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This First-Year Writing Seminar is devoted to the anthropological study of the human condition. Anthropology examines all aspects of human experience, from the evolution of the species to contemporary challenges of politics, environment, and society. The discipline emphasizes empirically rich field research informed by sophisticated theoretical understandings of human social life and cultural production. The diversity of anthropology's interests provides a diverse array of stimulating opportunities to write critically about the human condition. Topics vary by semester.Topics for 2024-2025 may include:TitleInstructorFWS: Canoe Cultures in America: Commerce, Conquest, ContradictionsA. ArcadiFWS: Historytelling as RitualJ. LuriaFWS: Culture on TourC. RechtzigelFWS: Becoming Indigenous in AsiaY. Liang

This course examines the relation between humanity as a species, our group affiliations, and our individual selves. In an era of increasing division, what remains of our commitment to one another as members of a human community? As contemporary problems challenge us at a global scale, there is a pressing need to revisit the question of our shared human existence. We will touch on an array of human productions and activities, from literature and labor to ritual and religion, in order to assess our commitments to self, community, and species. Together we will seek answers to a single pressing question: what are the obligations of being human? This is not only a question of who we are, but also where we are headed.

A broad introduction to archaeology-the study of material remains to answer questions about the human past. Case studies highlight the variability of ancient societies and illustrate the varied methods and interpretive frameworks archaeologists use to reconstruct them. This course can serve as a platform for both archaeology and anthropology undergraduate majors.

The evolution of humankind is explored through the fossil record, studies of the biological differences among current human populations, and a comparison with our closest relatives, the primates. This course investigates the roots of human biology and behavior with an evolutionary framework.

Anthropology is the study of human beings. Sociocultural anthropology examines the practices, structures, and meanings that shape lived experience. But what does that mean? What do sociocultural anthropologists do, and how can their ways of knowing help us understand our interconnected world? This course introduces sociocultural anthropology-its methods, concepts, and characteristic ways of thinking. Together, we will examine how people live their lives: how we eat, work, play, and fight; how we bury our dead and care for our living; how we wield and acquiesce to power. Along the way, we will work to challenge Eurocentric models of human nature and human difference. And we will consider how anthropological tools can help address contemporary issues, from global health to climate change to racial justice.

This course provides a basic introduction to the Tamil language. Our focus will be on conversational usage in common social encounters, such as in the market, visiting a family's home, the bank, a place of worship, observing a common ritual, railway station, etc. We will also learn the Tamil script and basic grammatical rules of written and spoken Tamil. Learning activities will be structured in conjunction with Tamil speaking and comprehension exercises so as to make both the learning of another culture and the learning of Tamil language part of the same process of engaged learning and research.

This course provides an interdisciplinary introduction to the diverse cultures, histories and contemporary situations of the Indigenous peoples of North America. Students will also be introduced to important themes in the post-1492 engagement between Indigenous and settler populations in North America and will consider the various and complex ways in which that history affected - and continues to affect - American Indian peoples and societies. Course materials draw on the humanities, social sciences, and expressive arts.

How might we engage with communities, whether here in Ithaca or across the globe, in our diverse histories, experiences, and perspectives? What structural forces shape inequalities and how do communities go about addressing social and racial injustice? This course is designed to help students bring global engaged learning into their Cornell education with a focus on community engaged learning in Ithaca. It introduces skills that are vital for intercultural engagement, including participant-observation research, ethnographic writing, and the habits of critical reflexivity. Through readings, film, and community partnerships, we will learn about global/local issues including the gendered and racialized aspects of labor, food and housing insecurity, structural violence, and migration. Students will complete projects that help them learn with and from Ithaca community members and organizations.

Mesopotamia is often defined by firsts: the first villages, cities, states, and empires. Archaeology has long looked to the region for explanations of the origins of civilization. The modern countries of the region, including Iraq, Syria, Iran, and Turkey, have also long been places where archaeology and politics are inextricably intertwined, from Europe's 19th century appropriation of the region's heritage, to the looting and destruction of antiquities in recent wars. This introductory course moves between past and present. It offers a survey of more than 10,000 years of human history, from the appearance of farming villages to the dawn of imperialism, while also engaging current debates on the contemporary stakes of archaeology in the southwest Asia. Our focus is on past material worlds and the modern politics in which they are entangled.

This course is an introduction to Palestine and the Palestinians. We will read ethnographic and historical studies written by scholars as well as by explorers, missionaries, revolutionaries, and spies. We will learn about Palestinian life-in Palestine, exile, and diaspora-and ask what these experiences can teach us about colonialism, indigeneity, capitalism, and resistance. We will also learn about how governments, courts, and activists use historical and ethnographic texts in political and legal struggles. Readings will include academic studies as well as primary sources, films, and pamphlets, and will foreground knowledge produced by Palestinian intellectuals and organizations.

Throughout most of the human career, people survived by hunting and gathering wild foods. The advent of food production is one of the most profound changes in history and prehistory. This course examines the current evidence for the appearance and spread of agriculture - plant and animal domestication - around the world. We will consider definitions of agriculture and domestication, the conditions under which it arises, the consequences for those who adopt it, and why it has spread over most of the world.

This introductory course surveys archaeology's contributions to the study of American Indian cultural diversity and change in North America north of Mexico. Lectures and readings will examine topics ranging from the debate over when the continent was first inhabited to present-day conflicts between Native Americans and archaeologists over excavation and the interpretation of the past. We will review important archaeological sites such as Chaco Canyon, Cahokia, Lamoka Lake, and the Little Bighorn battlefield. A principal focus will be on major transformations in lifeways such as the adoption of agriculture, the development of political-economic hierarchies, and the disruptions that accompanied the arrival of Europeans to the continent.

The history of humankind is also a history of health and disease; the rise of agricultural societies, ancient cities, and colonial empires had wide-ranging effects on diet and nutrition, the spread of infectious diseases, and occurrence of other health conditions. This history has also been shaped by complex interactions between environment, technology, and society. Using archaeological, environmental, textual, and skeletal evidence, we will survey major epidemiological transitions from the Paleolithic to the age of European conquest. We will also examine diverse cultural experiences of health, illness, and the body. How do medical practices from pre-modern societies, such as the medieval Islamic world and the Inca Empire, challenge dominant narratives of scientific development? The implications of past health patterns for modern-day communities will also be explored.

This course explores the multifaceted interactions between ancient Egypt and the Classical world, from the Bronze Age to the Roman Empire. We will look at both archaeological and textual evidence (in English translation) to ask what this entangled history can tell us about life in the ancient Mediterranean. Among many other topics, we will consider Greek merchants and mercenaries in Egypt; Egyptian influences on Greek and Roman art; the famous queen Cleopatra, and her seductive but threatening reputation in Roman literature; the appearance of Egyptian underworld gods on Greek and Roman magical gems and curse tablets; and the ways that Greco-Roman representations of Egypt have shaped modern conceptions of Egyptian civilization, from 19th-century Romanticism to 21st-century pop culture.

This course will examine the natural history of wild chimpanzees with an eye toward better understanding the changes that would have been necessary in human evolutionary history to promote the emergence of human culture and political life. After an overview of early research and preliminary attempts to apply our knowledge of chimpanzee life to social and political theory, the class will focus on our now extensive knowledge of chimpanzees derived from many ongoing, long-term field studies. Topics of particular interest include socialization, alliance formation and cooperation, aggression within and between the sexes, reconciliation, the maintenance of traditions, tool use, nutritional ecology and social organization, territorial behavior, and the importance of kin networks. The question of whether apes should have rights will also be explored.

This course will introduce students to the meaning and significance of forms of cultural diversity for the understanding of contemporary issues. Drawing from films, videos, and selected readings, students will be confronted with different representational forms that portray cultures in various parts of the world, and they will be asked to examine critically their own prejudices as they influence the perception and evaluation of cultural differences. We shall approach cultures holistically, assuming the inseparability of economies, kinship, religion, and politics, as well as interconnections and dependencies between world areas such as Africa, Latin America, the West. Among the issues considered: political correctness and truth; nativism and ecological diversity; race, ethnicity, and sexuality; sin, religion, and war; global process and cultural integrity.

This interdisciplinary course (with an emphasis in anthropology) will introduce students to the multiple routes/roots, lived experiences, and imagined worlds of South Asians who have traveled to various lands at different historical moments spanning Fiji, South Africa, Mauritius, Britain, Malaysia, United States, Trinidad, and even within South Asia itself such as the Tamil-speaking population of Sri Lanka. The course will begin with the labor migrations of the 1830s and continue up to the present period. The primary exercise will be to compare and contrast the varied expressions of the South Asian Diaspora globally in order to critically evaluate this transnational identity. Thus, we will ask what, if any, are the ties that bind a fifth-generation Indo-Trinidadian whose ancestor came to the New World as an indentured laborer or coolie in the mid-19th century to labor in the cane fields, to a Pakistani medical doctor who migrated to the United States in the late 1980s. If Diaspora violates a sense of identity based on territorial integrity, then could culture serve as the basis for a shared identity?

This course explores the major debates that define the study of contemporary Iran. Drawing from ethnographic works, literary criticism, intellectual histories and more, we will examine historical events and cultural developments from a diverse set of theoretical approaches. Topics include the Iranian revolution in comparative perspective, the Iran-Iraq war and its continued legacy, media forms and practice, contemporary film and literature, women's movements, youth culture, religious diversity, legal systems, techniques of governance, and more. Of particular interest will be the intersections of religion and secularism in Iranian society. Ultimately, it is the objective of the course to explore the diverse cultural, political, and material worlds that shape collective life and individual subjectivity in Iran today.

One of the most pressing questions of our time is how we should understand the relationship between nature, or the environment, and culture, or society, and whether these should be viewed as separate domains at all. How one answers this question has important implications for how we go about thinking and acting in such diverse social arenas as environmental politics, development, and indigenous-state relations. This course serves as an introduction to the various ways anthropologists and other scholars have conceptualized the relationship between humans and the environment and considers the material and political consequences that flow from these conceptualizations.

An introduction to the anthropology of sex, sexuality and gender, this course uses case studies from around the world to explore how the worlds of the sexes become gendered. In ethnographic, ethnohistorical and contemporary globalizing contexts, we will look at: intersexuality and supernumerary genders; physical and cultural reproduction; sexuality; and sex-based and gender-based violence and power. We will use lectures, films, discussion sections and short field-based exercises.

Global Mental Health is a growing and important field within the general category of Global Public Health. Anthropology has an established and long history of contributing to the debates about cross-cultural psychiatry and psychotherapy, as well as to the perennial questions of nature versus nurture in defining normal versus pathological ways of being human. Cross-cultural explanations for varied and/or universal forms of human subjectivity, affect, and personality are increasingly relevant given new research into neurological plasticity, genomics, and the dissemination and practice of evidence-based and pharmaceutically-oriented psychiatry at the expense of more holistic and culturally nuanced forms of care. We examine the efficacy of traditional and community-based mental health practices in non-Western contexts as well as the challenges to accessibile care posed by inequality and precarity, as well as the stigmas surrounding mental illness in varied cultural contexts.

The emergence of what has come to be called civilization marks a profound transformation in human culture, society, politics, economy, and psychology. The first civilizations have been variously described as the point of origin for artistic achievement and the genesis of social struggle, a victory over the state of nature and the source of human neurosis, the genealogical root of social inequality and the foundation for the rule of law. In this course we will examine the rise and fall of ancient civilizations at the same time as we interrogate the rise and fall of the concept of civilization itself in modern historical thought. Our primary focus will be a comparative archaeological examination of five pivotal case studies of early civilization: Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, the Indus Valley, and the Maya lowlands. Alongside our explorations of these early civilizations, we will undertake a critical examination of current key issues in political anthropology, including the nature of kingship, the origins of cities, and the role of coercion in the formation of early polities. The course will examine the spread of civilization, including the development of secondary states, early empires, and the first world systems. We will conclude the class with an examination of the concept of civilization itself, its historical roots and its current prominence in geopolitical thinking and policy making. The goal of the class is to provide students with an understanding of the nature of the world's first civilizations and the potency of their contemporary legacy.

The need to monitor human behavior and regulate order among individuals and groups is inherent to the human condition. This course is a basic introduction to the ways in which anthropology has examined legal and political processes across diverse societies and cultures. Students will learn foundational anthropological and legal principles and how they are applied among specific sociocultural groups.

How do humans organize production, distribution, exchange, and consumption? What social, political, environmental, and religious values underlie different forms of economic organization? And how do they produce racial, ethnic, class, gender, and sexual inequalities? This course uses a range of historical and contemporary case studies to address these questions, in the process introducing a range of analytic approaches including formalism, substantivism, Marxist and feminist theory, critical race studies, and science and technology studies. Course themes include gifts and commodities; the nature of money, markets, and finance; credit and debt relations; labor, property, and value; licit and illicit economies; capitalism and socialism; development and underdevelopment.

What is money? How do people use money in the real world? How are technological innovations changing people's perceptions of money? This course introduces anthropological perspectives on economy and society through a variety of ethnographic studies of money and finance. Topics of discussion include primitive money and colonial currencies, the uses of money in religious and ritual practices, social and cultural meanings of numbers, mobile money, crypto-currency and other alternative currency systems, and the social life of finance.

