Courses

2023–2024 Undergraduate Course Schedule

ANTH 12800 Formations of Indigeneity Instr.: Teresa Montoya/Matthew Kruer

Whose land are we on? What does it mean to be Indigenous, for generations past and in the twenty-first century? From debates over claims of Indigenous ancestry by political actors to the struggles of sacred lands protection against natural resource extraction, understanding the stakes of these concerns for Indigenous peoples and nations is more relevant than ever. This seminar–part of the sequence for majors in the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity–introduces students to core texts and concepts in the field of Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS). Topics will include sovereignty and governance, settler colonialism, citizenship and nationhood, blood quantum and racialization, diasporas and urban indigeneity, and relationships to land and environment. Course activities may include engagement with Indigenous films, dialogues with visiting Indigenous scholars, and field trips to Chicago-area cultural institutions.

ANTH 20003 Reading “Race” Instr.: Russell Tuttle

Before and since Anthropology became a discrete scientific field of study, questions about the biological reality, potential utility and misuse of the concept of race in Homo sapiens have been debated. We will read and discuss a sample of writings by 18th, 19th, and 20th century and contemporary authors who attempted to define human races and those who have promoted or debunked the utility of the concept of race with special attention to it role in retarding social progress, and the extermination and exploitation of some populations and individuals.

ANTH 20007 People’s Garbage: Intro to Archaeology & Histories of Waste Instr.: Alice Yao

This course introduces students to the myriad ways in which archaeologists use material culture to understand social worlds both in the distant past and lived present. Through active course attendance, field trips, and lab exercises, students will gain a solid grounding in archaeological methods and theory and learn how archaeologists come to know or make claims about social lives. In particular we will draw on a range of world case studies to address how people’s garbage permits us to study important social, economic, and political questions. How, for instance, does the size of a corn cob or the biography of a kettle narrate a “farm to table” story which also brings a history of consumer culture into view. We will inquire equally after “why the past matters” and “whose past is it anyway.” In the process students will also examine archaeology’s relationships with allied disciplines and fields.

ANTH 21424 Reading and Writing Ethnographically Instr.: Kamala Russell

Ethnographic renderings of spaces, surroundings, place, setting, and location have clearly always functioned as more than narrative set dressing. Critical perspectives on ethnographic research and writing have pointed out the authorization, exotification, and material conditions of mobility that undergird the ‘where’ in ‘being there’. However, contemporary anthropologists are writing space and place in ways that push ethnographic methods and writing past prior problematics and paradigms of comparison, localization, and totalizing description. How does space become an ethnographic doorway into questions of history, power, infrastructure, and affect?

In this course, we will work through a series of contemporary ethnographies (and some ethnography adjacent works) that employ space and place in creative ways. In class, we will help each other read sideways through texts that center on themes of infrastructure, revolution, love, capital, movement, and apartheid governance among others in order to see how ethnographic writing and research can push conceptual and political arguments about space and place. We will also help each other develop as ethnographic writers, and students (particularly thesis-writers) will have the option of producing ethnography for some course assignments.

ANTH 22830 Indigenous Media and the Politics of Representation Instr.: Teresa Montoya

This undergraduate seminar explores popular representations of Indigenous nations and issues across various modes of media such as film, photography, digital platforms, and museum installations. With a particular focus on media forms produced by Indigenous artists, filmmakers, and curators we will analyze these narratives through frameworks of self-determination, resistance, visual sovereignty, and relational futures.

Throughout the course, we will consider Indigenous media production(s) in relation to the broader social, historical, and cultural contexts in which they circulate in North America and beyond. The material covered in this course will acquaint students with an introduction to the contemporary debates surrounding Indigenous media and representation as they intersect with the larger fields of visual anthropology and Indigenous Studies.

ANTH 23312/33312 Dataset Instr.: Alice Yao

This course presents the basic statistical methodology used in many fields of application. It emphasizes statistical concepts and computational methods standard to the social sciences. However, the fragmentary nature of data excavated from archaeological contexts and biological anthropology also means that the quantification of ancient human activities presents different problems that require a critical understanding of conventional methods. This course will be useful to students who seek to gain an understanding of the use of statistics as well as the development of research design in archaeology and bioarchaeology.

