Anthropology (ANTH)
ANTH 0002 The City in South Asia
This interdisciplinary social science course examines key topics, themes, and analytic methods in the study of South Asia by focusing on significant South Asian cities. With one-fifth of the worlds population,South Asia and its urban centers are playing an increasingly important role in recent global economic transformations, resulting in fundamental changes within both the subcontinent and the larger world. Drawing primarily on ethnographic studies of South Asia in the context of rapid historical change, the course also incorporates research drawn from urban studies, architecture, political science, and history, as well as fiction and film. Topics include globalization and new economic dynamics in South Asia; the formation of a new urban middle class; consumption and consumer culture; urban political formations, democratic institutions, and practices; criminality & the underworld; population growth, changes in the built environment, and demographic shifts; everyday life in South Asia and ethnic, cultural, and linguistic identities, differences, and violence in South Asia's urban environments. This is an introductory level course appropriate for students with no background in South Asia or for those seeking to better understand South Asia's urban environments in the context of recent globalization and rapid historical changes. No prerequisites. Fulfills College sector requirement in Society and foundational approach in Cross-Cultural Analysis.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: SAST 0002, URBS 0002
1 Course Unit
ANTH 0020 Anthropology, Race, and the Making of the Modern World
Anthropology as a field is the study of human beings - past, present, and future. It asks questions about what it means to be human, and whether there are universal aspects to human existence. What do we share and how do we differ? What is "natural" and what is "cultural"? What is the relationship between the past and the present? This course is designed to investigate the ways anthropology, as a discipline, emerged in conjunction with European (and later, American) imperialism, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and the will to know and categorize difference across the world. We will probe the relationships between anthropology and modern race-making by investigating how anthropologists have studied key institutions and systems that structure human life: family and kinship, inequality and hierarchy, race and ethnicity, ritual and symbolic systems, gender and sexuality, reciprocity and exchange, and globalization and social change. The course fundamentally probes how the material and ideological constellations of any given moment shape the questions we ask and the knowledge we produce about human
Fall
1 Course Unit
ANTH 0030 Human Origins, Evolution and Diversity
How did humans evolve? When did humans start to walk on two legs? How are humans related to non-human primates? This course focuses on the scientific study of human evolution describing the emergence, development, and diversification of our species, Homo sapiens. As a starting point, we discuss the conceptual framework of evolutionary theory as well as basic genetics and heredity as they relate to human morphological, physiological, and genetic variation. We then examine what studies of nonhuman primates (monkeys and apes) can reveal about our own evolutionary past, reviewing the behavioral and ecological diversity seen among living primates. We conclude the course examining the "hard" evidence of human evolution - the fossil and material culture record of human history from our earliest primate ancestors to the emergence of modern Homo sapiens - and also explore the new insights into modern human origins and dispersal provided by genetic studies. We will further examine the nature of human biological variation and discuss the history of scientific racism in physical anthropology. As part of this course, you will have the opportunity, during recitations, to conduct hands-on exercises collecting and analyzing behavioral, morphological, and genetic data on both humans and nonhuman primates and work with the Department of Anthropology's extensive collection of fossil casts.
Fall
1 Course Unit
ANTH 0040 The Modern World and Its Cultural Background
An introduction to the diversity of cultures in the world. This course is divided into two parts. The first briefly examines different models of understanding human diversity: ethnicities, religions, languages, political forms, economic structures, cultures, and "civilizations". Students will learn to think about the world as an interconnected whole, and know the significance of culture on a global scale. The second part is an introduction to area studies, in which we undertake a survey of the different regions of the world. We conduct the survey paying attention to the different aspects of human diversities, which we examine in the first part of this course. Students will acquire a greater appreciation and understanding of cultural differences in the more comprehensive social context.
Spring
1 Course Unit
ANTH 0050 Great Transformations
This course explores the history and archaeology of the last 20,000 years from the development of agriculture to the industrial revolution. Why did people across the world abandon foraging for farming? How and why did cities and states develop? Why did societies succeed or fail? How have humans transformed themselves and the natural world, including the landscape and the climate? We will explore the methods that archaeologists use to consider these questions and analyze evidence for social and economic change from the Middle East, the Americas, Asia, Africa, Australia and Europe. In addition, students will have a chance to conduct hands-on exercises with artifacts from the Penn Museum during practicums.
Spring
1 Course Unit
ANTH 0058 Doing Research: First-Year Seminar
This interdisciplinary course introduces students to qualitative research methods and frameworks in the social sciences and humanities. The goals of the semester will be for each student to develop their own research proposal for a specific project that they could imagine pursuing over the summer or later in their undergraduate career,and to develop a web-based exhibit of one Penn-based research collection of interest. Students will be introduced to a range of textual, archival and media collections and databases available at Penn, with particular attention to South Asia and other specific regions of interest to course participants. The class will visit the Penn Musuem object collections and archives, the Art library, the Kislak Center for Rare Books and Manuscripts, Film Archives, and other special collections on campus, and meet with a representative from the Center for Undergraduate Research Funding (CURF). Students will learn how to frame an effective research question, situate it in relation to existing research, select the most appropriate methods for addressing the question, and develop an effective research plan. Each week students will be introduced to a new set of frameworks for analysis, see specific examples of their application drawn from anthropological, historical, and related scholarship and have opportunities to practice applying and evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of specific methodological tools. Students will also have the opportunity to identify sources of funding for summer research projects and prepare applications for these opportunities as part of the course. The course is ideal as an introduction to both the excellent libraries and research collections housed at Penn, and to a wide range of intellectual frameworks for engaging with these collections - a great way to kick off your undergraduate experience at Penn!
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: SAST 0058
1 Course Unit
ANTH 0063 East & West: A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Cultural History of the Modern World
Sugar and Spices. Tea and Coffee. Opium and Cocaine. Hop aboard the Indian Ocean dhows, Chinese junks, Dutch schooners, and British and American clipper ships that made possible the rise of global capitalism, new colonial relationships, and the intensified forms of cultural change. How have the desires to possess and consume particular commodities shaped cultures and the course of modern history? This class introduces students to the cultural history of the modern world through an interdisciplinary analysis of connections between East and West, South and North. Following the circulation of commodities and the development of modern capitalism, the course examines the impact of global exchange on interactions and relationships between regions, nations, cultures, and peoples and the influences on cultural practices and meanings. The role of slavery and labor migrations, colonial and imperial relations, and struggles for economic and political independence are also considered. From the role of spices in the formation of European joint stock companies circa 1600 to the contemporary cocaine trade, the course's use of both original primary sources and secondary readings written by historians and anthropologists will enable particular attention to the ways that global trade has impacted social, cultural, and political formations and practices throughout the world.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: SAST 0063
1 Course Unit
ANTH 0085 Contemporary Native Identities: Traditions, Resistance, Resilience, Advocacy and Joy
This First-Year Seminar will explore contemporary Native American, Alaska Native and Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) identities and experiences through interdisciplinary and multi-media resources. Readings, guest speakers and course lectures will focus on contemporary Native communities as they maintain their cultural traditions and ceremonies, while navigating the ever-changing political landscape that challenges their existence. Native leaders, authors, activists, educators, musicians and comedians such as Vine Deloria, Jr., Tommy Orange, Robert Warrior, Haunani-Kay Trask, Joy Harjo, Leslie Marmon Silko, David Treuer, Joanne Shenandoah, Jim Ruel and the 1491s, among others, will help us learn about Native resistance and advocacy, while also exploring resilience, joy and ways of knowing. Grades will be based on weekly reading, class discussion leadership and participation, in-class assignments, reading summaries and a final paper.
1 Course Unit
ANTH 0091 Sustainable Development and Culture in Latin America
This interdisciplinary course exposes students to the three dimensions of sustainable development -environmental, economic, and social- through an examination of three products -peyote, coca, and coffee- that are crucial in shaping modern identity in areas of Latin America. The course integrates this analysis of sustainable development in relation to cultural sustainability and cultural practices associated with peyote, coca, and coffee and their rich, traditional heritage and place in literature, film, and the arts.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ENVS 0053, LALS 0091, SPAN 0091
Mutually Exclusive: SPAN 3910
1 Course Unit
ANTH 0103 Origin and Culture of Cities
The UN estimates that 2.9 of the world's 6.1 billion people live in cities and that this percentage is rapidly increasing in many parts of the world. This course examines urban life and urban problems by providing anthropological perspectives on this distinctive form of human association and land use. First we will examine the "origin" of cities, focusing on several of the places where cities first developed, including Mesopotamia and the Valley of Mexico. We will then investigate the internal structure of non-industrial cities by looking at case studies from around the world and from connections between the cities of the past and the city in which we live and work today.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: MELC 0003, URBS 0003
1 Course Unit
ANTH 0105 Ancient Civilizations of the World
This course explores the archaeology (material culture) of early complex societies or civilizations in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Aegean. According to the traditional paradigm, civilization first emerged during the fourth millennium BCE in Egypt and Mesopotamia. In the Mediterranean, state-level societies first appeared in Crete and mainland Greece in the early second millennium BCE. This course investigates how and why these civilizations developed, as well as their appearance and structure in the early historic (or literate) phases of their existence. A comparative perspective will illustrate what these early civilizations have in common and the ways in which they are unique. This course will consist largely of lectures which will outline classic archaeological and anthropological theories on state formation, before turning to examine the available archaeological (and textual) data on emerging complexity in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Aegean. This course does not presuppose any knowledge of archaeology or ancient languages; the instructor will provide any background necessary. Because this is a course on material culture, some of the class periods will be spent at the Penn Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. These will consist of a guided tour of a relevant gallery, as well as a hands-on object-based lab with archaeological materials selected by the instructor.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: MELC 0050, URBS 0050
1 Course Unit
ANTH 0111 Archaeology & The Bible
In this introductory course, students will learn how archaeology illuminates the material and social world behind the texts of the Hebrew Bible and contributes to debates about the history and culture of these societies. We will study the sites, artifacts, and art of the lands of Israel, Judah, Phoenicia, Philistia, Ammon, Moab, and Edom during the period framing the rise and fall of these kingdoms, ca. 1200 to 330 BCE. We will see how biblical archaeology arose in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, how the complex relationship between archaeology and the biblical text has evolved to the present day, and how new discoveries continue to challenge preconceptions about this period. We will learn a broad range of methods in both current archaeology and biblical studies and how they can be used to answer questions about ancient societies, their practices and beliefs, and the material and textual remains they left behind.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: JWST 0111, MELC 0100, NELC 0100
1 Course Unit
ANTH 0120 Globalization And Its Historical Significance
This course sets the current state of globalization in historical perspective. It applies the concepts of anthropology, history, political economy and sociology to the study of globalization. We focus on a series of questions not only about what is happening, but about the growing awareness of it and the consequences of this increasing awareness. In answering these questions we draw on a variety of case studies, from historical examples of early globalization (e.g. The Atlantic and Indian Ocean Worlds, global flows of conspicuous commodities such as sugar, coffee, and tea, the rise and transformations of early capitalism), to issues facing our current globalized world (e.g. mass-mediatization and multilingualism, border regimes and international migration, planetary urbanization). The body of the course deals with particular dimensions of globalization, reviewing both the early and recent history of each. The overall approach is historical and comparative, setting globalization on the larger stage of the economic, political and cultural development of various parts of the modern world. The course is taught by anthropologists who draw from economic, linguistic, sociocultural, archaeological, and historical perspectives, offering the opportunity to compare and contrast distinct disciplinary approaches. It seeks to develop a general social-science-based theoretical understanding of the various historical dimensions of globalization: economic, political, social and cultural.
Fall
Also Offered As: HIST 0862, SOCI 2910
1 Course Unit
ANTH 0184 Food and Culture
This course is designed to survey the complex ways that food and food-related activities are woven into human behavior. We will examine foodways from an anthropological perspective by examining the biological, cultural, and historic contexts of our food production, preparation, presentation, and consumption. We will consider aspects of "food and culture" at several critical junctions of human history and address contemporary issues related to food, health, identity, and society.
Spring, odd numbered years only
1 Course Unit
ANTH 0330 Language, Society, and the Human Experience
Anthropology is the study of what it means to be human across space and time. In this introductory course, we explore how language is at the heart of what it means to be human, examining the constituting role of language in the human experience in societies across the globe. We address a number of questions: How is being a speaker being a member of a society? How do ways of speaking about the world shape ways of experiencing the world? What is linguistic diversity and why is it important? How does one's identity emerge through one's way of speaking? How are large-scale forces like globalization shaping languages and fashions of speaking around the world? Throughout, we explore how language reflects and shapes the ways in which human beings navigate the flux of everyday life.
Spring
1 Course Unit
ANTH 0630 Behind the Iron Curtain
This first-year seminar provides an introduction to the histories, cultures, and societies of Central and Eastern Europe, including Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, and the successor states of Yugoslavia. Through a selection of articles and essays written by anthropologists and sociologists and based on their extended fieldwork in the region, students will explore both the ethnographic method and the experience of everyday life during and after the communist era. Topics will include: popular music under socialism, food and wine, environmental concerns, the status of Muslim minorities, socialist aesthetics, public memory and cultures of commemoration, privatization, advertising, women's rights, gender and sexuality, emergent nationalisms, and the rise of income inequality and homelessness. All readings and assignments in English.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: REES 0630
1 Course Unit
ANTH 0905 Water in the Middle East Throughout History
Water scarcity is one of most important problems facing much of the Middle East and North Africa today. These are arid regions, but human and natural systems have interacted to determine relative water scarcity and abundance at different times and places. This course examines the distribution of water resources throughout the Middle East and the archaeology and anthropology of water exploitation and management over the last 9000 years, looking at continuities and changes through time. Students will learn to make basic digital maps representing Middle Eastern hydro-geography and arguments about modern and historic water resources in the region. The class will cooperatively play an "irrigation management game" designed to familiarize personnel involved in the operation of irrigation schemes with the logistical and social issues involved in water management. We will engage with a variety of media, including academic readings, popular journalism, films, satellite imagery, and digital maps, in our quest to explore whether or not the past can inform present efforts to better manage modern water resources. The course is structured in units focused on each of the major hydro-environmental zones of the Middle East: the river valleys of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Levant, the internal basins of western Central Asia and the Levant, the deserts of Arabia and North Africa, highland zones in Yemen and Iran, and coastal marsh areas along the Persian Gulf. We will examine irrigation systems, water supply systems, and ways of life surrounding water sources known from ethnographic studies, history, and archaeological excavations. These data will allow us to engage with debates in Middle Eastern anthropology, including those concerning the relationship between water and political power, the environment in which the world's earliest cities arose, and the relevance of "lessons of the past" for present and potential future water crises and "water wars." In our final weeks, we will discuss archaeology and historical anthropology's contribution to conceptions of water "sustainability" and examine attempts to revive traditional/ancient technologies and attitudes about water.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: MELC 0905, NELC 0905
1 Course Unit
ANTH 0930 Latinx Environmental Justice
This course explores the involvement of the Latinx environmental justice movement since the 1960s. It addresses theories and concepts of environmental racism and environmental justice, underscoring how Latinx have challenged, expanded, and contributed to the environmental justice discourse. In this course, students will explore national case studies of environmental and racial injustice as they bear on Latinx communities both in rural areas and in urban barrios throughout the United States. The course will analyze these case studies through the lens of Latinx artistic and literary texts (essays, paintings, short stories, documentaries, and short films) as they provide a unique historic and multicultural perspective of the Latinx experience with environmental injustice and of how Latinxs imagine alternative transitions and responses to environmental marginalization. In addition, the works of Latinx artists and writers will serve as case studies to deconstruct racial stereotypes of Latinxs as unconcerned about environmental issues, shedding light on how they share a broad engagement with environmental ideas. The case studies analyzed in this course emphasize race and class differences between farmworkers and urban barrio residents and how they affect their respective struggles. The unit on farmworkers will focus on workplace health issues such as toxic chemicals and collective bargaining contracts. The unit on urban barrios will focus on gentrification, affordable housing, and toxic substances in the home. We will also review current and past programs that have been organized to address the aforementioned problems. This is an Academically Based Community Service Course (ABCS course) through which students will learn from and provide support to a Latinx-serving organization in the City of Philadelphia on preventing exposure to hazardous substances, thus bridging the information gap on environmental justice issues in the Latinx community in Philadelphia. Information dissemination and education efforts will be conducted by collaborating with Esperanza Academy Charter School in Philadelphia to implement lessons on preventing exposure to hazardous substances. Studying environmental justice and pairing it with community service will heighten students' awareness of the complexities of culture, race, gender, and class while providing them with an invaluable experience of cross-cultural understanding.
Spring
Also Offered As: ENVS 0054, LALS 0093, SPAN 0093, URBS 0093
1 Course Unit
ANTH 1002 Introduction to Africa
This course provides an introduction to the study of Africa in all its diversity and complexity. Our focus is cultural, geographical, and historical: we will seek to understand Africa s current place in the world political and economic order and learn about the various social and physical factors that have influenced the historical trajectory of the continent. We study the cultural formations and empires that emerged in Africa before European colonial invasion and then how colonialism reshaped those sociocultural forms. We ll learn about the unique kinds of kinship and religion in precolonial Africa and the changes brought about by the spread of Islam and Christianity. Finally, we ll take a close look at contemporary issues such as ethnic violence, migration, popular culture and poverty, and we'll debate the various approaches to understanding those issues.
Fall
Also Offered As: AFRC 1002
1 Course Unit
ANTH 1020 Iraq: Ancient Cities and Empires
Iraq: Ancient Cities and Empires is a chronological survey of the ancient civilization that existed in the drainage basin of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers from the early settled village farming communities of the 7th millennium BCE to the middle of the 1st millennium BCE, when Nebuchadnezzar II ruled Babylon and much of the Middle East. Though organized period by period, NELC 241 explores various social, political, economic, and ideological topics, exposing students to various strands of evidence, including settlement survey data, excavated architectural remains, artifacts, and documentary sources, as well as an eclectic mix of theoretical perspectives. The course aims to provide students with a strong foundation for the further study of the ancient and pre-modern Middle East.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: MELC 1000, URBS 1020
1 Course Unit
ANTH 1040 Sex and Human Nature
This course is an introduction to the scientific study of sex in humans. Within an evolutionary framework, the course examines genetic, physiological, ecological, social and behavioral aspects of sex in humans. After providing the basic principles of evolutionary biology, the course delves into the development of sexual anatomy and physiology. Among the subjects to be explored are sex determination, the nature of orgasms, and the sexual development of females and males from birth to adulthood. The role of ecology and social life in shaping human mating patterns is also evaluated using ethnographic and cross-cultural materials from a variety of human cultures. In particular, the course examines why humans marry or pair bond, whether there is a biological basis of love, which biological and psychological factors produce jealousy. Finally, the course explores topics relevant to human sexuality today, such as the "hook-up culture", contraception and abortion, sex work, sexual transmitted diseases, and the ethical and legal dimensions of human sexuality.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: GSWS 1040
1 Course Unit
ANTH 1104 On the Stage and in the Streets: An Introduction to Performance Studies
What do Hamilton, RuPaul’s Drag Race, political protest, TikTok Ratatouille, and Queen Elizabeth’s funeral have in common? They all compose repertoires of performance. From artistic performances in theatres, galleries, and concert halls to an individual’s comportment in everyday life, to sporting events, celebrations, courtroom proceedings, performance studies explores what happens when embodied activities are repeatable and given to be seen. In this course we ask: what is performance? How do we describe, analyze, and interpret it? What do theatre and everyday life have in common? How does performance legitimize or challenge the exercise of power? How has social media shifted our understanding of the relationship of our daily lives to performance? How does culture shape what is considered to be performance and how it functions? What isn’t performance? Throughout the semester students will apply key readings in performance theory to case studies drawn from global repertoires of contemporary and historical performance. In addition to analyzing artistic performances, we will also consider sporting events, celebrations, political events, and the performance of everyday life. We will attend to the challenges provoked by performance’s embodied, ephemeral, affective, effective, relational, and contingent aspects. Coursework will include discussion posts, class facilitation, and the opportunity to choose between a research paper or creative project for the final assessment.
Also Offered As: COML 0104, ENGL 1890, THAR 0104
1 Course Unit
ANTH 1120 Sacred Stuff: Religious Bodies, Places, and Objects
Does religion start with what's in our heads? Or are religious commitments made, shaped and strengthened by the people, places, and things around us? This course will explore how religion happens in the material world. We'll start with classical and contemporary theories on the relationship of religion to stuff. We'll then consider examples of how religion is animated not just by texts, but through interactions with objects, spaces, bodies, monuments, color, design, architecture, and film. We'll ask how these material expressions of religion move beyond private faith and connect religion to politics and identity.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: ARTH 0339, RELS 1020
1 Course Unit
ANTH 1140 Migration and Borders
We live in an interconnected world of ever-intensifying flows of people, goods, and ideas. Rather than giving rise to a "borderless world," however, these flows have instead led to the proliferation and elaboration of borders on a planetary scale. This introductory course explores this paradox, evaluating the links between migration and borders in different contexts across the globe. We ask a number of related questions: What is migration? What is a border? What is the relationship between migration and borders? How might anthropology - the study of what it means to be human - shed light on this relationship? In so doing, we explore a number of case studies from archaeological, biological, cultural, and linguistic perspectives to better understand migration and borders as conjoined anthropological phenomena.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ANTH 1151 Madness and Mental Health in East Asian Worlds
Madness, however conceived, can trouble the limits of our worlds. Since COVID-19, questions of mental health have resurfaced with a sense of urgency, as many faced unprecedented changes in collective and intimate life. This course explores madness and mental health in East Asian worlds, across geographies, histories, social-political transformations, and racialized imaginations. How do East Asian therapeutics approach madness, through and beyond the concepts of psychiatry, neuroscience, or even ‘mental health’? What happens when Euro-American diagnostic categories and treatments travel to East Asia as part of missionary and empire-building projects? Bringing together readings in medical and psychological anthropology, as well as history, literature, psychoanalysis, and transcultural psychiatry, we will explore themes such as: shifting concepts of madness in Chinese, Korean, and Japanese medical and spiritual cures, colonial legacies of ‘culture-bound syndromes,’ and race as a site of psychic struggle in Asian American diasporas.
Also Offered As: ASAM 1620
1 Course Unit
ANTH 1160 Caribbean Culture and Politics
This course offers anthropological perspectives on the Caribbean as a geo-political and socio-cultural region, and on contemporary Caribbean diaspora cultures. We will examine how the region's long and diverse colonial history has structured relationships between race, ethnicity, class, gender and power, as well as how people have challenged these structures. As a region in which there have been massive transplantations of peoples and their cultures from Africa, Asia, and Europe, and upon which the United States has exerted considerable influence, we will question the processes by which the meeting and mixing of peoples and cultures has occurred. Course readings include material on the political economy of slavery and the plantation system, family and community life, religious beliefs and practices, gender roles and ideologies, popular culture, and the differing ways national, ethnic, and racial identities are expressed on the islands and throughout the Caribbean diaspora.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AFRC 1160, LALS 1160
1 Course Unit
ANTH 1169 Merchants, Saints, Slaves and Sojourners: the Worlds of the Indian Ocean
Do oceans serve to divide and demarcate distinct cultures and regions? Or do they facilitate exchange, connection and cosmopolitanism? This course will explore the manner in which the Indian Ocean has played both roles throughout history, and how the nature of those divisions and connections has changed over time from the ancient to the modern world. We will reconstruct the intertwined mercantile, religious and kinship networks that spanned the Indian Ocean world, across the Middle East, East Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia and China, illuminating the histories of Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam, while also considering the role of successive imperial political formations, from Rome to Britain. Throughout the semester we will seek to understand the Indian Ocean through the people who lived and worked in its milieu - from consuls and military commanders, to traders, brokers, sailors, prisoners and slaves. Course materials will draw on a variety of disciplines (anthroplogy, archaeology, material culture, religious studies) to construct the cultural, economic, and environmental history of the Indian Ocean.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: SAST 1169
1 Course Unit
ANTH 1171 Devotion's New Market: Religion, Economics, and the City
This graduate and undergraduate level course introduces students to the new forms of devotion as circulated in various urban centers in South Asia with a focus on growing market economy and urbanization. This course will particularly discuss case studies of how different modes of Hinduism, Islam, Christianity and other minor religions operate in an urbanized middle-class and educated communities. We will read theoretical and ethnographical works of contemporary research in religious studies and anthropology that deal with the questions of modernity, reformism and economic developmentalism. Throughout the semester, we focus on 1) how does religious forms such as sainthood practices, private and public rituals, narrative modes and everyday life evolve in the background of growing politics of development; 2) we discuss the tensions between classical notions of devotion and their new transformations in the city life, and finally 3) theoretically, we analyze concepts such as reformism, fundamentalism, recent discourses on identity politics and gender implications as connected to urban religious life.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: RELS 1640, SAST 1171
Mutually Exclusive: SAST 5571
1 Course Unit
ANTH 1202 Popular Culture and Youth in Africa
All across the continent, Africa is alive with the energies of young people, expressed in music, art, fashion, drama, video, poetry, protest, and urban legends. In this course, we take a close look at the wide variety of popular forms produced and consumed by young people in a diversity of contexts, urban and rural, elite and marginal, mainstream and transgressive. We will examine how popular culture draws from African tradition to craft innovative versions of modernity and futurity. We will explore themes of democracy, inequality, and social justice threaded through popular genres as well as experiences of joy, anger, fear, and hilarity. We will see how popular culture provides escape and entertainment for young people while also working to transform African societies.
Spring
Also Offered As: AFRC 1220
1 Course Unit
ANTH 1219 Archaeology in the City of Brotherly Love
This course introduces the archaeology of Philadelphia and the surrounding area through guided visits to local prehistoric and historic sites, accompanied by readings, discussions, and guest lectures. This is an experiential course, in that students will explore local archaeological sites, both well known and rarely discussed, in person. Moving beyond reading the histories of places like Eastern State Penitentiary, the President's House, or Sycamore Mills, students will engage with social scientific analysis of the material culture and landscape features that remain in the archaeological record. This course is open to all undergraduates, no previous archaeological experience is required. The course will be held Fridays from 10am - 5pm including travel time to the sites and back to the Penn Museum, transportation provided by the university. Enrollment is limited so permission of the instructor is required. Course may be repeated for credit.
Spring
1 Course Unit
ANTH 1230 Communication & Culture
The course looks at varieties of human expression -- such as art, film, language and song -- as communicative practices that connect persons together to form a common culture. Discussion is centered around particular case studies and ethnographic examples. Examination of communicative practices in terms of the types of expressive signs they employ, their capacity to formulate and transmit cultural beliefs and ideals (such as conceptions of politics, nature, and self), and to define the size and characteristics of groups and communities sharing such ideals. Discussion of the role of media, social institutions, and technologies of communication (print, electronic). Emphasis on contemporary communicative practices and the forms of culture that emerge in the modern world.
Spring
1 Course Unit
ANTH 1238 Introduction to Medical Anthropology
Introduction to Medical Anthropology takes central concepts in anthropology -- culture, adaptation, human variation, belief, political economy, the body -- and applies them to human health and illness. Students explore key elements of healing systems including healing technologies and healer-patient relationships. Modern day applications for medical anthropology are stressed.
Fall
Also Offered As: HSOC 1382
1 Course Unit
ANTH 1300 Introduction to Mediterranean Archaeology
The cultures of Greece and Rome, what we call classical antiquity, span over a thousand years of multicultural achievement in the Mediterranean. This course tells the story of what it was like to live in the complex societies of ancient Greece and Rome. This story is told principally using the art, architecture, pottery and coins produced by these societies. We will examine both the bold and sexy, and the small and humble, from the Parthenon to wooden huts, from the Aphrodite of Knidos to the bones of a fisherman named Peter.
