ANTHR-105 Introduction to Cultural Anthropology
Introduces the analysis of cultural diversity, including concepts, methods, and purposes in interpreting social, economic, political, and belief systems found in human societies.
ANTHR-204 Anthropology of Modern Japan
Certain keywords are crucial for understanding Japanese culture and society, words such as amae (dependence), uchi/soto (inside/outside), tatemae/honne (formality/true feeling), giri (obligation), hare/kegare (purity/pollution), seishin (spirit), and en (connection). This course will introduce seminal works that introduce some of these keywords, as well as more recent writing that examines the contexts such as the family, school, and workplace in which these cultural frameworks shape peoples' lives and are themselves reshaped. Also, we will attend to historical moments such as World War II, the postwar era of high-speed growth, and the long recession and era of low birth rate.
ANTHR-212 Shopping and Swapping: Cultures Consumption and Exchange
We shop for our food, for our clothes, for our colleges. We purchase cars, manicures, and vacations. It seems that there is little that cannot be bought or sold. But we also give and receive gifts, exchange favors, "go dutch" in restaurants, and invite friends for potlucks. This course examines exchange systems cross-culturally, in order to understand their cultural significance and social consequences. It explores how our own commodity exchange system, which appears to be no more than an efficient means of distributing goods and services, in fact contains intriguing symbolic dimensions similar to the gift exchange systems of Native North America, Melanesia, and Africa.
ANTHR-216 Special Topics in Anthropology
ANTHR-216AD Special Topics in Anthropology: 'Approaching Death: Culture, Health, and Science'
This class challenges assumptions about death and dying as we examine its meanings and related practices in various cultural contexts. We will ask: what is universal about death and dying, and what is socially constructed? What can the social sciences, bio medicine, literature, the arts, and our own qualitative research tell us about the processes of dying, of grieving, and of providing care? In essence, what does it take to approach death?
ANTHR-216AU Special Topics in Anthropology: 'Peoples and Cultures of Indigenous Australia'
Indigenous peoples of Australia have long been objects of interest and imagination by outsiders -- for their ceremonial practices, social structures, religious forms, aesthetic expressions, and relationships to land. This course will explore how Aboriginal peoples have struggled to reproduce and represent themselves and their lifeways on their own terms -- via visual media (pigment designs on bark, acrylic paintings on canvas); performances (cultural festivals, plays, other forms); archival interventions (photographic, textual, digital); museum exhibition; and various textual genres (autobiography, fiction, poetry). We will examine "traditional" and "contemporary" productions as all part of culture and culture-making in the present, emphasizing that this is ongoing and intercultural work.
ANTHR-216BE Special Topics in Anthropology: 'Black Ethnographers'
The aim of this class is to underscore the significance of Black perspectives and contributions within the field of anthropology. Black anthropology, and especially Black feminist anthropology, has historically been sidelined within anthropological discourse. In this course, we will collectively challenge this historical erasure by centering the work of Black ethnographers. By delving into works spanning continental Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States, students will begin to understand the vast impact Black ethnographers have had both in and outside the field of anthropology.
ANTHR-216EF Special Topics in Anthropology: 'Ethnographic Film'
Anthropologists have made films since the origins of the discipline and have long debated the role of film in the production of knowledge about others. This course explores the history, evolution, critiques, and contemporary practices of ethnographic film. We will consider key works that have defined the genre, and the innovations (and controversies) associated with them; we will engage documentary, observational, reflexive, and experimental cinema; and we will consider Indigenous media as both social activism and cultural reproduction. We will learn about film as a signifying practice, and grapple with the ethical and political concerns raised by cross-cultural representation.
ANTHR-216FD Special Topics in Anthropology: 'Ethnographic Food Documentary'
Students will learn basic skills on ethnographic methods in anthropology as they are introduced to issues of food and culinary cultural practices, politics and history. Selected readings and films will explore the intersections of food with colonialism, race and ethnicity, gender, health, political economy, and social movements. The course has a focus on Latinx and Latin American/Caribbean foodways, however students will apply the course's conceptual toolkit in a wide range of cultural settings. Students will learn techniques of participant observation, interviews, script writing and visual analysis to conduct fieldwork in a local cultural community in South Hadley and surroundings, as they are guided towards producing a short ethnographic food documentary.