Heritage typically conjures images of a glorified human past, and evokes sentiments of care for lost or endangered cultures that symbolize humanity's diversity. But heritage is also the foundation for a multi-billion dollar tourist industry and a basis for claims to national sovereignty. A closer look at heritage reveals institutions, places, and things possessed of extraordinary power. Drawing on case studies from around the world, this course attends to the complexities of heritage today. Topics include heritage ethics, tourism and the marketing of the past, approaches to preservation and management, disputed heritage and violence, heritage ideologies from nationalism to universalism, participation and inequality from the grassroots to the global, counterheritage, and the practice of public archaeology. Students apply insights gained by designing projects as heritage practitioners, engaged with heritage-scapes at Cornell and beyond.

Medicine has become the language and practice through which we address a broad range of both individual and societal complaints. Interest in this medicalization of life may be one of the reasons that medical anthropology is currently the fastest-growing subfield in anthropology. This course encourages students to examine concepts of disease, suffering, health, and well-being in their immediate experience and beyond. In the process, students will gain a working knowledge of ecological, critical, phenomenological, and applied approaches used by medical anthropologists. We will investigate what is involved in becoming a doctor, the sociality of medicines, controversies over new medical technologies, and the politics of medical knowledge. The universality of biomedicine, or hospital medicine, will not be taken for granted, but rather we will examine the plurality generated by the various political, economic, social, and ethical demands under which biomedicine has developed in different places and at different times. In addition, biomedical healing and expertise will be viewed in relation to other kinds of healing and expertise. Our readings will address medicine in North America as well as other parts of the world. In class, our discussions will return regularly to consider the broad diversity of kinds of medicine throughout the world, as well as the specific historical and local contexts of biomedicine.

This course explores the role of gender and sexuality in shaping the lives of Muslims past and present. Through a close examination of ethnographies, intellectual histories, and religious treatises, we will analyze the key debates and discourses surrounding the intersection of gender and Islam. We begin by investigating Quranic revelations and hadith concerning gender and sexual ethics, female figures of emulation in early Islam, and feminist exegeses of the Quran. Continuing onward, we focus upon the everyday lives of Muslim women and non-binary individuals in medieval, colonial, and post-colonial contexts, highlighting the ways in which people negotiate and respond to the sexual politics of the times in which they live as we ask what, if anything, is specifically Islamic about the situations under discussion? Following this, we embark upon a history of sexuality within Islam, tracing the ways in which the categories of homosexuality and heterosexuality came to exist in the Muslim world, as well as the history and positionality of trans communities past and present. We then continue with an exploration of Islamic feminism as it exists today, looking to the ways in which Muslim feminists have critically engaged both religious texts as well as Western feminist theory. Finally, the course concludes by analyzing the relationship between the study of Islam, gender, and empire.

What does it mean to study humanity at a time when it has become a geological force? What is required of us as thinking subjects under the Anthropocene? In this course, we will argue that anthropologists have an important role to play at this historical juncture. But we will also consider how climate change troubles some of the discipline's central categories. Time, space, nature, power, reason - climate change throws these concepts into question. It inflects our ways of knowing. It demands adaptive thinking. Throughout the semester, we will take on this work in common, proceeding from the presumption that it is not enough to think of climate change as a simple ethnographic object. Climate change is the unavoidable context of contemporary anthropology.

This course offers an anthropological approach to the study of religious traditions and practices in South Asia: India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Nepal. The course begins with a short survey of the major religious traditions of South Asia: Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, and Islam. We look to the development of these traditions through historical and cultural perspectives. The course then turns to the modern period, considering the impact of colonialism, nationalism, and globalization upon religious ideologies and practices. The primary focus of the course will be the ethnographic study of contemporary religious practices in the region. We examine phenomena such as ritual, pilgrimage, possession, devotionalism, monasticism, asceticism, and revivalism through a series of ethnographic case studies. In so doing, we also seek to understand the impact of politics, modernity, diasporic movement, social inequality, changing gender roles, and mass mediation upon these traditions and practices.

Who lived in the Ithaca area before American settlers and Cornell arrived? Where do these indigenous peoples reside today? This class explores the history and culture of the Gayogoho:no (Cayuga), which means people from the mucky land. We will read perspectives by indigenous authors, as well as archaeologists and historians, about past and current events, try to understand reasons why that history has been fragmented and distorted by more recent settlers, and delve into primary sources documenting encounters between settlers and the Gayogoho:no. We will also strive to understand the ongoing connections of the Gayogoho:no to this region despite forced dispossession and several centuries of colonialist exclusion from these lands and waters.

An introduction to the story of how human history from the earliest times through to the recent period interrelates with changing climate conditions on Earth. The course explores the whole expanse of human history, but concentrates on the most recent 15,000 years through to the Little Ice Age (14th-19th centuries AD). Evidence from science, archaeology and history are brought together to assess how climate has shaped the human story.

Did ancient Egyptians believe in the existence of souls? Why did they mummify the dead? Was the body of a pharaoh different from that of an ordinary person? This course sets the famous mortuary practices of ancient Egypt alongside treatments of living bodies and their immaterial components. We will read translated excerpts from ancient Egyptian texts—from magical spells recited for ancestors, to poetry on sex and death—while learning about items taken to the grave and monuments set up for posterity. In the process, we will reflect on contemporary representations of the past and evaluate the assumptions behind modern treatments of ancient artifacts and human remains.

This introductory course explores the roles of amulets, love potions, curse tablets, and many other magical practices in ancient Greek and Roman societies. In this course, you will learn how to invoke the powers of Abrasax, become successful and famous, get people to fall desperately in love with you, and cast horrible curses on your enemies! We will also examine a range of ancient and modern approaches to magic as a concept: what exactly do we mean by magic, and how does it relate to other spheres of activity, like religion, science, and philosophy? When people (in ancient times or today) label the activities of others as magic, what are the social and political consequences of that act? As we investigate the practices that Greeks and Romans considered magical, we will also explore what those practices can teach us about many other aspects of life in the past, such as social class, gender, religion, and ethnic and cultural identity.

This course is an introductory survey of the history, culture, and society of Ottoman and Mandate Palestine and Palestine/Israel. Students will learn about the history the region from the 19th Century to the present, through a close examination of various sources and texts. Sources may include ethnographies, literature, films, historical documents, and interdisciplinary scholarship.

This seminar course is designed to give anthropology majors an introduction to classical and contemporary social and anthropological theory and to help prepare them for upper-level seminars in anthropology. The seminar format emphasizes close reading and active discussion of key texts and theorists. The reading list will vary from year to year but will include consideration of influential texts and debates in 19th-, 20th-, and 21st-century anthropological theory especially as they have sought to offer conceptual and analytical tools for making sense of human social experience and cultural capacities.

This course is organized around the central theme of reproductive justice. It interrogates the connections between reproductive politics and policy, engaged research, and public health. By approaching reproduction through the lens of justice, we as a class will engage in sustained reflection on the place of reproduction within health, healthcare, and activism. The course situates reproduction and reproductive health within historical trajectories of health activism and governance, including but not limited to abortion, assisted reproduction, and immigration.

This introductory course familiarizes students with documentary filmmaking and audiovisual modes of knowledge production. Through lectures, screenings, workshops, and labs, students will develop single-camera digital video production and editing skills. Weekly camera, sound, and editing exercises will enhance students' documentary filmmaking techniques and their reflexive engagement with sensory scholarship. Additionally, students will be introduced to nonfiction film theory from the perspective of production and learn to critically engage and comment on each other's work. Discussions of debates around visual ethnography, the politics of representation, and filmmaking ethics will help students address practical storytelling dilemmas. Over the course of the semester, students conduct pre-production research and develop visual storytelling skills as they build a portfolio of short video assignments in preparation for continued training in documentary production.

What are peasantries, and why do they matter today? We will learn how peasant communities interact with land, plants, and animals, and how they are integrated into national governance and global markets. We will explore the contradictory ways-as reactionary and revolutionary, doomed and flourishing-that peasants have appeared in modern economic, political, and environmental projects. Topics include classic accounts of capitalism and agrarian change; anti-colonialism and national liberation; debates over development, indigeneity, and gender; and emerging concerns over fair trade, sustainable agriculture, and climate change. Readings include work from revolutionary intellectuals and peasant movements as well as ethnographic studies.

This course provides students with an orientation to the new technologies reshaping the effort to preserve cultural heritage. The course introduces students to the tools that Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and remote sensing (especially aerial and satellite imaging) provide for advancing heritage preservation and detecting cultural erasure. Our focus will be on contexts where heritage has emerged as a site of conflict, from Bosnia to Syria to Ukraine. Students will develop proficiency in a range of spatial technologies and their application to the human past. The course will culminate in projects that use new technologies to save heritage at risk.

Human-animal relationships are often seen in utilitarian, nutritional terms, particularly in archaeology. But animals and meat have significance far beyond their economic value. This course focuses on a broad range of these non-dietary roles of animals in human societies, past and present. This includes the fundamental shift in human-animal relations associated with domestication; the varied meanings of wild and domestic animals; as well as the importance of animals as wealth, as objects of sacrifice, as totems or metaphors for humans, and as symbols in art. Meat can be used in feasting and meat sharing to create, cement, and manipulate social relationships. This course is open to students of archaeology, cultural anthropology, and other disciplines with an interest in human-animal relations.

Archaeology has never operated in a vacuum. This course examines the political context of the study of the past, and the uses to which accounts of the past have been put in the present. Archaeology is often implicated in nationalist claims to territory, or claims of ethnic, racial, or religious superiority. Museum exhibits and other presentations to the public always have an agenda, consciously or otherwise. Archaeologists are increasingly required to interact with descendent communities, often in the context of postcolonial tensions. The antiquities trade and the protection of archaeological sites connects archaeologists to commercial and law enforcement sectors. We will also consider the internal politics of the practice of archaeology in various settings, including the implications of the funding sources that support archaeological work. This course is open to students of archaeology, socio-cultural anthropology, history, and other disciplines with an interest in the past.

Bioarchaeology is the study of human remains from archaeological sites. Like forensic scientists at the scene of the crime, bioarchaeologists search for clues embedded in human bone and mummified tissues to reconstruct how ancient peoples lived and died. As a dynamic living system, the human skeleton responds not only to hormones that govern human development but also to physiological stress brought on by disease, malnutrition, and trauma. The human body is also an artifact molded by cultural understandings of gender, prestige, self-expression, and violence. In this course, students will learn the scientific techniques for estimating skeletal age and sex, diagnosing pathology, and reconstructing diet and migration patterns. This course emphasizes the critical integration of biological and cultural evidence for understanding past individuals and societies.

This course considers the possibility of connections between the America and the Old World before the Spanish discovery not only as an empirical question, but also as an intensely controversial issue that has tested the limits of the scholarly detachment that archaeologists imagine characterizes their perspectives. We will consider the evidence for several possible episodes of interaction as well as the broader issue of how long-distance interaction can be recognized in the archaeological record. Transoceanic contact is a common element in popular visions of the American past, but most professional archaeologists have rejected the possibility with great vehemence. The issue provides an interesting case study in the power of orthodoxy in archaeology.

This course provides a long-term overview of the indigenous peoples of Cornell's home region and their neighbors from an archaeological perspective. Cornell students live and work in the traditional territory of the Haudenosaunee, or Six Nations Iroquois, and this class will help residents to understand the deep history of this place. We will examine long-term changes in material culture, settlement, subsistence, and trade; the founding of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy; indigenous responses to European and American colonization; the practicalities of doing indigenous-site archaeology in New York State; and contemporary indigenous perspectives on archaeology. Visits to local archaeological sites and museum collections will supplement classroom instruction.

An introduction to ancient Mesoamerica, focusing on the nature and development of societies that are arguably the most complex to develop anywhere in the precolumbian Americas. The course provides a summary of the history of the region before the European invasion, but the emphasis is on the organization of Mesoamerican societies: the distinctive features of Mesoamerican cities, economies, political systems, religion. We begin by considering Mesoamerican societies at the time of the Spanish invasion. Our focus will be on descriptions of the Aztecs of Central Mexico by Europeans and indigenous survivors, in an attempt to extract from them a model of the fundamental organizational features of one Mesoamerican society, making allowances for what we can determine about the perspectives and biases of their authorsWe then review the precolumbian history of Mesoamerica looking for variations on these themes as well as indications of alternative forms of organization. We will also look at such issues as the transition from mobile to sedentary lifeways, the processes involved in the domestication of plants and animals, the emergence of cities and states, and the use of invasion-period and ethnographic information to interpret precolumbian societies in comparative perspective.

This course is a survey of the rise and decline of civilizations in the Andean region of western South America before the European invasion. We begin with a consideration of Andean environments and an overview of some of the common features of Andean societies, then examine the organization and interrelationships of social relations, economic patterns, political institutions, and ecology in the best understood precolumbian society in the Andes, the invasion-period Inka. We will then look at Andean prehistory in chronological sequence, with an eye to recognizing the emergence of these patterns in pre-Inka material remains. We will also consider issues of general theoretical interest - the use of invasion-period texts and ethnographic information to interpret precolumbian societies, the emergence of settled farming life, the development of cities and states - in comparative perspective.

