Anthropology

The Anthropology Department:

Departmental Office: 452 Schermerhorn; 212-854-4552
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/anthropology

Director of Undergraduate Studies: 

Fall 2024

Professor Naor Ben-Yehoyada; 462 Schermerhorn Extension; 212 854-8936; nhb2115@columbia.edu

Spring 2025

Professor  María José de Abreu; 957 Schermerhorn Extension; 212-854-4752; md3605@columbia.edu    

Departmental Consultants (Archaeology):
Professor Hannah Chazin; 964 Schermerhorn Extension; 212-854-746; hc2986@columbia.edu 

The Study of Anthropology

Anthropology at Columbia is the oldest department of anthropology in the United States. Founded by Franz Boas in 1896 as a site of academic inquiry inspired by the uniqueness of cultures and their histories, the department fosters expansiveness of thought and independence of intellectual pursuit.

Cross-cultural interpretation, global socio-political considerations, a markedly interdisciplinary approach, and a willingness to think otherwise have formed the spirit of anthropology at Columbia. Boas himself wrote widely on pre-modern cultures and modern assumptions, on language, race, art, dance, religion, politics, and much else, as did his remarkable graduate students including, Ruth Benedict, Zora Neal Hurston, Edward Sapir, Manuel Gamio, Alfred Kroeber, Ella Deloria and Margaret Mead, among others.

In these current times of increasing global awareness, a spirit of mindful interconnectedness guides the department. Professors of anthropology at Columbia today write widely on colonialism and postcolonialism; on matters of gender, theories of history, knowledge, and power; on language, law, magic, mass-mediated cultures, modernity, and flows of capital and desire; on nationalism, ethnic imaginations, and political contestations; on material cultures and environmental conditions; on ritual, performance, and the arts; and on semiotics, linguistics, symbolism, and questions of representation. Additionally, they write across worlds of similarities and differences concerning the Middle East, China, Africa, the Caribbean, Japan, Latin America, South Asia, Europe, Southeast Asia, North America, and other increasingly transnational and technologically virtual conditions of being.

The Department of Anthropology traditionally offered courses and majors in three main areas: sociocultural anthropology, archaeology, and biological/physical anthropology. While the sociocultural anthropology program now comprises the largest part of the department and accounts for the majority of faculty and course offerings, archaeology is also a vibrant program within anthropology whose interests overlap significantly with those of sociocultural anthropology. Biological/physical anthropology has shifted its program to the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Biology. The Anthropology Department enthusiastically encourages cross-disciplinary dialogue across disciplines as well as participation in study abroad programs.

Sociocultural Anthropology 

At the heart of sociocultural anthropology is an exploration of the possibilities of difference and the craft of writing. Sociocultural anthropology at Columbia has emerged as a compelling undergraduate liberal arts major. Recently, the number of majors in sociocultural anthropology has more than tripled.

Students come to sociocultural anthropology with a wide variety of interests, often pursuing overlapping interests in, for example, performance, religion, writing, law, ethnicity, mass-media, teaching, language, literature, history, human rights, art, linguistics, environment, medicine, film, and many other fields, including geographical areas of interest and engagement. Such interests can be brought together into provocative and productive conversation with a major or concentration in sociocultural anthropology. The requirements for a major in sociocultural anthropology reflect this intellectual expansiveness and interdisciplinary spirit.

Archaeology 

Archaeologists study the ways in which human relations are mediated through material conditions, both past and present. Particular emphases in the program include the development of ancient states and empires, especially in the indigenous Americas; the impact of colonial encounters on communities in the American Southwest, the Levant and Africa; and human-animal relations in prehistory, religion and ritual, and the archaeology of the dead.

Themes in our teaching include the political, economic, social, and ideological foundations of complex societies; and archaeological theory and its relationship to broader debates in social theory, technology studies, and philosophy. Faculty members also teach and research on questions of museum representations, archaeological knowledge practices, and the socio-politics of archaeology. The program includes the possibility of student internships in New York City museums and archaeological fieldwork in the Americas and elsewhere.

In addition to the Major/Minor in Archaeology within the Anthropology Department, students can choose the interdisciplinary Major/Minor in Archaeology. All students with interests in archaeology are invited to sign up to the undergraduate archaeology list serv and are welcome to events organized by the Center for Archaeology.

Student Advising 

Majors and concentrators should consult the director of undergraduate studies when entering the department and devising programs of study. Students may also seek academic advice from any anthropology faculty member, as many faculty members hold degrees in several fields or positions in other departments and programs at Columbia. All faculty in the department are committed to an expansiveness of thought and an independence of intellectual pursuit and advise accordingly.

Coursework Taken Outside of Columbia

Undergraduate Research and Senior Thesis 

Department Honors and Prizes

Anthropology majors with a minimum GPA of 3.6 in the major who wish to write an honors thesis for departmental honors consideration may enroll in ANTH UN3999 SENIOR THESIS SEM IN ANTHROPOL. Students should have a preliminary concept for their thesis prior to course enrollment. Normally no more than 10% of graduating majors receive departmental honors in a given academic year.

Professors

  • Nadia Abu El-Haj (Barnard)
  • Lila Abu-Lughod
  • Partha Chatterjee, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology
  • Myron L. Cohen, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology
  • Zoe Crossland
  • Terence D’Altroy
  • Ralph L. Holloway, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology
  • Claudio Lomnitz, Department Chair
  • Mahmood Mamdani
  • Brinkley Messick
  • Rosalind Morris
  • Elizabeth Povinelli
  • Nan Rothschild (Barnard, emerita)
  • David Scott
  • Lesley A. Sharp (Barnard)
  • Michael Taussig, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology
  • Paige West (Barnard)

Associate Professors

  • Catherine Fennell
  • Severin Fowles (Barnard)
  • Marilyn Ivy
  • Brian Larkin (Barnard)
  • John Pemberton
  • Audra Simpson

Assistant Professors

  • Vanessa Agard-Jones
  • Naor Ben-Yehoyada
  • Hannah Rachel Chazin
  • Maria Jose de Abreu
  •  
  •  

Lecturers

  • Brian Boyd
  • Ellen Marakowitz
  •  

Adjunct Research Scholar

Guidance for Undergraduate Students in the Department

Grading

No course with a grade of D or lower can count toward the major or concentration. Only the first course that is to count toward the major or concentration can be taken Pass/D/Fail.

Courses

Courses offered in other departments count toward the major and concentration only when taught by a member of the Department of Anthropology. Courses from other departments not taught by anthropology faculty must have the approval of the director of undergraduate studies in order to count toward the major or concentration.

Undergraduate Programs of Study

Required Coursework for all Programs 

No one course is required for all Programs. ANTH 1002 is required for the Major and the Entry-Level Minor, but not for the Advanced Minor.

Major in Anthropology

The requirements for this program were modified on January 29, 2016.

The program of study should be planned as early as possible in consultation with the director of undergraduate studies.

The anthropology major requires 30 points in the Department of Anthropology.

Sociocultural Focus

Students interested in studying sociocultural anthropology are required to take the following courses:

ANTH UN1002THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURE
ANTH UN2004INTRO TO SOC & CULTURAL THEORY
ANTH UN2005THE ETHNOGRAPHIC IMAGINATION

Archaeology Focus

Students interested in studying archaeological anthropology are required to take the following courses:

ANTH UN1002THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURE
ANTH UN2004INTRO TO SOC & CULTURAL THEORY
ANTH UN2028THINK LIKE AN ARCHAEOLOGIST

NOTE: Students wishing to pursue an interdisciplinary major in archaeology should see the Archaeology section of this Bulletin.

Biological/Physical Focus

Students interested in studying this field should refer to the major in evolutionary biology of the human species in the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Biology.

Minor in Anthropology

The minor in Anthropology allows students to choose between two paths:

ANTH UN1002 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURE OR Two 2000-level courses 

In addition: any four (4) courses (or 3 courses, in the case of 2x2000 level) in the Anthropology department, in ethnomusicology, or taught by an Anthropology instructor Columbia or Barnard, regardless of department.

OR

ANTH UN2004 INTRO TO SOC & CULTURAL THEORY and

ANTH UN2005 THE ETHNOGRAPHIC IMAGINATION

In addition: any three (3) courses in the Anthropology department, in ethnomusicology, or taught by an Anthropology instructor at Columbia or Barnard, regardless of department.

For students who entered Columbia in or before the 2023-24 academic year

Concentration in Anthropology

The anthropology concentration requires 20 points in the Department of Anthropology.

Sociocultural Focus

Students interested in studying sociocultural anthropology are required to take the following course:

ANTH UN1002THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURE

Archaeology Focus

Students interested in studying archaeological anthropology are required to take the following course:

ANTH UN2028THINK LIKE AN ARCHAEOLOGIST

Biological/Physical Focus

Students interested in pursuing study in this field should refer to the concentration in evolutionary biology of the human species in the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Biology.

