Anthropology

This course is an introduction to the sub-discipline of sociocultural anthropology, which is the study of contemporary human cultures and societies. The course introduces the basic terminology and theoretical perspectives anthropologists use to understand the ways that humans organize themselves and the cultural logic through which they think about the world and their social relations. Course material covers a wide variety of cultural contexts, both familiar and unfamiliar, to help students understand the cultural logic of the beliefs and social practices of others and critically examine the cultural logics and assumptions of their own culture.

This course is an introduction to how the field of Medical Anthropology uses theoretical models, ethnographic research techniques, and writing from Cultural Anthropology to investigate the way that ideas about illness and things related to "medicine," "medical" procedures, and medical practitioners vary cross-culturally and intersect with relations of power both within societies and in cross-cultural encounters. Medical Anthropology is a relatively new field within Anthropology that can draw on Cultural, Biological, or Applied Anthropology. The basic premise of Medical Anthropology is that illness and suffering take place within complex social, cultural, and environmental systems that must be understood holistically, taking into consideration peoples' ideas about the body, mental states, economic relations, kinship, gender, sexuality, the supernatural, and other aspects of culture. This course will focus on the areas of Medical Anthropology that mainly consider how cultural ideas shape the way that people experience illness and "medicine" differently, their relations to different types of practitioners (doctors, shamans, others), ways that illnesses are categorized according to "folk" understandings, how illness can emanate from and express other social problems, and how even "biomedicine" contains within it certain cultural assumptions and ritual practices that stem from "western" culture and are therefore not culturally-neutral. It also explores other "niedical" processes that are not necessarily about illness such as reproductive technology, but that do involve ideas about the body, marriage, kinship, personhood, and so forth.

In this course we examine “education” by looking beyond the typical setting of the school. Instead, we will consider education in the context of learning and culture. As scholars in history and anthropology have shown during recent decades, learning can be found in classrooms, families, churches, and public places. Learning can be thought of broadly as the process by which people acquire knowledge, attitudes, values, and skills. We will study the past as a deeply constitutive force in the present. Historians call this approach cultural history, anthropologists call it historical ethnography. Specific topics will include prominent and influential theories of pedagogy and learning, as well as the historical and cultural dynamics of race and ethnicity in learning. Throughout the course, we will keep the long history of education reform in mind – including contemporary initiatives. The course is modeled as an intensive reading and writing seminar in which students will be expected to complete an original research paper testing or applying principles discussed in class.

The Americas were populated for millennia before European colonization transformed the hemisphere and the lives of its first inhabitants. Descendants of these first inhabitants live in many parts of North America – including Orange County, California. This seminar explores the histories and cultures of select Native American peoples from Canada, Mexico, and the United States during selected eras, from before colonization and into the contemporary period. Through reading current and classic scholarship on Native Americans, along with writing a research essay on a topic of the students’ choosing, students will acquire an understanding of the historical and cultural processes that have defined Native American lives. 

This course engages students in a critical examination of contemporary urban experiences with a focus on peoples living in the margins of large, dense urban communities, both inside and outside of North America. The course will address questions surrounding how the articulation of global and local markets affects the expression of traditional and modern identities, how underground or informal economies shape the creation of urban street life, and how children and adults actively pursue meaningful family life in contexts of extreme poverty. Readings will focus on cities in the Pacific basin.

The Americas were populated for millennia before European colonization transformed the hemisphere and the lives of its indigenous inhabitants. The descendants of these people live in many parts of North America – including Orange County, California. This seminar explores the histories and cultures of selected Native American peoples from Canada, Mexico, and the United States during selected eras from before colonization to the contemporary period. Reading current and classic scholarship on Native Americans and writing a research essay on a topic of the students’ choosing, students will acquire an understanding of the historical and cultural processes that have defined Native American lives.