This course surveys the histories, aesthetics, and politics of music and virtuality, focusing on contemporary manifestations of “virtual music” since the 2010s. We will learn about how music is created, performed, and consumed in virtual environments, focusing specifically on questions of embodiment and identity. Case studies will include virtual and augmented reality concerts; musical performances in video games; virtual bands; and Web3/blockchain music. We will pay particular attention to the ties between virtual worlds, musical aesthetics, and queer and trans community building. Students will learn how to conduct digital musical ethnography and will complete participant observation-based final projects in a virtual music community.

The course will investigate all aspects of non-human primate life. Based on the fundamentals of evolutionary theory, group and inter-individual behaviors will be presented. In addition, an understanding of group structure and breeding systems will be reached through an evaluation of ecological constraints imposed on primates in different habitats. Subjects include: primate taxonomy, diet and foraging, predation, cooperation and competition, social ontogeny, kinship, and mating strategies.

Social Justice highlights refugee-led organizing and its intersections with un/documented and Indigenous beyond borders activism. We will work with and learn from refugee and asylum seekers led organizations that are started by and run by members of formerly displaced groups. These organizations build collectives and coalitions to organize communities across identities and legal categories and advocate for access to mobility and social justice. We will closely collaborate with these organizations and work on joint research projects.

This course explores research on race, ethnicity and language in American education. It examines historical and current patterns of school achievement for minoritized youths. It also examines the cultural and social premises undergirding educational practices in diverse communities and schools. Policies, programs and pedagogy, including multicultural and bilingual education, are explored.

Through the centuries, Rabbinic Judaism developed an elaborate set of rules for governing marriage and family life, grounded in the Hebrew Bible and adapted to the realities of life in diaspora. This complex and sophisticated system helps to explain the continuity of Jewish collective identity in the sustained absence of a shared territorial homeland. We will study together part of the Talmudic tractate Yevamot (concerning the Levirate marriage) and relevant passages from the code known as Shulchan Aruch, along with scholarship in English. Some reading knowledge of Rabbinic Hebrew-Aramaic required.

The idea of the barbarians is as old as civilization itself. But what is a barbarian, and what is the role that barbarians play, as the savage enemies of civilization? In this course we will address such questions by looking at how different civilizations have imagined their barbarians, ranging from their key role in Greek drama, and as infidels in religious conceptions, to Chinese walls, and American savagery. We will examine both historical examples, and the barbarians of today -- the terrorists and insurgents so often framed as dark and primitive, in contrast with ourselves. Through readings and visual materials, we will seek to discover what these barbarians have in common. We will look comparatively for the underlying patterns of history that the barbarians are drafted from, to draw a new picture of the barbarians. At the same time, we will arrive at a new understanding of civilization as such, as well as of the general nature of human inequality, and how it is justified.

This course approaches the study of religion, symbols, and myth from an anthropological perspective. The centrality and universality of religion and myth-making in social and symbolic life has been fundamental in the development of cultural theory. Our aim is to understand with this is so. We begin by examining the classic theories of religion in the works of Durkheim, Marx, Weber, Mauss, and Freud, among others, followed by an exploration of how these theories have been influential in anthropological studies of symbolism, cosmology, ritual, selfhood, myth, sorcery, witchcraft, and pilgrimage. We conclude by examining the apparent persistence, revival and transformation of religious and magical beliefs and practices within modern, modernizing, and postcolonial states. We ask whether an increasing politicization and globalization of religious ideology through technological mediation poses significant challenges to the anthropological analysis of religion. In so doing, we also try to understand better the human experience of and identification with the spiritual, mythical, and religious in the contemporary moment. This, in turn, leads us to investigate the inherent volatility of such identifications and experiences within the larger national and global framework of cultural politics.

This course examines the cultures and histories of the circumpolar North. The primary emphasis is on the North American Arctic and Subarctic with some attention to northern Eurasia for comparative purposes. The focus is on the indigenous peoples of the region and the socio-political and ecological dimensions of their evolving relationships with southern industrial societies.

This course is a place-based seminar focused on key issues in contemporary urban nature, from the built environments of homes and neighborhoods, to infrastructures of waste and water management, to waterways, forests, and parks. Using the city of London as a case-study, students will explore topics including migration and racism; health and environmental justice; gentrification and public housing; green landscaping; climate change preparedness; and natural disaster. For the first eight weeks of the course, weekly seminars at Cornell will feature readings and discussions on these and other topics, drawn from anthropology, geography, sociology, and neighboring academic fields. Along the way, students will design independent projects focused on the history, ecology, and landscape of a particular neighborhood of the city. During spring break, the entire class will travel to London for one week in which we will be joined by local experts to explore the places and problems introduced in the first eight weeks. Students will carry out their independent research in London and present the results upon return.

This course offers an anthropological perspective on the global rise of authoritarianism, in the context of growing inequality, racism, misogyny, nationalism, genocide and war. In particular, it links macro-scale and historical theories regarding global processes (e.g., "world systems," "globalization"), on the one hand, and the closer correlates of these macro forces shaping individual experience, on the other. Drawing from anthropology as well as from cognate disciplines (history, psychology, political economy, etc.), the course surveys case studies from the US, Germany, China, and other countries, on topics such as the self-delusion of the oppressed, the narcissism of dictators, the politics of gender, as well as how the remaking of social identities relate to world economic cycles. Course readings highlight how fantasy, imagination, fear and hope, as well as propaganda and AI, intervene in the contemporary global trends.

Our children re-create culture and society as they grow up and take charge of the world. But how does this actually happen? What are the implications? In this course we look at children’s creative engagement and socialization, through the lens of anthropology, also borrowing from psychology, history, etc. We will pay special attention to how children learn, play, make-believe, and how they co-construct their own languages, cultures and societies. We draw on ethnographic studies of children, theories of childhood, as well as research on children who are disadvantaged, excluded, or captured for forced assimilation (historically, in 'Indian Schools', or in China's Uyghur genocide today), to understand both these unfortunate victims, and "normal" children.

This class considers the relationship between the body, knowledge and experience. We investigate the production and reproduction of the body across different times and spaces. Students examine specific histories through which the physical body came to be the purview of science, and its meaning the purview of social science and the humanities. In addition, students study other ways of knowing and being that capture the relations though which bodies emerge as simultaneously material and social. Ethnographies concerning healing and medicine, discipline and labor, governance and religion, aesthetics and desire offer alternative ways of approaching the body as both subject and object. Together, we will consider the historicity of the body, and in so doing explore questions of gender, race, class, sexuality, and coloniality.

Infrastructure! It's the hardware and software that undergirds transportation, energy, water, and security systems. This course asks what we can learn about infrastructure when we approach it not as a neutral set of technologies but as a context-dependent social and political force. Taking a critical approach to (among others) natural resources, labor, housing, and security, the course will trace how infrastructures have both served and obstructed colonial and contemporary projects for social change.

Anthropology provides a unique and powerful perspective on the world and especially on ourselves, as humans. Our closest sister-disciplines, philosophy and psychology, as well as psychoanalysis, are also engaged in the same quest to understand our world and ourselves, and have generated powerful insights that anthropology cannot overlook. How can we build a philosophically and psychologically aware anthropology? Focusing on key questions such as our perception of reality, our relations to non-human animals, and the psychological dimensions of identity and power, this course introduces areas where we can learn from each other through an interdisciplinary dialogue carried out in a sympathetic yet critical spirit.

This course introduces students to a tradition of radical scholarship on the articulations of race and racism with capitalism, and uses it as a frame through which to examine the ongoing role of racialized difference in structuring capitalist extraction. Beginning with chattel slavery's role in the origins of capitalism and moving into contemporary settings, the course will examine how capitalism produces race, how race shapes the accumulation of wealth, and what the role of an activist scholarship is in making these links visible. Readings will include the work of Black radical scholars as well as historical and ethnographic studies of the U.S. and global contexts-including discussions of plantation slavery, carceral capitalism, the 2008 mortgage crisis, and global labor migration.

Museums are places where academic research meets the public. Though they remain among the most trusted types of institutions, they have increasingly come under critical scrutiny. Questions around museums' perceived neutrality, the ethics of collecting, displaying, and interpreting cultural heritage, and whether they are welcoming to all audiences have made headlines and led to new developing practices. This class offers an introduction to the field of museum studies, pairing interactive lectures on museum history and theory with site visits to local and campus museums where students will learn from a variety of professionals about practical challenges.

Kingship plays an outsize role in Asian countries today, in both democratic and authoritarian countries. Even in countries that abolished the monarchy, the legacy of kingship is very much at play. In this course we will study Asia's kingdoms, states, and empires, with attention to both tradition and present-day modern states. Focusing on kingship as both ideology and practice, we will study how states and monarchic traditions first came to be, including as Stranger-Kings, Buddhist monarchs, secondary state formation, local adaptations of foreign models, and more. We will examine examples such as China, from the ancient states and early empires to the legacy of empire there today; Cambodia and its Angkor empire modeled on Indian traditions; as well as Burma, Thailand, Japan, and other parts of Asia. Using readings, films, lectures and guest presentations, we will re-examine the role of kingship in Asia so as to enable a new understanding of both ancient, historical, and contemporary Asia.

This course offers an introduction to the global issue of genocide and other mass atrocities, with an in-depth look at two genocides in Asia ongoing since 2017: in China, and in Burma (Myanmar). First, we will study how genocide works: the prerequisites, warning signs, and how it is carried out. We study the creation of the term genocide as a new crime in international law after WWII, in the UN Genocide Convention, and the checkered history of failing to prevent new genocides (incl. in Cambodia, Rwanda, etc.), but also some successes. Then, we focus on the new genocides under way against the Uyghurs in China and against the Rohingya in Burma: background, events, actors involved, the role of media and propaganda, and why Burma expels people while China force-assimilates people in place.

This winter course on site in Cambodia will focus on Cambodian heritage past and present - how it's been created in the past, including the city of Angkor, and how that heritage and history is understood and engaged today. We will visit historical sites as well as museums and other relevant sites, including performances, where history is remembered and engaged. There will be lectures, including by Cambodian experts, as well as film showings. The course will be based in Siem Reap, in collaboration with the Center for Khmer Studies, and there will also be excursions to Phnom Penh, the capital.

This course will investigate the social and political histories of Afghanistan from the late 19th century through the present day. Drawing from religious treatises, intellectual histories, ethnographies, literature, and film we will examine historical events and cultural developments from a diverse set of theoretical approaches. Topics will include colonialism and its legacies, the experiences of minoritized groups, alternative forms of nationalism, Afghan religious discourses, the role of Marxism and Islamic socialism, gender and politics, the war on terror, and more. Ultimately, it is the objective of the course to explore the diverse cultural, political, and material worlds that have shaped collective life in Afghanistan in the 20th and 21st centuries.

How does one study Islam from an anthropological perspective? Through close readings of recent ethnographies, canonical texts, theoretical works, and critiques of the genre, we will understand the major debates and intellectual trends that have defined the anthropology of Islam from its earliest inception through the present day. Geographic areas covered include South Asia, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, America, North Africa, and West Africa.

The common perception of ethnicity is that it is a natural and an inevitable consequence of cultural difference. Asians overseas, in particular, have won repute as a people who cling tenaciously to their culture and refuse to assimilate into their host societies and cultures. But, who are the Asians? On what basis can we label Asians an ethnic group? Although there is a significant Asian presence in the Caribbean, the category Asian itself does not exist in the Caribbean. What does this say about the nature of categories that label and demarcate groups of people on the basis of alleged cultural and phenotypical characteristics? This course will examine the dynamics behind group identity, namely ethnicity, by comparing and contrasting the multicultural experience of Asian populations in the Caribbean and the United States. Ethnographic case studies will focus on the East Indian and Chinese experiences in the Caribbean and the Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Filipino, and Indian experiences in the United States.

What is religion, and how can we use material culture to investigate ancient beliefs and rituals? This course (1) explores major themes and problems in the archaeology of ancient Greek religion, and (2) compares and critiques selected theoretical and methodological approaches to the archaeology of cult more generally. Students will examine ritual artifacts, cult sites, and other aspects of religious material culture, as well as primary textual sources (in translation).

This course explores the practice, theory, and methodology of humanities research, critical analysis, and communication through writing and oral presentation. We will study the work and impact of humanists (scholars of literature, history, theory, art, visual studies, film, anthropology, gender and sexuality studies), who pose big questions about the human condition. By reading and analyzing their scholarship-critiquing them and engaging their ideas-we will craft our own methods and voices. Students will refine their research methods (library research, note taking, organizing material, bibliographies, citation methods, proposals, outlines, etc.) and design their own independent research project.

This course explores the implications and significance of using textual materials as anthropological evidence. While participant observation remains the cornerstone of ethnography, literary, archival, and other written works are increasingly being utilized as primary sources within the anthropological project. This course will hence offer an overview of anthropological works that trace the intersections between cultural production and the literary imagination. Rather than consider the literary elements of ethnography itself, we will strive to understand the disparate forms of social phenomena-both knowledge and practices-that arise from texts and textual practices specifically. Examples include analyses of literary cultures, media forms and non-traditional textual sources, bureaucratic structures, the use of archives, and more. Particular attention will be paid to works based in the Middle East and the Islamic world. By examining the different theoretical, political, and ethical considerations of using the written word as ethnographic evidence, we will be able to shed light on the anthropological project as a whole.

