Department of AnthropologyCourses for Fall 2025
| Title | Instructor | Location | Time | All taxonomy terms | Description | Section Description | Cross Listings | Fulfills | Registration Notes | Syllabus | Syllabus URL | Course Syllabus URL | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ANTH 0020-001 | Anthropology, Race, and the Making of the Modern World | Deborah A Thomas | MW 10:15 AM-11:14 AM | 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 | Society sector (all classes) | |||||||||
| ANTH 0030-001 | Human Origins, Evolution and Diversity | Theodore G Schurr | TR 1:45 PM-2:44 PM | 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. | Living World Sector (all classes) | |||||||||
| ANTH 0050-601 | Great Transformations | TR 5:15 PM-6:44 PM | 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. | History & Tradition Sector (all classes) | ||||||||||
| ANTH 0103-401 | Origin and Culture of Cities | Richard L Zettler | TR 1:45 PM-3:14 PM | 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. | MELC0003401, URBS0003401 | History & Tradition Sector (all classes) | ||||||||
| ANTH 0111-401 | Archaeology & The Bible |
Timothy Hogue Vanessa Workman |
TR 1:45 PM-3:14 PM | 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. | JWST0111401, MELC0100401 | |||||||||
| ANTH 0120-401 | Globalization And Its Historical Significance | Kevin M Burke | TR 3:30 PM-4:29 PM | 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. | SOCI2910401 | Hum & Soc Sci Sector (new curriculum only) | ||||||||
| ANTH 0330-001 | Language, Society, and the Human Experience | Andrew M. Carruthers | MW 10:15 AM-11:44 AM | 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. | ||||||||||
| ANTH 1002-401 | Introduction to Africa | David K. Amponsah | MW 10:15 AM-11:44 AM | 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. | AFRC1002401 | Society sector (all classes) | ||||||||
| ANTH 1169-401 | Merchants, Saints, Slaves and Sojourners: the Worlds of the Indian Ocean | Ian C. Petrie | MW 3:30 PM-4:59 PM | 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. | SAST1169401 | https://coursesintouch.apps.upenn.edu/cpr/jsp/fast.do?webService=syll&t=202530&c=ANTH1169401 | ||||||||
| ANTH 1171-401 | Devotion's New Market: Religion, Economics, and the City | Mahboob Ali Mohammad | TR 1:45 PM-3:14 PM | 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. | RELS1640401, SAST1171401, SAST5571401 | |||||||||
| ANTH 1219-301 | Archaeology in the City of Brotherly Love | Megan Crandal Kassabaum | CANCELED | This course introduces the archaeology of Philadelphia through the Heritage West Community Archaeology Project. Depending on the semester, we will focus on archaeological fieldwork, lab analyses, and/or guided visits to local sites, accompanied by readings, discussions, and guest lectures. Please check the section notes for further details. This is an experiential course in which students will explore local archaeology in an intensive, hands-on way by engaging 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. | Society sector (all classes) | |||||||||
| ANTH 1238-401 | Introduction to Medical Anthropology | Adriana Petryna | MW 1:45 PM-2:44 PM | 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. | HSOC1382401 | Hum & Soc Sci Sector (new curriculum only) | ||||||||
| ANTH 1300-401 | Introduction to Mediterranean Archaeology | Kimberly Diane Bowes | MW 10:15 AM-11:44 AM | 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. | CLST1300401 | History & Tradition Sector (all classes) | ||||||||
| ANTH 1480-001 | Food and Fire: Archaeology in the Laboratory | Katherine M Moore | MW 1:45 PM-2:44 PM | 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. | Hum & Soc Sci Sector (new curriculum only) | https://coursesintouch.apps.upenn.edu/cpr/jsp/fast.do?webService=syll&t=202530&c=ANTH1480001 | ||||||||
| ANTH 1500-402 | World Musics and Cultures | MW 8:30 AM-9:59 AM | 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. | AFRC1500402, MUSC1500402 | Arts & Letters Sector (all classes) | |||||||||
| ANTH 1500-403 | World Musics and Cultures | TR 10:15 AM-11:44 AM | 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. | AFRC1500403, MUSC1500403 | Arts & Letters Sector (all classes) | |||||||||
| ANTH 1500-404 | World Musics and Cultures | MW 8:30 AM-9:59 AM | 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. | AFRC1500404, MUSC1500404 | Arts & Letters Sector (all classes) | |||||||||
| ANTH 1670-401 | Population and Public Health in Eastern Europe | Adriana Alexandra Scanteianu | MW 10:15 AM-11:44 AM | 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. | REES1670401, SOCI2950401 | |||||||||