Fall
Also Offered As: CLST 1300
1 Course Unit
ANTH 1303 The Material Past in a Digital World
The material remains of the human past -objects and spaces- provide tangible evidence of past people's lives. Today's information technologies improve our ability to document, study, and present these materials. But what does it mean to deal with material evidence in a virtual context? In this class, students will learn basic digital methods for studying the past while working with objects, including those in the collections of the Penn Museum. This class will teach relational database design and 3D object modeling. As we learn about acquiring and managing data, we will gain valuable experience in the evaluation and use of digital tools. The digital humanities are a platform both for learning the basic digital literacy students need to succeed in today's world and for discussing the human consequences of these new technologies and data. We will discuss information technology's impact on the study and presentation of the past, including topics such as public participation in archaeological projects, educational technologies in museum galleries, and the issues raised by digitizing and disseminating historic texts and objects. Finally, we will touch on technology's role in the preservation of the past in today's turbulent world. No prior technical experience is required, but we hope students will share an enthusiasm for the past.
Also Offered As: ARTH 0127, CLST 1303, HIST 0871
1 Course Unit
ANTH 1310 Small Business Anthropology
With a focus on minority-owned small businesses in the City of Philadelphia, this class will introduce students to the work of anthropologists who have made their careers in the business world using the tools they acquired through training in anthropology. By bringing anthropological perspectives into the workplace, business anthropologists seek to promote well-being for employees and owners, as well as consumers and the communities in which businesses operate. The class will also introduce students to Philadelphia from the point of view of minority owned small businesses. One of the two class days each week will focus on business anthropology as a profession and include readings on organizational culture, design anthropology, and the role of anthropologists in marketing and advertising, as well as in globalization processes and entrepreneurship. The second of the two days each week will focus on the city of Philadelphia and the role of small businesses within it. We will study the spatial layout of the city, the kinds of small businesses that are operative within the city and where they are located, the relationship of business to ethnicity, gentrification and its impact on small business, and the role of government and community groups in relationship to small businesses and their owners and employees. As part of the class, students will engage in guided research on specific small businesses, with the aim of developing an ethnographic understanding of the experiences of owners and employees, the opportunities they have seized upon and the problems they have confronted. We hope in the course of the semester to provide an ethnographic profile of a sampling of small businesses from different industries, which can in turn contribute to understanding larger social and cultural patterns within Philadelphia. Through a class blog or other means, we hope as well to contribute to the ability of minority small business owners to voice their experiences, as well as their fears and hopes for the future, to members of the University community and beyond.
Also Offered As: URBS 1310
1 Course Unit
ANTH 1340 Making the Natural World: An Introduction to Political Ecology
What are the limits of nature? When do natural systems become human or socio-natural systems? In this course, we examine the human construction of nature both conceptually, through ideas about environment, ecosystem, organism, and ecology; and materially, through trajectories of direct action in and on the landscape. Beginning with a consideration of foundational concepts in human ecology, we will discuss current problems and approaches, centering on political ecology. Readings and case studies are drawn from human-environmental contexts in Oceania, South Asia, Southeast Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, Europe, and North America. We will also consider topics including a) the relationship between indigenous and technocratic knowledge and resource governance, b) environmental movements themselves as objects of ethnographic study; c) justice and sustainability as environmental goals; d) inequality, displacement and violence as environmental problems; and e) fair trade and food security or sovereignty.
Fall
1 Course Unit
ANTH 1410 Museums, Monuments, and Social Justice
Monuments, museums, and heritage are all critical parts of the world that we have created and are shaped by. These institutions and sites often claim to represent our past, who we imagine ourselves to be today, and how we might define our futures. We often rely on museums and monuments to frame history and history’s relationship to our current social and cultural systems. However, in recent years, social, racial, and economic justice movements have pushed us to rethink the function of monuments, museums, and heritage. In particular, these social movements have helped us understand how racism, sexism, and colonialism are responsible for the creation of monuments and museums. This course examines the echoes and continuities of colonial representations in museums and monuments. In addition, we will examine how new ways of commemorating and representing the past can result in a new vision for our future. By visiting a variety of local monuments and sites and by engaging in conversations about accountability and social justice, this course will challenge us to rethink the tangible and intangible ways that we weave the past into the present for the creation of the future.
Fall
Also Offered As: ARTH 0141
1 Course Unit
ANTH 1430 Explorations in Human Biology
This course is an exploration of human biology from a biocultural and evolutionary perspective. The class will provide you with a better understanding of what it means to be human, how humans came to exhibit such a wide range variation, and what biological anthropology can contribute to your understanding of the world. In this class students will learn to integrate the theory and methods used in human biology research through lectures, assignments, and lab sessions. This course will explore topics including human genetics, growth and development, nutrition, disease, and reproduction. We will also use the course as an opportunity to introduce you to the important contributions of biological anthropologists to the study of race, inequality, sex and gender, and health among others.
Spring
1 Course Unit
ANTH 1440 Liquid Histories and Floating Archives
Climate change transforms the natural and built environments, and it is re-shaping how we understand, make sense, and care for our past. Climate changes history. This course explores the Anthropocene, the age when humans are remaking earth's systems, from an on-water perspective. In on-line dialogue and video conferences with research teams in port cities on four continents, this undergraduate course focuses on Philadelphia as one case study of how rising waters are transfiguring urban history, as well as its present and future. Students projects take them into the archives at the Independence Seaport Museum and at Bartram's Garden. Field trips by boat on the Schuylkill and Delaware Rivers and on land to the Port of Philadelphia and to the John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge invite transhistorical dialogues about how colonial and then industrial-era energy and port infrastructure transformed the region's vast tidal marshlands wetlands. Excursions also help document how extreme rain events, storms, and rising waters are re-making the built environment, redrawing lines that had demarcated land from water. In dialogue with one another and invited guest artists, writers, and landscape architects, students final projects consider how our waters might themselves be read and investigated as archives. What do rising seas subsume and hold? Whose stories do they tell? What floats to the surface?
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: COML 1140, ENGL 1589, ENVS 1440, GRMN 1140, HIST 0872
1 Course Unit
ANTH 1480 Food and Fire: Archaeology in the Laboratory
This course will let students explore the essential heritage of human technology through archaeology. People have been transforming their environment from the first use of fire for cooking. Since then, humans have adapted to the world they created using the resources around them. We use artifacts to understand how the archaeological record can be used to trace breakthroughs such as breaking stone and bone, baking bread, weaving cloth and firing pottery and metals. The seminar will meet in the Penn Museum's Center for the Analysis of Archaeological Materials. Students will become familiar with the Museum's collections and the scientific methods used to study different materials. Class sessions will include discussions, guest presentations, museum field trips, and hands-on experience in the laboratory.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: CLST 1302, MELC 0910, NELC 0910
1 Course Unit
ANTH 1490 Introduction to Native American and Indigenous Studies
This course offers a broad introduction to evolving scholarship in the combined fields of Native American Studies and Indigenous Studies worldwide. Students will examine the various ways that Indigenous peoples and academic researchers are currently engaging with Indigenous knowledges, while also exploring the lingering impacts of settler colonialism and the influence of decolonizing methodologies. Students will gain foundational understandings of the cross-disciplinary nature of Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS), by studying theoretical interpretations of Indigenous peoples in academic and historical contexts, and by examining practical approaches to Indigenous research in diverse worldwide settings. Students will approach topics from a variety of disciplinary traditions, utilizing historical texts, ethnological studies, oral literature, material culture, and modern media, including websites and databases produced by and for Indigenous communities. Readings will include the work of researchers who bridge the disciplines of anthropology, history, folklore, art, law, science, etc. Students will watch a selection of films by Indigenous filmmakers, and attend lectures by a selection of Indigenous guest speakers. NAIS faculty advisors from various schools at Penn (e.g., School of Arts and Sciences, Education, Law, Nursing) will also present several guest lectures to highlight their unique experiences and research projects with Indigenous communities. Special case studies will focus on: new directions in collaborative research; issues in museum representation and repatriation; heritage site protection and Indigenous archaeology; legal interventions and protections for Indigenous rights; and innovative projects in language restoration and cultural recovery.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ANTH 1500 World Musics and Cultures
This course examines how we as consumers in the "Western" world engage with musical difference largely through the products of the global entertainment industry. We examine music cultures in contact in a variety of ways-- particularly as traditions in transformation. Students gain an understanding of traditional music as live, meaningful person-to-person music making, by examining the music in its original site of production, and then considering its transformation once it is removed, and recontextualized in a variety of ways. The purpose of the course is to enable students to become informed and critical consumers of "World Music" by telling a series of stories about particular recordings made with, or using the music of, peoples culturally and geographically distant from the US. Students come to understand that not all music downloads containing music from unfamiliar places are the same, and that particular recordings may be embedded in intriguing and controversial narratives of production and consumption. At the very least, students should emerge from the class with a clear understanding that the production, distribution, and consumption of world music is rarely a neutral process. Fulfills College Cross Cultural Foundational Requirement.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: AFRC 1500, MUSC 1500
1 Course Unit
ANTH 1533 Music in Troubled Places
In this class, we go beyond the headlines to discuss the history and cultures of peoples who have had to endure terrible suffering, particularly through ethnic conflict and civil war. We will focus on a curious phenomenon: populations typically defined as separate from one another (e.g., Israelis and Palestinians) often have a history of shared or related cultural practices, of which music is a prime example. We will survey a number of current and recent conflict zones and use music as a way to deepen our understanding of the identities and relationships between the peoples involved including through a consideration of my own fieldwork in Sri Lanka. Querying the very definitions of music, trouble, and place, the course then broadens out to consider how musicians have been affected by and/or responded to important global problems like slavery, sexual violence, climate change and other ecological disasters, like Hurricane Katrina. Regions to be considered in our lectures and/or readings include: Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria (including Kurdish musics), Israel-Palestine, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, Myanmar/Burma, Uganda, Sierra Leone, North and South Korea, the Marshall Islands, Cambodia, Mexico, and the United States.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: MUSC 1530
1 Course Unit
ANTH 1560 Seeing/Hearing Globally (SNF Paideia Program Course)
This is a Penn Global Seminars Abroad semester long class with travel abroad after. It focuses on the interrelationship of music, arts, community-building, land, politics, and history. Places covered in coursework and travel vary by semester, and students have to apply for the class through Penn Global. The class is limited in student participation to no more than 20 students.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AFRC 1560, MUSC 1560
1 Course Unit
ANTH 1610 Humans and the Earth System: How it Works, How We Got Here, and How to Save Our Planet
As our planet's climate changes, it is imperative to understand the basic structures of the earth system and our connections to these, past, present, and future. The goal of this course is to help students develop an integrated understanding of climate change, linking the fundamental science - from the microscopic to the global scale - to human actions and possible futures. This course brings together approaches from environmental science, social sciences, history, and policy. Beyond providing basic climate and environmental literacy, we will also explore current and projected impacts of change, including changes to human life and biodiversity as well as other physical and biological systems. The course is divided into three units: 1. Science: what are the chemical and physical drivers of our changing climate, and what are the biological, health and environmental implications so far. 2. Impacts: how human activity has affected environments and climate so far and how climate change is currently impacting society, nature, agriculture, health, cities, and the most vulnerable communities. 3. Solutions: the roles of policy, business, agriculture, planning, and personal choices. The course is open to undergraduate students of all disciplines. While the reading and weekly assignments will be specific to the module, students may define a capstone project that reflects their academic interests.
Spring
Also Offered As: ENVS 1020
1 Course Unit
ANTH 1670 Population and Public Health in Eastern Europe
Since the collapse of communism in 1989 in Eastern Europe (and 1991 in the Soviet Union), many of the countries in the region have experienced public health crises and demographic catastrophe. Below replacement fertility rates and massive out migration have decimated the populations of these countries even as populations age and place unsustainable strains on pension systems and medical services. The demographic collapse has also been accompanied by falling male life expectancy and the rise of alcoholism, depression, domestic violence, and suicide. The economic exigencies of the transition from communism to capitalism dismantled welfare states at the exact moment when health services were most needed, leaving charities and nongovernmental organization to try to fill in the gaps. Through a combination of readings from the fields of epidemiology, demography, and medical anthropology, this course examines the public health implications of poverty and social dislocation in post-communist states. All readings and assignments are in English.
Also Offered As: REES 1670, SOCI 2950
1 Course Unit
ANTH 1688 Sex and Socialism
This seminar examines classic and current scholarship and literature on gender and sexuality in contemporary Eastern Europe, and examines the dialogue and interchange of ideas between East and West. Although the scholarly and creative works will primarily investigate the changing status of women during the last three decades, the course will also look at changing constructions of masculinity and LGBT movements and communities in the former communist bloc. Topics will include: the woman question before 1989; gender and emerging nationalisms; visual representations in television and film; social movements; work; romance and intimacy; spirituality; and investigations into the constructed concepts of "freedom" and "human rights."
Also Offered As: GSWS 1680, REES 1680, SOCI 2972
1 Course Unit
ANTH 1755 Listening in Troubled Times (SNF Paideia Program Course)
In this course, we will explore histories and theories of listening and the power of listening as a means to connect with other times and spaces. This course is part of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) Paideia Program. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Also Offered As: ENGL 0755
1 Course Unit
ANTH 1803 Sacred Stuff: Religious Bodies, Places, and Objects
Does religion start with what's in our heads? Or are religious commitments made, shaped and strengthened by the people, places, and things around us? This course will explore how religion happens in the material world. We'll start with classical and contemporary theories on the relationship of religion to stuff. We'll then consider examples of how religion is animated not just by texts, but through interactions with objects, spaces, bodies, monuments, color, design, architecture, and film. We'll ask how these material expressions of religion move beyond private faith and connect religion to politics and identity.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: RELS 1800
1 Course Unit
ANTH 1900 Pastoral Nomadism in the Past and Present
Pastoral nomadism is a "third way" of human subsistence separate from farming and foraging. It is a sustainable human adaptation to grassland and arid environments practiced through particular technologies and domesticated animals. This course begins by examining the human ecology and social organization that emerge from mobile ways of life, drawing on modern, ethnographic, and archaeological examples of pastoral nomadic groups in the Middle East and Central Asia. Academic readings and ethnographic films will form the basis of discussions about several larger themes, including: the origins of pastoral nomadism and horse riding; the development of dairy-based foods and human adaptations allowing the digestion of lactose; the historical relationship between mobile groups of pastoralists and territorial states; popular perceptions of nomads in various forms of historical and modern media; and the influence of ideas about nomads on modern senses of heritage and nationalism in the Middle East and Central Asia.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: MELC 0900, NELC 0900
1 Course Unit
ANTH 1905 GIS for the Digital Humanities and Social Sciences
This course introduces students to theory and methodology of the geospatial humanities and social sciences, understood broadly as the application of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and spatial analysis techniques to the study of social and cultural patterns in the past and present. By engaging with spatial theory, spatial analysis case studies, and technical methodologies, students will develop an understanding of the questions driving, and tools available for, humanistic and social science research projects that explore change over space and time. We will use ESRI's ArcGIS software to visualize, analyze, and integrate historical, anthropological, and environmental data. Techniques will be introduced through the discussion of case studies and through demonstration of software skills. During supervised laboratory sessions, the various techniques and analyses covered will be applied to sample data and also to data from a region/topic chosen by the student.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: MELC 1905, NELC 1905
Mutually Exclusive: MELC 6900
1 Course Unit
ANTH 1925 Who Owns the Past? Archaeology and Politics in the Middle East
This course explores the role of cultural heritage and archaeological discoveries in the politics of the Middle East from the nineteenth century to the recent aftermath of the Arab Spring. We will explore how modern Middle East populations relate to their pasts and how archaeology and cultural heritage have been employed to support particular political and social agendas, including colonialism, nationalism, imperialism, and the construction of ethnic-religious identities. Although it was first introduced to the Middle East as a colonial enterprise by European powers, archaeology became a pivotal tool for local populations of the Middle East to construct new histories and identities during the post-World War I period of intensive nation-building after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. To understand this process, we will first look at the nineteenth-century establishment of archaeology by institutions like the Penn Museum. Then we will move on to individual case studies in Turkey, Iraq, Egypt, Israel/Palestine, Iran, and the republics of former Soviet Transcaucasia to look at the role of archaeology and cultural heritage in the formation of these countries as modern nation-states with a shared identity among citizens. We will conclude with an examination of the recent impact of the Islamic State on material heritage in Syria and Iraq, the changing attitudes of Middle Eastern countries toward foreign museums, and the role of UNESCO in defining Middle Eastern sites of world heritage. The course will also include field trips to the Penn Museum.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: MELC 2900, NELC 2900
1 Course Unit
ANTH 2020 Language, Migration, Diaspora
Centering on the relation between language, migration, and diaspora, this course uses linguistic anthropological approaches to understand how the 'very big' is reflected in the 'very small.' We will approach language use as a process that unfolds in the microclimate of everyday interaction, but whose effects extend to and shape large-scale social processes. We will ask a number of interrelated questions: How does language use shape global phenomena like transnationalism and diasporic populations? How do globalizing forces impact and shape language structure and use? How are mobility and (im)migration enabled or constrained through everyday communicative interaction? We begin by exploring the ideologies inherent in everyday speech, evaluating how language is linked to social identities like class, race, gender, and sexuality, and to social personae like 'the migrant,' 'the refugee,' 'the foreigner,' or to the 'diasporic subject' more generally. We then explore the cultural politics of languages in and across nation-states, attending to their uses and values in unprecedented global flows of information, goods, and people.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ANTH 2024 Dress and Fashion in Africa
Throughout Africa, social and cultural identities of ethnicity, gender, generation, rank and status were conveyed in a range of personal ornamentation that reflects the variation of African cultures. The meaning of one particular item of clothing can transform completely when moved across time and space. As one of many forms of expressive culture, dress shape and give forms to social bodies. In the study of dress and fashion, we could note two distinct broad approaches, the historical and the anthropological. While the former focuses on fashion as a western system that shifted across time and space, and linked with capitalism and western modernity; the latter approach defines dress as an assemblage of modification the body. The Africanist proponents of this anthropological approach insisted that fashion is not a dress system specific to the west and not tied with the rise of capitalism. This course will focus on studying the history of African dress by discussing the forces that have impacted and influenced it overtime, such as socio-economic, colonialism, religion, aesthetics, politics, globalization, and popular culture. The course will also discuss the significance of the different contexts that impacted the choices of what constitute an appropriate attire for distinct situations. African dress in this context is not a fixed relic from the past, but a live cultural item that is influenced by the surrounding forces.
Spring
Also Offered As: AFRC 2324, ARTH 2094
1 Course Unit
ANTH 2060 Cultures of Science and Technology
Science and technology figure centrally in the economic, political, and socio-cultural changes that impact our worlds. Happenings in the life sciences, including the discovery of new genes, pathways, and processes, are redrawing concepts of the body and human nature and refiguring social and political relations. The seminar starts from the premise that scientific facts are made, not things existing a priori in the world and that are merely picked up by researchers and consumed by lay audiences. Likewise, technologies are created through a process of intense negotiation between producers and their sophisticated users. Focusing on the biosciences, we explore the production of science and technology and how they 1)affect individuals, self-identities, subjectivity, kinship, and social relationships; 2)have interacted with or reinforced political programs, racial classifications, unequal access to knowledge, and patterns of social injustice; 3)inform contemporary institutional structures, strategies of governance, and practices of citizenship. We will combine methods and perspectives from social and cultural anthropology, and the social studies of science and technology, and will draw from historical case studies, contemporary ethnographies of science, scientific and medical journals, documentary films and media reports.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ANTH 2070 Primate Behavior and Ecology
This course explores the behavior of wild primates and the ecological models that attempt to explain the evolution of these behaviors. The evolution and taxonomy of primates will be reviewed, followed by a brief history of wild primate studies. We will then explore primate behavior through theoretical frameworks ranging from socioecological theory to sexual selection. Topics discussed include, but are not limited to, socioecology, aggression, kinship, cooperation, reproductive strategies, cognition, and conservation. Those enrolled in the graduate section (ANTH 6070) will have additional responsibilities assigned.
Not Offered Every Year
Mutually Exclusive: ANTH 6070
1 Course Unit
ANTH 2080 Anthropology of Futurity
How should we think about the future amid worlds on edge? What is an inevitable versus a contingent course of events? What role do humans and non-humans, machines, animals, and plants play as agents of futurity in the context of the Anthropocene? This seminar explores these pressing questions, linking multiple sources of knowledge production—biological, medical, ecological, engineering, economic, and anthropological—with manifestations of the future. It starts with the basic premise that futures are made, molded by competing material, economic, and creative desires and possibilities, and not foreordained. Innovating futures also entails unexpected ethical and technical entanglements that current forms of knowledge cannot always anticipate. Drawing from readings in anthropology, the social studies of science and technology, Indigenous studies, as well as from engineering, AI, and scientific journals and films, we explore tensions between knowledge and uncertainty on the one hand, and ethics and innovation on the other. With these tensions in mind, we consider the myriad of agents whose role will be vital to shaping planetary futures—as well as how alternative futures, especially among communities confronting systemic inequalities and colonial and race-based injustices, are imagined and realized. From the climate crises to the ongoing pandemics, militarization, and mass migrations that have torn apart social fabrics, we will learn to become ‘technologists of the future’—that is, individuals and collectives with the tools to realize more inclusive, flourishing, and just futurities.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: DSGN 3120
1 Course Unit
ANTH 2093 Psyche, Trauma, Culture
What shapes our psychic lives today? How are histories of pain and creative possibility transmitted, ruptured, and transformed? The language of mental health and trauma have become more present in recent years. These vocabularies have made room for conversations about forms of violence that may have been difficult to put into words before. In the United States, this includes the insidious effects of racialization, indigenous dispossession, and other forms of exclusion, extraction, and misrecognition. Yet, the rise of mental health discourses also poses new conundrums, as self-care is increasingly promoted in times of collective crisis, and trauma becomes a basis on which to seek rights, recognition, and resources. This course draws on the works of anthropologists, psychoanalysts, and decolonial thinkers to explore tensions between trauma, culture, and the psyche. We begin with common encounters that inform and disrupt our lives, examine historical and contemporary concepts of trauma, and close with questions of what lives on.
Also Offered As: ASAM 2093
1 Course Unit
ANTH 2109 Adivasis/Indigenous Peoples & British Colonialism in India
Modern Western colonialism impacted the world in many ways. However, each country and community has had a different encounter and experience with colonialism. For the Adivasis (indigenous peoples) of India, it was catastrophic and marked a new phase in their history. The pre-colonial symbolizes a period of freedom in the hills and forest, whereas the colonial era symbolizes state coercion, eviction from land and the end of free movement in the forest. The proposed course discusses Adivasis' encounters with the British colonial state. The course examines Indian history from the perspectives of Adivasis and contrasts these with dominant paradigms of Indian history. In this way, the course allows students to understand India from a different perspective. Under British colonialism, the diverse ethnic self-governing communities were imagined as primitive, uncivilized, barbaric, violent, backward and childlike people. The course discusses how such constructions impacted Adivasi social life and development. It traces how the expansion of the colonial state in forests and hills put an end to self-rule and induced massive migration from the plains of India and asks how Adivasi areas were integrated into the colonial economy. How did the colonial state use revenue and forest policies and regulations to bring these areas under its control? How did commercialization of agriculture and forest conservation work to further marginalize Adivasis? The course also examines how Adivasi knowledge of cultivation and forest conservation were viewed by the colonial state and asks why the colonial state encouraged caste-Hindu peasant migration into Adivasi areas. Finally, it traces the ways that colonial intervention has resulted in a series of contestations, acts of resistance, and insurgencies by Adivasi groups? Tracing forms of Adivasi resistance, the course puts these into conversation with intellectual history, emphasizing the role of rumours, myths, and orality, which provided the basis for the new insurgent consciousness that spread throughout Adivasi communities. Adivasi resistance movements have been documented and analyzed by colonial rulers and anthropologists. Colonial discourses were successful in criminalizing Adivasi politics. Ironically, many colonial-era discourses concerning Adivasis have been perpetuated within the post-colonial academy. The anti-colonial struggles of Adivasis were constructed as sporadic, spontaneous, unorganized and apolitical. The inauguration of the Subaltern Studies Project has reversed such arguments and attempted to provide ideological integrity to Adivasi politics. Students will be introduced to important literature on Adivasi anti-colonial insurgent consciousness and will be encouraged to think critically about the concepts and theories of subaltern politics. Assigned readings include texts by James Scott, Ranajit Guha, David Arnold, David Hardiman, Ajay Skaria, Dhanagare, Ramachandra Guha, Biswamoy Pati, Alpa Shah, Crispin Bates, Jangkhomang Guite and Bhangya Bhukya. One aim of the course is to sensitize the students to how the political and cultural mobilizations by subalterns have contributed to the shaping of democracy.
Spring
Also Offered As: HIST 0853, SAST 2239, SOCI 2974
Mutually Exclusive: SAST 5239
1 Course Unit
ANTH 2110 Religion and Ecology
This class will introduce the overlaps between religion and ecology. Rather than assuming that there is a necessary positive or negative relationship between religion and ecology, we will look at how these relationships have materialized in complicated ways at different moments in history. We'll consider perspectives and case studies from a range of different moments in history. We'll consider perspectives and case studies from a range of different traditions, with a special attention paid to the genesis of the field of Religion and Ecology in critiques of Christian attitudes toward the environment in the 1960s and 1970s.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ENVS 2410, RELS 2110
1 Course Unit
ANTH 2120 Animals and Religion
Religion is full of animals--lions and lambs, monkeys and elephants, buffalo and snakes, even mythical beasts. The identity of the human being is explained, in many traditions, by contrast with the identity of other species. We know who we are because we know who they are, or do we? This course interrogates--through an exploration of sacred texts, art, film, and museum artifacts--the tension present in many traditions between an anthropocentric prioritization of the human being and religious resources that encourage a valuing of other animal species. We'll explore the way animals function both as religious objects and as religious subjects across diverse traditions, asking how human-animal relationships have shaped religion and how religion has shaped the way we think about and interact with other animals. We'll ask how religion has engaged with animals over time and across global cultures, understanding them as symbols, messengers, and manifestations of the divine; as material for ritual and sacrifice; as kin and subordinates; as food and as filth; as helpmeets and as tempters. How have these perspectives shaped animal ethics, influencing the treatment, use, and consumption of animals and their bodies? Finally, we'll ask what it means that we ourselves are evolved animals. How does our own animality factor into the practice of human religion? Is our religious capacity part of what sets us apart from other animals or is religiosity a trait we might expect to find in other species? To what extent is religion a function of the animal?
