Courses

ANTH 100 African Perspectives on Justice, Human Rights, and Renewal

This team-taught course introduces students to some of the experiences, cultural beliefs, values, and voices shaping contemporary Africa. Students focus on the impact of climatic, cultural, and geopolitical diversity; the politics of ethnicity, religion, age, race, and gender and their influence on daily life; and the forces behind contemporary policy and practice in Africa. The course forges students’ critical capacity to resist simplistic popular understandings of what is taking place on the continent and works to refocus their attention on distinctively “African perspectives.” Students design a research project to augment their knowledge about a specific issue within a particular region. The course is primarily for first- and second-year students with little critical knowledge of Africa and serves as the introduction to the General Education concentration Considering Africa (C022).

ANTH 101 Cultural Anthropology

An introduction to the study of a wide variety of social and cultural phenomena. The argument that the reality we inhabit is a cultural construct is explored by examining concepts of race and gender, kinship and religion, the individual life cycle, and the nature of community. Course materials consider societies throughout the world against the background of the emerging global system and the movement of refugees and immigrants.

ANTH 107 Sensory Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of Our Senses in the World

This course considers the senses and sensory perception from a sociocultural perspective. How do our senses help us to order and organize our world? How are our senses themselves ordered and organized? In what ways might our senses be intertwined with the world in which we live? This course considers these questions in a range of different contexts, and it challenges students to think about the senses as socially and culturally constructed pathways between bodies and worlds. In doing so, the course directs our attention to the politics of the senses: namely, how worlds of perception and experience are opened for us, closed to us, and shaped by forces beyond our immediate control.

ANTH 108 Medical Anthropology

This course introduces students to medical anthropology, an interdisciplinary approach exploring how humans differently define and experience life, death, illness, wellness, health, sex, and pain throughout the world and over time. The course begins with classic texts in medical anthropology and ethnomedicine and shifts to more contemporary work in critical medical anthropology. There is a special focus in the course on global inequalities in health and medicine, on cross-cultural perspectives on pain and suffering, and on understanding biomedicine as a cultural system.

ANTH 114 Introduction to Classical Archaeology

Physical remains from the ancient world – from Troy to Athens to Rome – are important for reconstructing daily life in past societies. The goal of the course is to familiarize you with the archaeology of the ancient Greco-Roman world and the social contexts that gave rise to important sites, monuments, and objects. We will use archaeology and material culture as a lens to explore Greek and Roman society, values, political and religious institutions. We will examine critically how Greek and Roman sites and monuments have been appropriated over the centuries by different groups and why these sites continue to fascinate archaeologists, collectors, and the general public millennia later.

ANTH 125 Critical Perspectives on Sport and Society

This course explores the connections between sports and a broad range of anthropological concerns, including colonialism, resistance and domination, race, and gender. Students consider questions such as: Why do we play the sports we do? Why are sporting performances socially significant, and how have groups and political regimes used this significance to suit their needs? What can teams, players, and brands tell us about how we (and others) see the world? Addressing topics from cricket in the Caribbean to boxing in Chicago, students reappraise conventional sporting narratives and use sports to analyze the social and historical conditions in which they occur. In doing so, students think critically about their own sporting experiences and develop a deeper and subtler understanding of the ways that societies make sports and sports make societies.

ANTH 203 Cultural and Creative Expressions of the American Indian

This course examines American Indian expression and settler colonialism in North American through a lens of Tribal Critical Theory and Critical Race Theory. The course establishes an understanding of settler-colonialism and its functions and impacts, including federal “Indian policy,” the development of hegemonic control of all facets of American Indian society and its overreaches regarding tribal affiliation, racial tensions, land allocation, subsistence rights, and access, and their many intersects. Students consider dominant narratives, aided by critical theories, including hypotheses of the “peopling of the Americas,” and the way in which the dominant hegemonic narrative has established regional histories and experiences of North American Indigenous/Native/First Nations people with persistent implications.