| ANTH 1688-401 | Sex and Socialism | Angelina E Eimannsberger | MW 10:15 AM-11:44 AM | 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." | GSWS1680401, REES1680401, SOCI2972401 | https://coursesintouch.apps.upenn.edu/cpr/jsp/fast.do?webService=syll&t=202530&c=ANTH1688401 | ||||||||
| ANTH 1755-401 | Listening in Troubled Times (SNF Paideia Program Course) | Aaron Levy | M 1:45 PM-4:44 PM | 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. | ENGL0755401 | |||||||||
| ANTH 2093-401 | Psyche, Trauma, Culture | Emily K Ng | F 1:45 PM-4:44 PM | 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. | ASAM2093401 | |||||||||
| ANTH 2221-401 | Material World in Archaeological Science |
Marie-Claude Boileau Deborah I Olszewski Vanessa Workman |
TR 10:15 AM-11:44 AM | 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. | ANTH5221401, ARTH0221401, CLST3302401, MELC2960401, MELC6920401 | |||||||||
| ANTH 2230-401 | Storytelling in Africa | Pamela Blakely | T 5:15 PM-8:14 PM | African storytellers entertain, educate, and comment obliquely on sensitive and controversial issues in artful performance. The course considers motifs, structures, and interpretations of trickster tales and other folktales, storytellers performance skills, and challenges to presenting oral narrative in written and film texts. The course also explores ways traditional storytelling has inspired African social reformers and artists, particularly filmmakers. Students will have opportunities to view films in class. | AFRC2230401, CIMS2230401 | |||||||||
| ANTH 2332-301 | Medicine and the Language of Pain | Justin T Clapp | R 3:30 PM-6:29 PM | 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. | ||||||||||
| ANTH 2340-301 | Pharmaceuticals and Global Health | Michael B Joiner | W 5:15 PM-8:14 PM | 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. | ||||||||||
| ANTH 2440-001 | Disease and Human Evolution | Mallika Sarma | TR 3:30 PM-4:59 PM | 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. | ||||||||||
| ANTH 2777-301 | Perspectives on Human Stress & Resilience | Mallika Sarma | M 1:45 PM-4:44 PM | This course explores the concepts of stress and resilience including the underlying psychophysiologic mechanisms that regulate them and the impacts they have in our current world. Shaped by evolutionary forces, human psychophysiologic, emotional, behavioral, and social performance continuously adapts to intrinsic and extrinsic stressors. The traditional topics are supplemented with current stress-related research in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and current climate disasters. These core topics and processes are discussed in the broader context of (mental) health and understanding of the etiology of stress-related psychopathologies, such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Contemporary findings from research studies conducted in laboratory (e.g., neuroimaging), occupational and extreme (e.g., spaceflight), and clinical (e.g., mental health clinic) environments are discussed in the context of history, systems, and research paradigms used to study the psychobiology of stress. Theoretical concepts and research findings are evaluated relative to their utility in developing prevention and mitigation strategies for stress-related psychopathologies, and translational implementation in clinical treatments. This course may feature expert guest lecturers (occupational health experts, and NASA and Antarctic researchers) and practical application of state-of-the-art experimental methodologies used in psychophysiologic research on stress and resilience. | ||||||||||
| ANTH 2805-401 | Ruins and Reconstruction | Lynn M. Meskell | W 1:45 PM-4:44 PM | 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. | ANTH5805401, CLST7317401, HSPV5850401, MELC2905401, MELC5950401 | |||||||||
| ANTH 2807-401 | Activist, Public, and Engaged Anthropology | Kristina M Lyons | T 12:00 PM-2:59 PM | What are the broader goals, public impacts, and political commitments of social scientific research? Not only with whom, but for whom and with what purpose do we engage in fieldwork and ethnographic practice? Growing numbers of scholars have questioned and responded to the asymmetrical privileges built into Western science by carrying out research in ways that partner with the political aims of their local interlocutors and communities. This course examines what can we learn from public, activist, “engaged,” and decolonial approaches to anthropology as well as the politics of the field, the written page, and the classroom. Terms such as collaboration, advocacy, social criticism, accompaniment, public engagement, and anthropology for liberation are important historical and contemporary trends in the field. During this course, we will discuss the methods, contradictions, and potentiality of research that claims to take stands on issues of inequality, social and environmental injustices, and structural transformations. Students will not only interact with written and visual materials on these topics but will also engage with practitioners regarding how they navigate the relationship between academia, community partnerships, political struggles, and the practical and ethical necessities of attending to local priorities as well as to concrete issues occurring in the world. | ANTH5807401 | |||||||||