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ENVS 2420, RELS 2120
1 Course Unit
ANTH 2145 Reading Maya Culture: Decipherment and a New Window into the Ancient Americas
The past three decades have seen a revolution in the study of the Ancient Americas, one with far-reaching implications for how we understand indigenous society and culture on this continent. This course will take us on a journey of academic discovery—encompassing language, art, and materiality—that explains how the decipherment of a major writing system has revealed a previously hidden world. The Maya are one of the most distinctive and best-known of Mesoamerican peoples, who live today, as they did in ancient times, in the Yucatan Peninsula and a region that spans modern southern Mexico, the whole of Guatemala and Belize, and the westernmost fringes of Honduras and El Salvador. From as early as 1000 BCE they were erecting major architecture and flourished for twenty-five more centuries before the invasion of Europeans brought their independence to an end in the sixteenth century CE. Within their elaborate urban spaces, the Maya erected large stone monuments inscribed with imagery and hieroglyphic texts—most of them commissioned in the Classic Period that reaches from 150-900 CE—although the script is also found on many smaller and more intimate objects. For the first century of research these texts proved all but unintelligible, as faulty assumptions and lack of adequate sources left a deep pessimism that they could ever be understood. But beginning in the 1980s major progress in "cracking the code" took place and today we can read almost all inscriptions to some extent, a decent number in their entirety. This course will teach practical skills that allow students with no previous background to read Maya inscriptions and gain access to the history, politics, religious beliefs, and practical material culture they describe. The fabulous design of the hieroglyphs, that at first seem so impenetrable, will be broken-down to reveal not only language but an iconographic system that reveals much about the ancient Maya aesthetics and visual culture.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ARTH 2145, LALS 2145
1 Course Unit
ANTH 2150 The Ancient Maya: Integrating Material, Text, and Image
Ancient Maya studies is one of the most dynamic and innovative fields in world archaeology today. Emerging as a true historical archaeology only in the past three decades, the decipherment of Maya script now provides a powerful complement and counterpoint to both traditional excavation data and new remote sensing technologies. Equally, the reading of images, and their interaction with texts and artifacts, forms a vital part of our interest in the broader humanistic concerns of worldview and the transcendent--where our primary interest lies in gaining access to past mentalities. This course will provide a comprehensive introduction into current knowledge of the Ancient Maya, with a recurring methodological focus on how different types of evidence are integrated to assemble a persuasive "portrait of the past." This scope of this process is unique in the ancient Americas, since only the Maya offer us the opportunity to read their own descriptions of the world two millennia or more in the past. Geographically, we will be looking at the greater Yucatan Peninsula, which today covers parts of southeastern Mexico, the whole of Guatemala and Belize, and the western extremities of Honduras and El Salvador. Since archaic times (before 1200 BCE) this has been occupied by speakers of the Mayan language group, and millions of people identified as Maya by that means continue to do so today (despite popular notions to the contrary, they have never "disappeared"). No prior knowledge of archaeology or art history is necessary. The course structure is one 3-hour session per week, consisting of a lecture followed by group discussion in seminar-style. Additionally, in Week 6 there will be a virtual tour of the new Mexico and Central American Gallery at Penn Museum. This will introduce the class to the issues of disseminating scholarship and building narratives that are accessible to the wider public.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ARTH 2200, LALS 2150
1 Course Unit
ANTH 2154 Performing History
This seminar concentrates on the ways that various peoples in the world make their history by means other than relying on written texts alone. Over the course of the semester, we therefore may be examining such different public events and civic rituals as parades, political and religious processions, local historical pageants, carnivals, historic preservation, museums, military reenactments, and history theme parks. The emphasis in each of these forms, places, and semiotic processes will be on their identity and function as key performances that transform consciousness, shift individuals alternately into both actors and spectators, reframe the everyday as the metaphysical, and intensify the status of cultural values in the histories they present to view. Course requirements: a seminar paper, the topic of which you will discuss with me no later than week five of the course; and a working annotated bibliography and statement of your paper's main thesis. I will say more about these assignments as they approach.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ARTH 3790, HIST 3154
1 Course Unit
ANTH 2208 Doing Research: Qualitative Methods and Research Design
This interdisciplinary course introduces students to qualitative research methods and frameworks in the social sciences and humanities. Students will learn how to frame an effective research question, situate it in relation to existing research, select the most appropriate methods for addressing the question, and develop an effective research plan. Each week students will be introduced to a new set of frameworks for analysis, see specific examples of their application drawn from anthropological, historical, and related scholarship and have opportunities to practice applying and evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of specific methodological tools. The goals of the semester will be for each student to develop their own research proposal for a specific project. Students will be introduced to a range of textual, archival and media collections and databases available at Penn, with particular attention to South Asia and other specific regions of interest to course participants. Students will also have the opportunity to identify sources of funding for summer and/or thesis research projects, and submit applications for these opportunities as part of the course. The course is ideal for freshmen, sophomores, juniors, or seniors considering summer or independent research, an undergraduate thesis, or an application to the Fulbright or other research program following graduation.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: SAST 2208
Mutually Exclusive: ANTH 5208
1 Course Unit
ANTH 2221 Material World in Archaeological Science
By focusing on the scientific analysis of inorganic archaeological materials, this course will explore processes of creation in the past. Class will take place in the Center for the Analysis of Archaeological Materials (CAAM) and will be team taught in three modules: analysis of lithics, analysis of ceramics and analysis of metals. Each module will combine laboratory and classroom exercises to give students hands-on experience with archaeological materials. We will examine how the transformation of materials into objects provides key information about past human behaviors and the socio-economic contexts of production, distribution, exchange and use. Discussion topics will include invention and adoption of new technologies, change and innovation, use of fire, and craft specialization.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ARTH 0221, CLST 3302, MELC 2960, NELC 2960
Mutually Exclusive: ANTH 5221
1 Course Unit
ANTH 2267 Living World in Archaeological Science
By focusing on the scientific analysis of archaeological remains, this course will explore life and death in the past. It takes place in the Center for the Analysis of Archaeological Materials (CAAM) and is team taught in three modules: human skeletal analysis, analysis of animal remains, and analysis of plant remains. Each module will combine laboratory and classroom exercises to give students hands-on experience with archaeological materials. We will examine how organic materials provide key information about past environments, human behavior, and cultural change through discussions of topics such as health and disease, inequality, and food.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: CLST 3303, MELC 2950, NELC 2950
Mutually Exclusive: ANTH 5267
1 Course Unit
ANTH 2307 Contemporary Native Americans
This course examines the social and political lives of contemporary Native American Indians in the United States and Canada. Topics include: Indigenous identity; homelands and natural resources; popular culture and media; Indigenous arts and cultural expression; museum representations; athletics; gender relations; tribal recognition and sovereignty; and resistance movements. We will consider the origins of federal programs and legislation that have become essential to the protection of Native American freedoms. Students can expect to gain an appreciation of the complexity and cultural diversity of Native communities and tribal nations and insights into their interactions with other cultures over time.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ANTH 2308 Ethnohistory of the Native Northeast
Ethnohistory is a multi-disciplinary form of ethnographic study and documentary research that employs both anthropological and historical approaches. This course examines the foundations of the ethnohistorical method as a means to interpret cross-cultural colonial interactions and conflicts, and to better understand the complex histories of Native American Indian peoples from Pennsylvania and northward and eastward. Students will develop skills and strategies for interpreting and contextualizing primary and secondary source materials, oral traditions, colonial records, historical maps, and material culture. Hands-on study will include visits to local archives and historical sites to view relevant documents and landscapes.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ANTH 2317 The Politics of Matter and the Matter of Politics
What is nature? What is culture? What kinds of practices and actors constitute what we call science? Who and what constitute the sphere we refer to as politics? A number of theoretical developments in cultural anthropology, political theory, critical geography, and feminist science studies have problematized the modernist ontological divide between Nature and Culture and a whole series of binary oppositions (such as objects/subjects, matter/form, bio/geo) that follow from it. Taking inspiration from this literature and placing it in conversation with Native and Indigenous scholarship and a series of contemporary socio-environmental struggles occurring in Latin America and beyond, this course will discuss the conceptual-methodological tools that a concern with politics of matter has generated. The epistemic and political implications of these tools go beyond their analytical usefulness as innovative devices to explore novel phenomena. They complicate well-established fields of inquiry, such as political ecology and economy, environmental studies, ethics, social justice, and modern politics; and, indeed, the singular ontology that these fields may inadvertently and explicitly sustain. We will explore how it is that things, stuff, matter, 'nature' came to fall outside modern politics as such, and the kinds of ethico-political repercussions that problematizing this division may produce.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: LALS 2317
1 Course Unit
ANTH 2327 Dispossession and Territorial Recovery Among Indigenous Peoples in South America
This seminar will focus on contemporary dynamics of dispossession, territorial claims and territorial recovery involving indigenous peoples in South America. Drawing on cases from different countries (particularly from Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Bolivia and Colombia), we will examine, in historical perspective, processes of territorial dispossession, socio-environmental conflicts, collective action, and struggles for territorial recovery and recognition set against the policies of settler colonial nation-states and economic activities that tend to evict people from their lands. More specifically, we will focus on actions carried out by indigenous peoples and movements to fight territorial dispossession, recover and protect their lands. Particular attention will be paid to the period marked by the growing visibility of the indigenous movements in South America, from 1970s to the present. The perspectives and strategies of indigenous peoples and movements regarding their territorial rights and projects of living well will be considered within the broader framework of identity, ethnicity and land issues. In that sense, the course will draw connections to the actions carried out by landless peasants and other groups. By devoting our attention to different contexts through the region, we will be able both to understand specific situations and identify underlying dynamics.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: LALS 3260
1 Course Unit
ANTH 2329 Psychoanalytic and Anthropological Perspectives on Childhood
How do people become who they are, both similar to others and uniquely individual? How might these similarities and differences be shaped by childhood experiences in family, community, and societies around the world? How do children develop emotionally? Morally? What features of human development, expression of emotions, and relational patterns are universal for our species? What features are not universal? And what is and is not known about these questions? In this course, we will consider these and many other questions. We will read about and discuss complex and dynamic interactions between culture and individual psychology, and between nature and nurture from birth to adulthood. We will carefully examine various phases of human development as described by psychoanalysts and anthropologists. The course includes anthropologic and psychoanalytic readings and videotapes, as well as literature, fairy tales, and mythologies from cultures around the world. The instructors are both psychiatrists, one a psychoanalyst, the other a psychoanalytically sophisticated child psychiatrist. The course counts towards the Psychoanalytic Studies (PSYS) Minor.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ANTH 2330 Origins of Art / Origins of Writing
Each of the earliest systems of writing had intimate and enduring ties to pictorial traditions. This seminar addresses the fundamental relationship between texts and visual imagery in the Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Chinese, and Maya traditions. The class will take a comparative approach to examine the parallel development of scripts and images, extending from their earliest beginnings to their on-going lives as mature systems. As the individual scripts became more capable of representing speech, the subject matter, composition, and function of images changed, and one goal of this class is to identify these processes. Emphasis will be put on seeing text and image as collaborative and interactive constructions, in which parts of a single message can be encoded and presented in different ways. The class will make extensive use of the collections and the curatorial expertise of the Penn Museum.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ARTH 3230, MELC 3070, NELC 3070
1 Course Unit
ANTH 2332 Medicine and the Language of Pain
Pain can be a particularly complex and morally charged object of biomedicine. The interiority of pain- the deeply private nature of pain experience- complicates its communication. Pain, particularly its chronic form, defies purely biological explanation, troubling fundamental biomedical distinctions between mind and body, subject and object. And decisions about analgesia are fraught, as doctors and patients pursue relief from pain amidst a widespread epidemic of opiate abuse that infuses their interaction with concerns about addiction, drug seeking, culpability, and responsibility. This seminar seeks to shed light on these issues by using concepts from linguistic and medical anthropology to explore how we experience, think about, and talk about pain. As an interdisciplinary endeavor, the course is of relevance not only to anthropology but also to medical sociology, medical ethics, public health, health policy, and science and technology studies.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ANTH 2338 Modalities of Black Freedom and Escape: Ships
The course circulates around ships and boats. The course combines methods from environmental humanities, visual arts and history to consider multi-modal practices of black freedom and escape. From free black sailors in the eighteenth century Caribbean Sea, to twentieth and twenty-first century West African fishing boats, notions of Haitian “boat people,” Parliament Funkadelic’s mothership, and sinking boats with Somali and Ethiopian migrants off Yemen’s coast, ships have been and remain technologies of containment and freedom for communities of African descent. In the face of environmental vulnerabilities and the reality of water ways as systems of sustenance and imminent death, this course asks: how do black people use the ship and the process and practice of shipping as vessels for freedom, escape, and as a site to experiment with futures? Using the city of Philadelphia and the Schuylkill and Delaware rivers as our primary site of interrogation, the course attends to the threats that black people experience following natural disaster (New Orleans, Haiti, Puerto Rico) and everyday engagement with the local and global state structures regarding water (Flint, MI). In this context, we also look to shipping as a site to theorize and account for black innovation, meanings of (non-)sovereignty, and alternative futures.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AFRC 2238, LALS 2238
1 Course Unit
ANTH 2340 Pharmaceuticals and Global Health
In some parts of the world, spending on pharmaceuticals is astronomical. In others, people do not have access to basic or life-saving drugs. Individuals struggle to afford medications; whole populations are neglected, considered too poor to constitute profitable markets for the development and distribution of necessary drugs. This seminar analyzes the dynamics of the burgeoning international pharmaceutical trade and the global inequalities that emerge from and are reinforced by market-driven medicine. Questions about who will be treated and who will not filter through every phase of pharmaceutical production --from preclinical research to human testing, marketing, distribution, prescription, and consumption. Whether considering how the pharmaceutical industry shapes popular understandings of mental illness in North America and Great Britain, how Brazil has created a model of HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment program, or how the urban pooer in Delhi understand and access healthcare, the seminar draws on anthropological case studies to illuminate the roles of corporations, governments, non-governmental organizations, and individuals in relation to global pharmaceuticals. As we analyze each case and gain famliarity with tehnographic methods, we will ask how individual and group health is shaped by new medical technologies and their evolving regulatory regimes and markets. The course familiarizes students with critical debates on globalization and with local responses to globalizing processes; and it contributes to ethical and political debates on the development and access to new medical technologies.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ANTH 2440 Disease and Human Evolution
This course will explore the role played by disease in human evolution, from the emergence of the human lineage to the present day. We will evaluate both infectious and non-infectious diseases and examine the way in which populations and disease organisms have co-evolved. Related issues to be explored include the nature of the virulence and pathogenicity of infectious agents, and the impact of vaccination on pathogen evolution. In addition, we will discuss the epidemiological transition and the rise of complex diseases of modernization (e.g., diabetes, cancer) that has occurred in the past several centuries. Overall, the course will provide a broader understanding of the influence of disease processes on the evolution of the human species.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ANTH 2450 Environment in India: Nature, Culture, & Conservation in the Western Ghats
India, one of the world's most populous countries, also ranks as one of the most important centers of biodiversity, conservation, and environmental movements. Despite pervasive scholarly and popular narratives of inevitable ecological damage associated with population growth, human land use has, at times, enhanced biodiversity, preserved existing environments, and created new ones. In this course, students will examine long-term human and natural histories from a number of perspectives to develop more accurate, historically-informed understandings of how India's natural spaces have developed and how the spaces can be best sustained. them. During the travel component, students will visit India and work with local partners who are actively engaged in protecting human livelihoods, reducing human-wildlife conflict, and conserving biodiversity in the Western Ghat Mountains, a biodiversity hotspot.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ANTH 2460 Molecular Anthropology
In this course, we will explore the molecular revolution in biological anthropology. In particular, we will examine how molecular data can be used to illuminate anthropological question concerning human origins, evolution and biological variation. Some of the specific topics to be covered in this course are the phylogenetic relationships among primates, kinship in apes and monkeys, the hominoid trichotomy, modern human origins and migrations, Neanderthal and Denisovan admixture with modern humans, biogenetics of skin color, and physiological, phenotypic and disease adaptations.
Not Offered Every Year
Mutually Exclusive: ANTH 6460
1 Course Unit
ANTH 2490 Evolutionary Medicine
Evolutionary medicine is the application of modern evolutionary theory to studies of health and disease in humans. In taking this approach, the course will explore the role that disease played in human evolution. We will examine both infectious and non-infectious diseases, and assess the way in which populations and disease organisms have co-evolved. Related issues to be examined are the nature of the virulence and pathogenicity of infectious agents, and their efforts to subvert the immune system's responses to infection. We will also explore the evolved responses that enable individuals to protect, heal and recuperate themselves from infections and injuries, such as fever and sickness behavior, and the fitness enhancing aspects of these processes. Finally, we will study how past adaptations of early humans to their environments now affects modern humans, who have very different diets, life expectancy, activity patterns, and hygiene than their ancestors.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ANTH 2515 Race, Rights and Rebellion
This course provides an in-depth examination of theories of race and different kinds of social struggles for freedom around the globe. We will critically engage the latest scholarship from a variety of scholars and social movement actors. From anti-slavery revolts to struggles for independence to anti-apartheid movements, this course will emphasize how racialized peoples have employed notions of rights and societal resources grounded in cultural differences. Though much of the readings will highlight the experiences of African descendant peoples in Africa and its diaspora, the course will also explore the intersections of Black struggles with social movements organized by indigenous peoples in the Americas. Students will also have the unique experience of accessing readings primarily written by primarily Black scholars, some of whom have participated as key actors in the social movements they describe. Key concepts include power, resistance, subaltern, hegemony, identity politics, consciousness, and intellectual activism. The course will be organized around the following objectives: 1. To explore a range of contemporary theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches to the study of social movements; 2. To focus on the relationship between race, gender, class, culture, and politics in the African diaspora; 3. To study the historical development of organized struggles, social protests, uprisings, revolutions, insurgencies, and rebellions; 4. To examine the political agency of African descendant peoples in the global struggle for liberation and citizenship.
Spring
Also Offered As: AFRC 3515, LALS 3515, SOCI 2907
1 Course Unit
ANTH 2540 Violence, Tolerance, Freedom
This seminar examines how the adjective "religious" has been used to modify the nouns "violence," "tolerance," and "freedom." It traces the historical development of liberal ideas of tolerance and human rights, interrogates the common assumption that religion exerts a perverse influence on politics and vice versa, critically examines the concept of terrorism, and connects the neoliberal ideal of unfettered free markets to the idea of being "spiritual but not religious."
Spring
Also Offered As: RELS 2540
1 Course Unit
ANTH 2550 Modern Southeast Asia
This first-year friendly course provides a broad introductory overview of modern Southeast Asia, surveying the region's extraordinary diversity and ongoing social, economic, and political transformations. Centering on the nation-states that have emerged following the second World War, we will assess elements of Southeast Asian geography, history, language and literature, cosmologies, kinship systems, music, art and architecture, agriculture, industrialization and urbanization, politics, and economic change. We will remain particularly attentive to the ways Southeast Asians negotiate and contend with ongoing challenges with modernization, development, and globalization.
Also Offered As: SAST 2550
1 Course Unit
ANTH 2560 Music and Performance of Africa
This class provides an overview of the most popular musical styles and discussion of the cultural and political contexts in which they emerged in contemporary Africa. Learning to perform a limited range of African music/dance will be part of this course. No prior performance experience required. (Formerly Music 253).
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AFRC 3560, MUSC 3560
1 Course Unit
ANTH 2570 Caribbean Music and Diaspora
This course considers Caribbean musics within a broad and historical framework.Caribbean musical practices are explored by illustrating the many ways that aesthetics, ritual, communication, religion, and social structure are embodied in and contested through performance. These initial inquiries open onto an investigation of a range of theoretical concepts that become particularly pertinent in Caribbean contexts--concepts such as post-colonialism, migration, ethnicity, hybridity, syncretism, and globalization. Each of these concepts, moreover, will be explored with a view toward understanding its connections to the central analytical paradigm of the course--diaspora. Throughout the course, we will listen to many different styles and repertories of music ranging from calpso to junkanoo, from rumba to merengue, and from dance hall to zouk. We will then work to understand them not only in relation to the readings that frame our discussions but also in relation to our own North-American contexts of music consumption and production. (Formerly Music 258).
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AFRC 3570, LALS 3570, MUSC 3570
1 Course Unit
ANTH 2590 Nutritional Anthropology
The course is an introduction to nutritional anthropology, an area of anthropology concerned with human nutrition and food systems in social, cultural and historical contexts. On the one hand, nutritional anthropologists study the significance of the food quest in terms of survival and health. On the other hand, they also know that people eat food for a variety of reasons that may have little, if anything, to do with nutrition, health, or survival. While the availability of food is dependent upon the physical environment, food production systems, and economic resources, food choice and the strategies human groups employ to gain access to and distribute food are deeply embedded in specific cultural patterns, social relationships, and political and economic systems. Thus, nutritional anthropology represents the interface between anthropology and the nutritional sciences, and as such, can provide powerful insights into the interactions of social and biological factors in the context of the nutritional health of individuals and populations. Because food and nutrition are quintessential biocultural issues, the course takes a biocultural approach drawing on perspectives from biological, socio-cultural and political-economic anthropology. Course content will include: a discussion of approaches to nutritional anthropology; basics of human nutrition; food systems, food behaviors and ideas; methods of dietary and nutritional assessment; and a series of case studies addressing causes and consequences to nutritional problems across the world.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: LALS 2590, URBS 2590
1 Course Unit
ANTH 2730 Global Health: Anthropological Perspectives
In some parts of the world spending on pharmaceuticals is astronomical. In others, people struggle for survival amid new and reemerging epidemics and have little or no access to basic or life-saving therapies. Treatments for infectious diseases that disproportionately affect the world's poor remain under-researched and global health disparities are increasing. This interdisciplinary seminar integrates perspectives from the social sciences and the biomedical sciences to explore 1) the development and global flows of medical technologies; 2) how the health of individuals and groups is affected by medical technologies, public policy, and the forces of globalization as each of these impacts local worlds. The seminar is structured to allow us to examine specific case material from around the world (Haiti, South Africa, Brazil, Russia, China, India, for example), and to address the ways in which social, political-economic, and technological factors -- which are increasingly global in nature -- influence basic biological mechanisms and disease outcomes and distribution. As we analyze each case and gain familiarity with ethnographic methods, we will ask how more effective interventions can be formulated. The course draws from historical and ethnographic accounts, medical journals, ethical analyses, and films, and familiarizes students with critical debates on globalization and with local responses to globalizing processes.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: HSOC 2382
1 Course Unit
ANTH 2762 The Politics of Everyday Life in Africa
This course will explore the different dimensions of everyday life in Africa. Everyday life has been described by Agnes Heller (1978) as “the secret yeast of history.” What constitutes this “yeast of history” in contemporary Africa? In exploring everyday life, we will examine the existing (in)capacities in the structures of state and society in Africa for human well-being in relation to the differences between political life (bios) and bare life (zoe). The course engages with the everyday life in terms of how social, economic, and political lives are constituted and the implications of this process for whether Africans live well or not, how they die, and their struggles for alternative lives. With (ethnographic) accounts and perspectives from different countries in Africa, the course focuses deeply on how to understand and explain the conditions under which everyday social needs and economic necessities are turned into political/existential struggles as well as the conditions under which political exigencies can transform into economic, social and bodily fatalities. The overarching questions that will animate this course include these: What are the prevalent conditions of everyday life in Africa? What and who determines (in)eligibility regarding the everyday tools of good life and human survival? How are these determinations related to the differential distribution of potential and/or actual injury, harm, and damage to human life and the conditions of its survival? What can ethnographic insight contribute to our understanding of everydayness in Africa? The roles of sexualities, gender, generation, humor, identities, racism, hate, memory, memorial, transactions, etc., in the construction, reconstruction, and deconstruction of daily life – and death – in the continent will be examined. Audio-visual materials will be used to analyze important themes about quotidian life in Africa.
Spring
Also Offered As: AFRC 2762, SOCI 2905
1 Course Unit
ANTH 2790 Theorizing the Role of Affect in Society and Culture
Affect has held a prominent place in social theory, including the role of fear in Hobbes's formulation of the origins of civil society, respect (for the sacred) in Durkheim's theory of religion, and guilt in Freud's understanding of civilization. Can such formulations be brought into conversation with the biological understandings of human beings from Darwin up to recent developments in affective neuroscience? This reading and discussion-based seminar focuses on such questions. We explore the terrain of social, cultural, and psychoanalytic theory in light of conceptualizations growing out of the biological side of anthropology. We trace social and cultural theorization through the twentieth developments, including A.R. Radcliffe-Brown on joking and lamentation, Frantz Fanon on hate and guilt in race relations, Clifford Geertz on long-lasting moods and motivations, and others. We also explore twenty-first century developments in affect theory within anthropology and adjacent disciplines, including works by Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart. During the course of the semester, students will write short reading response papers, and lead class discussions based on their responses. They will also work on and submit a final term paper based on their exploration of some aspect of the literature in which they are especially interested.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ANTH 2840 World Heritage in Global Conflict
Heritage is always political. Such a statement might refer to the everyday politics of local stakeholder interests on one end of the spectrum, or the volatile politics of destruction and erasure of heritage during conflict, on the other. If heritage is always political then one might expect that the workings of World Heritage might be especially fraught given the international dimension. In particular, the intergovernmental system of UNESCO World Heritage must navigate the inherent tension between state sovereignty and nationalist interests and the wider concerns of a universal regime. The World Heritage List has almost 1200 properties has many such contentious examples, including sites in Iraq, Mali, Syria, Crimea, Palestine, Armenia and Cambodia. As an organization UNESCO was born of war with an explicit mission to end global conflict and help the world rebuild materially and morally yet has found its own history increasingly entwined with that of international politics and violence.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: CLST 3319, MELC 2920, NELC 2920
1 Course Unit
ANTH 2866 Exploring the Ancient Maya: Image, Text, and Artefact
Few topics in ancient studies are experiencing such profound and revelatory change as that of the Ancient Maya—a complex society that covered what is today southeastern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and parts of Honduras and El Salvador. The decipherment of Maya script and advances in archaeological techniques, including aerial LiDAR scanning and isotopic analysis, are combining with art historical and literary sources to transform our understanding of a culture that ranks among the most famous, but enigmatic, on this continent. The ability to read Maya inscriptions has created the first historical archaeology for the ancient Americas, giving access to an Indigenous voice that has been silent for more than a millennium—with implications not only for scholarship but for the efforts of descendent peoples in asserting a modern Maya identity with existing Latin American states. This course will be a broad-based, contemporary look at archaeological practice as it operates through multiple disciplines, all in pursuit of the single goal of illuminating a vibrant and living past.
Also Offered As: LALS 2866
1 Course Unit
ANTH 2940 Global Cities: Urbanization in the Global South
This course examines the futures of urbanization in most of the world. With cities in "developing" countries set to absorb 95% of urban population growth in the next generation, the course explores the plans, spaces and social experiences of this dramatic urban century. How do proliferating urban populations sustain themselves in the cities of Latin America, Africa and Asia? What kinds of social and political claims do these populations make more just and sustainable cities? The course investigates the ongoing experiences in urban planning, infrastructure development and environmental governance in cities of the Global South. In so doing, it imagines new forms of citizenship, development and sustainability that are currently unfolding in these cities of the future.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: URBS 2940
1 Course Unit
ANTH 2970 Nature Culture Environmentalism
Water wars, deforestation, climate change. Amidst many uncertain crises, in this course we will explore the emergent relationship between people and the environment in different parts of the world. How do people access the resources they need to live? How, when and for whom does 'nature' come to matter? Why does it matter? And what analytical tools we might use to think, mitigate and adapt to the effects of climate change? Drawing together classical anthropological texts and some of the emergent debates in the field of climate studies and environmental justice, in this class we focus on the social-ecological processes through which different groups of humans imagine, produce and inhabit anthropogenic environments.
Fall
Also Offered As: SAST 2970, URBS 2970
1 Course Unit
ANTH 2978 Just Futures Seminar II: Health and Healing in Abiayala (the Americas)
Health and Healing in Abiayala (the Americas) will introduce students to ecosocial notions of health, colonialism’s contributions to ill-health, and decolonial action as healing action. Part one of the course introduces general concepts of body, health, and illness in biomedical models. It then pivots to the relational and ecosocial practices of body, health, and wellbeing among many First Peoples of the Abiayala, highlighting “radical relationality.” For many First Peoples, community includes humans, plants, animals, ancestors, and earth beings (such as the land, mountains, rivers, and lakes) that are materially, socially, and spiritually interdependent. These beings work together to maintain a “shared body” through practices of reciprocal care. Part two of the course examines how the shared body has been and is threatened by the colonization of Indigenous lands and bodies through (e.g.) land dispossession, pollution, extractive industry, lack of access to quality education and medical care, forced sterilization, forced removal of children, exploitative economic relations, and political violence. The third part of the course will follow how First Peoples of Abiayala are healing from the physical, social, and spiritual wounds of colonialism through decolonial action. First Peoples are creating their own healing centers and ecological protection agencies, engaging in Land Back movements, in legal and direct-action processes to protect the shared body from extractive industry, and reproductive justice movements. Healing is future oriented, powering the “radical resurgence” of First Peoples. Some questions addressed in this class include, where does the body begin and end? What constitutes personhood? How does continued colonization affected indigenous peoples’ health—and that of all peoples? How do indigenous peoples use ancestral knowledges, relation ethics, and local ecologies to help heal historic and contemporary wounds to power their futures? Is there a political dimension to healing? How do autonomy and self-determination figure into healing and wellbeing?