ANTHR-216GH Special Topics in Anthropology: 'Case Studies in Global Health'
This course is devoted to anthropological perspectives on global health projects and paradigms. We will interrogate how current global health programs emerged from 19th and 20th century development logics, as well as the concurrent rise of discourses, laws and practices that posited healthcare as a universal human right, and how these transformations of these concepts are still mobilized in global health strategies today. We will pay particular attention to when and how health burdens come under governmental jurisprudence or corporate control, how these reworkings affect individual risk and responsibility, or what it means to be ill or well across different global contexts.
ANTHR-216HM Special Topics in Anthropology: 'Feminist Engagements with Hormones'
This course takes a transdisciplinary and multi-sited approach to explore the social, political, biocultural, and legal complexities of hormones. Hormones "appear" in many discussions about reproductive and environmental justice, identity, health and chronicity. But what are hormones? What are their social, political and cultural histories? Where are they located? How do they act? The course will foster active learning, centering feminist pedagogies of collaborative inquiry. Examples of topics to be explored are: transnational/transcultural knowledge production about hormones; hormonal relations to sexgender, natureculture, bodymind; and hormone-centered actions and activism.
ANTHR-216HP Special Topics in Anthropology: 'Feminist Health Politics'
Health is about bodies, selves and politics. We will explore a series of health topics from feminist perspectives. How do gender, sexuality, class, disability, and age influence the ways in which one perceives and experiences health and the access one has to health information and health care? Are heteronormativity, cissexism, or one's place of living related to one's health status or one's health risk? By paying close attention to the relationships between community-based narratives, activities of health networks and organizations and theory, we will develop a solid understanding of the historical, political and cultural specificities of health issues, practices, services and movements.
ANTHR-216HR Special Topics in Anthropology: 'Anthropology and Human Rights'
This course explores anthropological approaches to human rights -- a key theme of transnational politics and international law. Anthropologists have contributed to discussions on human rights since the UN Declaration and the field has provided a vibrant platform to analyze ideologies, politics, and practices surrounding human rights. We will survey an array of anthropological studies that approach human rights from the perspective of cultural relativism, contextualization, advocacy, and practice. Students will gain a critical perspective on the seemingly universal rhetoric of human rights by learning how it produces diverse effects in places such as Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East.
ANTHR-216LA Special Topics in Anthropology: 'Anthropology of Latin America'
Latin America has undergone massive political, economic and cultural transformations since the end of the Cold War. Indeed, during the final decades of the twentieth century, much of the region embraced neoliberal governance and free market capitalism. However, by the turn of the millennium, many Latin American governments had made a sharp "turn to the Left," as states began to intervene more directly in the economy, promote alternative imaginings of modernization, and recognize greater rights for Indigenous and Afro-descendent peoples. This course will begin with a focus on these shifts in governance, but largely focuses on the consequences of these changes within people's everyday lives.
ANTHR-216MB Special Topics in Anthropology: 'The Medical Body'
How has medical anthropology apprehended bodies through its decades-long history? We will be reading four books cover to cover, with shorter framing pieces in interstitial weeks. Our readings will come primarily from medical anthropologists, but we will also read across cognate fields in medical humanities and social science. Central to our class discussions will be the ways biomedicine has cared for people occupying gendered, racialized and disabled bodies, especially when many medical practices are designed for an idea of a canonical, universally standardized body. Taken together, this course will shed light on the porosity and multiplicity of embodied states within healthcare systems.