| ANTH 3025-401 | Anthropology and Religion: Reason, Magic, Technology | Angelantonio Grossi | T 1:45 PM-4:44 PM | Is religion a private matter? How does it differ from science and politics? Are there convergences between religious thought and current technological developments such as artificial intelligence? Is there still a place for magic and spirituality in today’s secular politics? Questions around the nature of religion, its boundaries, and transformations keep animating people’s lives and their imaginations. Situating the study of religion in the broader history of the Enlightenment and modernity, this seminar will introduce students to the study of religion beginning with its emergence as a comparative discipline during the rise of European Empires. Tracing the role of religion in the history of colonization, the course will examine the ways both science and politics seem to have parted ways with religious thought in what is usually understood as a process of secularization. At the same time, students will familiarize themselves with early ethnological accounts from West Africa, their receptions as discourses about the "Other” of Europe that prompted the genesis of concepts such as “fetishism,” “animism,” and questions of media and mediation. Tracing how modernity came to be associated with progress, rationality and scientific thinking, this course will illustrate how the differentiation between magic, religion, and science became a core feature of modern theories of the human and their entanglement with racialization, accumulation of wealth, disenchantment, and the ecological transformation of the Earth for resource extraction. Alternative approaches to the study of religion, spirituality and magical thought will be explored through close reading of ethnographies of Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas. In parallel, addressing current interests in the materiality of information, the class will explore the convergence between technoscientific materialism, generative AI, and spiritual traditions such as Vodu and mysticism. | ANTH5025401 | |||||||||
| ANTH 3045-401 | Oil to Diamonds: The Political Economy of Natural Resources in Africa |
Adewale Adebanwi Gayatri Sahgal |
R 10:15 AM-1:14 PM | 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. | AFRC4500401, PSCI4130401, SOCI2904401 | |||||||||
| ANTH 3100-401 | Middle Passages and Returns (SNF Paideia Program Course) | Deborah A Thomas | T 10:15 AM-1:14 PM | This course will engage students in questions of slavery, indentured labor, migration, and repair through the conceptual frameworks of middle passages and returns. We will collectively investigate the routes and roots through which and from which people have traveled back and forth between African, Asian, and American sites in order to ask complicated questions about travel, conscription, labor, spirituality, and self-narration. How do we think about the complex trajectories that brought Africans and Asians to the Americas? How do we excavate lesser known inter- and intra-continental circulations? In what ways is return theoretically and methodologically im/possible? How has repair been envisioned? We will focus our attention throughout the semester on narrative texts (slave narratives, autobiographies, memoirs, and travel journals), considering these as ethnographic offerings which we will contextualize with anthropological and historical material. During the break after the semester, we will enact our own “return” by traveling to South Africa and St. Helena, a small island in the South Atlantic to which “liberated Africans” from intercepted slaveships were redirected after Britain abolished the slave trade. | ANTH5100401 | |||||||||
| ANTH 3180-301 | Anthropology and Praxis | Gretchen E L Suess | R 1:45 PM-4:44 PM | 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. | ||||||||||