The Caucasus occupies a distinctive place in the historical and cultural imagination, a region long anchored to tropes of disobedience, punishment, and redemption. It is also a place in which liminality, betwixt and between Europe and Asia, endures as both a perceived geographic imaginary and an experienced condition in the detritus of Persian, Ottoman, Russian, and Soviet imperialisms. This course explores the Caucasus through its anthropology, history, and cultural production, with a particular focus on the Russian conquest, Soviet socialism, and the conflicts and capitalist formations of the post-Soviet decades. We will examine the entanglements of the region's history, political economy, and geopolitics in order to get a sense of the array of forces shaping the Caucasus today.

One animal behaviorist speculates that big brains develop when species are social; that is, when they must read cues from members of their group to understand when to approach, when to flee, when to fight, when to care. This course looks not only at animals in their social lives, but also at animals in their lives with us. We ask questions about how species become entangled and what that means for both parties, about the social lives of animals independently and with humans, about the survival of human and animal species, and about what it means to use animals for science, food, and profit. The course draws on readings from Anthropology, Science & Technology Studies, and animal trainers and behaviorists.

We live in a world of ruins. Our planet is damaged. Cities grapple with urban decay caused by deindustrialization and other socio-economic problems. Capitalism, socialism, and imperialism have left a trail of detritus - the remnants of colonialism, extraction, industry, and failed utopian projects. For their part, 20th century dictatorships left behind the material traces of repression and mass violence. All the while, for centuries the ruin has evolved as a poignant allegory, representing such abstractions as history, the nation, the universal human, and even our emancipation from the destructive forces of capitalism. In conversation with philosophy and cultural geography, this course explores anthropological and archaeological approaches to modern ruins and ruination.

Liberal feminists and political theorists argue that sentiments such as compassion and empathy have the capacity to alert us to suffering, injustice, and oppression, and thus incite transformative political action. This interdisciplinary seminar explores the challenges to this theory by staging a conversation between postcolonial, feminist, and queer theories of affect, and anthropological critiques of humanitarian projects. Sentiments are mobilized to defend borders, wage wars, grant asylum to refugees, provide medical care and disaster relief, and inspire feminist activism. We will analyze how these gendered and racialized ethical projects and political regimes are co-constituted, and how they mediate access to resources and survival, as well as political agency, subjectivity, citizenship, and national belonging.

Community-engaged archaeology brings together knowledgeable communities located within and beyond academic institutions who collaborate to produce higher-quality accounts of the past. In this course, students will build their archaeological fieldwork and laboratory skills while contributing to strong university-community relationships in the local area. Drawing on historical documents, previous scholarship, expert collaborators, and archaeological investigation, students in this course contribute to the understanding of regional sites and landmarks. The topic for Fall 2022 addresses the Underground Railroad through a partnership between Ithaca's historic St. James AME Church, the Cornell Institute of Archaeology and Material Studies, and local schools. Students in this course will study archaeological evidence related to the everyday experiences of people who formed part of a congregation active in the Underground Railroad during the early- to mid-19th century.

This course is an exploration of Maya understandings of their own history as it is reflected in ancient texts. We will begin by looking at episodes in Colonial and recent history to illustrate some of the ways Maya thinking about history may differ from more familiar genres. We will then review basic aspects of precolumbian Maya writing, but we will focus mainly on analyzing texts from one or more Classic period Maya cities.

In little more than a century the Inkas created an empire stretching thousands of kilometers along the Andean spine from Ecuador to Chile. This course focuses on the political and economic structure of the empire and on its roots in earlier Andean prehistory. Archaeological remains, along with documents produced in the aftermath of the Spanish invasion, will be used to trace the history of Inka territorial organization, statecraft, and economic relationships and the Colonial transformation of Andean societies.

What is the role of ethics in archaeology today? What principles shape the discipline's response to serious dilemmas? What is the relationship between ethics and politics in archaeology? This seminar provides an in-depth exploration of these questions across a range of subfields, from indigenous, public, and postcolonial archaeologies, to critical heritage studies, conflict archaeology and the archaeology of the contemporary past. We will learn the normative ethics of Western archaeology, with its concern for best practices, multiculturalism, and the politics of identity, as well as radical alternatives centered on hard politics, oppression, and justice. We will also explore the ethics of the profession, as it pertains to equity and inclusion. This course traverses the terrain of moral right and wrong in archaeology.

Critical approaches to embodiment compel bioarchaeologists to consider how social norms and institutional inequalities are enacted and materialized through the body. This course contributes a deep archaeological perspective on the lived experience of inequality and the historically contingent nature of sexuality, gender, and violence. Drawing upon the study of human skeletons, social theory, and a rich comparative literature in cultural anthropology, we will theorize bones as once-living bodies and explore topics such as body modification and mutilation, masculinity and performative violence, gender and sexual fluidity, and sickness and suffering in past societies. We will not only consider privilege and marginalization in lived experience, but also in death, examining how unequal social relationships are reproduced when the dead body is colonized as an object of study.

What is authenticity and why does it matter? Connoisseurship-the expertise required to make discerning judgments-involves assessments of quality,authenticity, historical and cultural significance, and many other issues. This course focuses on connoisseurship in the fine arts, archaeology, and ethnography in both academic contexts and the art world. Emphasis is on developing a nuanced understanding of authentication, at the core of the art market and an important determinant of relevant data for academic art historians and archaeologists. Topics include the role of authenticity in assigning value; looting and faking in relation to antiquities markets; technical analysis and forgery detection.

This is an intensive laboratory course in the study of human skeletal remains. A detailed knowledge of skeletal anatomy is fundamental to forensic anthropology, bioarchaeology, and the medical sciences. This course teaches students how to identify all 206 bones and 32 teeth of the human skeleton, in both complete and fragmentary states. Students will also learn osteological methods for establishing a biological profile and documenting skeletal trauma and pathological lesions. Hands-on laboratory training will be supplemented by case studies that demonstrate the importance of human osteology for criminal investigations in the present and the study of health and violence in the past. The ethics of working with human remains are also discussed.

This seminar provides a higher-level general introduction to, and survey of, contemporary theories, methods, and approaches in the archaeology of the Mediterranean world. Rather than focusing on a specific geographical sub-region or chronological period, this course examines and critically assesses the practice and distinctive character of Mediterranean archaeology more broadly.

An introduction to belief systems in ancient Mexico and Central America, emphasizing the blending of religion, astrology, myth, history, and prophecy. Interpreting text and image in pre-Columbian books and inscriptions is a major focus.

This advanced seminar focuses on the archaeological study of houses, households, families, and communities. How is the study of domestic life transforming our understanding of ancient societies? How can we most effectively use material evidence to investigate the practices, experiences, identities, and social dynamics that made up the everyday lives of real people in antiquity, non-elite as well as elite? To address these questions, we will survey and critically examine historical and current theories, methods, and approaches within the field of household archaeology.

This is a hands-on laboratory course in zooarchaeological method: the study of animal bones from archaeological sites. It is designed to provide students with a basic grounding in identification of body part and taxon, aging and sexing, pathologies, taphonomy, and human modification. We will deal only with mammals larger than squirrels. While we will work on animal bones from prehistoric Europe, most of these skills are easily transferable to the fauna of other areas, especially North America. This is an intensive course that emphasizes laboratory skills in a realistic setting. You will analyze an assemblage of actual archaeological bones. It is highly recommended that students also take the course in Zooarchaeological Interpretation (ANTHR 4264/ARKEO 4264) offered in the spring.

This course follows from last semester's Zooarchaeological Method. We will shift our emphasis here from basic skills to interpretation, although you will continue to work with archaeological bones. We will begin by examining topics surrounding the basic interpretation of raw faunal data: sampling, quantification, taphonomy, seasonality. We will then explore how to use faunal data to reconstruct subsistence patterns, social structure, and human-animal relations.

Examines the structure and history of the largest polity in ancient Mexico, the empire of the Aztecs, using descriptions left by Spanish invaders, accounts written by Aztecs under Colonial rule, and archaeological evidence. Explores Aztec visions of the past, emphasizing the roles of myth, religion, and identity in Aztec statecraft and the construction of history.

This seminar uses archaeology to examine engagements between settlers and indigenous peoples throughout world history. Archaeology provides a perspective on settler-indigenous encounters that both supplements and challenges conventional models. We will assess the strengths and weaknesses of various theories of cultural engagement, examine methodologies, and explore a series of archaeological case studies, using examples from both the ancient world and the European expansion over the past 600 years. The seminar provides a comparative perspective on indigenous-colonial relationships, in particular exploring the hard-fought spaces of relative autonomy created and sustained by indigenous peoples.

This production seminar is for students with basic documentary filmmaking skills who want to work with previously collected footage and/or are in production on a project in or around Ithaca. Over the course of the semester, students complete a documentary film based on an immersive engagement with their selected subject matter. Alongside watching and discussing relevant texts and films, students will complete exercises to help them focus their projects, build a cohesive narrative, learn script writing, brainstorm scene ideas, overcome narrative challenges, discover their aesthetic, and develop a film circulation plan. Students will regularly present new footage and scenes and explain their work in terms their goals for the final project. The course culminates in a public screening of students' independent video projects.

This seminar examines public schools and other educational spaces as sites where knowledge, learning, learner, and identities are produced and contested. It explores how power and cultural norms work in educational settings, and the unintended teaching and learning that happens outside the purported curriculum. Topics include issues of multiculturalism and pluralism in schools and society, the school achievement of racial and ethnic minorities, youth cultures and identities, and literacy in adult learning spaces. This course is for students interested in the advanced study of multicultural schooling and education.

This course is designed to give advanced undergraduate and graduate students a practical understanding of what anthropologists actually do in what has traditionally been understood as the field, a construction that has been contested. We will examine situations that emerge in conducting fieldwork, and explore the ethical, methodological, theoretical, epistemological, and practical issues that are raised in the observation, participation in, recording, and representation of sociocultural processes and practices. Students are expected to develop a semester-long, local research project that will allow them to experience fieldwork situations.

The modern Jewish religious movement known as Hasidism began in Eastern Europe in the eighteenth century and thrives today. We will approach Hasidism primarily through three avenues: recent critical social history; selections from Hasidic literature; and ethnographic accounts of Hasidic life today. By the end of the semester, students will be able to articulate some ways that Hasidism reflects both broader trends in European religious and moral thought of its time, and some ways that it represents distinctively Jewish developments. You will also gain a deeper appreciation of the various kinds of evidence and disciplinary approaches that need to be brought to bear on the attempt to articulate as broad, deep and varied a phenomenon as modern Hasidic Judaism.

This extraordinary figure died in 1941, and his death is emblematic of the intellectual depredations of Nazism. Yet since World War II, his influence, his reputation, and his fascination for scholars in a wide range of cultural and political disciplines has steadily grown. He is seen as a bridging figure between German and Jewish studies, between materialist critique of culture and the submerged yet powerful voice of theology, between literary history and philosophy. We will review Benjamin's life and some of the key disputes over his heritage; read some of the best-known of his essays; and devote significant time to his enigmatic and enormously rich masterwork, the Arcades Project, concluding with consideration of the relevance of Benjamin's insights for cultural and political dilemmas today.

Living in the contemporary moment means living with reminders that the end of the world - at least as we know it - is looming. From the global ecological crisis to evangelical apocalyptic visions, and from nuclear threats to the changes wrought by automated work, people are brushing up against the limits of human knowledge and experience. In this course, we will consider how anthropologists have grappled with the end of the world, drawing the discipline's boundaries liberally. Working with ethnography, science fiction, film, and more, we will ask: What does it mean to adopt the uncertain future as an object of study? And might the end of the world as we know it also mean the start of a more speculative anthropology?

At this time of planetary instability, all politics are environmental politics. But all environmental politics are not the same. Contemporary movements diverge around key questions: Is technology an environmental boon or an environmental bad? Can sustainable ends be achieved through capitalist means? Who should be endowed with the power to intervene? At what scale, in what ways, on whose behalf? Reading across different ecopolitical formations-conservation, green capitalism, ecosocialism, ecofascism, and more-we ask how the environment manages to contain such a capacious field, why it so thoroughly deranges usual political coordinates. Then, we hone tools for thinking critically and hopefully within the mess.

What are the poetics and politics of ethnographic writing? How is this genre, what many would call the signature of cultural anthropology, distinct from other modes of scholarly writing? What are its possibilities, limits and effects? In this course we will read classic and experimental ethnographies and undertake exercises in ethnographic writing as a means to investigate ethnography as epistemology, genre and craft.

This course develops an anthropological approach to corporations with a focus on large, profit-oriented, publicly-traded corporations. To denaturalize the corporation, we will consider competing cultural logics internal to corporations as well as the contingent historical processes and debates that shaped the corporate form over the past two centuries. The course will examine processes through which various social groups have sought to alter and restrain corporations as well as reciprocal corporate attempts to reshape the social environment in which they operate.

This seminar explores the history and theory of ethnographic film. Keeping in mind broader issues of cross-cultural representation, we consider the evolution of ethnographic film as a genre for representing reality, embodied practices, and anthropological concepts. Students will examine ethnographic authority, the production of otherness, and the sensory dimensions of knowledge production. The course charts out various approaches to ethnographic film, ranging from the mobilization of the camera as a tool for storytelling, scientific record and analysis, empowerment and political advocacy, and arts and aesthetics. We will theorize the role and status of ethnographic film as a signifying practice, form of meaning-making, and mode of anthropological theory building. We will pay close attention to the ethical and political concerns of cross-cultural communication and representation.

