Anthropology is the global and holistic study of human biology and behaviour, and includes four subfields: biological anthropology, archaeology, sociocultural anthropology and linguistic anthropology. The material covered is directed to answering the question: What makes us human? This course is a survey of sociocultural and linguistic anthropology. In some years, students may have the option of participating in an international learning experience during Reading Week that will have an additional cost and application process.

A general introductory course emphasizing social and political organization, economics, and the development of theory. Specific cases of social dynamics are drawn from both traditional and contemporary societies.

Introduction to linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics. This includes: the issue of meaning in language, the use of language in context, the role of language in the organization of human activity, language and identity, the sequential organization of talk-in-interaction.

The question of what it means to be human has been at the core of anthropology for over two centuries, and it remains as pressing now as it ever was. This course introduces students to some classic attempts at addressing this question with specific reference to the nature of personhood and social life. By engaging with the writings of Marx, Weber, Freud, and DeBeauvoir among other great thinkers of the modern age, students will develop deeper knowledge of the major theories guiding anthropological research. We will pay close attention to how arguments are constructed in these texts and focus on the methodologies that these pioneers of social thought developed in their inquiries. The course covers enduring topics ranging from the production of social inequality, what it means to be an individual, how collective life is shaped by economic markets, and the role of religion in shaping human experience, to develop an understanding of central issues facing the world today.

This course will introduce students to culture and social theory via the lens of popular culture. Commodities, advertising, and new technologies will be considered in light of their cultural content. The course may consider the marketing of identities, gender, sexualities, bodies, ethnicity, religion, and ideology, as well as resistance.

This course explores how anthropology approaches the study of various interventions into human life and society. These forms of intervention--nation building, human rights, and development--differ in the scale and scope of their projects and in what they hope to accomplish. They also have much in common. Each is explicitly concerned with improving the conditions under which people live, and yet each has also been criticized for making things worse rather than better. This course will explore why this might be the case by focusing on examples taken from around the world.

Few questions are more obviously important than that which Socrates poses in Plato's Republic: "how should one live?" This course considers the various ways this question has been asked and the answers it has received across a range of very different contexts. It begins with Socrates' address to the Athenian assembly in The Apology and his conclusion that the examined life is the only one worth living. We then turn to the Greek past and the Homeric background against which the reflective life, that Socrates exemplified, stood in stark contrast. With this background in place we will proceed to consider the various ways in which the question of how one should live has been answered across of a range of social settings. Drawing on ethnography as well journalism and documentary film we will consider, for instance, Rastafarianism, Jainism, living "off-grid" in North America, deaf communities in the US, transgenderism, and non-binary gender identity.

This course will explore anthropological approaches to the study of various forms of illegal activities. Denaturalizing the state-imposed categories of legality and illegality, the course will examine how the legal-illegal divide is constructed contingently, and unpack moralities, inequalities, precarities, and forms of politics that illegal activities both rely on and make possible. The course will bring together recent ethnographies of racketeering, gang violence, piracy, human trafficking and contraband smuggling from different world regions.

The course is designed to introduce the key concepts, issues, and methods of legal anthropology as a specific field of study in relation to the larger history of the discipline. The course will explore how anthropological works understand and examine the legal and social orders, political and normative authorities, frames of rights, regimes of crime and punishment, and forms of justice-seeking. Accounting for different understandings of law and everyday legal practices, the course readings include canonical texts of legal anthropology as well as recent ethnographies of law.

“How do we know what we know?” is a question that has long concerned anthropologists. And in a world like ours – where “fake news,” religious credos and conspiracy theories coexist with common sense, mainstream media and scientific truth(s) – the question seems more important than ever. This course explore anthropological insights into knowledge and the question of how we know. To do so we will examine a range of contemporary knowledge-making activities which may include surveillance, witchcraft, conspiracy, governance, Artificial Intelligence and Big Data.

This course will examine the relationship between the field of anthropology and Indigenous people of Turtle Island. We will examine the past, present, and future manifestations of this relationship. This course will emphasize Indigenous, decolonial, and community scholars. Students will be encouraged to think critically and reflect on their own world views.

Special course on selected topics in sociocultural and/or linguistic anthropology; focus of topic changes each year. The contact hours for this course may vary in terms of contact type (L,S,T,P) from year to year, but will be between 24-36 contact hours in total. See the UTM Timetable.

Today most people live in state-level societies. But 8,000 years ago, no one did. Why such a dramatic change? This comparative analysis of ancient, complexly organized societies is focused on understanding the processes involved in the functioning of states, examining how various political, social, economic, and religious orientations affected state information, cohesion, maintenance and dissolution. What were the range of alternatives explored in the earliest and later complexly organized societies that developed around the world?

