35 courses with the subject ANTH, each shown exactly as we captured it from the college's catalog, with every element we hold. Where the wording looks broken, that is our reading of the catalog, not the college's text.
ANTH 102Culture, Diversity, and Inequality1.00
Provides an introduction to cultural anthropology and is intended to help students come to a better understanding of contemporary human cultures and societies through the analysis and comparison of specific cases. Students study diverse societies from a wide range of geographic areas and examine topics such as race and ethnicity, kinship and gender, political and economic organization, religion, globalization, and social change. Students learn about some of the major theories and theorists in cultural anthropology and examine the way cultural anthropologists collect and interpret data, particularly in the course of fieldwork. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: No Junior, Senior Area of Inquiry: Social Relations,Inst.& Agents Liberal Arts Practices: Confronting Collective Challenges Core Component: None
Introduces students to the basic concepts and issues of archaeology today through an examination of both method and theory. Topics include data analysis and interpretation, advancements in scientific knowledge, heritage preservation, cultural resource management, and archaeologists' roles in understanding past and present human societies. Students examine case studies in world prehistory to explore major societal transitions, including population shifts, agriculture, social inequality, and political hierarchies. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: No Junior, Senior Area of Inquiry: Social Relations,Inst.& Agents Liberal Arts Practices: Confronting Collective Challenges Core Component: None
Considers the development of warfare across the ancient civilizations across the globe. Utilizing a massive body of data, archaeology is in a unique position to study how warfare evolved alongside the emergence of civilizations. Students focus on several civilizations, such as Mesoamerica, the Mediterranean, and the Andes to compare and contrast various models of warfare in the ancient world. In some cases, warfare results in the utter annihilation of millions of people. In other cases, warfare is limited to a ceremonial gathering of armies that result in few to no deaths. By understanding the different models of human warfare, students engage with universal questions such as, how and why warfare happens. Is warfare an innate part of humanity? What is and is not warfare? Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: No Junior, Senior Area of Inquiry: Social Relations,Inst.& Agents Liberal Arts Practices: None Core Component: None
ANTH 210Otherworldly Selves in Science Fiction and Anthropology1.0
Anthropology and science fiction often evoke thoughts of strangers in a strange land, but what does each actually consider "strange"? What are the problems and possibilities that differentiation or assimilation present? Fusing ethnography, theory, film, and literature, this course enhances students' ability to think critically about questions of (non)human difference, including race, gender, culture, species, time, and space. Themes include the boundaries of self and other, real and imaginary, past/present/future, (post)apocalypse, human and machine, the body and its parts, and familiar and strange, while also challenging these distinctions. Provides opportunities for creative expression, empowers students to utilize literary works and media as interpretive tools for social scientific research, and encourages thinking across the disciplinary divides of science, social studies, and humanities. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: No Junior, Senior Area of Inquiry: Social Relations,Inst.& Agents Liberal Arts Practices: Artistic Practice and Interpretation or Confronting Collective Challenges Core Component: None
Introduces students to the research methods that anthropologists use to study human beings in all their complexity: the range of qualitative, in-depth, and participatory techniques that comprise ethnography. Through a series of hands-on active research projects, students learn how to investigate the complex social world we live in, and analyze what they find. Coursework covers the research process from asking compelling questions, to collecting qualitative data and critically analyzing it, to choosing how to present it. Coursework also addresses the ethical implications and responsibilities that accompany learning about human beings by interacting with them, and then representing them to others. The readings, lectures, and discussions explore how anthropological knowledge is generated and anthropology's relationship to political- economic power, historical experience, and personal identity. Students also gain valuable research methods skills for career choices.