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: GSWS 2978, HSOC 2332, LALS 2978
1 Course Unit
ANTH 3022 Bodies of Water: Conflicts and Collaborations around Wetlands and Watersheds
In less than half a decade, the idea that "nature" possesses inalienable rights akin to human rights has gone from a strictly theoretical concept to the basis of policy changes in several countries and U.S. municipalities. This seminar will introduce students to current legal, political, ethical, and practical debates about the implementation and impacts of granting "rights to nature" in these different contexts with a particular focus on the rights associated with bodies of water. We will begin by examining how the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) supported citizens of Tamaqua, Pennsylvania to write the world's first local "rights of nature" ordinance. We will then go on to compare the politics of "rights of nature" cases in Ecuador, New Zealand, India, and Colombia paying special attention to the cases of rivers. We will focus on the ways biocentric constitutional moves may transform concepts and understandings of environmental justice and socio-environmental conflicts. In particular, how the recognition of "nature" as a victim of war may transform understandings of violence, and hence, approaches to constructing peace and engaging and reparative and restorative practices within the larger framework of planetary and community efforts to mitigate climate change, deforestation, and the degradation of watersheds and wetlands. Lastly, we will explore the possibilities and tensions between community decision-making, the "rights of nature," and national level policies regarding the intensification of extractive activities and questions of territorial ordinance as they relate to mulitiple bodies of water.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: LALS 3022
1 Course Unit
ANTH 3030 Research Methods in Cultural Anthropology
This undergraduate seminar is about how ethnographers do research. It introduces fundamental concepts and techniques - research design, participant observation, interviews, questionnaires, field notes, archives, data collection and analysis. It also addresses ethical and legal issues- cultural protocols, intellectual property rights, collaborative anthropology, and institutional review boards. Students will conduct original ethnographic research in partnership with the Netter Center.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ANTH 3045 Oil to Diamonds: The Political Economy of Natural Resources in Africa
This course examines the ways in which the processes of the extraction, refining, sale and use of natural resources – including oil and diamond – in Africa produce complex regional and global dynamics. We explore how values are placed on resources, how such values, the regimes of valuation, commodification and the social formations that are (re)produced by these regimes lead to cooperation and conflict in the contemporary African state, including in the relationships of resource-rich African countries with global powers. Specific cases will be examined against the backdrop of theoretical insights to encourage comparative analyses beyond Africa. Some audio-visual materials will be used to enhance the understanding of the political economy and sociality of natural resources.
Fall
Also Offered As: AFRC 4500, PSCI 4130, SOCI 2904
Mutually Exclusive: AFRC 5700
1 Course Unit
ANTH 3050 Anthropology and Policy: History, Theory, Practice
From the inception of the discipline, anthropologists have applied their ethnographic and theoretical knowledge to policy issues concerning the alleviation of practical human problems. This approach has not only benefited peoples in need but it has also enriched the discipline, providing anthropologists with the opportunity to develop new theories and methodologies from a problem-centered approach. The class will examine the connection between anthropology and policy, theory and practice (or 'praxis'), research and application. We will study these connections by reading about historical and current projects. As an ABCS course, students will also volunteer in a volunteer organization of their choice in the Philadelphia area, conduct anthropological research on the organization, and suggest ways that the anthropological approach might support the efforts of the organization.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ANTH 3052 An Anthropological Approach to Bioethics
Bioethics and anthropology have a complicated relationship. Though the two disciplines have long studied overlapping topics, the contribution of anthropological work to bioethical discussions and associated health policy interventions has been limited. This course will investigate whether and how anthropology can contribute to ethics and characterize the unique perspective that the discipline adds to bioethics topics. We will begin by carrying out an anthropology of bioethics, exploring how bioethics developed as a field with a specific philosophical and political orientation and a particular conception of which issues in health, illness, and medicine are worthy of attention as ethical problems. Next, we will clarify how anthropology can contribute to bioethical theory and debate by considering decades-old, ongoing debates about the relevance of (descriptive) social scientific findings to the development of (prescriptive) bioethics frameworks. Finally, we will apply an anthropological lens to bioethical problems. We will use anthropology's global, ethnographic orientation to explore a series of classic bioethics topics (e.g., the rights of research subjects, the allocation of medical resources, the uses of genetic testing, the withdrawal of life-sustaining care), examining how anthropologists' conclusions about these topics might differ from bioethicists', why, and with what ramifications.
1 Course Unit
ANTH 3090 Psychoanalysis and Anthropology
This course will introduce students to the rich literature that has grown up around the encounter between psychoanalysis and anthropology, from totem and taboo, to studies of the Oedipus complex, child-rearing practices, ritual symbolism, mythology, and dreams. The class will also look to the future, endeavoring to examine as well such issues as the role of computers (are they self objects?) and the internet (including such online games as "Second Life"), dreams in space alien abduction narratives, sexuality in advertising, political psychology, and other contemporary issues. This course counts towards towards the Psychoanalytic Studies (PSYS) Minor.
Not Offered Every Year
Mutually Exclusive: ANTH 6090
1 Course Unit
ANTH 3101 Disasters in the Ancient Mediterranean World
Natural disasters occupy a powerful place in our imagination. Stories of floods plagues, earthquakes and storms excite and horrify us, and communities mobilize their resources quickly in response to these events. In the ancient Mediterranean world, natural disasters could take on potent meaning, indicating the anger or disfavor of the gods, acting as warnings against certain courses of action, or confirmations of individuals' fears or suspicions about the world in which they lived. In this course, we explore the evidence for some disasters in the ancient Mediterranean world, the ways in which contemporaries reacted to those disasters and interpreted their causes. This project is, of necessity, multidisciplinary, involving textual, archaeological, geological, and comparative materials and drawing on methodologies from history, political and archaeological science, and the emerging field of disaster studies. In the process, we will gain an appreciation of the social structures of communities in the period, the thought-world in which they operated, and the challenges and opportunities that attend a project of this sort. No prior knowledge of Ancient History is required, although it would be useful to have taken an introductory survey course such as ANCH 0100, ANCH 0101, or ANCH 0102. Texts will be discussed in translation.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ANCH 3201, CLST 3201
1 Course Unit
ANTH 3110 Transdisciplinary Environmental Humanities
Emergent transdisciplinary fields, such as the environmental and medical humanities, reflect a growing awareness that responses to contemporary environmental dilemmas require the collaborative work of not only diverse scientists, medical practitioners, and engineers, but also more expansive publics, including artists, urban and rural communities, social scientists, and legal fields. This course is inspired by the need to attend to environmental challenges, and their health, justice, and knowledge production implications, as inherently social concerns. The class is co-taught by faculty from the School of Arts and Sciences and the School of Medicine, and will address the challenges and possibilities of working across disciplinary boundaries, building collaborative affinities, and negotiating frictions between diverse methodologies and epistemological approaches. Dr. Kristina Lyons from the Department of Anthropology brings years of experience collaborating with scientists, small farmers, indigenous communities, lawyers, and judges in Colombia and Chile on watershed restoration projects, soil degradation, toxicity, and the implementation of socio-ecological justice. Dr. Marilyn Howarth is a medical doctor from the Center of Excellence in Environmental Toxicology of the School of Medicine and has experience engaging the public, legislators and regulators around environmental health issues affecting the quality of air, water, soil and consumer products. Through their different lenses, they will foster interdisciplinary environmental collaboration and scholarship by engaging students in discussions and research that bring together the arts and sciences regarding issues of urban air pollution, soil remediation, deforestation, and water contamination, among other environmental health problems. This class offers a unique opportunity for students from engineering, natural and social sciences, humanities, and the arts to learn to converse and collaborate around pressing socio-environmental and public health issues.
Spring
Also Offered As: LALS 3110
1 Course Unit
ANTH 3130 Gender, Capitalism, and Environment
What is "the economy," and how is "it" gendered? How is access to land, resources, and livelihood options mediated by hierarchies of gender that are co-constituted with race, class, age, and ability? How are gender equality, economic justice, and environmental justice interrelated? This course grapples with these and other foundational questions concerning the ways that gender, economy, and environment are intimately linked. Using case studies from around the world, we will consider Marxist-feminist, ecofeminist, political ecology, queer, critical race, and postcolonial approaches to understanding how abstract economic processes are materialized in social relations and in human-environment interactions. From women peasant farmer's online practices in Myanmar to land-grabs and contemporary witch-hunting in African countries, together we will engage with the material histories, politics, and power relations shaping the uneven distribution of wealth and resources among gendered populations - and how different social groups are mobilizing to contest these gender, economic, and environmental inequalities together. In addition to our core questions, this course asks: How is capitalism itself gendered, and with what effects? What is considered productive work, and how are categories of worker gendered? Why are women overrepresented as peasant farmers in global south countries? How and why is climate change gendered? How and why are solutions to climate change and other environmental problems gendered? What are the gendered benefits and costs of sustainable development, and who bears them? Most of these questions lack clear answers, but by the end of the semester you will be able to give compelling oral and written explanations in response to each. Using a diverse array of texts - including film, podcasts, poetry, and peer-reviewed academic literature - this course will equip students with tools to thoughtfully and ethically engage with academic, activist, policy, and development spaces that are concerned with the intersection of gender, economy, and the environment.
Also Offered As: GSWS 3130
1 Course Unit
ANTH 3137 Environmental (In)Equalities
This seminar focuses on the interrelations of equity, justice, and environmental crisis. Beginning with a discussion of the emergence of climate justice as a critical term in international negotiations, we will consider several dimensions of substantive and historical inequality and the framing of justice as an environmental right as they arise from these settings. Broadening the discussion to include a larger framework of environmental issues in relation to inequality, the course will draw on considerations of geographies of vulnerability, environments as inhabited risk, and ecological debt in relation to “natural disaster” or environmental crisis. Moving from an historical account of structural inequalities in socio-natural systems to contemporary environmental politics, we will then discuss the disjuncture in environmental movements and aspirations between the global south and north, and particularly, how justice and equity figure into environmentalism(s) on a global basis. Finally, we discuss emerging frameworks including Just Transition movements, ecological sovereignty and rights discourses, and flourishing and capabilities approaches.
Not Offered Every Year
Mutually Exclusive: ANTH 5137
1 Course Unit
ANTH 3180 Anthropology and Praxis
This course focuses on real world community problems, engaged scholarship, and the evaluation of actively-running Penn programs intended to improve social conditions in West Philadelphia. Two trends emerge in public interest social science that students will explore through research and evaluation: 1.) mergingproblem solving with theory and analysis in the interest of change motivated bya commitment to social justice, racial harmony, equality, and human rights; and 2.) engaging in public debate on human issues to make the research results accessible to a broad audience. As part of the course, students will learn the foundations of anthropology, social theory, and evaluation as they work with qualitative and quantitative data while conducting an evaluation based on community and partner need. Students will gain direct experience conducting evaluation research as a collaborative process and have an opportunity to engage in academically-based community service with a focus on social change.
Not Offered Every Year
Mutually Exclusive: ANTH 6180
1 Course Unit
ANTH 3215 Archaeology of Animals
This course introduces the study of animal bones from archaeological sites. Faunal analysis is an interdisciplinary science which draws methods from archaeology, biology, and paleontology. Bones, shells, and other remains yield evidence for the use of animals by humans, and evidence for the biology of animals and for past environments. The course will focus on research approaches to important transitions in human-animal relationships: the development of human hunting and fishing, animal domestication, early pastoralism, and the emergence of market economies in animal products. Class presentations will include lectures and discussion concerning research design and archaeological case material, with additional videos, slidework with field and laboratory equipment, and supervised work identifying and describing archaeological materials from the University Museum's collections. This class is taught in the Zooarchaeology Laboratory of the Center for the Analysis of Archaeological Materials
Not Offered Every Year
Mutually Exclusive: ANTH 5215
1 Course Unit
ANTH 3219 Mining Archaeology
In ancient times, materials such as stone and metals were used to produce artifacts including pigments, jewelry, tools, and weapons. This course is designed to introduce students to research on the early exploitation of mineral resources. Which techniques were used to access and process raw materials in antiquity? Which archaeological methods can be used to investigate these features and artifacts? The course will provide worldwide examples through time, ranging from Stone Age flint mining, Iron Age rock salt mining to Medieval silver mining. Ethnographic studies and hands-on activities will contribute to our understanding of mining in archaeology, and artifacts from the Museum's collections will undergo scientific analysis in the Center for the Analysis of Archaeological Materials.
Spring
Also Offered As: CLST 3314, MELC 4950, NELC 4950
Mutually Exclusive: ANTH 5219
1 Course Unit
ANTH 3221 Surface Archaeology
Non-invasive and non-destructive methods make up an ever-greater proportion of archaeological investigations, for both intellectual and practical reasons. These methods comprise collection of data from the surface (pedestrian surface survey, geophysical prospection, geoarchaeology) and from above-ground platforms (drones, aircraft, balloons, kites, satellites), using a variety of sensors from human perception to multispectral scanning devices. The data acquired from these methods complement the contextual information drawn from traditional excavation, but also allow the archaeologist to address diverse research questions at a scale much greater than the excavated site. Aspiring archaeologists should have a good working knowledge of surface archaeological methods. In this course, we will delve deeply into these methods, and read and analyze case studies to expose strengths and weaknesses and to identify best practices. Students will have the opportunity for hands-on training in the Philadelphia area or elsewhere.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: CLST 3321
Mutually Exclusive: CLST 5321
1 Course Unit
ANTH 3230 Forensic Anthropology
This course will investigate and discuss the various techniques of analysis that biological anthropologists can apply to forensic cases. Topics include human osteology, the recovery of bodies, the analysis of life history, the reconstruction of causes of death, and various case studies where anthropologists have contributed significantly to solving forensic cases. Discussions will include the limitations of forensic anthropology and the application of DNA recovery to skeletal/mummified materials.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: CRIM 2230
1 Course Unit
ANTH 3235 The Past Preserved: Conservation In Archaeology
This course explores the scientific conservation of cultural materials from archaeological contexts. It is intended to familiarize students with the basics of artifact conservation but is not intended to train them as conservators. The course will cover how various materials interact with their deposit environments; general techniques for on-site conservation triage and retrieval of delicate materials; what factors need to be considered in planning for artifact conservation; and related topics. Students should expect to gain a thorough understanding of the role of conservation in archaeology and how the two fields interact.
Also Offered As: ARTH 0143, CLST 3315, MELC 4955, NELC 4955
Mutually Exclusive: ANTH 5235
1 Course Unit
ANTH 3240 Plants and Society
Interactions between humans and the living landscape around us have played - and continue to play - a fundamental role in shaping our worldview. This course is designed to introduce students to the diverse ways in which humans interact with plants. We will focus on the integration of ethnographic information and archaeological case studies in order to understand the range of interactions between humans and plants, as well as how plants and people have profoundly changed one another. Topics will include the origins of agriculture; cooking and plant processing; human health and the world of ethnomedicine; and poisonous and psychoactive plants. We will examine ancient plant material firsthand at the Center for the Analysis of Archaeological Materials (CAAM) and will handle botanical ecofacts from the Penn Museum's collections. Students will also carry out a substantial research project focused on an archaeological culture and plant species of their own interest.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: CLST 3316
Mutually Exclusive: ANTH 5240
1 Course Unit
ANTH 3244 Introduction to the Human Skeleton
An introduction to the anatomy and biology of the human skeleton. Laboratory work will be supplemented by lectures and demonstrations on the development structure, function, and evolution of the human skeleton.
Not Offered Every Year
Mutually Exclusive: ANTH 5244
1 Course Unit
ANTH 3307 Intro to Digital Archaeology
Students in this course will be exposed to the broad spectrum of digital approaches in archaeology with an emphasis on fieldwork, through a survey of current literature and applied learning opportunities that focus on African American mortuary landscapes of greater Philadelphia. As an Academically Based Community Service (ABCS) course, we will work with stakeholders from cemetery companies, historic preservation advocacy groups, and members of the African Methodist Episcopal Church to collect data from three field sites. We will then use these data to reconstruct the original plans, untangle site taphonomy, and assess our results for each site. Our results will be examined within the broader constellation of threatened and lost African American burial grounds and our interpretations will be shared with community stakeholders using digital storytelling techniques. This course can count toward the minor in Digital Humanities, minor in Archaeological Science and the Graduate Certificate in Archaeological Science.
Also Offered As: CLST 3307, MELC 3950, NELC 3950
Mutually Exclusive: CLST 5620
1 Course Unit
ANTH 3310 Historical Ecology
The relationship between the human beings and the environment is complex, dynamic, and contentious. Historical ecology addresses this relationship over the long term through the physical signatures and patterns of past human activity that are embedded in landscape. In some preindustrial cases, humans caused environmental degradation and societal collapse. In other situations, people transformed, created, and managed resources for sustainable lifeways over centuries and increased biodiversity. This seminar will examine the Myth of the Ecologically Noble Savage, the Myth of the Pristine Environment, domestication of landscape, biocultural diversity, the alliance between native peoples and Green Politics, and the contribution of past societies to appropriate technology, sustainable development, and biodiversity through the historical, ethnographic, and archaeological record.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ANTH 3328 Performing Culture, Native American Arts
This course analyzes cultural performances as sites for the formation, expression, and transmission of social identity. Students will read ethnographies, critiques, and reports of performance genres including ritual, theater, music, dance, art, and spoken word, with a particular focus on Native American and Indigenous arts and expressions. Topics include: expressive culture as survivance; debates around authenticity and invented traditions; public identity and sexuality; political resistance; the effects of globalization; transnationalism and hybridity; cultural appropriation; and the transformation of folk performances in the wake of modern media.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ANTH 3340 Feminist Ethnography
This course will investigate the relationships among women, gender, sexuality, and anthropological research. We will begin by exploring the trajectory of research interest in women and gender, drawing first from the early work on gender and sex by anthropologists like Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict; moving through the 1970s and 1980s arguments about gender, culture, and political economy; arriving at more current concerns with gender, race, sexuality, and empire. For the rest of the semester, we will critically read contemporary ethnographies addressing pressing issues such as nationalism, militarism, neoliberalism and fundamentalism. Throughout, we will investigate what it means not only to "write women's worlds", but also to analyze broader socio-cultural, political, and economic processes through a gendered lens. We will, finally, address the various ways feminist anthropology fundamentally challenged the discipline's epistemological certainties, as well as how it continues to transform our understanding of the foundations of the modern world.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AFRC 3340, GSWS 3340
1 Course Unit
ANTH 3360 The Peopling of the Americas
The peopling of the Americas is a question that has intrigued scholars and laymen for over 500 years. The origin of Native Americans was also a seminal issue during the emergence of American Anthropology as a discipline at the turn of the 20th century, with research on this topic animating current studies of ethnohistory, indigenous archeology, post-colonialism and repatriation. The proposed course will review the scholarship dedicated to describing this long history from an interdisciplinary perspective. It will explore their roots in the expansion of modern humans into Eurasia, evaluate the new archeological and genetic research that has fundamentally altered our understanding of the migration history and diversity of indigenous peoples in the American continents, and examine issues of identity, ethnicity and cultural heritage in contemporary Native populations that extend from this knowledge. The course will further draw on the instructor's fieldwork experience working with indigenous communities in Alaska, Canada, the Lower 48, Mexico and the Caribbean, as well as native Siberians in Russia, where the cultural and biological roots of ancestral Native American populations lie.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: LALS 3360
1 Course Unit
ANTH 3368 Anthropology of Museums
This course examines museums as sites where issues of Indigenous identity, memory, place and power intersect. Museums have long been engaged in the selective preservation, representation, and contextualization of Indigenous objects, cultures, and histories. We will examine antiquarian impulses that inspired the collecting of curiosities, scientific studies that drove the collection of biological specimens, and nationalist ideals that shaped monuments to house imperialist memories. Museums are now sites for complex, often contentious discourse around Indigenous collections. Students will review histories of local and national collecting processes, with a particular focus on Native American collections and concerns. We will also consider how Indigenous curators and new kinds of museums have developed innovative displays and interpretations.
1 Course Unit
ANTH 3376 Ethnographic Approaches to Urban Athletics and Human Movement
Rooted in the rubric of public interest social science, the course focuses on bridging theory and practice motivated by a commitment to social justice through original ethnographic research. In particular, this course will focus on kinesiology and the anthropology of sports and well-being through intense analysis of the Young Quakers Community Athletics (YQCA) program, a collaboration between the Netter Center for Community Partnerships and Penn Athletics. In guest lecturers from multiple disciplines will help to round out the course. The core learning objective is to bring a broad range of specialized expertise to foster a holistic examination of a complex institutional partnership intended to promote positive social transformation and improved human health and well-being.
1 Course Unit
ANTH 3390 Imagining Environmental Justice
Advanced seminar in Environmental Humanities centered around issues of international environmental justice. Sustained engagement with Indigenous North American, African American, Palestinian, and South African imaginary traditions will highlight diverse ways of relating to land, water and nonhuman animals challenge that challenge capitalist and colonial logics of extraction. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: COML 2595, ENGL 2595
1 Course Unit
ANTH 3407 Human Evolution
An examination of fossils and other evidence documenting human evolution. Lectures and readings are supplemented with slide and fossil reproduction materials.
Not Offered Every Year
Mutually Exclusive: ANTH 5407
1 Course Unit
ANTH 3420 Dispossessions in the Americas: The Loss and Recovery of Indigenous Lands, Bodies, and Heritage
Settler colonialism in the Americas is both material and ideological, rooted in dispossessions that are traceable to historical conquest, yet marked in the present. To rectify dispossession is to look both backwards and forwards, to repair material losses and to attend to the values and ideologies that hybridize our present. This course delves into case histories of Indigenous, Latinx, Afro-descendant, and other marginalized populations who have been dispossessed of territory, natural resources, freedom, political rights, and cultural heritage. Our primary goals are the following: first, we seek to document specific territorial, embodied, and heritage dispossessions through the mechanisms of deceit, disease, and warfare (both broadly and specifically); second, we aspire to outline and identify models and processes that promote recovery and restorative justice. Faculty from several departments and programs (anthropology, history, Latin American studies, Native American studies, gender studies, etc.) will present guest lectures highlighting their critical studies of archaeological, museological, artistic, and other processes of dispossession and recovery. Their case studies include: counter-mapping techniques for identifying Indigenous lands; mapping the movements of bodies and objects among museums; tracking trends in heritage loss and recovery; etc. Students will learn about useful resources and initiatives for decolonizing, and will gain experience in understanding dispossessions of the past, while applying restorative methodologies in the present.
Fall, odd numbered years only
1 Course Unit
ANTH 3424 Political Ecologies of the City
Cities have been centres of aspiration for much of human history. They have provided a limited yet critical locus for social mobility, both in political and economic terms. As large agglomerations of political and economic power, urban residents have also consumed growing proportions of the earths mineral, food and water resources from the national (and international) body. The contradictory aspects of urban aspiration frame this course. Drawing on the frameworks of political ecology, in this course we think through the cities of the global south to understand how cities are made. To do this, we will first focus on the construction on the liberal city and how it has been occupied, both formally and informally, by urban subjects in most of the world. Next, we will learn about projects through which natural resources have been directed to and through the city. Finally we will conclude with a particular attention to how urban resources are claimed by marginalized migrants, and the particular sorts of governance institutions these practices engender.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: URBS 3424
Mutually Exclusive: ANTH 5424
1 Course Unit
ANTH 3429 Anthropology of the Environment
This seminar draws from social scientific and scientific literatures to explore current themes in the anthropology of the environment. We will investigate the links between climate change science and social science, and the ways in which anthropologists can contribute via in-depth fieldwork methodology and long engagement in issues of society-environment interactions. We will also explore how potential environmental, social, and biological impacts of global warming on the future are being assessed through conceptual paradigms linked to risk, probability, scenario forecasting, tipping points, planetary boundaries, and extinction.
Mutually Exclusive: ANTH 5429
1 Course Unit
ANTH 3442 Making Virtual Worlds: Space, Place, and Human Experience
In this class, we will explore virtual worlds as they shape identities, foster social interactions, and redefine our understanding of history and human experience. This class will provide equal parts of technical skill-building in virtual reality design, and engaged discussion on readings. It considers virtual reality as a way of making media, conducting scientific experiments, and probing the limits of humanity. Over the course of the semester, discussions, activities, and workshops will help you incrementally build a small-scale virtual world/gathering/or experience as your final project, informed by insights from design anthropology, neuroscience, psychology and philosophy. Key readings of scholars like Manuel Delanda and Donna Haraway will be supplemented with immersive “field trips” to boundary-breaking 3D virtual worlds crafted by contemporary artists, historically-accurate recreations of landscapes and buildings, as well as virtual worlds built by scientists to better understand the ways that brains work and bodies can be healed. At the end of the course, you will emerge with a technical skill set as well as a critical anthropological perspective on virtualized worlds. You will be able to: Integrate anthropological approaches to visual ethnography and participatory design Understand the core principles and techniques of virtual reality landscape design and development Employ industry-standard software tools to create virtual worlds, Analyze virtual reality landscapes, informed by anthropological perspectives on social interaction, identity construction, and community formation. Apply virtual reality landscape design techniques to a real-world project, employing ethnographic methods to understand user experiences, cultural contexts, and social dynamics. This course requires a basic understanding of 3D modeling software. If you have completed at least one course in computer graphics or possess equivalent experience, you possess the foundation to delve into the realm of Making Virtual Worlds.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: FNAR 3442
Mutually Exclusive: ANTH 6442
1 Course Unit
ANTH 3443 Creative Studio for Ethnographers
This intensive practice-based workshop is a semester-long creative studio for students seeking to bring an existing experimental ethnography project to fruition, both in terms of production quality and theoretical engagement. Here, “experimental” implies an engagement with a creative process whose outcomes are unknown and unpredictable, while “ethnography” suggests a project that engages a shared social world or community. Rather than limit ourselves to one creative medium or theory base, this class will be shaped in conversation with students' specific interests, and is open to those exploring a variety of media forms. Students are expected to enter the class with a rough draft of an experimental ethnographic project (a collection of photographs, illustrations, video clips, a sound piece, a creative story, a short film, etc…). Over the course of the semester, this draft will be continuously honed and re-iterated through community conversation. In the introductory portion of the course, we will draw on pedagogical methods developed in art studio settings as we learn about one another’s projects, build a shared language for understanding and responding to each other's work. The second phase and bulk of the course will involve a rotating schedule of presentations and response sessions, when students will present a new iteration of their in-process work and the class will respond substantively, rigorously, and thoroughly using the shared language developed at the beginning of the course. Instructors will prepare weekly class ethnographic readings/screenings that draw from the presenting students theoretical/methodological engagements, and provoke stimulating discussion. Over the course of the semester, students will present four increasingly-honed iterations of their project, culminating in a showcase/exhibit at the end of the course (which may be private or public, depending on students aims). For their final assignment, students will submit their project to the journal/platform/exhibit they selected at the beginning of the course and/or outline a course of action for doing so.