ANTH 24001 Colonizations 1 Instr.: Stephan Palmié

This quarter examines the making of the Atlantic world in the aftermath of European colonial expansion. Focusing on the Caribbean, North and South America, and western Africa, we cover the dynamics of invasion, representation of otherness, enslavement, colonial economies and societies, as well as resistance and revolution.

ANTH 25305 Anthropology of Food and Cuisine Instr.: Stephan Palmié 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 29920 B.A. Honors Seminar Preparation Instr.: Susan Gal

This workshop is for fourth-year Anthropology majors writing a BA thesis.

ANTH 21107 Anthropological Theory Instr.: Stephan Palmié

Since its inception as an academically institutionalized discipline, anthropology has always addressed the relation between a self-consciously modernizing “West” and its various and changing “others.” Yet it has not always done so with sufficient critical attention to its own concepts and categories – a fact that has led, since at least the 1980s, to considerable debate about the nature of the anthropological enterprise and its epistemological foundations. This course provides a brief critical introduction to the history of anthropological thought over the course of the discipline’s “long” twentieth century, from the 1880s to the present. Although it centers on the North American and British traditions, we will review important strains of French and, to a lesser extent, German social theory in chronicling the emergence and transformation of “modern” anthropology as an empirically based, but theoretically informed practice of knowledge production about human sociality and culture.

ANTH 22830 Indigenous Media and the Politics of Representation Instr.: Teresa Montoya

ANTH 24001 Colonizations 1 Instr.: François Richard

ANTH 24810 Atmospherics Instr.: Joseph Masco

In a world of changing climate, how do we change the political? What affective chemistry is needed to recognize and mobilize on behalf of shifting air currents? This seminar explores the conceptual and material chemistries of atmosphere. The course will investigate key texts on climate change, embodiment, and affect, as well as recent ethnographic explorations of environmental sensibilities across air, ice, ocean, and land.

ANTH 25211 Feminisms and Anthropology Instr.: Julie Chu

This course examines the fraught yet generative relation between various movements of feminism and the discipline of anthropology. Both feminism(s) and anthropology emerged in the 19th century as fields invested in thinking “the human” through questions of alterity or Otherness. As such, feminist and anthropological inquiries often take up shared objects of analysis--including nature/culture, kinship, the body, sexuality, exchange, value, and power--even as they differ in their political and scholarly orientations through the last century and a half. Tracking the emergence of feminisms and anthropology as distinct fields of academic discourse on the one hand and political intervention on the other, we pursue the following lines of inquiry: (1) a genealogical approach to key concepts and problem-spaces forged at the intersection of these two fields, (2) critical analysis of the relation of feminist and postcolonial social movements to the professionalizing fields of knowledge production (including Marxist-inspired writing on women and economy, Third World feminism and intersectionality, and feminist critiques of science studies), and (3) a reflexive contemporary examination of the way these two strands of thought have come together in the subfield of feminist anthropology, and the continual frictions and resonances of feminist and anthropological approaches in academic settings and in the larger world (e.g., #MeToo, sex positive activism, queer politics, feminist economics).

ANTH 25310 Drinking Alcohol: Social Problem or Normal Cultural Practices? Instr.: Michael Dietler/William Green

Alcohol is the most widely used psychoactive agent in the world, and, as archaeologists have recently demonstrated, it has a very long history dating back at least 9,000 years. This course will explore the issue of alcohol and drinking from a trans-disciplinary perspective. It will be co-taught by an anthropologist/ archaeologist with experience in alcohol research and a neurobiologist who has experience with addiction research. Students will be confronted with literature on alcohol research from anthropology, sociology, history, biology, medicine, psychology, and public health and asked to think through the conflicts and contradictions. Selected case studies will be used to focus the discussion of broader theoretical concepts and competing perspectives introduced in the first part of the course. Topics for lectures and discussion include: fermentation and the chemistry and pharmacology of alcohol; the early history of alcohol; histories of drinking in ancient, medieval, and modern times; alcohol and the political economy; alcohol as a cultural artifact; styles of drinking and intoxication; how is alcohol metabolized; addiction; how does alcohol affect sensations; social problems; alcohol and religion; alcohol and health benefits; comparative case studies of drinking.

ANTH 26910 Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology Instr.: Fadi Hakim

“It’s not what you say, It’s how you say it” An Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology.