Fall 2024
Sociocultural Anthropology

ANTH UN1002 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURE. 3.00 points.

The anthropological approach to the study of culture and human society. Case studies from ethnography are used in exploring the universality of cultural categories (social organization, economy, law, belief system, art, etc.) and the range of variation among human societies

Fall 2024: ANTH UN1002
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ANTH 1002 001/00004 T Th 10:10am - 11:25am
263 Macy Hall
Clare Casey 3.00 63/90
Spring 2025: ANTH UN1002
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ANTH 1002 001/10586 M W 10:10am - 11:25am
309 Havemeyer Hall
Naor Ben-Yehoyada 3.00 70/120

ANTH UN1007 THE ORIGINS OF HUMAN SOCIETY. 3.00 points.

Mandatory recitation sections will be announced first week of classes.

An archaeological perspective on the evolution of human social life from the first bipedal step of our ape ancestors to the establishment of large sedentary villages. While traversing six million years and six continents, our explorations will lead us to consider such major issues as the development of human sexuality, the origin of language, the birth of “art” and religion, the domestication of plants and animals, and the foundations of social inequality. Designed for anyone who happens to be human

Fall 2024: ANTH UN1007
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ANTH 1007 001/00005 T Th 11:40am - 12:55pm
304 Barnard Hall
Camilla Sturm 3.00 71/90

ANTH UN2004 INTRO TO SOC & CULTURAL THEORY. 3.00 points.

This course presents students with crucial theories of society, paying particular attention at the outset to classic social theory of the early 20th century. It traces a trajectory of writings essential for an understanding of the social: from Saussure, Durkheim, Mauss, Weber, and Marx, on to the structuralist ethnographic elaboration of Claude Levi-Strauss and the historiographic reflections on modernity of Michel Foucault. We revisit periodically, reflections by Franz Boas, founder of anthropology in the United States (and of Anthropology at Columbia), for a sense of origins, an early anthropological critique of racism and cultural chauvinism, and a prescient denunciation of fascism. We turn as well, also with ever-renewed interest in these times, to the expansive critical thought of W. E. B. Du Bois. We conclude with Kathleen Stewart’s A Space on the Side of the Road--an ethnography of late-twentieth-century Appalachia and the haunted remains of coal-mining country--with its depictions of an uncanny otherness within dominant American narratives

Fall 2024: ANTH UN2004
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ANTH 2004 001/10726 M W 10:10am - 11:25am
633 Seeley W. Mudd Building
John Pemberton 3.00 36/60

ANTH UN2017 Mafias and Other Dangerous Affiliations. 3.00 points.

Regimes of various shapes and sizes tend to criminalize associations, organizations, and social relations that these ruling powers see as anathema to the social order on which their power depends: witches, officers of toppled political orders, alleged conspirators (rebels, traitors, terrorists, and dissidents), gangsters and mafiosi, or corrupt officers and magnates. Our main goal will be to understand how and under what conditions do those with the power to do so define, investigate, criminalize and prosecute those kinds of social relations that are cast as enemies of public order. We will also pay close attention to questions of knowledge – legal, investigative, political, journalistic, and public – how doubt, certainty, suspicion and surprise shape the struggle over the relationship between the state and society. The main part of the course is organized around six criminal investigations on mafia-related affairs that took place from the 1950s to the present (two are undergoing appeal these days) in western Sicily. After the introductory section, we will spend two weeks (four meetings) on every one of these cases. We will follow attempts to understand the Mafia and similarly criminalized organizations, and procure evidence about it. We will then expand our inquiry from Sicily to cases from all over the world, to examine questions about social relations, law, the uses of culture, and political imagination. *Although this is a social anthropology course, no previous knowledge of anthropology is required or presumed. Classroom lectures will provide necessary disciplinary background

Fall 2024: ANTH UN2017
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ANTH 2017 001/11493 M W 10:10am - 11:25am
614 Schermerhorn Hall
Naor Ben-Yehoyada 3.00 69/95

ANTH UN2028 THINK LIKE AN ARCHAEOLOGIST. 4.00 points.

$25 mandatory lab fee.

This course provides a comprehensive introduction to methods and theory in archaeology – by exploring how archaeologists work to create narratives about the past (and the present) on the basis on the material remains of the past. The course begins with a consideration of how archaeologists deal with the remains of the past in the present: What are archaeological sites and how do we ‘discover’ them? How do archaeologists ‘read’ or analyze sites and artifacts? From there, we will turn to the question of how archaeologists interpret these materials traces, in order to create narratives about life in the past. After a review of the historical development of theoretical approaches in archaeological interpretation, the course will consider contemporary approaches to interpreting the past

Fall 2024: ANTH UN2028
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ANTH 2028 001/10347 M W 10:10am - 11:25am
310 Fayerweather
Hannah Chazin 4.00 43/90

ANTH UN3007 ARCHAEOL BEFORE THE BIBLE. 3.00 points.

Please note that this is not a class on “biblical archaeology”. It is a course about the politics of archaeology in the context of Israel/Palestine, and the wider southwest Asia region. This course provides a critical overview of prehistoric archaeology in southwest Asia (or the Levant - the geographical area from Lebanon in the north to the Sinai in the south, and from the middle Euphrates in Syria to southern Jordan). It has been designed to appeal to anthropologists, historians, and students interested in the Ancient Mediterranean and Middle Eastern Studies. The course is divided into two parts. First, a social and political history of archaeology, emphasizing how the nature of current theoretical and practical knowledge has been shaped and defined by previous research traditions and, second, how the current political situation in the region impinges upon archaeological practice. Themes include: the dominance of "biblical archaeology" and the implications for Palestinian archaeology, Islamic archaeology, the impact of European contact from the Crusades onwards, and the development of prehistory

Fall 2024: ANTH UN3007
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ANTH 3007 001/10397 T Th 11:40am - 12:55pm
414 Pupin Laboratories
Brian Boyd 3.00 13/35

ANTH UN3040 ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY. 4.00 points.

Open to majors; all others with instructor's permission.

Prerequisites: an introductory course in anthropology.
Comprehensive and in-depth engagement with foundational and contemporary theoretical concepts and texts in Anthropology. Required of all Barnard students majoring in Anthropology (including specialized tracks). Permission of instructor required for non-majors. Not open to First Year students. Prerequisite: an introductory (1000 level) course in Anthropology

Fall 2024: ANTH UN3040
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ANTH 3040 001/00098 M W 10:10am - 11:25am
202 Milbank Hall
Brian Larkin, Alexander Maier 4.00 29/35

ANTH UN3091 Disability. 4.00 points.

This course centers disability in its many manifestations and meanings – as an embodied, social, and cultural experience, as an organizing discourse in local and global contexts, as an analytic framework, and as a position from which to approach, think about, and engage in the world. Together, we will seek to understand disability in diverse settings and contexts through ethnographic texts, autobiography, documentary film, and essays, drawing primarily from works in anthropology but also more broadly from the interdisciplinary traditions known as (Critical) Disability Studies. Throughout the semester, we will move between considering disability in more and less specific and categorical terms. We will ask what the stakes are – intellectually, socially, politically - for different ways of doing, thinking, and representing disability. What becomes apparent when we consider, say, the experiences of deaf young adults in India working together to learn Indian Sign Language, or physically disabled adults in the United States whose disabilities must be situated within histories of racialized poverty and urban neglect? What happens – what are the resonances and the tensions – when we put these settings into conversation? Through our engagements with materials analyzing these and many other instances, we will think together about what it means to study and think with disability from different disciplinary perspectives, different methods, and different media

Fall 2024: ANTH UN3091
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ANTH 3091 001/00099 T 2:10pm - 4:00pm
214 Milbank Hall
Elizabeth Green 4.00 14/14

ANTH UN3160 THE BODY AND SOCIETY. 4.00 points.

Not offered during 2023-2024 academic year.

Prerequisites: Non-anthropology majors require the instructor's permission.
As an introduction to the field of medical anthropology, this seminar addresses themes of health, affliction, and healing across sociocultural domains. Concerns include critiques of biomedical, epidemiological and other models of disease and suffering; the entwinement of religion and healing; technocratic interventions in healthcare; and the sociomoral underpinnings of human life, death, and survival. A 1000 level course in Anthropology is recommended as a prerequisite, although not required. Enrollment limited to 30. 4 units

Fall 2024: ANTH UN3160
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ANTH 3160 001/00101 F 11:00am - 12:50pm
227 Milbank Hall
Gina Jae 4.00 12/16

ANTH UN3356 EARTH WORKS: Anthropology, Art, Extraction. 3.00 points.