| ANTH 3244-401 | Introduction to Human Osteology | Rachel Watkins | TR 10:15 AM-11:44 AM | This course introduces students to the human skeleton as a biological and sociocultural product of lived experience. Main objectives of this course include: 1) learning to identify all 206 bones in the adult human skeleton at their various stages of development; 2) learning to identify skeletal landmarks associated with muscle attachment; and 3) learning the major muscle groups associated with shoulder, elbow, hip and knee joints. Students will also explore historical, methodological and theoretical developments in bioanthropology that help us to understand how empirical observation of the skeleton is a social process. Finally, students will be introduced to the process of constructing biological profiles based on skeletal and documentary analysis, including age-at-death, sex, and pathological conditions. | ANTH5244401 | |||||||||
| ANTH 3307-401 | Intro to Digital Archaeology | Jason Herrmann | MW 3:30 PM-4:59 PM | 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. | AAMW5620401, ANTH5220401, CLST3307401, CLST5620401, MELC3950401 | |||||||||
| ANTH 3444-401 | Human Growth and Development | Caroline E Jones | MW 12:00 PM-1:29 PM | 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. | ANTH5444401 | |||||||||
| ANTH 3669-401 | Experimental Ethnography Performance: Black/ Feminist Studio Practice | W 1:45 PM-4:44 PM | Students will engage with performance as a creative ethnographic research practice, guided by a special visiting fellow at the Center for Experimental Ethnography who is a master of the craft. Sections differ in content and focus, and involve a production component as well as a final exhibit/showcase/screening. | ANTH6669401 | ||||||||||
| ANTH 3672-401 | Experimental Ethnographies Sound:Ethnographies in-between | R 1:45 PM-4:44 PM | Students will engage with sound as a creative ethnographic research practice, guided by a special visiting fellow at the Center for Experimental Ethnography who is a master of the craft. Sections differ in content and focus, and involve a production component as well as a final exhibit/showcase/screening. | ANTH6672401 | ||||||||||
| ANTH 3780-401 | The Biology of Inequality | Caroline E Jones | TR 1:45 PM-3:14 PM | 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. | ANTH5780401 | |||||||||
| ANTH 4000-301 | Research Seminar in Anthropology | Kevin M Burke | F 8:30 AM-11:29 AM | 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. | ||||||||||
| ANTH 5025-401 | Anthropology and Religion: Reason, Magic, Technology | Angelantonio Grossi | T 1:45 PM-4:44 PM | Is religion a private matter? How does it differ from science and politics? Are there convergences between religious thought and current technological developments such as artificial intelligence? Is there still a place for magic and spirituality in today’s secular politics? Questions around the nature of religion, its boundaries, and transformations keep animating people’s lives and their imaginations. Situating the study of religion in the broader history of the Enlightenment and modernity, this seminar will introduce students to the study of religion beginning with its emergence as a comparative discipline during the rise of European Empires. Tracing the role of religion in the history of colonization, the course will examine the ways both science and politics seem to have parted ways with religious thought in what is usually understood as a process of secularization. At the same time, students will familiarize themselves with early ethnological accounts from West Africa, their receptions as discourses about the "Other” of Europe that prompted the genesis of concepts such as “fetishism,” “animism,” and questions of media and mediation. Tracing how modernity came to be associated with progress, rationality and scientific thinking, this course will illustrate how the differentiation between magic, religion, and science became a core feature of modern theories of the human and their entanglement with racialization, accumulation of wealth, disenchantment, and the ecological transformation of the Earth for resource extraction. Alternative approaches to the study of religion, spirituality and magical thought will be explored through close reading of ethnographies of Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas. In parallel, addressing current interests in the materiality of information, the class will explore the convergence between technoscientific materialism, generative AI, and spiritual traditions such as Vodu and mysticism. | ANTH3025401 | |||||||||
| ANTH 5026-401 | Material & Methods in Mediterranean Archaeology | Ann L Kuttner | R 1:45 PM-4:44 PM | 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. | AAMW5260401, CLST6300401 | |||||||||
