During the first week of course preregistration for spring and fall
terms, you may register for a total of four academic courses,
including a maximum of two Five College courses. This limit does not
apply during the add/drop periods. However, According to Amherst
College policy, students may register for a maximum of two Amherst
College courses per semester.
| Course | Title (click to view description) | Credits | Meeting Info |
|---|
| ANTHR-105-01 | Intro to Cultural Anthropology | 4.00 | MW 01:45PM-03:00PM |
| Introduces the analysis of cultural diversity, including concepts, methods, and purposes in interpreting social, economic, political, and belief systems found in human societies. |
| ANTHR-105-02 | Intro to Cultural Anthropology | 4.00 | MW 03:15PM-04:30PM |
| Introduces the analysis of cultural diversity, including concepts, methods, and purposes in interpreting social, economic, political, and belief systems found in human societies. |
| ANTHR-105-03 | Intro to Cultural Anthropology | 4.00 | TTH 10:30AM-11:45AM |
| Introduces the analysis of cultural diversity, including concepts, methods, and purposes in interpreting social, economic, political, and belief systems found in human societies. |
| ANTHR-105-04 | Intro to Cultural Anthropology | 4.00 | TTH 03:15PM-04:30PM |
| Introduces the analysis of cultural diversity, including concepts, methods, and purposes in interpreting social, economic, political, and belief systems found in human societies. |
| ANTHR-105-05 | Intro to Cultural Anthropology | 4.00 | TTH 01:45PM-03:00PM |
| Introduces the analysis of cultural diversity, including concepts, methods, and purposes in interpreting social, economic, political, and belief systems found in human societies. |
| ANTHR-204-01 | Anthropology of Modern Japan | 4.00 | TTH 03:15PM-04:30PM |
| Since the mid-nineteenth century, Americans have viewed Japan as the Orient's most exotic and mysterious recess, alternately enticing and frightening in its difference. Intense economic relations and cultural exchange between Japan and the U.S. have not dispelled the image of Japanese society and culture as fundamentally different from our own. In this course, we will strive for greater understanding of shared experiences as well as historical particularities. Issues covered may vary from one semester to another, but frequently focus on work, women, minorities, and popular culture. Films and anthropological works provide ethnographic examples of some key concepts. |
| ANTHR-212-01 | Shopping and Swapping | 4.00 | TTH 09:00AM-10:15AM |
| We shop for our food, for our clothes, for our colleges. We purchase cars, manicures, and vacations. It seems that there is little that cannot be bought or sold. But we also give and receive gifts, exchange favors, 'go dutch' in restaurants, and invite friends for potlucks. This course examines exchange systems cross-culturally, in order to understand their cultural significance and social consequences. It explores how our own commodity exchange system, which appears to be no more than an efficient means of distributing goods and services, in fact contains intriguing symbolic dimensions similar to the gift exchange systems of Native North America, Melanesia, and Africa. |
| ANTHR-216FD-01 | Ethnographic Food Documentary | 4.00 | TTH 03:15PM-04:30PM |
| Students will learn basic skills on ethnographic methods in anthropology as they are introduced to issues of food and culinary cultural practices, politics and history. Selected readings and films will explore the intersections of food with colonialism, race and ethnicity, gender, health, political economy, and social movements. The course has a focus on Latinx and Latin American/Caribbean foodways, however students will apply the course's conceptual toolkit in a wide range of cultural settings. Students will learn techniques of participant observation, interviews, script writing and visual analysis to conduct fieldwork in a local cultural community in South Hadley and surroundings, as they are guided towards producing a short ethnographic food documentary. |
| ANTHR-216MB-01 | The Medical Body | 4.00 | TTH 01:45PM-03:00PM |
| How has medical anthropology apprehended bodies through its decades-long history? In this course we will answer this question by nesting larger anthropological understandings of the body within central concepts in medical anthropology. We will begin the course by exploring the history of medical anthropology from the mid-20th century to the present. The second part of the course will be devoted to a few key topics in medical anthropological scholarship: caregiving labor, access to healthcare, bioethics, biopolitics, and structural violence. We will then turn to a series of discussions on key topics of interest to contemporary medical anthropologists in the third part of the course. Taken together, this course will shed light on the porosity and multiplicity of embodied states. |
| ANTHR-216MH-01 | Migration and Human Rights | 4.00 | TTH 10:30AM-11:45AM |
