A broad introduction to archaeology-the study of material remains to answer questions about the human past. Case studies highlight the variability of ancient societies and illustrate the varied methods and interpretive frameworks archaeologists use to reconstruct them. This course can serve as a platform for both archaeology and anthropology undergraduate majors.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS, SSC-AS) (HA-AG, SBA-AG)

Full details for ANTHR 1200 - Ancient Peoples and Places

Anthropology is the study of human beings. Sociocultural anthropology examines the practices, structures, and meanings that shape lived experience. But what does that mean? What do sociocultural anthropologists do, and how can their ways of knowing help us understand our interconnected world? This course introduces sociocultural anthropology—its methods, concepts, and characteristic ways of thinking. Together, we will examine how people live their lives: how we eat, work, play, and fight; how we bury our dead and care for our living; how we wield and acquiesce to power. Along the way, we will work to challenge Eurocentric models of human nature and human difference. And we will consider how anthropological tools can help address contemporary issues, from global health to climate change to racial justice.

Catalog Distribution: (GLC-AS, SCD-AS) (CA-AG, D-AG)

Full details for ANTHR 1400 - Introduction to Sociocultural Anthropology

This course provides an interdisciplinary introduction to the diverse cultures, histories and contemporary situations of the Indigenous peoples of North America. Students will also be introduced to important themes in the post-1492 engagement between Indigenous and settler populations in North America and will consider the various and complex ways in which that history affected - and continues to affect - American Indian peoples and societies. Course materials draw on the humanities, social sciences, and expressive arts.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS, SCD-AS) (D-AG, HA-AG)

Full details for ANTHR 1700 - Indigenous North America

How might we engage with communities, whether here in Ithaca or across the globe, in our diverse histories, experiences, and perspectives? What structural forces shape inequalities and how do communities go about addressing social and racial injustice? This course is designed to help students bring global engaged learning into their Cornell education with a focus on community engaged learning in Ithaca. It introduces skills that are vital for intercultural engagement, including participant-observation research, ethnographic writing, and the habits of critical reflexivity. Through readings, film, and community partnerships, we will learn about global/local issues including the gendered and racialized aspects of labor, food and housing insecurity, structural violence, and migration. Students will complete projects that help them learn with and from Ithaca community members and organizations.

Catalog Distribution: (GLC-AS, SCD-AS) (CA-AG, D-AG)

Full details for ANTHR 1900 - Global Engagements: Living and Working in a Diverse World

This course will examine the natural history of wild chimpanzees with an eye toward better understanding the changes that would have been necessary in human evolutionary history to promote the emergence of human culture and political life. After an overview of early research and preliminary attempts to apply our knowledge of chimpanzee life to social and political theory, the class will focus on our now extensive knowledge of chimpanzees derived from many ongoing, long-term field studies. Topics of particular interest include socialization, alliance formation and cooperation, aggression within and between the sexes, reconciliation, the maintenance of traditions, tool use, nutritional ecology and social organization, territorial behavior, and the importance of kin networks. The question of whether apes should have rights will also be explored.

Catalog Distribution: (BIO-AS) (OPHLS-AG)

Full details for ANTHR 2310 - The Natural History of Chimpanzees and the Origins of Politics

One of the most pressing questions of our time is how we should understand the relationship between nature, or the environment, and culture, or society, and whether these should be viewed as separate domains at all. How one answers this question has important implications for how we go about thinking and acting in such diverse social arenas as environmental politics, development, and indigenous-state relations. This course serves as an introduction to the various ways anthropologists and other scholars have conceptualized the relationship between humans and the environment and considers the material and political consequences that flow from these conceptualizations.

Catalog Distribution: (GLC-AS, SCD-AS) (CA-AG, D-AG)

Full details for ANTHR 2420 - Nature-Culture: Ethnographic Approaches to Human Environment Relations

How do humans organize production, distribution, exchange, and consumption? What social, political, environmental, and religious values underlie different forms of economic organization? And how do they produce racial, ethnic, class, gender, and sexual inequalities? This course uses a range of historical and contemporary case studies to address these questions, in the process introducing a range of analytic approaches including formalism, substantivism, Marxist and feminist theory, critical race studies, and science and technology studies. Course themes include gifts and commodities; the nature of money, markets, and finance; credit and debt relations; labor, property, and value; licit and illicit economies; capitalism and socialism; development and underdevelopment.