ANTH 205 Citizenship, Borders, and Belonging

Increasing levels of globalization have prompted scholars to predict the diminishing importance of national borders. Contrarily, in the age of detention, deportation, and refugee crises, citizenship has gained renewed importance. In this course, students explore different ways of organizing citizenship around the world from multiple perspectives including those of refugees, visa seekers, unauthorized immigrants, soldiers, and mothers, among others. They examine how formal framings of rights are shaped by a politics of representation where the ideal citizen is crafted and contested. They also consider how those excluded from legal and cultural citizenship form alternative structures of belonging.

ANTH 207 Race, Racism, and Redress

Recent events in the United States and around the globe have prompted a re-examination of the role of race in contemporary life. Since its inception, anthropology has been concerned with questions of human origins, diversity, and community. In this course, students examine the origins of racial thought, its transformation over time, and the ways race and intersecting identifications shape everyday life. Through ethnographies of global cultures, students explore how race takes form and meaning in different contexts. Throughout, they learn how to think critically about their own identities and beliefs and engage with strategies for redress.

ANTH 209 Pixelated Parts: Race, Gender, Video Games

This course considers the politics of race, gender, and sexuality as they emerge in video games and their surrounding ecosystems: in games and their conditions and processes of production, in the representations and spaces of identification that come with the play of games, in the communities that players generate among themselves, and in the affective and material interactions that result when players look at a screen, hold a controller, type on a keyboard, and move a mouse.

ANTH 210 Ethnographic Methods

This course is designed to introduce students to ethnographic research methods and ethics. Student begin with a review of early ethnographic “fieldwork” methods-a defining feature of anthropology that includes conducting research in situ to create an in-depth and complex understanding of cultural practices, social processes, and the human condition. While drawing on a variety of interdisciplinary sources, students critically examine cultural anthropology’s primary methods: participant observation, qualitative interviewing, archival research, writing fieldnotes, visual media (photography, drawing, film) and apply some of these tools to ethnographic projects over the course of the semester. This course also builds from decolonial methods from a wide-range of historically marginalized perspectives and, as such, will interrogate the politics of knowledge production, which include research collection, analysis, and representation. Throughout the course, students reflect on the ethical dimensions of conducting research with human subjects, considering how social issues impact a diversity of communities within and outside of the U.S., as well as how communities make sense of and develop responses to social issues. Ultimately, this course seeks not just to provide students with a toolkit of ethnographic methods, but also to enable them to think expansively about the politics of those methods and the conditions in which those methods are used.

ANTH 212 How Music Performs Culture: Introduction to Ethnomusicology

An introduction to the field of ethnomusicology, the study of “music as culture.” Emphasis is on the interdisciplinary character of the field, and the diverse analytical approaches to music making undertaken by ethnomusicologists over time. The centrality of fieldwork and ethnography to the discipline is also a core concept of the course. Through readings, multimedia, and discussion, students examine relationships among ethnomusicology, musicology, anthropology, and world music, and consider the implications of globalization to the field as a whole. Students explore applied music learning as well as performance as a research technique through participation in several hands-on workshops with the Bates Gamelan Ensemble.

ANTH 214 Afro-Latinx Diasporas in the United States

Over the last two decades, Afro-Latinx culture and history has become a rich area of study. Emphasizing ethnographic approaches, this course examines how racial formations, gender and national belonging have historically and recently intersected in the production and representation of Blackness within Latinx spaces. Students draw from decolonial frameworks and use different media to critically analyze how anti-Blackness rooted in the myth of racial democracy shapes Afro-Latinx cultures in the U.S. Recommended background: coursework in Africana, anthropology, gender and sexuality studies, or Latin American and Latinx studies. Crosslisted in Africana, anthropology, and Latin American and Latinx studies.

ANTH 215 Death and Burial in Ancient Rome

This course will examine the historical and archaeological aspects of death and burial in the Roman world from c. 150 BCE – 300 CE, in order to understand how the Romans cared for, disposed of, and commemorated the dead. We will explore culturally-specific attitudes to death, grief, mourning and funerals, alongside the physical monuments that commemorate the deceased. Geographically, we will focus on Italy, although case studies will span the Mediterranean world. Together, we will investigate Roman funerary rituals and follow the body on its journey from the world of the living to that of the dead, while exploring new narratives about death in different classes of ancient (and modern) society.