Explores discourses and practices of diverse masculinities across cultures, with particular attention to relationships between gender and power. Students engage with anthropological works that critically examine how masculine myths and ideology are mobilized in different global contexts - reinforcing gendered hierarchies in some settings, while challenging gender discrimination in others. Drawing on ethnographic studies of the complex range of cis and trans men's experiences across race, class, sexuality, age, religion, ability and other intersections, students develop theoretical and methodological skills to think about power and gender in more rigorous ways. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: No Junior, Senior Area of Inquiry: Social Relations,Inst.& Agents Liberal Arts Practices: Confronting Collective Challenges Core Component: None
ANTH 222Medical Anthropology: Culture, Health, and Social Justice1.00
Introduces students to medical anthropology—the study of the relationships among cultures, social systems, the environment, and disease and healing. Interpretations of health and illness, and the experience of one's body are often taken for granted. Yet our ideas about and experiences of health, disease, and medicine are profoundly shaped by culture; by transnational flow of people, ideas, and resources; by histories of colonialism and structural inequalities; and by the development of new technologies. Students are introduced to approaches used by medical anthropologists to study the social, cultural, economic, and political dimensions of the human experience of the body, health, illness, and healing. Topics covered include cultural interpretations of sickness and healing, cultural ideas about the body, social and environmental causes of illness, the effects of poverty and racism on health, the roles of doctors and healers in society, cultural clashes and ethical issues in health care delivery, anthropological critiques of Western biomedicine, and the place of medical anthropology in the study of public health. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: No First-year, Senior Area of Inquiry: Social Relations,Inst.& Agents Liberal Arts Practices: Confronting Collective Challenges Core Component: None Formerly: ANTH 322
In contemporary American society, Western medicine-or biomedicine-is seen as offering quick, effective, and technologically advanced solutions to pain and suffering. Biomedicine is a medical system that privileges the physiological and biological causes of disease. As a clinical science, biomedicine is usually seen as culture-less, as universally effective on all bodies. But what happens when Western medicine goes "global," that is, when it encounters cultural values or beliefs that conceptualize illness, healing, or the body in different ways? Is medicine itself "cultural," and if so, how? This course examines how people experience, use, and critique global health interventions across the globe, and why sociological and anthropological approaches to global health are critical to improving these interventions. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: No Senior Area of Inquiry: Social Relations,Inst.& Agents Liberal Arts Practices: Confronting Collective Challenges Core Component: None
Takes a feminist perspective to the study of gender and identity in prehistoric societies and ancient civilizations. By looking at the variation of gender roles and relations throughout history and cross-culturally, students help to deconstruct many modem-day assumptions about gender and gender roles in the present. The course will provide an overview of how material remains are used for understanding social identities in the past. It will review feminist critiques of archaeology and how feminism has impacted the discipline of archaeology. Students examine archaeological resources for gendering the past (burials, art, artifacts) and explore gender in a range of prehistoric cultural contexts (hunter-gatherers, farmers, states, and empires) using archaeological case studies as examples. Students additionally look at the ways in which historical archaeology has helped to better understand gender relations in historical contexts. Students critically examine how gender and identity have been represented in academic research, museums, and popular media, in order to deconstruct modern-day assumptions about gender. Case studies derive from the earliest human origins, ancient complex civilizations, and recent colonial America. This course is designed for students with little or no background in archaeology or anthropology. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: No Junior, Senior Area of Inquiry: Social Relations,Inst.& Agents Liberal Arts Practices: Confronting Collective Challenges Core Component: None
Who owns a song? Who owns the tango dance? Who owns knowledge about medicinal plants? Key anthropological questions about culture and property intersect in each of these questions. Native and indigenous societies, whose views on cultural property and heritage have long been marginalized, bring their own perspectives to these questions. With reference to critical anthropological literature, this course uses specific case studies to examine local and global intellectual property and cultural heritage regimes. The topics in this course intersect with the fields of legal anthropology, cultural studies, Native American studies,
The words "nature" and "the environment" conjure up visions of wild animals and open landscapes, but are people part of nature, too? Shows how nature and human culture are intertwined, both in terms of how we shape our environment as well as how it shapes us. Through a series of case studies, students explore this relationship, focusing especially on the way that nature and culture are "political": inequalities, social problems and movements, and power relations all flow from the way that we interact with our environment. Takes a global, comparative, and historical view of this process, and includes the following special topics: the rise of environmental awareness and environmental social movements; globalization and environmental values; consumption and the environment; environmental inequalities and justice; risk, technology, and environmental politics; and public policy and the environment. Crosslisted: SOCI 245 Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: No Junior, Senior Area of Inquiry: Social Relations,Inst.& Agents Liberal Arts Practices: Confronting Collective Challenges Core Component: None