Catalog Distribution: (SCD-AS, SSC-AS) (D-AG, SBA-AG)

Full details for ANTHR 2437 - Economy, Power, and Inequality

Full details for ANTHR 2772 - Body and Spirit in Ancient Egypt

Full details for ANTHR 2925 - The Anthropology of Israel-Palestine

This seminar course is designed to give anthropology majors an introduction to classical and contemporary social and anthropological theory and to help prepare them for upper-level seminars in anthropology. The seminar format emphasizes close reading and active discussion of key texts and theorists. The reading list will vary from year to year but will include consideration of influential texts and debates in 19th-, 20th-, and 21st-century anthropological theory especially as they have sought to offer conceptual and analytical tools for making sense of human social experience and cultural capacities.

Catalog Distribution: (SCD-AS, SSC-AS) (D-AG, SBA-AG)

Full details for ANTHR 3000 - Introduction to Anthropological Theory

This introductory course familiarizes students with documentary filmmaking and audiovisual modes of knowledge production. Through lectures, screenings, workshops, and labs, students will develop single-camera digital video production and editing skills. Weekly camera, sound, and editing exercises will enhance students' documentary filmmaking techniques and their reflexive engagement with sensory scholarship. Additionally, students will be introduced to nonfiction film theory from the perspective of production and learn to critically engage and comment on each other's work. Discussions of debates around visual ethnography, the politics of representation, and filmmaking ethics will help students address practical storytelling dilemmas. Over the course of the semester, students conduct pre-production research and develop visual storytelling skills as they build a portfolio of short video assignments in preparation for continued training in documentary production.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for ANTHR 3110 - Documentary Production Fundamentals

This course provides a long-term overview of the indigenous peoples of Cornell's home region and their neighbors from an archaeological perspective.  Cornell students live and work in the traditional territory of the Haudenosaunee, or Six Nations Iroquois, and this class will help residents to understand the deep history of this place. We will examine long-term changes in material culture, settlement, subsistence, and trade; the founding of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy; indigenous responses to European and American colonization; the practicalities of doing indigenous-site archaeology in New York State; and contemporary indigenous perspectives on archaeology. Visits to local archaeological sites and museum collections will supplement classroom instruction.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS, SSC-AS) (HA-AG, SBA-AG)

Full details for ANTHR 3248 - Finger Lakes and Beyond: Archaeology of the Native Northeast

Full details for ANTHR 3318 - Virtual Music

Full details for ANTHR 3418 - Environmental Justice Studio

Our children re-create culture and society as they grow up and take charge of the world. But how does this actually happen? What are the implications? In this course we look at children's creative engagement through the lens of anthropology, also borrowing from psychology, history, etc. We will pay special attention to how children learn, play, make-believe, and how they co-construct their own languages, cultures and societies. We draw on ethnographic studies of children, theories of childhood, as well as research on disadvantaged or excluded children, and, how the consequences can help us understand what "normal" children do.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, SSC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG, SBA-AG)

Full details for ANTHR 3443 - Anthropology of Children

This class considers the relationship between the body, knowledge and experience. We investigate the production and reproduction of the body across different times and spaces. Students examine specific histories through which the physical body came to be the purview of science, and its meaning the purview of social science and the humanities. In addition, students study other ways of knowing and being that capture the relations though which bodies emerge as simultaneously material and social. Ethnographies concerning healing and medicine, discipline and labor, governance and religion, aesthetics and desire offer alternative ways of approaching the body as both subject and object. Together, we will consider the historicity of the body, and in so doing explore questions of gender, race, class, sexuality, and coloniality.

Catalog Distribution: (SCD-AS, SSC-AS) (D-AG, SBA-AG)

Full details for ANTHR 3465 - Anthropology of the Body

Infrastructure! It's the hardware and software that undergirds transportation, energy, water, and security systems. This course asks what we can learn about infrastructure when we approach it not as a neutral set of technologies but as a context-dependent social and political force. Taking a critical approach to (among others) natural resources, labor, housing, and security, the course will trace how infrastructures have both served and obstructed colonial and contemporary projects for social change.

Catalog Distribution: (SSC-AS) (SBA-AG)

Full details for ANTHR 3474 - Infrastructure

This course introduces students to a tradition of radical scholarship on the articulations of race and racism with capitalism, and uses it as a frame through which to examine the ongoing role of racialized difference in structuring capitalist extraction. Beginning with chattel slavery's role in the origins of capitalism and moving into contemporary settings, the course will examine how capitalism produces race, how race shapes the accumulation of wealth, and what the role of an "activist" scholarship is in making these links visible. Readings will include the work of Black radical scholars as well as historical and ethnographic studies of the U.S. and global contexts—including discussions of plantation slavery, carceral capitalism, the 2008 mortgage crisis, and global labor migration.