ANTHR-216MH Special Topics in Anthropology: 'Migration and Human Rights'
Can the history of nation-states and global capitalism also be understood as a history of migration? In what ways are the experiences of refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants different from the legal categories assigned to them? Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben's conceptualizations of "state of exception" and "bare life" are frequently invoked in current scholarship on refugee and detention camps. What -- if any -- is the difference between life in concentration camps, refugee camps, and migrant detention centers? Are human rights frameworks adequate to the task of addressing protracted statelessness and migration brought about by the intersection of conflict, economic crises, and climate change? These questions will be examined through scholarship on migration, human rights, and humanitarianism.
ANTHR-216PR Special Topics in Anthropology: 'Precarious Labor'
What do scholars and policy makers mean by the term "precarious labor"? How have transformations in global capitalism contributed to the proliferation of poorly paid work conducted in unsafe conditions in the Global North as well as the Global South? How do nation-states' attempts to regulate migration contribute to the maintenance of unfree labor conditions? How has the globalization of precarious labor affected the organization of reproductive and care labor within families and households in different parts of the world? These questions will be examined through interdisciplinary scholarship on labor under neoliberal capitalism in the Global South as well as in the Global North.
ANTHR-216RC Special Topics in Anthropology: 'Representing Race'
This class takes a ~look~ at the components of racial representation in audio-visual media: How can ideas and theories be conveyed or communicated through a visual mode? What ethical concerns emerge when representing others in different media? Drawing from written texts, documentaries, graphic novels, and artwork, we will explore the myriad ways media creatives construct racial representations, and question the perceived boundary between research and art. Starting with early anthropological film, this class will move through both conventional and nontraditional material that is used to tell stories, make political statements, and represent people's lived experiences.
ANTHR-216RE Special Topics in Anthropology: 'Anthropology of Reproduction'
This course focuses on the biological and cultural components of reproduction and childbirth through cross-cultural perspectives. We explore the birth process across geographies, historical trends, and recent dialogues surrounding the technocratic model of birth, to understand the changing focus of birth as a medical condition. Indigenous birthing customs and beliefs from several different cultural contexts will be considered, as well as the contemporary rates of maternal mortality facing some today. We will also investigate how access to different types of maternal, fetal, and reproductive care is politicized across different times and places.
ANTHR-221 Anthropology of Media
This course critically examines how media make a difference in diverse peoples' lives. How are media produced, circulated, and consumed? Together, we will explore the material forms through which subjectivities, collectivities, and histories are produced; and the social practices of constructing and contesting national identities, forging alternative political visions, transforming religious practice, and producing new relationships. In this 21st century, media are not just indispensable to what is known, but also, to how we know. Case studies will include film, TV, photography, art, archives, journalism, and digital platforms; ethnographic examples will be drawn from around the world.
ANTHR-230 Language in Culture and Society
Language is integral to human experiences across cultures. Interpersonal communication holds social worlds together, lending them significance. This course examines language as a complex, embodied field of cultural practice and performance. It bridges core concepts within linguistic anthropology and semiotics -- such as relativity, indexicality, performance, and language ideology -- with critical analyses of social fields including race, gender, and sexuality. Illustrative examples are drawn from Western and non-Western societies.
ANTHR-235 History of Anthropological Thought
This course offers a historical foundation for themes in contemporary social theory and ethnography. We build this foundation through readings of twentieth-century anthropological and critical theories, including historicism, interpretive anthropology, structuralism, feminism, and postcolonialism. The course encourages critical and creative responses to anthropology's history through readings that challenge the canon and through active engagement with primary documents revealing the field's social, ethical, and political contexts.
ANTHR-240 Medical Anthropology
This course provides an introduction to medical anthropology. Core topics will include: the culture of medicine, illness experience, caregiving, power, violence, and humanitarian intervention. We will explore how ethnographic research and social theory can enrich understanding of illness and care, raising issues for and about medicine and public health often left out of other disciplinary approaches. Throughout, we will emphasize the vantage point of the local worlds in which people experience, narrate, and respond to illness and suffering, and the ways in which large-scale forces contribute to such local experience.
