30 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 001Foundations: Culture, Power, and Meaning1
This course offers students a foundation in the theories, methods, and history of the discipline of cultural anthropology. Anthropology is a comparative study of culture, practice, and human diversity. This course will introduce students to some of the discipline’s key conceptual innovations, theoretical approaches, and past and present debates. Anthropologists study various societies to understand how meaning is constituted and circulated, how daily practices are structured by social norms and power systems, and how people resist, subvert, and transform inequalities and common modes of identification. Drawing on deep engagement with specific groups, communities, and processes, anthropology offers unique insights into pressing questions of our time, such as the effects of the global circulation of capital and people and how social structures, cultural-political ideologies, and everyday life interact. Topics to be covered include ritual and religion, kinship and family, gift and exchange, citizenship and nationalism, gender and sexuality, medicine and healing, media and circulation, and food and consumption. Students will gain familiarity with ethnography, anthropology’s flagship genre. We will also explore the discipline’s key field research methods and the ethical issues related to its goals to understand, interpret, and represent the lived experiences of people in diverse contexts. Required for SOAN majors and minors. Social sciences. 1 credit. Spring 2027. Nadkarni. Fall 2027 Staff. Spring 2029
The goal of this seminar is to dismantle commonplace assumptions about gender, sexuality, and sexual difference. It brings key texts in gender theory (Foucault, Butler, and others) into conversation with anthropological studies that respond to, problematize, or advance these theoretical claims. Our focus is the gendered body as the site of power and resistance, in contexts that range from past empires to present-day inequalities, and from technologies of reproduction to drag performances of femininity. Social sciences. 1 credit. Eligible for GSST Fall 2026. Nadkarni.
ANTH 003GFirst-Year Seminar: Development and its Discontents1
In this course, our goal will be to gain a new perspective on an often-unquestioned social “good”: that of international economic development, including foreign aid to countries in the global south. This course will provide students with an introduction to the origin and evolution of ideas about development, and will encourage them to examine major theories and approaches to development from classical modernization theories to world-systems theories. Students will gain insight into how ideas of development fit into larger global dynamics of power and politics and how, contrary to professed goals, the practices of international development have often perpetuated poverty and widened the gap between rich and poor. During the course, we will investigate these issues through an array of texts that address different audiences including a novel, academic books and journals, film, popular writings and ethnographic monographs. Social sciences. 1 credit. Eligible for BLST, ENVS, PEAC, ESCH, GLBL - Core Fall 2027 Schuetze.
Looking at ethnographic texts, films, and literature from different parts of the region, this class examines the complexity and richness of culture and life in the Middle East. The topics we will cover include orientalism, colonization, gender, ethnicity, tribalism, nationalism, migration, nomadism, and religious beliefs. We will also analyze the local, national, and global forces that are reshaping daily practices and cultural identities in various Middle Eastern countries. Social sciences. Writing course 1 credit. Eligible for ISLM, GLBL-Paired
ANTH 012CAnthropology of Childhood and the Family1
The experience of being a child would appear universal, and yet the construction of childhood varies greatly across cultures and throughout history. This course examines childhood and child-rearing in a number of ethnographic contexts, investigating children as both social actors and as the target of specific cultural ambitions and anxieties. Topics include new forms of family and reproduction, children as objects (and agents) of violence, and representations of childhood in human rights discourse, among others. Social sciences. 1 credit. Eligible for GSST
ANTH 023CAnthropological Perspectives on Conservation1
Conservation of biodiversity through the creation of national parks is an idea and a practice that began in the U.S. with the creation of Yellowstone in 1872. In this course, we will examine the ideas behind the initial creation of national parks and explore the global spread of these ideas through the historical and contemporary creation of parks in other countries. As we examine the origin of the idea for parks, we will also consider the human costs that have been associated with their creation. Ultimately, the class offers a critical exploration of theories and themes related to nature, political economy, and culture-themes that fundamentally underlie the relationship between society and environment. Social sciences. 1 credit. Eligible for BLST, ENVS, GLBL- core
This course introduces students to the theory and practice of ethnographic research. Ethnography is the bread and butter of sociocultural anthropology, both as a research method and genre of writing. Ethnographic research methods are also gaining in popularity as a research methodology beyond the discipline as well as beyond the academy. Ethnographic research can be used to explore a range of scales, from the minutia of everyday experience-what Bronislaw Malinowski called the “imponderabilia of actual life”-to broad brushstroke analyses of social structure and symbolic meaning. But how do anthropologists practice their craft? What exactly do they do “out there” in the field and what is unique about their modes of studying human experience? This course offers students an opportunity to explore and gain practice using a variety of methods used in ethnographic research. We will pay particular attention to questions of knowledge, location, evidence, ethics, power, translation, experience, and the way theoretical problems can be framed in terms of ethnographic research. This course is in large part a workshop in which students will learn and mobilize various ethnographic methods and techniques, engage in ethnographic writing, and actively evaluate and guide one another’s work. Students will apply what they learn during the course toward designing their own ethnographic research project. Methods Course. Social sciences. 1 credit.