Catalog Distribution: (SCD-AS, SSC-AS) (D-AG, SBA-AG)

Full details for ANTHR 3487 - Racial Capitalism

This course offers an introduction to the global issue of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and other mass atrocities, and an in-depth look at two contemporary genocides in Asia: in China, and in Burma (Myanmar). First, we will study how genocide works: its prerequisites, its warning signs, and how it is carried out. We review the history of genocide in international law after WWII, the UN Genocide Convention, and the checkered history of failing to prevent genocides (Cambodia, Rwanda, etc.), but also some successes. Then, we focus on the new 21st century genocides under way in Xinjiang, China and against the Rohingya in Burma: the background, the events, the actors involved, the key role of media and propaganda, and why Burma's government expels people, while China's instead focuses on forced identity conversion and the erasure of languages and cultures, so that people paradoxically are "ethnically cleansed in place."

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS, SCD-AS) (D-AG, HA-AG)

Full details for ANTHR 3552 - Genocide Today: The Erasure of Cultures

The common perception of ethnicity is that it is a natural and an inevitable consequence of cultural difference. Asians overseas, in particular, have won repute as a people who cling tenaciously to their culture and refuse to assimilate into their host societies and cultures. But, who are the Asians? On what basis can we label Asians an ethnic group? Although there is a significant Asian presence in the Caribbean, the category Asian itself does not exist in the Caribbean. What does this say about the nature of categories that label and demarcate groups of people on the basis of alleged cultural and phenotypical characteristics? This course will examine the dynamics behind group identity, namely ethnicity, by comparing and contrasting the multicultural experience of Asian populations in the Caribbean and the United States. Ethnographic case studies will focus on the East Indian and Chinese experiences in the Caribbean and the Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Filipino, and Indian experiences in the United States.

Catalog Distribution: (GLC-AS) (CA-AG, D-AG)

Full details for ANTHR 3703 - Asians in the Americas: A Comparative Perspective

What is authenticity and why does it matter? Connoisseurship—the expertise required to make discerning judgments—involves assessments of quality,authenticity, historical and cultural significance, and many other issues. This course focuses on connoisseurship in the fine arts, archaeology, and ethnography in both academic contexts and the art world. Emphasis is on developing a nuanced understanding of authentication, at the core of the art market and an important determinant of relevant data for academic art historians and archaeologists. Topics include the role of authenticity in assigning value; looting and faking in relation to antiquities markets; technical analysis and forgery detection.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, HST-AS) (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for ANTHR 4231 - Fakes and the Authentic: Connoisseurship, Value, and Judgement

This seminar provides a higher-level general introduction to, and survey of, contemporary theories, methods, and approaches in the archaeology of the Mediterranean world. Rather than focusing on a specific geographical sub-region or chronological period, this course examines and critically assesses the practice and distinctive character of Mediterranean archaeology more broadly.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS)

Full details for ANTHR 4254 - Themes in Mediterranean Archaeology

The modern Jewish religious movement known as Hasidism began in Eastern Europe in the eighteenth century and thrives today. We will approach Hasidism primarily through three avenues: recent critical social history; selections from Hasidic literature; and ethnographic accounts of Hasidic life today. By the end of the semester, students will be able to articulate some ways that Hasidism reflects both broader trends in European religious and moral thought of its time, and some ways that it represents distinctively Jewish developments. You will also gain a deeper appreciation of the various kinds of evidence and disciplinary approaches that need to be brought to bear on the attempt to articulate as broad, deep and varied a phenomenon as modern Hasidic Judaism.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, ETM-AS) (CA-AG, KCM-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for ANTHR 4407 - Hasidism: History, Community, Thought

This extraordinary figure died in 1941, and his death  is emblematic of the intellectual depredations of Nazism. Yet since World War II, his influence, his reputation, and his fascination for scholars in a wide range of cultural and political disciplines has steadily grown. He is seen as a bridging figure between German and Jewish studies, between materialist critique of culture and the submerged yet powerful voice of theology, between literary history and philosophy. We will review Benjamin's life and some of the key disputes over his heritage; read some of the best-known of his essays; and devote significant time to his enigmatic and enormously rich masterwork, the Arcades Project, concluding with consideration of the relevance of Benjamin's insights for cultural and political dilemmas today.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, HST-AS) (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for ANTHR 4413 - Walter Benjamin

This course develops an anthropological approach to corporations with a focus on large, profit-oriented, publicly-traded corporations. To denaturalize the corporation, we will consider competing cultural logics internal to corporations as well as the contingent historical processes and debates that shaped the corporate form over the past two centuries. The course will examine processes through which various social groups have sought to alter and restrain corporations as well as reciprocal corporate attempts to reshape the social environment in which they operate.