As a symbolic system and field of practice, kinship produces configurations of sexuality, gender, race and power embodied by persons. This recognition is indebted to critical race, feminist, postcolonial and queer interventions in the field of kinship studies. In this course we will review key texts in this field beginning with classic anthropological theories of kinship. We will consider the variability of sanctioned arrangements of sexuality, procreation, household labor and economy across the historical and ethnographic record. Focusing on this variation, we will pose relatedness as a question. Which lives, forms of desire, modes of embodiment are enabled, and which are abjected through the grammar of kinship at work in a particular place and time? What possibilities of life lie outside dominant kinmaking practices? What pleasures and what costs does exile from kinship entail?

Scientific knowledge and practice enacted colonial divisions and served postcolonial struggles. How then might we understand the work of science in the struggles that shape our world today? This class considers science outside Europe and the United States. We take the postcolonial as a dynamic space reworking the dichotomies that structured colonial power and knowledge, including western-indigenous, modern- traditional, global-local, centers-peripheries, and developed-underdeveloped. In the process, students confront the complex histories embodied in institutions, identities, bodies, and landscapes. Through controversies over the environment, medicine, and indigenous knowledge, we investigate the processes through which claims to the universal emerge and the effects of such claims. We attend to the collaborations and alliances through which substance is articulated, and the world in all its multiplicities is apprehended.

This seminar develops an ethnographic approach to projects aiming to improve the human condition. Our object of study - development, humanitarianism, and the will to improve - is defined capaciously to allow for the study of projects ranging in orientation from politically conservative to progressive and revolutionary; from religious to secular; and from the global South to the global North. Whether we are studying construction megaprojects or hygiene lessons, programs for preserving tradition or introducing modernity, climate change mitigation efforts or truth commissions, we will explore ethnographically the actors, targets, explicit motives, practical techniques, and intended and unintended consequences. Our aim will be to link the micropolitics of lived experience and intersubjective relations to the macropolitics that structure and enable improvement projects.

Identifying and managing the toxic is critical to medical and environmental sciences as well as techniques of governing and resisting. This course takes up the subject of toxicity as a field of expertise, an object of knowledge and ethical substance. We will consider the specific histories of industrialization and of the sciences that shape modern engagements with toxicity, and we will explore other ways that the sorts of harms, poisons, and powers glossed as toxicity have been articulated. Over the course of the semester, students will develop the skills to provincalizing relations between toxicity, remedy and memory. Texts will draw from social theory, anthropology, science and technology studies and history as well as art and activism.

Death is both the opposite of life and an intimate part of life. Though it comes to us all, human understandings of the process of dying and of our relations to the dead have varied widely. For many, the dead remain engaged with the living for better and for worse. For others, the dead are just history. We will draw on anthropological, sociological, historical and literary texts to understand better this vast range of attitudes toward the dead and the process of dying-and we will come to understand better what we gain and lose by consigning the dead to oblivion. After considering a wide range of comparative studies, we will conclude with an intensive focus on death, dying, and the dead in Jewish cultures.

The COVID-19 pandemic has reminded us of the relation between biological and the political, power and resistance, and life and death. Fifty years ago, the philosopher Michel Foucault offered two terms to describe it: biopolitics and biopower. In this introduction to both, we take up Foucault's writings on biopolitics in a series of interdisciplinary contexts, including but not limited to the philosophical, anthropological, and political. In addition to Foucault, w will be reading elaborations on what has been called the biopolitical paradigm from writers as diverse as Agamben, Arendt, Arif, Biehl, Butler, Esposito, Fassin, Mbembe, and Sloterdijk. Questions to be asked include how to describe relation between biopolitics and racism and in what ways has the pandemic altered our understanding of biopolitics.

This seminar explores the educational lives and schooling experiences of women and girls through ethnographies conducted in the U.S. and different regions of the world. Drawing on the anthropology of education, and decolonial and transnational feminist theories, we explore how girls and women construct ways of knowing through prisms of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, nation, and citizenship. We examine how gendered-racialized discourses of development, and state sanctioned forms of structural violence, frame their educational experiences and opportunities. In turn, we consider girls and young women as active learners and pedagogues who craft their own lives and literacies across borders and diverse spaces of home, school, and community. Lastly, we interrogate what is feminist in ethnographic representations and identify the possibilities for liberatory pedagogies.

How is citizenship both an ideal of formal equality as well as a mechanism for the elaboration of social inequity? Although the concept of citizenship is premised on liberal ideals of enfranchisement, the rise of xenophobic nationalisms globally have revealed the very notion of citizenship to be an exclusionary category of belonging. Introducing students to classic and contemporary theories of citizenship, this course examines both the contradictions in the theoretical underpinnings of citizenship that set up binaries of citizen and non-citizen, as well as the proliferation of documentary regimes that try to identify who is NOT a citizen. Questioning universal conceptualizations of citizenship which foreground the individual as the locus of rights and recognition, we will discuss anthropological approaches to understanding how people struggle for legal recognition and social belonging as members of collectivities. The thematic focus of the course will be borders, though materials will be drawn from other areas as well.

This course examines theories of subjectivity and self-formation from a comparative, ethnographic perspective. We begin by examining classic and contemporary phenomenological, psychodynamic, semiotic, structuralist, and post-structuralist theories of self and subject formation. Moving into the ethnographic literature, we assess the utility of these models for understanding the selves of others, particularly in critical juxtaposition to multiple and alternate theories of the self and person as understood in different cultures. By examining debates in the anthropology of emotion, cognition, healing, and mental health we bring into sharper focus the particular theoretical and empirical contributions, as well as the failures, of anthropologists towards developing a cross-cultural psychology.

Grounded in anthropological and interdisciplinary analyses of policing, prisons, and security, this course aims to account for how carcerality shapes our worlds. Attentive to specificity and variability across place and time, we will consider how carceral logics take hold and expand, and how they are contested and reimagined. We will pay particular attention to the interrelatedness of race and carcerality; lived experiences of carcerality, including those of people imprisoned in various contexts and those engaged in carceral work; the intersections between carcerality and science and technology; and abolitionist frameworks that address the limitations and constitutive oppressions of carcerality as they radically reimagine other possibilities.

This course is an in-depth introduction to the study of taboo, dirt, and cleanliness. The core concern is the relation between taboo and subjectivity, the making of persons and communities. We'll examine a range of actual examples from around the world, including taboos around sexuality, hair, and blood; food taboos, and other taboos governing religious practices; disgust, fear, and avoidance; modern and contemporary conceptions of hygiene, filth, and waste treatment; as well as the ideas underlying racism and social purity, built on the logic of taboo. We'll survey and discuss a wealth of writings, including the latest attempts to re-think and understand the classic topic of taboo. This is mainly through anthropologists such as Valeri, Douglas, Steiner, and others, and through crucial contributions from psychology and literary studies, with Freud, Kristeva, and others. Students will engage in research and writing, including on their own personal experiences.

This is a semester-long upper division seminar course that will rotate among members of the faculty focusing on different special topics in the fields of abolitionist, critical, and decolonial theories of the social and political.

Drawing on feminist and queer theory and ethnographic studies of ritual and devotional practices around the world this course will consider the relationships among the social organization of sexuality, embodiment of gender, nationalisms and everyday forms of worship. In addition to investigating the norms of family, gender, sex and the nation embedded in dominant institutionalized forms of religion we will study such phenomena as ritual transgenderism, neo tantrism, theogamy (marriage to a deity), priestly celibacy and temple prostitution. The disciplinary and normalizing effects of religion as well as the possibilities of religiosity as a mode of social dissent will be explored through different ethnographic and fictional accounts of ritual and faithful practices in Africa, Asia and the Americas.

Is there anything outside of capitalism today? How do we think beyond capitalism? This course uses the concept of primitive accumulation as a jumping-off point for considering the relationship between capitalism and its others. We will engage with a range of thinkers coming out of feminist, agrarian studies, indigenous and environmental justice, and anarchist traditions who point out how capitalism relies on resources produced outside of itself (e.g. by nature) and on unwaged or unacknowledged work (e.g. care labor). We will also take seriously the ways that forms of productive or life-making labor can and do diverge from capitalist practice. Topics include: agrarian life, householding, care, so-called informal work, commons, ecological justice. Authors considered include: Rosa Luxemburg, Anna Tsing, Gargi Bhattacharyya, Silvia Federici, Ursula K. LeGuin.

This course explores how religious beliefs and practices in Southeast Asia have been transformed by the combined forces of colonialism, nationalism, and globalization. By examining both diversity and resurgence in one of the world's most rapidly modernizing regions, we aim to understand the common economic, social, and political conditions that are contributing to the popularity of contemporary religious movements. At the same time, we also consider the unique ideological, theological, and cultural understandings behind different religions and movements. Through this process we also rethink conceptions of modernity.

Topics will address South Asian culture and literature and change in relation to curricular needs within the Department of Asian Studies.

Examining the symbolic within cultural and social processes in Southeast Asia, anthropologists have produced contextually rich accounts of cultural uniqueness. Interpretive ethnographies tend, however, to downplay the role of power and domination. Using the traditional strengths of symbolic anthropology, this course examines how ritual, art, religion, and seeming traditions in contemporary Southeast Asian societies have been shaped by colonialism, war, nationalism, capitalism and socialism, and play a role in structuring ethnic, class, and gender inequalities. In addition to providing a broad and comparative ethnographic survey of Southeast Asia, this course investigates how culturally specific forms of power and domination are reflected in national politics, and in local and regional responses to the economic and cultural forces of globalization.

Explores the interpretive and analytic tools made available through the ethnographic analysis of the societies within the Nilgiris Biosphere Reserve. Through anthropological understandings of culture as the primary human adaptation, we assess the possibility of understanding the lives of others, particularly in critical juxtaposition to multiple and alternate theories of the self and/or person as understood in different cultures. In this case, we examine relationships between culture and the environment (social and physical), focusing upon unique patterns and adaptations that have developed within particular Nilgiri societies. In doing so, we also examine debates in the anthropology of emotion, cognition, healing, development, the body and health. To this end, we bring into sharper focus the particular theoretical and empirical contributions (and/or limits) of anthropologists towards developing a cross-cultural understanding of human nature and social processes.

Global Mental Health is a growing and important field. Anthropology has a long history of contributing to debates in cross-cultural psychiatry and psychotherapy, as well as to the perennial questions of nature versus nurture in defining normal versus pathological ways of being human. We examine the efficacy of traditional and community-based mental health practices in a non-Western indigenous context as well as the challenges to accessible care posed by inequality and poverty, as well as the stigmas surrounding mental illness in varied cultural contexts. In addition to exploring traditional healing traditions, we will study the efficacy of new community-based forms of biomedical care, as they relate to both debates on changing health care practices and aspirational needs (e.g., bio-medicalization vs. alternative traditional medicine; the need for better healthcare delivery systems, etc.) and ideas of the person, wellbeing, and the ethical life that exist within Nilgiris societies.

This course introduces students to the study of environmental justice through the Middle East. We cover long-standing environmental emerging from fossil fuel extraction, drought, colonialism, and desertification; contemporary problems of climate change mitigation, green cities, and sustainable agricultural technology; and questions raised by the growing power of the Gulf states and their involvement in a range of environmental issues, from land grabs in Sudan to the control of water in Arizona. We will begin with key texts about environmental justice, before moving into case studies-consisting of academic work, journalism, and other media-to explore different aspects of environmental justice.

From Jerusalem to Rome, from Shanghai to Marrakesh, Jews and cities have been shaping each other for thousands of years. This course ranges through time and space to examine how Jewish and other minority experiences offer a window onto questions of modernity and post-colonialism in intersections of the built environment with migration, urban space, and memory. Readings and film/video encompass historical, ethnographic, visual, architectural and literary materials to offer a broad look at materials on ghettos, empires, cosmopolitanism, tolerance, immigrant enclaves, race and ethnicity.

This course offers a broad survey of contemporary Shi'i beliefs, practices, and politics with a focus on Twelver or Imami Shi'ism. Through a close examination of ethnographies, intellectual and political histories, theological writings, and more we will investigate the themes which define the politics and cultural practices of contemporary Shi'ism. In particular, we will highlight the ways in which Shi'is utilize their theological beliefs to negotiate and respond to the socio-political context of the times in which they live. The course begins by examining the early days of what would later be called Shi'ism. We then examine the key theological concepts which distinguish Shi'ism from Sunnism, including themes of adalat (divine justice), shahadat (martyrdom), the Karbala paradigm, and the role of the imamate and clerical class. The rest of course is devoted to investigating the ways that Shi'ism informs and interacts with the social realm and vice versa, ranging from negotiations of the everyday to responding to moments of great civil and society unrest and to that which is called sectarianism. Travelling from South Asia to the Middle East, from Africa to America, we will ultimately examine how Shi'i beliefs and identity act as a dynamic force for shaping the worlds in which they live today.