ANTH 216 Indigenous American Photography

The practice of photography has a complicated history with regards to Indigenous American communities and cultures. The extensive photographs of Indigenous Americans created by Edward Curtis even now hold sway over America’s collective imaging of Indigenous American culture. And yet the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries are rich with photographies of Indigenous Americans, representing themselves through the medium, new and vibrant ways of seeing, understanding, and representing Indigenous American cultures and histories. In this course, we begin with an overview study of how the process of colonization (specifically as it occurred in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the era after the invention of photography), deployed the camera and photography to assert discursive control over Indigenous Americans. From that painful history, we move into study of the later twentieth century and early twenty-first century studying lens-based photographic and filmic works of contemporary Indigenous American artists. The goal of the course is to explore and better understand how the photographic image, as leveraged by Indigenous Americans, redresses and decolonizes the social landscape of our United States, and to honor the art works of these photographers.

ANTH 217 Indigenous Arts

This course examines traditional and contemporary Indigenous artistic production, and investigates the multiple webs of meaning and social worlds within which native practitioners and their creative productions exist. A diverse range of contemporary art practices –- including painting, photography, film, music, performance, fashion, and new media -– are considered in relation to key aspects of cultural, political, and social lives of Indigenous peoples. Students analyze, among other things, art as particular expressions of Indigenous cosmologies, the entanglement of Primitivism and modernity, art and native sovereignty, capitalism and Indigenous cultural futures, art and value in the marketplace, tourist art and the value of authenticity, art and national identity, and colonial and postcolonial art. Additionally, students engage with recent scholarship on decolonization and Indigenous studies, and current events related to the theme of the course.

ANTH 225 Rituals, Sentiments, and Gods: Religion in Ancient Greece

An anthropological approach to ancient Greek religion in which archeological, literary, and art-historical sources are examined to gain an understanding of religion in ancient Greek society. Topics explored include cosmology, polytheism, mystery cults, civic religion, ecstasy, sacrifice, pollution, dreams, and funerary customs.

ANTH 226 Ethnographic Film

This course looks at the development of ethnographic film from an anthropological lens and from international perspectives. Starting with the advent of the documentary and concluding with ethnographic new media, we will investigate how, why, and to what end film has been used as a tool by anthropologists and the communities that they work with to expand discussions about the modern world. Topics include filmmaking as a methodology for social scientists, the connections between ethnographic film and self-determination efforts in minority communities, and critical examinations of media making practices, onscreen and off, and the global impact these factors have had.

ANTH 229 The Anthropology of Media

This course examines the social and political life of media and how it makes a difference in the daily lives of people as a practice—in production, reception, and/or circulation. It introduces some key concepts in social theory, such as ideology, hegemony, the public sphere, and the nation, which have been critical to the study of media across disciplines. This class provides an overview of the increasing theoretical attention paid to the mass media by anthropologists, and focuses on concrete ethnographic examples. It examines cross-culturally how mass media have become the primary means for the circulation of symbolic forms across time and space, as well as how these forms are crucial to the constitution of subjectivities, collectivities, and histories in the contemporary world. Prerequisite(s): any course in Anthropology.

ANTH 231 Money and Magic: Anthropological Exploration of Contemporary Capitalism

This course examines the more magical and relational aspects of contemporary economy, markets, and capitalism. First, students examine ideas often taken for granted about nature, humans, and nonhumans that shape cultural understandings of “economy” in American capitalism. Then they explore economic practices, ideal subjects, and the production of economic “others” in contemporary capitalism(s) around the world, past and present. Through readings and use of various media (film, TikTok, Twitter, etc.) students explore how economy is cultural, relational, and ultimately a bit “magical.”