Catalog Distribution: (SCD-AS, SSC-AS) (D-AG, SBA-AG)

Full details for ANTHR 4419 - Anthropology of Corporations

The COVID-19 pandemic has reminded us of the relation between biological and the political, power and resistance, and life and death. Fifty years ago, the philosopher Michel Foucault offered two terms to describe it: biopolitics and biopower. In this introduction to both, we take up Foucault's writings on biopolitics in a series of interdisciplinary contexts, including but not limited to the philosophical, anthropological, and political. In addition to Foucault, w will be reading elaborations on what has been called "the biopolitical paradigm" from writers as diverse as Agamben, Arendt, Arif, Biehl, Butler, Esposito, Fassin, Mbembe, and Sloterdijk. Questions to be asked include how to describe relation between biopolitics and racism and in what ways has the pandemic altered our understanding of biopolitics.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS) (HA-AG)

Full details for ANTHR 4450 - Introduction to Biopolitics

This seminar explores the educational lives and schooling experiences of women and girls through ethnographies conducted in the U.S. and different regions of the world. Drawing on the anthropology of education, and decolonial and transnational feminist theories, we explore how girls and women construct ways of knowing through prisms of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, nation, and citizenship. We examine how gendered–racialized discourses of development, and state sanctioned forms of structural violence, frame their educational experiences and opportunities. In turn, we consider girls and young women as active learners and pedagogues who craft their own lives and literacies across borders and diverse spaces of home, school, and community. Lastly, we interrogate what is feminist in ethnographic representations and identify the possibilities for liberatory pedagogies.

Catalog Distribution: (GLC-AS, SCD-AS)

Full details for ANTHR 4458 - Girls, Women, and Education in Global Perspective: Feminist Ethnography and Praxis

Independent reading course in topics not covered in regularly scheduled courses. Students select a topic in consultation with the faculty member who has agreed to supervise the course work.

Full details for ANTHR 4910 - Independent Study: Undergrad I

Independent reading course in topics not covered in regularly scheduled courses. Students select a topic in consultation with the faculty member who has agreed to supervise the course work.

Full details for ANTHR 4920 - Independent Study: Undergrad II

Research work supervised by the thesis advisor, concentrating on determination of the major issues to be addressed by the thesis, preparation of literature reviews, analysis of data, and the like. The thesis advisor will assign the grade for this course.

Full details for ANTHR 4983 - Honors Thesis Research

Course will consist of several mandatory meetings of all thesis writers with the honors chair. These sessions will inform students about the standard thesis production timetable, format and content expectations, and deadlines; expose students to standard reference sources; and introduce students to each other's projects. The chair of the Honors Committee will assign the grade for this course.

Full details for ANTHR 4991 - Honors Workshop I

This course examines the history and development of anthropology as a discipline with emphasis on British social anthropology and American cultural anthropology. The course will trace major schools of thought -- Evolutionism, Functionalism, and Structuralism -- leading to the post-structural critique of culture. The latter part of the course will examine a range of  debates around anthropology's method and claims to theory beginning with the reflexive turn. Specifically, this part of the course will address how the recognition by anthropologists of the operations of power both in the world out there and within anthropology has led to diverse methodologies and theories that define contemporary anthropology.

Full details for ANTHR 6020 - History of Anthropological Thought

Full details for ANTHR 6100 - Borders Belonging Technoscience

This course will explore the relationship between popular belief, political action, and the institutional deployment of social power. The class will be roughly divided in three parts, opening with a discussion of how the material world influences the culture of a society. The middle section will connect culture to political ideology, including symbolism and the construction of group identity. The last part of the course will consider ways in which cultural symbols and ideology can be manipulated in order to legitimate government authority. We will then, coming full circle, trace how political regimes can influence the social practices from which culture originates.

Full details for ANTHR 6102 - Political Culture

This introductory course familiarizes students with documentary filmmaking and audiovisual modes of knowledge production. Through lectures, screenings, workshops, and labs, students will develop single-camera digital video production and editing skills. Weekly camera, sound, and editing exercises will enhance students' documentary filmmaking techniques and their reflexive engagement with sensory scholarship. Additionally, students will be introduced to nonfiction film theory from the perspective of production and learn to critically engage and comment on each other's work. Discussions of debates around visual ethnography, the politics of representation, and filmmaking ethics will help students address practical storytelling dilemmas. Over the course of the semester, students conduct pre-production research and develop visual storytelling skills as they build a portfolio of short video assignments in preparation for continued training in documentary production.

