Courses

This First-Year Writing Seminar is devoted to the anthropological study of the human condition. Anthropology examines all aspects of human experience, from the evolution of the species to contemporary challenges of politics, environment, and society. The discipline emphasizes empirically rich field research informed by sophisticated theoretical understandings of human social life and cultural production. The diversity of anthropology's interests provides a diverse array of stimulating opportunities to write critically about the human condition. Topics vary by semester.

Full details for ANTHR 1101 - FWS: Culture, Society, and Power

The evolution of humankind is explored through the fossil record, studies of the biological differences among current human populations, and a comparison with our closest relatives, the primates. This course investigates the roots of human biology and behavior with an evolutionary framework.

Full details for ANTHR 1300 - Human Evolution: Genes, Behavior, and the Fossil Record

This course provides a basic introduction to the Tamil language.  Our focus will be on conversational usage in common social encounters, such as in the market, visiting a family's home, the bank, a place of worship, observing a common ritual, railway station, etc. We will also learn the Tamil script and basic grammatical rules of written and spoken Tamil. Learning activities will be structured in conjunction with Tamil speaking and comprehension exercises so as to make both the learning of another culture and the learning of Tamil language part of the same process of engaged learning and research.

Full details for ANTHR 1520 - Tamil Conversation in Context

The longest archaeological record in the world is found on the continent of Africa. Our goal for this course is to delve into the diversity and complexity of transformations that shaped life in Africa and beyond. As the birthplace of humankind African archaeology extends back at least 2.5 million years, however our story starts in the Middle and Late Stone Age when we see some of the earliest evidence of symbolic thought, art, and shifts in food procurement strategies at the beginning of the Holocene 10,000 years ago. We will examine Africa's rich archaeological past from the development of food production, metallurgy, monumental architecture, urbanism and social and political complexity, religious movements, large-scale webs of trade and exchange and through the forceful absorption into European and Arab colonial empires, and trans-oceanic diasporas. Africa's past and Africa today is often misrepresented and misunderstood in popular news media and in our imaginations. Throughout the course we will be discussing the politics and ethics of doing archaeology in post-colonial Africa for African archaeologists and local communities and for archeologists coming from Euro-western countries. Our archaeological course materials includes both theory—the big ideas, models, questions, debates—and specific archaeological finds and sites on which analysis takes place, new methods are created, and theory is built.

Full details for ANTHR 2016 - Archaeologies of Africa

This course is an introduction to Palestine and the Palestinians. We will read ethnographic and historical studies written by scholars as well as by explorers, missionaries, revolutionaries, and spies. We will learn about Palestinian life—in Palestine, exile, and diaspora—and ask what these experiences can teach us about colonialism, indigeneity, capitalism, and resistance. We will also learn about how governments, courts, and activists use historical and ethnographic texts in political and legal struggles. Readings will include academic studies as well as primary sources, films, and pamphlets, and will foreground knowledge produced by Palestinian intellectuals and organizations.

Full details for ANTHR 2104 - Palestine and the Palestinians

This course will introduce students to the meaning and significance of forms of cultural diversity for the understanding of contemporary issues. Drawing from films, videos, and selected readings, students will be confronted with different representational forms that portray cultures in various parts of the world, and they will be asked to examine critically their own prejudices as they influence the perception and evaluation of cultural differences. We shall approach cultures holistically, assuming the inseparability of economies, kinship, religion, and politics, as well as interconnections and dependencies between world areas such as Africa, Latin America, the West. Among the issues considered: political correctness and truth; nativism and ecological diversity; race, ethnicity, and sexuality; sin, religion, and war; global process and cultural integrity.

Full details for ANTHR 2400 - Cultural Diversity and Contemporary Issues

The need to monitor human behavior and regulate order among individuals and groups is inherent to the human condition. This course is a basic introduction to the ways in which anthropology has examined legal and political processes across diverse societies and cultures. Students will learn foundational anthropological and legal principles and how they are applied among specific sociocultural groups.

Full details for ANTHR 2433 - Anthropology of Law and Politics

What is money? How do people use money in the real world? How are technological innovations changing people's perceptions of money? This course introduces anthropological perspectives on economy and society through a variety of ethnographic studies of money and finance. Topics of discussion include "primitive money" and colonial currencies, the uses of money in religious and ritual practices, social and cultural meanings of numbers, mobile money, crypto-currency and other alternative currency systems, and the social life of finance.

Full details for ANTHR 2440 - The Social Life of Money

Medicine has become the language and practice through which we address a broad range of both individual and societal complaints. Interest in this medicalization of life may be one of the reasons that medical anthropology is currently the fastest-growing subfield in anthropology. This course encourages students to examine concepts of disease, suffering, health, and well-being in their immediate experience and beyond. In the process, students will gain a working knowledge of ecological, critical, phenomenological, and applied approaches used by medical anthropologists. We will investigate what is involved in becoming a doctor, the sociality of medicines, controversies over new medical technologies, and the politics of medical knowledge. The universality of biomedicine, or hospital medicine, will not be taken for granted, but rather we will examine the plurality generated by the various political, economic, social, and ethical demands under which biomedicine has developed in different places and at different times. In addition, biomedical healing and expertise will be viewed in relation to other kinds of healing and expertise. Our readings will address medicine in North America as well as other parts of the world. In class, our discussions will return regularly to consider the broad diversity of kinds of medicine throughout the world, as well as the specific historical and local contexts of biomedicine.