This course is about the way that Latin American immigration to the US, and often their return back to Latin America, affects the communities, families, racial identities, and even sex lives of both immigrants and the people they leave behind. The course will draw on readings primarily from Anthropologists and Sociologists who see immigration, not as a linear process of arrival and eventual integration, but as a transnational process of the movement of people, money, culture, and politics back and forth across borders in complex ways that affect both the US and Latin America. Thus, while the course will cover the overall historical trends of Latino immigration to the US, changing demographics, the effects of US immigration laws on immigrants and their families, and the overall economic and political trends in Latin America that explain why people migrate, the real focus of the course is on the effects of these overall trends on communities and families in both the US and Latin America as illustrated through ethnographically rich case studies based on participant observation with migrants, return migrants, and members of the sending communities.

Central America is often known as a region of rich cultural heritage but also a legacy of vast inequalities and forms of violent repression and rebellion. The purpose of this course is to understand the cultural, political, and economic factors that have led to this particular situation. We begin by looking at the process of conquest and colonization in shaping new societies and social structures, then explore the socio-economic processes that set the stage for many of the conflicts and problems that Central America faces today, and finally we explore the current situation in Central America as it relates to changing ideas about gender and the role of women, racism and race mixing, immigration and exile, and forms of violence caused by over 30 years of civil war and economic upheaval. 

This course introduces students to the basic histories, social structures, cultures, and current issues facing indigenous peoples in Central and South America. It explores how indigenous communities and identities have been formed, from the conquest and through today, examining a range of processes and events, such as colonialism, integration into the global economy, racism and racial hierarchies, civil wars, indigenous social movements, and migration and exile. It also examines the responses of indigenous peoples to these processes and events, looking specifically at topics such as retreat, revolution, and political activism. The goal of the course is to understand indigenous peoples as products of complex processes through which communities, identities and inequalities are produced.  

This course uses ethnographic case studies to understand how sex, gender, and sexuality are socially constructed in different societies around the world and how these social constructions generate different identities, social categories, and relations of power. The course uses analytical tools of Anthropology to understand the cultural logic behind practices and beliefs that are informed by culturally specific sex/gender/sexuality systems; how those cultural logics and practices are related to relations of power between individuals; how they become embedded in institutions of the state that affect the way rights are distributed and often violated; and what happens when they come into contact through various types of transnational movements of people and ideas. The course will also expose students to debates about how we use these understandings of the cultural logics of gendered practices and ideologies in order to address specific examples of gender/sexuality discrimination, gender violence, and international human rights discourse and policies.

This course satisfies the advanced writing skills course requirement.

This course engages students in an examination of how indigenous peoples of Oceania have been deeply engaged in global cultural, political, and economic processes since the time of their earliest encounters with representatives of the West. This class incorporates classic and contemporary studies from Anthropology and Pacific History together with the voices and views from islander writers and artists. Social science perspectives are helpful for understanding natural and cultural environments, cultural history and change, language issues, and current socioeconomic and educational issues facing the Islands today. Writers and artists can show how islanders are active in shaping their views of themselves, and the larger political-economic processes in which they participate. By combining these two points of view, the class will examine the tensions between cultural traditions and globalization and how we, as outsiders and as islanders, come to know and empathize with the peoples of Oceania.

The goal of this class is to understand the particular forms of violence that exist in Latin America, the causes of these forms of violence, and how they are connected to particular local and national histories, cultural ideologies, and social structures. It is also the goal of this class to understand the meaning of violence: that is, how do people in Latin America make sense of the violence around them? How do they justify and/or condemn it? How is violence sometimes used as a way to make meaning, to protest inequality and impunity, and to assert subjectivity? The course will be based primarily on ethnographic case studies of different forms of violence (structural, institutional, state-sponsored, intra-familial, vigilante, armed resistance, etc.) that look at its socio-economic-political context but also its cultural meaning to the perpetrators, victims, and bystanders. The rationale of the course is that it is by understanding the meaning of violence, the context within which it is carried out, and its cultural logic, that we are best equipped to begin to address it.