ANTH 027CEthnographies of Contemporary Latin America1
This course examines contemporary Latin America through an anthropological lens, focusing on the enduring effects of colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, and U.S. intervention. Organized thematically rather than chronologically, the course moves across different geographies within Latin America to explore key historical events and social processes, including revolutions, military dictatorships, democratic transitions, and contemporary returns to authoritarianism, with particular attention to how race, class, gender, and sexuality are produced and contested in everyday life across the region. Drawing on recent ethnographies, topics include post-conflict transitions, crime and transnational security regimes, femicide, migration and diasporic formations, enforced disappearance, extractivism, debt, and political ecologies, among others. The course also examines anthropology produced in and about Latin America, engaging debates on decolonial knowledge production, feminist and Black theory and ethnography, Indigenous thought, and social movements. Social sciences. 1 credit. Eligible for LALS Fall 2026. Grimaldi.
This intermediate course explores the anthropology of modernity and the mass-mediation of modern forms of knowledge. It examines how the emergence of mass media has produced new kinds of subjects and social relations: from novel images of nationhood to mass experiences of crime, war, and violence. Along the way, the course also asks the impact of new media technologies on how anthropology itself imagines identity, community, and locality. Social sciences. 1 credit. Eligible for FMST, INTP
(Cross-listed as ENVS 024 ) This course offers students an introduction to Environmental Anthropology, a subfield of anthropology which encompasses the study of the interrelationships between humans and the ecosystems in which they are embedded as well as analysis and application of anthropological knowledge to contemporary environmental issues. Humans have transformed their environments for millennia, but in recent decades, have altered the global environment in ways that have no precedent in human history or in geological time. With contemporary environmental crises as its backdrop, this course examines some classic and contemporary anthropological approaches to the environment, exploring the value of anthropological theory, methods, and approaches in the humanistic study of the environment. In this sense, the course will expose students to diverse ways for thinking about the environment in its many dimensions and critical perspectives on contemporary environmental issues. We will review various theoretical approaches and their implications for our understanding of human relations to the environment, and explore how anthropologists and those they study are engaging with contemporary environmental issues including biodiversity conservation, deforestation, community-based natural resource management, ecotourism, and climate change. Social sciences. 1 credit. Eligible for ENVS
Central America returned to global attention in 2022 through El Salvador’s war on gangs, marked by mass arrests and mega-prisons detaining U.S. deportees, consolidating a transnational security model across the Americas. Building on this conjunction, this course offers a regionally focused anthropological examination of carceral states in Central America through feminist and abolitionist frameworks. We examine how carceral systems-including prisons, policing, legal regimes, and immigration enforcement- are shaped by colonial and imperial legacies, military dictatorships, and transnational security formations linking the U.S. and Central America. Topics include the War on Terror, War on Drugs, and War on Gangs; migration control; grassroots organizing; masculinities and reproductive injustices; and the entanglement of carcerality with extractive capitalism targeting Black and Indigenous communities. Social sciences. 1 credit. Eligible for LALS Fall 2026. Grimaldi.