This course examines the fixity of Bible's representations of Israel as it relates to the fluidity of Israel's social, political, and religious experience as revealed in archaeology and texts from outside the Bible. We will use the tools of biblical criticism (philological, archaeological, literary historical) and methods drawn from such disciplines as History, Political Science, Anthropology, and Literary Criticism, to examine four biblical narrative traditions: The Joseph story; the exodus from Egypt; the Israelite conquest of Canaan; and the Song of Deborah, a text widely regarded as the oldest in the Hebrew Bible. Each of these played an essential role in the process of fabricating biblical Israel. As works of biblical historiography, each functioned to create a shared sense of a Jewish past in light of the urgencies of the present. Each is also witness to a creative process that unfolded when the past was still malleable, the terms not yet rigid. We will focus on the modes and materials of textual production and on how modern historians engage biblical narrative in fabricating their own narrative histories of ancient Israel. We will also consider how ancient and modern historical writing on ancient Israel has been put into the service of contemporary political discourse on boundaries and borders in Israel-Palestine.

Therapeutic knowledge and practice in Africa have changed dynamically over the past century. Yet, questions about healing continue to be questions about the intimate ways that power works on bodies. Accounts of healing and medicine on the continent describe ongoing struggles over what counts as knowledge and who has the authority to intervene in social and physical threats. This class will discuss the expansion of biomedicine in Africa, the continuities and changes embodied in traditional medicine, and the shifting relationship between medicine, science and law. Our readings with trace how colonialism, post-independence nationalism, international development, environmental change and globalization have shaped the experience of illness, debility and misfortune today, as well as the possibilities for life, the context of care, and the meaning of death.

Race is but one of many ways that we classify ourselves and others as we navigate the world. But what role has science, technology, and medicine played in shaping our understanding of race as both a concept and aspect of our personal identity? This course investigates how ideas about race have been constructed and deployed at various scales in both social and scientific contexts. Students will trace the historical production of racial meaning from the 18th century to the present, exploring topics such as: individual projects of racial self-fashioning, national projects of technological racial surveillance, and even global networks of genomic data. Rather than focusing solely on scientific authority, this course will underscore how marginalized communities have challenged scientific scrutiny and engaged as co-producers of racial knowledge.

The relationship between North American Indian peoples and the states of Canada and the US is in many ways unique, a product of centuries of trade compacts, treaties, legislation, warfare, land claim negotiations, and Supreme Court decisions. Apparently straightforward concepts such as land, property, and sovereignty, based as they are on European cultural assumptions, often seem inadequate for making sense of the cross-cultural terrain of Indian-State relations, where they tend to take on new - and often ambiguous - meanings. In this course we will explore some of these ambiguous meanings, attending to the cultural realities they reflect and the social relationships they shape. Then we will examine the complex interplay of legal, political, and cultural forces by taking an in-depth look at several selected case studies.

American Jews have frequently been touted as a model minority. This course will take a more critical look at the historical interactions between Jewish immigration, United States industrialization, and processes of social and geographical mobility-all through the prism of New York's Lower East Side, first home for over 750,000 Jewish immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe, the Ottoman Empire and elsewhere between the mid-19th century and the 1920s. We will compare the Jewish experience to that of other immigrants/migrants by considering social institutions as well as material and other cultural practices. We will examine interactions with the built environment -most especially the tenement-in Lower East Side culture. Special attention will be paid to immigrant labor movement politics including strikes, splits, and gender in the garment trade. From the perspective of the present, the course will examine how commemoration, heritage tourism and the selling of [immigrant] history intersect with gentrifying real estate in an iconic New York City neighborhood. Projects using the ILR's archives on the Triangle Fire and other topics are explicitly encouraged. This course counts as an out of college elective for B. Arch and M. Arch students.

This seminar examines long-term colonialist processes of erasing Indigenous histories, and recent attempts to bring this heritage back to visibility. We will read texts by Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Jean O'Brien, Patrick Wolfe, Keith Basso, Andrea Lynn Smith, and others. Students will engage in critical analysis of primary sources, Indigenous histories, and monuments related to the American 1779 Sullivan-Clinton invasion of Haudenosaunee (Six Nations Confederacy) territory and also the post-1779 Haudenosaunee reoccupations after the devastation. Student projects will focus on local Indigenous heritage and can include artwork, videos, counter-monument designs, poetry, and prose fiction, as well as more traditional academic research papers.

The materiality of art as willful agents will be considered from ontology to an Indigenous expression of more than human relations. Located at the intersection of multiple modernities, art and science; the shift from art historical framings of form over matter and connoisseurship to viewing materiality as an active process that continues to map larger social processes and transformation will be discussed. Archives will be sites of investigation across varied Indigenous geographies marking place, space, bodies and land. This class is designed to introduce the latest methodologies in the field of art history, material culture and Indigenous Studies. Students will consult the archive, do hands-on evaluation of art, material culture, and expand their historic and theoretical knowledge about materiality. Beyond the theoretically and historically grounded critique this class provides, it will also introduce students to working with original documents and / or conduct on-site research. Students will consult the Cornell University library holdings of the Huntington Free Library's Native American Collection and conduct original archival research with historic and contemporary art and material culture at Haudenosaunee cultural centers, museums and exhibitions spaces through a class trip or individual visits (TBD).

This course examines Latinx education in comparative perspective, with a focus on transnational communities and cross-border movements that link U.S. Latinx education with Latin American education. We ask: how do legacies of colonialism and empire shape the education of Latinx and Latin American communities? How are race, language, gender, cultural and national identity, and representation negotiated in schools? Drawing on ethnographic studies of education in and out of school, we explore how families and youths create knowledge, do literacy, and respond to cultural diversity, displacement, migration, and inequality. Throughout, we inquire into the potential for a decolonial and transformative education.

Independent reading course in topics not covered in regularly scheduled courses. Students select a topic in consultation with the faculty member who has agreed to supervise the course work.

Independent reading course in topics not covered in regularly scheduled courses. Students select a topic in consultation with the faculty member who has agreed to supervise the course work.

Research work supervised by the thesis advisor, concentrating on determination of the major issues to be addressed by the thesis, preparation of literature reviews, analysis of data, and the like. The thesis advisor will assign the grade for this course.

Final write-up of the thesis under the direct supervision of the thesis advisor, who will assign the grade for this course.

Course will consist of several mandatory meetings of all thesis writers with the honors chair. These sessions will inform students about the standard thesis production timetable, format and content expectations, and deadlines; expose students to standard reference sources; and introduce students to each other's projects. The chair of the Honors Committee will assign the grade for this course.

Course will consist of weekly, seminar-style meetings of all thesis writers until mid-semester, under the direction of the honors chair. This second semester concentrates on preparation of a full draft of the thesis by mid-semester, with ample time left for revisions prior to submission. Group meetings will concentrate on collective reviewing of the work of other students, presentation of research, and the like.

This course examines the history and development of anthropology as a discipline with emphasis on British social anthropology and American cultural anthropology. The course will trace major schools of thought -- Evolutionism, Functionalism, and Structuralism -- leading to the post-structural critique of culture. The latter part of the course will examine a range of debates around anthropology's method and claims to theory beginning with the reflexive turn. Specifically, this part of the course will address how the recognition by anthropologists of the operations of power both in the world out there and within anthropology has led to diverse methodologies and theories that define contemporary anthropology.

This course explores advanced topics in anthropological theory and practice. It builds on the history of the discipline that students will have examined in the preceding course ANTHR 6020, and seeks to immerse students in major contemporary theoretical developments and debates and the discipline's most pressing concerns. Coursework will proceed mainly by way of reading, writing, and discussion.

This course begins from the premise that bodies and sensing are the ground of sociality. Drawing on texts from Anthropology, Science & Technology Studies, Disability Studies, and Animal Studies, as well as some classics of social theory, this course brings bodies and senses to the fore in thinking about how humans live, work, relate, and create together. It considers all the senses from the big five (sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste) to the hidden senses (balance, kinesthesia, proprioception, and affect). The goal is to read and think materially, semiotically, and theoretically about how humans, as a social species, interact with our own and other species through our bodies, our senses, and our movements.

This course will explore the relationship between popular belief, political action, and the institutional deployment of social power. The class will be roughly divided in three parts, opening with a discussion of how the material world influences the culture of a society. The middle section will connect culture to political ideology, including symbolism and the construction of group identity. The last part of the course will consider ways in which cultural symbols and ideology can be manipulated in order to legitimate government authority. We will then, coming full circle, trace how political regimes can influence the social practices from which culture originates.

This introductory course familiarizes students with documentary filmmaking and audiovisual modes of knowledge production. Through lectures, screenings, workshops, and labs, students will develop single-camera digital video production and editing skills. Weekly camera, sound, and editing exercises will enhance students' documentary filmmaking techniques and their reflexive engagement with sensory scholarship. Additionally, students will be introduced to nonfiction film theory from the perspective of production and learn to critically engage and comment on each other's work. Discussions of debates around visual ethnography, the politics of representation, and filmmaking ethics will help students address practical storytelling dilemmas. Over the course of the semester, students conduct pre-production research and develop visual storytelling skills as they build a portfolio of short video assignments in preparation for continued training in documentary production.

What are peasantries, and why do they matter today? We will learn how peasant communities interact with land, plants, and animals, and how they are integrated into national governance and global markets. We will explore the contradictory ways-as reactionary and revolutionary, doomed and flourishing-that peasants have appeared in modern economic, political, and environmental projects. Topics include classic accounts of capitalism and agrarian change; anti-colonialism and national liberation; debates over development, indigeneity, and gender; and emerging concerns over fair trade, sustainable agriculture, and climate change. Readings include work from revolutionary intellectuals and peasant movements as well as ethnographic studies.

Human-animal relationships are often seen in utilitarian, nutritional terms, particularly in archaeology. But animals and meat have significance far beyond their economic value. This course focuses on a broad range of these non-dietary roles of animals in human societies, past and present. This includes the fundamental shift in human-animal relations associated with domestication; the varied meanings of wild and domestic animals; as well as the importance of animals as wealth, as objects of sacrifice, as totems or metaphors for humans, and as symbols in art. Meat can be used in feasting and meat sharing to create, cement, and manipulate social relationships. This course is open to students of archaeology, cultural anthropology, and other disciplines with an interest in human-animal relations.

Archaeology has never operated in a vacuum. This course examines the political context of the study of the past, and the uses to which accounts of the past have been put in the present. Archaeology is often implicated in nationalist claims to territory, or claims of ethnic, racial, or religious superiority. Museum exhibits and other presentations to the public always have an agenda, consciously or otherwise. Archaeologists are increasingly required to interact with descendent communities, often in the context of postcolonial tensions. The antiquities trade and the protection of archaeological sites connects archaeologists to commercial and law enforcement sectors. We will also consider the internal politics of the practice of archaeology in various settings, including the implications of the funding sources that support archaeological work. This course is open to students of archaeology, socio-cultural anthropology, history, and other disciplines with an interest in the past.

Bioarchaeology is the study of human remains from archaeological sites. Like forensic scientists at the scene of the crime, bioarchaeologists search for clues embedded in human bone and mummified tissues to reconstruct how ancient peoples lived and died. As a dynamic living system, the human skeleton responds not only to hormones that govern human development but also to physiological stress brought on by disease, malnutrition, and trauma. The human body is also an artifact molded by cultural understandings of gender, prestige, self-expression, and violence. In this course, students will learn the scientific techniques for estimating skeletal age and sex, diagnosing pathology, and reconstructing diet and migration patterns. This course emphasizes the critical integration of biological and cultural evidence for understanding past individuals and societies.

This course considers the possibility of connections between the America and the Old World before the Spanish discovery not only as an empirical question, but also as an intensely controversial issue that has tested the limits of the scholarly detachment that archaeologists imagine characterizes their perspectives. We will consider the evidence for several possible episodes of interaction as well as the broader issue of how long-distance interaction can be recognized in the archaeological record. Transoceanic contact is a common element in popular visions of the American past, but most professional archaeologists have rejected the possibility with great vehemence. The issue provides an interesting case study in the power of orthodoxy in archaeology.

This course provides a long-term overview of the indigenous peoples of Cornell's home region and their neighbors from an archaeological perspective. Cornell students live and work in the traditional territory of the Haudenosaunee, or Six Nations Iroquois, and this class will help residents to understand the deep history of this place. We will examine long-term changes in material culture, settlement, subsistence, and trade; the founding of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy; indigenous responses to European and American colonization; the practicalities of doing indigenous-site archaeology in New York State; and contemporary indigenous perspectives on archaeology. Visits to local archaeological sites and museum collections will supplement classroom instruction.

This studio-style seminar provides an in-depth examination of the principles and practices of archaeological research design. We will examine all aspects of the research process, from concept formation, to methodology, to ethical practice and data management. Over the course of the semester, students will undertake a series of projects that will build incrementally into a research proposal. We will focus on developing the skills vital to designing archaeological research, starting with the formulation of a question and continuing through the exploratory process of defining proper sites, assemblages, analytical techniques, and presentation of findings. Class sessions will focus on designing research projects examining case studies drawn from world archaeology and student research projects.

