What is the apocalypse? How is it imagined and lived by people from different cultures around the world? We will explore the multiple utopic and dystopic potential future realities that the apocalypse may lead to through an anthropological lens. We consider the role of cultures, knowledges, epistemologies, and social- environmental relations as they inform pathways to the future.
The Anthropology of the Apocalypse will be action-packed with anthropological theory, an adventure in climate fiction (cli-fi) literature and film, and informed with the latest research in climate science. Together we learn from diverse perspectives and cultures in a quest to understand our future in a world of climate change. How we as humans envision the world, our place in it, and what we desire for our futures are key components of how we understand and treat the world now, as well as how we react to various possible social and environmental transformations. Diverse ways of imagining the future are essential for developing programs and policies that ensure equity, justice, and sustainable utopic future realities.
Fulfills requirements for Arts & Sciences General Education: Diversity-Global Perspective and Distribution-Social Sciences
What does it mean to think anthropologically? This course will provide an overview of the history and foundations of anthropological thought, with a special focus on the key method of anthropology: ethnography. Drawing on both classical and contemporary anthropological texts from a broad range of international settings, we will analyze the meaning of the categories we use to organize our experiences and social relationships. Topics will include: the "culture" concept, particularly in relation to ideas of difference, relativism, translation, and individual and group identity; the role of language, narrative, and interpretation in the constitution of the self and the social world; symbols, metaphors, and ideologies as forms of power and vehicles for social transformation; ethnographic methods, ethics, and techniques of anthropological research and fieldwork; and cross-cultural comparisons of systems of kinship, gender/sex/sexuality, labor and economic exchange.
See the for specifics, recommendations, and prerequisites.
Where did human beings come from?
How did we come to inhabit the world?
Why don鈥檛 we eat wild foods anymore?
How did complex urban societies rise and fall?
All this and more鈥�..
Professor Douglas Bamforth
See the for specifics, recommendations, and prerequisites.
Archaeozoology will give students practical and analytical skills in the identification and analysis of animal bones from archaeological sites. Students in the course will engage with current methodological and theoretical issues in the discipline, and develop a basic familiarity with the vertebrate skeleton using museum specimens, reference collections, and archaeological material. Participants will cultivate the ability to understand human behavior and human-environmental relationships through skeletal remains of ancient animals 鈥� including basic taphonomy, quantitative analysis/data visualization, and animal paleopathology. Students will also learn best practices for the curation of faunal remains, and engage with new research direction and trends in archaeozoology, including 3D scanning and biomolecular techniques (isotopes, ancient DNA, and Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry). Each student will develop an original research project that complements their existing academic goals. Those interested in the course can email william.taylor@colorado.edu for more information. Space is limited. Museum & Field Studies (MFS) students should contact the Graduate Program Coordinator, Janet Bensko, at janet.bensko@colorado.edu to enroll.
Instructor: Bailey Duhe虂
Who invented race? Do police really target communities of color? Are race and ethnicity the same thing? Is white privilege bad?
If you鈥檝e asked any of these questions and want a space to work through the answers, ANTH 4020: Brown Studies is for you.
This is an introduction to Critical Race Theory course that uses mixed-race experiences in the United States as examples to answer, discuss, and problematize race as we understand it today.
Want more information? Got a question? bailey.duhe@colorado.edu
Maymester 2021
Professor Laura DeLuca
ADVENTURING AS AN ARMCHAIR ANTHROPOLOGIST
Education Abroad鈥檚 is going virtual this summer! Students on this virtual program will the opportunity to learn about East African cultures, immerse themselves in the Swahili language, and connect with amazing people on the African continent. Dr. Laura DeLuca, known to students as Mwalimu (Swahili for teacher), will teach the course along with a number of guest lecturers. These lecturers include top experts in their field, from safari guides to indigenous leaders, many of whom are on the ground to show students the location they鈥檙e learning about. For example, Edward Loure, the winner of the Goldman Environmental Prize will share his wisdom about Maasai land rights with our group.
Students on the program will earn 3 upper-division anthropology credits over the course of the two and a half week program during Maymester. While students may not spend their summer wandering the winding streets of Arusha and Zanzibar, they can still gain meaningful cultural experiences, expand their social network, earn CU course credit, and all at a fraction of the on-site program cost. Are you interested in learning more about the nuts and bolts of global work and anthropology field immersion? This program is a great option for any student looking to dip their toes into an international experience and stand out to future employers whether they鈥檙e looking to pursue international development, environmental conservation work, medicine, law, education or the corporate world. Learn the skills that will serve you in a variety of global settings.
Key benefits of taking the Global Seminar Tanzania:
Learn more at the on Wednesday, January 27th at 3:30 PM.
ANTH 4760 Ethnography of Southeast Asia
Professor Carla Jones
Join us as we discover the anthropological scholarship on Southeast Asia, a region with some of the highest ethnic, linguistic, and cultural diversity in the world. From the Buddhist cosmological origins of modern Thailand to the gendered dynamics of market trade in Java, the politics of reproduction in Singapore, the allure of pop music in English, the socialist and spiritual aesthetics of apartment design in Vietnamese apartments, and the globalization of mass manufacturing to export processing zones, Southeast Asia provides fascinating examples of cultural vibrancy. Welcome!
Advanced Osteology provides an intensive introduction to human osteology and the methods used to interpret the human skeleton. Students will learn:
Students will be evaluated on in-class lab worksheets (40% of grade), weekly quizzes (30%), osteology sketchbook (25%), and attendance (5%).
Please email Christina Ryder (christina.ryder@colorado.edu) with any questions or concerns.
How do humans and other-than-humans co-exist? How is existence constituted through relations among a diversity of objects and beings? These questions have newly animated strains of scientific, humanistic, and post- humanist analysis over the past two decades. Join us to consider how these approaches differ and inform each other in the field of anthropology. This course qualifies as a bridging seminar in the graduate curriculum for the Department of Anthropology, bringing together scholarship from archaeology and cultural anthropology. Broadly, it asks how the other-than-human is conceived, respected, managed, produced, or feared by the human, across historical periods and contexts. How might mountains, rocks, trees, rivers, mass- produced commodities, buildings, sacred objects, spirits, fungi, or viruses visibly or invisibly make humans?
We will consider perspectives from semiotics, physics, assemblage theory, phenomenology, and material sciences to explore debates regarding ontology, representation, temporality and spatiality. We will bridge fields and cases, such as Christian conversion in Indonesia, socialist building projects in Vietnam, ancient political systems in the Caucasus, burial practices in Madagascar, ontologies of other beings in the Amazon and Andes, and mushrooms!
Computational methods play a significant role in modern statistical data analysis due to the ever-increasing data sizes, complexity, and the evolution of more robust statistical analyses. This course is an introduction to the modern, computationally intensive methods in statistics focusing on data analysis and inference for anthropology.
Students in this class will be able to use R to read and create data frames, as well as understand how different data objects such as vectors, dictionaries, and matrices better serve various forms of analyses. Students will also understand the fundamental functioning of data summarization and visualization in R. Over the course of the semester, students will be able to apply this knowledge to their own data sets. Finally, we will spend some time discussing data visualization, including common data reductions such as Linear Regression and Principal Component Analysis.
