Anthropology (ANTH-UH)

How do media representations reflect and affect communities? How do people exploit old and new forms of communication? How do technological mediation channel and reshape social relations? This course reviews ethnographic literature on a wide range of media including print, photography, film, television, radio, cell phones, and internet-based social networks. Each week, we explore how media use redefines a central anthropological concern, such as kinship, colonialism, mobility, religion, or violence. We continuously interrogate the diverse effects of technology, infrastructure, reception, sensation, and interaction. Engaging with both "live" and "virtual" communities, we revisit the methods and ethics of studying mediated relations. Students deliver an initial critical auto-ethnography of their own media consumption, a detailed assessment of a debate in the field, and a final project investigating a specific media community using original ethnographic research. Throughout the course, we collaboratively develop our own experimental virtual community based on the priorities and interests of the class participants. Innovative integrations of art and interactivity will be encouraged.

What does it mean to study the senses? One way to approach this is to recognize, as anthropologists do, that sensory perception, which is experienced by the individual as a physical and biological capacity to engage with the world around us, is also always a cultural act. This class explores how gender, sexuality, ethnicity and class are embodied in sensory perceptions and everyday social interactions. Students will examine how our physiological capacities are engaged and reproduced in social, economic and political relations of power which are the outcome of complex historical trajectories. Discussions include a broad range of scholarly debates on the senses and sensory perception drawn from the anthropology of the senses, human geography, cultural history, film, museum studies, impairment and disability studies, literature, and art. The class will focus in particular on how corporeal practices involving food, art, music and movement are perceived, mediated and expressed through the senses.

Brokers and intermediaries bring people together for material or symbolic rewards, often overcoming a lack of trust or information between strangers. Brokers have been viewed, over time, with endearment as well as with suspicion, more recently viewed as superfluous middle-men in a supposedly “friction-free” world. Despite several predictions about the end of brokers, they are still present and thriving in different forms and scales. How do we think of brokers in an increasingly (inter)networked, digitized, and automated world? We explore the role of brokers and intermediaries across a range of social, cultural, and political relations and institutions, including gender, media, political rule, public health, infrastructure, and religion. Course readings are drawn from various disciplines and fields, including anthropology, sociology, political science, economics, and history, and we consider how inter-disciplinary discussions and debates have approached the concept of mediation over time.

This course offers multiple approaches to India under broad the conceptual frameworks of caste, communalism and sectarianism. The geographical focus for the course is India, broadly conceived to include its diaspora and in relation to other South Asian states. The disciplinary location for the course is in Social and Cultural Anthropology and History. Caste is the lens through which a range of social and cultural issues such as gender, class, modernity and food are considered. Key historical moments are examined via the anthropological and historical study of communalism and sectarianism. Such key moments may include some of the following: Partition (1947), the State of Emergency (1975-77), the destruction of the Babri Masjid, Ayodhya (1992), the Gujarat riots (2002) and the Citizenship Amendment Bill (2019).

Memoir is the best-selling genre in contemporary literature. Indeed, our fascination with all things autobiographical attests to the importance of examining one particular life in order to understand larger issues concerning culture, community, race, gender and even social and global transformations. Narrative Ethnography is also a form of writing which uses the first person pronoun. In this genre, "participant observation" - actually experiencing the beliefs, rituals and life-ways of another culture first hand - is the methodology employed in order to explicitly understand not just the self, but the 'other'. What are the differences between memoir and ethnography? What kinds of knowledge travel in each? How does writing in the first person challenge other modes of knowledge production? How might memoir and ethnography contribute to our understanding of cultural and cross-cultural dialogue, while providing a post-colonial critique? In this course we examine the rhetorical and aesthetic rules that govern these genres, as well as the way they create social imaginations that go on to live political lives in the world.

This course is about ethnographic research that engages art production and art that employs ethnographic methods. It associates theory with practice by adopting a combined seminar/studio format. Students will learn about precursors to art/anthropology work and about feminist and humanist reactions to positivist ethnography. They will study recent collaborations between artists and anthropologists and carry out hands-on experiments in ethnography, drawing, photography, audio recording, movement, curating, and devising participatory events in class and around the campus. This will lead to examining ideas of "experience," "immersion" and to reflection on how practice, participation and performance are part of any ethnography and encourage a critical and practical approach to multi-modal fieldwork design and artistic ethnographic practice. Throughout the course students will experiment with individual and collaborative research, reflect on the ethics of field research and the affordances of diverse media and artistic practices both in the research process and in outcomes for diverse audiences.

This course introduces students to the study of human language and its use across diverse cultural and social contexts. Inspired by the work of anthropologists, linguistics, literary theorists, novelists, and philosophers, we will examine language as more than a verbal figuration of the world but as a living social process vital to the workings and maintenance of any culture. Topics to be explored include archives, language acquisition and socialization, language contact, literacy, multilingualism, narrative, poetics, semiotics and gender, translation, writing, and other mediated communication. We will also practice different methods of linguistic analysis (the ethnography of speaking, language socialization, and conversation analysis) used to analyze communicative events across cultures.

In this course, we will explore how anthropologists study health and well-being by attending to connections with politics across varying scales - social, institutional, and governmental. Using ethnographies and public health research, we will examine the ideologies and priorities that form national and transnational health programs; how these forces shape and sometimes produce unintended effects on local delivery of care, with in-depth case studies from Sub-Saharan contexts; how the allocation of care and services can play out unequally, organized by colonial, structural, racial, and ethno-religious lines. Some of the topics we will cover include structural inequality, global health, therapy, politics of health, pandemics, health systems, care, risk, and pandemics.