Also Offered As: FNAR 3443
Mutually Exclusive: ANTH 6443
1 Course Unit
ANTH 3444 Human Growth and Development
In this course we will examine key issues and the processes involved in human growth and development. By their very nature, growth and development are biocultural processes that require an integrated analysis of social construction and biological phenomena. As such, we will incorporate insight from evolutionary theory, ecology, developmental biology, psychology, human biology, and cultural anthropology in our study of growth and development. Such an integrated perspective will help students to see that development is not just a biological unfolding from birth through adolescence and adulthood. Rather, development is best understood as process that is deeply intertwined with the environment within which the organism develops. Additionally, we will apply these biocultural and socio-ecological insights to emerging health challenges associated with various developmental stages. The study of human growth and development is useful to all students in biological, health-related, and social sciences. Course enrollment is restricted to juniors, seniors, and graduate students only.
Not Offered Every Year
Mutually Exclusive: ANTH 5444
1 Course Unit
ANTH 3447 From Puberty to Parenting: The Evolutionary Context of Reproduction
This course explores the processes that influence reproduction in human populations. We adopt an evolutionary perspective to examine the factors that have shaped human reproductive physiology and contribute to variation in reproductive parameters between populations. To place human reproduction in a broad evolutionary context, we will consider similarities and differences between humans and other apes in how ecology shapes reproduction. The biology of puberty, pregnancy, hormonal changes across the lifespan, the cessation of reproduction, the impact of parenting behavior on the biology of offspring and parents themselves, and the influence of sex and gender diversity on reproduction will be discussed. Both the ecological and sociocultural factors that influence the steps in the reproductive process will be considered.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: GSWS 3447
Mutually Exclusive: ANTH 5447
1 Course Unit
ANTH 3451 Historical Archaeology
Archaeology of the Modern World from the Columbian voyage (1492) to the 20th century. Topics such as the rise of early modern Europe, European exploration and colonization, African American Archaeology, Asian American Archaeology, the rise of colonial society, contact with native peoples, the Industrial Revolution, and the archaeology of the 20th century will be covered.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ANTH 3454 Quantitative Analysis of Anthropological Data
This course is designed to provide students with a basic understanding of how to work with and present quantitative data. Topics include graphical display of numerical data, probability, sampling, descriptive and inferential statistics (parametric and non-parametric two-and three group tests, regression and correlation). Using examples drawn from the social sciences and anthropology, the focus is on teaching the logic behind quantitative arguments and statistical tests, rather than on the mathematical formulas, making the course especially relevant for students who do not have a strong background in mathematics. This course fulfills the Colleges Quantitative Data Analysis requirement.
Fall or Spring
Mutually Exclusive: ANTH 5454
1 Course Unit
ANTH 3470 Anthropology of Corporations
Modern business corporations can be characterized as having their own internal cultures, more or less distinct from one another. They also exist within encompassing cultures and cultural flows. At the same time, corporations are producers and disseminators, and thus have effects on their surrounding environments, effects that extend from the local to the global. This course examines modern corporations from these three perspectives through theoretical and ethnographic readings, guest speakers from the corporate world, and independent research conducted by the students. Course requirements include student presentations of their research and readings; one or more take-home exams; and a final research paper.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ANTH 3480 Colonialism and its Legacies
In this course we explore the history and long-term consequences of European colonial expansion, with a primary focus on Eurasia and on the British Empire, though we will range further afield as needed. Rather than attempting a comprehensive historical overview, we will use a series of case studies to illustrate changing understandings of colonialism and associated processes, including anti-colonial movements, decolonization, postcoloniality, and the enduring effects of colonialism in the present. This is a seminar-style course.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ANTH 3520 Music, Religion, Ritual in South and Southeast Asia.
What role does music play in articulating religious identities and spaces? What is the importance of ritual musics as they persist and change in the modern world? How does music reflect and articulate religious ways of thinking and acting? In this course, we explore these and other questions about the interrelations between music, religion, and ritual in South and Southeast Asia. Focusing on India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and Indonesia, the course emphasizes musics from Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim and Christian traditions; nevertheless, it draws widely to touch upon sacred musics in Pakistan, Nepal, Burma, Thailand, Vietnam, and among some indigenous peoples in the region. Throughout, we explore ontologies of sound; sonic occurrences in religious structures, public processions, and pilgrimage sites; the construction of religion and ritual as ideas forged through colonial encounter and modern scholarship on religion; the politics of sacred sounds in today's public spaces and contemporary media, such as television and online; and the surprising fluidity between popular and sacred musical genres.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: MUSC 3520
1 Course Unit
ANTH 3521 Health, Gender, and Sexuality
This course will explore gender and sexuality as areas of medical care and intervention. We will examine the complex relationships between health, gender, and sexuality, including the ways that gender and sexual identity affect health as well as how medicine shapes and defines gender and sexuality, historically and in the present. We will discuss topics including reproductive health and technology, gender and mental health, and gender-affirming medical care. Across these different areas, we will ask: how do gender and sexuality affect how health is experienced and healthcare is accessed? What forms of gender and sexual identity are embraced and fostered by medical practices? How should we understand the medical interest in gender and sexuality, and how do practices of health contribute to the continual redefinition of gender and sexuality? How do the intersections of gender and sexuality with other axes of social identity affect how medical care is experienced? Can anthropological ideas about gender and sexuality inform efforts in public health and clinical medicine to redress gender- and sexuality-based harms? Course readings will include work in medical anthropology as well as queer and trans theory and feminist psychoanalysis. Students will complete an independent project focused on a topic related to gender, sexuality, and health of their choosing.
1 Course Unit
ANTH 3540 Art, Medicine, & Magic: Bodily Remedies
In this activity-centric course, you will explore art, medicine, and magic as entangled approaches for healing human bodies across time, space, and societies. At first glance, artists, doctors, and religious leaders may seem to address questions about bodies and healing in very different ways. Yet, in practice, art, magic, and medicine have been in deep conversation with one another for millennia. 4,000 years ago in Mesopotamia, medical doctors were professionals who had offices, hospital beds, and pharmacological and surgical equipment expertise, but they often worked hand in hand with diviners and exorcists. In rural Haiti today, Haitian Vodou priestesses collect herbs, craft sculptures, and sing as they clean wounds and dispense antibiotics within the course of a single "remed" (remedy). In the United States, megachurches send thousands of doctors on evangelical medical missions each year, while in Colombia, contemporary artists are called on to assuage profound social trauma related to decades of military conflict. Examples like these show that art, magic, and medical practice have long been entangled technologies; sometimes working together, sometimes at odds with one another, these practices have always been in dialog about what "healing" is and how it can be achieved. Attending to these entanglements this course asks "what does healing look like and feel like - in what ways do humans transform affliction?" Together, we will investigate how everyday bodily experiences of "wellbeing" and "illness" are configured through art, magic, and medical practices across human communities, shaping how people understand and manage disorders from COVID-19 to schizophrenia, from ancestral trauma to breast cancer. Throughout the course, you will use ethnographic case studies & in-class activities to work through three aspects of the core class question: 1) how do art, magic, and medicine work in communities? 2) how are they experienced in communities (who has access to what kind of healing and who doesn't have access; who can be a healer and who can't be; what should and does healing/sickness feel like?) 3) how do they approach inequalities? (e.g. how and why are illnesses unequally distributed; what illnesses matter more (and less) than others; which communities should be saved (and which sacrificed).
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AFRC 3540
1 Course Unit
ANTH 3620 Agroecology: Farming & the Planet
Food production, essential to life, is also today a major contributor to climate change. In this course, we examine farming and food through the rubric of agroecology, an approach that integrates biological, cultural, and historical factors to develop understandings of farming and food history as well as agriculture's multiple contemporary forms, industrial and non-industrial. We will cover basic aspects of crop evolution and growth, soil, water, and nutrients, with a special focus on the historical global diversity of farming systems, especially in terms of potential alternatives to industrial agriculture. This review forms the foundation for a broader consideration of the impacts of food systems on the planet, and ways to address challenges of climate change, food security, and food sovereignty.
Spring, even numbered years only
Mutually Exclusive: ANTH 5620
1 Course Unit
ANTH 3664 Documentary Ethnography for Museum of Exhibition practices
This course will investigate research modalities that center around documentary storytelling in the museum context. During the semester, we will examine research strategies that collaborate with curatorial experts. e class will utilize cinematic techniues that investigate cultural narratives revolving around cultural heritage sites, rituals and ceremonies, artifacts, materials and living traditions. Students will engage Solomon's process of her creation of the new digital and in-gallery content that will reframe e Metropolitan Museum’s African art galleries. e semester will culminate in students creating their own short lm content that will screen publicly in the gallery at the end of the semester.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: CIMS 3664, FNAR 3664
1 Course Unit
ANTH 3665 Fables from the Flesh: Black feminist movement and the embodied archive
Drawing inspiration from Harge’s multiform fable project FLY | DROWN and Audre Lorde’s conception of biomythography, students will trace their interiority to realize and imagine how personal histories, ancestral inheritance, and metaphysics live/move through the body. We will translate and transform stories of the flesh into a series of compositional modalities–which may include text, movement, performance, sound, and installation–to create lexicons that honor subjectivity as form. Informed by surrender, refusal, imagination, and self-sovereignty; we will situate our embodied archives as vessels for fable writing, create and correct myths through movement, and expand our relationship to memory, time, space, and illegibility. Throughout the course, we will turn to Black feminist literary and performance works employing fable, myth, and ancestral legacies including but not limited to: Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Aretha Franklin’s gospel music, Jaamil Olawale Kosoko’s Chameleon, and a close reading of Harge’s FLY | DROWN. The room will be grounded in practices of Black fellowship, moving between study group, kickback, ceremony, cypher, and incubator. We will oscillate between these formats depending on the needs of the course and the cohort.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AFRC 3665, GSWS 3665
1 Course Unit
ANTH 3666 Crafting an Ethnography of Vulnerability (SNF Paideia Course)
Crafting an Ethnography of Vulnerability What if we could practice a radical ethnography of vulnerability because we believe that truly democratized, ethical engagement requires the unconditional vulnerability of the ethnographer: the relinquishing of all academic, professional, and project power bullying through a humble transparency and personal permeability that immediately triggers trust by de-enshrining the intellectual, by bravely including the emotional and spiritual life of the empathic ethnographer. Most of reality is invisible; the deeper communal paths are psychic. I am a veteran, multi-disciplinary social choreographer who has intuitively employed ethnographic tools and strategies for the past 30 years, collectively producing transformative performative portraits of threatened communities. For this graduate and undergraduate seniors workshop, I wish to invite students into my field process, in terms of my readings and roamings through the world. The workshop experience will culminate in a field trip to San Juan under the auspices of the Conservation Trust of Puerto Rico, to visit historic colonial sites and contemporary model projects such as El Departamento de la Comida, a queer farming collective. Travel over the week of spring break is required for our course, with airfare, in-country travel, room and board covered completely for all students (thanks to generous support from the Padeia program).
Also Offered As: FNAR 3666
Mutually Exclusive: ANTH 6666
1 Course Unit
ANTH 3667 Advanced Documentary Storytelling
The course is intended for students who have already taken an earlier documentary course and have an interest in film work or research in the nonfiction realm. The course will isolate, highlight, and explore the aspect of narration (storytelling) in documentary cinema. The objective is to enhance students’ understanding of the relation between content and form in documentary films; provide them with critical and aesthetic tools to think about nonfiction cinema and inspire them to find original and expressive ways to deliver their own non-fiction material to audiences. The very definition of a film as “nonfiction” implies (perhaps wrongly) that it is not written and directed in the way that a fiction film is. We must ask ourselves, then, where in craft of nonfiction filmmaking lies the storytelling? Over the trajectory of the course, we will be analyzing the narrative system of several documentary films. We will learn how story-telling tools are employed in nonfiction cinema and examine the aesthetical and ethical dilemmas unique to nonfiction storytelling. Rather than classifying films by their themes such as “war”, “family” or “race relations” - or categorizing them by accepted taxonomies in documentary theory (“observational”, “classical” or “performative”) - our method we will suggest that an effective way to study a documentary film is to start by identifying its primary documentary material, and to observe how the tools of cinema (diegetic and non-diegetic elements) are applied to this material - creating the storytelling system of the film. The primary material, the element that instigates the making of a documentary, is often a character, a strong human story or an event, but it may also be something much more abstract: An experience, a memory; a place; a painting; an essay or theory, or many other possibilities. The course will begin with the exploration of texts on narrative and documentary theory which will help us define both nonfiction and narration - concepts that will be at the foundation of our discourse moving forward. Once the foundations for exploring narration in the context of nonfiction will have been laid, we will move into to the second and third parts of the course, in which the class will study masterful documentaries, and explore the way their narration systems work, identifying elements that emerge as common narrating “tools”. Then, we will reverse our approach. In the last unit of the course, we will “zoom in” on the specific story-telling elements we identified in our exploration and see how they are used by different filmmakers to achieve different objectives. By the end of the course students should have a grasp of the way characters and events are constructed in documentaries, as well as how filmmakers create storytelling systems and find narrative solutions for challenging and original nonfiction stories.
Also Offered As: CIMS 3667
Mutually Exclusive: ANTH 6667
1 Course Unit
ANTH 3690 Language and Identity
If language lies at the heart of what it means to be human, then our everyday linguistic and communicative practices lie at the heart of our communal and individual identities. This seminar examines the relationship between ‘language’ and ‘identity,’ while also unsettling our preconceived notions about these sociocultural phenomena. We explore a number of interrelated questions: What does what we say (and how we say it) say about who we are? Is it true an individual can ‘choose’ their identity, and if so, how and why? What is the ‘self’ and how is it expressed through spoken communicative interaction? How does being a speaker of a language mean being a member of a community? How do fashions of speaking relate to forms of life? We will address these and other issues, drawing on anthropological and transdisciplinary scholarship and ethnographic examples from across the globe.
Fall, odd numbered years only
1 Course Unit
ANTH 3745 Rights of/for Nature: Critical Engagements from Latin America
This course delves into various approximations of the Rights of Nature movement. It specifically examines a range of legal actions that have arisen to safeguard life and emphasize human relationships with non-human entities. The course is particularly dedicated to dissecting a range of legal strategies that have come into existence to ensure the preservation of life forms beyond just humans, forging a profound connection between humanity and the diverse entities that constitute the natural world. The course will concentrate on Latin American cases as a burgeoning global movement, although the philosophical and theoretical exploration extends far beyond this region. Some topics we will discuss in class are: Earth Law and the Rights of Nature; Bringing Nature to Court and the Law; and Animal Rights. For instance, are animals part of the Rights of Nature movement? By analyzing these legal actions, students will understand how legal systems can be leveraged as powerful environmental conservation and advocacy tools. Students will also learn the importance of bridging the legal practice with how the social sciences approach these questions.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: LALS 3745
Mutually Exclusive: LALS 5745
1 Course Unit
ANTH 3766 Cultures of Surveillance
Developments in digital technology have generated urgent political discussions about the pervasive role of surveillance in our everyday life, from the mundane to the exceptional. But surveillance has a much longer history. In this course, students will learn to think and write critically about the historical, socio-cultural, and political dynamics that define surveillance today. This course asks: how can we historicize what we call surveillance to understand its political and social implications beyond what appears in the document caches of the NSA or on a Black Mirror episode? What role does identity and identification play in surveillance? How do surveillance and computational technologies produce racializing effects? Students will apply course concepts to technologies of daily use, such as self-tracking devices like fit bits or identity documents, and reflect on debates surrounding race, policing, imperialism, and privacy. Through primary source materials, films, podcasts, and key texts, we will engage in a cross-cultural exploration of the multi-faceted phenomena of surveillance technology. Through regular writing assignments, such as surveillancediaries, students will analyze and articulate how they understand surveillance to operate in various domains of everyday life. In this course, students will: (1) Apply course concepts to their lived experience, from securitized architecture to search engines, in order to understand how surveillance operates in everyday life; (2) Analyze how historical context has shaped the current configuration of securitization and surveillance on a global scale; (3) Use ethnographic approaches to study the interaction between individuals, their social relations, and technologies of surveillance.
Fall
Also Offered As: STSC 3766
1 Course Unit
ANTH 3770 Black Speculative Futures
Why do black cultural producers turn to the speculative? What, in turn, is speculative about blackness? These questions frame this seminar's exploration of how black artists, theorists, and activists imagine different futures, often in the service of critiquing power asymmetries and creating radical transformation in the present. We will explore how the speculative works differently across black literature, visual culture and performance. Additionally, inspired by the multi-disciplinary work that we encounter in the course, we will experiment with crafting our own embodied speculative art in order to better understand its function as both art practice and politics. The course will be divided between discussions centered on close reading of primary and secondary material and creative writing/movement exploration (no previous movement experience necessary). Occasional guest lectures with visiting artists will provide additional fodder for our critical and creative work.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AFRC 3770, FNAR 3770
1 Course Unit
ANTH 3780 The Biology of Inequality
What is a more important predictor of how long you will live, the genes you inherit from your parents or the zip code where you were raised? In this class, we will try to answer this question and others regarding the origins of social disparities in health in the US. The course will also consider the broader global context, and ask why the US spends so much money on health care, but lags behind many nations in key indicators of population health. We will examine how social stratification by race/ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, education, and neighborhood quality shapes our biology and the health status of individuals, families, and populations; and, conversely, how health itself can be a fundamental determinant of key social outcomes such as educational achievement. This class takes a biocultural perspective seeking to understand how social inequalities interact with human biology; especially nutrition, health, and physiological stress. The course begins by reviewing perspectives on various forms of inequality and the ways inequalities become embodied as biology (including a review of biological systems and processes), and introduces several overlapping biocultural models that have emerged from anthropology and public health. A series of readings and case studies follow that link some aspect of human biology (nutrition, health, reproduction, psychosocial stress) to poverty and inequalities, and try to present both quantitative and qualitative aspects of these linkages, as well as how inequalities and poor health reinforce and reproduce each other. In order to be successful, this class requires engagement, participation, and discussion.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ANTH 3804 Sighting Black Girlhood
The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the deep inequities of our social systems, and protests against police killings drew broader attention to anti-Black state violence worldwide, yet the gendered dimensions of these problems are not always fully understood. While many in the public have come to recognize the suffering of Black boys and men as acute and eventful, Black girls’ suffering has remained largely invisible, a slow confluence of violences that too often go unaddressed. As one way to bring the issues facing Black girls globally to public attention, and to celebrate and support Black girls, this course will provide a background for understanding the challenges faced by Black girls in Philadelphia, Jamaica, and South Africa. We will frame these challenges historically and geopolitically, drawing attention to the issues that contribute to the invisibility of the ordinary Black girl in diverse sites, as well as the resources that will begin to address them. This course also aims to equip students to understand the relationships between research and creative work, and to see artistic production as a catalyst for community-building and critical thinking and action. Toward this end, we will work with a number of partners in Philadelphia, including the Colored Girls Museum and Black Lives Matter-Philly. Because this course is part of a broader project, we will travel as a class to Jamaica during the summer of 2022 and students will participate in a range of projects there, working with partners in the arts, community engagement, and legal advocacy. The question motivating our project is: What are the personal, psychic, spiritual, and economic costs and benefits associated with Black girls fully exercising their humanity?
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AFRC 3804
Mutually Exclusive: ANTH 6804
1 Course Unit
ANTH 3820 Writing, Society & Power: How Pre-Modern Scripts Shaped Societies and Political Action
The written word, expressed in a range of different visual media and materials, envelops us today in ways as ubiquitous as it is largely unexamined as a cultural artifact. This course examines the power of writing through societies other than our own, examining a range of ancient scripts from two linked perspectives. It looks at them first as semiotic systems with specific origins and structures, and then moves to the purposes to which they were put. The overriding focus here is not writing as prosaic tool, but how it was used to create and sustain social and political power. Preferred prerequisite: previous class in social studies and humanities
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ANTH 3867 Reproduction, Justice and Care: Listening in Philly
In this class, you will be introduced to reproductive justice as a holistic theory and a methodological framework that can guide the practice of medicine and anthropology. You will create an oral history with a Philly-based community activist, midwife, doula, or other practitioner whose work engages with reproductive justice, understood expansively as the right to have children, to not have children, and to parent children in healthy environments free from violence and state oppression. At the end of the class, we will release these oral histories together as part of a new season of CEE’s “Reckoning and Repair in Philadelphia” podcast. Recent reports in Philadelphia have called particular attention to the severity of the maternal health crisis in the city, where black birthing people are more than four times as likely to die of preventable causes than their white peers. Such inequalities are not unique or new; Philadelphia was a crucial site where medicine broadly and obstetrics more specifically were born… . Philadelphia is the first city in the United States to have an obstetric society, and it is also the educational home of the so-called father of gynecology, James Marion Sims, who notoriously experimented on enslaved women to develop foundational obstetric procedures still in use today. At the same time, Philadelphia has also been an activist stronghold, as a site of historical Black, Caribbean, Latinx, and immigrant organizing and community care for more than a century. Today, midwives, doulas, doctors, environmental justice workers and others continue to develope nurturing models of child, maternal, and familial care that uplift communities. Many of these have been informed by reproductive justice frameworks. Engaging with a long tradition of scholar-activist ethnography, we will turn to the experiences of these community organizers, birthworkers, midwives, and doulas to gain an understanding of their battles for reproductive justice in Philadelphia: from the persistent inequities in maternal medical care, to the community work to create safe neighborhoods, to patient rights education campaigns, to medical interventions within prisons. Working one-on-one with a partner engaged in this work, students will produce an oral history of reproductive justice in Philadelphia. In the process students will learn crucial methods of critical medical anthropology, and build their skills in ethnographic listening as both a research method and a potentially transformative act of care. It is open to students with all levels of experience, including those with no prior background in audio/media production Through your podcast episodes, you'll answer the following questions: 1. How have historical medical practices and medical cultures in Philadelphia, especially in the context of clinical obstetric care, shaped the current disparities and challenges in reproductive health? 2. What cultural, social, and economic factors have influenced the development of homegrown methods of care within Philadelphia's reproductive justice community, and what do these practices provide (or avoid) that hospital practices do not? 3. How do the experiences and perspectives of doula, reproductive justice workers, and health practitioners intersect with or challenge established medical paradigms? 4. What good does listening and documenting these stories of care and resistance in reproductive justice do, if anything, at the personal, social, and institutional level. This course offers a unique, hands-on, real-world experience, enabling you to develop collaborative, ethical, and engaged work that contributes to Philadelphia's reproductive justice community.
Not Offered Every Year
Mutually Exclusive: ANTH 6867
1 Course Unit
ANTH 3910 Multi-Modal Ethnography: Anthropology Beyond Text
What does the digital age mean for humanistic, social scientific, and professional inquiry and practice? How do non-text based formats - such as film, dance and other kinds of performance, creative writing, and soundscapes - transform both the processes and products of research? How do they inform and transform our disciplines, and what might this mean for the communities with which we work? This advanced undergraduate seminar will address these (and other related) questions. Taught by the invited Fellows from the Center for Experimental Ethnography, this course will take shape differently each semester according to the Fellow's area of expertise and practice. Students will be encouraged to explore alternative formats of representation that move beyond text while still being grounded in ethnographic research, and they will develop skills in relevant media. https://www.sas.upenn.edu/anthropology/courses/topics-courses
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ANTH 3930 Latinx Environmental Justice
This course explores the involvement of the Latinx environmental justice movement since the 1960s. It addresses theories and concepts of environmental racism and environmental justice, underscoring how Latinx have challenged, expanded, and contributed to the environmental justice discourse. In this course, students will explore national case studies of environmental and racial injustice as they bear on Latinx communities both in rural areas and in urban barrios throughout the United States. The course will analyze these case studies through the lens of Latinx artistic and literary texts (essays, paintings, short stories, documentaries, and short films) as they provide a unique historic and multicultural perspective of the Latinx experience with environmental injustice and of how Latinxs imagine alternative transitions and responses to environmental marginalization. In addition, the works of Latinx artists and writers will serve as case studies to deconstruct racial stereotypes of Latinxs as unconcerned about environmental issues, shedding light on how they share a broad engagement with environmental ideas. The case studies analyzed in this course emphasize race and class differences between farmworkers and urban barrio residents and how they affect their respective struggles. The unit on farmworkers will focus on workplace health issues such as toxic chemicals and collective bargaining contracts. The unit on urban barrios will focus on gentrification, affordable housing, and toxic substances in the home. We will also review current and past programs that have been organized to address the aforementioned problems. This is an Academically Based Community Service Course (ABCS course) through which students will learn from and provide support to a Latinx-serving organization in the City of Philadelphia on preventing exposure to hazardous substances, thus bridging the information gap on environmental justice issues in the Latinx community in Philadelphia. Information dissemination and education efforts will be conducted by collaborating with Esperanza Academy Charter School in Philadelphia to implement lessons on preventing exposure to hazardous substances. Studying environmental justice and pairing it with community service will heighten students' awareness of the complexities of culture, race, gender, and class while providing them with an invaluable experience of cross-cultural understanding.
Spring
Also Offered As: ENVS 3445, LALS 3930, SPAN 3930, URBS 3930
Prerequisite: SPAN 1800 AND SPAN 1900
1 Course Unit
ANTH 3999 Independent Study in Anthropology
A study under faculty supervision of a problem area or topic not included in the formal curriculum.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ANTH 4000 Research Seminar in Anthropology
ANTH 4000 is a Research Seminar for anthropology majors. It defines the Penn anthropology major by bringing together and inter-relating major threads from the different subfields of the Penn anthropology curriculum. Each session includes contributions from members of the standing faculty and seminar discussions of a research theme in which anthropological knowledge is currently progressing.
Fall
1 Course Unit
ANTH 4010 Senior Thesis
Individual research under faculty supervision culminating in a thesis.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ANTH 5020 Masters in Liberal Arts Seminar: Topics Course
Reading and discussion course on selected topics in the liberal arts.
1 Course Unit
ANTH 5024 Mesopotamia 2200-1600 BCE
This seminar style class will focus on two canonical periods of Mesopotamian history from 2100-1600 BCE. It is structured to examine fundamental institutions of kingship, religion, economy, law and literature. Practices well established in Sumer by the end of the third millennium evolved during the first half of the second millennium BCE when Amorite speaking peoples assume central roles in Mesopotamian institutions. The class will be structured around case studies engaging key monuments of art, architecture and literature. It will be team-taught by Prof. Pittman, focusing on material remains and visual arts and by Prof. Steve Tinney who brings expertise to the rich cuneiform textual traditions.
Also Offered As: AAMW 5020, ARTH 5240, MELC 5020, NELC 5020
1 Course Unit
ANTH 5026 Material & Methods in Mediterranean Archaeology
This course is intended to provide an introduction to archaeological methods and theory in a Mediterranean context, focusing on the contemporary landscape. The class will cover work with museum collections (focusing on the holdings of the Penn Museum), field work and laboratory analysis in order to give students a diverse toolkit that they can later employ in their own original research. Each week, invited lecturers will address the class on different aspects of archaeological methodology in their own research, emphasizing specific themes that will be highlighted in readings and subsequent discussion. The course is divided into three sections: Method and Theory in Mediterranean Archaeology; Museum collections; and Decolonizing Mediterranean Archaeology. The course is designed for new AAMW graduate students, though other graduate students or advanced undergraduate students may participate with the permission of the instructor.