What is globalization? Is globalization “cultural imperialism,” Westernization, Americanization, or McDonaldization? Our class will examine such questions and critically analyze how global flows (of goods, capital, labor, information, and people) are shaping cultural practices and identities. We will study recent theories of globalization and transnationalism and read various ethnographic studies of how global processes are articulated and resisted in various cultural settings. Social sciences. Writing course. 1 credit.
Food, a daily necessity for human survival, is strongly shaped by social relationships and cultural meanings. Who makes our food, what we eat, how we eat, and with whom we eat all reflect and reproduce various social connections and inequalities. This class explores how food, its making, and its consumption have been analyzed by different scholars, particularly anthropologists. We will also look at how various societies define, manage, and regulate the preparation and consumption of food. The class consider questions such as: Why do we serve specific foods at certain occasions? What constitutes a proper meal? How does class, gender, race, and ethnicity shape the making and serving of certain foods? Why might a particular food be viewed a delicacy in one society, but be seen as disgusting and repulsive in another? How did food become a “problem” that has to be managed in many of our contemporary societies? Through our readings and discussions, we will seek a deeper understanding of edible matters, how we shape them and how they shape us. Social Sciences. 1 credit. Eligible for GLBL- core Fall 2026. Ghannam. Fall 2027 Ghannam.
This course examines the anthropology of rights, justice, and the state. Its focus is citizenship: as both an ideal of formal equality and a lived practice of political belonging that reflects and reproduces social inequity. The first half investigates how citizenship intersects with forms of difference such as race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability. Ethnographic examples include debates about the legal recognition of gay marriage, spatial struggles over the right to the city, and disability activism and the biopolitics of citizenship. The second half examines how new forms of mobility of people, ideas, and capital challenge the nation-state as the site of political membership. What is the state’s responsibility towards its “others”: from transnational entrepreneurs to illegal migrant workers, and from political refugees to the detainees at Guantanamo Bay? Social sciences. 1 credit. Eligible for ESCH
People in all societies encounter and manage sickness. Yet, there are diverse and unique approaches to understanding and managing health and disease. The human experience of sickness entails a complex interplay between biological, socio-economic and cultural factors. This course offers an introduction to medical anthropology, and draws upon social, cultural, biological, and linguistic anthropology to better understand those factors which influence health and well being (broadly defined), the experience and distribution of illness, the prevention and treatment of sickness, healing processes, the social relations of therapy management, and the cultural importance and use of pluralistic medical systems. Topics covered include how beliefs about health, disease and the body are constructed and transmitted, how healers are chosen and trained, social disparities in health and illness, and the importance of narrative and performance in the effectiveness of healing practices. Finally, we will consider the ways in which medical anthropology can shed light upon important contemporary medical and social concerns. Social sciences. 1 credit. Eligible for ENVS, ESCH, GLBL - Core Fall 2027 Schuetze.
(Cross-listed as PEAC 043 ) How has gender emerged as an analytical category? How has sexuality emerged as an analytical category? What role did discourses surrounding gender and sexuality play in the context of Western colonialism in the Global South historically as well as in the context of Western imperialism in the Global South today? How are gender and sexuality-based liberation understood differently around the world? What global social movements have surfaced to codify rights for women and LGBTQ populations? How has the global human rights apparatus shaped the experiences of women and queer communities? What is the relationship between gender and masculinity? What are the promises and limits of homonationalism and pinkwashing as theoretical frameworks in our understanding of LGBT rights discourses? When considering the relationship between faith and homosexuality, how are religious actors queering theology? How do we define social change with such attention to gender and sexuality? Social sciences. Writing course. 1 credit. Eligible for PEAC, GSST, INTP, GLBL- Core, ESCH
Explore how different societies regulate, discipline, and shape the human body. In the first part, we examine social theories and explore the strengths and limitations of different approaches to the study of the body. In the second part, we look at several ethnographic cases and compare diverse cultural practices that range from seemingly traditional practices (such as circumcision and foot binding) to what is currently fashionable (including weight lifting, dieting, aesthetic surgery, piercing, and tattooing). When comparing body modifications through time and space, we seek to understand their socio-economic contexts and relate them to broader cultural meanings and social inequalities. We also investigate how embodiment shapes personal and collective identities (especially gender identities) and vice versa. Social sciences. 1 credit. Eligible for GSST, INTP, ESCH, GLBL-Core Spring 2027. Ghannam. Spring 2028 Ghannam.
