Courses

• CAS AM 555: Boston Architectural and Community History Workshop
  This course focuses on class readings, lectures, and research on a single neighborhood or community in Boston (or Greater Boston). Greatest emphasis is on using primary sources-- land titles and deeds, building permits, fire insurance atlases and other maps. There are both group and individual research projects.
• 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. Carries social science divisional credit in CAS.
• 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. Carries natural science divisional credit (with lab) in CAS.
• CAS AN 103: Anthropology Through Ethnography
  Examines the diversity of human lifeways and cultures across a variety of societies and through time, as well as the social processes that shape individuals. Seminar-style introduction to social anthropology through reading of ethnography, with discussion and debate. Carries social science divisional credit in CAS.
• 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 234: Evolutionary Psychology
  Critical analysis of human behavior from an evolutionary perspective. Emphasis placed on viewing humans as products of biological evolution. Topics include evolution of language and intelligence, cultural evolution, sex and reproduction, kinship and family dynamics, cooperation, aggression, warfare, and status. Cannot be taken for credit in addition to the course with this title previously numbered CAS AN 334.
• 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. Carries social science divisional credit in CAS.
• 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. Carries social science divisional credit in CAS.
• 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. Carries social science divisional credit in CAS.
• CAS AN 263: The Behavioral Biology of Women
  An exploration of female behavioral biology focusing on evolutionary, physiological, and biosocial aspects of women's lives from puberty through pregnancy, birth, lactation, menopause, and aging. Examples are drawn from traditional and industrialized societies, and data from nonhuman primates are considered.
• 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 309: Boston: An Ethnographic Approach (area)
  An anthropological study of Boston using the city as a site of recovery and discovery as students develop ethnographic skills and an understanding of the interplay between geography, history, and demography in the social mapping of urban spaces.
• CAS AN 310: Studies in North American Ethnography (area)
  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 314: Cultures of Latin America (area)
  From the effects of European colonization to the causes of transnational migration, anthropologists have found Latin America a rich place to study key themes for the discipline. Contemporary ethnography is used to trace the region's contribution to anthropological debates.

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