Full details for ANTHR 6110 - Documentary Production Fundamentals

This course provides a long-term overview of the indigenous peoples of Cornell's home region and their neighbors from an archaeological perspective.  Cornell students live and work in the traditional territory of the Haudenosaunee, or Six Nations Iroquois, and this class will help residents to understand the deep history of this place. We will examine long-term changes in material culture, settlement, subsistence, and trade; the founding of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy; indigenous responses to European and American colonization; the practicalities of doing indigenous-site archaeology in New York State; and contemporary indigenous perspectives on archaeology. Visits to local archaeological sites and museum collections will supplement classroom instruction.

Full details for ANTHR 6248 - Finger Lakes and Beyond: Archaeology of the Native Northeast

This course is designed to give advanced undergraduate and graduate students a practical understanding of what anthropologists actually do in what has traditionally been understood as the field, a construction that has been contested. We will examine situations that emerge in conducting fieldwork, and explore the ethical, methodological, theoretical, epistemological, and practical issues that are raised in the observation, participation in, recording, and representation of sociocultural processes and practices. Students are expected to develop a semester-long, local research project that will allow them to experience fieldwork situations.

Full details for ANTHR 6403 - Ethnographic Field Methods

Full details for ANTHR 6418 - Environmental Justice Studio

Our children re-create culture and society as they grow up and take charge of the world. But how does this actually happen? What are the implications? In this course we look at children's creative engagement through the lens of anthropology, also borrowing from psychology, history, etc. We will pay special attention to how children learn, play, make-believe, and how they co-construct their own languages, cultures and societies. We draw on ethnographic studies of children, theories of childhood, as well as research on disadvantaged or excluded children, and, how the consequences can help us understand what "normal" children do.

Full details for ANTHR 6443 - Anthropology of Children

Full details for ANTHR 6453 - The State in Anthropological Perspective

Infrastructure! It's the hardware and software that undergirds transportation, energy, water, and security systems. This course asks what we can learn about infrastructure when we approach it not as a neutral set of technologies but as a context-dependent social and political force. Taking a critical approach to (among others) natural resources, labor, housing, and security, the course will trace how infrastructures have both served and obstructed colonial and contemporary projects for social change.

Full details for ANTHR 6474 - Infrastructure

This course introduces students to a tradition of radical scholarship on the articulations of race and racism with capitalism, and uses it as a frame through which to examine the ongoing role of racialized difference in structuring capitalist extraction. Beginning with chattel slavery's role in the origins of capitalism and moving into contemporary settings, the course will examine how capitalism produces race, how race shapes the accumulation of wealth, and what the role of an "activist" scholarship is in making these links visible. Readings will include the work of Black radical scholars as well as historical and ethnographic studies of the U.S. and global contexts—including discussions of plantation slavery, carceral capitalism, the 2008 mortgage crisis, and global labor migration.

Full details for ANTHR 6487 - Racial Capitalism

This course offers an introduction to the global issue of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and other mass atrocities, and an in-depth look at two contemporary genocides in Asia: in China, and in Burma (Myanmar). First, we will study how genocide works: its prerequisites, its warning signs, and how it is carried out. We review the history of genocide in international law after WWII, the UN Genocide Convention, and the checkered history of failing to prevent genocides (Cambodia, Rwanda, etc.), but also some successes. Then, we focus on the new 21st century genocides under way in Xinjiang, China and against the Rohingya in Burma: the background, the events, the actors involved, the key role of media and propaganda, and why Burma's government expels people, while China's instead focuses on forced identity conversion and the erasure of languages and cultures, so that people paradoxically are "ethnically cleansed in place."

Full details for ANTHR 6552 - Genocide Today: The Erasure of Cultures

The common perception of ethnicity is that it is a natural and an inevitable consequence of cultural difference. Asians overseas, in particular, have won repute as a people who cling tenaciously to their culture and refuse to assimilate into their host societies and cultures. But, who are the Asians? On what basis can we label Asians an ethnic group? Although there is a significant Asian presence in the Caribbean, the category Asian itself does not exist in the Caribbean. What does this say about the nature of categories that label and demarcate groups of people on the basis of alleged cultural and phenotypical characteristics? This course will examine the dynamics behind group identity, namely ethnicity, by comparing and contrasting the multicultural experience of Asian populations in the Caribbean and the United States. Ethnographic case studies will focus on the East Indian and Chinese experiences in the Caribbean and the Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Filipino, and Indian experiences in the United States.

