The anthropological approach to the study of culture and human society. Using case studies from ethnography, the course explores the universality of cultural categories (social organization, economy, law, belief system, art, etc.) and the range of variation among human societies.

Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to 100 students.

Introduction to the study of the production, interpretation, and reproduction of social meanings as expressed through language. In exploring language in relation to culture and society, the focus is on how communication informs and transforms the sociocultural environment.

Introduces students to theoretical works and ideas that have formed the modern field of anthropology. These include classic 19th century social theories (e.g., those of Durkheim, Weber, Marx), 20th century interpretive approaches (for example, structuralism), and contemporary modes of sociocultural analysis.

Examination of religion and society not limited to the Middle East. A series of Muslim societies of various types and locations will be approached historically and contextually to understand their family resemblances and their differences, their distinctive mechanisms of coherence and their patterns of contestation.

Introduces the main theoretical approaches of environmental anthropology beginning with cultural ecology and covering eco-systematic models, environmental history, political ecology, and new approaches deriving from contemporary anthropological theory. Ethnographic material from Melanesia, Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East illustrates the theoretical material introduced.

Introduction to the contemporary societies of China, Japan, and Korea, with special attention to social institutions and cultural patterns that shape hierarchy, egalitarianism, and inequality as reflected in family patterns, community life, religion, and economic behavior of social change.

Prerequisites: Required of all Barnard Anthropology majors; open to other students with instructor's permission only. Enrollment limited to 40 students. * To be taken in conjunction with ANTH V3041, preferably in sequence. This course replaces ANTH V3011, �Living in Society.�

First of a two semester sequence intended to introduce departmental majors to key readings in social theory that have been constitutive of the rise and contemporary practice of modern anthropology. The goal is to understand historical and current intellectual debates within the discipline.

Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor is required. Enrollment limited to 40.

Introduction to medical anthropology, whose purpose is to explore health, affliction, and healing cross-culturally. Theory and methods from other fields will be drawn on to address critiques of biomedical, epidemiological, and other models of disease; the roles of healers in different societies; and different conceptions of the body and health.

Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to 20 students.

Examines how bodies become mechanized and machines embodied. Studies shifts in the status of the human under conditions of capitalist commodification and mass mediation. Readings consist of works on the fetish, repetition and automaticity, reification, and late modern techno prosthesis.

Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to 20 students. Junior standing or completion of introductory course(s) in Psychology and/or Anthropology.

Considers mental disturbance and its relief by examining historical, anthropological, psychoanalytic and psychiatric notions of self, suffering, and cure. After exploring the ways in which conceptions of mental suffering and abnormality are produced, we look at specific kinds of psychic disturbances and at various methods for their alleviation.

Pursues the spectral effects of culture in the modern. Through a consideration of anthropologically significant, primarily non-western sites and various domains of social creation�performance, ritual practice, narrative production, technological invention�traces the ghostly remainders of cultural machineries, circuitries of voice, and representational forms crucial to modern discourse networks.

Prerequisites: ANTH V1010. Permission of instructor required.

Examination of the biological data for modern human diversity at the molecular, phenotypical, and behavioral levels, as distributed geographically.

Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to 20 students.

Examines human understandings and transformations of nature, drawing on theories of the relationship between nature and culture and the social production and construction of nature. Analyzes contemporary environmental use, conservation projects, and environmentally focused ethnographic writing. Demonstrates the relationship between nature ideologies and productions, and the social, economic, and environmental politics they engender.

Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor required.

Examines debates in the social studies of science, beginning with a focus on questions of epistemology and analyzing the significance of social interests, laboratory and social practices, and �culture(s)� in the making of scientific knowledge. The course then turns to consider the role of the sciences in fashioning larger social worlds.

The recent proliferation of writings on the social significations of the human body have brought to the fore the epistemological, disciplinary, and ideological structures that have participated in creating a dimension of the human body that goes beyond its physical consideration. The course, within the context of anthropology, has two considerations, a historical one and a contemporary one. If anthropology can be construed as the study of human society and culture, then, following Marcel Mauss, this study must be considered the actual, physical bodies that constitute the social and the cultural.