This undergraduate seminar is offered to students interested in the anthropological analysis of extractive economies and the social and political forms associated with them, as well as the arts through which they have been made the object of both investment and resistance. The course this semester will be focused on mining, and is organized along three axes: 1) mineral object; 2) socioeconomic form; and 3) aesthetics, with the latter including the arts of artisanal extraction, and literary, visual and media artistic practice

Fall 2024: ANTH UN3356
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ANTH 3356 001/10302 Th 4:10pm - 6:00pm
963 Ext Schermerhorn Hall
Rosalind Morris 3.00 8/25

ANTH UN3663 The Ancient Table: Archaeology of Cooking and Cuisine. 4.00 points.

Prerequisites: None Humans don’t just eat to live. The ways we prepare, eat, and share our food is a complex reflection of our histories, environments, and ideologies. Whether we prefer coffee or tea, cornbread or challah, chicken breast or chicken feet, our tastes are expressive of social ties and social boundaries, and are linked to ideas of family and of foreignness. How did eating become such a profoundly cultural experience? This seminar takes an archaeological approach to two broad issues central to eating: First, what drives human food choices both today and in the past? Second, how have social forces shaped practices of food acquisition, preparation, and consumption (and how, in turn, has food shaped society)? We will explore these questions from various evolutionary, physiological, and cultural viewpoints, highlighted by information from the best archaeological and historic case studies. Topics that will be covered include the nature of the first cooking, beer-brewing and feasting, writing of the early recipes, gender roles and ‘domestic’ life, and how a national cuisine takes shape. Through the course of the semester we will explore food practices from Pleistocene Spain to historic Monticello, with particular emphasis on the earliest cuisines of China, Mesoamerica, and the Mediterranean

Fall 2024: ANTH UN3663
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ANTH 3663 001/00100 W 12:10pm - 2:00pm
214 Milbank Hall
Camilla Sturm 4.00 15/15

ANTH UN3723 American Material Culture. 4 points.

Not offered during 2023-2024 academic year.

This seminar provides an intensive introduction to material culture analysis and its potential contributions to the study of American history. As such, our focus is methodological. In seminar discussions, we will consider both (1) key texts that give intellectual shape to the central questions in modern material culture studies and (2) published case studies demonstrating how to engage in serious object-based research. Seminar discussions will be supplemented by visits to three NYC museums (the American Museum of Natural History, the 9/11 Museum, and the Tenement Museum) as well as three laboratory practicums. Designed for both Archaeology/Anthropology and American Studies majors, as well as other students interested in using the methods of material culture analysis in original research projects. (Depending on the student’s choice of a research paper topic, this seminar also fulfills either the pre-1800, the 19th century, or the post-1900 Foundations requirement of the American Studies major.) No prerequisites.

Fall 2024: ANTH UN3723
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ANTH 3723 001/00096 T Th 2:40pm - 3:55pm
Ll001 Milstein Center
Severin Fowles 4 21/24

ANTH UN3725 Politics of Recognition. 4 points.

This course examines the contemporary history of struggles for recognition, reform and revolution as articulated around the politics of recognition. The course is genealogical in spirit, beginning with a set of texts that have provided the touchstone for contemporary theory and practices of politics and then moving to more recent engagements with the same.

Fall 2024: ANTH UN3725
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ANTH 3725 001/10329 T 2:10pm - 4:00pm
963 Ext Schermerhorn Hall
Elizabeth Povinelli 4 16/25

ANTH UN3811 TOXIC. 4.00 points.

It is no secret by now that we live in a toxic sea. Every day, in every place in this world, we are exposed to an unknown number of contaminants, including those in the places that we live, the air that we breathe, the foods that we eat, the water that we drink, the consumer products that we use, and in the social worlds that we navigate. While we are all exposed, the effects of these exposures are distributed in radically unequal patterns, and histories of racialization, coloniality, and gendered inequality are critical determinants of the risks to wellness that these toxic entanglements entail. Scientists use the term body burden to describe the accumulated, enduring amounts of harmful substances present in human bodies. In this course, we explore the global conditions that give rise to local body burdens, plumbing the history of toxicity as a category, the politics of toxic exposures, and the experience of toxic embodiment. Foregrounding uneven exposures and disproportionate effects, we ask how scientists and humanists, poets and political activists, have understood toxicity as a material and social phenomenon. We will turn our collective attention to the analysis of ethnographies, memoirs, maps, film, and photography, and students will also be charged with creating visual and narrative projects for representing body burden of their own

Fall 2024: ANTH UN3811
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ANTH 3811 001/10693 W 10:10am - 12:00pm
302 Alfred Lerner Hall
Vanessa Agard-Jones 4.00 13/14

ANTH UN3812 Accusing Corpse-forensic trace. 4.00 points.

This colloqium explores the history of forensic anthropology, and the ways in which it produces the body as evidence. We will consider how truth claims are made based on the evidence of the dead body and follow the ways in which the evidence of the dead is explained and delineated for peers and for different publics by forensic anthropologists. The course will also trace the history and background to forensic anthropology and explore the assumptions around race and ancestry that were folded into its methods and which remain a part of forensic anthropological practice today

Fall 2024: ANTH UN3812
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ANTH 3812 001/13515 F 12:10pm - 2:00pm
963 Ext Schermerhorn Hall
Zoe Crossland 4.00 10/15

ANTH UN3823 ARCH ENGAGE: PAST IN PUB EYE. 4.00 points.

Enrollment limited to 15. Enrollment Priorities: Seniors and Juniors in ARCH or ANTH

This course provides a panoramic, but intensive, inquiry into the ways that archaeology and its methods for understanding the world have been marshaled for debate in issues of public interest. It is designed to examine claims to knowledge of the past through the lenses of alternative epistemologies and a series of case-based problems that range from the academic to the political, legal, cultural, romantic, and fraudulent

Fall 2024: ANTH UN3823
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ANTH 3823 001/10515 T 4:10pm - 6:00pm
951 Ext Schermerhorn Hall
Terence D'Altroy 4.00 7/15

ANTH BC3871 SENIOR THESIS SEMINAR I. 4.00 points.

Prerequisites: Limited to Barnard Anthropology Seniors. Offered every Fall. Discussion of research methods and planning and writing of a Senior Essay in Anthropology will accompany research on problems of interest to students, culminating in the writing of individual Senior Essays. The advisory system requires periodic consultation and discussion between the student and her adviser as well as the meeting of specific deadlines set by the department each semester. Limited to Barnard Senior Anthropology Majors

Fall 2024: ANTH BC3871
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ANTH 3871 001/00097 M 4:10pm - 6:00pm
Ll001 Milstein Center
Gina Jae, Clare Casey, Fern Thompsett, Elizabeth Green, Camilla Sturm 4.00 29/35

ANTH UN3888 ECOCRITICISM FOR THE END TIMES. 4.00 points.

Prerequisites: the instructor's permission.
Prerequisites: the instructors permission. This seminar aims to show what an anthropologically informed, ecocritical cultural studies can offer in this moment of intensifying ecological calamity. The course will not only engage significant works in anthropology, ecocriticism, philosophy, literature, politics, and aesthetics to think about the environment, it will also bring these works into engaged reflection on living in the end times (borrowing cultural critic Slavoj Zizeks phrase). The seminar will thus locate critical perspectives on the environment within the contemporary worldwide ecological crisis, emphasizing the ethnographic realities of global warming, debates on nuclear power and energy, and the place of nature. Drawing on the professors long experience in Japan and current research on the aftermath of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant disaster, the seminar will also take care to unpack the notion of end times, with its apocalyptic implications, through close considerations of works that take on the question of ecocatastrophe in our times. North American and European perspectives, as well as international ones (particularly ones drawn from East Asia), will give the course a global reach

Fall 2024: ANTH UN3888
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ANTH 3888 001/10728 M 2:10pm - 4:00pm
467 Ext Schermerhorn Hall
Marilyn Ivy 4.00 11/15

ANTH UN3921 Anticolonialism. 4 points.

Enrollment limited to 20.

Through a careful exploration of the argument and style of five vivid anticolonial texts, Mahatma Gandhi's Hind Swaraj, C.L.R. James' The Black Jacobins, Aimé Césaire's Discourse on Colonialism, Albert Memmi's Colonizer and Colonized, and Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, this course aims to inquire into the construction of the image of colonialism and its projected aftermaths established in anti-colonial discourse.

Fall 2024: ANTH UN3921
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ANTH 3921 001/10327 W 10:10am - 12:00pm
963 Ext Schermerhorn Hall
David Scott 4 12/15

CSER UN3935 Historical Anthropology of the US-Mexico Border. 4 points.