Full details for ANTHR 2468 - Medicine, Culture, and Society

This course explores the role of gender and sexuality in shaping the lives of Muslims past and present. Through a close examination of ethnographies, intellectual histories, and religious treatises, we will analyze the key debates and discourses surrounding the intersection of gender and Islam. We begin by investigating Quranic revelations and hadith concerning gender and sexual ethics, female figures of emulation in early Islam, and feminist exegeses of the Quran. Continuing onward, we focus upon the everyday lives of Muslim women and non-binary individuals in medieval, colonial, and post-colonial contexts, highlighting the ways in which people negotiate and respond to the sexual politics of the times in which they live as we ask what, if anything, is specifically "Islamic" about the situations under discussion? Following this, we embark upon a history of sexuality within Islam, tracing the ways in which the categories of "homosexuality" and "heterosexuality" came to exist in the Muslim world, as well as the history and positionality of trans communities past and present. We then continue with an exploration of Islamic feminism as it exists today, looking to the ways in which Muslim feminists have critically engaged both religious texts as well as Western feminist theory. Finally, the course concludes by analyzing the relationship between the study of Islam, gender, and empire.

Full details for ANTHR 2470 - Islam and Gender

What does it mean to study humanity at a time when it has become a geological force? What is required of us as thinking subjects under the Anthropocene? In this course, we will argue that anthropologists have an important role to play at this historical juncture. But we will also consider how climate change troubles some of the discipline's central categories. Time, space, nature, power, reason – climate change throws these concepts into question. It inflects our ways of knowing. It demands adaptive thinking. Throughout the semester, we will take on this work in common, proceeding from the presumption that it is not enough to think of climate change as a simple ethnographic object. Climate change is the unavoidable context of contemporary anthropology.

Full details for ANTHR 2482 - Anthropology of Climate Change

An introduction to the story of how human history from the earliest times through to the recent period interrelates with changing climate conditions on Earth. The course explores the whole expanse of human history, but concentrates on the most recent 15,000 years through to the Little Ice Age (14th-19th centuries AD). Evidence from science, archaeology and history are brought together to assess how climate has shaped the human story.

Full details for ANTHR 2729 - Climate, Archaeology and History

What are peasantries, and why do they matter today? We will learn how peasant communities interact with land, plants, and animals, and how they are integrated into national governance and global markets. We will explore the contradictory ways—as reactionary and revolutionary, doomed and flourishing—that peasants have appeared in modern economic, political, and environmental projects. Topics include classic accounts of capitalism and agrarian change; anti-colonialism and national liberation; debates over development, indigeneity, and gender; and emerging concerns over fair trade, sustainable agriculture, and climate change. Readings include work from revolutionary intellectuals and peasant movements as well as ethnographic studies.

Full details for ANTHR 3152 - Peasant Economies and Ecologies

Bioarchaeology is the study of human remains from archaeological sites. Like forensic scientists at the scene of the crime, bioarchaeologists search for clues embedded in human bone and mummified tissues to reconstruct how ancient peoples lived and died. As a dynamic living system, the human skeleton responds not only to hormones that govern human development but also to physiological stress brought on by disease, malnutrition, and trauma. The human body is also an artifact molded by cultural understandings of gender, prestige, self-expression, and violence. In this course, students will learn the scientific techniques for estimating skeletal age and sex, diagnosing pathology, and reconstructing diet and migration patterns. This course emphasizes the critical integration of biological and cultural evidence for understanding past individuals and societies.  

Full details for ANTHR 3235 - Bioarchaeology

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 3248 - Finger Lakes and Beyond: Archaeology of the Native Northeast

This course is a survey of the rise and decline of civilizations in the Andean region of western South America before the European invasion.  We begin with a consideration of Andean environments and an overview of some of the common features of Andean societies, then examine the organization and interrelationships of social relations, economic patterns, political institutions, and ecology in the best understood precolumbian society in the Andes, the invasion-period Inka.  We will then look at Andean prehistory in chronological sequence, with an eye to recognizing the emergence of these patterns in pre-Inka material remains.   We will also consider issues of general theoretical interest – the use of invasion-period texts and ethnographic information to interpret precolumbian societies, the emergence of settled farming life, the development of cities and states – in comparative perspective.

Full details for ANTHR 3256 - Ancient Civilizations of the Andes

The course will investigate all aspects of non-human primate life. Based on the fundamentals of evolutionary theory, group and inter-individual behaviors will be presented. In addition, an understanding of group structure and breeding systems will be reached through an evaluation of ecological constraints imposed on primates in different habitats. Subjects include: primate taxonomy, diet and foraging, predation, cooperation and competition, social ontogeny, kinship, and mating strategies.

Full details for ANTHR 3390 - Primate Behavior and Ecology with Emphasis on African Apes

This course explores research on race, ethnicity and language in American education. It examines historical and current patterns of school achievement for minoritized youths. It also examines the cultural and social premises undergirding educational practices in diverse communities and schools. Policies, programs and pedagogy, including multicultural and bilingual education, are explored.

