Courses

ANTH/CHST 20015 Anthropology at Chicago: Tradition, Discipline, Department
Instructor: Sarah Newman, M/W/F 12:30-1:20pm
For nearly a century, the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago has been home to ethnographers, linguists, archaeologists, and biological anthropologists who have shaped the field of anthropology. This course explores those intellectual traditions, with an emphasis on faculty members' current scholarship: archival and historical silences, notions of kinship, language-in-use, ideas of waste (ancient to nuclear), science and technology studies, and more. Class meetings will focus on discussions with current faculty around their research, while assignments will incorporate faculty and departmental archives held at the Regenstein Library, artifact collections at the Field Museum, and oral histories collected from members of the department. Intended for those interested in anthropology and/or the history of the social sciences, this course encourages students to get to know faculty members and scholarship that are part the Department, and provides an opportunity to learn more about the people and traditions that have shaped anthropological research at UChicago.

ANTH 21006 Media, Animation, and the Semiotic Construction of Social Life
Instructor: Kenzell Huggins, T/TH 12:30-1:50pm
Human beings have constituted other objects as possessing some kind of vitality, from the fetish objects that early colonial authorities found among African societies to fictional characters that seem to have lives of their own. This course investigates the construction of such figures in contemporary social worlds, understanding said worlds as composed not only of humans but also their creations. What do robots and AI chatbots have to tell us about people's desire for intimacy, and how do entities like corporations come to be seen as having forms of personhood in contemporary legal formations? The course draws on social theory and contemporary anthropology of media and religion to address these questions. Students will learn how to apply this literature to develop insights about the analysis of social worlds.

ANTH/CEGU/CHST/HLTH/RDIN 21014 Toxic Chicago
Instructor: Reed McConnell, M/W 3:00-4:20pm
In this field trip-rich course, students will learn about Chicago's many toxic environments, focusing in particular on fallout from the city's industrial past and on racialized, unequal distributions of harmful exposure. We will ask: What is unique (and not unique) about the way that Chicago's toxic geography has been shaped by environmental racism? What happens when we think about toxicity on different temporal and geographical scales, from molecule to neighborhood to international corporation, from a day in the life to deep time? How does this trouble everyday ideas about cause and effect, responsibility and liability? And finally, what unique challenges are presented by the difficulty of producing scientific knowledge about toxic environments, especially when it comes to environmental justice activism or other attempts at change-making? We will visit former Superfund sites, city history museums, industrial processing facilities, and environmental justice non-profits, among other sites. Readings will be drawn from environmental anthropology, STS, Black studies, Native studies, and the history of science, and will forefront scholarship about Chicago. Excerpts from final projects will be collected together into a (physical) zine that will be distributed guerilla-style around the city.

ANTH/EALC 21270 Material Worlds Across Premodern East Asia
Instructor: Alice Yao, W 10:30am-1:20pm
China, Korea, and Japan are recognized as key players in the globalized world. Together they figure East Asia as a region of dynamic growth where consumers and producers create new goods and tastes at an unprecedented pace. East Asia however perplexes in that liberal ideology and politic does not appear to be a condition of liberal economy. This course examines the topic of materialism in East Asia in its pre-capitalist formations (1000 BC-1500 AD) through the lens of consumption and production in China, Korea, and Japan. In particular we explore how things become goods within the framework of autocratic states, how rituals create consumers and temptations, as well as the conditions which entertain popular panregional forms such as manga, martial arts, and mafia. The course draws on anthropology, archaeology, mixed media materials, and museum visits.

ANTH 24123 Digital Ethnographic Methods
Instructor: Kenzell Huggins, T/TH 9:30-10:50 AM
Social life occurs not only in face-to-face contexts but also through many digitally mediated environments. Yet ethnography is still traditionally conceived of as built on the primacy of "being-there," the seeming immediacy of co-presence between researcher and social interlocutors. This course is an introduction to conducting ethnographic research with digitally mediated environments. Students will engage with prior literature in anthropology on doing research in virtual gaming worlds, through social media websites and apps, and in face-to-face interaction with mobile digital devices. Students will also gain hands-on experience through conducting a designed research project of their own throughout the quarter.