Full details for ANTHR 6703 - Asians in the Americas: A Comparative Perspective

What is authenticity and why does it matter? Connoisseurship—the expertise required to make discerning judgments—involves assessments of quality,authenticity, historical and cultural significance, and many other issues. This course focuses on connoisseurship in the fine arts, archaeology, and ethnography in both academic contexts and the art world. Emphasis is on developing a nuanced understanding of authentication, at the core of the art market and an important determinant of relevant data for academic art historians and archaeologists. Topics include the role of authenticity in assigning value; looting and faking in relation to antiquities markets; technical analysis and forgery detection.

Full details for ANTHR 7231 - Fakes and the Authentic: Connoisseurship, Value, and Judgement

This seminar provides a higher-level general introduction to, and survey of, contemporary theories, methods, and approaches in the archaeology of the Mediterranean world. Rather than focusing on a specific geographical sub-region or chronological period, this course examines and critically assesses the practice and distinctive character of Mediterranean archaeology more broadly.

Full details for ANTHR 7254 - Themes in Mediterranean Archaeology

The modern Jewish religious movement known as Hasidism began in Eastern Europe in the eighteenth century and thrives today. We will approach Hasidism primarily through three avenues: recent critical social history; selections from Hasidic literature; and ethnographic accounts of Hasidic life today. By the end of the semester, students will be able to articulate some ways that Hasidism reflects both broader trends in European religious and moral thought of its time, and some ways that it represents distinctively Jewish developments. You will also gain a deeper appreciation of the various kinds of evidence and disciplinary approaches that need to be brought to bear on the attempt to articulate as broad, deep and varied a phenomenon as modern Hasidic Judaism.

Full details for ANTHR 7407 - Hasidism: History, Community, Thought

This extraordinary figure died in 1941, and his death is emblematic of the intellectual depredations of Nazism. Yet since World War II, his influence, his reputation, and his fascination for scholars in a wide range of cultural and political disciplines has steadily grown. He is seen as a bridging figure between German and Jewish studies, between materialist critique of culture and the submerged yet powerful voice of theology, between literary history and philosophy. We will review Benjamin's life and some of the key disputes over his heritage; read some of the best-known of his essays; and devote significant time to his enigmatic and enormously rich masterwork, the Arcades Project, concluding with consideration of the relevance of Benjamin's insights for cultural and political dilemmas today.

Full details for ANTHR 7413 - Walter Benjamin

This course develops an anthropological approach to corporations with a focus on large, profit-oriented, publicly-traded corporations. To denaturalize the corporation, we will consider competing cultural logics internal to corporations as well as the contingent historical processes and debates that shaped the corporate form over the past two centuries. The course will examine processes through which various social groups have sought to alter and restrain corporations as well as reciprocal corporate attempts to reshape the social environment in which they operate.

Full details for ANTHR 7419 - Anthropology of Corporations

The COVID-19 pandemic has reminded us of the relation between biological and the political, power and resistance, and life and death. Fifty years ago, the philosopher Michel Foucault offered two terms to describe it: biopolitics and biopower. In this introduction to both, we take up Foucault's writings on biopolitics in a series of interdisciplinary contexts, including but not limited to the philosophical, anthropological, and political. In addition to Foucault, w will be reading elaborations on what has been called "the biopolitical paradigm" from writers as diverse as Agamben, Arendt, Arif, Biehl, Butler, Esposito, Fassin, Mbembe, and Sloterdijk. Questions to be asked include how to describe relation between biopolitics and racism and in what ways has the pandemic altered our understanding of biopolitics.

Full details for ANTHR 7450 - Introduction to Biopolitics

This seminar explores the educational lives and schooling experiences of women and girls through ethnographies conducted in the U.S. and different regions of the world. Drawing on the anthropology of education, and decolonial and transnational feminist theories, we explore how girls and women construct ways of knowing through prisms of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, nation, and citizenship. We examine how gendered–racialized discourses of development, and state sanctioned forms of structural violence, frame their educational experiences and opportunities. In turn, we consider girls and young women as active learners and pedagogues who craft their own lives and literacies across borders and diverse spaces of home, school, and community. Lastly, we interrogate what is feminist in ethnographic representations and identify the possibilities for liberatory pedagogies.

Full details for ANTHR 7458 - Girls, Women, and Education in Global Perspective: Feminist Ethnography and Praxis

Independent reading course on topics not covered in regularly scheduled courses. Students select a topic in consultation with the faculty member who has agreed to supervise the course work.

Full details for ANTHR 7520 - Southeast Asia: Readings in Special Problems

Independent reading course in topics not covered in regularly scheduled courses. Students select a topic in consultation with the faculty member who has agreed to supervise the course work.

Full details for ANTHR 7530 - South Asia: Readings in Special Problems

Independent reading course in topics not covered in regularly scheduled courses. Students select a topic in consultation with the faculty member who has agreed to supervise the course work.