ANTH 238 Culture, Conflict, and Change in Latin America

Over 400 million Latin Americans share a common language, but the region’s racial, ethnic, geographical, and cultural diversity complicates a singular continental identity. This course surveys the anthropological scholarship on the diverse lifeways in Latin America and the Caribbean. Images and texts drawn from distinct locales considers how contrasting anthropological perspectives from the region’s peoples, histories, and contemporary challenges. Of particular concern are the ways legacies of colonialism shape both Latin America and anthropology. Additional topics of interest include indigenous and Afro-Latinx resistance and expression; immigration, transnationalism, and deportation; sex, gender, and sex work.

ANTH 242 Environment, Human Rights, and Indigenous Peoples

This course looks at the complex intersection between environmentalism, the human rights movement, and indigenous politics. Starting with the premise that settler colonialism is not a past event but rather a structure that continues to shape societies worldwide, students consider topics including the emergence and growth of the global indigenous movement; the politics of (environmental) representation; resource conflicts such as bioprospecting and biopiracy, climate change, wildlife conservation, and extractive industries; and indigenous calls for self-determination and decolonization. Prerequisite(s): one of the following: ANTH 101 or ENVR 204.

ANTH 280 Ethnographic Explorations (Special Topics in Anthropology)

Through the critical reading and analysis of ethnographic materials including books and articles, film and video, and other forms of representation, students will explore contemporary anthropological work in a particular area of interest. Students will also build a methodological toolkit for investigating complex social problems from an anthropological perspective. Special topic for Winter 2024: The Anthropology of Food and Eating. Prerequisite(s): ANTH 101.

ANTH 298 Musical Ethnography: Writing Music Culture

This course focuses on ethnomusicological research methods with an emphasis on the fieldwork experience. Students design and undertake an innovative field research project that reflects an understanding of the current philosophical underpinnings, ethical considerations, and approaches to ethnography within the discipline. Developing a feasible research problem and forging logical relationships between project design components are emphasized. Processes of participant observation, interviewing, and various techniques of documentation become part of the student ethnographer’s toolkit. Students analyze and interpret their gathered materials from within a selected theoretical perspective, culminating in a final multimedia document. Recommended background: course work in anthropology, ethnomusicology, or music.

ANTH 305 Art, Power, and Politics

An anthropological examination of the relationship among art, power, and politics. What can the artistic works of various societies say about their worlds that other creations cannot? What claims can art make about the workings of power, and what artistic techniques does power itself employ? Students consider these and other questions from a number of different perspectives, including the politics of perception, the place of art in modern life, the artistry of terror, the art of protest and propaganda, and the dream of building a beautiful regime. Recommended background: familiarity with classical social theory, especially Marx, is encouraged but not necessary. Prerequisite(s): one course in Africana, American studies, anthropology, art and visual culture, or gender and sexuality studies.

ANTH 307 Spaces of Black Liberation

This course examines Black Feminisms in the Americas through an anthropological lens. Using decolonial frameworks, students engage with media created by Black womxn with an emphasis on Brazil and the United States. They analyze how Black communities exercise everyday forms of resistance through knowledge sharing, communal care, art (music, visual and performance), refusal, abolition, and other forms of social and political activism. Prerequisite(s), which may be taken concurrently: one course in Africana, anthropology, gender and sexuality studies, or sociology. Recommended background: coursework in the humanities or social sciences. Crosslisted in Africana, Anthropology, and Gender and Sexuality Studies.

ANTH 308 Feminist and Queer Ethnography

This course introduces students to ethnographic research methods by exploring how interdisciplinary queer and feminist scholars have engaged and challenged traditional anthropology. Students consider the dynamics of fieldwork, the ethics of research, and the production of anthropological knowledge through an engagement with the history of feminism and queer theory in the discipline as well as with contemporary debates about the possibilities and constraints of ethnography. Students design their own projects and conduct mini-ethnographies throughout the semester. Course topics include race, gender, and sexuality; embodiment; colonization; the cultures of biomedicine; the anthropology of reproduction; and multispecies ethnography.