Full details for ANTHR 3405 - Multicultural Issues in Education

This course approaches the study of religion, symbols, and myth from an anthropological perspective. The centrality and universality of religion and myth-making in social and symbolic life has been fundamental in the development of cultural theory. Our aim is to understand with this is so. We begin by examining the classic theories of religion in the works of Durkheim, Marx, Weber, Mauss, and Freud, among others, followed by an exploration of how these theories have been influential in anthropological studies of symbolism, cosmology, ritual, selfhood, myth, sorcery, witchcraft, and pilgrimage. We conclude by examining the apparent persistence, revival and transformation of religious and magical beliefs and practices within modern, modernizing, and postcolonial states. We ask whether an increasing politicization and globalization of religious ideology through technological mediation poses significant challenges to the anthropological analysis of religion. In so doing, we also try to understand better the human experience of and identification with the spiritual, mythical, and religious in the contemporary moment. This, in turn, leads us to investigate the inherent volatility of such identifications and experiences within the larger national and global framework of cultural politics.

Full details for ANTHR 3420 - Myth, Ritual, and Symbol

This course offers a synthetic perspective on a spectrum of currently troubling phenomena -- the rise of authoritarian populism, growing inequality, racism, misogyny, nationalism, war. In particular, it links macro-scale and historical theories regarding global processes -- such as  world systems, globalization, etc. -- on the one hand, and the more intimate correlates of these macro forces shaping individual experience, on the other.  Drawing from anthropology as well as from cognate disciplines like political economy, history, and psychology, the course surveys and assesses both case studies of phenomena such as the self-delusion of the oppressed, the narcissism of dictators, and how the making and remaking of social identities relate to world economic cycles.  Course readings highlight how fantasy, imagination, hope and fear figure crucially in people's apprehensions of the contemporary world.

Full details for ANTHR 3437 - Brave New World, 21st Century Authoritarianism

The relationship among culture, language, and thought has been a core concern in anthropology. Language and culture are commonly defined as processes that are public and shared yet they also operate within and upon subliminal experiential realms. In this course we shall examine how anthropologists have explored this relationship, which is engendered in the interaction between culture and language as parallel mediating devices for the constitution, interpretation, and expression of human experience.

Full details for ANTHR 3479 - Culture, Language, and Thought

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 3487 - Racial Capitalism

How does one study Islam from an anthropological perspective?  Through close readings of recent ethnographies, canonical texts, theoretical works, and critiques of the genre, we will understand the major debates and intellectual trends that have defined the anthropology of Islam from its earliest inception through the present day. Geographic areas covered include South Asia, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, America, North Africa, and West Africa.

Full details for ANTHR 3680 - Islam and the Ethnographic Imagination

This course explores the practice, theory, and methodology of humanities research, critical analysis, and communication through writing and oral presentation. We will study the work and impact of humanists (scholars of literature, history, theory, art, visual studies, film, anthropology, gender and sexuality studies), who pose big questions about the human condition. By reading and analyzing their scholarship—critiquing them and engaging their ideas—we will craft our own methods and voices. Students will refine their research methods (library research, note taking, organizing material, bibliographies, citation methods, proposals, outlines, etc.) and design their own independent research project.

Full details for ANTHR 3950 - Humanities Scholars Research Methods

This course is an exploration of Maya understandings of their own history as it is reflected in ancient texts. We will begin by looking at episodes in Colonial and recent history to illustrate some of the ways Maya thinking about history may differ from more familiar genres. We will then review basic aspects of precolumbian Maya writing, but we will focus mainly on analyzing texts from one or more Classic period Maya cities.

Full details for ANTHR 4216 - Maya History

Res ipsa loquitur -- the thing speaks for itself. This common expression captures a widespread belief about objects' roles in human lives, but deciphering what objects have to say is actually a complex cultural process. An object rarely has a single meaning; they are read variously in different cultural settings, and even by different individuals within a cultural system. How does one know, can one know, the meanings of an object? How are objects strategically deployed in social interaction, particularly in cross-cultural interactions where each side may have radically different understandings? How does one even know what an object is? We will explore the history and variety of ways that material culture and its meanings have been studied, using archaeological and ethnographic examples.

Full details for ANTHR 4235 - Meaningful Stuff: Interpreting Material Culture

This is an intensive laboratory course in the study of human skeletal remains. A detailed knowledge of skeletal anatomy is fundamental to forensic anthropology, bioarchaeology, and the medical sciences. This course teaches students how to identify all 206 bones and 32 teeth of the human skeleton, in both complete and fragmentary states. Students will also learn osteological methods for establishing a biological profile and documenting skeletal trauma and pathological lesions. Hands-on laboratory training will be supplemented by case studies that demonstrate the importance of human osteology for criminal investigations in the present and the study of health and violence in the past. The ethics of working with human remains are also discussed.

Full details for ANTHR 4246 - Human Osteology

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 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.

Full details for ANTHR 4413 - Walter Benjamin

In this course, we examine the role that law and language, as mutually constitutive mediating systems, occupy in constructing ethnoracial identity in the United States. We will approach law from a critical anthropological perspective, as a signifying and significant sociocultural system, rather than as an objective structure of rational rules and processes, to consider how legal norms, procedures, and discourses inform other processes of sociocultural production and reproduction, thus contributing to the creation and maintenance of differential power relations. We will draw on anthropological, linguistic, and critical race theory as well as ethnographic and legal material to guide and document our analyses.