Full details for ANTHR 7550 - East Asia: Readings in Special Problems

A series of workshops and lectures on a range of themes in the discipline sponsored by the Department of Anthropology. Presentations include lectures by invited speakers, debates featuring prominent anthropologists from across the globe, and works in progress presented by anthropology faculty and graduate students.

Full details for ANTHR 7900 - Department of Anthropology Colloquium

Independent reading course in topics not covered in regularly scheduled courses. Students select a topic in consultation with the faculty member who has agreed to supervise the course work.

Full details for ANTHR 7910 - Independent Study: Grad I

Independent reading course in topics not covered in regularly scheduled courses. Students select a topic in consultation with the faculty member who has agreed to supervise the course work.

Full details for ANTHR 7920 - Independent Study: Grad II

Independent reading course in topics not covered in regularly scheduled courses. Students select a topic in consultation with the faculty member who has agreed to supervise the course work.

Full details for ANTHR 7930 - Independent Study: Grad III

A broad introduction to archaeology-the study of material remains to answer questions about the human past. Case studies highlight the variability of ancient societies and illustrate the varied methods and interpretive frameworks archaeologists use to reconstruct them. This course can serve as a platform for both archaeology and anthropology undergraduate majors.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS, SSC-AS) (HA-AG, SBA-AG)

Full details for ARKEO 1200 - Ancient Peoples and Places

Full details for ARKEO 2666 - Apocalypse!

These seminars offer an introduction to the humanities by exploring historical, cultural, social, and political themes. Students will explore themes in critical dialogue with a range of texts and media drawn from the arts, humanities, and/or humanistic social sciences. Guest speakers, including Cornell faculty and Society for the Humanities Fellows, will present from different disciplines and points of view. Students will make field trips to relevant local sites and visit Cornell special collections and archives. Students enrolled in these seminars will have the opportunity to participate in additional programming related to the annual focus theme of Cornell's Society for the Humanities and the Humanities Scholars Program for undergraduate humanities research.

Full details for ARKEO 2750 - Introduction to Humanities

Full details for ARKEO 2772 - Body and Spirit in Ancient Egypt

Undergraduate students pursue topics of particular interest under the guidance of a faculty member.

Full details for ARKEO 3000 - Undergraduate Independent Study in Archaeology and Related Fields

Introduction and training in dendrochronology (tree-ring dating) and its applications in archaeology, art history, climate and environment through lab work and participation in ongoing research projects using ancient to modern wood samples from around the world. Supervised reading and laboratory/project work. Possibilities exists for summer fieldwork in the Mediterranean, Mexico, and New York State.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS) (HA-AG)

Full details for ARKEO 3090 - Introduction to Dendrochronology

This course uses artifacts, spaces, and texts to examine the emergence of the modern world in the 500-plus years since Columbus.  This is a distinctive sub-field of archaeology, not least because modern attitudes toward economic systems, race relations, and gender roles emerged during this period.  We will read classic and contemporary texts to unearth the physical histories of contemporary ideas, including coverage of the archaeologies of capitalism, colonialism, gender relations, the African diaspora, ethnogenesis, and conflicts over the use of the past in the present.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS, SSC-AS)

Full details for ARKEO 3210 - Historical Archaeology: Capitalism, Colonialism, Race, Gender

This course introduces students to the arts of the ancient Americas from circa 2000 BC to the Spanish invasions of the 15th and 16th centuries. The inhabitants of the Americas produced outstanding works of art and architecture that showcased their diverse aesthetic contributions. This course covers the arts of indigenous Mesoamerica (Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras), the Caribbean (Cuba, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, and the Greater and Lesser Antilles), and Andean South America (Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Chile). Students will become familiar with the history, archaeology, and visual arts of the earliest cultures that populated these regions up through the Inca, Aztec, and Maya cultures that encountered the Spaniards. This course will also explore the legacies of pre-Columbian art in colonial, modern, and contemporary Latin America.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS)

Full details for ARKEO 3566 - Art and Architecture of the Pre-Columbian Americas

What is authenticity and why does it matter? Connoisseurship—the expertise required to make discerning judgments—involves assessments of quality,authenticity, historical and cultural significance, and many other issues. This course focuses on connoisseurship in the fine arts, archaeology, and ethnography in both academic contexts and the art world. Emphasis is on developing a nuanced understanding of authentication, at the core of the art market and an important determinant of relevant data for academic art historians and archaeologists. Topics include the role of authenticity in assigning value; looting and faking in relation to antiquities markets; technical analysis and forgery detection.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, HST-AS) (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for ARKEO 4231 - Fakes and the Authentic: Connoisseurship, Value, and Judgement

