2024-2025 Academic Year

Fall 2024

ANTH 220 Ethnography
Ethnography is a unique form of research through which we learn about people’s experiences in the world and their own perspectives in their everyday lives. Ethnographic research is done in any context, from rural farms, to urban train systems, from medical tourism networks, to nuclear power plants. This course examines ethnographic scholarship with attention to the methods of research. Students learn about the methods ethnographers employ in their work, how they use them, and the kinds of results those methods yield. Examples draw from ethnographic work on diverse topics and in varied contexts throughout the world. Students develop brief projects using some of the methods that are examined. Prerequisite: 101

ANTH 345 Life in the Anthropocene
Increased attention to human influences on Earth's climates and geology has given rise to a much-discussed Anthropocene epoch. Whether we locate the start of the epoch thousands of years ago with the origins of agriculture, with the industrial revolution, or more recently with nuclear bomb technologies, we can understand the label through rapid successions of record high temperatures and severe weather events, polar ice melts and rising sea levels, and astonishing numbers of extinctions, all of which play out in disparate ways across the globe. These changes call for new ways to understand how humans live in the world. In this course we examine what it means to be human in these times, and how people live in mutual and dynamic relationships with technologies, environments, and other species in ways that shape these processes and that are shaped by them. Our organizing frame will be ethnography, with examples drawn from throughout the world. Sustainability will be a persistent question during the semester.