Full details for ANTHR 4434 - Ethnoracial Identity in Anthropology, Language, and Law

As renewed calls against racial violence in this country are articulated through the language of abolitionism, this course investigates how activism and projects to promote greater social justice are reorienting around an abolitionist worldview. Looking both backwards and forward, this course examines how the abolition of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade informs contemporary practices of advocating for racial justice. Over the course of the semester, we will turn to the work of social justice activists in order to interpret strategic planning documents by organizations working to promote transformative and reparative justice. For longer description and instructor bio visit the Society for the Humanities website.

Full details for ANTHR 4464 - Abolition. Justice. Reparations.

What does it mean to consider something broken? Can brokenness ever be seen as productive itself? This class explores the generativity of broken worlds. It considers the question of brokenness through analyzing thwarted infrastructures across the globe that give rise to the impulse of repair of our everyday social, material, political, and affective lives. Broken infrastructures can, indeed, afford various reparative affects, practices and spaces. Yet, to repair means that not only humans, but also nonhumans, such as plants or animals, can emerge as infrastructures of repair in their own right. This course then emerges from the idea that we are restorative species, constantly engaged in mending and fixing of broken material and affective worlds. The course ends by reffllflecting on the reparative potential of researchers. For longer description and instructor bio visit the Society for the Humanities website.

Full details for ANTHR 4469 - Ethnographies of Brokenness and Repair

This is a semester-long upper division seminar course that will rotate among members of the faculty focusing on different special topics in the fields of abolitionist, critical, and decolonial theories of the social and political.

Full details for ANTHR 4489 - Theory and Anthropology from Below: Special Topics

This course explores how religious beliefs and practices in Southeast Asia have been transformed by the combined forces of colonialism, nationalism, and globalization. By examining both diversity and resurgence in one of the world's most rapidly modernizing regions, we aim to understand the common economic, social, and political conditions that are contributing to the popularity of contemporary religious movements. At the same time, we also consider the unique ideological, theological, and cultural understandings behind different religions and movements. Through this process we also rethink conceptions of modernity.

Full details for ANTHR 4513 - Religion and Politics in Southeast Asia

Explores the interpretive and analytic tools made available through the ethnographic analysis of the societies within the Nilgiris Biosphere Reserve. Through anthropological understandings of culture as the primary human adaptation, we assess the possibility of understanding the lives of others, particularly in critical juxtaposition to multiple and alternate theories of the self and/or person as understood in different cultures. In this case, we examine relationships between culture and the environment (social and physical), focusing upon unique patterns and adaptations that have developed within particular Nilgiri societies. In doing so, we also examine debates in the anthropology of emotion, cognition, healing, development, the body and health. To this end, we bring into sharper focus the particular theoretical and empirical contributions (and/or limits) of anthropologists towards developing a cross-cultural understanding of human nature and social processes.

Full details for ANTHR 4520 - Society and Culture in the Nilgiris: Engaged Research in Rural South India

From Jerusalem to Rome, from Shanghai to Marrakesh, Jews and cities have been shaping each other for thousands of years. This course ranges through time and space to examine how Jewish and other "minority" experiences offer a window onto questions of modernity and post-colonialism in intersections of the built environment with migration, urban space, and memory. Readings and film/video encompass historical, ethnographic, visual, architectural and literary materials to offer a broad look at materials on ghettos, empires, cosmopolitanism, tolerance, immigrant enclaves, race and ethnicity.

Full details for ANTHR 4620 - Jewish Cities

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

Final write-up of the thesis under the direct supervision of the thesis advisor, who will assign the grade for this course.

Full details for ANTHR 4984 - Honors Thesis Write-Up

Course will consist of weekly, seminar-style meetings of all thesis writers until mid-semester, under the direction of the honors chair. This second semester concentrates on preparation of a full draft of the thesis by mid-semester, with ample time left for revisions prior to submission. Group meetings will concentrate on collective reviewing of the work of other students, presentation of research, and the like.

Full details for ANTHR 4992 - Honors Workshop II

This course explores advanced topics in anthropological theory and practice. It builds on the history of the discipline that students will have examined in the preceding course ANTHR 6020, and seeks to immerse students in major contemporary theoretical developments and debates and the discipline's most pressing concerns. Coursework will proceed mainly by way of reading, writing, and discussion.  

Full details for ANTHR 6025 - Proseminar in Anthropology

This seminar will introduce multiple texts and approaches organized around the concept of thinking. It will involve careful and close reading of texts in phenomenology, critical theory, political-economy, psychoanalysis, subaltern studies, Black Studies, and anthropology. What is critique and is it necessarily secular? What does it mean to invert speculative thought in order to analyze the commodity-form? What is the relationship between thinking and time? What is embodied thinking? What is a hermeneutic of suspicion? Is all thought Black thought? How does desire and the unconscious shape our orientation in thinking? What are the political and epistemological consequences of fieldwork?