ANTHR-261 Cultures of Power in Mexico
This course introduces the anthropology of Mexico through ethnographies of power, knowledge, and indigeneity. Drawing on feminist and decolonial critical methods, we will trace constructions of Mexican indigeneity through two intersecting stories. The first centers the effects of neocolonial capitalism on indigenous lives, with attention to contemporary ethnographic themes including bioprospecting, narcoculture, social movements, and resistance/refusal. The second lends historical texture to these themes by tracing how state anthropologists have constructed and governed indigenous communities since the Revolution.
ANTHR-275 Research Methods in Cultural Anthropology
Topics include research design, ethical dilemmas, and the relationship between academic research and community based learning. Applied fieldwork and presentations are an integral part of this course.
ANTHR-295 Independent Study
ANTHR-314 Science, Feminism, and Mount Holyoke
Students in this course will develop a collaborative history and ethnography of cultures of science at Íøºì±¬ÁÏ. Through archival and ethnographic research carried out across the semester, we will examine scientific education and knowledge production at Mount Holyoke in cultural perspective. The collaborative project will introduce students to two broader stories: a history of feminist activist and scholarly challenges to the power of the life sciences; and a history of feminist scientists' work to reform their own institutional cultures. The interdisciplinary field that emerged at the nexus of these two movements, feminist science studies, will offer critical frameworks.
ANTHR-316 Special Topics in Anthropology
ANTHR-316CA Special Topics in Anthropology: 'Carbon Christianity'
This seminar investigates the multiple connections between modern forms of Christianity and fossil fuels. The course begins with a consideration of recent scholarship that details how workers' everyday experiences in coal mines and oil fields profoundly shaped their religious sensibilities. We then examine how fossil fuel companies funded many of the most significant Christian institutions in the United States -- both liberal and conservative -- during the twentieth century. Finally, the course will reflect on contemporary Christian responses to climate change, both those that seek to halt the burning of fossil fuels and those that deny it is taking place.
ANTHR-316DD Special Topics in Anthropology: 'Drugs and Devices'
This seminar will explore anthropological approaches to political economy and materiality within the context of medical anthropology. Medical anthropologists have long been focused on the ways health and illness are reconceptualized in relation to the production and circulation of various organic and inorganic materials -- for example, drugs, devices, vaccines, organs, and stem cells, to name a few. Against the backdrop of these scholarly debates, this seminar will take up a series of ethnographies, each about a different type of "biocapital" broadly construed, to foster student discussions about the global transaction of biological materials.
ANTHR-316DM Special Topics in Anthropology: 'Decolonizing Museums'
Museums collect, preserve, categorize, and exhibit objects, and through these practices, produce and circulate knowledge. This course takes "the museum" as an object of ethnographic inquiry, focusing especially on Indigenous peoples and their ways of knowing, being, and doing things. How might museums acknowledge the confronting truths of colonization, and the intergenerational and ongoing trauma endured by Indigenous peoples? How might this often-intercultural work offer possibilities for healing? Teaching and learning will be guided by principles of Indigenous sovereignty, and grounded in storytelling and in making things as Indigenous ways of transmitting knowledge.
ANTHR-316EG Special Topics in Anthropology: 'Eggs and Embryos: Innovations in Reproductive and Genetic Technologies'
This seminar will focus on emerging innovations in the development, use and governance of reproductive and genetic technologies (RGTs). How do novel developments at the interface of fertility treatment and biomedical research raise both new and enduring questions about the 'naturalness' of procreation, the politics of queer families, the im/possibilities of disabilities, and transnational citizenship? Who has a say in what can be done and for which purposes? We will engage with ethnographic texts, documentaries, policy statements, citizen science activist projects, and social media in order to closely explore the diversity of perspectives in this field.
ANTHR-316ET Special Topics in Anthropology: 'Advanced Seminar in Ethnomusicology'
Designed for music and non-music majors, this advanced seminar examines core theoretical and methodological issues in ethnomusicology and the debates that have shaped its practice since its origins in the early twentieth century as comparative musicology. Drawing on musical traditions from different parts of the world and supplemented by workshops conducted by visiting professional musicians, the course explores the interdisciplinary approaches that inform how ethnomusicologists study the significance of music "in" and "as" culture. Topics covered will include ethnographic methods, the intersection of musicological and anthropological perspectives, the political significance of musical hybridity, applied ethnomusicology, and sound studies.