Fall
Also Offered As: AAMW 5260, CLST 6300
1 Course Unit
ANTH 5080 Conservation and Management of Archaeological Sites and Landscapes
This seminar will address the history, theories, principles, and practices of the preservation and interpretation of archaeological sites and landscapes. The course will draw from a wide range of published material and experiences representing both national and international contexts. Topics will include site and landscape documentation and recording; site formation and degradation; intervention strategies including interpretation and display, legislation, policy, and contemporary issues of descendent community ownership and global heritage. Depending on the site, students will study specific issues leading toward the critique or development of a conservation and management program in accordance with guidelines established by ICOMOS/ ICAHM and other official agencies.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: HSPV 7470
1 Course Unit
ANTH 5110 Ethics, Archaeology, and Cultural Heritage
This seminar will explore some of the most important issues that are now a central part of archaeological, anthropological and historical research throughout the world. The identification and control of cultural heritage is a central part of the framework for research within other communities. Issues for this course will also include cultural identity, human rights, repatriation, colonialism, working with communities and many other topics. Field research today must be based upon a new series of ethical standards that will be discussed and examined within this class. Major topics include: cultural heritage - definitions and constructs, cosmopolitanism and collecting, archaeology and looting, cultural heritage preservation, museums - universal and national, museum acquisition policies, cultural identity, international conventions (including underwater issues), national laws of ownership, community based development, cultural tourism, development models, and human rights.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: LALS 5110
1 Course Unit
ANTH 5137 Environmental (In)Equalities
This seminar focuses on the interrelations of equity, justice, and environmental crisis. Beginning with a discussion of the emergence of climate justice as a critical term in international negotiations, we will consider several dimensions of substantive and historical inequality and the framing of justice as an environmental right as they arise from these settings. Broadening the discussion to include a larger framework of environmental issues in relation to inequality, the course will draw on considerations of geographies of vulnerability, environments as inhabited risk, and ecological debt in relation to “natural disaster” or environmental crisis. Moving from an historical account of structural inequalities in socio-natural systems to contemporary environmental politics, we will then discuss the disjuncture in environmental movements and aspirations between the global south and north, and particularly, how justice and equity figure into environmentalism(s) on a global basis. Finally, we discuss emerging frameworks including Just Transition movements, ecological sovereignty and rights discourses, and flourishing and capabilities approaches.
Mutually Exclusive: ANTH 3137
1 Course Unit
ANTH 5208 Doing Research: Qualitative Methods and Research Design
This interdisciplinary course introduces students to qualitative research methods and frameworks in the social sciences and humanities. Students will learn how to frame an effective research question, situate it in relation to existing research, select the most appropriate methods for addressing the question, and develop an effective research plan. Each week students will be introduced to a new set of frameworks for analysis, see specific examples of their application drawn from anthropological, historical, and related scholarship and have opportunities to practice applying and evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of specific methodological tools. The goals of the semester will be for each student to develop their own research proposal for a specific project. Students will be introduced to a range of textual, archival and media collections and databases available at Penn, with particular attention to South Asia and other specific regions of interest to course participants. Students will also have the opportunity to identify sources of funding for summer and/or thesis research projects, and submit applications for these opportunities as part of the course. The course is ideal for freshmen, sophomores, juniors, seniors, and MA students considering summer research, an undergraduate or MA thesis, or an application to the Fulbright or other research program or to PhD programs.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: SAST 5208
Mutually Exclusive: SAST 2208
1 Course Unit
ANTH 5211 Petrography of Cultural Materials
Introduction to thin-section petrography of stone and ceramic archaeological materials. Using polarized light microscopy, the first half of this course will cover the basics of mineralogy and the petrography of igneous, metamorphic and sedimentary rocks. The second half will focus on the petrographic description of ceramic materials, mainly pottery, with emphasis on the interpretation of provenance and technology. As part of this course, students will characterize and analyze archaeological samples from various collections. Prior knowledge of geology is not required.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AAMW 5120, CLST 7311
1 Course Unit
ANTH 5215 Archaeology of Animals
This course introduces the study of animal bones from archaeological sites. Faunal analysis is an interdisciplinary science which draws methods from archaeology, biology, and paleontology. Bones, shells, and other remains yield evidence for the use of animals by humans, and evidence for the biology of animals and for past environments. The course will focus on research approaches to important transitions in human-animal relationships: the development of human hunting and fishing, animal domestication, early pastoralism, and the emergence of market economies in animal products. Class presentations will include lectures and discussion concerning research design and archaeological case material, with additional videos, slidework with field and laboratory equipment, and supervised work identifying and describing archaeological materials from the University Museum's collections. This class is taught in the Zooarchaeology Laboratory of the Center for the Analysis of Archaeological Materials
Not Offered Every Year
Mutually Exclusive: ANTH 3215
1 Course Unit
ANTH 5219 Mining Archaeology
In ancient times, materials such as stone and metals were used to produce artifacts including pigments, jewelry, tools, and weapons. This course is designed to introduce students to research on the early exploitation of mineral resources. Which techniques were used to access and process raw materials in antiquity? Which archaeological methods can be used to investigate these features and artifacts? The course will provide worldwide examples through time, ranging from Stone Age flint mining, Iron Age rock salt mining to Medieval silver mining. Ethnographic studies and hands-on activities will contribute to our understanding of mining in archaeology, and artifacts from the Museum's collections will undergo scientific analysis in the Center for the Analysis of Archaeological Materials.
Spring
Also Offered As: CLST 5314
Mutually Exclusive: ANTH 3219
1 Course Unit
ANTH 5220 Intro to Digital Archaeology
Students in this course will be exposed to the broad spectrum of digital approaches in archaeology with an emphasis on fieldwork, through a survey of current literature and applied learning opportunities that focus on African American mortuary landscapes of greater Philadelphia. As an Academically Based Community Service (ABCS) course, we will work with stakeholders from cemetery companies, historic preservation advocacy groups, and members of the African Methodist Episcopal Church to collect data from three field sites. We will then use these data to reconstruct the original plans, untangle site taphonomy, and assess our results for each site. Our results will be examined within the broader constellation of threatened and lost African American burial grounds and our interpretations will be shared with community stakeholders using digital storytelling techniques. This course can count toward the minor in Digital Humanities, minor in Archaeological Science and the Graduate Certificate in Archaeological Science.
Also Offered As: AAMW 5620, CLST 5620
Mutually Exclusive: CLST 3307
1 Course Unit
ANTH 5221 Material World in Archaeological Science
By focusing on the scientific analysis of inorganic archaeological materials, this course will explore processes of creation in the past. Class will take place in the Center for the Analysis of Archaeological Materials (CAAM) and will be team taught in three modules: analysis of lithics, analysis of ceramics and analysis of metals. Each module will combine laboratory and classroom exercises to give students hands-on experience with archaeological materials. We will examine how the transformation of materials into objects provides key information about past human behaviors and the socio-economic contexts of production, distribution, exchange and use. Discussion topics will include invention and adoption of new technologies, change and innovation, use of fire, and craft specialization.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: MELC 6920, NELC 6920
Mutually Exclusive: ANTH 2221
1 Course Unit
ANTH 5230 Archaeobotany Seminar
In this course we will approach the relationship between plants and people from archaeological and anthropological perspectives in order to investigate diverse plant consumption, use, and management strategies. Topics will include: archaeological formation processes, archaeobotanical sampling and recovery, lab sorting and identification, quantification methods, and archaeobotany as a means of preserving cultural heritage. Students will learn both field procedures and laboratory methods of archaeobotany through a series of hands-on activities and lab-based experiments. The final research project will involve an original in-depth analysis and interpretation of archaeobotanical specimens. By the end of the course, students will feel comfortable reading and evaluating archaeobotanical literature and will have a solid understanding of how archaeobotanists interpret human activities of the past.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AAMW 5390, CLST 7313, MELC 6930, NELC 6930
1 Course Unit
ANTH 5231 Surface Archaeology
Non-invasive and non-destructive methods make up an ever-greater proportion of archaeological investigations, for both intellectual and practical reasons. These methods comprise collection of data from the surface (pedestrian surface survey, geophysical prospection, geoarchaeology) and from above-ground platforms (drones, aircraft, balloons, kites, satellites), using a variety of sensors from human perception to multispectral scanning devices. The data acquired from these methods complement the contextual information drawn from traditional excavation, but also allow the archaeologist to address diverse research questions at a scale much greater than the excavated site. Aspiring archaeologists should have a good working knowledge of surface archaeological methods. In this course, we will delve deeply into these methods, and read and analyze case studies to expose strengths and weaknesses and to identify best practices. Students will have the opportunity for hands-on training in the Philadelphia area or elsewhere.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AAMW 5239, CLST 5321
1 Course Unit
ANTH 5235 The Past Preserved: Conservation In Archaeology
This course explores the scientific conservation of cultural materials from archaeological contexts. It is intended to familiarize students with the basics of artifact conservation but is not intended to train them as conservators. The course will cover how various materials interact with their deposit environments; general techniques for on-site conservation triage and retrieval of delicate materials; what factors need to be considered in planning for artifact conservation; and related topics. Students should expect to gain a thorough understanding of the role of conservation in archaeology and how the two fields interact.
Also Offered As: CLST 5315
Mutually Exclusive: ANTH 3235
1 Course Unit
ANTH 5239 Adivasis/Indigenous Peoples & British Colonialism in India
Modern Western colonialism impacted the world in many ways. However, each country and community has had a different encounter and experience with colonialism. For the Adivasis (indigenous peoples) of India, it was catastrophic and marked a new phase in their history. The pre-colonial symbolizes a period of freedom in the hills and forest, whereas the colonial era symbolizes state coercion, eviction from land and the end of free movement in the forest. The proposed course discusses Adivasis' encounters with the British colonial state. The course examines Indian history from the perspectives of Adivasis and contrasts these with dominant paradigms of Indian history. In this way, the course allows students to understand India from a different perspective. Under British colonialism, the diverse ethnic self-governing communities were imagined as primitive, uncivilized, barbaric, violent, backward and childlike people. The course discusses how such constructions impacted Adivasi social life and development. It traces how the expansion of the colonial state in forests and hills put an end to self-rule and induced massive migration from the plains of India and asks how Adivasi areas were integrated into the colonial economy. How did the colonial state use revenue and forest policies and regulations to bring these areas under its control? How did commercialization of agriculture and forest conservation work to further marginalize Adivasis? The course also examines how Adivasi knowledge of cultivation and forest conservation were viewed by the colonial state and asks why the colonial state encouraged caste-Hindu peasant migration into Adivasi areas. Finally, it traces the ways that colonial intervention has resulted in a series of contestations, acts of resistance, and insurgencies by Adivasi groups? Tracing forms of Adivasi resistance, the course puts these into conversation with intellectual history, emphasizing the role of rumours, myths, and orality, which provided the basis for the new insurgent consciousness that spread throughout Adivasi communities. Adivasi resistance movements have been documented and analyzed by colonial rulers and anthropologists. Colonial discourses were successful in criminalizing Adivasi politics. Ironically, many colonial-era discourses concerning Adivasis have been perpetuated within the post-colonial academy. The anti-colonial struggles of Adivasis were constructed as sporadic, spontaneous, unorganized and apolitical. The inauguration of the Subaltern Studies Project has reversed such arguments and attempted to provide ideological integrity to Adivasi politics. Students will be introduced to important literature on Adivasi anti-colonial insurgent consciousness and will be encouraged to think critically about the concepts and theories of subaltern politics. Assigned readings include texts by James Scott, Ranajit Guha, David Arnold, David Hardiman, Ajay Skaria, Dhanagare, Ramachandra Guha, Biswamoy Pati, Alpa Shah, Crispin Bates, Jangkhomang Guite and Bhangya Bhukya. One aim of the course is to sensitize the students to how the political and cultural mobilizations by subalterns have contributed to the shaping of democracy. Course Requirements: Short writing responses to readings In-class presentations on readings Midterm short essay Final research paper based on primary and secondary sources. (No exams) Instructor's Objectives: 1. Students will understand indigenous perspectives on Indian culture and history 2. Students will be able to situate indigenous movements in relation to Subaltern Studies, dominant schools of historiography, and colonial and postcolonial ethnography 3. Students will be able to analyze primary sources and identify different schools of thought within secondary literature 4. Students will be able to analyze the impact of colonial practices and discourses on indigenous cultures, histories and practices, and the forms of resistance that indigenous groups have utilized
Spring
Also Offered As: SAST 5239
Mutually Exclusive: SAST 2239
1 Course Unit
ANTH 5240 Plants and Society
Interactions between humans and the living landscape around us have played - and continue to play - a fundamental role in shaping our worldview. This course is designed to introduce students to the diverse ways in which humans interact with plants. We will focus on the integration of ethnographic information and archaeological case studies in order to understand the range of interactions between humans and plants, as well as how plants and people have profoundly changed one another. Topics will include the origins of agriculture; cooking and plant processing; human health and the world of ethnomedicine; and poisonous and psychoactive plants. We will examine ancient plant material firsthand at the Center for the Analysis of Archaeological Materials (CAAM) and will handle botanical ecofacts from the Penn Museum's collections. Students will also carry out a substantial research project focused on an archaeological culture and plant species of their own interest.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: CLST 5316
Mutually Exclusive: ANTH 3240
1 Course Unit
ANTH 5244 Introduction to the Human Skeleton
An introduction to the anatomy and biology of the human skeleton. Laboratory work will be supplemented by lectures and demonstrations on the development structure, function, and evolution of the human skeleton.
Not Offered Every Year
Mutually Exclusive: ANTH 3244
1 Course Unit
ANTH 5267 Living World in Archaeological Science
By focusing on the scientific analysis of archaeological remains, this course will explore life and death in the past. It takes place in the Center for the Analysis of Archaeological Materials (CAAM) and is team taught in three modules: human skeletal analysis, analysis of animal remains, and analysis of plant remains. Each module will combine laboratory and classroom exercises to give students hands-on experience with archaeological materials. We will examine how organic materials provide key information about past environments, human behavior, and cultural change through discussions of topics such as health and disease, inequality, and food.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: CLST 5303
Mutually Exclusive: ANTH 2267
1 Course Unit
ANTH 5318 Politics of Psychic Life
The psyche has long been a site of translation, contention, and imagination. From colonial discourses on the mentality of others to political philosophies of reason and autonomy, mental life has been a central figure in claims to modernity. Meanwhile, problems of psychic subjugation and liberation have been crucial to anti-imperialist and anti-psychiatric movements, including spiritual traditions that do not take the problem to be a secular one. Since COVID-19, forms of psychic suffering old and new have intensified across experiences of collective isolation, racialized violence, and extraction and surveillance (digital and otherwise), accompanied by calls to decolonize mental health. This seminar engages with classic and contemporary texts from anthropology and beyond to rethink the politics of psychic life today. How might attention to psychic life, broadly conceived, make way for new forms of critical and transformative inquiry?
1 Course Unit
ANTH 5320 Medical Anthropology in the Anthropocene
Ongoing climate crises, militarization, racial injustice, and mass migration have torn apart social fabrics and have further exposed the unequal structures of power that have defined health, how it is realized, and for whom. The massive human toll of COVID-19 and demands for reparations from communities around the world confront health institutions and expose their colonial, scientific, and epistemic underpinnings. From colonial histories of medicine to movements to decolonize global and planetary health, this seminar charts how anthropological and trans-disciplinary forms of research can help shift knowledge claims about injury and vulnerability away from hegemonic centers to frontline communities. This shift implies tracking the lived aspects of health both in and beyond clinical spaces and into multiple environments (from low-wage work to toxic exposures and militarized zones) that perpetuate human/nonhuman vulnerabilities and unequal exposures to disease. As we consider multi-faceted efforts (including traditions of mutual aid and care, de-occupation and, more recently, abolition medicine) to reverse such trends, we probe innovations, forms of resistance, and ethical and political potentials unleashed by diverse justice struggles, and through which diverse planetary futures are imagined and realized.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ANTH 5360 The Peopling of the Americas
The peopling of the Americas is a question that has intrigued scholars and laymen for over 500 years. The origin of Native Americans was also a seminal issue during the emergence of American Anthropology as a discipline at the turn of the 20th century, with research on this topic animating current studies of ethnohistory, indigenous archeology, post-colonialism and repatriation. The proposed course will review the scholarship dedicated to describing this long history from an interdisciplinary perspective. It will explore their roots in the expansion of modern humans into Eurasia, evaluate the new archeological and genetic research that has fundamentally altered our understanding of the migration history and diversity of indigenous peoples in the American continents, and examine issues of identity, ethnicity and cultural heritage in contemporary Native populations that extend from this knowledge. The course will further draw on the instructor's fieldwork experience working with indigenous communities in Alaska, Canada, the Lower 48, Mexico and the Caribbean, as well as native Siberians in Russia, where the cultural and biological roots of ancestral Native American populations lie.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ANTH 5407 Human Evolution
An examination of fossils and other evidence documenting human evolution. Lectures and readings are supplemented with slide and fossil reproduction materials.
Not Offered Every Year
Mutually Exclusive: ANTH 3407
1 Course Unit
ANTH 5410 Critical Engagements with Science(s) and Justice(s)
This course places science studies in conversation with counterforensic and ethnographic methodologies, decolonial and feminist approaches, data and environmental justice, critical race and disability studies, and conflict medicine, among other topics. We will be looking at the ways that the arts, natural and social sciences, and community-oriented research agendas come together, and what tensions and possibilities these emergent alliances, intersectional modes of thinking, and practical collaborations may produce. This class offers a unique opportunity for graduate students from engineering, the medical school, natural and social sciences, humanities, and the arts to learn to converse and collaborate around pressing socio-environmental and public health issues. Emergent transdisciplinary fields, such as the environmental and medical humanities, reflect a growing awareness that responses to the environmental and public health dilemmas being faced require the collaborative work of not only diverse scientists, but also more expansive publics, including artists, urban and rural communities, and their relationships with nonhumans and materialities. Aspirations for justice and the possibilities for evidence making require translation across different practices, temporalities and scales; negotiations with the forces of extractive economic structures; and endurance within racist and colonial legacies as well as situations of everyday militarization and social and armed conflict. Throughout the course we will collectively explore moments of newly shared insight, mutual incomprehension, and partial connection between disparate actors and potentially unlikely allies. The idea is not for us to necessarily give up our disciplinary orientations, but rather to learn how to approach shared matters of concern without canceling out our differences and the generative agonisms they produce.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ANTH 5424 Political Ecologies of the City
Cities have been centres of aspiration for much of human history. They have provided a limited yet critical locus for social mobility, both in political and economic terms. As large agglomerations of political and economic power, urban residents have also consumed growing proportions of the earths mineral, food and water resources from the national (and international) body. The contradictory aspects of urban aspiration frame this course. Drawing on the frameworks of political ecology, in this course we think through the cities of the global south to understand how cities are made. To do this, we will first focus on the construction on the liberal city and how it has been occupied, both formally and informally, by urban subjects in most of the world. Next, we will learn about projects through which natural resources have been directed to and through the city. Finally we will conclude with a particular attention to how urban resources are claimed by marginalized migrants, and the particular sorts of governance institutions these practices engender.
Not Offered Every Year
Mutually Exclusive: ANTH 3424
1 Course Unit
ANTH 5429 Anthropology of the Environment
This seminar draws from social scientific and scientific literatures to explore current themes in the anthropology of the environment. We will investigate the links between climate change science and social science, and the ways in which anthropologists can contribute via in-depth fieldwork methodology and long engagement in issues of society-environment interactions. We will also explore how potential environmental, social, and biological impacts of global warming on the future are being assessed through conceptual paradigms linked to risk, probability, scenario forecasting, tipping points, planetary boundaries, and extinction.
Mutually Exclusive: ANTH 3429
1 Course Unit
ANTH 5433 Andean Archaeology
Consideration of the culture history of the native peoples of the Andean area, with emphasis on the pre-conquest archaeology of the Central-Andean region.
Not Offered Every Year
Mutually Exclusive: ANTH 3433
1 Course Unit
ANTH 5440 Public Environmental Humanities
By necessity, work in environmental humanities spans academic disciplines. By design, it can also address and engage publics beyond traditional academic settings. This seminar explores best practices in public environmental humanities. Students receive close mentoring and build collaborative community to develop and execute cross-disciplinary, public engagement projects on the environment. This spring, this broadly interdisciplinary course is designed in conjunction with the ongoing environmental humanities project, An Ecotopian Toolkit for the Anthropocene. In the framework of our seminar, students will have opportunities to work with tne project’s curators and educators as well as Toolmakers on project-based assignments that also engage wider publics around issues of climate and environmental justice. This lab-style seminar is suitable for advanced undergraduates (with permission) and fulfills the “Capstone” requirement for the Minor in Environmental Humanities. It is also open to graduate students in departments across Arts and Sciences as well as other schools at the university.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: COML 5440, ENVS 5440, GRMN 5440, URBS 5440
1 Course Unit
ANTH 5444 Human Growth and Development
In this course we will examine key issues and the processes involved in human growth and development. By their very nature, growth and development are biocultural processes that require an integrated analysis of social construction and biological phenomena. As such, we will incorporate insight from evolutionary theory, ecology, developmental biology, psychology, human biology, and cultural anthropology in our study of growth and development. Such an integrated perspective will help students to see that development is not just a biological unfolding from birth through adolescence and adulthood. Rather, development is best understood as process that is deeply intertwined with the environment within which the organism develops. Additionally, we will apply these biocultural and socio-ecological insights to emerging health challenges associated with various developmental stages. The study of human growth and development is useful to all students in biological, health-related, and social sciences. Course enrollment is restricted to juniors, seniors, and graduate students only.
Not Offered Every Year
Mutually Exclusive: ANTH 3444
1 Course Unit
ANTH 5447 From Puberty to Parenting: The Evolutionary Context of Reproduction
This course explores the processes that influence reproduction in human populations. We adopt an evolutionary perspective to examine the factors that have shaped human reproductive physiology and contribute to variation in reproductive parameters between populations. To place human reproduction in a broad evolutionary context, we will consider similarities and differences between humans and other apes in how ecology shapes reproduction. The biology of puberty, pregnancy, hormonal changes across the lifespan, the cessation of reproduction, the impact of parenting behavior on the biology of offspring and parents themselves, and the influence of sex and gender diversity on reproduction will be discussed. Both the ecological and sociocultural factors that influence the steps in the reproductive process will be considered.
Not Offered Every Year
Mutually Exclusive: ANTH 3447, GSWS 3447
1 Course Unit
ANTH 5451 Historical Archaeology
Archaeology of the Modern World from the Columbian voyage (1492) to the 20th century. Topics such as the rise of early modern Europe, European exploration and colonization, African American Archaeology, Asian American Archaeology, the rise of colonial society, contact with native peoples, the Industrial Revolution, and the archaeology of the 20th century will be covered.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ANTH 5454 Quantitative Analysis of Anthropological Data
This course is designed to provide students with a basic understanding of how to work with and present quantitative data. Topics include graphical display of numerical data, probability, sampling, descriptive and inferential statistics (parametric and non-parametric two-and three group tests, regression and correlation). Using examples drawn from the social sciences and anthropology, the focus is on teaching the logic behind quantitative arguments and statistical tests, rather than on the mathematical formulas, making the course especially relevant for students who do not have a strong background in mathematics. This course fulfills the Colleges Quantitative Data Analysis requirement.
Fall or Spring
Mutually Exclusive: ANTH 3454
1 Course Unit
ANTH 5460 Global Citizenship
This course examines the possibilities and limitations of conceiving of and realizing citizenship on a global scale. Readings, guest lecturers, and discussions will focus on dilemmas associated with addressing issues that transcend national boundaries. In particular, the course compares global/local dynamics that emerge across different types of improvement efforts focusing on distinctive institutions and social domains, including: educational development; human rights; humanitarian aid; free trade; micro-finance initiatives; and the global environmental movement. The course has two objectives: to explore research and theoretical work related to global citizenship, social engagement, and international development; and to discuss ethical and practical issues that emerge in the local contexts where development initiatives are implemented.
Spring
Also Offered As: EDUC 5431, URBS 5460
1 Course Unit
ANTH 5467 Community Youth Filmmaking
This course focuses on how the filmmaking medium and process can provide a means for engaging youth in ethnographically grounded civic action projects where they learn about, reflect on, and communicate to others about their issues in their schools and communities. Students receive advanced training in film and video for social change. A project-based service-learning course, students collaborate with Philadelphia high school students and community groups to make films and videos that encourage creative self-expression and represent issues important to youth, schools, and local communities. Stories and themes on emotional well-being, safety, health, environmental issues, racism and social justice are particularly encouraged. A central thread throughout is to assess and reflect upon the strengths (and weaknesses) of contemporary film (digital, online) in fostering debate, discussion and catalyzing community action and social change. The filmmaking medium and process itself is explored as a means to engage and interact with communities. This course provides a grounding in theories, concepts, methods and practices of community engagement derived from Community Participatory Video, Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) and Ethnographic methods. For the very first time, Penn students will be trained to operate a state-of-the-art TV studio at PSTV (Philadelphia Schools TV). At the end of the semester approved films will be screened with an accompanying panel discussion at an event at the School District of Philadelphia (SDP). These films will also be broadcast on Comcast Philadelphia's PSTV Channel 52 and webcast via the district's website and YouTube channel. This is an ABCS course, and students will produce short ethnographic films with students in Philadelphia high schools as part of a partnership project with the School District of Philadelphia. EDUC 5466 Ethnographic Filmmaking (or equivalent) is a pre-requisite or permission of instructor.
Spring
Also Offered As: EDUC 5467
1 Course Unit
ANTH 5470 Anthropology and Education
An introduction to the intent, approach, and contribution of anthropology to the study of socialization and schooling in cross-cultural perspective. Education is examined in traditional, colonial, and complex industrial societies.
Fall, Spring, and Summer Terms
Also Offered As: EDUC 5495, URBS 5470
1 Course Unit
ANTH 5480 Colonialism and its Legacies
In this course we explore the history and long-term consequences of European colonial expansion, with a primary focus on Eurasia and on the British Empire, though we will range further afield as needed. Rather than attempting a comprehensive historical overview, we will use a series of case studies to illustrate changing understandings of colonialism and associated processes, including anti-colonial movements, decolonization, postcoloniality, and the enduring effects of colonialism in the present. This is a seminar-style course.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ANTH 5490 Topics in Archaeological Method and Theory
The subject matter of this seminar will vary by term and instructor. Each course will concern itself with contemporary archaeology through an in-depth examination of new directions in archaeological method and theory. Please check https://www.sas.upenn.edu/anthropology/courses/topics-courses for the term-specific course description.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ANTH 5500 Critical Ethnography
"This graduate course introduces students to theories, practices, and critiques of critical ethnography. Ethnography -- an approach to the study of culture which anthropologist James Clifford described as a process that "translates experiences into text" - will have our full attention. This process of translation, although seemingly straightforward, requires layers of interpretation, selection, and the imposition of a viewpoint or politics. While ethnography is often narrowly conceived of as a methodology, this course considers ethnography as a mode of inquiry, as a philosophy, as an ongoing question and performance. We wrestle with notions of "the self" and "the other" at the intersection of imbricated cultural and performance worlds. Together we'll ask: How is ethnography both critical and performative? What is the relationship between theory and method? How can we evaluate ethnographic work? And finally, what kinds of ethnographers do we want to be? This course considers a range of ethnographic examples in order to analyze both the craft and the stakes of "translating experiences into text."