Full details for ANTHR 6045 - The Task of Thinking

Bioarchaeology is the study of human remains from archaeological sites. Like forensic scientists at the scene of the crime, bioarchaeologists search for clues embedded in human bone and mummified tissues to reconstruct how ancient peoples lived and died. As a dynamic living system, the human skeleton responds not only to hormones that govern human development but also to physiological stress brought on by disease, malnutrition, and trauma. The human body is also an artifact molded by cultural understandings of gender, prestige, self-expression, and violence. In this course, students will learn the scientific techniques for estimating skeletal age and sex, diagnosing pathology, and reconstructing diet and migration patterns. This course emphasizes the critical integration of biological and cultural evidence for understanding past individuals and societies.

Full details for ANTHR 6235 - Bioarchaeology

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 an exploration of Maya understandings of their own history as it is reflected in ancient texts. We will begin by looking at episodes in Colonial and recent history to illustrate some of the ways Maya thinking about history may differ from more familiar genres. We will then review basic aspects of precolumbian Maya writing, but we will focus mainly on analyzing texts from one or more Classic period Maya cities.

Full details for ANTHR 6256 - Maya History

In this course, we examine the role that law and language, as mutually constitutive mediating systems, occupy in constructing ethnoracial identity in the United States. We will approach law from a critical anthropological perspective, as a signifying and significant sociocultural system, rather than as an objective structure of rational rules and processes, to consider how legal norms, procedures, and discourses inform other processes of sociocultural production and reproduction, thus contributing to the creation and maintenance of differential power relations. We will draw on anthropological, linguistic, and critical race theory as well as ethnographic and legal material to guide and document our analyses.

Full details for ANTHR 6424 - Ethnoracial Identity in Anthropology, Language, and Law

This course offers a synthetic perspective on a spectrum of currently troubling phenomena -- the rise of authoritarian populism, growing inequality, racism, misogyny, nationalism, war. In particular, it links macro-scale and historical theories regarding global processes -- such as  world systems, globalization, etc. -- on the one hand, and the more intimate correlates of these macro forces shaping individual experience, on the other.  Drawing from anthropology as well as from cognate disciplines like political economy, history, and psychology, the course surveys and assesses both case studies of phenomena such as the self-delusion of the oppressed, the narcissism of dictators, and how the making and remaking of social identities relate to world economic cycles.  Course readings highlight how fantasy, imagination, hope and fear figure crucially in people's apprehensions of the contemporary world.

Full details for ANTHR 6437 - Brave New World, 21st Century Authoritarianism

This seminar focuses on preparing a full-scale proposal for anthropological fieldwork for a dissertation. Topics include identifying appropriate funding sources; defining a researchable problem; selecting and justifying a particular fieldwork site; situating the ethnographic case within appropriate theoretical contexts; selecting and justifying appropriate research methodologies; developing a feasible timetable for field research; ethical considerations and human subjects protection procedures; and preparing appropriate budgets. This is a writing seminar, and students will complete a proposal suitable for submission to a major funding agency in the social sciences.

Full details for ANTHR 6440 - Proposal Development

The relationship among culture, language, and thought has been a core concern in many disciplines. Anthropology among them offers a particularly productive perspective for considering this concern. Language and culture are commonly defined as processes that are public and shared yet they also operate within and upon subliminal experiential realms. In this course we shall examine how anthropologists have explored this relationship, which is engendered in the interaction between culture and language as parallel mediating devices for the constitution, interpretation, and expression of human thought and experience.

Full details for ANTHR 6475 - Culture, Language, and Thought

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

How does one study Islam from an anthropological perspective?  Through close readings of recent ethnographies, canonical texts, theoretical works, and critiques of the genre, we will understand the major debates and intellectual trends that have defined the anthropology of Islam from its earliest inception through the present day.  Geographic areas covered include South Asia, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, America, North Africa, and West Africa.

Full details for ANTHR 6680 - Islam and the Ethnographic Imagination

An introduction to the story of how human history from the earliest times through to the recent period interrelates with changing climate conditions on Earth. The course explores the whole expanse of human history, but concentrates on the most recent 15,000 years through to the Little Ice Age (14th-19th centuries AD). Evidence from science, archaeology and history are brought together to assess how climate has shaped the human story.

Full details for ANTHR 6729 - Climate, Archaeology and History

Res ipsa loquitur -- the thing speaks for itself. This common expression captures a widespread belief about objects' roles in human lives, but deciphering what objects have to say is actually a complex cultural process. An object rarely has a single meaning; they are read variously in different cultural settings, and even by different individuals within a cultural system. How does one know, can one know, the meanings of an object? How are objects strategically deployed in social interaction, particularly in cross-cultural interactions where each side may have radically different understandings? How does one even know what an object is? We will explore the history and variety of ways that material culture and its meanings have been studied, using archaeological and ethnographic examples.

Full details for ANTHR 7235 - Meaningful Stuff: Interpreting Material Culture

This is an intensive laboratory course in the study of human skeletal remains. A detailed knowledge of skeletal anatomy is fundamental to forensic anthropology, bioarchaeology, and the medical sciences. This course teaches students how to identify all 206 bones and 32 teeth of the human skeleton, in both complete and fragmentary states. Students will also learn osteological methods for establishing a biological profile and documenting skeletal trauma and pathological lesions. Hands-on laboratory training will be supplemented by case studies that demonstrate the importance of human osteology for criminal investigations in the present and the study of health and violence in the past. The ethics of working with human remains are also discussed.