ANTHR-316EX Special Topics in Anthropology: 'Craft and Composition: Experimental Ethnography'
Above all else, ethnography is a form of writing. Its formal properties range widely, running a gamut that transects art criticism, speculative fiction, travel writing, memoir, science writing, and poetry. But the genre's soul is an imaginative experiment: transporting one world into another. Ethnographers, then, share practices of representation and evocation with the arts. This course introduces the craft of imaginative ethnography, paying central attention to writing that refuses the (social) sciences' stodgy conventions. We will reflect on experiential shapes of reading -- what does ethnography do for or to us? -- as we recompose ourselves as a collective of ethnographic experimentalists.
ANTHR-316HD Special Topics in Anthropology: 'Problematizing Humanitarianism'
The emergence of modern humanitarianism connecting different parts of the world is either lauded as evincing progress in human evolution, or criticized as masking the advancement of Western imperialism. In this course we will examine the complex and shifting relationships between gender, race, class, religious conceptions and practices of charity, the global spread of capitalism through colonialism and enslavement, and the emergence of international humanitarianism. Final projects for the course will be based on student research conducted in the Íøºì±¬ÁÏ archives.
ANTHR-316LA Special Topics in Anthropology: 'Race and Religion in Latin America'
The course will begin with an investigation of the proto-racial and religious categories through which Europeans in the early modern era understood human difference. From there, we will trace how these notions were re-conceptualized in the centuries following the encounter between Europeans, Africans, and the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas. As we examine this history -- including the emergence of slavery, eugenics, mestizaje, and Liberation Theology -- we will pay particular attention to how interwoven racial and religious hierarchies were both constructed and resisted. The final section of the course will concentrate on the contemporary entanglements of race and religion in the region.
ANTHR-316LW Special Topics in Anthropology: 'Ethnographies of Law'
This seminar focuses on the anthropological study of the legal field. The class will begin with a survey of some classical texts that underpin the legal thought in the modern era. We will then see how anthropologists contributed to the study of law by conceptualizing it as part of larger socio-political processes and as a field that includes social relations, processes, and practices. The students will learn how some key legal issues such as dispute management, decision making, and reconciliation are actualized in diverse cultural and social settings, to think critically and evaluate legal processes in a multicultural setting and in plural societies.
ANTHR-316ME Special Topics in Anthropology: 'Political Anthropology of the Middle East'
This seminar focuses on anthropological studies of how power -- both in its open and hidden forms -- manifests itself and shapes everyday life in the contemporary Middle East. It explores how authority is established and contested in various domains including bureaucracy and the state; sexuality and the family; religion and civil society; markets and the media. We will trace how experiences of colonization, imperialism, modernization, nationalism, capitalism, occupation, war and revolt mold the conditions of living for peoples of the Middle East. We will also examine how specific forms of knowledge production attribute coherence to the region, allowing its imagination as an object of intervention in the name of development and security.
ANTHR-316ND Special Topics in Anthropology: 'Indigenous Data Sovereignty'
This course offers a qualitative approach to Indigenous Data Sovereignty. As we explore examples of innovative tools and technologies, and investigate how Indigenous ways of knowing, being, and doing are online/in digital environments, we ground all learning in Indigenous ontologies: relationality, interconnectedness, and storytelling as a primary form of knowledge transmission. No system/structure for preserving or ensuring access to data is neutral; we will work together in a thought-experiment to radically reimagine digital infrastructures (as well as ideas about security and privacy online) from Indigenous perspectives.