This course surveys the archaeology of South Asia (modern-day India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and northern regions) from the Palaeolithic to the Medieval Period (+200,000 ya to ca. 1600 CE/AD) using a comparative framework. South Asia is a place where many external cultural traditions mixed with indigenous traditions to create new socioeconomic and sociopolitical entities and sequences. While we will examine classic examples of hunter-gatherer groups, early villages, urban settlements, regional polities, and large empires through time, we will also stress the contemporaneity of groups of people with very different lifestyles -- hunter-gatherers participated in trading networks with town and city dwellers, pastoral nomads moved through settled village regions during their annual migrations. The impact of archaeological research on the region today is seen through the politicization of South Asian prehistory and history that has strongly affected both interpretations of the past and modern political events. Cases such as the debate over the identity of the Harappans and the existence of the Aryans will be evaluated from both an archaeological and a political perspective.

This course will present various perspectives on the nature and dynamics of youth culture. The course will examine one or more of the following: capitalism and youth cultures, ethnomusicology, and discourses of "youth." Topics may include North American subcultures (such as punk and hip-hop) and/or ethnographies of youth from other parts of the world. The course may also use frameworks from cultural studies and semiotics.

Gender concerns the ways that groups define and experience what it is to be male, female, or a gender identity in-between or outside of that binary, and in all societies the boundaries of gender categories are both policed and resisted. In this course we examine how gender is made materially, discursively, and through intersections with other structures of inequality (e.g. race, sexuality, class, etc.).

The course uses ethnographic material to examine ways in which global forces have changed the nature of work in different sites since World War Two -- North America, Europe, and the countries of the South are selectively included.

Sociocultural anthropology has, since its inception, questioned the assumption that "the economy" ought to be understood as a domain distinguishable from other fields of human interaction, such as religion and kinship, or from power, politics, affect, and morality. This class offers a set of introductory readings that range from the analysis of non-Western forms of exchange and value to the study of capitalism; from stock-markets to the anti-globalization movement.

This course explores ethnographically the social and cultural practices through which the exercise of power is legitimized, authorized, and contested, examining such topics as nation-building, non-governmental activism, human rights, and the global "war on terror."

This course explores key concepts in medical anthropology, disability studies, and gender and queer studies by examining how gender and sexuality matter in the contexts of illness and disability across a range of institutional, social, and national contexts. Students will learn to think critically about the body as a site of power configured in the social and material fields of heath/illness, dis/ability, race, and gender and sexuality.

This class explores different forms of rebellion, insurgency, protest and political mobilization from an anthropological perspective, focusing specifically on anti-capitalist mobilizations. Grounded in ethnographies that range from studies of piracy, hacking, and the occupy movements, to struggles against the privatization of water and social movements organizing for "the commons," this course offers key insight into contemporary social movements, their deep groundings in the past, and the implications they might have for the future.

How does technology mediate our ideas about the social differences of disability, race, and gender? By rethinking the role of technology in reproducing social disparities and challenging bioethical debates about enhancement, students will emerge with the tools to reimagine the relationship between technology, the human body, and social justice.

This course will explore political violence and social change in the modern Middle East. What forms of loyalty, authority or rivalry have accompanied political violence? What economic activities and relations have been shaped by political conflict and peace in the region? What are the historical origins of nation-states, political regimes, and social movements in the region? By taking a historical and anthropological look at political conflict and change, this course will examine the transformations of the region in the last two centuries.

This course examines anthropological approaches to the environment and environmentalism. Through key readings on indigenous peoples and conservation, traditional ecological knowledge, community-based natural resource management, ecotourism and the human dimensions of climate change, the course explores the complex social, cultural and political encounters that produce 'the environment' as a resource in need of management.

This course investigates how sociocultural and/or linguistic anthropologists collect data, conduct fieldwork, and interpret research results. The course will benefit students who want to gain an appreciation of research design and practice and those considering graduate-level work in anthropology or another social science.

This course considers anthropological approaches to western and non-western religions and religious phenomena.

The course aims to introduce students to theoretical questions and contemporary research in linguistic anthropology. Topics include language ideologies, language and media, language and embodiment, as well as core theories in linguistic anthropology.

What's the difference between magic and science? Is there one? This course explores anthropological approaches to magic and science and related topics, raising basic questions about the nature of knowledge: what can we know about the world, and how can we know it? Through close readings of key anthropological texts, we consider what--if anything--differentiates magic and science, belief and truth, subjectivity and objectivity, irrationality and rationality.

This course will give students hands-on experience in methods for recording, transcribing, coding, and analyzing ethnographic data in linguistic anthropology. Students will synthesize weekly reading materials focused on these methods with actual, collaborative, in-class practice on a designated topic in the anthropology of everyday social interaction. Through this synthesis students will come to discern the relationship between everyday instances of communication between people and what the patterns of speech in this interaction may say about larger society. Students will be expected to develop their own analyses of the data collected under the guidance of the instructor and to formulate a final project.

Humans, to paraphrase Clifford Geertz, are suspended in webs of meaning that they themselves have spun. This course introduces students to the tools anthropologists and others have developed in order to analyze and understand these "webs of meaning." Readings in philosophy, cultural theory and ethnography will be used to engage with questions regarding the construction of meaning in relation to ethnic identity, social structure, gender, political economy, personhood, and religion. Drawing on classic texts and the tools of semiotics, students will learn to apply the lens of symbolic analysis to interpret a range of contemporary social phenomena.