Anthropology

• CAS AN 101: Introduction to Cultural Anthropology
  An introduction to the basic concepts, principles, and problems of cultural anthropology, emphasizing study of both traditional and complex societies. Special attention to the evolution of human societies and culture; the changing organization and meaning of religion, economic life, kinship, and political order; and the problem of cultural variation in the modern world.
• CAS AN 102: Human Biology, Behavior, and Evolution
  Biology relevant to the behavioral sciences. Introduces basic principles of evolutionary biology, animal social behavior, primate adaptions, human origins, genetic/hormonal/neural bases of behavior, and issues of human socioecology and adaptions. Discussions highlight nature-vs-nurture issues.
• CAS AN 210: Medical Anthropology
  Examines the influence of culture on health care beliefs, practices, and institutions. Special topics include cross-cultural approaches to birth, aging, and death; drug use and abuse; health care in developing countries; and socialist models of health-care service.
• CAS AN 220: Urban Anthropology
  Survey of urban phenomena in evolutionary perspective using illustrative materials from records of the past and from current description in all world areas; contrasting social processes under different historical, geographical, political, and economic circumstances.
• CAS AN 240: Legal Anthropology
  An introduction to the anthropologist's approaches to law. Investigation of the relationship among society, culture, and law focuses on how different societies generate and structure competition and conflict. Examines the range of social and symbolic mechanisms for regulating dispute.
• CAS AN 250: Understanding Folklore and Folklife
  The ways individuals, families, and communities express themselves, their beliefs, and their values within their own culture. Emphasis on meaning carried by oral literature, folk arts and crafts, social customs and festivals, and family folklore.
• CAS AN 252: Ethnicity and Identity
  Political and cultural factors underlying ethnic and nationalist sentiments examined through case studies drawn from Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Discusses factors underlying ethnic boundaries, as well as such boundary-transcending influences as the media.
• CAS AN 260: Sex and Gender in Anthropological Perspective
  Cross-cultural examination of changing gender roles, expectations, and activities. Focuses on economic, social, political, and ideological determinants that structure the hierarchy of power and privileges accorded the thoughts, activities, and experiences of women and men in various societies.
• CAS AN 280: English Ritual Dance and Drama
  A movement-oriented course on the performance styles, history, and folklore of the seasonal Morris dances and mummers' plays that traditionally thrive in England.
• CAS AN 285: Coping with Crisis in Contemporary Africa (area)
  Explores the ways ordinary Africans are coping with problems of security, environmental degradation, forced migration, economic decline, and disease. Readings and lectures contrast outsiders' interpretations of these "crises" with the way they are experienced by those they affect.
• CAS AN 290: Children and Culture
  Explores the way various cultures shape the lives and social development of children. Topics include cultural concepts of childhood; the acquisition of culture; socialization and moral development; cognition, emotion, and behavior in childhood; children's language and play; and the cultural shaping of personality.
• CAS AN 307: Turkey and Middle East in Comparative Perspective (area)
  Social and cultural diversity of the modern Middle East with particular attention to Turkey. Focus on the interplay of tradition and socio-economic changes that have occured during the twentieth century and their implications for the future.
• CAS AN 308: Food, Culture, and Society
  Study of foodways, culinary social history, and diet and food ecology with special attention to Asian societies and Boston's food culture. Examines the use of food and cuisine as a focus for identity, national development, and social change.
• CAS AN 310: Studies in North American Ethnography
  A survey including an appreciation of the traditional background and heritage of native North Americans, and analysis of the history and contact with Europeans and governmental policies, and an examination and evaluation of the contemporary situation.
• CAS AN 312: Peoples and Cultures of Africa (area)
  Survey of the continent with attention to ethnohistory, traditional cultures, and cultural change.
• CAS AN 317: Power and Society in the Middle East (area)
  Peoples and cultures of the Middle East from Afghanistan to Morocco and from the Caucasus to Yemen. Focuses on social organization, family structure, the relationship between the sexes, and the development and maintenance of authority.
• CAS AN 318: Southeast Asia: Tradition and Development (area)
  Provides an in-depth introduction to the cultural traditions and contemporary development of Southeast Asia. Examines the contemporary society and culture through the optic of political and cultural history, so as to understand the "imaginative revolutions" that have shaped this region and are transforming it still today.
• CAS AN 319: Anthropology of Muslim Cultures and Politics
  Examines Muslim societies' ongoing struggle over the forms and meanings of Muslim culture and politics, as well as its implications for religious authority, gender ideals, and new notions of citizenship, civil society, and democracy.
• CAS AN 320: Women in the Muslim World
  A cross-cultural approach to the diversity and complexity of women’s lives in the Muslim world, including the United States. Looks at issues such as gender equality, civil society and democracy, sex segregation and sexual politics, kinship and marriage, and veiling.
• CAS AN 326: Oral Traditions as Verbal Art
  Exploration of religious and secular poetry worldwide with emphasis on the ethnography of communication. A focus on performance in oral traditions and its consequences for literary form, as well as the impact of mass media and literacy on orality.

Note that this information may change at any time.

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