Beginning in the 1980s, border crossing became an academic rage in the humanities and the social sciences. This was a consequence of globalization, an historical process that reconfigured the boundaries between economy, society, and culture; and it was also a primary theme of post-modernist aesthetics, which celebrated playful borrowing of multiple and diverse historical references. Within that frame, interest in the US-Mexican border shifted dramatically. Since that border is the longest and most intensively crossed boundary between a rich and a poor country, it became a paradigmatic point of reference. Places like Tijuana or El Paso, with their rather seedy reputation, had until then been of interest principally to local residents, but they now became exemplars of post-modern “hybridity,” and were meant to inspire the kind of transnational scholarship that is required in today’s world. Indeed, the border itself became a metaphor, a movable imaginary boundary that marks ethnic and racial distinction in American and Mexican cities. This course is an introduction to the historical formation of the US-Mexican border.

Fall 2024: CSER UN3935
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
CSER 3935 001/13935 M 10:10am - 12:00pm
963 Ext Schermerhorn Hall
Claudio Lomnitz 4 11/20

ANTH UN3976 ANTHROPOLOGY OF SCIENCE. 4.00 points.

Not offered during 2023-2024 academic year.

This course examines specific debates in the history and philosophy of science, and in science and technology studies (STS), with a view towards exploring the relationships among science, technology and society. The first half of the course engages methodological questions and theoretical debates concerning the nature of epistemology, and the significance of social interests, material agency, laboratory and social practices, and “culture(s)” in the making of scientific knowledge. The second half delves more specifically into the ways in which sciences and technologies are both embedded in and shape contemporary social and political practices and imaginaries

Fall 2024: ANTH UN3976
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ANTH 3976 001/00102 Th 12:10pm - 2:00pm
214 Milbank Hall
Gina Jae 4.00 5/16

ANTH UN3997 SUPERVISED INDIVIDUAL RESEARCH. 2.00-6.00 points.

Prerequisite: the written permission of the staff member under whose supervision the research will be conducted

Fall 2024: ANTH UN3997
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ANTH 3997 001/10165  
Nadia Abu El-Haj 2.00-6.00 0/5
ANTH 3997 002/10166  
Lila Abu-Lughod 2.00-6.00 0/5
ANTH 3997 003/10167  
Maria Jose de Abreu 2.00-6.00 0/5
ANTH 3997 004/10168  
Claudio Lomnitz 2.00-6.00 0/5
ANTH 3997 005/10169  
Rosalind Morris 2.00-6.00 1/5
ANTH 3997 006/10170  
Marilyn Ivy 2.00-6.00 0/5
ANTH 3997 007/10171  
Brian Larkin 2.00-6.00 0/5
ANTH 3997 008/10172  
Catherine Fennell 2.00-6.00 0/5
ANTH 3997 009/10173  
Elizabeth Green 2.00-6.00 0/5
ANTH 3997 010/10174  
John Pemberton 2.00-6.00 0/5
ANTH 3997 011/10175  
Elizabeth Povinelli 2.00-6.00 0/5
ANTH 3997 012/10176  
David Scott 2.00-6.00 0/5
ANTH 3997 013/10177  
Lesley Sharp 2.00-6.00 0/5
ANTH 3997 014/10178  
Paige West 2.00-6.00 0/5
ANTH 3997 015/10179  
Kaya Williams 2.00-6.00 0/5
ANTH 3997 017/10180  
Naor Ben-Yehoyada 2.00-6.00 1/5
ANTH 3997 018/10181  
Severin Fowles 2.00-6.00 0/5
ANTH 3997 019/10182  
Terence D'Altroy 2.00-6.00 0/5
ANTH 3997 020/10183  
Vanessa Agard-Jones 2.00-6.00 0/5
ANTH 3997 021/10184  
Hannah Chazin 2.00-6.00 0/5
ANTH 3997 022/10185  
Audra Simpson 2.00-6.00 0/5
ANTH 3997 023/10186  
Mahmood Mamdani 2.00-6.00 0/5
ANTH 3997 024/10426  
Camilla Sturm 2.00-6.00 0/5
ANTH 3997 025/10427  
Brian Boyd 2.00-6.00 1/5
ANTH 3997 026/10428  
Zoe Crossland 2.00-6.00 0/5
ANTH 3997 027/10429  
Sheng Long 2.00-6.00 0/5
ANTH 3997 028/10430  
LaShaya Howie 2.00-6.00 0/5

ANTH UN3999 SENIOR THESIS SEM IN ANTHROPOL. 4.00 points.

Enrollment limited to 15. Open to CC and GS majors in Anthropology only.

Prerequisites: The instructor's permission. Students must have declared a major in Anthropology prior to registration. Students must have a 3.6 GPA in the major and a preliminary project concept in order to be considered. Interested students must communicate/meet with thesis instructor in the previous spring about the possibility of taking the course during the upcoming academic year. Additionally, expect to discuss with the instructor at the end of the fall term whether your project has progressed far enough to be completed in the spring term. If it has not, you will exit the seminar after one semester, with a grade based on the work completed during the fall term.
Prerequisites: The instructors permission. Students must have declared a major in Anthropology prior to registration. Students must have a 3.6 GPA in the major and a preliminary project concept in order to be considered. Interested students must communicate/meet with thesis instructor in the previous spring about the possibility of taking the course during the upcoming academic year. Additionally, expect to discuss with the instructor at the end of the fall term whether your project has progressed far enough to be completed in the spring term. If it has not, you will exit the seminar after one semester, with a grade based on the work completed during the fall term. This two-term course is a combination of a seminar and a workshop that will help you conduct research, write, and present an original senior thesis in anthropology. Students who write theses are eligible to be considered for departmental honors. The first term of this course introduces a variety of approaches used to produce anthropological knowledge and writing; encourages students to think critically about the approaches they take to researching and writing by studying model texts with an eye to the ethics, constraints, and potentials of anthropological research and writing; and gives students practice in the seminar and workshop formats that are key to collegial exchange and refinement of ideas. During the first term, students complete a few short exercises that will culminate in a substantial draft of one discrete section of their senior project (18-20 pages) plus a detailed outline of the expected work that remains to be done (5 pages). The spring sequence of the anthropology thesis seminar is a writing intensive continuation of the fall semester, in which students will have designed the research questions, prepared a full thesis proposal that will serve as a guide for the completion of the thesis and written a draft of one chapter. Only those students who expect to have completed the fall semester portion of the course are allowed to register for the spring; final enrollment is contingent upon successful completion of first semester requirements. In spring semester, weekly meetings will be devoted to the collaborative refinement of drafts, as well as working through issues of writing (evidence, voice, authority etc.). All enrolled students are required to present their project at a symposium in the late spring, and the final grade is based primarily on successful completion of the thesis/ capstone project. Note: The senior thesis seminar is open to CC and GS majors in Anthropology only. It requires the instructor’s permission for registration. Students must have a 3.6 GPA in the major and a preliminary project concept in order to be considered. Interested students should communicate with the thesis instructor and the director of undergraduate study in the previous spring about the possibility of taking the course during the upcoming academic year. Additionally, expect to discuss with the instructor at the end of the fall term whether your project has progressed far enough to be completed in the spring term. If it has not, you will exit the seminar after one semester, with a grade based on the work completed during the fall term. Enrollment limit is 15. Requirements: Students must have completed the requirements of the first semester of the sequence and seek instructor approval to enroll in the second

Fall 2024: ANTH UN3999
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ANTH 3999 001/10188 M 4:10pm - 6:00pm
963 Ext Schermerhorn Hall
Audra Simpson 4.00 6/15
Spring 2025: ANTH UN3999
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ANTH 3999 001/10841 W 10:10am - 12:00pm
963 Ext Schermerhorn Hall
Vanessa Agard-Jones 4.00 6/10

ANHS GU4001 THE ANCIENT EMPIRES. 3.00 points.

CC/GS/SEAS: Partial Fulfillment of Global Core Requirement

The principal goal of this course is to examine the nature and histories of a range of early empires in a comparative context. In the process, we will examine influential theories that have been proposed to account for the emergence and trajectories of those empires. Among the theories are the core-periphery, world-systems, territorial-hegemonic, tributary-capitalist, network, and IEMP approaches. Five regions of the world have been chosen, from the many that could provide candidates: Rome (the classic empire), New Kingdom Egypt, Qin China, Aztec Mesoamerica, and Inka South America. These empires have been chosen because they represent a cross-section of polities ranging from relatively simple and early expansionist societies to the grand empires of the Classical World, and the most powerful states of the indigenous Americas. There are no prerequisites for this course, although students who have no background in Anthropology, Archaeology, History, or Classics may find the course material somewhat more challenging than students with some knowledge of the study of early societies. There will be two lectures per week, given by the professor

Fall 2024: ANHS GU4001
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ANHS 4001 001/10516 M W 11:40am - 12:55pm
614 Schermerhorn Hall
Terence D'Altroy 3.00 104/120

ANTH GU4196 Mexico’s Disappeared Practicum. 4.00 points.