ANTH 315 Queering Capitalism: Sexual Politics and Properties of Economic Life

In this class, students investigate the history of the term queer(ing) in anthropology, and explore the intersectional relationship between LGBTQ+ people, theory, anthropology, and economics by “queering capitalism”. Students engage ethnographic accounts of LGBTQ lives and films and representations of cultures and economy in media that point to the significant relationship between queerness and capitalism. We look at capitalisms queer relationships and formations often “under the covers” in mainstream economic anthropology to investigate the role of heteronormativity in studies of the family, kinship, relationships, and sexuality in global capitalist contexts. We then look at ethnographic accounts – stories and studies of everyday lives – that challenge our taken-for-granted views and “queer” our understandings of capitalism. Recommended background: ANTH 101 or GSS 100.

ANTH 324 Ethnographic Filmmaking: Multimedia Storytelling for Social Change

This course explores documentary and ethnographic filmmaking through hands-on production and engagement with key issues in anthropology. Activities include in-class workshops and field explorations for final ethnographic film or media projects with an emphasis on activist anthropology and field recording. Students learn by doing, using ethnographic methods such as participant-observation, interviewing, data visualization, digital textual analysis, and film/audio/podcast recording. This class includes group activities, reading ethnographies, watching films/media, site visits, and guest tutorials in audio/visual media production. Students apply what they learn in class to document their cultural worlds at Bates and in Maine, taking care to mobilize anthropological tools to “situate” themselves in domains of power while creating media that examines core social issues of our time. The course concludes with presentations of multimedia projects for members of the Bates community.

ANTH 333 Culture and Interpretation

Beginning with a consideration of symbolic anthropology as it developed in the 1960s and 1970s, this course surveys critiques of the symbolic turn in anthropology and its use of the culture concept. Emphasis is given to history, political economy, and transnational social currents. Prerequisite(s): prior course work in anthropology.

ANTH 360 Independent Study

ANTH 365 Special Topics

ANTH 441 History of Anthropological Theory

A consideration of some of the major theories in the development of the field of anthropology, with an emphasis on the fundamental issues of orientation and definition that have shaped and continue to influence anthropological thought. Topics include cultural evolution, the relationship between the individual and culture, the nature-nurture debate, British social anthropology, feminist anthropology, and anthropology as cultural critique.

ANTH 457 Senior Thesis

Students participate in individual and group conferences in connection with the writing of the senior thesis. Majors writing an honors thesis register for ANTH 457 in the fall semester and 458 in the winter semester. Prerequisite(s): approval by the department of a thesis prospectus prior to registration.

ANTH 458 Senior Thesis

Individual and group conferences in connection with the writing of the senior thesis. Majors writing an honors thesis register for both ANTH 457 in the fall semester and 458 in the winter semester. One course credit is given for each registration. Majors writing a one semester thesis normally register for ANTH 458. Prerequisite(s): approval by the department of a thesis prospectus prior to registration.

ANTH S11 Bordering Hispaniola: Blackness, Mixture, and Nation in the Dominican Republic

This course explores Dominican identity and its relation to ideas of nation vis-à-vis the island’s shared border with Haiti. Before departing for Santo Domingo, students consider the contexts of colonialism, state formation, and labor migration that shape contemporary Dominican identities. In the Dominican Republic, students visit key sites in the African and Haitian diasporas in the country. Further, they examine performance and popular culture as key sites of antiracist engagement. Students employ participatory ethnographic methods and map making to examine key themes of identity, performance, and resistance. Cross-listed in Africana, anthropology, and Latin American and Latinx studies.

ANTH S12 Race, Gender, and the Practices and Politics That Move Videogames From Imagination to Reality

Before videogames reach the market, levels must be designed, characters drawn, narratives written, and mechanics coded. Before that, videogames must be imagined, tested, and pitched. This course is designed to allow students to experience for themselves those earliest stages of videogame development, when games move from idea to collaborative project. After working through some of the most influential scholarship on the politics of videogames and their design, and hearing from several industry experts about their experiences in the field, students form groups and work collaboratively to develop pitch materials for an imagined game. Groups pitch these ideas to each other at the end of the term, and each student submits an autoethnographic account of their experiences on their “development team.” Whether the pitched games strike students as viable or not, they leave the course with a deepened understanding of the complexities of game design and the politics that infuse the process.