| ANTH 5100-401 | Middle Passages and Returns (SNF Paideia Program Course) | Deborah A Thomas | T 10:15 AM-1:14 PM | This course will engage students in questions of slavery, indentured labor, migration, and repair through the conceptual frameworks of middle passages and returns. We will collectively investigate the routes and roots through which and from which people have traveled back and forth between African, Asian, and American sites in order to ask complicated questions about travel, conscription, labor, spirituality, and self-narration. How do we think about the complex trajectories that brought Africans and Asians to the Americas? How do we excavate lesser known inter- and intra-continental circulations? In what ways is return theoretically and methodologically im/possible? How has repair been envisioned? We will focus our attention throughout the semester on narrative texts (slave narratives, autobiographies, memoirs, and travel journals), considering these as ethnographic offerings which we will contextualize with anthropological and historical material. During the break after the semester, we will enact our own “return” by traveling to South Africa and St. Helena, a small island in the South Atlantic to which “liberated Africans” from intercepted slaveships were redirected after Britain abolished the slave trade. | ANTH3100401 | |||||||||
| ANTH 5220-401 | Intro to Digital Archaeology | Jason Herrmann | MW 3:30 PM-4:59 PM | 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. | AAMW5620401, ANTH3307401, CLST3307401, CLST5620401, MELC3950401 | |||||||||
| ANTH 5221-401 | Material World in Archaeological Science |
Marie-Claude Boileau Deborah I Olszewski Vanessa Workman |
TR 10:15 AM-11:44 AM | 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. | ANTH2221401, ARTH0221401, CLST3302401, MELC2960401, MELC6920401 | |||||||||
| ANTH 5230-401 | Archaeobotany Seminar | Chantel E. White | F 8:30 AM-11:29 AM | 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. | AAMW5390401, CLST7313401, MELC6930401 | |||||||||
| ANTH 5244-401 | Introduction to Human Osteology | Rachel Watkins | TR 10:15 AM-11:44 AM | This course introduces students to the human skeleton as a biological and sociocultural product of lived experience. Main objectives of this course include: 1) learning to identify all 206 bones in the adult human skeleton at their various stages of development; 2) learning to identify skeletal landmarks associated with muscle attachment; and 3) learning the major muscle groups associated with shoulder, elbow, hip and knee joints. Students will also explore historical, methodological and theoretical developments in bioanthropology that help us to understand how empirical observation of the skeleton is a social process. Finally, students will be introduced to the process of constructing biological profiles based on skeletal and documentary analysis, including age-at-death, sex, and pathological conditions. | ANTH3244401 | |||||||||
| ANTH 5318-301 | Politics of Psychic Life | Emily K Ng | W 1:45 PM-4:44 PM | 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? | ||||||||||
| ANTH 5390-301 | Advanced Readings in Environment and Society | Nikhil Anand | M 1:45 PM-4:44 PM | As capitalist relations remake the earth through projects of intensified mineral extraction, carbon-based energy consumption and the production of 'waste', in this course we will examine the diverse histories and practices through which nature-society relations have been studied in anthropology and related disciplines. The course will follow a genealogical approach to understand some contemporary theoretical developments in environmental anthropology, including multispecies ethnography, the anthropology of infrastructure, and ontological anthropology. In what ways do these modes of doing anthropology recapitulate or address some of the earlier debates on race, indigeneity, materiality and alterity? How might recent work in the field generate new ways to remake the world and our understanding of it? The class will combine key theoretical texts in cultural ecology, political ecology and science and technology studies together with ethnographies of natureculture to investigate how earth water, earth, air and fire are being remade in the current moment. It borrows from and builds on the "Reading List for a Progressive Environmental Anthropology" by Guarasci, Moore and Vaughn (2018) to rethink and reconstitute what counts as the canon of the field by attending to the contributions of women, people of color, scholars working outside of the United States, and indigenous authors. By examining theentanglements of nature, culture and political economy in the contemporary moment, the course will enable students to situate and construct their dissertation research projects with what is a prolific and compelling literature to imagine and understand our climate changed world. | ||||||||||