Full details for ANTHR 7246 - Human Osteology

This course asks how anthropologists articulate the relevance of our work in theoretical and political terms by staging an encounter between three disparate strands of scholarship: anthropology of the contemporary, engaged/public anthropology, and anthropology of everyday violence and ordinary affects. Designed to bring together pre-fieldwork and post-fieldwork graduate students, this seminar functions as a laboratory for expanding existing conversations and exploring further articulations of engaged anthropology of the contemporary. Participants will reflect on how their political commitments, ethnographic and other sensibilities, and theoretical perspectives inform each other, and will invigorate their research design, writing, and analytical frameworks in light of these reflections and engagement with course texts. The course is open to students from across the disciplines.

Full details for ANTHR 7256 - Ancient Civilizations of the Andes

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

As renewed calls against racial violence in this country are articulated through the language of abolitionism, this course investigates how activism and projects to promote greater social justice are reorienting around an abolitionist worldview. Looking both backwards and forward, this course examines how the abolition of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade informs contemporary practices of advocating for racial justice. Over the course of the semester, we will turn to the work of social justice activists in order to interpret strategic planning documents by organizations working to promote transformative and reparative justice. For longer description and instructor bio visit the Society for the Humanities website.

Full details for ANTHR 7464 - Abolition. Justice. Reparations.

What does it mean to consider something broken? Can brokenness ever be seen as productive itself? This class explores the generativity of broken worlds. It considers the question of brokenness through analyzing thwarted infrastructures across the globe that give rise to the impulse of repair of our everyday social, material, political, and affective lives. Broken infrastructures can, indeed, afford various reparative affects, practices and spaces. Yet, to repair means that not only humans, but also nonhumans, such as plants or animals, can emerge as infrastructures of repair in their own right. This class then emerges from the idea that we are restorative species, constantly engaged in mending and fixing of broken material and affective worlds. The course ends by reffllflecting on the reparative potential of researchers. For longer description and instructor bio visit the Society for the Humanities website.

Full details for ANTHR 7469 - Ethnographies of Brokenness and Repair

This is a semester-long upper division seminar course that will rotate among members of the faculty focusing on different special topics in the fields of abolitionist, critical, and decolonial theories of the social and political.

Full details for ANTHR 7489 - Theory and Anthropology from Below: Special Topics

This course explores how religious beliefs and practices in Southeast Asia have been transformed by the combined forces of colonialism, nationalism, and globalization. By examining both diversity and resurgence in one of the world's most rapidly modernizing regions, we aim to understand the common economic, social, and political conditions that are contributing to the popularity of contemporary religious movements. At the same time, we also consider the unique ideological, theological, and cultural understandings behind different religions and movements. Through this process we also rethink conceptions of modernity.

Full details for ANTHR 7513 - Religion and Politics in Southeast Asia

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 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 7540 - Problems in Himalayan Studies

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

From Jerusalem to Rome, from Shanghai to Marrakesh, Jews and cities have been shaping each other for thousands of years. This course ranges through time and space to examine how Jewish and other "minority" experiences offer a window onto questions of modernity and post-colonialism in intersections of the built environment with migration, urban space, and memory. Readings and film/video encompass historical, ethnographic, visual, architectural and literary materials to offer a broad look at materials on ghettos, empires, cosmopolitanism, tolerance, immigrant enclaves, race and ethnicity.  

Full details for ANTHR 7620 - Jewish Cities

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

The longest archaeological record in the world is found on the continent of Africa. Our goal for this course is to delve into the diversity and complexity of transformations that shaped life in Africa and beyond. As the birthplace of humankind African archaeology extends back at least 2.5 million years, however our story starts in the Middle and Late Stone Age when we see some of the earliest evidence of symbolic thought, art, and shifts in food procurement strategies at the beginning of the Holocene 10,000 years ago. We will examine Africa's rich archaeological past from the development of food production, metallurgy, monumental architecture, urbanism and social and political complexity, religious movements, large-scale webs of trade and exchange and through the forceful absorption into European and Arab colonial empires, and trans-oceanic diasporas. Africa's past and Africa today is often misrepresented and misunderstood in popular news media and in our imaginations. Throughout the course we will be discussing the politics and ethics of doing archaeology in post-colonial Africa for African archaeologists and local communities and for archeologists coming from Euro-western countries. Our archaeological course materials includes both theory—the big ideas, models, questions, debates—and specific archaeological finds and sites on which analysis takes place, new methods are created, and theory is built.

Full details for ARKEO 2016 - Archaeologies of Africa

This course examines the production and exchange of wine, beer, coffee and tea, and the social and ideological dynamics involved in their consumption. We start in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, and end with tea and coffee in the Arab and Ottoman worlds. Archaeological and textual evidence will be used throughout to show the centrality of drinking in daily, ritual and political life.

Full details for ARKEO 2522 - Drinking through the Ages: Intoxicating Beverages in Near Eastern and World History

An introduction to the story of how human history from the earliest times through to the recent period interrelates with changing climate conditions on Earth. The course explores the whole expanse of human history, but concentrates on the most recent 15,000 years through to the Little Ice Age (14th-19th centuries AD). Evidence from science, archaeology and history are brought together to assess how climate has shaped the human story.