An introduction to ancient Mesoamerica, focusing on the nature and development of societies that are arguably the most complex to develop anywhere in the precolumbian Americas. The course provides a summary of the history of the region before the European invasion, but the emphasis is on the organization of Mesoamerican societies: the distinctive features of Mesoamerican cities, economies, political systems, religion. We begin by considering Mesoamerican societies at the time of the Spanish invasion. Our focus will be on descriptions of the Aztecs of Central Mexico by Europeans and indigenous survivors, in an attempt to extract from them a model of the fundamental organizational features of one Mesoamerican society, making allowances for what we can determine about the perspectives and biases of their authors. We then review the precolumbian history of Mesoamerica looking for variations on these themes as well as indications of alternative forms of organization. We will also look at such issues as the transition from mobile to sedentary lifeways, the processes involved in the domestication of plants and animals, the emergence of cities and states, and the use of invasion-period and ethnographic information to interpret precolumbian societies in comparative perspective.

This course is an exploration of Maya understandings of their own history as it is reflected in ancient texts. We will begin by looking at episodes in Colonial and recent history to illustrate some of the ways Maya thinking about history may differ from more familiar genres. We will then review basic aspects of precolumbian Maya writing, but we will focus mainly on analyzing texts from one or more Classic period Maya cities.

Sociologist C. Wright Mills challenged his readers to develop their sociological imagination to understand the social and historical forces at work in seemingly individual events, such as the receipt of a pink slip, a draft card, or a drug prescription. Within science and technology studies, scholars have documented how social issues can become scientific, technological, or medical, often appearing to leave the social realm naturalized, normalized, or pathologized. This course introduces graduate students to classic texts and concepts in social theory with a focus on how scholars apply such theories to empirical research. It will consider major thinkers and schools of social thought, such as Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Mannheim, Foucault, and the Frankfurt School. It will also consider how a nuanced interplay of theory and empirical data can bring critically important insights to both theoretical and empirical understandings of the world. The course is relevant for students in sociology, history, and anthropology who are interested in social theory.

This required seminar for the new graduate minor in media studies considers media from a wide number of perspectives, ranging from the methods of cinema and television studies to those of music, information science, communication, science and technology studies, and beyond. Historical and theoretical approaches to media are intertwined with meta-critical reflections on media studies as an interdisciplinary field of inquiry. Close attention will be paid to media's role in shaping and being shaped by race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, and other politically constructed categories of identity and sociality.

This course is designed to give advanced undergraduate and graduate students a practical understanding of what anthropologists actually do in what has traditionally been understood as the field, a construction that has been contested. We will examine situations that emerge in conducting fieldwork, and explore the ethical, methodological, theoretical, epistemological, and practical issues that are raised in the observation, participation in, recording, and representation of sociocultural processes and practices. Students are expected to develop a semester-long, local research project that will allow them to experience fieldwork situations.

Through the centuries, Rabbinic Judaism developed an elaborate set of rules for governing marriage and family life, grounded in the Hebrew Bible and adapted to the realities of life in diaspora. This complex and sophisticated system helps to explain the continuity of Jewish collective identity in the sustained absence of a shared territorial homeland. We will study together part of the Talmudic tractate Yevamot (concerning the Levirate marriage) and relevant passages from the code known as Shulchan Aruch, along with scholarship in English. Some reading knowledge of Rabbinic Hebrew-Aramaic required.

The idea of the barbarians is as old as civilization itself. But what is a barbarian, and what is the role that barbarians play, as the savage enemies of civilization? In this course we will address such questions by looking at how different civilizations have imagined their barbarians, ranging from their key role in Greek drama, and as infidels in religious conceptions, to Chinese walls, and American savagery. We will examine both historical examples, and the barbarians of today -- the terrorists and insurgents so often framed as dark and primitive, in contrast with ourselves. Through readings and visual materials, we will seek to discover what these barbarians have in common. We will look comparatively for the underlying patterns of history that the barbarians are drafted from, to draw a new picture of the barbarians. At the same time, we will arrive at a new understanding of civilization as such, as well as of the general nature of human inequality, and how it is justified.

This course examines the cultures and histories of the circumpolar North. The primary emphasis is on the North American Arctic and Subarctic with some attention to northern Eurasia for comparative purposes. The focus is on the indigenous peoples of the region and the socio-political and ecological dimensions of their evolving relationships with southern industrial societies.

Concepts and categories form the basis of much human thought and action, and anthropologists have long been fascinated by the human penchant forcategorization. Yet concepts and categories shape social scientific thought every bit as much as (if not more than) the thoughts and actions of those weproport to study. How we categorize the world and the conceptual tools we bring to bear in the study of socio-cultural phenomena profoundly shape ourunderstandings of them. Despite this, however, many of the concepts and categories that anthropologists and other social scientists use are implicit intheir work rather than consciously theorized. The goal of this course is to make students aware of the role that concepts and categories play in thepractice of social science - and anthropology in particular - and to provide them with the theoretical tools they need to adequately conceptualize theirown work and to assess conceptual frames in anthropological and other social scientific writing.

This course offers an anthropological perspective on the global rise of authoritarianism, in the context of growing inequality, racism, misogyny, nationalism, genocide and war. In particular, it links macro-scale and historical theories regarding global processes (e.g., "world systems," "globalization"), on the one hand, and the closer correlates of these macro forces shaping individual experience, on the other. Drawing from anthropology as well as from cognate disciplines (history, psychology, political economy), the course surveys case studies from the US, Germany, China, and other countries, on topics such as the self-delusion of the oppressed, the narcissism of dictators, the politics of gender, as well as how the remaking of social identities relate to world economic cycles. Course readings highlight how fantasy, imagination, fear and hope, as well as propaganda and AI, intervene in the contemporary global trends.

This seminar focuses on preparing a full-scale proposal for anthropological fieldwork for a dissertation. Topics include identifying appropriate funding sources; defining a researchable problem; selecting and justifying a particular fieldwork site; situating the ethnographic case within appropriate theoretical contexts; selecting and justifying appropriate research methodologies; developing a feasible timetable for field research; ethical considerations and human subjects protection procedures; and preparing appropriate budgets. This is a writing seminar, and students will complete a proposal suitable for submission to a major funding agency in the social sciences.

Our children re-create culture and society as they grow up and take charge of the world. But how does this actually happen? What are the implications? In this course we look at children’s creative engagement and socialization, through the lens of anthropology, also borrowing from psychology, history, etc. We will pay special attention to how children learn, play, make-believe, and how they co-construct their own languages, cultures and societies. We draw on ethnographic studies of children, theories of childhood, as well as research on children who are disadvantaged, excluded, or captured for forced assimilation (historically, in 'Indian Schools', or in China's Uyghur genocide today), to understand both these unfortunate victims, and "normal" children.

The state figures critically - if sometimes implicitly - in most contemporary anthropological analyses. In this course we will examine the history of anthropological (and related) treatments of the state with an eye to destabilizing the received view of the state as a unified entity capable of coherent action. We then engage with recent ethnographic work that views the state more as a process than an entity and grapple with the theoretical and methodological issues involved in studying the constellation of government agents, institutions, ideological projects, and processes that together constitute what we think of as the state.

In this graduate level course, we will take the body and bodiliness as spaces of ethnographic engagement and questioning. Discussion, text and other materials in this class will invite students to consider the ways that the body (as an epistemological and ontological object) is transformed through a variety of scientific, economic and political projects. Because meditations on the body have rested -- implicitly or explicitly -- on theoretical and methodological approaches to experience, students will find themselves exploring histories of bodily senses, appetites, and capacities. Ultimately, our inquiry into contests over and reflections on the body and bodiliness aim to open up broader anthropological questions about knowledge, authority, agency, sovereignties, and material life.

Infrastructure! It's the hardware and software that undergirds transportation, energy, water, and security systems. This course asks what we can learn about infrastructure when we approach it not as a neutral set of technologies but as a context-dependent social and political force. Taking a critical approach to (among others) natural resources, labor, housing, and security, the course will trace how infrastructures have both served and obstructed colonial and contemporary projects for social change.

Anthropology provides a unique and powerful perspective on the world and especially on ourselves, as humans. Our closest sister-disciplines, philosophy and psychology, as well as psychoanalysis, are also engaged in the same quest to understand our world and ourselves, and have generated powerful insights that anthropology cannot overlook. How can we build a philosophically and psychologically aware anthropology? Focusing on key questions such as our perception of reality, our relations to non-human animals, and the psychological dimensions of identity and power, this course introduces areas where we can learn from each other through an interdisciplinary dialogue carried out in a sympathetic yet critical spirit.

This course will critically examine the key texts that have informed our understanding of the nation and nationalism. Beginning with some of the founding texts such as Hahn Kohn's The Idea of Nationalism: A Study in its Origins and Backgrounds, Plamenatz's Two Types of Nationalism, and Renan's What is a Nation, we will then move on to more contemporary writings by Gellner, Hobsbawm and Anderson and end with analytical approaches addressing the national question in postcolonial contexts such as Partha Chatterjee's Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World. A central theme will be how culture, power, and history are implicated in the concept of Nation. We will also explore the possibilities of an ethnographic approach to the nation and ask if such an analytical and methodological move may help us better grapple with the perplexing emotive dimension of nationalisms.

This course introduces students to a tradition of radical scholarship on the articulations of race and racism with capitalism, and uses it as a frame through which to examine the ongoing role of racialized difference in structuring capitalist extraction. Beginning with chattel slavery's role in the origins of capitalism and moving into contemporary settings, the course will examine how capitalism produces race, how race shapes the accumulation of wealth, and what the role of an activist scholarship is in making these links visible. Readings will include the work of Black radical scholars as well as historical and ethnographic studies of the U.S. and global contexts-including discussions of plantation slavery, carceral capitalism, the 2008 mortgage crisis, and global labor migration.

Museums are places where academic research meets the public. Though they remain among the most trusted types of institutions, they have increasingly come under critical scrutiny. Questions around museums' perceived neutrality, the ethics of collecting, displaying, and interpreting cultural heritage, and whether they are welcoming to all audiences have made headlines and led to new developing practices. This class offers an introduction to the field of museum studies, pairing interactive lectures on museum history and theory with site visits to local and campus museums where students will learn from a variety of professionals about practical challenges.

Examining the symbolic within cultural and social processes in Southeast Asia, anthropologists have produced contextually rich accounts of cultural uniqueness. Interpretive ethnographies tend, however, to downplay the role of power and domination. Using the traditional strengths of symbolic anthropology, this course examines how ritual, art, religion, and seeming traditions in contemporary Southeast Asian societies have been shaped by colonialism, war, nationalism, capitalism and socialism, and play a role in structuring ethnic, class, and gender inequalities. In addition to providing a broad and comparative ethnographic survey of Southeast Asia, this course investigates how culturally specific forms of power and domination are reflected in national politics, and in local and regional responses to the economic and cultural forces of globalization.

Kingship plays an outsize role in Asian countries today, in both democratic and authoritarian countries. Even in countries that abolished the monarchy, the legacy of kingship is very much at play. In this course we will study Asia's kingdoms, states, and empires, with attention to both tradition and present-day modern states. Focusing on kingship as both ideology and practice, we will study how states and monarchic traditions first came to be, including as Stranger-Kings, Buddhist monarchs, secondary state formation, local adaptations of foreign models, and more. We will examine examples such as China, from the ancient states and early empires to the legacy of empire there today; Cambodia and its Angkor empire modeled on Indian traditions; as well as Burma, Thailand, Japan, and other parts of Asia. Using readings, films, lectures and guest presentations, we will re-examine the role of kingship in Asia so as to enable a new understanding of both ancient, historical, and contemporary Asia.

This course offers an introduction to the global issue of genocide and other mass atrocities, with an in-depth look at two genocides in Asia ongoing since 2017: in China, and in Burma (Myanmar). First, we will study how genocide works: the prerequisites, warning signs, and how it is carried out. We study the creation of the term genocide as a new crime in international law after WWII, in the UN Genocide Convention, and the checkered history of failing to prevent new genocides (incl. in Cambodia, Rwanda, etc.), but also some successes. Then, we focus on the new genocides under way against the Uyghurs in China and against the Rohingya in Burma: background, events, actors involved, the role of media and propaganda, and why Burma expels people while China force-assimilates people in place.

This winter course on site in Cambodia will focus on Cambodian heritage past and present - how it's been created in the past, including the city of Angkor, and how that heritage and history is understood and engaged today. We will visit historical sites as well as museums and other relevant sites, including performances, where history is remembered and engaged. There will be lectures, including by Cambodian experts, as well as film showings. The course will be based in Siem Reap, in collaboration with the Center for Khmer Studies, and there will also be excursions to Phnom Penh, the capital.

This course will investigate the social and political histories of Afghanistan from the late 19th century through the present day. Drawing from religious treatises, intellectual histories, ethnographies, literature, and film we will examine historical events and cultural developments from a diverse set of theoretical approaches. Topics will include colonialism and its legacies, the experiences of minoritized groups, alternative forms of nationalism, Afghan religious discourses, the role of Marxism and Islamic socialism, gender and politics, the war on terror, and more. Ultimately, it is the objective of the course to explore the diverse cultural, political, and material worlds that have shaped collective life in Afghanistan in the 20th and 21st centuries.

How does one study Islam from an anthropological perspective? Through close readings of recent ethnographies, canonical texts, theoretical works, and critiques of the genre, we will understand the major debates and intellectual trends that have defined the anthropology of Islam from its earliest inception through the present day. Geographic areas covered include South Asia, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, America, North Africa, and West Africa.