ANTH S20 The Anthropology of Plants and Fungi

What kinds of social lives do plants and fungi lead in relation to humans, and humans in relation to plants and fungi? How do humans, plants, and fungi communicate? This course brings anthropological perspectives to these questions, and considers how language mediates this relationality. This course also examines how the category of plant––and increasingly the fungi––carries a political charge, as well as new multispecies collaborative potentials. Topics include traditional Indigenous knowledge and intellectual property; biodiversity and conservation; colonization and sovereignty; language, personhood, and the construction of human/more-than-human social identities. Particular attention is paid to contemporary issues around plant and fungi use in Maine.

ANTH S21 Economic Ecologies: Anthropology, Digital Humanities, and Climate Change in the North Atlantic

This course provides a multidisciplinary introduction to the north of Iceland as a unique site to explore culture and nature from the medieval era to the present. Students examine local knowledges and folklore to better understand the rapidly changing climate. They investigate how locals work with global scholars to document and better understand humans’ relationship to the natural world, using interdisciplinary tools from climate and social sciences, medieval and premodern studies, and digital media studies. Students apply what they learn by documenting the cultural and economic ecologies around them at Bates and in Maine through ethnographic and digital humanities methods. Recommended background: prior coursework in anthropology and/or environmental studies.

ANTH S22 Culture and Power

This course explores the relationship between cultural practices and power through media that range from academic texts and photography to graphic novels and theater. The course draws from global, cross-cultural examples to address topics such as the afterlives of slavery, postcolonialism, immigration, obstetric violence, racial inequality, and media representations. Students gain an understanding of the key interests and methods driving cultural anthropology. In the final project, students have the opportunity to expand on a course topic through the medium of their choice.

ANTH S24 From Sagas to Memes: Anthropology of Vikings in the Digital Age

This course uses an anthropological and intersectional lens to unpack the concept of “the Viking ” in history, literature, archaeology, politics, video games, television and film, social media and contemporary popular culture. We examine Icelandic sagas, Marvel Studio’s Thor franchise, the role of “Viking Bankers” in the 2008 global financial crisis, the Charlottesville Rally, the rise of online neopagan extremism, and the 2021 White House insurrection. We unpack the social and political consequences of representing Norse peoples of “the Viking age” and learn about Norse cultures in and beyond the North Atlantic. We trace the rise of online communities, digital medievalism, and the role of social media and meme culture in representations of “Vikings.” Students explore interdisciplinary scholarship and activism that confronts racist, sexist, ableist, and anti-indigenous images of the Viking age and work together to create multimedia projects.

ANTH S50 Independent Study

ANTH s31 Landscape Ethnography

Environmental anthropologists, geographers and political ecologists have long been preoccupied with understanding the ways in which seemingly “natural” landscapes are actually the result of complex social histories. Landscape ethnography is the approach we take in this class to understand the entangled human and ecological histories of place, and challenge dichotomies of nature and culture. Informed by multispecies, interspecies and more-than-human perspectives across the social sciences and humanities, this class enables students an explorative and creative space to produce a landscape ethnography.

AVC 278 At the Cross-Roads: Art & Migration

This course examines entanglements between artistic expression and the movement of people, ideas, and capital across the globe between the 19th and 21st centuries. Addressing art’s relationships to these forms of movement, it focuses on the relationship between art and migration. The realities of which have de-linked art history from the nation-state and allowed for a recalibration between center and periphery. Drawing on interdisciplinary debates, this class explores current trends in artistic and cultural analysis, migration theory, and the politics of mobility through frameworks of decolonization and questions of identity. By looking at the circulation of material culture, ideas, and peoples, students consider art in relation to border, home, exile, and resistance. They analyze the multiple temporalities created by migration and intersections of art, politics, migration, and the environment, examining how migratory movements have reshaped art, culture, and publics in recent decades.