Full details for ARKEO 2729 - Climate, Archaeology and History

What was it like to live in the Roman world?  What did that world look, taste and smell like?  How did Romans raise their families, entertain themselves, understand death, and interact with their government? What were Roman values and how did they differ from our own?  This course takes as its subject the everyday lives of individuals and explores those lives using the combined tools of archaeology, architecture and art, as well as some primary source readings.  In doing so, it seeks to integrate those monuments into a world of real people, and to use archaeology to narrate a story about ancient lives and life habits. Some of the topics explored will include the Roman house; the Roman family, children and slaves; bathing and hygiene; food; gardens, agriculture and animals.

Full details for ARKEO 2743 - Archaeology of Roman Private Life

An introduction to the history and theory of writing systems from cuneiform to the alphabet, historical and new writing media, and the complex relationship of writing technologies to human language and culture. Through hands-on activities and collaborative work, students will explore the shifting definitions of "writing" and the diverse ways in which cultures through time have developed and used writing systems. We will also investigate the traditional divisions of "oral" vs. "written" and consider how digital technologies have affected how we use and think about writing in encoding systems from Morse code to emoji.

Full details for ARKEO 2812 - Hieroglyphs to HTML: History of Writing

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

Bioarchaeology is the study of human remains from archaeological sites. Like forensic scientists at the scene of the crime, bioarchaeologists search for clues embedded in human bone and mummified tissues to reconstruct how ancient peoples lived and died. As a dynamic living system, the human skeleton responds not only to hormones that govern human development but also to physiological stress brought on by disease, malnutrition, and trauma. The human body is also an artifact molded by cultural understandings of gender, prestige, self-expression, and violence. In this course, students will learn the scientific techniques for estimating skeletal age and sex, diagnosing pathology, and reconstructing diet and migration patterns. This course emphasizes the critical integration of biological and cultural evidence for understanding past individuals and societies.  

Full details for ARKEO 3235 - Bioarchaeology

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 ARKEO 3248 - Finger Lakes and Beyond: Archaeology of the Native Northeast

This course is a survey of the rise and decline of civilizations in the Andean region of western South America before the European invasion.  We begin with a consideration of Andean environments and an overview of some of the common features of Andean societies, then examine the organization and interrelationships of social relations, economic patterns, political institutions, and ecology in the best understood precolumbian society in the Andes, the invasion-period Inka.  We will then look at Andean prehistory in chronological sequence, with an eye to recognizing the emergence of these patterns in pre-Inka material remains.   We will also consider issues of general theoretical interest – the use of invasion-period texts and ethnographic information to interpret precolumbian societies, the emergence of settled farming life, the development of cities and states – in comparative perspective.

Full details for ARKEO 3256 - Ancient Civilizations of the Andes

The purpose of the course is to place the Bible within the context of a larger ancient world that can be explored by systematic excavation of physical remains. Students will become familiar with archaeological excavations and finds from ancient Syria-Palestine from 10,000 bce to 586 bce. We will explore this archaeological evidence on its own terms, taking into consideration factors such as archaeological method and the interpretive frameworks in which the excavators themselves work, as well as the implications of this body of evidence for understanding the complexity and diversity of biblical Israel.

Full details for ARKEO 3588 - Archaeology and the Bible

This course is an exploration of Maya understandings of their own history as it is reflected in ancient texts. We will begin by looking at episodes in Colonial and recent history to illustrate some of the ways Maya thinking about history may differ from more familiar genres. We will then review basic aspects of precolumbian Maya writing, but we will focus mainly on analyzing texts from one or more Classic period Maya cities.

Full details for ARKEO 4216 - Maya History

Topics Rotate. Spring 23 topic: Humans and Animals. As Greek and Roman societies relied fundamentally on hunting and agriculture, animals constituted a crucial point of reference in their conception of the world. Animals occupied different functions and roles for humans, such as foe or protector and companion, food and resource, sacrificial victim, subject and object of prodigies, but also status symbol, pet, object of entertainment, object of scientific study etc. We will look at how the different forms of interaction between humans and animals resulted from man's views of other species, but also how such interactions themselves helped shape these views. How did they eventually intersect with discourses on gender, age, class, and race? We will investigate written sources covering the whole range of literary genres; images; and archaeological material. Readings will also refer to the modern debate on the relationship between humans and animals.

Full details for ARKEO 4233 - Greek and Roman Art and Archaeology

Res ipsa loquitur -- the thing speaks for itself. This common expression captures a widespread belief about objects' roles in human lives, but deciphering what objects have to say is actually a complex cultural process. An object rarely has a single meaning; they are read variously in different cultural settings, and even by different individuals within a cultural system. How does one know, can one know, the meanings of an object? How are objects strategically deployed in social interaction, particularly in cross-cultural interactions where each side may have radically different understandings? How does one even know what an object is? We will explore the history and variety of ways that material culture and its meanings have been studied, using archaeological and ethnographic examples.