(Cross-listed as PEAC 053 ) This course provides students with interdisciplinary perspectives on contemporary Israeli and Palestinian societies and peace movements. Through ethnographic explorations, we will emphasize the heterogeneity of these communities and how politics, violence, religion, economics, psychology, and culture shape everyday lives in Israel/Palestine. In addition, students will advance their analytical and critical thinking skills, particularly in understanding debates on salient issues that animate the region and interrogating worldviews from across the ideological spectrum. By the end of the course, we will discern the central role of Israel/Palestine in global politics, and the stakes for people on the ground in this historic, conflicted, and beautiful land. Social sciences. 1 credit. Eligible for PEAC
This course introduces students to the study of “public health” and various problems framed by public health actors through the theoretical and methodological lenses of sociocultural anthropology. The field of public health is typically defined by its commitment to understand not just the manifestations and patterns of illness in populations, but the social, political and economic forces that place certain individuals and populations at greater risk of morbidity and mortality. By critically examining various frameworks for understanding disease in human populations, the class will explore the potentials and challenges of improving health and healthcare in various populations, both within and outside of the United States. Additionally, this class aims to demonstrate the value of anthropology to the field of public health and to efforts to solve national and global health problems. Students will be urged to think about “public health” and “global health” as dynamic cultural artifacts and cultural systems; and likewise, to consider how ethnography is an important methodological tool, both to understand public health agendas as well as to investigate the subjects and elisions of public health interventions. Social sciences. 1 credit. Eligible for ESCH,GLBL-core
How do national communities remember-and forget? What roles do commemoration and amnesia play in constructing, maintaining, or challenging national and collective identities? This course considers memory and its pathologies as a central problematic for the nation-state. It reads theory and ethnography against each other to explore the politics and aesthetics of national memory across numerous sites and contexts, attentive to both the collectivities such commemorations inspire and their points of resistance or failure. Social sciences. 1 credit. Eligible for GSST, GLBL-Paired Fall 2026. Nadkarni.
This course introduces students to the history, theory, and practice of visual anthropology. Topics include the intertwined histories of colonial photography and anthropology, how anthropologists use visual ethnographic methods as tools of cultural analysis, and how indigenous groups and activists use contemporary visual technologies to gain visibility and to remake their social worlds. The course will include a series of film screenings, as well as a small production component. Methods course. Social sciences. 1 credit. Eligible for FMST
(Cross-listed as DANC 079 ) This course will explore the shifts in sexuality and gender constructions of Indian women from national to transnational symbols through the dance sequences in Bollywood. We will examine the place of erotic in reconstructing gender and sexuality from past notions of romantic love to desires for commodity. The primary focus will be centered on approaches to the body from anthropology and sociology to performance, dance, and film and media studies. Social sciences. 1 credit. Eligible for ASIA, FMST, GSST
All students wishing to do independent work must have the advance consent of the department and of an instructor who agrees to supervise the proposed project. Two options exist for students wishing to get credit for independent work. Option 1 - consists of individual or group directed reading and study in fields of special interest to the students not dealt with in the regular course offerings. Option 2 - credit may be received for practical work in which direct experience lends itself to intellectual analysis and is likely to contribute to a student’s progress in regular course work. Students must demonstrate to the instructor and the department a basis for the work in previous academic study. Students will normally be required to examine pertinent literature and produce a written report to receive credit. 0.5 or 1 credit.