How have contemporary global markets, media, and mobility fueled a worldwide Islamic revival? Has expanded access to public schooling and digital media among ordinary Muslims challenged state power and authority—or enhanced it? If pious Muslims rejected Islam's mystical (Sufi) traditions in the twentieth century, why are many embracing these traditions today? This course poses and answers such questions by exploring Muslim-majority societies across time and place, emphasizing the changing technologies, institutions, practices, and identities that bind them. Major historical topics addressed in the course include Islam's foundational texts and interpretive traditions, colonial modernity and market capitalism, the rise of nation-states and national identities, and contemporary globalization. Major social-cultural topics include changing media technologies and usage, current Islamic revivalism and Islamic feminist movements, gender and sexuality, knowledge and power, and secularism and non-Muslim religious minorities. Crosslisted: MIST 252 Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: No Junior, Senior Area of Inquiry: Social Relations,Inst.& Agents
ANTH 253Field Methods and Interpretation in Archaeology1.00
Provides students with hands-on experience in procedures archaeologists employ in collecting, processing, and reporting data. The course revolves around two basic premises: learning about archaeology includes doing archaeology, and doing archaeology involves more than just digging. Training in archaeological fieldwork and data processing is based upon an ongoing research project in Central New York. Each student has the opportunity to participate in various aspects of this research from excavation and field recording to cataloguing and analysis. The culmination of the course is a detailed report based upon research conducted during the semester. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Social Relations,Inst.& Agents Liberal Arts Practices: Confronting Collective Challenges or Quantitative and Algorithmic Reasoning Core Component: None
ANTH 253LField Methods and Interpretation in Archaeology Lab0.25
Required corequisite for ANTH 253. Provides a hands-on experience conducting archaeological research through the excavation of an archaeological site in Central New York. Students learn how to plan research, how to collect data, how to analyze data, and how to report results. Coursework is divided into three components: 1. Research design and planning 2. Excavation 3. Analysis and reporting. Each student has the opportunity to participate in all aspects of this research. The culmination of the course is a detailed archaeological report and presentation based upon research conducted during the semester. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Social Relations,Inst.& Agents Liberal Arts Practices: None Core Component: None
Opportunity for individual study in areas not covered by formal course offerings, under the guidance of a member of the faculty. Credits: variable Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Social Relations,Inst.& Agents
Critically examines science as a global social-cultural phenomenon. Using the tools of anthropology, students explore how science is embedded in social, cultural, political and economic systems and processes. Case studies drawn from around the world show how the context in which science is produced and consumed matters. They also demonstrate how science is a transnational phenomenon, in which ideas, objects, methods and practices change as they travel. Critical examination of different sciences and scientists teaches us as much about the social world as it does about the natural one, and challenges the divide between the two. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: No First-year Area of Inquiry: Social Relations,Inst.& Agents Liberal Arts Practices: Confronting Collective Challenges Core Component: None
Focuses on gender as a culturally constructed, historically variable, and politically contested category rather than an immutable biological "given." Students have two major objectives: first, to develop a cross-cultural understanding of femininity, masculinity, androgyny, and gendered phenomena generally by examining and comparing gender relations and gender ideologies in a wide variety of human societies, ranging from small bands of hunters and gatherers to post-industrial states; and second, to develop a critical understanding of the types of theories, methods, and data that are relevant to the study of gender and sexuality - including heteronormativity, same-sex relations, transgender practices and identities, "third sexes," and "third genders" - in anthropology and related disciplines. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: No First-year Area of Inquiry: Social Relations,Inst.& Agents Liberal Arts Practices: None Core Component: None
Explores the media practices through which people create and negotiate religious value and meaning. It takes as its starting premise the idea that all religious activity is mediated as well as sensual and that, through anthropological theories of religion, culture, and media, one can gain insight into religions' growing political power today. The course involves active participant observation of ritual performances and media as well as substantial engagement with theoretical questions anthropologists have posed about religion, ritual, and media over the last century.
How does language shape the medical sphere? How does the medical sphere shape language? Fusing two anthropological subfields, medical anthropology and linguistic anthropology, coursework provides concepts, tools, and training to understand and analyze the intersections between language, medicine, and society. Students explore how patients, medical professionals and other people communicate in healthcare settings. Students also examine the role of language and perception in people's understandings of the body, care, and healing. Topics include health communicative justice, visual/graphic communication, language ideologies, translation, narrative, metaphors of illness, and more. Offering an applied dimension, students engage with archiving practices, health media/communication materials, and information systems. Crosslisted: GPEH 323 Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: No First-year Area of Inquiry: Social Relations,Inst.& Agents Liberal Arts Practices: Confronting Collective Challenges Core Component: None
Business corporations are among the most influential institutions on the earth today. This course examines the place of corporations in the contemporary world, focusing on their roles in global political-economic and social systems, and in our own lives. It considers how studying business corporations can help to better understand capitalism, globalization, work, consumerism, law, inequality, cultural change and personhood. The course delves into case studies that follow transnational corporations from Silicon Valley, to Papua New Guinea, and back again. In addition, the course includes a research component in which students will conduct and analyze original interviews. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Social Relations,Inst.& Agents Liberal Arts Practices: Confronting Collective Challenges and The Process of Writing Core Component: None
People across the globe and through time have had understandings of death that may appear strange or even shocking to many today. For anthropologists and archaeologists, burials provide evidence for
Explores incarceration from a global perspective, considering how carceral practices and ideologies vary across contexts. Each individual prison has its own complex, internal social dynamics - and each prison exists within a broader community with its own history. Drawing on ethnographic research and first-person narratives, students consider day-to-day experiences of life in prison, not as a site of exception, but as a place from which to better understand life beyond prison walls as well. Students engage with the work of prison ethnographers and incarcerated scholars to consider how sites of incarceration shape, and are shaped by, the diverse communities of which they are a part. Through collaboration with community-based organizations, students consider how prison reform and abolitionist activists have sought to change the cultures that support incarceration, locally and globally. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: No First-year Area of Inquiry: Social Relations,Inst.& Agents Liberal Arts Practices: Confronting Collective Challenges Core Component: None
ANTH 343Race in Biosciences and Technologies of Empire1
Examines how biological sciences and technology have shaped racial and indigenous identities, colonial empires, and contributed both toward empowering and marginalizing contemporary communities. Students are introduced to the ethnographic/anthropological study of how racism and imperialism intersect with scientific research and biomedicine. Coursework covers the history and role of anthropology and the biological sciences in dually challenging and reinforcing hierarchies of race and colonial rule, alongside some science fiction possibilities for reimagining race and decolonial futures. Focuses on critical BIPOC, postcolonial, and Global South perspectives. Featured assignments include multimedia-based work (e.g. podcast production) and close reading analysis to unpack colonial history and complicated relationships between race and biological sciences. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: No First-year
ANTH 102 or ANTH 222 or ANTH 226 or SOCI 101 or SOCI 212
Corequisite
None
ANTH 350Theorizing Contemporary Cultures1.00
Anthropologists are philosophers of the social. With firm roots in classical social theory, anthropologists have always questioned the relationship of materiality and imagination in human culture, the dialectic of individual and social, the structures of power and authority, the pull of kinship and cosmology, and the cultural patterning of time, space, gender, and story. Anthropology trains our attention on big questions of comparative and global import, but seeks answers in concrete things that people do, say, and make. Anthropological theory thus rests on the empiricism of ethnography, archaeology, and material studies, and provides the questions that drive research. This course links contemporary theoretical work in the discipline with essential forerunner texts and projects. It also considers influential texts from theorists outside the discipline proper, recognizing that anthropology takes insights from many theoretical quarters, and in turn informs theoretical endeavors across the social sciences and humanities. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: No First-year Area of Inquiry: Social Relations,Inst.& Agents Liberal Arts Practices: The Process of Writing Core Component: None
Debate key issues surrounding the Aztecs of Central Mexico using archaeological and written evidence to understand ancient Aztec culture. This course explores the great technological achievements of Aztec civilization, its complex rituals and beliefs, bustling marketplaces and cities, and the everyday lives of ordinary people. Questions addressed include: Who were the Aztecs? Why did the Aztecs practice human sacrifice and cannibalism? How did the Aztecs become the largest empire in ancient Mesoamerica? Did the Aztec Empire promote the well-being of its commoners? Was religion used as a tool of domination? What was the role of women in Aztec society? Why did the Aztec Empire fall to the Spanish? What happened to people following the fall of the Aztec Empire? Students will integrate primary sources, archaeological research, and ethnohistory to uncover the Aztec past. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: No First-year Area of Inquiry: Social Relations,Inst.& Agents Liberal Arts Practices: Confronting Collective Challenges Core Component: None
Examines a range of significant ethical issues relating to the archaeology of Native Americans in North America primarily, but also to some extent in Central and South America. Students not only read about and discuss conflicting perspectives leading to ethical dilemmas, but also propose solutions and evaluate
Focuses on the comparative and historical study of Native American cultures and societies throughout the Americas. Through the reading of several ethnographies, students compare and contrast Native American social, religious, political, and economic institutions and practices from the time of European contact to the present day. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: No First-year Area of Inquiry: Social Relations,Inst.& Agents Liberal Arts Practices: Confronting Collective Challenges and The Process of Writing Core Component: None
ANTH 361Ancient Environments and Human Legacies1.00
Many, if not most of today's geopolitical problems can be traced to how people interact with the environment. Warfare, globalization, market economies, food production, ethnic conflicts, and disease are all contingent on the relationship between human beings and their environments. Focuses on the complexity and nuance of those relationships through both space and time by utilizing an archaeological perspective. While many academic fields now focus on topics relating to environments, archaeology works with a dataset that spans the entirety of human history. Such a dataset allows archaeological researchers to ask powerful and fundamental questions, such as: How do human societies respond to environmental change? Have human beings ever successfully found a balance between themselves and their natural world? What events created today's environmental challenges? What leads to the downfall of a society? Students consider questions like these through various case-studies across the globe that deal with the diversity of human societies and the specific environments from which they emerged. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Social Relations,Inst.& Agents
Examines the relationship between power, politics, and social change with a special focus on social movements. Considers questions such as: What leads to social movement? What do social movements do? What are the tools they use? The approach is historical and comparative. Students consider what social movements can tell us about society, and apply key social scientific concepts to considerations of collective action. Students also consider the building blocks of social movements from the perspective of a social movement participant. By studying social movements through the perspectives of both scholar and activist, students gain helpful tools for collective action and social change. Crosslisted: SOCI 368 Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: No First-year Area of Inquiry: Social Relations,Inst.& Agents Liberal Arts Practices: Confronting Collective Challenges Core Component: None
Since classical times, philosophers and historians have studied and recorded the details of everyday life with an eye to grasping the meaning of social practice. The past 50 years, however, have seen the burgeoning of an exciting body of critical theory on the quotidian. Much of this work is concerned with profound questions about how the systems, structures, and practices of modernity shape basic human interactions with things, with places, and with other persons, and how these, in turn, reproduce social structures. This course presents sociological and anthropological texts concerned with everyday domesticity, cuisine, gesture, movement, activity, entertainment, talk, schooling, and bureaucracy, and explores the theoretical paradigms of knowledge, practice, and power to which these texts are ultimately addressed. Crosslisted: SOCI 378 Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: No First-year Area of Inquiry: Social Relations,Inst.& Agents Liberal Arts Practices: None Core Component: None
Opportunity for individual study in areas not covered by formal course offerings, under the guidance of a member of the faculty. Credits: variable Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Social Relations,Inst.& Agents Liberal Arts Practices: None Core Component: None
In this capstone seminar for the anthropology major, students design original research projects grounded in recent anthropological theory and relevant literature on their topics and collect and analyze appropriate ethnographic or cultural data; and each student writes a significant thesis paper. Seminars also focus on intensive reading about select theoretical issues in contemporary anthropology; the specific focus of the seminar reading depends on the instructor. When Offered: Fall semester only Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: Only Senior Recommended: All anthropology majors should plan to take this course in fall term of their senior year. Area of Inquiry: Social Relations,Inst.& Agents Liberal Arts Practices: The Process of Writing Core Component: None
ANTH 495Independent Study for Honors and High Honors1.00
This independent study is for candidates for honors and high honors in anthropology. When Offered: Spring semester only Major/Minor Restrictions: Only Anthropology Majors Class Restriction: Only Senior Restrictions: Enrollment limited to seniors with a major GPA of 3.50 Area of Inquiry: Social Relations,Inst.& Agents Liberal Arts Practices: None Core Component: None