Full details for ARKEO 4235 - Meaningful Stuff: Interpreting Material Culture

This is an intensive laboratory course in the study of human skeletal remains. A detailed knowledge of skeletal anatomy is fundamental to forensic anthropology, bioarchaeology, and the medical sciences. This course teaches students how to identify all 206 bones and 32 teeth of the human skeleton, in both complete and fragmentary states. Students will also learn osteological methods for establishing a biological profile and documenting skeletal trauma and pathological lesions. Hands-on laboratory training will be supplemented by case studies that demonstrate the importance of human osteology for criminal investigations in the present and the study of health and violence in the past. The ethics of working with human remains are also discussed.

Full details for ARKEO 4246 - Human Osteology

Topic Spring 23: Portraiture.

Full details for ARKEO 4351 - Problems in Byzantine Art

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

Topics Rotate. Spring 23 topic: Humans and Animals. As Greek and Roman societies relied fundamentally on hunting and agriculture, animals constituted a crucial point of reference in their conception of the world. Animals occupied different functions and roles for humans, such as foe or protector and companion, food and resource, sacrificial victim, subject and object of prodigies, but also status symbol, pet, object of entertainment, object of scientific study etc. We will look at how the different forms of interaction between humans and animals resulted from man's views of other species, but also how such interactions themselves helped shape these views. How did they eventually intersect with discourses on gender, age, class, and race? We will investigate written sources covering the whole range of literary genres; images; and archaeological material. Readings will also refer to the modern debate on the relationship between humans and animals.

Full details for ARKEO 6233 - Greek and Roman Art and Archaeology

Bioarchaeology is the study of human remains from archaeological sites. Like forensic scientists at the scene of the crime, bioarchaeologists search for clues embedded in human bone and mummified tissues to reconstruct how ancient peoples lived and died. As a dynamic living system, the human skeleton responds not only to hormones that govern human development but also to physiological stress brought on by disease, malnutrition, and trauma. The human body is also an artifact molded by cultural understandings of gender, prestige, self-expression, and violence. In this course, students will learn the scientific techniques for estimating skeletal age and sex, diagnosing pathology, and reconstructing diet and migration patterns. This course emphasizes the critical integration of biological and cultural evidence for understanding past individuals and societies.

Full details for ARKEO 6235 - Bioarchaeology

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 ARKEO 6248 - Finger Lakes and Beyond: Archaeology of the Native Northeast

This course is an exploration of Maya understandings of their own history as it is reflected in ancient texts. We will begin by looking at episodes in Colonial and recent history to illustrate some of the ways Maya thinking about history may differ from more familiar genres. We will then review basic aspects of precolumbian Maya writing, but we will focus mainly on analyzing texts from one or more Classic period Maya cities.

Full details for ARKEO 6256 - Maya History

Seminar topics rotate each semester. Topic for Spring 2023: Portraiture.

Full details for ARKEO 6351 - Problems in Byzantine Art

An introduction to the story of how human history from the earliest times through to the recent period interrelates with changing climate conditions on Earth. The course explores the whole expanse of human history, but concentrates on the most recent 15,000 years through to the Little Ice Age (14th-19th centuries AD). Evidence from science, archaeology and history are brought together to assess how climate has shaped the human story.

Full details for ARKEO 6729 - Climate, Archaeology and History

Res ipsa loquitur -- the thing speaks for itself. This common expression captures a widespread belief about objects' roles in human lives, but deciphering what objects have to say is actually a complex cultural process. An object rarely has a single meaning; they are read variously in different cultural settings, and even by different individuals within a cultural system. How does one know, can one know, the meanings of an object? How are objects strategically deployed in social interaction, particularly in cross-cultural interactions where each side may have radically different understandings? How does one even know what an object is? We will explore the history and variety of ways that material culture and its meanings have been studied, using archaeological and ethnographic examples.

Full details for ARKEO 7235 - Meaningful Stuff: Interpreting Material Culture

This is an intensive laboratory course in the study of human skeletal remains. A detailed knowledge of skeletal anatomy is fundamental to forensic anthropology, bioarchaeology, and the medical sciences. This course teaches students how to identify all 206 bones and 32 teeth of the human skeleton, in both complete and fragmentary states. Students will also learn osteological methods for establishing a biological profile and documenting skeletal trauma and pathological lesions. Hands-on laboratory training will be supplemented by case studies that demonstrate the importance of human osteology for criminal investigations in the present and the study of health and violence in the past. The ethics of working with human remains are also discussed.

Full details for ARKEO 7246 - Human Osteology

This course asks how anthropologists articulate the relevance of our work in theoretical and political terms by staging an encounter between three disparate strands of scholarship: anthropology of the contemporary, engaged/public anthropology, and anthropology of everyday violence and ordinary affects. Designed to bring together pre-fieldwork and post-fieldwork graduate students, this seminar functions as a laboratory for expanding existing conversations and exploring further articulations of engaged anthropology of the contemporary. Participants will reflect on how their political commitments, ethnographic and other sensibilities, and theoretical perspectives inform each other, and will invigorate their research design, writing, and analytical frameworks in light of these reflections and engagement with course texts. The course is open to students from across the disciplines.

Full details for ARKEO 7256 - Ancient Civilizations of the Andes

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

Full details for ARKEO 8902 - Master's Thesis