This practicum is an exercise in engaged pedagogy. The academic work we do will be conducted for the benefit of the cause of Mexico's now over 110,000 disappeared persons. Students will be engaged in a sustained research effort to development a "context analysis" of disappearances in the state of Zacatecas (Mexico)-- an exercise in social study that focuses on the economic, political, social, and criminological context in which disappearances occur. Research is done in coordination with Mexico's National Commission for the Search of the Disappeared. Alongside the practical, real-world, objective, this Practicum is designed to perfect research skills in the social sciences PREREQUISITE: Spanish language comprehension is compulsory for 60% of those enrolled

Fall 2024: ANTH GU4196
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ANTH 4196 001/10794 M 2:10pm - 4:00pm
963 Ext Schermerhorn Hall
Claudio Lomnitz 4.00 15/18

Archaeology

ANTH UN1007 THE ORIGINS OF HUMAN SOCIETY. 3.00 points.

Mandatory recitation sections will be announced first week of classes.

An archaeological perspective on the evolution of human social life from the first bipedal step of our ape ancestors to the establishment of large sedentary villages. While traversing six million years and six continents, our explorations will lead us to consider such major issues as the development of human sexuality, the origin of language, the birth of “art” and religion, the domestication of plants and animals, and the foundations of social inequality. Designed for anyone who happens to be human

Fall 2024: ANTH UN1007
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ANTH 1007 001/00005 T Th 11:40am - 12:55pm
304 Barnard Hall
Camilla Sturm 3.00 71/90

ANTH UN2031 Corpse Life: Anthropological Histories of the Dead [Previously Archaeologies of Death and . 4 points.

CC/GS/SEAS: Partial Fulfillment of Global Core Requirement

The awareness of mortality seems to be a peculiarly human affliction, and its study has been a key theme of 20th century philosophy. This class will address the question of human finitude from outside of the western philosophical tradition. Anthropologists have shown that humans deal with the challenge of death in diverse ways, which nevertheless share some common themes. During the semester we’ll look at case studies from across the world and over time and also explore the ethics and politics of disturbing the dead. The evidence of past human mortuary assemblages will provide some of our key primary texts. We’ll analyze famous burials such as those of Tutankhamun, the Lord of Sipan, and Emperor Qin’s mausoleum, containing the celebrated terracotta warriors, but we’ll also consider less well-known mortuary contexts. We will also critically examine the dead body as a privileged site for anthropological research, situating its study within the broader purview of anthropological theories of the body's production and constitution.

ANTH UN3007 ARCHAEOL BEFORE THE BIBLE. 3.00 points.

Please note that this is not a class on “biblical archaeology”. It is a course about the politics of archaeology in the context of Israel/Palestine, and the wider southwest Asia region. This course provides a critical overview of prehistoric archaeology in southwest Asia (or the Levant - the geographical area from Lebanon in the north to the Sinai in the south, and from the middle Euphrates in Syria to southern Jordan). It has been designed to appeal to anthropologists, historians, and students interested in the Ancient Mediterranean and Middle Eastern Studies. The course is divided into two parts. First, a social and political history of archaeology, emphasizing how the nature of current theoretical and practical knowledge has been shaped and defined by previous research traditions and, second, how the current political situation in the region impinges upon archaeological practice. Themes include: the dominance of "biblical archaeology" and the implications for Palestinian archaeology, Islamic archaeology, the impact of European contact from the Crusades onwards, and the development of prehistory

Fall 2024: ANTH UN3007
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ANTH 3007 001/10397 T Th 11:40am - 12:55pm
414 Pupin Laboratories
Brian Boyd 3.00 13/35

ANTH UN3151 Living with Animals: Anthropological Perspective. 4 points.

This course examines how humans and animals shape each other’s lives. We’ll explore the astounding diversity of human-animal relationships in time and space, tracing the ways animals have made their impact on human societies (and vice-versa). Using contemporary ethnographic, historical, and archaeological examples from a variety of geographical regions and chronological periods, this class will consider how humans and animals live and make things, and the ways in which humans have found animals “good to think with”.  In this course, we will also discuss how knowledge about human-animal relationships in the past might change contemporary and future approaches to living with animals.

ANTH BC3234 Indigenous Place-Thought. 4.00 points.

This seminar considers what it means to be of a place and to think with and be committed to that place—environmentally, politically, and spiritually. After locating ourselves in our own particular places and place-based commitments, our attention turns to the Indigenous traditions of North America, to accounts of tribal emergence and pre-colonial being, to colonial histories of land dispossession, to ongoing struggles to protect ecological health and land-based sovereignty, to the epistemological and moral systems that have developed over the course of many millennia of living with and for the land, and to the contributions such systems might make to our collective future. The seminar’s title is borrowed from an essay on “Indigenous place-thought” by Mohawk/Anishinaabe scholar Vanessa Watts

ANTH UN3663 The Ancient Table: Archaeology of Cooking and Cuisine. 4.00 points.

Prerequisites: None Humans don’t just eat to live. The ways we prepare, eat, and share our food is a complex reflection of our histories, environments, and ideologies. Whether we prefer coffee or tea, cornbread or challah, chicken breast or chicken feet, our tastes are expressive of social ties and social boundaries, and are linked to ideas of family and of foreignness. How did eating become such a profoundly cultural experience? This seminar takes an archaeological approach to two broad issues central to eating: First, what drives human food choices both today and in the past? Second, how have social forces shaped practices of food acquisition, preparation, and consumption (and how, in turn, has food shaped society)? We will explore these questions from various evolutionary, physiological, and cultural viewpoints, highlighted by information from the best archaeological and historic case studies. Topics that will be covered include the nature of the first cooking, beer-brewing and feasting, writing of the early recipes, gender roles and ‘domestic’ life, and how a national cuisine takes shape. Through the course of the semester we will explore food practices from Pleistocene Spain to historic Monticello, with particular emphasis on the earliest cuisines of China, Mesoamerica, and the Mediterranean

Fall 2024: ANTH UN3663
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ANTH 3663 001/00100 W 12:10pm - 2:00pm
214 Milbank Hall
Camilla Sturm 4.00 15/15

ANTH UN3823 ARCH ENGAGE: PAST IN PUB EYE. 4.00 points.

Enrollment limited to 15. Enrollment Priorities: Seniors and Juniors in ARCH or ANTH

This course provides a panoramic, but intensive, inquiry into the ways that archaeology and its methods for understanding the world have been marshaled for debate in issues of public interest. It is designed to examine claims to knowledge of the past through the lenses of alternative epistemologies and a series of case-based problems that range from the academic to the political, legal, cultural, romantic, and fraudulent

Fall 2024: ANTH UN3823
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ANTH 3823 001/10515 T 4:10pm - 6:00pm
951 Ext Schermerhorn Hall
Terence D'Altroy 4.00 7/15

ANHS GU4001 THE ANCIENT EMPIRES. 3.00 points.

CC/GS/SEAS: Partial Fulfillment of Global Core Requirement

The principal goal of this course is to examine the nature and histories of a range of early empires in a comparative context. In the process, we will examine influential theories that have been proposed to account for the emergence and trajectories of those empires. Among the theories are the core-periphery, world-systems, territorial-hegemonic, tributary-capitalist, network, and IEMP approaches. Five regions of the world have been chosen, from the many that could provide candidates: Rome (the classic empire), New Kingdom Egypt, Qin China, Aztec Mesoamerica, and Inka South America. These empires have been chosen because they represent a cross-section of polities ranging from relatively simple and early expansionist societies to the grand empires of the Classical World, and the most powerful states of the indigenous Americas. There are no prerequisites for this course, although students who have no background in Anthropology, Archaeology, History, or Classics may find the course material somewhat more challenging than students with some knowledge of the study of early societies. There will be two lectures per week, given by the professor

Fall 2024: ANHS GU4001
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ANHS 4001 001/10516 M W 11:40am - 12:55pm
614 Schermerhorn Hall
Terence D'Altroy 3.00 104/120

ANTH GU4175 WRITING ARCHAEOLOGY. 3.00 points.

Prerequisites: the instructor's permission.

Like fiction archaeology allows us to visit other worlds and to come back home again. In this class we'll explore different genres of archaeological texts. How do writers contribute to the development of narratives about the past, what are the narrative tricks used by archaeologists, novelists and poets to evoke other worlds and to draw in the reader? What is lost in the translationfrom the earth to text, and what is gained? There is an intimacy to archaeological excavation, an intimacy that is rarely captured in archaeological narratives. What enlivening techniques might we learn from fictional accounts, and where might we find narrative space to include emotion and affect, as well as the texture and grain of encounters with the traces of the past? How does archaeological evidence evoke a particular response, and how do novels and poems work to do the same thing? What is the role of the reader in bringing a text to life?  Enrollment limit is 15.  Priority:  Anthropology graduate students, archaeology senior thesis students.