ANTHR-316PG Special Topics in Anthropology: 'Who's Involved?: Participatory Governance, Emerging Technologies and Feminism'
Deep brain stimulation, genome sequencing, regenerative medicine...Exploring practices of 'participatory governance' of emerging technologies, we will examine the formal and informal involvement of citizens, patients, health professionals, scientists and policy makers. What initiatives exist at local, national and transnational levels to foster science literacy? How do lived experiences of nationality, ability, class, race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality become visible and/or disappear within constructed frameworks of participatory governance? How can feminist ethnographic research and feminist theory contribute to a larger project of democratizing knowledge production and governance?
ANTHR-316RC Special Topics in Anthropology: 'Ethnographic Research in Religious Communities'
With a focus on local religious communities, this course puts into practice the research methods, modes of analysis, and writing styles that characterize ethnographic fieldwork. We first consider prominent ethnographies of religious communities in the United States in order to better understand the specific questions, debates, and ethical challenges that this literature addresses. Students then gain hands-on experience with a variety of ethnographic methods through course field trips to local places of worship. Final projects are rooted in extensive independent ethnographic research with a religious community.
ANTHR-316SE Special Topics in Anthropology: 'Anthropology of Secularism'
What is secularism? For many of us, the answer is obvious: the world without religious belief, or the separation of church and state, or even the "really real" world. In recent years, scholars in a number of fields have begun to question these common sense notions about secularism. In this course, we will investigate this rapidly expanding literature and the critical lines of inquiry it has opened up: Under what specific cultural and historic conditions did secularism first emerge? Is secularism experienced today in the same way throughout the world? If not, how do they vary? What ways of being and living does secularism encourage or allow to flourish? Which does it stunt, block, or prohibit?
ANTHR-316VN Special Topics in Anthropology: 'Violence and the State'
The definition of terrorism within international law remains contested. Coined in the late 18th century, the term was initially used to refer to government by intimidation as directed and implemented by the party in power during the French Revolution. In current usage, the term is used to refer to unofficial or unauthorized use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims by non-state actors. We will examine the ways in which these contestations of definition derive from conceptions of the state as that entity which alone has monopoly over the legitimate use of violence. Our case-studies will be drawn from the Global North and the Global South.
ANTHR-317 Play
We associate play with childhood, a time of spontaneous and creative activity, in contrast to the boring routine of adult responsibilities. And yet play is more than just fun and games. It is through play that children develop lasting cognitive and social skills. For adults too, there can be serious play -- play that has real consequence -- play that shapes the intimate lives of individuals, as well as entire social formations. We will consider attempts to gamify work processes and settings in light of anthropological understandings of play. And we will attempt to gamify anthropology, designing games ourselves based on anthropological readings in order to better understand our discipline.
ANTHR-342 Science as Culture
What is science? The progressive discovery of Nature's laws? The process of honing claims about the universe? Is science the act of postulating and testing hypotheses? Or is it tinkering and experimentation? This course offers an advanced introduction to cultural and anthropological studies of science. Through careful readings of work in areas such as the sociology of scientific knowledge, actor-network theory, feminist science studies, and affect theory, we will explore the sciences as complex systems of cultural production. The course will culminate in a series of critical ethnographic studies of how the sciences shape concepts and experiences of race, the body, gender, and sexuality.
ANTHR-350 Issues in Contemporary Anthropological Theory
This course explores the major theoretical frameworks developed and debated by anthropologists of the past two decades. It covers core issues in anthropological epistemology, the relationship of ethnography to social and cultural theory, trends in anthropological analysis, and the place of anthropological theory in broader academic and public discourses.
ANTHR-352 Digital Cultures
In the last decades, digital media have become integral to our quotidian lives as well as to myriad translocal processes. "New" technologies are hailed in celebratory narratives of democratization and participation, access and innovation, enchantment and possibility; and newly-available gadgets, devices, and platforms are taken up with great speed and facility. This course is designed to ethnographically explore "the digital," as both a site and subject of scholarly inquiry, in which we think through how this form is shifting the ways in which we know ourselves, our social networks, our bodies, and the dynamic cultural and political contexts in which we live.
ANTHR-395 Independent Study