CMS 215 Death and Burial in Ancient Rome

This course will examine the historical and archaeological aspects of death and burial in the Roman world from c. 150 BCE – 300 CE, in order to understand how the Romans cared for, disposed of, and commemorated the dead. We will explore culturally-specific attitudes to death, grief, mourning and funerals, alongside the physical monuments that commemorate the deceased. Geographically, we will focus on Italy, although case studies will span the Mediterranean world. Together, we will investigate Roman funerary rituals and follow the body on its journey from the world of the living to that of the dead, while exploring new narratives about death in different classes of ancient (and modern) society.

CMS S24 From Sagas to Memes: Anthropology of Vikings in the Digital Age

This course uses an anthropological and intersectional lens to unpack the concept of “the Viking ” in history, literature, archaeology, politics, video games, television and film, social media and contemporary popular culture. We examine Icelandic sagas, Marvel Studio’s Thor franchise, the role of “Viking Bankers” in the 2008 global financial crisis, the Charlottesville Rally, the rise of online neopagan extremism, and the 2021 White House insurrection. We unpack the social and political consequences of representing Norse peoples of “the Viking age” and learn about Norse cultures in and beyond the North Atlantic. We trace the rise of online communities, digital medievalism, and the role of social media and meme culture in representations of “Vikings.” Students explore interdisciplinary scholarship and activism that confronts racist, sexist, ableist, and anti-indigenous images of the Viking age and work together to create multimedia projects.

FYS 484 Making Sense: The Social Significance of Sensory Perception

How do our senses help us to order and organize our world? How are our senses themselves ordered and organized? In what ways might our senses be intertwined with the world in which we live? This course considers these questions in a range of different contexts, and it challenges students to think about the senses as socially and culturally constructed pathways between bodies and worlds. In doing so, this course directs attention to the politics of the senses: how worlds of perception and experience are opened for us, closed to us, and shaped by forces beyond our immediate control.

FYS 549 Race and Gender in Biomedicine

This course explores conceptualizations and representations of race and gender in health and medicine. Students begin by looking at the history of race, sex, and sexuality in Western science, especially in terms of how they have been articulated through multiple contexts involving infectious diseases. How does scientific thought and practice intersect with larger political and economic movements including colonization and imperialism? Then they discuss the uses of race and sex in contemporary biomedicine focusing on the following questions: How is inequality “written on the body”? How are categories of risk and susceptibility racialized and biologized? How are racism and sexism considered “underlying conditions” that powerfully shape whether or not people contract infectious diseases and who lives and who dies? The course focuses on global health disparities.

HIST 215 Death and Burial in Ancient Rome

This course will examine the historical and archaeological aspects of death and burial in the Roman world from c. 150 BCE – 300 CE, in order to understand how the Romans cared for, disposed of, and commemorated the dead. We will explore culturally-specific attitudes to death, grief, mourning and funerals, alongside the physical monuments that commemorate the deceased. Geographically, we will focus on Italy, although case studies will span the Mediterranean world. Together, we will investigate Roman funerary rituals and follow the body on its journey from the world of the living to that of the dead, while exploring new narratives about death in different classes of ancient (and modern) society.

REL S24 From Sagas to Memes: Anthropology of Vikings in the Digital Age

This course uses an anthropological and intersectional lens to unpack the concept of “the Viking ” in history, literature, archaeology, politics, video games, television and film, social media and contemporary popular culture. We examine Icelandic sagas, Marvel Studio’s Thor franchise, the role of “Viking Bankers” in the 2008 global financial crisis, the Charlottesville Rally, the rise of online neopagan extremism, and the 2021 White House insurrection. We unpack the social and political consequences of representing Norse peoples of “the Viking age” and learn about Norse cultures in and beyond the North Atlantic. We trace the rise of online communities, digital medievalism, and the role of social media and meme culture in representations of “Vikings.” Students explore interdisciplinary scholarship and activism that confronts racist, sexist, ableist, and anti-indigenous images of the Viking age and work together to create multimedia projects.