Anthropology

  • CAS AN 379: China: Tradition and Transition (area)
    Examines daily life in China and Taiwan, tracing how opposed economic and political paths transformed a common tradition. Topics include capitalism and socialism; politics and social control; dissidence; gender relations; religion, arts, and literature; and pollution.
  • CAS AN 382: Wealth, Poverty, and Culture
    Explores vital cultural dimensions of production, exchange, and consumption in varied settings. Asks how social ties relate to property, wealth, and poverty. Examines how people classify, control, and allocate resources, and how resources in turn influence people.
  • CAS AN 384: Anthropological Study of Religion
    An introduction to the anthropological study of myth, ritual, and religious experience across cultures. Special attention to the problem of religious symbolism and meaning, religious conversion and revitalization, contrasts between traditional and world religions, and the relation of religious knowledge to science, magic, and ideology.
  • CAS AN 397: Anthropological Film and Photography
    Considers the history and development of anthropoligical, ethnographic, and transcultural filmmaking. In-depth examination of important anthropological films in terms of methodologies, techniques, and strategies of expression; story, editing, narration, themes, style, content, art, and aesthetics.
  • CAS AN 401: Senior Independent Work
  • CAS AN 402: Senior Independent Work
  • CAS AN 434: African Thought
    This course description is currently under construction.
  • CAS AN 438: Ethnography of American Culture (area)
    Provides a theoretical basis for the anthropological investigation of American culture. After an introduction to the classical literature, readings focus on the suburban experience, sexuality and family life, and class in the contemporary United States.
  • CAS AN 461: Ethnography and Anthropological Theory I
    Discussion and analysis of major concepts, methods, and theories in social anthropology using case studies on ritual, politics, leadership, social control, and kinship belief.
  • CAS AN 462: Ethnography and Anthropological Theory II
    Required of majors. Examines the background and philosophy of current anthropological theory and method. Discussion focuses on current issues in evolutionary, linguistic, and sociocultural theory.
  • CAS AN 491: Directed Study in Anthropology
    Individual instruction and directed research in anthropology.
  • CAS AN 492: Directed Study in Anthropology
    Individual instruction and directed research in anthropology.
  • CAS AN 505: Asian Development: The Case of Women (area)
    How women's lives in China, Japan, and India have been affected by economic development and social change. Women's education, health, child rearing, and labor force participation are considered in the context of socioeconomic and cultural influences.
  • CAS AN 515: Authenticity and Identity
    Explores the idea of the authentic self in Western culture in readings from authors such as Montesquieu, Hegel, Rousseau, Diderot, Molière, and Nietzsche. Historical and cross-cultural perspective is provided through examples from medieval Europe, Pakistan, America, Bali, and China.
  • CAS AN 519: Kinship
    Marriage, the family, and the use of kinship principles in human social organization. Examines moral and legal rules and social customs affecting alliance, descent, filiation, residence, inheritance, and property rights.
  • CAS AN 520: Nilotic Peoples: African Culture in Depth (area)
    Explores classic and contemporary studies of Nilotic and Bantu speaking cultures of the middle and upper Nile (Nuer, Dinka, Shilluk, Luo, and others) and, through them, the centrality to anthropology of a British African tradition of ethnography and theory.
  • CAS AN 521: Sociolinguistics
    Introduction to language in its social context. Methodological and theoretical approaches to sociolinguistics. Linguistic variation in relation to situation, gender, socioeconomic class, linguistic context, and ethnicity. Integrating micro- and macro-analysis from conversation to societal language planning.
  • CAS AN 524: Seminar: Language and Culture Contacts in Contemporary Africa
    Focuses on language variation and change in Africa. Provides students with a foundation in the scholarship on contact linguistics, language variation and change, and the relationships between language variation and gender, ethnicity, religion, and youth culture.
  • CAS AN 525: Ritual and Political Identity
    Provides a conceptual foundation for interpreting and understanding ritual and its role in shaping political and social identity and worldview. Focus on cases drawn from the contemporary Muslim world.
  • CAS AN 534: Advanced Topics in Human Behavioral Evolution
    Topics in the behavioral evolution of Homo sapiens, including social and sexual behavior, tool traditions, diet and hunting, cognition, language and intelligence, and locomotion. Considers inferred behavioral traditions that characterized the origin of our genus and of our species.

Note that this information may change at any time.

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