ANTH GU4345 NEANDERTHAL ALTERITIES. 3.00 points.

Enrollment priorities: Graduate students, and 3rd & 4th year undergraduates only

Using The Neanderthals partly as a metaphorical device, this course considers the anthropological, philosophical and ethical implications of sharing the world with another human species. Beginning from a solid grounding in the archaeological, biological and genetic evidence, we will reflect critically on why Neanderthals are rarely afforded the same reflexive capacities, qualities and attributes - agency- as anatomically modern humans, and why they are often regarded as lesser or nonhuman animals despite clear evidence for both sophisticated material and social engagement with the world and its resources. Readings/materials are drawn from anthropology, philosophy, ethics, gender studies, race and genetics studies, literature and film

Spring 2025: ANTH GU4345
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ANTH 4345 001/11414 W 12:10pm - 2:00pm
951 Ext Schermerhorn Hall
Brian Boyd 3.00 20/18

Physical Anthropology

 Spring 2025
Sociocultural Anthropology

ANTH UN1002 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURE. 3.00 points.

The anthropological approach to the study of culture and human society. Case studies from ethnography are used in exploring the universality of cultural categories (social organization, economy, law, belief system, art, etc.) and the range of variation among human societies

Fall 2024: ANTH UN1002
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ANTH 1002 001/00004 T Th 10:10am - 11:25am
263 Macy Hall
Clare Casey 3.00 63/90
Spring 2025: ANTH UN1002
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ANTH 1002 001/10586 M W 10:10am - 11:25am
309 Havemeyer Hall
Naor Ben-Yehoyada 3.00 70/120

ANTH UN1008 THE RISE OF CIVILIZATION. 3.00 points.

CC/GS/SEAS: Partial Fulfillment of Global Core Requirement
Mandatory recitation sections will be announced first week of classes. $25.00 laboratory fee.

Corequisites: ANTH V1008
Corequisites: ANTH UN1108 The rise of major civilization in prehistory and protohistory throughout the world, from the initial appearance of sedentism, agriculture, and social stratification through the emergence of the archaic empires. Description and analysis of a range of regions that were centers of significant cultural development: Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus River Valley, China, North America, and Mesoamerica. DO NOT REGISTER FOR A RECITATION SECTION IF YOU ARE NOT OFFICIALLY REGISTERED FOR THE COURSE

Spring 2025: ANTH UN1008
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ANTH 1008 001/17254 T Th 11:40am - 12:55pm
402 Chandler
Clarence Gifford 3.00 100/100

ANTH UN1009 INTRO TO LANGUAGE & CULTURE. 3.00 points.

This is an introduction to the study of the production, interpretation, and reproduction of social meanings as expressed through language. In exploring language in relation to culture and society, it focuses on how communication informs and transforms the sociocultural environment

Spring 2025: ANTH UN1009
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ANTH 1009 001/00645 M W 10:10am - 11:25am
405 Milbank Hall
Elizabeth Green 3.00 40/90

ANTH UN1012 INTERPRETATION OF CULTRE-DISC. 0.00 points.

Fall 2024: ANTH UN1012
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ANTH 1012 001/00884 T 12:10pm - 1:00pm
306 Milbank Hall
Phoebe Whiteside 0.00 11/15
ANTH 1012 002/00888 Th 12:10pm - 1:00pm
409 Barnard Hall
Phoebe Whiteside 0.00 7/15
ANTH 1012 003/00887 Th 4:10pm - 5:00pm
207 Milbank Hall
Rishav Kumar Thakur 0.00 10/15
ANTH 1012 004/00889 Th 5:10pm - 6:00pm
214 Milbank Hall
Rishav Kumar Thakur 0.00 7/15
ANTH 1012 005/00885 M 1:10pm - 2:00pm
302 Milbank Hall
Kiara Houston 0.00 16/15
ANTH 1012 006/00886 W 3:10pm - 4:00pm
119 Milstein Center
Kiara Houston 0.00 12/15
Spring 2025: ANTH UN1012
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ANTH 1012 001/10842  
0.00 11/15
ANTH 1012 002/10843  
0.00 0/15
ANTH 1012 003/10844  
0.00 0/15
ANTH 1012 004/10845  
0.00 0/15
ANTH 1012 005/10846  
0.00 1/15
ANTH 1012 006/10847  
0.00 0/15
ANTH 1012 007/10848  
0.00 1/15
ANTH 1012 008/10849  
0.00 0/15

ANTH UN1108 THE RISE OF CIVILIZATION-DISC. 0.00 points.

Spring 2025: ANTH UN1108
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ANTH 1108 001/17651  
0.00 3/30
ANTH 1108 002/17653  
0.00 0/30
ANTH 1108 003/17655  
0.00 0/30
ANTH 1108 004/17656  
0.00 0/30
ANTH 1108 005/17657  
0.00 0/30
ANTH 1108 006/17658  
0.00 0/30

ANTH UN2005 THE ETHNOGRAPHIC IMAGINATION. 3.00 points.

Introduction to the theory and practice of “ethnography”—the intensive study of peoples’ lives as shaped by social relations, cultural images, and historical forces. Considers through critical reading of various kinds of texts (classic ethnographies, histories, journalism, novels, films) the ways in which understanding, interpreting, and representing the lived words of people—at home or abroad, in one place or transnationally, in the past or the present—can be accomplished. Discussion section required

Spring 2025: ANTH UN2005
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ANTH 2005 001/10836 T Th 2:40pm - 3:55pm
303 Uris Hall
Maria Jose de Abreu 3.00 39/60

ANTH BC2012 LAB METHODS ARCHAEOLOGY. 4.00 points.

Only the most recent chapters of the past are able to be studied using traditional historiographical methods focused on archives of textual documents. How, then, are we to analyze the deep history of human experiences prior to the written word? And even when textual archives do survive from a given historical period, these archives are typically biased toward the perspectives of those in power. How, then, are we to undertake analyses of the past that take into account the lives and experiences of all of society’s members, including the poor, the working class, the colonized, and others whose voices appear far less frequently in historical documents? From its disciplinary origins in nineteenth century antiquarianism, archaeology has grown to become a rigorous science of the past, dedicated to the exploration of long-term and inclusive social histories. “Laboratory Methods in Archaeology” is an intensive introduction to the analysis of archaeological artifacts and samples in which we explore how the organic and inorganic remains from archaeological sites can be used to build rigorous claims about the human past. The 2022 iteration of the course centers on assemblages from two sites, both excavated by Barnard’s archaeological field program in the Taos region of northern New Mexico: (1) the Spanish colonial site of San Antonio del Embudo founded in 1725 and (2) the hippie commune known as New Buffalo, founded in 1967. Participants in ANTH BC2012 will be introduced to the history, geology, and ecology of the Taos region, as well as to the excavation histories of the two sites. Specialized laboratory modules focus on the analysis of chipped stone artifacts ceramics, animal bone, glass, and industrial artifacts. The course only demands participation in the seminars and laboratory modules and successful completion of the written assignments, but all students are encouraged to develop specialized research projects to be subsequently expanded into either (1) a senior thesis project or (2) a conference presentation at the Society for American Archaeology, Society for Historical Archaeology, or Theoretical Archaeology Group meeting

Spring 2025: ANTH BC2012
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ANTH 2012 001/00637 T Th 4:10pm - 6:00pm
954 Ext Schermerhorn Hall
Severin Fowles 4.00 9/8

ANTH UN2101 THE ETHNOGRAPHIC IMAGINAT-DISC. 0.00 points.

Spring 2025: ANTH UN2101
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ANTH 2101 001/10837  
0.00 8/25
ANTH 2101 002/10838  
0.00 2/25
ANTH 2101 003/10839  
0.00 0/25
ANTH 2101 004/10840  
0.00 0/25
ANTH 2101 005/10851  
0.00 1/18

ANTH BC3223 Gender Archaeolxgy. 4.00 points.

This seminar critically reexamines the ancient world from the perspective of gender archaeology. Though the seedlings of gender archaeology were first sown by of feminist archaeologists during the 70’s and 80’s, this approach involves far more than simply ‘womanizing’ androcentric narratives of past. Rather, gender archaeology criticizes interpretations of the past that transplant contemporary social roles onto the archaeological past, casting the divisions and inequalities of today as both timeless and natural. This class challenges the idea of a singular past, instead championing a turn towards multiple, rich, messy, intersectional pasts. The ‘x’ in ‘archaeolxgy’ is an explicit signal of our focus on this diversity of pasts and a call for a more inclusive field of practice today

Spring 2025: ANTH BC3223
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ANTH 3223 001/00646 W 10:10am - 12:00pm
111 Milstein Center
Camilla Sturm 4.00 10/16

ANTH UN3321 INFRASTRUCTURES. 4.00 points.