More than the content, the information, the semantic meanings of speech—all those aspects that tend to be the official function of language in our (and not just our) society—how does how we communicate, in all its subtle complexity, say something about us as persons? How do we “do things with words”: signal identities (of race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, class, religion, subculture), form social relations (of solidarity and community, of social hierarchy and invidious distinction, etc.), enact power and create social difference, indeed, shape thought and social reality itself? And how do how human societies do this vary across time and space, across cultures and contexts? And how can we productively study them? In this introduction to the field of linguistic anthropology, we explore how anthropological approaches to communication can elucidate these questions to these longstanding but pressing questions of human meaningfulness in cultural and political context.

ANTH 29910 B.A. Essay Seminar Instr.: Lake Polan

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 40-50 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. Along the way, participants will work toward producing a 20-page first draft.

ANTH 21265 Celts: Ancient, Modem, Postmodem Instr.: Michael Dietler

Celts and things Celtic have long occupied a prominent and protean place in the popular imagination, and “the Celts” has been an amazingly versatile concept in the politics of identity and collective memory in recent history. This course is an anthropological exploration of this phenomenon that examines: (1) the use of the ancient past in the construction of modern nationalist mythologies of Celtic identity (e.g., in France and Ireland) and regional movements of resistance to nationalist and colonialist project (e.g., in Brittany, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Gallicia, Asturias); (2) the construction of transnational ethno-nostalgic forms of Celtic identity in modern diasporic communities (Irish, Scottish, etc.); and (3) various recent spiritualist visions of Celticity that decouple the concept from ethnic understandings (e.g., in the New Age and Neo-Pagan movements).

All of these are treated in the context of what is known archaeologically about the ancient peoples of Europe who serve as a symbolic reservoir for modern Celtic identities. The course explores these competing Celtic imaginaries in the spaces and media where they are constructed and performed, ranging from museums and monuments, to neo-druid organizations, Celtic cyberspace, Celtic festivals, Celtic theme parks, Celtic music, Celtic commodities, etc.

ANTH 21420 Ethnographic Methods Instr.: Lake Polan

This course introduces students to the theory and practice of ethnographic methods. In the class, we will consider the ways ethnography works as both a mode of inquiry and a form of knowledge production.

We will examine the kinds of questions anthropologists ask, as well as the relationship between research questions, methodological approaches, data analysis, and knowledge. We will examine the ways scholars marshal evidence to address their questions, and practically, how they arrive at that evidence. We will study different components of ethnographic fieldwork, such as participant observation, interviewing, photography, object analysis, archival work, digital methods, and qualitative surveys. In so doing, we will engage with the complexities surrounding ethnographic research, including how one negotiates access during fieldwork, the racialized and gendered subjectivities that inhere in fieldwork, the ethics of knowledge production, and the politics of representation. The class entails both critical engagement with scholarship, and practical exercises. The goal is to give students practical, theoretically grounded insights into fieldwork in order to help them understand how to develop and carry out a research project.

ANTH 21428 Apes and Human Evolution Instr.: Russell Tuttle

This course is a critical examination of the ways in which data on the behavior, morphology, and genetics of apes have been used to elucidate human evolution. We emphasize bipedalism, hunting, meat eating, tool behavior, food sharing, cognitive ability, language, self-awareness, and sociability. Visits to local zoos and museums, film screenings, and demonstrations with casts of fossils and skeletons required.

ANTH 22450 Language, Gender and Sexuality Instr.: Fadi Hakim

No course description.

ANTH 24001 Colonizations I Instr.: François Richard

ANTH 24001/2/3 Colonizations I, II, III (Study Abroad) Instr.: Kaushik Sunder Rajan

This quarter covers the histories of modern European and Japanese colonialism in South and East Asia and the Pacific. Themes examined include the logics and dynamics of imperial expansion and rule; Orientalist discourses; uprisings and anti-imperial movements; the rise of nationalisms; and paths to decolonization in the region.

ANTH 24304/41210 Talking with Animals Instr.: E. Summerson Carr

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 24905/41405 The Figuration of Social Thought and Action Instr.: Jim Fernandez

No course description.

ANTH Introduction to Anthropology Instr.: Eléonore Rimbault

No course description.