ANTH/CHDV 24304 Talking with Animals
Instructor: Summerson Carr, F 9:30am-12:20 pm
All over the world, children have long learned the lessons of what it means to be human from what animals tell them. In addition to ventriloquizing non-human animals to socialize human ones, projects for facilitating cross-species communication abound. These projects reveal not only how people imagine their relations with other animals, but also how we conceive of the possibilities and limits of sign systems. And while many focus on talking with animals, others suggest that animals are effective communicators precisely because they lack language, raising fascinating questions about ideologies of (im)mediation. As we learn how Peruvian kids talk with llamas and American cowboys whisper to wild horses, and explore what spiders say and how apes read the human keepers who teach them to sign, this class explores how distinctions are drawn between human and non-human animals, as well as attempts to cross those divides through communicative forms and technologies.

ANTH/KNOW 25305 Anthropology of Food and Cuisine
Instructor: Stephan Palmié, T/TH 12:30-1:50 PM
Contemporary human foodways are not only highly differentiated in cultural and social terms, but often have long and complicated histories. Anthropologists have long given attention to food. But, until quite recently, they did so in an unsystematic, haphazard fashion. This course explores several related themes with a view towards both the micro- and macro-politics of food by examining a range of ethnographic and historical case studies and theoretical texts. It takes the format of a seminar augmented by lectures (during the first few weeks), scheduled video screenings, and individual student presentations during the rest of the course.

ANTH/RDIN 26335 Principles of Kinship
Instructors: Sarah Newman and Natacha Nsabimana, M/W 1:30-2:50pm
This introductory course is an attempt to think about the theoretical and historical debates around kinship and world-making practices in anthropology. People everywhere across time and space create meaning about the world they live in and their relations in that world. For this reason, anthropology, the study of human societies past and present, has been preoccupied with kinship relations since its inception as a discipline. Co-taught by an archeologist and a socio-cultural anthropologist, the course will explore different forms of making kin from the deep past to the present. We will ask how and why anthropologists have made kinship a central category in understanding ourselves and others, and review critiques of the concept. The ultimate goal of this course is to encourage students to recognize the ongoing importance of kinship in our own lives and in the contemporary world. By the end of the course we hope to have provided tools to think about kinship and its centrality in human societies from an informed, critical perspective.

ANTH 26701 Capitalism and the State
Instructor: John Kelly, T/TH 9:30-10:50am
What can historical ethnography teach us, about the origins of capitalism, sovereignty and corporations, and the past and future of planning? This course will examine transformative events: the advent and the abolition of British empire slavery. Whaling and its consequences. The "7 Years War" in India and America. The Mongol conquests. Also, twentieth century (c20) stock market crashes. The late c20 rise of global cities. China's c21 "Belt and Road Project." Cognizance of global warming. We will use transformative events to track the emergent assemblage of state and capitalist institutions, including money, markets and taxation, banks and stock markets, accounting and budgets. Like Weber, we will seek causal patterns in between determinism and serendipity. Following Veblen, we will focus on corporations and "New Deals."

ANTH 29910 BA Honors Seminar 1
Instructor: Kamala Russell, W 3:00-5:50 pm
This seminar is designed to prepare fourth-year Anthropology majors to write a compelling BA thesis. To that end, the course is structured as a writing workshop that addresses three key issues: First, we will focus on formulating a viable research question that can be interrogated in a 35-40 page paper; second, we will examine core anthropological research methods, paying particular attention to the relationship between questions and evidence; finally, we will consider the writing process (including aspects such as planning, outlining, and drafting) and modes of argumentation. In the first quarter, participants will work toward producing a 20-page first draft.