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AFRC 5500
1 Course Unit
ANTH 5510 Experimenting with Ethnography: Craft, Genre & Conceptual Work
This course takes inspiration from conversations and practices occurring at the interfaces of cultural anthropology, creative nonfiction, and experimental ethnography. Anthropologist Stuart McLean (2017) has asked: "What might become of anthropology if it were to suspend its sometime claims to be a social science? What if it were to turn instead to exploring its affinities with art and literature as a mode of engaged creative practice carried forward in a world heterogeneously composed of humans and other than humans?" At the same time, the emergence of the environmental and medical humanities as academic disciplines in the twenty-first century reflect the growing conviction that environmental and public health problems cannot be solved by science and technology alone. Instead, the need for public engaged writing and experimental methods and alliance building between the arts and social and natural sciences ask us to reflect about the craft, expanding genre, and conceptual work of our ethnographic practice. In this course, we will push our methodological premises and analytical training to experiment with the contexts, human interlocutors, matters of concern, and diverse materialities that emerge from and participate in our ethnographic research. This is a writing intensive seminar, and we will workshop different elements of the craft of ethnographic writing, as well as introduce several multimodal techniques into our modes of ethnographic conceptualization.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ANTH 5564 Colonial Ecologies
This seminar explores the historical ecology of European colonial expansion in a comparative framework, concentrating on the production of "periphery" and the transformation of incorporated societies and environments. We begin with a discussion of the theoretical frameworks, sources of evidence, and analytical strategies employed by researchers to address the conjunction of environmental and human history in colonial contexts, including underdevelopment and global systems of circulation; political ecology; and ecological imperialism. We then discuss the circulation of persons, crops, invasives, and microbes as fundamental conditions of emerging global systems. Drawing on these elements, we discuss landscapes as sites of misrecognition, rationalization, and cultural production. This discussion sets the stage for an examination of novel forms of economic and ecological production, including the emergence of the 'drug foods', the transformation of forest products, and the rise of the plantation. We then consider the political ecology of crisis in colonial settings, including agrarian collapse, famine, and 'ecological poverty.'
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ANTH 5570 Archaeology of Landscapes
Traditionally, archaeological research has focused on the "site" or "sites." Regional investigation tends to stress settlement pattern and settlement system determined through archaeological site survey. This seminar will stress the space between the sites or "points" on the landscape. Most previous attempts at "landscape archaeology" tended to focus on the relationship of sites and the natural environment. This course will highlight the cultural, "anthropogenic," or "built environment"--in this case human modification and transformation of the natural landscape in the form of pathways, roads, causeways, monuments, walls, agricultural fields and their boundaries, gardens, astronomical and calendrical alignments, and water distribution networks. Features will be examined in terms of the "social logic" or formal patterning of cultural space. These can provide insights into indigenous structures such as measurement systems, land tenure, social organization, engineering, cosmology, calendars, astronomy, cognition, and ritual practices. Landscapes are also the medium for understanding everyday life, experience, movement, memory, identity, time, and historical ecology. Ethnographic, ethnohistorical, and archaeological case studies will be investigated from both the Old and New Worlds.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AAMW 5570, LALS 5570
1 Course Unit
ANTH 5620 Agroecology: Farming & the Planet
Food production, essential to life, is also today a major contributor to climate change. In this course, we examine farming and food through the rubric of agroecology, an approach that integrates biological, cultural, and historical factors to develop understandings of farming and food history as well as agriculture's multiple contemporary forms, industrial and non-industrial. We will cover basic aspects of crop evolution and growth, soil, water, and nutrients, with a special focus on the historical global diversity of farming systems, especially in terms of potential alternatives to industrial agriculture. This review forms the foundation for a broader consideration of the impacts of food systems on the planet, and ways to address challenges of climate change, food security, and food sovereignty. Graduate students will prepare a research paper.
Spring, even numbered years only
Mutually Exclusive: ANTH 3620
1 Course Unit
ANTH 5669 Audio Ethnography
This is an intensive, graduate-level, practice-based course in which students will record, edit, and produce anthropologically informed audio works that record and interpret culture and lived experience. Projects in this class will look beyond conventional linguistic or musical codes to sounds whose semiotic or affective value may be less immediately evident. Through the process of making location recordings, analyzing those recordings, composing them into autonomous works, and critiquing every step of the way, this course will engage with questions of ethnographic representation through the medium of sound. In parallel with contextualizing readings and sound projections, throughout the semester students will work intensively on audio projects, receiving training on recording techniques, audio editing, and basic post-production techniques. The course is an opportunity to open up the question of what might constitute 'audio documentary' or 'ethnographic audio'. Presentation strategies for final projects will be discussed and decided on individual bases. Projects will be situated in relationship to cognate fields, including the anthropology of the senses, interdisciplinary sound studies, ethnomusicology, ethnographic cinema, sound art, sound mapping, soundscape composition, and experimental nonfiction media practices which involve location recording. Through weekly sound projections and home listening, students will also gain a familiarity with existing genres and uses of nonfiction audio in anthropology and related fields.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ANTH 5700 Oil to Diamonds: The Political Economy of Natural Resources in Africa
This course examines the ways in which the processes of the extraction, refining, sale and use of natural resources – including oil and diamond – in Africa produce complex regional and global dynamics. We explore how values are placed on resources, how such values, the regimes of valuation, commodification and the social formations that are (re)produced by these regimes lead to cooperation and conflict in the contemporary African state, including in the relationships of resource-rich African countries with global powers. Specific cases will be examined against the backdrop of theoretical insights to encourage comparative analyses beyond Africa. Some audio-visual materials will be used to enhance the understanding of the political economy and sociality of natural resources.
Fall
Also Offered As: AFRC 5700, SOCI 5700
Mutually Exclusive: AFRC 4500
1 Course Unit
ANTH 5720 Geophysical Prospection for Archaeology
Near-surface geophysical prospection methods are now widely used in archaeology as they allow archaeologists to rapidly map broad areas, minimize or avoid destructive excavation, and perceive physical dimensions of archaeological features that are outside of the range of human perception. This course will cover the theory of geophysical sensors commonly used in archaeological investigations and the methods for collecting, processing, and interpreting geophysical data from archaeological contexts. We will review the physical properties of common archaeological and paleoenvironmental targets, the processes that led to their deposition and formation, and how human activity is reflected in anomalies recorded through geophysical survey through lectures, readings, and discussion. Students will gain experience collecting data in the field with various sensors at archaeological sites in the region. A large proportion of the course will be computer-based as students work with data from geophysical sensors, focusing on the fundamentals of data processing, data fusion, and interpretation. Some familiarity with GIS is recommended.
Spring, even numbered years only
Also Offered As: AAMW 5720, CLST 7315, MELC 5925, NELC 5925
1 Course Unit
ANTH 5745 Rights of/for Nature: Critical Engagements from Latin America
This course delves into various approximations of the Rights of Nature movement. It specifically examines a range of legal actions that have arisen to safeguard life and emphasize human relationships with non-human entities. The course is particularly dedicated to dissecting a range of legal strategies that have come into existence to ensure the preservation of life forms beyond just humans, forging a profound connection between humanity and the diverse entities that constitute the natural world. The course will concentrate on Latin American cases as a burgeoning global movement, although the philosophical and theoretical exploration extends far beyond this region. Some topics we will discuss in class are: Earth Law and the Rights of Nature; Bringing Nature to Court and the Law; and Animal Rights. For instance, are animals part of the Rights of Nature movement? By analyzing these legal actions, students will understand how legal systems can be leveraged as powerful environmental conservation and advocacy tools. Students will also learn the importance of bridging the legal practice with how the social sciences approach these questions.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: LALS 5745
Mutually Exclusive: LALS 3745
1 Course Unit
ANTH 5770 Everyday States: The Anthropology of Power and Politics
While anthropologists have long been interested in political systems, they have in recent years made the modern state a critical site of ethnographic analysis. By focusing on everyday practice of officials in the Global North and South, anthropologists have drawn attention to the creative ways in which state actors and subjects of rule make and maintain its powerful institutions. Even as bureaucracies are formalized and instituted as sites of rational order and even-handed administration, scholars of everyday state formation have drawn attention to the ways that state authority depends on and reproduces racialized, gendered and geopolitical inequality. Indeed, like many other social institutions, racialized states are constituted through differentiated relations between government workers and the governed, through everyday rituals of violence and sovereignty, discipline and improvement. The class begins with a review of some influential theorizations of the modern state. Next, we focus on how political authority and social difference are produced by the everyday work of states. We attend to the colonial, racialized and gendered workings of states- particularly through their efforts to discipline black and brown bodies through sovereign violence and differentiated plans and programs of development. Finally, we will conclude the class by attending to the political work of subordinated groups as they demand distributive justice, equity and full citizenship in 'most of the world.'
Spring, odd numbered years only
1 Course Unit
ANTH 5780 The Biology of Inequality
What is a more important predictor of how long you will live, the genes you inherit from your parents or the zip code where you were raised? In this class, we will try to answer this question and others regarding the origins of social disparities in health in the US. The course will also consider the broader global context, and ask why the US spends so much money on health care, but lags behind many nations in key indicators of population health. We will examine how social stratification by race/ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, education, and neighborhood quality shapes our biology and the health status of individuals, families, and populations; and, conversely, how health itself can be a fundamental determinant of key social outcomes such as educational achievement. This class takes a biocultural perspective seeking to understand how social inequalities interact with human biology; especially nutrition, health, and physiological stress. The course begins by reviewing perspectives on various forms of inequality and the ways inequalities become embodied as biology (including a review of biological systems and processes), and introduces several overlapping biocultural models that have emerged from anthropology and public health. A series of readings and case studies follow that link some aspect of human biology (nutrition, health, reproduction, psychosocial stress) to poverty and inequalities, and try to present both quantitative and qualitative aspects of these linkages, as well as how inequalities and poor health reinforce and reproduce each other. In order to be successful, this class requires engagement, participation, and discussion.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ANTH 5805 Ruins and Reconstruction
This class examines our enduring fascination with ruins coupled with our commitments to reconstruction from theoretical, ethical, socio-political and practical perspectives. This includes analyzing international conventions and principles, to the work of heritage agencies and NGOs, to the implications for specific local communities and development trajectories. We will explore global case studies featuring archaeological and monumental sites with an attention to context and communities, as well as the construction of expertise and implications of international intervention. Issues of conservation from the material to the digital will also be examined. Throughout the course we will be asking what a future in ruins holds for a variety of fields and disciplines, as well as those who have most to win or lose in the preservation of the past.
Also Offered As: CLST 7317, HSPV 5850, MELC 5950, NELC 5950
1 Course Unit
ANTH 5809 It was the Law at the Time: Museums, Colonialism, and the Question of Property
Current discussions about who owns cultural property, especially in relation to objects acquired under and during Europe's colonial project, form their arguments, limits and possibilities around international legal instruments such as UNESCO's conventions on cultural property. Like broader claims for reparations by formally colonized peoples, legal demands for reparations or restitution with regard to cases of colonial injustice often run up against responses such as 'it was the law at the time' or 'it was a long, long time ago and therefore there are no legal venues for claimants today'. The CARICOM-claim regarding reparations for slavery submitted by a number of Caribbean states, as well as demands regarding cultural treasures looted in the late 19th century in different parts of Africa and elsewhere, are clear examples of this phenomenon. Proposed solution for these conflicts almost always circumvent questions of ownership (at the time) or other legal possibilities. They are sought in extra-legal ways. Increased attention for these and similar cases have fueled new research into the histories of slavery and colonialism, and into the provenance of colonial cultural objects in Western museums. Similarly there is an increasing number of research projects that explore, for example, the fate of colonial objects in Europe, in relation to the fate of Nazi-looted art. While the legal limits of current claims form part of the investigation of many of these studies, they often fail to pay serious attention to the relationship between the law and the colonial project itself. Importantly, they also fail to explore the relationship between the law, questions of property and the 'creation' of the colonized subject. This seminar will focus on this nexus and will interrogate the role of law within the colonial era, especially with regard to the legal fashioning of hierarchies of colonial subjects and colonial objects. In what ways is the law implicated the colonial project itself, and what role did it place in the fashioning of colonial subjects and colonial objects? Moreover, what role should an attentiveness at the law play in today's debates around reparation or restitution/ These are some of the key questions that the course will explore. Bringing together readings from legal and political philosophy, material culture and critical heritage studies, this course explores some of the key debates and texts surrounding questions of law, philosophy, colonialism and questions around reparations or restitution of cultural objects. Students will be introduced to the works of some of the key thinkers on which contemporary notions of ownership, the legal subject and (cultural) property are based, probing their genealogy in relation to the racial hierarchies established under the colonial project. We will explore both the history and application of legal frameworks that governed colonial subjects and (cultural) objects alike and their basis in legal philosophy. Is there reason to rethink the role of law within debates around reparations and restitution? And, last but not least: are there reasons to rethink the idea of property itself? What other genealogies of the law can we trace to think differently about ownership of (cultural) property?
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ANTH 5830 Ethnographic Filmmaking
This ethnographic methodology course considers filmmaking/videography as a tool in conducting ethnographic research as well as a medium for presenting academic research to scholarly and non-scholarly audiences. The course engages the methodological and theoretical implications of capturing data and crafting social scientific accounts/narratives in images and sounds. Students are required to put theory into practice by conducting ethnographic research and producing an ethnographic film as their final project. In service to that goal, students will read about ethnography (as a social scientific method and representational genre), learn and utilize ethnographic methods in fieldwork, watch non-fiction films (to be analyzed for formal properties and implicit assumptions about culture/sociality), and acquire rigorous training in the skills and craft of digital video production. This is an ABCS course, and students will produce short ethnographic films with students in Philadelphia high schools as part of a partnership project with the School District of Philadelphia. Due to the time needed for ethnographic film production, this is a year-long course, which will meet periodically in both the fall and spring semesters.
Two Term Class, Student must enter first term; credit given after both terms are complete
Also Offered As: EDUC 5466
1 Course Unit
ANTH 5840 World Heritage in Global Conflict
Heritage is always political. Such a statement might refer to the everyday politics of local stakeholder interests on one end of the spectrum, or the volatile politics of destruction and erasure of heritage during conflict, on the other. If heritage is always political then one might expect that the workings of World Heritage might be especially fraught given the international dimension. In particular, the intergovernmental system of UNESCO World Heritage must navigate the inherent tension between state sovereignty and nationalist interests and the wider concerns of a universal regime. The World Heritage List has almost 1200 properties has many such contentious examples, including sites in Iraq, Mali, Syria, Crimea, Palestine, Armenia and Cambodia. As an organization UNESCO was born of war with an explicit mission to end global conflict and help the world rebuild materially and morally yet has found its own history increasingly entwined with that of international politics and violence.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: HSPV 5840
1 Course Unit
ANTH 5857 Cultural Heritage and Conflict
Intentional destruction of cultural heritage is designed to erase the presence of a people in history and has become an all too familiar feature of the devastation wrought by contemporary violence and "ethnic cleansing." Recent cases appear frequently in news headlines and include such well-known examples as the 2001 demolition of the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan, the 2012 destruction of Sufi shrines in Timbuktu, Mali, and the recent obliteration of historic sites across Syria and Iraq. This course explores this phenomenon by examining such questions as: Why is cultural heritage targeted in conflict? Under what circumstances? By whom? In so doing, we will engage with readings that discuss the historical development of the international laws and norms that aim to protect cultural heritage during conflict and examples successful and unsuccessful humanitarian interventions.
Spring
1 Course Unit
ANTH 5893 Natural and Cultural Heritage in Global Perspective
This seminar will explore the ideas surrounding the theories, discourses, and practices surrounding natural and cultural heritage. Heritage has become inscribed in the planning of urban and rural landscapes, designed as tourist destinations, and considered a universal good in global cosmopolitan society. But it would be well to ask: what kind of "nature" and "culture" has been labeled as heritage? What kind of organizations, economics, and politics are necessary to sustain it? How are these put in place? By whom? For whom? Over the course of the semester, students will engage with readings that discuss how cultural and natural heritage is communicated to the public and the relationship between academic critique and pragmatic social engagement.
Spring
1 Course Unit
ANTH 5898 The Economics of Heritage
Governmental resources for archaeological and heritage sites are declining worldwide while commercial and economic development initiatives are threatening the fabric of heritage and the larger landscape environment to ever greater degrees. As a consequence, the competition for resources to protect and preserve heritage is intensifying, as is the challenge to articulate the value of heritage resources vs. competing commercial or public projects. This is the context for understanding the issues surrounding the definition of the value of cultural heritage assets and the tools available for their measurement and management. This course explores in some depth issues relating to the economic analysis of heritage and culture. It is designed to provide students with a foundational understanding of the economics of heritage-related projects, the tools and techniques available for their analysis and the ethical and practical issues of public policy and private actions that determine the future of heritage resources. Readings and case studies will explore technical, practical and ethical issues that arise in cultural heritageeconomics. Relevant analytical techniques will be introduced and particular emphasis will be placed on commercial, government and community issues unique to heritage-related activities. Special emphasis will be placed upon developing pertinent strategies for the tourist industry. Students will produce one case-study project intended to integrate the technical and practical aspects of the course.
1 Course Unit
ANTH 5910 Multi-Modal Ethnography: Anthropology Beyond Text
What does the digital age mean for humanistic, social scientific, and professional inquiry and practice? How do non-text based formats - such as film, dance and other kinds of performance, creative writing, and soundscapes - transform both the processes and products of research? How do they inform and transform our disciplines, and what might this mean for the communities with which we work? This advanced undergraduate seminar will address these (and other related) questions. Taught by the invited Fellows from the Center for Experimental Ethnography, this course will take shape differently each semester according to the Fellow's area of expertise and practice. Students will be encouraged to explore alternative formats of representation that move beyond text while still being grounded in ethnographic research, and they will develop skills in relevant media. https://www.sas.upenn.edu/anthropology/courses/topics-courses
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ANTH 5940 Indigenous Theory & Decolonizing Methodologies
This course will delve into some of the innovative theoretical approaches and interpretations, rooted in long-standing Indigenous ontologies, that are emerging within the inter-disciplinary field of Native American and Indigenous Studies. Decolonial projects highlight Indigenous conceptions of materiality, kinship, and landscape, while also critically examining the impact of colonizing ideologies, and undoing antiquated and biased colonial settler interpretations. Students will learn practical methods for deploying Indigenous theory and decolonizing methodologies in diverse research settings. Course readings and interviews with Indigenous knowledge-keepers will feature innovative socio-cultural, ethnohistorical, museological, and archaeological research projects that emphasize processes of consultation and collaboration. Individual case studies will focus on: ecological knowledges; territorial sovereignty; community-based archaeological research; and the reclamation and preservation of cultural heritage. The goal is to understand how academic research can be more inclusive of, and more responsible to, Indigenous communities.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ANTH 5955 Evaluative Practices and the Problem of "Value"
The problem of “value” has long beguiled and bedeviled scholars across the humanities and social sciences. In this seminar, we unravel this problematic by exploring the way “value” has been variably characterized as both that which agents strive for and that which signs stand for. Ultimately, our focus will not be on “value” per se, but on “evaluation” as a discursive and semiotic process that reflects and shapes the ways we humans navigate and negotiate our worlds. Drawing from wide-ranging ethnographic examples, and informed by classical and contemporary theoretical issues in the humanities and social sciences, we will re-evaluate value as a matter of anthropological concern.
Spring, even numbered years only
1 Course Unit
ANTH 5970 Contemporary Artists in Conversation: Reckoning and Repair
In this project-based learning course, students will develop skills in interviewing, oral history, and podcast production by hosting a series of conversations with visiting contemporary artists including participating artists in the transformative, multi-site exhibit, "Rising Sun-Artists and an Uncertain America" (a Spring 2022 collaboration between the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts and the African American Museum of Philadelphia). Following the exhibit plan, this course focuses thematically on how these contemporary artists tackle the "disquieting canonical history of the United States", and how their diverse practices speak to the "re-appraisal, reformation, reckoning, and repair necessary to find a collective way forward" at this critical social moment. This course considers contemporary art as a complementary method of scholarship to ethnography, giving students hands on-experience in exploring how conversations between art and anthropology can open up avenues for collaborative, ethical, and engaged scholarship. This course is designed to be fruitful for students with all levels of experience, including beginners with little prior podcasting/media experience. Students will be tasked with conducting ethnographic oral histories in interviews with artists, but also attending to the specific assumptions and conventions of representation that artists use, and the way they intervene into social challenges of reckoning and repair in their practice.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ANTH 6000 Contemporary Archaeology in Theory
This graduate seminar addresses contemporary anthropological archaeology and considers the varied ways inferences are made about past and present human behavior from the archaeological record. It reviews such fundamental topics as the use of analogy, Middle Range theory, symbolism and meaning, social and cultural evolution, ideology and power, feminism and gender, and indigenous (non-Western) perspectives. It also foregrounds basic issues regarding heritage, looting, and ethics.
Fall
1 Course Unit
ANTH 6010 Contemporary Approaches to the Study of Culture and Society
A critical examination of recent history and theory in cultural and social anthropology. Topics include structural-functionalism; symbolic anthropology; post-modern theory. Emphasis is on major schools and trends in America, Britain, and France.
Spring
1 Course Unit
ANTH 6015 Queer Anthropology
This graduate seminar offers a chronological exploration of queer anthropology. We trace the trajectory of this subfield: how has research on non-normative forms of gender and sexuality enriched the discipline of anthropology? And how have anthropological theory and methods contributed to lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender/queer/intersex (LGBTQI) studies? Our seminar examines feminist and queer ethnography as genres of writing and as modalities of praxis. We traverse a wide geographic scope in our readings, including North America, Latin America, the Caribbean, Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, East Asia, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. This cross-cultural lens elucidates how queer epistemologies, ontologies, and subjectivities intersect with legacies of colonialism, imperialism, indigeneity, nationalism, transnationalism, race, religion, class, disability, medicine, technology, social movements, activism, family, and affect (including pleasure and joy). Students will gain a deep understanding of anthropological concepts—and their convergences with queer theory—including notions of sexuality, gender, embodiment, agency, performativity, identity, physical and structural violence, narrative, representation, and social change. As we consider the past, present, and future of queer anthropology we will also discern a foundational question of what constitutes queer ethnography.
1 Course Unit
ANTH 6020 Evolutionary Anthropology
This course will explore various subfields of biological anthropology to better understand what it means to be human. Special attention will be paid to current issues and problems in these subfields, and the different ways in which researchers are attempting to understand and uncover the details of human evolution. Among the areas that are explored in this course are paleoanthropology, primatology, human biology, molecular anthropology, evolutionary medicine, epigenetics, and human life history. Specific issues to be explored include the primate roots of human behavior, brain and language evolution, new fossil hominins, the origins of anatomically modern humans, and modern human migration history.
Spring
1 Course Unit
ANTH 6030 Language in Culture and Society
First-year anthropology graduate students or Instructor Permission. Examination of properties of human language which enable social persons to interpret the cultural world and to act within it. Topics include: principles of lexical and grammatical organization; the role of language structure (grammar) and linguistic context (indexicality) in discursive activity; referential uses of language; social interaction; markers of social role, identity, and group-belonging; criteria by which models of linguistic form and function are formulated; the empirical limits within which different models have explanatory value.
Fall
1 Course Unit
ANTH 6070 Primate Behavior and Ecology
This course explores the behavior of wild primates and the ecological models that attempt to explain the evolution of these behaviors. The evolution and taxonomy of primates will be reviewed, followed by a brief history of wild primate studies. We will then explore primate behavior through theoretical frameworks ranging from socioecological theory to sexual selection. Topics discussed include, but are not limited to, socioecology, aggression, kinship, cooperation, reproductive strategies, cognition, and conservation. Those enrolled in the graduate section (ANTH 6070) will have additional responsibilities assigned.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AAMW 6070
Mutually Exclusive: ANTH 2070
1 Course Unit
ANTH 6090 Psychoanalysis and Anthropology
This course will introduce students to the rich literature that has grown up around the encounter between psychoanalysis and anthropology, from totem and taboo, to studies of the Oedipus complex, child-rearing practices, ritual symbolism, mythology, and dreams. The class will also look to the future, endeavoring to examine as well such issues as the role of computers (are they self objects?) and the internet (including such online games as "Second Life"), dreams in space alien abduction narratives, sexuality in advertising, political psychology, and other contemporary issues. This course counts towards towards the Psychoanalytic Studies (PSYS) Minor.
Not Offered Every Year
Mutually Exclusive: ANTH 3090
1 Course Unit
ANTH 6110 Topics In Anthropology and the Modern World
This course relates anthropological models and methods to current problems in the Modern World. The overall objective is to show how the research findings and analytical concepts of anthropology may be used to illuminate and explain events as they have unfolded in the recent news and in the course of the semester. Each edition of the course will focus on a particular country or region that has been in the news.
Fall
Also Offered As: MELC 6650, NELC 6650
1 Course Unit
ANTH 6180 Anthropology and Praxis
This course focuses on real world community problems, engaged scholarship, and the evaluation of actively-running Penn programs intended to improve social conditions in West Philadelphia. Two trends emerge in public interest social science that students will explore through research and evaluation: 1.) mergingproblem solving with theory and analysis in the interest of change motivated bya commitment to social justice, racial harmony, equality, and human rights; and 2.) engaging in public debate on human issues to make the research results accessible to a broad audience. As part of the course, students will learn the foundations of anthropology, social theory, and evaluation as they work with qualitative and quantitative data while conducting an evaluation based on community and partner need. Students will gain direct experience conducting evaluation research as a collaborative process and have an opportunity to engage in academically-based community service with a focus on social change.
Not Offered Every Year
Mutually Exclusive: ANTH 3180
1 Course Unit
ANTH 6200 Directed Reading and Research
To be arranged only by consultation with academic adviser and faculty member(s) to be involved; a proposed syllabus must be presented for approval, and written papers will be required without exception. On approval of these papers one copy must be presented to the Department of Anthropology office for filing.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ANTH 6220 Historical Archaeology Laboratory
Parallel graduate course to ANTH 1220. Lab class will meet in three hour sections on Fridays and Saturdays and will involve the analysis of artifacts, documentary records, oral historic sources and period illustrations collected on Southern New Jersey historic sites and Silver Reef, a ghost town in Southwestern Utah. No Previous archaeological or lab experience is required. Course may be repeated for credit.
Spring
1 Course Unit
ANTH 6260 Intensity
This course examines the manner in which humans encounter the continuous and gradable features of phenomena in social life - sensory qualities of objects, people's aspirations and affect, pitch movement during voiced talk, monsoons and sea breezes, biological growth and environmental degradation, migratory flows in transnational settings - and attempt to evaluate or convert them into discrete dimensions of social life. We examine how intensities and gradients are managed in everyday life as well as in institutional settings - through government policies, scientific protocols, surveillance regimes, infrastructural agendas - and we survey the ways in which everyday and institutional practices reflect and shape each other in societies across the world. In particular, we explore the question of what an anthropology of intensity might look like, and how it may reconfigure approaches to the ethnographic study of human affairs.
1 Course Unit
ANTH 6280 Language in Culture and Society: Special Topics
The course is devoted to a single research topic of contemporary interest in linguistic anthropology. Topics vary from year to year. Readings locate current debates in relation to longstanding assumptions in the literature and new directions in contemporary research.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ANTH 6307 Contemporary Native Americans
This course examines the social and political lives of contemporary Native American Indians in the United States and Canada. Topics include: Indigenous identity; homelands and natural resources; popular culture and media; Indigenous arts and cultural expression; museum representations; athletics; gender relations; tribal recognition and sovereignty; and resistance movements. We will consider the origins of federal programs and legislation that have become essential to the protection of Native American freedoms. Students can expect to gain an appreciation of the complexity and cultural diversity of Native communities and tribal nations and insights into their interactions with other cultures over time.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ANTH 6329 Psychoanalytic and Anthropological Perspectives on Childhood
How do people become who they are, both similar to others and uniquely individual? How might these similarities and differences be shaped by childhood experiences in family, community, and societies around the world? How do children develop emotionally? Morally? What features of human development, expression of emotions, and relational patterns are universal for our species? What features are not universal? And what is and is not known about these questions? In this course, we will consider these and many other questions. We will read about and discuss complex and dynamic interactions between culture and individual psychology, and between nature and nurture from birth to adulthood. We will carefully examine various phases of human development as described by psychoanalysts and anthropologists. The course includes anthropologic and psychoanalytic readings and videotapes, as well as literature, fairy tales, and mythologies from cultures around the world. The instructors are both psychoanalysts, one a psychiatrist and one a pediatrician. The course counts towards the Psychoanalytic Studies (PSYS) Minor.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ANTH 6340 Feminist Ethnography
This course will investigate the relationships among women, gender, sexuality, and anthropological research. We will begin by exploring the trajectory of research interest in women and gender, drawing first from the early work on gender and sex by anthropologists like Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict; moving through the 1970s and 1980s arguments about gender, culture, and political economy; arriving at more current concerns with gender, race, sexuality, and empire. For the rest of the semester, we will critically read contemporary ethnographies addressing pressing issues such as nationalism, militarism, neoliberalism and fundamentalism. Throughout, we will investigate what it means not only to "write women's worlds", but also to analyze broader socio-cultural, political, and economic processes through a gendered lens. We will, finally, address the various ways feminist anthropology fundamentally challenged the discipline's epistemological certainties, as well as how it continues to transform our understanding of the foundations of the modern world.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ANTH 6420 Ethnographies in Linguistic Anthropology
This course provides graduate students in linguistic anthropology and allied fields an opportunity for sustained, critical engagement with ethnographic monographs in linguistic and semiotic anthropology. Readings vary yearly, but run the gamut from the classical or 'canonical' to the contemporary or 'experimental.' Recurring concerns include: the nature of the ethnographic monograph as text-artifact; the presentation and exposition of ethnographic and linguistic particulars; questions of 'authorial voice'; and the registers, genres, and styles of ethnographic representation obtaining in the linguistic anthropological tradition.