| ANTH 5410-301 | Critical Engagements with Science(s) and Justice(s) | Kristina M Lyons | W 12:00 PM-2:59 PM | 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. | ||||||||||
| ANTH 5444-401 | Human Growth and Development | Caroline E Jones | MW 12:00 PM-1:29 PM | 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. | ANTH3444401 | |||||||||
| ANTH 5470-401 | Anthropology and Education | Alexander Posecznick | M 2:00 PM-3:59 PM | 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. | EDUC5495401, URBS5470401 | |||||||||
| ANTH 5570-401 | Archaeology of Landscapes | Chad Hill | M 10:15 AM-1:14 PM | 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. | AAMW5570401, LALS5570401 | |||||||||
| ANTH 5780-401 | The Biology of Inequality | Caroline E Jones | TR 1:45 PM-3:14 PM | 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. | ANTH3780401 | |||||||||
| ANTH 5805-401 | Ruins and Reconstruction | Lynn M. Meskell | W 1:45 PM-4:44 PM | 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. | ANTH2805401, CLST7317401, HSPV5850401, MELC2905401, MELC5950401 | |||||||||
| ANTH 5807-401 | Activist, Public, and Engaged Anthropology | Kristina M Lyons | T 12:00 PM-2:59 PM | What are the broader goals, public impacts, and political commitments of social scientific research? Not only with whom, but for whom and with what purpose do we engage in fieldwork and ethnographic practice? Growing numbers of scholars have questioned and responded to the asymmetrical privileges built into Western science by carrying out research in ways that partner with the political aims of their local interlocutors and communities. This course examines what can we learn from public, activist, “engaged,” and decolonial approaches to anthropology as well as the politics of the field, the written page, and the classroom. Terms such as collaboration, advocacy, social criticism, accompaniment, public engagement, and anthropology for liberation are important historical and contemporary trends in the field. During this course, we will discuss the methods, contradictions, and potential impacts of research that claims to take stands on issues of inequality, social and environmental injustices, and structural transformations. Students will not only interact with written and visual materials on these topics but will also engage with practitioners regarding how they navigate the relationship between academia, community partnerships, political struggles, and the practical and ethical necessities of attending to local priorities as well as to concrete issues occurring in the world. | ANTH2807401 | |||||||||
| ANTH 5830-401 | Ethnographic Filmmaking |
Alissa M. Jordan Paula Helene Rogers |
W 9:30 AM-11:29 AM | 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. | EDUC5466401 | |||||||||
| ANTH 6000-301 | Contemporary Archaeology in Theory | Lauren M Ristvet | T 10:15 AM-1:14 PM | 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. | ||||||||||
| ANTH 6030-301 | Language in Culture and Society | Asif Agha | MW 9:45 AM-11:44 AM | 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. | ||||||||||
| ANTH 6280-301 | Language in Culture and Society: Special Topics | Asif Agha | T 10:15 AM-1:14 PM | 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. | ||||||||||
| ANTH 6420-301 | Ethnographies in Linguistic Anthropology | Andrew M. Carruthers | T 1:45 PM-4:44 PM | 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. | ||||||||||
| ANTH 6669-401 | Experimental Ethnography Performance: Black/Feminist Studio Practice | W 1:45 PM-4:44 PM | Students will engage with performance as a creative ethnographic research practice, guided by a special visiting fellow at the Center for Experimental Ethnography who is a master of the craft. Sections differ in content and focus, and involve a production component as well as a final exhibit/showcase/screening. | ANTH3669401 | ||||||||||
| ANTH 6672-401 | Experimental Ethnography Sound: Ethnographies in-between | R 1:45 PM-4:44 PM | Students will engage with sound as a creative ethnographic research practice, guided by a special visiting fellow at the Center for Experimental Ethnography who is a master of the craft. Sections differ in content and focus, and involve a production component as well as a final exhibit/showcase/screening. | ANTH3672401 |