(Cross-listed with PEAC 103 ) This honors seminar will introduce students to the most salient theoretical debates among anthropologists on humanitarian intervention around the world. We will also examine a range of case studies, from the birth of Western Christian humanitarian missions in colonial contexts to humanitarian interventions (e.g. military, food-based assistance, natural disaster relief, post-conflict reconstruction) today. The geographic scope of this seminar will encompass North America, South America, the Caribbean, Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East/North Africa, East Asia, and South Asia. We will consider, for instance, how anthropologists have examined relief efforts in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. What social science scholarship has been produced on mental health interventions after political and natural crises in Haiti? How are victims of torture at the hands of the Indian military supported by international organizations in Kashmir? What is the nature of global Islamic humanitarianism today? How are local national staff employed by international organizations shaping humanitarian approaches to gender-based violence in Colombia? These are among the many questions we will address over the course of the semester. Counts as only 1 credit toward a major housed in the Sociology and Anthropology department Social sciences. 2 credits. Eligible for ESCH
This seminar explores recent interdisciplinary insights to the analysis of spatial practices, power relationships, and urban forms. In addition, we read ethnographies and novels and watch films to explore questions such as: How is space socially constructed? What is the relationship between space and power? How is this relationship embedded in urban forms under projects of modernity and postmodernity? How do the ordinary practitioners of the city resist and transform these forms? Our discussion will pay special attention to issues related to racism and segregation, ethnic enclaves, urban danger, gendered spaces, colonial urbanism, and the “global” city. Counts as only 1 credit toward a major housed in the Sociology and Anthropology department Social sciences. 2 credits.
(Cross-list as PEAC 113 ) This honors seminar will explore the intersection between peace and conflict studies and medical anthropology. We will examine the impact of conflict on health (mental and physical) as well as health-interventions in conflict settings around the world. Sub-themes include international aid, health infrastructures, global health interventions, public health emergency policymaking, the role of doctors and medical professionals amidst political violence, psychosocial humanitarianism, gender-based violence programs, responses to migration flows, economic development, disability and caregiving, and healing and ecoanxiety after natural disasters. Counts as only 1 credit toward a major housed in the Sociology and Anthropology department Social sciences. 2 credits. Eligible for PEAC
As key players in the global economy, cities are the focus of a rich body of literature that explores how urban life is shaped by the complex interplay between global, national, and local processes. How to best understand this interplay and how it shapes daily life in cities? How can we understand the inequalities that structure daily life in urban centers around the globe? How to analyze the different identities, spaces, and subjectivities that are being constituted under changing economic, social, and political conditions? In this seminar, we read ethnographies from and about cities around the globe and analyze how scholars, particularly anthropologists, have studied cities, their cultures, and social groups. We pay attention to the forces (such as neoliberalism, modernism, nationalism, and globalization) and inequalities (such as class, race, and gender) that shape urban life. The texts we read explore current pressing issues such as poverty, violence, policing, gentrification, and homelessness. Alongside our investigation of city life, students also will have the opportunity to develop their skills in ethnographic research methods by closely analyzing how different authors accessed and wrote about cities as well as by conducting their own mini-ethnographies. Methods course. Counts as only 1 credit toward a major housed in the Sociology and Anthropology department Social sciences. 2 credits. Eligible for GLBL-core Fall 2026. Ghannam. Fall 2027 Ghannam.
This seminar will be an interdisciplinary investigation into the shifting manners by which Islam is multiply understood as a creatively mystical force, a canonically organized religion, a political platform, a particular approach to economic investment, and a secular but powerful identity put forth in interethnic conflicts, to name only a handful of incarnations. Though wide ranging in our theoretical perspective, a deeply ethnographic approach to the lived experience of Islam in a number of cultural settings guides this study. Counts as only 1 credit toward a major housed in the Sociology and Anthropology department Social sciences. 2 credits. Eligible for ISLM
In this seminar we explore biomedicine from an anthropological perspective, exploring the entanglement of bodies with history, environment, culture, and power. We begin the course with a focus on the historical emergence of biomedical technologies and their related discourses and practices and then move into contemporary contexts of their use and circulation. Throughout, we focus on the ways in which the development, use, and distribution of biomedical technologies and discourses are influenced by prevailing medical systems, political interests, and cultural norms. Topics to be covered include biomedicine as technology, medical categorization and ideas of the normal, ethics and moral boundaries, the space of the clinic, the circulation of pharmaceuticals, and health and inequality. Counts as only 1 credit toward a major housed in the Sociology and Anthropology department
ANTH 043E or permission of the Instructor Social sciences. 2 credits. Eligible for GLBL-core Spring 2028 Schuetze. Catalog chapter: Sociology and Anthropology Department website: http://www.swarthmore.edu/sociology-anthropology Access the class schedule to search for sections.
