: The Dark Turn in Television Storytelling

This course, offered in association with the Calderwood Seminars in Public Writing, examines a certain tendency in contemporary television storytelling. Taking the debut of "The Sopranos" in 1999 as a benchmark, we will explore the emergence in dramas and comedies of a dark, uncertain, pessimistic, or disillusioned address within a medium long known for its reassuring tone. We will consider the industrial and social conditions for this tonal shift, as well as the role it has played in elevating public perceptions of television's cultural value.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-FILM
Identical With: FILM362, AMST362
Prereq: None

ANTH362 Visualizing Black Remains

This advanced seminar engages African Diaspora critical thought and aesthetic production (visual art, performance, film, literature) that grapple with the appetite, effects, and stakes of representing Black remains. What does this visual reproduction make possible or obscure, and what is its relationship to violence? The class will also encourage students to think about the ethics of reparation/repatriation in relation to forms of loss and dispossession that can neither be repaired/repatriated nor visually evidenced (in conventional ways). In those instances, how do contemporary critical thinkers and/as contemporary artists help us rethink loss, mourning, objecthood, violence, empathy, and reparation?
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM362, AFAM363, ENGL363, FGSS362, THEA362
Prereq: None

ANTH392 Sacrifice

Sacrifice entails the surrender, destruction, or self-denial of something precious or desired in exchange for peace, power, prosperity, freedom, or edification. Destruction by sacrifice, says anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard, is an act of giving of the self that must be costly and "necessarily reciprocated." In sacrifice, humans come face-to-face with death without dying. Through a collection of interdisciplinary readings, this seminar examines the implications of this ruse through the themes of war, animal and human sacrifice, asceticism, acts of political immolation, big-game hunting, high-altitude mountaineering and extreme sports, and the experience of excess in festivals such as Burning Man.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-ANTH
Prereq: None

ANTH395 The Anthropology of Religion

What do we study when we study religion? We can observe practices, record speech, examine objects and actions--but what do these things tell us? If religion is about belief, what can we say about belief from documenting actions? Perhaps we must conclude that religion is not about belief, but if so, are in danger of "explaining away" the very phenomena we seek to understand? This course will introduce students to a cross-cultural, comparative perspective on religious practice and belief in order to critically reflect on the role of methodology and research design in the study of religion and the social sciences more broadly. How do we know what we know? How do we plan research in order to find out what we want to know? The course has a significant methods component. Students will be expected to do field research exercises in a local religious community and prepare a methodology research proposal for a fictional or real project as a final assignment. Methodological exercises will be interspersed with ethnographic texts that allow us to reflect on how religion is studied, experienced, and explained. Students planning theses or other research projects with an ethnographic component, in any social science field, may use the class and the final assignment to conceptualize and plan their projects.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-RELI
Identical With: RELI395
Prereq: None

ANTH397 Difficult Women: Post/Feminism in Television Comedies and Dramedies

Although postwar family sitcoms represented women as homemakers, one of the first and most popular sitcom wives also articulated discontent with domestic femininity. Lucy Ricardo became the prototype of the "unruly woman," a figure with feminist potential whose desires exceed and disrupt dominant gender norms. As those norms have shifted, so have TV's unruly women. Second-wave feminism, anticipated in I Love Lucy, was incorporated into a 1970s cycle of comedies centered on single working women whose career aspirations were rewarded. Over the following decades, a postfeminist sensibility dominated television comedies and dramas and became central to a gendered neoliberalism in which energetic individuals "empower" themselves. In recent years, a new type of female protagonist has emerged. Alongside the can-do optimism of single-women comedies from The Mary Tyler Moore Show to Sex and the City to 30 Rock and Parks and Rec, a stream of comedies and dramedies, made largely by and for women, have depicted a variety of flawed, difficult, unruly women coming of age under conditions of socioeconomic precarity, whose less focused energies seem to articulate a more uncertain, downbeat, post-recessional mood. In this course we will situate the latter cycle in relation to both the longer history of televisual representations of women and to the current state of feminist politics. Among the shows we will look at are: I Love Lucy, Bewitched, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Sex and the City, Ally McBeal, Girlfriends, The Mindy Project, 30 Rock, Parks and Rec, Girls, Insecure, Broad City, Better Things, Two Broke Girls, New Girl, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Jane the Virgin, Unreal, Abbott Elementary, Fleabag, Dear White People, and Somebody Somewhere.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM397, AMST391, FGSS397, FILM202
Prereq: None