The common perception of ethnicity is that it is a natural and an inevitable consequence of cultural difference. Asians overseas, in particular, have won repute as a people who cling tenaciously to their culture and refuse to assimilate into their host societies and cultures. But, who are the Asians? On what basis can we label Asians an ethnic group? Although there is a significant Asian presence in the Caribbean, the category Asian itself does not exist in the Caribbean. What does this say about the nature of categories that label and demarcate groups of people on the basis of alleged cultural and phenotypical characteristics? This course will examine the dynamics behind group identity, namely ethnicity, by comparing and contrasting the multicultural experience of Asian populations in the Caribbean and the United States. Ethnographic case studies will focus on the East Indian and Chinese experiences in the Caribbean and the Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Filipino, and Indian experiences in the United States.

Race is but one of many ways that we classify ourselves and others as we navigate the world. But what role has science, technology, and medicine played in shaping our understanding of race as both a concept and aspect of our personal identity? This course investigates how ideas about race have been constructed and deployed at various scales in both social and scientific contexts. Students will trace the historical production of racial meaning from the 18th century to the present, exploring topics such as: individual projects of racial self-fashioning, national projects of technological racial surveillance, and even global networks of genomic data. Rather than focusing solely on scientific authority, this course will underscore how marginalized communities have challenged scientific scrutiny and engaged as co-producers of racial knowledge.

An introduction to the story of how human history from the earliest times through to the recent period interrelates with changing climate conditions on Earth. The course explores the whole expanse of human history, but concentrates on the most recent 15,000 years through to the Little Ice Age (14th-19th centuries AD). Evidence from science, archaeology and history are brought together to assess how climate has shaped the human story.

This course explores the implications and significance of using textual materials as anthropological evidence. While participant observation remains the cornerstone of ethnography, literary, archival, and other written works are increasingly being utilized as primary sources within the anthropological project. This course will hence offer an overview of anthropological works that trace the intersections between cultural production and the literary imagination. Rather than consider the literary elements of ethnography itself, we will strive to understand the disparate forms of social phenomena-both knowledge and practices-that arise from texts and textual practices specifically. Examples include analyses of literary cultures, media forms and non-traditional textual sources, bureaucratic structures, the use of archives, and more. Particular attention will be paid to works based in the Middle East and the Islamic world. By examining the different theoretical, political, and ethical considerations of using the written word as ethnographic evidence, we will be able to shed light on the anthropological project as a whole.

The Caucasus occupies a distinctive place in the historical and cultural imagination, a region long anchored to tropes of disobedience, punishment, and redemption. It is also a place in which liminality, betwixt and between Europe and Asia, endures as both a perceived geographic imaginary and an experienced condition in the detritus of Persian, Ottoman, Russian, and Soviet imperialisms. This course explores the Caucasus through its anthropology, history, and cultural production, with a particular focus on the Russian conquest, Soviet socialism, and the conflicts and capitalist formations of the post-Soviet decades. We will examine the entanglements of the region's history, political economy, and geopolitics in order to get a sense of the array of forces shaping the Caucasus today.

Ever-increasing global interconnection drives some of the most pressing political and ethical questions of our time. This seminar centers on two intersecting areas of inquiry. The first deals with the nature of global movements: how people, ideas, arts, and capital move through world. Engaging postcolonial theory and scholarship on contemporary migration and transnationalism, we will interrogate the idea of borders and nations as well as those categories-like diaspora-that surpass or circumvent them. The second addresses how and why we might study these processes ethnographically. Here we will consider the potential and limitations of multi-sited and global ethnography, and question the possibility of an activist ethnography of global interconnection.

We live in a world of ruins. Our planet is damaged. Cities grapple with urban decay caused by deindustrialization and other socio-economic problems. Capitalism, socialism, and imperialism have left a trail of detritus - the remnants of colonialism, extraction, industry, and failed utopian projects. For their part, 20th century dictatorships left behind the material traces of repression and mass violence. All the while, for centuries the ruin has evolved as a poignant allegory, representing such abstractions as history, the nation, the universal human, and even our emancipation from the destructive forces of capitalism. In conversation with philosophy and cultural geography, this course explores anthropological and archaeological approaches to modern ruins and ruination.

Liberal feminists and political theorists argue that sentiments such as compassion and empathy have the capacity to alert us to suffering, injustice, and oppression, and thus incite transformative political action. This interdisciplinary seminar explores the challenges to this theory by staging a conversation between postcolonial, feminist, and queer theories of affect, and anthropological critiques of humanitarian projects. Sentiments are mobilized to defend borders, wage wars, grant asylum to refugees, provide medical care and disaster relief, and inspire feminist activism. We will analyze how these gendered and racialized ethical projects and political regimes are co-constituted, and how they mediate access to resources and survival, as well as political agency, subjectivity, citizenship, and national belonging.

Community-engaged archaeology brings together knowledgeable communities located within and beyond academic institutions who collaborate to produce higher-quality accounts of the past. In this course, students will build their archaeological fieldwork and laboratory skills while contributing to strong university-community relationships in the local area. Drawing on historical documents, previous scholarship, expert collaborators, and archaeological investigation, students in this course contribute to the understanding of regional sites and landmarks. The topic for Fall 2022 addresses the Underground Railroad through a partnership between Ithaca's historic St. James AME Church, the Cornell Institute of Archaeology and Material Studies, and local schools. Students in this course will study archaeological evidence related to the everyday experiences of people who formed part of a congregation active in the Underground Railroad during the early- to mid-19th century.

In little more than a century the Inkas created an empire stretching thousands of kilometers along the Andean spine from Ecuador to Chile. This course focuses on the political and economic structure of the empire and on its roots in earlier Andean prehistory. Archaeological remains, along with documents produced in the aftermath of the Spanish invasion, will be used to trace the history of Inka territorial organization, statecraft, and economic relationships and the Colonial transformation of Andean societies.

What is the role of ethics in archaeology today? What principles shape the discipline's response to serious dilemmas? What is the relationship between ethics and politics in archaeology? This seminar provides an in-depth exploration of these questions across a range of subfields, from indigenous, public, and postcolonial archaeologies, to critical heritage studies, conflict archaeology and the archaeology of the contemporary past. We will learn the normative ethics of Western archaeology, with its concern for best practices, multiculturalism, and the politics of identity, as well as radical alternatives centered on hard politics, oppression, and justice. We will also explore the ethics of the profession, as it pertains to equity and inclusion. This course traverses the terrain of moral right and wrong in archaeology.

Critical approaches to embodiment compel bioarchaeologists to consider how social norms and institutional inequalities are enacted and materialized through the body. This course contributes a deep archaeological perspective on the lived experience of inequality and the historically contingent nature of sexuality, gender, and violence. Drawing upon the study of human skeletons, social theory, and a rich comparative literature in cultural anthropology, we will theorize bones as once-living bodies and explore topics such as body modification and mutilation, masculinity and performative violence, gender and sexual fluidity, and sickness and suffering in past societies. We will not only consider privilege and marginalization in lived experience, but also in death, examining how unequal social relationships are reproduced when the dead body is colonized as an object of study.

What is authenticity and why does it matter? Connoisseurship-the expertise required to make discerning judgments-involves assessments of quality,authenticity, historical and cultural significance, and many other issues. This course focuses on connoisseurship in the fine arts, archaeology, and ethnography in both academic contexts and the art world. Emphasis is on developing a nuanced understanding of authentication, at the core of the art market and an important determinant of relevant data for academic art historians and archaeologists. Topics include the role of authenticity in assigning value; looting and faking in relation to antiquities markets; technical analysis and forgery detection.

This is an intensive laboratory course in the study of human skeletal remains. A detailed knowledge of skeletal anatomy is fundamental to forensic anthropology, bioarchaeology, and the medical sciences. This course teaches students how to identify all 206 bones and 32 teeth of the human skeleton, in both complete and fragmentary states. Students will also learn osteological methods for establishing a biological profile and documenting skeletal trauma and pathological lesions. Hands-on laboratory training will be supplemented by case studies that demonstrate the importance of human osteology for criminal investigations in the present and the study of health and violence in the past. The ethics of working with human remains are also discussed.

Explores the ways Mesoamericans understood the world and their place in it, and the ways they constructed history as these are reflected in the few books that have survived from the period before the European invasion. Examines the structure of writing and systems of notation, especially calendars, and considers their potential for illuminating Mesoamerican world views and approaches to history. Primary focus is detailed analysis of five precolumbian books: Codex Borgia, a central Mexican manual of divinatory ritual; Codex Boturini, a history of migration in central Mexico; Codex Nuttall, a Mixtec dynastic history; and two Maya books of astrology and divination, Codex Dresden and Codex Madrid.

This seminar provides a higher-level general introduction to, and survey of, contemporary theories, methods, and approaches in the archaeology of the Mediterranean world. Rather than focusing on a specific geographical sub-region or chronological period, this course examines and critically assesses the practice and distinctive character of Mediterranean archaeology more broadly.

This course asks how anthropologists articulate the relevance of our work in theoretical and political terms by staging an encounter between three disparate strands of scholarship: anthropology of the contemporary, engaged/public anthropology, and anthropology of everyday violence and ordinary affects. Designed to bring together pre-fieldwork and post-fieldwork graduate students, this seminar functions as a laboratory for expanding existing conversations and exploring further articulations of engaged anthropology of the contemporary. Participants will reflect on how their political commitments, ethnographic and other sensibilities, and theoretical perspectives inform each other, and will invigorate their research design, writing, and analytical frameworks in light of these reflections and engagement with course texts. The course is open to students from across the disciplines.

This advanced seminar focuses on the archaeological study of houses, households, families, and communities. How is the study of domestic life transforming our understanding of ancient societies? How can we most effectively use material evidence to investigate the practices, experiences, identities, and social dynamics that made up the everyday lives of real people in antiquity, non-elite as well as elite? To address these questions, we will survey and critically examine historical and current theories, methods, and approaches within the field of household archaeology. This course is intended for graduate students and advanced undergraduates with some previous background in archaeology, material culture studies, or related fields.

This is a hands-on laboratory course in zooarchaeological method: the study of animal bones from archaeological sites. It is designed to provide students with a basic grounding in identification of body part and taxon, aging and sexing, pathologies, taphonomy, and human modification. The course will deal only with mammals larger than squirrels. While students will work on animal bones from prehistoric Europe, most of these skills are easily transferable to the fauna of other areas, especially North America. This is an intensive course that emphasizes laboratory skills in a realistic setting. Students will analyze an assemblage of actual archaeological bones. It is highly recommended that students also take the course in Zooarchaeological Interpretation (ANTHR 7264/ARKEO 7264) offered in the spring.

This course follows from last semester's Zooarchaeological Method. We will shift our emphasis here from basic skills to interpretation, although you will continue to work with archaeological bones. We will begin by examining topics surrounding the basic interpretation of raw faunal data: sampling, quantification, taphonomy, seasonality. We will then explore how to use faunal data to reconstruct subsistence patterns, social structure, and human-animal relations.

Examines the structure and history of the largest polity in ancient Mexico, the empire of the Aztecs, using descriptions left by Spanish invaders, accounts written by Aztecs under Colonial rule, and archaeological evidence. Explores Aztec visions of the past, emphasizing the roles of myth, religion, and identity in Aztec statecraft and the construction of history.

This seminar uses archaeology to examine engagements between settlers and indigenous peoples throughout world history. Archaeology provides a perspective on settler-indigenous encounters that both supplements and challenges conventional models. We will assess the strengths and weaknesses of various theories of cultural engagement, examine methodologies, and explore a series of archaeological case studies, using examples from both the ancient world and the European expansion over the past 600 years. The seminar provides a comparative perspective on indigenous-colonial relationships, in particular exploring the hard-fought spaces of relative autonomy created and sustained by indigenous peoples.

This production seminar is for students with basic documentary filmmaking skills who want to work with previously collected footage and/or are in production on a project in or around Ithaca. Over the course of the semester, students complete a documentary film based on an immersive engagement with their selected subject matter. Alongside watching and discussing relevant texts and films, students will complete exercises to help them focus their projects, build a cohesive narrative, learn script writing, brainstorm scene ideas, overcome narrative challenges, discover their aesthetic, and develop a film circulation plan. Students will regularly present new footage and scenes and explain their work in terms their goals for the final project. The course culminates in a public screening of students' independent video projects.

This seminar examines public schools and other educational spaces as sites where knowledge, learning, learner, and identities are produced and contested. It explores how power and cultural norms work in educational settings, and the unintended teaching and learning that happens outside the purported curriculum. Topics include issues of multiculturalism and pluralism in schools and society, the school achievement of racial and ethnic minorities, youth cultures and identities, and literacy in adult learning spaces. This course is for students interested in the advanced study of multicultural schooling and education.

The modern Jewish religious movement known as Hasidism began in Eastern Europe in the eighteenth century and thrives today. We will approach Hasidism primarily through three avenues: recent critical social history; selections from Hasidic literature; and ethnographic accounts of Hasidic life today. By the end of the semester, students will be able to articulate some ways that Hasidism reflects both broader trends in European religious and moral thought of its time, and some ways that it represents distinctively Jewish developments. You will also gain a deeper appreciation of the various kinds of evidence and disciplinary approaches that need to be brought to bear on the attempt to articulate as broad, deep and varied a phenomenon as modern Hasidic Judaism.