Infrastructures are the built networks moving goods, commodities, people, energy, waste organizing human action in modern societies. This course critically examines the work of infrastructures globally. It examines issues of urbanism, racial infrastructures, infrastructural breakdown and emergency, postcolonial infrastructures, climate change, and extraction

Spring 2025: ANTH UN3321
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ANTH 3321 001/00641 M 2:10pm - 4:00pm
227 Milbank Hall
Brian Larkin 4.00 11/16

ANTH UN3465 WOMEN, GENDER POL-MUSLIM WORLD. 3.00 points.

CC/GS/SEAS: Partial Fulfillment of Global Core Requirement

Practices like veiling, gendered forms of segregation, and the honor code that are central to Western images of Muslim women are also contested issues throughout the Muslim world. This course examines debates about gender, sexuality, and morality and explores the interplay of political, social, and economic factors in shaping the lives of men and women across the Muslim world, from the Middle East to Europe. The perspective will be primarily anthropological, although special attention will be paid to historical processes associated with colonialism and nation-building that are crucial to understanding present gender politics. We will focus on the sexual politics of everyday life in specific locales and explore the extent to which these are shaped by these histories and the power of representations mobilized in a global world in the present and international political interventions. In addition to reading ethnographic works about particular communities, we read memoirs and critical analyses of the local and transnational activist movements that have emerged to address various aspects of gender politics and rights

Spring 2025: ANTH UN3465
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ANTH 3465 001/10584 M W 11:40am - 12:55pm
614 Schermerhorn Hall
Lila Abu-Lughod 3.00 80/75

ANTH UN3467 WOMEN/GENDER-MUSLIM WORLD-DISC. 0.00 points.

Spring 2025: ANTH UN3467
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ANTH 3467 001/10715  
0.00 0/25
ANTH 3467 002/10716  
0.00 0/25
ANTH 3467 003/10717  
0.00 0/25
ANTH 3467 004/10718  
0.00 0/25

ANTH UN3604 As If: Anthropologies of the Future. 4.00 points.

This seminar engages--through science fiction and speculative fiction, film, and companion readings in anthropology and beyond—a range of approaches to the notion of the “future” and to the imagination of multiple futures to come. We will work through virtual and fictive constructions of future worlds, ecologies, and social orders “as If” they present alternative possibilites for pragmatic yet utopian thinking and dreaming in the present (and as we’ll also consider dystopian and “heterotopian” possibilities as well)

Spring 2025: ANTH UN3604
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ANTH 3604 001/11050 M 2:10pm - 4:00pm
467 Ext Schermerhorn Hall
Marilyn Ivy 4.00 10/12

ANTH UN3665 The Politics of Care. 4.00 points.

Semester: What are the consequences of entrenched inequalities in the context of care? How might we (re)imagine associated practices as political projects? Wherein lie the origins of utopic and dystopic visions of daily survival? How might we track associated promises and failures as they travel across social hierarchies, nationalities, and geographies of care? And what do we mean when we speak of “care”? These questions define the scaffolding for this course. Our primary goals throughout this semester are threefold. First, we begin by interrogating the meaning of “care” and its potential relevance as a political project in medical and other domains. Second, we will track care’s associated meanings and consequences across a range of contents, including urban and rural America, an Amazonia borderland, South Africa, France, and Mexico. Third, we will address temporal dimensions of care, as envisioned and experienced in the here-and-now, historically, and in a futuristic world of science fiction. Finally, and most importantly, we will remain alert to the relevance of domains of difference relevant to care, most notably race, gender, class, and species. Upper level seminar; 4 points Summer: What do we mean when we speak of “care”? How might we (re)imagine practices of care as political and moral projects? What promises, paradoxes, or failures surface amid entrenched inequalities? And what hopes, desires, and fears inform associated utopic and dystopic visions of daily survival? These questions will serve as a scaffolding of sorts for this course, and our primary goals are fourfold. First, we will begin by interrogating the meaning of “care” and its potential relevance as a political project in medical and other domains. Second, we will track care’s associated meanings and consequences across a range of contents, communities, and geographies of care. Third, we will remain alert to the temporal dimensions of care, as envisioned and experienced historically, in the here-and-now, and in the futuristic world of science fiction. Finally, we will consider the moral underpinnings of intra-human alongside interspecies care. Enrollment limited to 10; 4 points

Spring 2025: ANTH UN3665
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ANTH 3665 001/00644 F 11:00am - 12:50pm
214 Milbank Hall
Gina Jae 4.00 17/16

ANTH UN3851 Theatricality & the Political. 4.00 points.

This course addresses the articulation between theatricality and the political from a cross-cultural and trans-historical perspective. From the Renaissance theater to the profuse baroque, to the modernizing logics and aesthetics, to so-called “neo-baroque”, the course addresses logics and grammars within past and present dramaturgies of the social. How do certain theatrical traditions articulate with various power formations? How do these connect and complicate the relation between power and resistance, colonialism and liberation, center and periphery, particular and universal, actors and audiences? What technical apparatuses, cultural structures, ethical dispositions and bodily repertoires are mobilized? And how do old and new media technologies reconfigure protocols of stage-form in ancient and contemporary political theater?

Spring 2025: ANTH UN3851
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ANTH 3851 001/17270 M 2:10pm - 4:00pm
313 Pupin Laboratories
Maria Jose de Abreu 4.00 10/15

ANTH UN3861 Anthropology of the Anthropocene. 4 points.

Enrollment limited to 20. Priority given to majors in Anthropology.

This course focuses on the political ecology of the Anthropocene. As multiple publics become increasingly aware of the extensive and accelerated rate of current global environmental change, and the presence of anthropogenesis in ever expanding circumstances, we need to critically analyze the categories of thought and action being developed in order to carefully approach this change. Our concern is thus not so much the Anthropocene as an immutable fact, inevitable event, or definitive period of time (significant though these are), but rather for the political, social, and intellectual consequences of this important idea. Thus we seek to understand the creativity of "The Anthropocene" as a political, rhetorical, and social category. We also aim to examine the networks of capital and power that have given rise to the current state of planetary change, the strategies for ameliorating those changes, and how these are simultaneously implicated in the rhetorical creation of "The Anthropocene".

Spring 2025: ANTH UN3861
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ANTH 3861 001/00647 M 6:10pm - 8:00pm
113 Milstein Center
Patrick Nason 4 7/15

ANTH BC3868 ETHNOGRAPHIC FIELD RESEARCH IN NYC. 4.00 points.

This course provides the aspiring anthropologist with an array of primarily qualitative methodological tools essential to successful urban fieldwork. As such, it is a practicum of sorts, where regular field assignments help build one’s ability to record and analyze social behavior by drawing on several key data collection techniques. Because we have the luxury of inhabiting a large, densely populated, international city, this class requires that you take a head-first plunge into urban anthropology. The NYC area will define the laboratory for individually- designed research projects. Be forewarned, however! Ethnographic engagement involves efforts to detect social patterns, but it is often a self-reflexive exercise, too. Readings provide methodological, analytical, and personal insights into the skills, joys, and trials that define successful field research

Spring 2025: ANTH BC3868
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ANTH 3868 001/00640 T 2:10pm - 4:00pm
407 Barnard Hall
Kaya Williams 4.00 20/35

ANTH BC3872 SENIOR THESIS SEMINAR II. 4.00 points.

Prerequisites: Must complete ANTH BC3871x. Limited to Barnard Senior Anthropology Majors. Offered every Spring. Discussion of research methods and planning and writing of a Senior Essay in Anthropology will accompany research on problems of interest to students, culminating in the writing of individual Senior Essays. The advisory system requires periodic consultation and discussion between the student and her adviser as well as the meeting of specific deadlines set by the department each semester

Spring 2025: ANTH BC3872
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ANTH 3872 001/00639 M 4:10pm - 6:00pm
502 Diana Center
Gina Jae, Clare Casey, Fern Thompsett, Elizabeth Green, Camilla Sturm 4.00 27/32

ANTH UN3880 LISTENINGS: AN ETHNOG OF SOUND. 4.00 points.

Prerequisites: the instructor's permission.
We explore the possibilities of an ethnography of sound through a range of listening encounters: in resonant urban soundscapes of the city and in natural soundscapes of acoustic ecology; from audible pasts and echoes of the present; through repetitive listening in the age of electronic reproduction, and mindful listening that retraces an uncanniness inherent in sound. Silence, noise, voice, chambers, reverberation, sound in its myriad manifestations and transmissions. From the captured souls of Edison’s phonography, to everyday acoustical adventures, the course turns away from the screen and dominant epistemologies of the visual for an extended moment, and does so in pursuit of sonorous objects. How is it that sound so moves us as we move within its world, and who or what then might the listening subject be?

