Undergraduate Program

How do people live, love, work, pray,  parent, and play around the world? This course introduces students to the ways in which cultural anthropologists research human diversity. Students will learn about the different ways people understand racial categories and national identities; how they organize gender dynamics, sexualities, and families; how they generate belief systems and heal sickness; how they structure law, politics, and markets; and how they cope with transitions and upheaval. This course therefore raises questions about cultural diversity, social inequality, justice, and power, in a world shaped by global flows of people, money, media, and technology, and asks students to challenge their assumptions and consider alternative views. Open only to first-year and sophomore students.

Location

(MWF 10:25AM - 11:15AM)

This course is a general inquiry into the practice of ethnography, including fieldwork and writing, carried out through a close reading of materials that investigate the role of the built environment in the production of power and inequality. This course has two aims. First, it will enable students to analyze and evaluate how anthropologists create ethnographic knowledge. Second, it will introduce students to urban anthropology and in particular, to scholarship which examines the politics of urban restructuring (including urban renewal, gentrification, urban violence, deindustrialization, and other topics). Reading ethnographies that document struggles over space in the US and abroad, we will investigate different constellations of power, inequality, and resistance - - and how anthropologists study them. Prerequisite: ANTH 101 or permission of instructor.

Location

(MW 9:00AM - 10:15AM)

A survey of anthropological and philosophical debates over how to explain the apparently irrational beliefs of other people in terms of their different cultural perceptions of the same natural world, or in terms of their different experiences of ontologically different worlds. Readings include works by Durkheim, Evans-Pritchard, Levi-Strauss, Latour, Descola, Ingold, Willerslev, and Kohn.

Location

(MW 2:00PM - 3:15PM)

This course examines the arguments and the rhetoric of radical thinkers who have tried to change the world rather than just interpret it since the revolutions of 1848

Location

(MW 4:50PM - 6:05PM)

Some of the world's major music traditions, including theater music from China and Japan, Indian and Indonesian classical music, ritual and ceremonial music from West Africa, Eastern Europe, and the United States. Focuses on musical sound structures as well as social, political, and religious contexts for musical performances.

Location

(TR 2:00PM - 3:15PM)

Anyone can get old. Aging is not solely about older adults, but an issue with deep implications for the lives of individuals and families. This course introduces students to the key concepts, debates, and theories in the studies of aging. Using ethnographic cases in the Unites States, China, and other contexts, we will explore how economic, social, structural, and cultural factors shape the experiences and practices of aging. We will discuss connections between early-life experiences and later-life health and well-being. We will interrogate the assumptions and stereotypes about aging, the economic and intergenerational impacts of aging, common diseases and functional problems, and what roles family and community members play. Because of the multi-faceted nature of aging, this course will touch on a range of other important issues in medical anthropology as well, including care, chronic illness, mental health, and disability. Class materials include contemporary readings, films, documentaries, video clips, and newspaper articles. In addition to developing an understanding of the interdisciplinary nature of aging studies, students will have a chance to learn ethnographic methods and conduct first-hand research on the cultural aspects of aging in their own communities.

Location

(MW 3:25PM - 4:40PM)

Using a critical lens, this course examines how forms of social organization create good health for some groups and poor health for other groups. Pre-requisite: ANTH 101 or PHLT 101.

Location

(TR 11:05AM - 12:20PM)

This course is a deeper introduction to medical anthropology. It provides an overview of a broad range of key topics, theoretical approaches, and research methods in this rapidly expanding sub-field. Apart from exploring the medical systems of other cultures, we will reflect on biomedicine as a cultural artifact. How do patients and health professionals understand and experience states of health and illness? How is the body socially and culturally constructed? How do ideas, practices, and material artifacts of medicine shape our understandings of each other and ourselves as particular kinds of persons? What lies at the intersection of health, racism, poverty, and other social inequalities? How can we think of health care differently by looking at alternative visions of care in other places? Key topics covered include cultural interpretations of sickness and healing, social determinants of health, iatrogenesis, global epidemics, addiction, care, and the training of medical professionals. This course is meant to help students have a better grasp of the major concepts and theoretical approaches in medical anthropology, and enable students to interrogate their own beliefs and experiences of sickness and bodies, as well as the causes of human suffering and vulnerabilities.

Location

(MW 10:25AM - 11:40AM)

What is progress? Are universal theories of development possible? This course introduces students to major trends in the anthropological study of international development through case studies from around the world. Topics include: indigenous people and development, debates over cultural property and cultural loss, sustainability, and the role of cultural values in economic life.

Location

(TR 9:40AM - 10:55AM)

Mental illness (or madness) has long been of interest to sociocultural, medical, and psychological anthropologists, in part because it can serve as a lens through which to understand difference or deviance across and within societies. In this course we will explore the ways mental illness is understood and experienced across different cultural contexts. We will begin with the long-standing anthropological insight that culture shapes how persons experience and respond to illness. In particular, given the proliferation of biological models of mental illness in our contemporary world, we will examine psychiatry as a culture of its own: we will explore how ‘psy’ knowledge is created and how they transform over time and space; how persons inhabit or are made to inhabit diagnostic categories; and how various social actors experiment with diagnostic categories and therapeutic practices—such as psychopharmaceuticals, religious and spiritual rituals, and psychotherapy. Additionally, our survey of the literature considers social epidemiology, looking at the intersections of psychic distress and various social identities—such as gender, life-stage transitions, class, race, and immigration status. Thus, we will develop a comprehensive understanding of mind and mental illness as shaped by both cultural contexts and social structures, enriching anthropological theories of subjectivity and psychiatric theories of mental illness and mental health.