Covers the basic readings in the contemporary debate over nationalism and different disciplinary approaches and looks at recent studies of nationalism in the formerly colonial world as well as in the industrial West. The readings offer a mix of both theoretical and empirical studies, including the following: Eric Hobsbawn: Nationalism since 1700; Ernest Gillner: Nations and Nationalism; Benedict Anderson: Imagined Communities; Antony Smith: The Ethic Origins of Nations; Linda Coley: Britons; Peter Sahlins: Boundaries; and Partha Chatterjee: The Nation and Its Fragments.

Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to 18 students.

Examines the grand sweep of human development from our first bipedal steps some six million years ago, to the earliest evidence of art and symbolism, and on to the emergence of the first agricultural villages. Given the immensity of time under consideration, emphasis is placed on those heightened periods of change commonly described as "revolutions". Participants will become familiar with the fossil and/or archaeological records or those revolutions and the competing theories of why they occurred.

Prerequisites: Sophomore Standing.

Hunting and gathering has been identified as the strategy of subsistence at the time fully modern humans emerged, according to analogy with similar groups found today from the semi-deserts of southern Africa to frozen plains of Antarctica. The apparent temporal duration and geographical extension of this mode of life suggests that it is one of the most successful economic means by which human beings have lived their lives. There would seem, therefore, to be some merit in studying hunter-gatherers as a group. But to what extent can human societies be compared in the present, the past, and possibly the future, on the basis of their subsistence alone?

Prerequisites: Sophomore standing. Limited to 20 students.

Explores how corporeal senses (e.g. of touch, vision, smell, listening) are formed through various sociocultural practices which render bodies, objects, and media part of a world 'sensible.' Upper-division seminar open to advanced undergraduates.

Prerequisites: Junior standing or permission of instructor.

Examines how economic development and environmental conservation have become different means for valuing nature and natural resources. Both of these have sometimes altered and sometimes reinforced inequalities across local, national, and international scales. In this course, students will be asked to think critically about the relationships between global commodities, natural resources management, development organizations, and local ideas about these.

The anthropological approach to the study of culture and human society. Using case studies from ethnography, the course explores the universality of cultural categories (social organization, economy, law, belief system, art, etc.) and the range of variation among human societies.

Rise of major civilizations in prehistory and protohistory throughout the world, from the initial appearance of sedentism, agriculture, and social stratification through the emergence of the archaic empires. Description and analysis of a range of regions that were centers of significant cultural development: Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus River Valley, China, North America, Mesoamerica, and Andean South America.

Introduction to the theory and practice of �ethnography��the intensive study of peoples� lives as shaped by social relations, cultural images, and historical forces. Considers through critical reading of various kinds of texts (classic ethnographies, histories, journalism, novels, films) the ways in which understanding, interpreting, and representing the lived words of people�at home or abroad, in one place or transnationally, in the past or the present�can be accomplished.

Introduces the main theoretical approaches of environmental anthropology beginning with cultural ecology and covering eco-systematic models, environmental history, political ecology, and new approaches deriving from contemporary anthropological theory. Ethnographic material from Melanesia, Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East illustrates the theoretical material introduced.

Prerequisites: ANTH V3040. Required of all Barnard Anthropology majors; open to other students with instructor's permission only. Enrollment limited to 40 students.

Second of a two semester sequence intended to introduce departmental majors to key readings in social theory that have been constitutive of the rise and contemporary practice of modern anthropology. The goal is to understand historical and current intellectual debates within the discipline. To be taken in conjunction with ANTH V3040, preferably in sequence. This course replaces ANTH V3041 �Theories of Culture: Past and Present.�

Prerequisites: ANTH V1009 Language and Culture, or permission of the instructor.

Introduction to functional linguistics: describing, classifying and explaining the relation between linguistic form and linguistic function; and language typology: describing and comparing the forms and functions of the world�s languages in order to uncover, classify and explain cross-linguistic patterns.

Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. Sophomore standing.