| Can the history of nation-states and global capitalism also be understood as a history of migration? In what ways are the experiences of refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants different from the legal categories assigned to them? Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben's conceptualizations of "state of exception" and "bare life" are frequently invoked in current scholarship on refugee and detention camps. What -- if any -- is the difference between life in concentration camps, refugee camps, and migrant detention centers? Are human rights frameworks adequate to the task of addressing protracted statelessness and migration brought about by the intersection of conflict, economic crises, and climate change? These questions will be examined through scholarship on migration, human rights, and humanitarianism. |
| ANTHR-235-01 | History of Anthropol. Thought | 4.00 | MW 10:00AM-11:15AM |
| This course offers a historical foundation for themes in contemporary social theory and ethnography. We build this foundation through readings of twentieth-century anthropological and critical theories, including historicism, interpretive anthropology, structuralism, feminism, and postcolonialism. The course encourages critical and creative responses to anthropology's history through readings that challenge the canon and through active engagement with primary documents revealing the field's social, ethical, and political contexts. |
| ANTHR-295-01 | Independent Study1 | Variable | |
| 1This course is variable credit: 1.00-4.00 credits.
1This course requires instructor permission
|
| No description provided by host campus. |
| ANTHR-316LA-01 | Race & Religion in Latin Amer | 4.00 | T 01:30PM-04:20PM |
| The course will begin with an investigation of the proto-racial and religious categories through which Europeans in the early modern era understood human difference. From there, we will trace how these notions were re-conceptualized in the centuries following the encounter between Europeans, Africans, and the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas. As we examine this history -- including the emergence of slavery, eugenics, mestizaje, and Liberation Theology -- we will pay particular attention to how interwoven racial and religious hierarchies were both constructed and resisted. The final section of the course will concentrate on the contemporary entanglements of race and religion in the region. |
| ANTHR-316ND-01 | Indigenous Data Sovereignty | 4.00 | W 07:15PM-10:05PM |
| This course offers a qualitative approach to Indigenous Data Sovereignty. As we explore examples of innovative tools and technologies, and investigate how Indigenous ways of knowing, being, and doing are online/in digital environments, we ground all learning in Indigenous ontologies: relationality, interconnectedness, and storytelling as a primary form of knowledge transmission. No system/structure for preserving or ensuring access to data is neutral; we will work together in a thought-experiment to radically reimagine digital infrastructures (as well as ideas about security and privacy online) from Indigenous perspectives. |
| ANTHR-316PR-01 | Reproductive Labor in Mideast | 4.00 | W 01:30PM-04:20PM |
| How has global capitalism shaped labor and the lives of working people in the Middle East, a region that has historically been considered marginal to European and North American metropoles? This question will guide our analysis of "free" versus "unfree" and "formal" versus "informal" labor. We will develop a better understanding of the shifting location of the Middle East within the world economy. We will examine ways in which the region's incorporation into the global economy has relied on and encouraged the spread of "unfree" and "informal" labor. Finally, we will study the effects of this proliferation of unfree and informal labor on the organization of reproductive and care labor within households in different parts of the Middle East. |
| ANTHR-342-01 | Science As Culture | 4.00 | M 01:30PM-04:20PM |
| What is science? The progressive discovery of Nature's laws? The process of honing claims about the universe? Is science the act of postulating and testing hypotheses? Or is it tinkering, experimentation? This course offers an advanced introduction to cultural and anthropological studies of science. Through careful readings of work in areas such as the sociology of scientific knowledge, actor-network theory, feminist science studies, and affect theory, we will explore the sciences as complex systems of cultural production. The course will culminate in a series of critical ethnographic studies of how the sciences shape concepts and experiences of race, the body, gender, and sexuality. |
| ANTHR-395-01 | Independent Study2 | Variable | |
| 2This course is variable credit: 1.00-8.00 credits.
2This course requires instructor permission
|
| No description provided by host campus. |