Location

(MW 12:30PM - 1:45PM)

In light of the recent revival of populism and authoritarian politics around the world, much attention has centered around the emergence of an era of “post-truth.” This course explores the mediation practices that shape this contemporary moment and the social, material, and political-economic conditions that they result from and foster. We will examine how knowledge is produced and travels in ways we might consider non-normative and the effects that these forms of mediation have in the world, shaping subjectivities, forms of political mobilization, and their mutual relationships. 

The first part of the course analyzes some of the broader social conditions that shape the possibility of knowledge—the mediated quality of social life, the role of ideological and affective formations, and some of the blind spots that shape our modes of perception and sense-making. It also touches on some of the subtle forms of violence that permeate social worlds. The second part looks at the social lives of different “genres” of non-normative knowledge—including secrecy, spectacle, rumor, and conspiracy theory. We explore how these forms of knowledge travel, the kinds of affective dispositions attached to them, what notions of and relations to power they presuppose, how they seek to overcome or sustain uncertainty, and how they relate to normative forms of knowledge production. We finish the course by looking at a distinct set of genres of knowledge production and circulation—such as parody, humor, and fiction—and their creative modes of power subversion.

Location

(TR 11:05AM - 12:20PM)

This course explores the War on Drugs through the lens of US imperial politics. We will analyze how this war, conceived and orchestrated by the American state, largely unfolds as a violent conflict south of its border. We will do so by directing critical attention to different themes, including: 1) contemporary imperialism, both as a theoretical concept and an empirical phenomenon unfolding in the Western hemisphere; 2) the production, commodification, and consumption of particular psychoactive substances, including their political-economic relations, regimes of prohibition, and sociocultural effects; 3) the war’s violent consequences, particularly affecting racialized populations in the United States and Latin America. We will finish the course by considering peace efforts undertaken in the region, focusing on forms of transitional justice. The course’s overarching goal is for students to gain a critical perspective of the War on Drugs as situated in longstanding US warfare practices, as well as geopolitical and economic relations in the hemisphere.

Location

(TR 3:25PM - 4:40PM)

This course adopts an anthropological approach towards understanding the dramatic socio-cultural transformations that have followed in the wake of China’s post-Mao economic reforms. What happens when a society officially committed to economic and gender equality witnesses the rise of stark social divisions? Beginning with an historical overview of the key features of the Maoist and post-Mao periods, we will move on to examine such issues as the creation of a market economy, the rise of new social classes, rural to urban migration, changing ideologies of gender and sexuality, new attitudes towards education and work, transformations in family life, religious revival and conversion, and the influences of global popular culture and mass consumption, with an eye towards identifying both continuities and departures from the Maoist era. Throughout our discussions we will consider the implications of these changes for China’s political, social, and economic futures.

Location

(TR 12:30PM - 1:45PM)

This course uses social theories to frame current issues in global health. Readings include critiques of development and ethnographic methods. Pre-requisite: PHLT 101 or ANTH 101.

Location

(MW 10:25AM - 11:40AM)

This course covers topics in global history. For spring 2025:

Animal Cities: From Pizza Rat to Neil the Seal

What can our fascination with Pizza Rat’s herculean appetite or Neil the Seal’s traffic-jamming antics tell us about the relationships today between the beast and the borough, the human and the nonhuman? Why do we celebrate some urban wildlife while ignoring, reviling, and even exterminating others? This introduction to the interdisciplinary field of animal studies addresses these and other questions through recent scholarship on multispecies cities. The first part of the course surveys urban human-animal ecology from domestication to enclosure with an emphasis on the 19th and 20th centuries. In the second part, we ponder contemporary studies of interspecies contact, collision, and cohabitation, from macaques in Delhi and mosquitos in Dar es Salaam to capybaras in Buenos Aires and parakeets in London. Students will gain an understanding of the historical forces that have shaped everyday encounters with nonhuman animals, particularly as they concern matters of violence, intimacy, and justice. Alongside class discussions, we will collectively produce a ”subjective atlas” that explores the city of Rochester from the perspective(s) of its animal residents.

Location

(TR 9:40AM - 10:55AM)

While many of us may or may not live in cities today, their presence as central places for administrative, judicial, and social purposes is undeniable. Both the historical and archaeological record demonstrate the city is not a new phenomenon, but scholars debate over what actually constitutes a city, especially in the prehispanic Americas. To this end, we will read key texts about cities and urbanism that will help us better understand this debate. We will also discuss how recent anthropological approaches to studying cities have helped archaeologists better understand prehispanic urbanism and city-life.

Location

(TR 9:40AM - 10:55AM)

Our current resource-intensive economic practices have led to ecological and social crises, among them climate change, mass extinction, and vast wealth inequities.  Are there alternative practices that would instead promote human flourishing within planetary limits?  In this Advanced Topics course, students will use anthropological materials to imagine alternate ways of organizing economic life.  We will study classic economic anthropology texts alongside other ethnographic and historical materials to understand a cross-cultural range of economic practices.  We will read contemporary writing on degrowth, regenerative economies, reparations, and cooperatives; examine primary sources; and learn about local economic experiments through field trips and class visits.  In addition to weekly readings and discussions, students will propose, develop, and present a semester-long research project. 

Note: open to declared ANTH majors/minors who have taken ANTH 101 and a 200-level core course; graduate students by permission of instructor.

Location

(W 2:00PM - 4:40PM)

For ANTH 101, Being Human Cultural Anthropology. By application only. The TA program requires students to work in teams and to lead group discussion.

Location

( 7:00PM - 7:00PM)

Location

( 7:00PM - 7:00PM)

Location

( 7:00PM - 7:00PM)