Analyzes the role of mediation in religious practice. Explores the ways in which religion is encoded into specific semiotic forms and how the nature of those forms - and their performance contexts - affect the practice of religion and the ways of making the divine manifest. Topics include word, print, image, sound, film and video in relation to Islam, Pentecostalism, Buddhism and animist religions.

Addresses mass culture and its relationship with Japan at the end of the century, as it anticipates the continuation of millennial anxieties and fantasies into the 21st century. With one of the most developed, mass-mediated formations in the world, Japan becomes a compelling instance of late modernity, non-western, yet not. With ethnographic sensibilities, approaches such thematic domains as everyday orderliness, criminality and terror, gender and sexuality, and money and consumption through the media of print, video, film, sound recordings, and photography. Theoretical works in mass cultural criticism and Japan-specific readings are paired with weekly seminar discussions.

Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor required. Enrollment limited to 20 students.

Examines theories and ethnographies of consumption as well as the political economy of production and consumption. Compares historic and current consumptive practices, compares exchange based economies with post-Fordist economies. Engages the work of Mauss, Marx, Godelier, Baudrillard, Appadurai, and Douglas among others.

A field course and seminar considering the aesthetic, political, and sociocultural aspects of selected city museums, public spaces, and window displays.

Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to 20 students. Junior standing or completion of introductory course(s) in Psychology and/or Anthropology.

Considers mental disturbance and its relief by examining historical, anthropological, psychoanalytic and psychiatric notions of self, suffering, and cure. After exploring the ways in which conceptions of mental suffering and abnormality are produced, we look at specific kinds of psychic disturbances and at various methods for their alleviation.

Imagines conception and the fetus as cultural ideas. We will explore how various cultures throughout time and in contemporary discourse rationalize conception and the identity of the fetus. This cross-cultural discussion will provide the basis for a discussion of how kinship structure, social life and family are constructed. These concepts will then be related to American contemporary controversies surrounding abortion, new reproductive technologies, and the sociopolitical issues embedded within conception and childbirth. Finally we will place these issues within a global context of debates over reproduction ideology and population strategies.

Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to 20 students.

Examines trauma as an individual, collective, and international political phenomena. Topics include the history and physiology of trauma, trauma and psychoanalysis, trauma and politics, and trauma after 9-11.

Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor required. Enrollment limited to 15 students.

Draws on the perspectives of Bakhtin and other theorists to analyze the logic of five opera performances the class will attend this semester. Productions scrutinized in terms of the forms of communication utilized; the class, status, and gender perspective mobilized; and the specified mechanisms used to engage or distance the audience from them. Performance rather than musicological angle emphasized.

The recent proliferation of writings on the social significations of the human body have brought to the fore the epistemological, disciplinary, and ideological structures that have participated in creating a dimension of the human body that goes beyond its physical consideration. The course, within the context of anthropology, has two considerations, a historical one and a contemporary one. If anthropology can be construed as the study of human society and culture, then, following Marcel Mauss, this study must be considered the actual, physical bodies that constitute the social and the cultural.

Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to 18 students.

Prerequisites: Sophomore standing. Enrollment limited to 20 students. Instructor's permission required. Anthropology, African Studies, and Francophone Studies students encouraged to enroll.

Critiques the many ways the great Red Island has been described and imagined by explorers, colonists, social scientists, and historians-as and Asian-African amalgamation, and ecological paradise, and a microcosm of the Indian Ocean. Religious diasporas, mercantilism, colonization, enslavement, and race and nation define key categories of comparative analysis.

Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to 20 students.

Addresses the ways that we can understand the variety of issues and challenges facing individuals, organizations, and nations as we come to understand and combat anthropogenic climate change. Drawing on work in anthropology, sociology, geography, and other disciplines, this course will examine concepts of risk and vulnerability, the role of science and local knowledge, and the social contexts of policies and actions, as well as how climate change is affecting and will continue to affect communities worldwide.

Prerequisites: Sophomore standing.

Explores 40,000 years of the human creation of, entanglement with, enchantment by, and violence towards idols. Case studies roam from the Paleolithic to Petra and from the Hopi to the Taliban, and the theoretical questions posed include the problem of representation, iconoclasm, fetishism and the sacred.