ANTH398 Queer/Anthropology: Ethnographic Approaches to Queer Studies

What are the many ways in which queerness obtains meaning across cultures? What does it mean to have a queer relationship to one's world? Queer/Anthropology traces the history and present state of ethnographic studies of queerness, defined here as non-heteronormative sexualities and gender embodiments. We examine the way in which heteronormativity is established as integral to hegemonic order and the manner in which it functions within Western armchair ethnographic studies and sexology of the early 20th century. We look at the binary system as a mode of organization and the way in which anthropological studies of sexuality and gender have nearly always challenged the presumed universality of these modes. We read contemporary ethnographic work in order to compare and contrast different cultures' usage of sexuality and gendered categories in relation to various contexts, such as colonialism, race/racism, capitalist and non-capitalist economic and political systems, cosmology/religion, and regionality/place.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-ANTH
Prereq: None

ANTH400 Cultural Analysis: Senior Capstone Seminar

This seminar is for all senior anthropology majors who intend to write honors theses or senior essays. It is designed to enable students to pursue individual research projects in a group context, with attention to debates on the nature of anthropological interpretation. The seminar is structured as a workshop: each student gives a series of presentations on their own research project to the group; equally important is engaging with and offering constructive criticism of the projects presented by others.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-ANTH
Prereq: ANTH208 AND (ANTH295A OR ANTH295B OR ANTH295C OR ANTH295D OR ANTH295E OR ANTH295G)

ANTH401 Individual Tutorial, Undergraduate

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

ANTH402 Individual Tutorial, Undergraduate

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

ANTH403 Department/Program Project or Essay

Project to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F

ANTH404 Department/Program Project or Essay

Project to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F

ANTH407 Senior Tutorial (downgrade thesis)

Downgraded Senior Thesis Tutorial - Project to be arranged in consultation with the tutor. Only enrolled in through the Honors Coordinator.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F

ANTH408 Senior Tutorial (downgraded thesis)

Downgraded Senior Thesis Tutorial - Project to be arranged in consultation with the tutor. Only enrolled in through the Honors Coordinator.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F

ANTH409 Senior Thesis Tutorial

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

ANTH410 Senior Thesis Tutorial

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

ANTH411 Group Tutorial, Undergraduate

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

ANTH412 Group Tutorial, Undergraduate

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

ANTH419 Student Forum

Student-run group tutorial, sponsored by a faculty member and approved by the chair of a department or program.
Offering: Host
Grading: Cr/U

ANTH420 Student Forum

Student-run group tutorial, sponsored by a faculty member and approved by the chair of a department or program.
Offering: Host
Grading: Cr/U

ANTH465 Education in the Field, Undergraduate

Students must consult with the department and class dean in advance of undertaking education in the field for approval of the nature of the responsibilities and method of evaluation.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

ANTH466 Education in the Field, Undergraduate

Students must consult with the department and class dean in advance of undertaking education in the field for approval of the nature of the responsibilities and method of evaluation.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

ANTH467 Independent Study, Undergraduate

Credit may be earned for an independent study during a summer or authorized leave of absence provided that (1) plans have been approved in advance, and (2) all specified requirements have been satisfied.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: None
Prereq: None

ANTH468 Independent Study, Undergraduate

Credit may be earned for an independent study during a summer or authorized leave of absence provided that (1) plans have been approved in advance, and (2) all specified requirements have been satisfied.
Offering: Host
Grading: Cr/U

ANTH469 Education in the Field, Undergraduate

Students must consult with the department and class dean in advance of undertaking education in the field for approval of the nature of the responsibilities and method of evaluation.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: None
Prereq: None

ANTH470 Independent Study, Undergraduate

Credit may be earned for an independent study during a summer or authorized leave of absence provided that (1) plans have been approved in advance, and (2) all specified requirements have been satisfied.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 0.50
Gen Ed Area: None
Prereq: None

ANTH491 Teaching Apprentice Tutorial

The teaching apprentice program offers undergraduate students the opportunity to assist in teaching a faculty member's course for academic credit.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

ANTH492 Teaching Apprentice Tutorial

The teaching apprentice program offers undergraduate students the opportunity to assist in teaching a faculty member's course for academic credit.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

ANTH496 Research Apprentice, Undergraduate

Project to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: Cr/U

ANTH502 Individual Tutorial, Graduate

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F

ANTH511 Group Tutorial, Graduate

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

ANTH561 Graduate Field Research

Research in the field, normally on thesis project.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

ANTH562 Graduate Field Research

Research in the field, normally on thesis project.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

ANTH591 Advanced Research, Graduate

Investigation of special problems leading to a thesis.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

ANTH592 Advanced Research, Graduate

Investigation of special problems leading to a thesis.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT