14 courses with the subject AN, 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.
AN 120Cultural Anthropology1098
Systematic study of the customs, social organization, environmental adaptation and belief systems of primitive and contemporary societies. Considers cultural variations in technology, economy, language, families, government and religion, with a special emphasis on social and cultural change and global relations. Non-majors may substitute this course as a prerequisite for other courses in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Criminal Justice.
Analysis of the family as a basic social institution in both Western and non-Western cultures. Exploration of various marriage arrangements, kinship, family life cycle, and issues and problems relating to societal change as it affects kinship and family structure.
This course introduces students to the scientific study of archeology, examining how human cultures’ survival, success and sometimes failure to thrive is studied through the analysis of material culture and remains. It provides students a survey of fundamental archaeological practice by covering the basic empirical methods and theories of data explanation used by contemporary archaeologists. An overview of the archaeological record from human beginnings to recent times gives students an appreciation for the diversity of world cultures through time and across space. Contemporary questions of cultural resource management, issues of ethics, and ownership of heritage and artifacts will be addressed.
AN120 or AN150 or by permission of the instructor.
AN 220Social Issues1098
In-depth analysis, from a social science perspective, of a substantive social issue confronting modern societies. Emphasizes pertinent social structure, values and attitudes, and the effects on the individual. Topics vary from year to year. May be repeated for credit.
This course presents students with an exploration of the genre of data presentation unique to cultural anthropology, the ethnographic monograph. Students explore the difficulty of translating ‘emic’ perspectives to ‘etic’ analysis, as well as becoming knowledgeable with the tropes of contemporary ethnographic writing. Also, students will become familiar with the ways that cultural anthropologists use contemporary social and anthropological theory to frame questions and provide analysis. Finally, the course explores the ethical dilemmas usually encountered and recounted within ethnographic monographs.
(Also listed as SO 241 ) Ethnographic film explores the history and impact of documentary films made by anthropologists and the issues and ethical dilemmas involved in this type of storytelling. Classes consist of lectures, readings, screenings and discussions concerning the style and content of the major ethnographic films, and anthropological and documentary film theory.
This course introduces students to ethnographic methods, strategies of participant observation, interviewing techniques, the writing of field notes, qualitative research design and analysis. One of the foci of the course is on auto ethnography so that the student may trace his or her own human journey from an ethnographic perspective.
This course studies human belief systems in their varied forms, the nature of religious understanding and the interplay between religious forms of life, and political structures using anthropological concepts. Consideration includes the resurgence of religious belief in modern culture. This course assumes a basic familiarity with Anthropology.
This course examines how systems of power are established through the imposition and contestation of symbolic practices both within and between cultural groups. Beginning with an examination of how the powerless have historically used deception and feigning deference as a political strategy to confront a sovereign state, central emphasis of the course is on understanding “symbolic violence,” the establishment of a sense of the “natural” to cultural constructions of identity and practice. Utilizing this notion of symbolic violence, the course investigates how the historical formulations of racial, gender and class hierarchies were developed as modern classificatory schemas of identity within the colonial context. The course ends with an ethnographic examination of power within a contemporary ethnographic situation of cultural conflict.
This course provides an introductory overview of how medical anthropology has contributed to an understanding of the cultural embeddedness of knowledge and practice around health, illness, disease and healing. The course reviews the central anthropological schools of thought (ecological, interpretive, and critical medical anthropology) in the ethnographic examination of disease causality, the dynamics of healers’ roles, and health disparities among individuals at the local level. An emphasis of the course is familiarizing students with the actual research processes associated with participant observation, mostly qualitative, that anthropologists utilize in creating ethnographic monographs.
This seminar introduces students to the existing international norms and systems for the protection of human rights, including the United Nations, Inter-American, European, and African treaty systems and various specialized treaties and supervisory bodies. In addition, selected substantive rights will be discussed in detail, with an emphasis on a comparative analysis of the systems. A substantial part of the seminar is devoted to two simulations. Students will play the roles of individual petitioners, government agents, and international judges when handling human rights complaints from their initial stages to the handing down of final judgments. Students will thus be enabled to apply their knowledge of legal reasoning and methodology in practice.
AN 361Social Change: Globalization and Culture1098
Designed for the advanced Anthropology student or International Business and Culture major, this course examines the recent re-territorialization of the world known as “globalization.” Using a critical anthropological perspective that addresses the cultural dimensions of globalization, the course examines the organized and disjunctive social processes by which local and transnational identity have emerged.
AN 120 or SO 261. Majors in International Business and Culture should have more than 90 credits.
AN 370Anthropological Theory1098
This seminar explores the historic and contemporary ways that anthropologists have used key theoretical ideas and explored complex conceptual debates in their research and writing as attempts to understand humankind. These ideas and debates are explored both as historically changing, often confrontational, clashes between different schools of anthropological thought around central disciplinary questions like the definition of culture, the relationship of structure to agency, the question and place of relativity, the relationship between power and knowledge, and the contemporary ethnographic location of culture and identity in a world marked by scalar processes of neoliberal globalization. While these ideas and debates express central disciplinary concerns, the course also contextualizes how these debates are often marked by and directly address broader social and historical contexts of which they are a part. A thematic emphasis of the course is on how anthropological writing is a practice of knowledge making, as well as knowledge dissemination. Through both textual analysis and their own written production, students investigate how subtle shifts in the anthropological style and voice results in different forms of anthropological knowledge.