Spring
1 Course Unit
ANTH 6442 Making Virtual Worlds: Space, Place, and Human Experience
In this class, we will explore virtual worlds as they shape identities, foster social interactions, and redefine our understanding of history and human experience. This class will provide equal parts of technical skill-building in virtual reality design, and engaged discussion on readings. It considers virtual reality as a way of making media, conducting scientific experiments, and probing the limits of humanity. Over the course of the semester, discussions, activities, and workshops will help you incrementally build a small-scale virtual world/gathering/or experience as your final project, informed by insights from design anthropology, neuroscience, psychology and philosophy. Key readings of scholars like Manuel Delanda and Donna Haraway will be supplemented with immersive “field trips” to boundary-breaking 3D virtual worlds crafted by contemporary artists, historically-accurate recreations of landscapes and buildings, as well as virtual worlds built by scientists to better understand the ways that brains work and bodies can be healed. At the end of the course, you will emerge with a technical skill set as well as a critical anthropological perspective on virtualized worlds. You will be able to: Integrate anthropological approaches to visual ethnography and participatory design Understand the core principles and techniques of virtual reality landscape design and development Employ industry-standard software tools to create virtual worlds, Analyze virtual reality landscapes, informed by anthropological perspectives on social interaction, identity construction, and community formation. Apply virtual reality landscape design techniques to a real-world project, employing ethnographic methods to understand user experiences, cultural contexts, and social dynamics. This course requires a basic understanding of 3D modeling software. If you have completed at least one course in computer graphics or possess equivalent experience, you possess the foundation to delve into the realm of Making Virtual Worlds.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: FNAR 6442
Mutually Exclusive: ANTH 3442
1 Course Unit
ANTH 6443 Creative Studio for Ethnographers
This intensive practice-based workshop is a semester-long creative studio for students seeking to bring an existing experimental ethnography project to fruition, both in terms of production quality and theoretical engagement. Here, “experimental” implies an engagement with a creative process whose outcomes are unknown and unpredictable, while “ethnography” suggests a project that engages a shared social world or community. Rather than limit ourselves to one creative medium or theory base, this class will be shaped in conversation with students' specific interests, and is open to those exploring a variety of media forms. Students are expected to enter the class with a rough draft of an experimental ethnographic project (a collection of photographs, illustrations, video clips, a sound piece, a creative story, a short film, etc…). Over the course of the semester, this draft will be continuously honed and re-iterated through community conversation. In the introductory portion of the course, we will draw on pedagogical methods developed in art studio settings as we learn about one another’s projects, build a shared language for understanding and responding to each other's work. The second phase and bulk of the course will involve a rotating schedule of presentations and response sessions, when students will present a new iteration of their in-process work and the class will respond substantively, rigorously, and thoroughly using the shared language developed at the beginning of the course. Instructors will prepare weekly class ethnographic readings/screenings that draw from the presenting students theoretical/methodological engagements, and provoke stimulating discussion. Over the course of the semester, students will present four increasingly-honed iterations of their project, culminating in a showcase/exhibit at the end of the course (which may be private or public, depending on students aims). For their final assignment, students will submit their project to the journal/platform/exhibit they selected at the beginning of the course and/or outline a course of action for doing so.
Also Offered As: FNAR 6443
Mutually Exclusive: ANTH 3443
1 Course Unit
ANTH 6460 Molecular Anthropology
In this course, we will explore the molecular revolution in biological anthropology. In particular, we will examine how molecular data can be used to illuminate anthropological question concerning human origins, evolution and biological variation. Some of the specific topics to be covered in this course are the phylogenetic relationships among primates, kinship in apes and monkeys, the hominoid trichotomy, modern human origins and migrations, Neanderthal and Denisovan admixture with modern humans, biogenetics of skin color, and physiological, phenotypic and disease adaptations.
Not Offered Every Year
Mutually Exclusive: ANTH 2460
1 Course Unit
ANTH 6530 Social Theory from Kant to Deleuze
The course examines the work of 20th century writers like Weber, Bourdieu, Foucault and Deleuze in the light of the intellectual traditions to which they belong, including the work of writers like Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche. Particular attention is given to the philosophical roots of the models of society proposed by specific authors and the question of the applicability of such models to ethnographically based anthropological research.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ANTH 6550 Methods and Grantwriting for Anthropological Research
This course is designed for third- and fourth-year graduate students in anthropology who are working on their dissertation research proposals and submitting grants. Graduate students from other departments who will be submitting grant proposals that include an ethnographic component are also welcome. Students will develop their proposals throughout the course of the semester, and will meet important fall submission deadlines. They will begin by working with various databases to search funding sources relevant to the research they plan to conduct. In class sessions, they will also work with the professor and their peers to refine their research questions, their methods, the relationship of any previous research to their dissertation fieldwork, and the broader theoretical and "real-world" significance of their proposed projects. Finally, students will also have the opportunity to have live "chats" with representatives from funding agencies, thereby gaining a better sense of what particular foundations are looking for in a proposal.
Fall
1 Course Unit
ANTH 6552 The State, Civil Society, and Democracy in Africa
This course examines the nature and dynamics of the state and civil society in Africa and how these determine the career of democracy, democratization and democratic rule in the continent. It considers different accounts of the state in Africa (or the African state), civil society and democracy in elaborating an informed understanding of the political, economic and social processes in the continent. How does the nature of the state in Africa account for the nature of the civil society and vice versa? How can the career of democracy in the continent illuminate our understanding of the nature of state-society relations? How robust is the relationship between civil society and the state? How can we account for the relationships among civil society, the state and democratic institutions and processes? What are the local, regional, and global forces that nurture and/or hinder democratic practices, including electoral democracy? These questions are confronted in light of their implications for, and complex interactions with, different social formations, institutions, groups, and social practices including gender, ethnicity, nationalism, race, religion, social protest, political institutions, economic formations, etc., etc.
Spring
Also Offered As: AFRC 6552
1 Course Unit
ANTH 6570 Research Design
This is a practical course on the challenges of designing research projects in anthropology with a special focus on the dissertation project. We will discuss how to select and refine a topic that is, ideally, important without being impossible. Interesting research can often be described or understood in multiple ways, and we will practice recasting project proposals for different kinds of audiences and formats. We will also consider issues of methodology, or the logic of method. Specific kinds of questions tend to lead to specific field and lab methods, and it is important to match your questions to your ways of answering them. This is not, however, a methods course. If you need to learn ethnography, ceramic analysis, textual analysis or some other set of methods, you should look for specific instruction in that field. Instead, we will consider how to assemble a research project that is well-structured, significant, and feasible using one or more analytical strategies. Research design is critical not only for planning research appropriate to your questions but also serves as the basis for successful proposals. Proposal-writing is a specific genre you will need to master; the final product for this course is therefore a research proposal. We will discuss the format of the proposal in detail. Not all proposals need to follow the same template, but there is a family resemblance to successful proposals; thus, although we will follow advice for writing scientific proposals, more humanistically-oriented students should not find this to be a problem.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ANTH 6580 Discourse Seminar
This seminar explores the interface between discourse, culture, and social processes. It is designed for graduate students in anthropology and related disciplines who (1) wish to study some aspect of culture from the perspective of discourse, including not only discourse in the form of linguistic signs but also discourse as film or other multimodal signs; and (2) themselves have or will acquire during the semester materials (texts, recordings, ethnographic data, etc.) that they wish to analyze from an anthropological point view or who are preparing dissertation proposals dealing these issues. While the course is designed with these two purposes, graduate students interested in studying literature on discourse for other purposes are also welcomed. Class sessions will include discussion of theoretical issues in the study of discourse, as well as writings by contemporary authors dealing with semiotics, discourse, and film. The seminar is designed for maximum flexibility in accommodating students interests and needs.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ANTH 6664 Documentary Ethnography for Museum of Exhibition practices
This course will investigate research modalities that center around documentary storytelling in the museum context. During the semester, we will examine research strategies that collaborate with curatorial experts. e class will utilize cinematic techniues that investigate cultural narratives revolving around cultural heritage sites, rituals and ceremonies, artifacts, materials and living traditions. Students will engage Solomon's process of her creation of the new digital and in-gallery content that will reframe e Metropolitan Museum’s African art galleries. e semester will culminate in students creating their own short lm content that will screen publicly in the gallery at the end of the semester.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: CIMS 6664, FNAR 6664
Mutually Exclusive: ANTH 3664
1 Course Unit
ANTH 6665 Fables from the Flesh: Black feminist movement and the embodied archive
Drawing inspiration from Harge’s multiform fable project FLY | DROWN and Audre Lorde’s conception of biomythography, students will trace their interiority to realize and imagine how personal histories, ancestral inheritance, and metaphysics live/move through the body. We will translate and transform stories of the flesh into a series of compositional modalities–which may include text, movement, performance, sound, and installation–to create lexicons that honor subjectivity as form. Informed by surrender, refusal, imagination, and self-sovereignty; we will situate our embodied archives as vessels for fable writing, create and correct myths through movement, and expand our relationship to memory, time, space, and illegibility. Throughout the course, we will turn to Black feminist literary and performance works employing fable, myth, and ancestral legacies including but not limited to: Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Aretha Franklin’s gospel music, Jaamil Olawale Kosoko’s Chameleon, and a close reading of Harge’s FLY | DROWN. The room will be grounded in practices of Black fellowship, moving between study group, kickback, ceremony, cypher, and incubator. We will oscillate between these formats depending on the needs of the course and the cohort.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AFRC 6665, GSWS 6665
Mutually Exclusive: ANTH 3665
1 Course Unit
ANTH 6666 Crafting an Ethnography of Vulnerability
What if we could practice a radical ethnography of vulnerability because we believe that truly democratized, ethical engagement requires the unconditional vulnerability of the ethnographer: the relinquishing of all academic, professional, and project power bullying through a humble transparency and personal permeability that immediately triggers trust by de-enshrining the intellectual, by bravely including the emotional and spiritual life of the empathic ethnographer. Most of reality is invisible; the deeper communal paths are psychic. I am a veteran, multi-disciplinary social choreographer who has intuitively employed ethnographic tools and strategies for the past 30 years, collectively producing transformative performative portraits of threatened communities. For this graduate and undergraduate seniors workshop, I wish to invite students into my field process, in terms of my readings and roamings through the world. The workshop experience will culminate in a field trip to San Juan, under the auspices of the Conservation Trust of Puerto Rico, to visit historic colonial sites and contemporary model projects such as El Departamento de la Comida, a queer farming collective.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: FNAR 6666
Mutually Exclusive: ANTH 3666
1 Course Unit
ANTH 6667 Advanced Documentary Storytelling
The course is intended for students who have already taken an earlier documentary course and have an interest in film work or research in the nonfiction realm. The course will isolate, highlight, and explore the aspect of narration (storytelling) in documentary cinema. The objective is to enhance students’ understanding of the relation between content and form in documentary films; provide them with critical and aesthetic tools to think about nonfiction cinema and inspire them to find original and expressive ways to deliver their own non-fiction material to audiences. The very definition of a film as “nonfiction” implies (perhaps wrongly) that it is not written and directed in the way that a fiction film is. We must ask ourselves, then, where in craft of nonfiction filmmaking lies the storytelling? Over the trajectory of the course, we will be analyzing the narrative system of several documentary films. We will learn how story-telling tools are employed in nonfiction cinema and examine the aesthetical and ethical dilemmas unique to nonfiction storytelling. Rather than classifying films by their themes such as “war”, “family” or “race relations” - or categorizing them by accepted taxonomies in documentary theory (“observational”, “classical” or “performative”) - our method we will suggest that an effective way to study a documentary film is to start by identifying its primary documentary material, and to observe how the tools of cinema (diegetic and non-diegetic elements) are applied to this material - creating the storytelling system of the film. The primary material, the element that instigates the making of a documentary, is often a character, a strong human story or an event, but it may also be something much more abstract: An experience, a memory; a place; a painting; an essay or theory, or many other possibilities. The course will begin with the exploration of texts on narrative and documentary theory which will help us define both nonfiction and narration - concepts that will be at the foundation of our discourse moving forward. Once the foundations for exploring narration in the context of nonfiction will have been laid, we will move into to the second and third parts of the course, in which the class will study masterful documentaries, and explore the way their narration systems work, identifying elements that emerge as common narrating “tools”. Then, we will reverse our approach. In the last unit of the course, we will “zoom in” on the specific story-telling elements we identified in our exploration and see how they are used by different filmmakers to achieve different objectives. By the end of the course students should have a grasp of the way characters and events are constructed in documentaries, as well as how filmmakers create storytelling systems and find narrative solutions for challenging and original nonfiction stories.
Mutually Exclusive: ANTH 3667
1 Course Unit
ANTH 6668 Footage Films, or Narrating a Dataset
We begin this course with a moratorium on audio-video capture. A hundred days without your own images:) We will attempt instead to collectively and then sequentially author a set of video essays that engage with material that we are already deeply enmeshed in. That are typically too vast, "thin", that either overflow or flow beneath representational or affective media. Examples of what we could make here would be: a video essay on the Wikileaks dataset of global US Embassy shopping lists, a film made from the Radia phone taps, and so on. This course draws on CAMP's learnings from running an open-access footage archive, Pad.ma and related projects, since 2007. Pad.ma asked: what is the ethical and political relation between the category footage ("found", shot in large quantities, with good intentions, left in shoe boxes or dying hard disks) and the category "film". Footage is the raw material, but does it also tell us how film is made, and whether it is beautiful on the inside. That film is made from footage, seems tautological. But in the process we will follow, any simple relation between footage and film is shattered into a multitude of moves by imagers, sounders, writers, editors, narrators and materials. We are inspired by Elizaveta Svilova, editor of "Man with the Movie Camera" carefully indexing, splicing and assembling pieces of film (intercutting them with images of women's work - patching phone lines, sewing, or painting fingernails), and that of her contemporary, Esfir Shub who was foraging cellars, gathering, restoring and compiling footage into films, a hundred years ago. Extending the footage metaphor to other media, we enter a vast terrain of over-collected materials. Health, insurance and other management databases, surveillance data, cctv streams, most of what the modern media industry is made of and which Matt Fuller and Andrew Goffey called Evil Media. Archive or be archived, we said in 2010. But the questions have moved beyond archival ones, to questions of what can be done with archives by situated subjects. We begin by identifying footage collections or datasets that we can situate ourselves in, individually or as a group. We evolve narrative and editorial strategies within a Pad.ma - like interface via group annotations in a process called three-ing. In the second half of the course the participants develop a series of video essays. We see this as a counter-AI process of assimilation. At the end, we may also recognise that there are missing images - and if there is need for us to film, and if so why, with whom, and how. This prepares participants ethically and formally to go forth in the world to create really new images. The course is interdisciplinary and open to graduate students who have interests in film, ethnography, film studies, digital archives and contemporary art, and who like to work collectively and processually to realise ambitious projects.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ANTH 6770 Black Speculative Futures
Why do black cultural producers turn to the speculative? What, in turn, is speculative about blackness? These questions frame this seminar s exploration of how black artists, theorists, and activists imagine different futures, often in the service of critiquing power asymmetries and creating radical transformation in the present. We will explore how the speculative works differently across black literature, visual culture and performance. Additionally, inspired by the multi-disciplinary work that we encounter in the course, we will experiment with crafting our own embodied speculative art in order to better understand its function as both art practice and politics. The course will be divided between discussions centered on close reading of primary and secondary material and creative writing/movement exploration (no previous movement experience necessary). Occasional guest lectures with visiting artists will provide additional fodder for our critical and creative work.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AFRC 6770, ENGL 6770
1 Course Unit
ANTH 6804 Sighting Black Girlhood
The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the deep inequities of our social systems, and protests against police killings drew broader attention to anti-Black state violence worldwide, yet the gendered dimensions of these problems are not always fully understood. While many in the public have come to recognize the suffering of Black boys and men as acute and eventful, Black girls’ suffering has remained largely invisible, a slow confluence of violences that too often go unaddressed. As one way to bring the issues facing Black girls globally to public attention, and to celebrate and support Black girls, this course will provide a background for understanding the challenges faced by Black girls in Philadelphia, Jamaica, and South Africa. We will frame these challenges historically and geopolitically, drawing attention to the issues that contribute to the invisibility of the ordinary Black girl in diverse sites, as well as the resources that will begin to address them. This course also aims to equip students to understand the relationships between research and creative work, and to see artistic production as a catalyst for community-building and critical thinking and action. Toward this end, we will work with a number of partners in Philadelphia, including the Colored Girls Museum and Black Lives Matter-Philly. Because this course is part of a broader project, we will travel as a class to Jamaica during the summer of 2022 and students will participate in a range of projects there, working with partners in the arts, community engagement, and legal advocacy. The question motivating our project is: What are the personal, psychic, spiritual, and economic costs and benefits associated with Black girls fully exercising their humanity?
Also Offered As: AFRC 6804
Mutually Exclusive: ANTH 3804
1 Course Unit
ANTH 6840 Religion and Society in World History
Anthropologists have never found a society that did not have ideas, rituals and practice that falls easily into our category of "religion" (a term coined in Roman times to cover everything relating to assumptions about supernatural forces in any cultural context). So how can we define religion now, over two thousand years since the end of the "Axial Age" (800-200 BCE) that produced all the major religious ideas, that would allow us to include all the forms we know not only of Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity and Islam, but also Confucianism, Hinduism, Jainism, Shinto, Sikhism, Taoism, and Zoroastrianism, and the religions of the small isolated communities we found during the colonial period in Africa and Australia? And why has religious practice been declining in the Western world since the middle of the 20th century? Is the anthropology of religion a different subject now than what it was a hundred years ago? The religions that we know historically, because they are based on texts, especially Christianity and Islam, have obviously changed in many ways since their early days, and it is easy to see a relationship between the way they changed and what was going on in the societies that carried them: Christianity spread through the Roman Empire; Islam spread from Mesopotamia along trade routes, west to Egypt and North Africa, and east into central Asia and north China. It will be interesting to study the various constituents of religion (e.g. Faith, Law, Authority, Ritual, Sacraments, morality, spirituality) comparatively between each of the religions for which we have sufficient data, religious wars, and see the historical significance of (for example) the French Revolution, the Pope, and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ANTH 6867 Reproduction, Justice, and Care: Listening in Philly
Course Summary In this class, you will be introduced to reproductive justice as a holistic theory and a methodological framework that can guide the practice of medicine and anthropology. You will create an oral history with a Philly-based community activist, midwife, doula, or other practitioner whose work engages with reproductive justice, understood expansively as the right to have children, to not have children, and to parent children in healthy environments free from violence and state oppression. At the end of the class, we will release these oral histories together as part of a new season of CEE’s “Reckoning and Repair in Philadelphia” podcast. Recent reports in Philadelphia have called particular attention to the severity of the maternal health crisis in the city, where black birthing people are more than four times as likely to die of preventable causes than their white peers. Such inequalities are not unique or new; Philadelphia was a crucial site where medicine broadly and obstetrics more specifically were born… . Philadelphia is the first city in the United States to have an obstetric society, and it is also the educational home of the so-called father of gynecology, James Marion Sims, who notoriously experimented on enslaved women to develop foundational obstetric procedures still in use today. At the same time, Philadelphia has also been an activist stronghold, as a site of historical Black, Caribbean, Latinx, and immigrant organizing and community care for more than a century. Today, midwives, doulas, doctors, environmental justice workers and others continue to develope nurturing models of child, maternal, and familial care that uplift communities. Many of these have been informed by reproductive justice frameworks. Engaging with a long tradition of scholar-activist ethnography, we will turn to the experiences of these community organizers, birthworkers, midwives, and doulas to gain an understanding of their battles for reproductive justice in Philadelphia: from the persistent inequities in maternal medical care, to the community work to create safe neighborhoods, to patient rights education campaigns, to medical interventions within prisons. Working one-on-one with a partner engaged in this work, students will produce an oral history of reproductive justice in Philadelphia. In the process students will learn crucial methods of critical medical anthropology, and build their skills in ethnographic listening as both a research method and a potentially transformative act of care. It is open to students with all levels of experience, including those with no prior background in audio/media production Through your podcast episodes, you'll answer the following questions: 1. How have historical medical practices and medical cultures in Philadelphia, especially in the context of clinical obstetric care, shaped the current disparities and challenges in reproductive health? 2. What cultural, social, and economic factors have influenced the development of homegrown methods of care within Philadelphia's reproductive justice community, and what do these practices provide (or avoid) that hospital practices do not? 3. How do the experiences and perspectives of doula, reproductive justice workers, and health practitioners intersect with or challenge established medical paradigms? 4. What good does listening and documenting these stories of care and resistance in reproductive justice do, if anything, at the personal, social, and institutional level. This course offers a unique, hands-on, real-world experience, enabling you to develop collaborative, ethical, and engaged work that contributes to Philadelphia's reproductive justice community.
Not Offered Every Year
Mutually Exclusive: ANTH 3867
1 Course Unit
ANTH 6980 Intensive Language Training in Anthropology
This course is designed to allow graduate students to obtain in-depth training in a scholarly language that will be utilized for dissertation fieldwork and satisfying the language exam for the Department of Anthropology Graduate Program. Through this intensive training in the oral and written forms of a language, students will accelerate their competency in it, while also potentially preparing themselves for advanced language training through tutorials or summer immersion programs.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ANTH 6990 Directed Field Training and Research
To be arranged only by consultation with academic adviser and the faculty member(s) to be involved; a proposed syllabus must be presented for approval and written papers will be required without exception. On approval of these papers, one copy must be presented to the Department of Anthropology office for filing.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ANTH 6999 Independent Study in South Asian Archaeology
This course provides a broad overview of the archaeology and early history of South Asia, a region that includes present-day India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Myanmar, Bhutan, and the Maldives. Beginning with a brief overview of the Paleolithic, we will discuss the multiple origins of early agriculture, the development of early states in the Indus river basin and beyond, the second urbanization, the expansion of institutionalized forms of religion, long-distance trade, social differentiation, and the rise of states as empires. No background in archaeology is required. The class will produce a collaborate spatial database of archaeological sites for selected time periods and will produce a document describing some of the major historical changes in South Asia as illustrated by the archaeological database.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ANTH 7000 Colloquium Seminar
This graduate seminar is a full year course open to second year anthropology graduate students. Other interested students should contact the instructors for permission before enrolling. Topic changes each year, corresponding to the Penn Anthropology Department Colloquium series.
Two Term Class, Student may enter either term; credit given for either
1 Course Unit
ANTH 7030 Readings & Research In Linguistic Anthropology
The course is designed for students and faculty interested in discussing current research and/or research topics in any area of linguistic or semiotic anthropology. The primary intent of the course is to familiarize students with the literature on selected research topics and to develop their own research agendas in the light of the literature. Students may enroll on an S/U basis for 0.5 CU per semester. The course may be repeated for credit up to 4 times.
Two Term Class, Student may enter either term; credit given for either
1 Course Unit
ANTH 7040 Culture/Power/Subjectivities
This doctoral level course will introduce students to a conceptual language and theoretical tools for analyzing and explaining the complex intersection of racialized, ethnic, gendered, sexual, and classed differences and asymmetrical social relations. The students will examine critically the interrelationships between culture, power, and subjectivity through a close reading of classical and contemporary social theory. Emphasis will be given to assessing the power of various theories for conceptualizing and explaining mechanisms of social stratification as well as the basis of social order and processes of social change.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: EDUC 8405, URBS 7060
Prerequisite: EDUC 5495
1 Course Unit
ANTH 7070 Craft of Ethnography
This course is designed to follow after Ethnographic Research Methods (EDUC 7468). In the introductory course, students learned how to use qualitative methods in conducting a brief field study. This advanced level course focuses on research design and specifically the craft of ethnographic research. Students will apply what they learn in the course in writing a proposal for a dissertation research project. Prerequisite: Must have completed EDUC 7468 or equivalent introductory qualitative methods course.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: EDUC 8466
1 Course Unit
ANTH 7307 Intellectual Histories of South Asia in Global Context: Genealogies of the Present
This graduate seminar explores intellectual histories of contemporary South Asia. Readings will trace selected literary, cultural, political, religious, and linguistic genealogies that have shaped present-day understandings, practices, alliances and categories of thought in South Asia. Particular attention will be placed on 19th and 20th century global influences and interactions, including with England, Ireland, Germany, the Soviet Union/Russia, Turkey and the Arab World, East and Southeast Asia, the United States, and Africa. Topics will including histories of mapping and census efforts, publishing projects (including those funded by the Soviet Union and the United States), international conferences (e.g., the 1893 World's Parliament of Religions at the World's Fair in Chicago, 1955 Bandung Conference, the 2009 Durban Conference), technological influences and exchanges, and educational institutions and practices. The course will also include discussions of methods for carrying out intellectual history projects and would therefore be of use for students conducting research in other regions of the world.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: SAST 7307
1 Course Unit
ANTH 7410 Anthropology of Affect
This course draws upon three anthropological literatures pertaining to affect. One, growing out of Darwin's observations in The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals, looks at the evolutionary and neurobiological bases of affect. A second developed in connection with psychoanalysis, and centers upon insights gained through empathic and introspective processes. A third arose with cultural studies and reactions within anthropology to structuralism, including research on cross-cultural variation in the conceptualization of emotions. The course is appropriate for graduate students interested in exploring the linkages among these literatures, and who envision or are already actively undertaking research for which knowledge of them is pertinent. Students will be expected to lead discussions of specific works, as well as present aspects of their own present or proposed future research. Students outside of the Anthropology Department should contact the instructor to request a permit.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ANTH 7701 Methodology Seminar: Topics
Topics vary
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: SAST 7701
1 Course Unit
ANTH 7704 State, Society, and Culture in South Asia
This interdisciplinary course introduces graduate students to both classic and more recent theoretical frameworks used in understanding and analyzing society, culture, and the state, with particular reference to South Asia. Topics include bureaucracy and the state; power and performance; hierarchy and individualism; caste, community, and domination; money and markets; credit and debt; globalization and consumption; economic liberalization and political transformations; local and trans-local contexts of meaning; the environment, politics, and urban and rural ecologies; and culture and the changing shape of politics. Particular emphasis will be placed on the ways in which recent ethnographic and historical monographs have positioned their interventions in relation to broader debates and scholarship, both within scholarship on South Asia and more generally.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: SAST 7704
1 Course Unit