This seminar provides a higher-level general introduction to, and survey of, contemporary theories, methods, and approaches in the archaeology of the Mediterranean world. Rather than focusing on a specific geographical sub-region or chronological period, this course examines and critically assesses the practice and distinctive character of Mediterranean archaeology more broadly.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS)

Full details for ARKEO 4254 - Themes in Mediterranean Archaeology

How can a small sculpture produce monumental effects? Recent shifts in metal-detecting and excavation practices have transformed our understanding of the scope of figural art after the Roman empire's collapse; the field is newly flooded with evidence of toys, puppets, and other tiny bodies. Working across the disciplines of anthropology, archaeology, art history, philosophy, and gender studies, this course investigates how figurines shaped space, ritual, and concepts of personhood in the early medieval world.

Full details for ARKEO 4706 - The Poetics of Embodiment: Figurines in the Early Middle Ages

Full details for ARKEO 4712 - Staffage: Figures for Scale, 1500-1850

Independent work under the close guidance of a faculty member.

Full details for ARKEO 4981 - Honors Thesis Research

The student, under faculty direction, will prepare a senior thesis.

Full details for ARKEO 4982 - Honors Thesis Write-Up

Graduate students pursue advanced topics of particular interest under the guidance of faculty member(s).

Full details for ARKEO 6000 - Graduate Independent Study in Archaeology

This course uses artifacts, spaces, and texts to examine the emergence of the modern world in the 500-plus years since Columbus.  This is a distinctive sub-field of archaeology, not least because modern attitudes toward economic systems, race relations, and gender roles emerged during this period.  We will read classic and contemporary texts to unearth the physical histories of contemporary ideas, including coverage of the archaeologies of capitalism, colonialism, gender relations, the African diaspora, ethnogenesis, and conflicts over the use of the past in the present.

Full details for ARKEO 6210 - Historical Archaeology: Capitalism, Colonialism, Race, Gender

Introduction to the theory, history, and practice of Historic Preservation Planning in America, with an emphasis on understanding the development and implementation of a preservation project. The course discusses projects ranging in scale and character from individual buildings to districts to cultural landscapes; as well as topics such as preservation economics, government regulations, significance and authenticity, and the politics of identifying and conserving cultural and natural resources.

Full details for ARKEO 6620 - Perspectives on Preservation

How can a small sculpture produce monumental effects? Recent shifts in metal-detecting and excavation practices have transformed our understanding of the scope of figural art after the Roman empire's collapse; the field is newly flooded with evidence of toys, puppets, and other tiny bodies. Working across the disciplines of anthropology, archaeology, art history, philosophy, and gender studies, this course investigates how figurines shaped space, ritual, and concepts of personhood in the early medieval world.

Full details for ARKEO 6706 - The Poetics of Embodiment: Figurines in the Early Middle Ages

Full details for ARKEO 6712 - Staffage: Figures for Scale, 1500-1850

An introduction to the field of Dendrochronology and associated topics with an emphasis on their applications in the field of archaeology and related heritage-buildings fields. Course aimed at graduate level with a focus on critique of scholarship in the field and work on a project as part of the course.

Full details for ARKEO 6755 - Archaeological Dendrochronology

Archaeology studies the past through its material remains. In doing so, it builds on wide-ranging theories and methods to develop its own disciplinary toolbox. This graduate seminar explores this toolbox, treating a topic of broad theoretical and/or methodological interest such as emerging topics in archaeological thought, the history of archaeological theory, key archaeological methods, themes that tie archaeology to the wider domain of the humanities and social sciences, or some combination of the above. The seminar is taught by various members of the Archaeology faculty, each of whom offers their own version of the seminar. The seminar is required for incoming CIAMS M.A. students, and needed for CIAMS membership for Ph.D. students.

Full details for ARKEO 7000 - CIAMS Core Seminar in Archaeological Theory and Method

What is authenticity and why does it matter? Connoisseurship—the expertise required to make discerning judgments—involves assessments of quality,authenticity, historical and cultural significance, and many other issues. This course focuses on connoisseurship in the fine arts, archaeology, and ethnography in both academic contexts and the art world. Emphasis is on developing a nuanced understanding of authentication, at the core of the art market and an important determinant of relevant data for academic art historians and archaeologists. Topics include the role of authenticity in assigning value; looting and faking in relation to antiquities markets; technical analysis and forgery detection.

Full details for ARKEO 7231 - Fakes and the Authentic: Connoisseurship, Value, and Judgement

Students, working individually with faculty member(s), prepare a master's thesis in archaeology.

Full details for ARKEO 8901 - Master's Thesis