Spring 2025: ANTH UN3880
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ANTH 3880 001/10592 T 2:10pm - 4:00pm
963 Ext Schermerhorn Hall
John Pemberton 4.00 12/12

ANTH BC3911 SOCIAL CONTEXTS IMMIGRATN LAW. 4.00 points.

Examines the historical and contemporary social, economic, and political factors that shape immigration law and policy along with the social consequences of those laws and policies. Addresses the development and function of immigration law and aspects of the immigration debate including unauthorized immigration, anti-immigration sentiments, and critiques of immigration policy

Spring 2025: ANTH BC3911
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ANTH 3911 001/00642 M 10:10am - 12:00pm
113 Milstein Center
J.C. Salyer 4.00 20/20

ANTH BC3932 CLIM CHNG/GLOBAL MIGR/HUM RGT. 4.00 points.

While the existence of processes of anthropogenic climate change is well established, predictions regarding the future consequences of these processes are far less certain. In no area is the uncertainty regarding near and long term effects as pronounced as in the question of how climate change will affect global migration. This course will address the issue of climate migration in four ways. First, the course will examine the theoretical and empirical literatures that have elucidated the nature of international migration in general. Second, the course will consider the phenomena of anthropogenic climate change as it relates to migration. Third, the course will consider how human rights and other legal regimes do or do not address the humanitarian issues created by anthropogenic climate change. Fourth, the course will synthesize these topics by considering how migration and climate change has arisen as a humanitarian, political, and economic issue in the Pacific. Human Rights elective

Spring 2025: ANTH BC3932
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ANTH 3932 001/00643 M 2:10pm - 4:00pm
113 Milstein Center
J.C. Salyer 4.00 20/20

ANTH UN3939 ANIME EFFECT: JAPANESE MEDIA. 4.00 points.

Culture, technology, and media in contemporary Japan. Theoretical and ethnographic engagements with forms of mass mediation, including anime, manga, video, and cell-phone novels. Considers larger global economic and political contexts, including post-Fukushima transformations. Prerequisites: the instructor's permission

Spring 2025: ANTH UN3939
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ANTH 3939 001/11052 T 2:10pm - 4:00pm
467 Ext Schermerhorn Hall
Marilyn Ivy 4.00 16/15

ANTH UN3947 TEXT, MAGIC, PERFORMANCE. 4.00 points.

CC/GS/SEAS: Partial Fulfillment of Global Core Requirement

Prerequisites: the instructor's permission.
Prerequisites: the instructors permission. This course pursues interconnections linking text and performance in light of magic, ritual, possession, narration, and related articulations of power. Readings are drawn from classic theoretical writings, colonial fiction, and ethnographic accounts. Domains of inquiry include: spirit possession, trance states, séance, ritual performance, and related realms of cinematic projection, musical form, shadow theater, performative objects, and (other) things that move on their own, compellingly. Key theoretical concerns are subjectivity - particularly, the conjuring up and displacement of self in the form of the first-person singular I - and the haunting power of repetition. Retraced throughout the course are the uncanny shadows of a fully possessed subject --within ritual contexts and within everyday life

Spring 2025: ANTH UN3947
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ANTH 3947 001/10591 M 2:10pm - 4:00pm
963 Ext Schermerhorn Hall
John Pemberton 4.00 18/17

ANTH UN3971 Culture and Environmental Behavior. 4 points.

Enrollment limited to 15.Not offered during 2023-2024 academic year.

Seemingly "natural" meanings and objects are produced and known within distinctive cultural, political, economic, and historic contexts. These cultural forms are then circulated, reproduced, and naturalized in ways that obscure the social milieu in which they arose. In this course, we will denaturalize nature.

Spring 2025: ANTH UN3971
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ANTH 3971 001/00638 M 12:10pm - 2:00pm
406 Barnard Hall
Paige West 4 17/15

ANTH UN3998 SUPERVISED INDIVIDUAL RESEARCH. 2.00-6.00 points.

Prerequisite: the written permission of the staff member under whose supervision the research will be conducted

Spring 2025: ANTH UN3998
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ANTH 3998 002/10886  
Lila Abu-Lughod 2.00-6.00 0/5
ANTH 3998 003/10887  
Vanessa Agard-Jones 2.00-6.00 0/5
ANTH 3998 004/10888  
Naor Ben-Yehoyada 2.00-6.00 0/5
ANTH 3998 005/10889  
Brian Boyd 2.00-6.00 0/5
ANTH 3998 006/10890  
Hannah Chazin 2.00-6.00 0/5
ANTH 3998 007/10891  
Zoe Crossland 2.00-6.00 0/5
ANTH 3998 010/17669  
Clarence Gifford 2.00-6.00 0/5
ANTH 3998 011/10894  
Elizabeth Green 2.00-6.00 0/5
ANTH 3998 012/17670  
Marilyn Ivy 2.00-6.00 0/5
ANTH 3998 013/17672  
Clare Casey 2.00-6.00 0/5
ANTH 3998 014/17747  
Brian Larkin 2.00-6.00 0/5
ANTH 3998 017/17748  
Severin Fowles 2.00-6.00 0/5
ANTH 3998 018/17749  
LaShaya Howie 2.00-6.00 0/5
ANTH 3998 019/17750  
Madisson Whitman 2.00-6.00 0/5
ANTH 3998 020/17751  
James Meador 2.00-6.00 0/5
ANTH 3998 021/17753  
Ellen Marakowitz 2.00-6.00 0/5
ANTH 3998 022/17752  
Sheng Long 2.00-6.00 0/5
ANTH 3998 024/17754  
Rosalind Morris 2.00-6.00 0/5
ANTH 3998 025/17755  
John Pemberton 2.00-6.00 0/5
ANTH 3998 026/17756  
Elizabeth Povinelli 2.00-6.00 0/5
ANTH 3998 027/17761  
Camilla Sturm 2.00-6.00 0/5
ANTH 3998 028/17764  
Fern Thompsett 2.00-6.00 0/5
ANTH 3998 030/17757  
Paige West 2.00-6.00 0/5
ANTH 3998 031/17758  
Kaya Williams 2.00-6.00 0/5
ANTH 3998 033/17760  
Cine Ostrow 2.00-6.00 0/5
ANTH 3998 035/17762  
Patrick Nason 2.00-6.00 0/5
ANTH 3998 036/17765  
Laurel Kendall 2.00-6.00 0/5
ANTH 3998 037/17766  
J.C. Salyer 2.00-6.00 0/5
ANTH 3998 038/17767  
Gina Jae 2.00-6.00 0/5

ANTH UN3999 SENIOR THESIS SEM IN ANTHROPOL. 4.00 points.

Enrollment limited to 15. Open to CC and GS majors in Anthropology only.

Prerequisites: The instructor's permission. Students must have declared a major in Anthropology prior to registration. Students must have a 3.6 GPA in the major and a preliminary project concept in order to be considered. Interested students must communicate/meet with thesis instructor in the previous spring about the possibility of taking the course during the upcoming academic year. Additionally, expect to discuss with the instructor at the end of the fall term whether your project has progressed far enough to be completed in the spring term. If it has not, you will exit the seminar after one semester, with a grade based on the work completed during the fall term.
Prerequisites: The instructors permission. Students must have declared a major in Anthropology prior to registration. Students must have a 3.6 GPA in the major and a preliminary project concept in order to be considered. Interested students must communicate/meet with thesis instructor in the previous spring about the possibility of taking the course during the upcoming academic year. Additionally, expect to discuss with the instructor at the end of the fall term whether your project has progressed far enough to be completed in the spring term. If it has not, you will exit the seminar after one semester, with a grade based on the work completed during the fall term. This two-term course is a combination of a seminar and a workshop that will help you conduct research, write, and present an original senior thesis in anthropology. Students who write theses are eligible to be considered for departmental honors. The first term of this course introduces a variety of approaches used to produce anthropological knowledge and writing; encourages students to think critically about the approaches they take to researching and writing by studying model texts with an eye to the ethics, constraints, and potentials of anthropological research and writing; and gives students practice in the seminar and workshop formats that are key to collegial exchange and refinement of ideas. During the first term, students complete a few short exercises that will culminate in a substantial draft of one discrete section of their senior project (18-20 pages) plus a detailed outline of the expected work that remains to be done (5 pages). The spring sequence of the anthropology thesis seminar is a writing intensive continuation of the fall semester, in which students will have designed the research questions, prepared a full thesis proposal that will serve as a guide for the completion of the thesis and written a draft of one chapter. Only those students who expect to have completed the fall semester portion of the course are allowed to register for the spring; final enrollment is contingent upon successful completion of first semester requirements. In spring semester, weekly meetings will be devoted to the collaborative refinement of drafts, as well as working through issues of writing (evidence, voice, authority etc.). All enrolled students are required to present their project at a symposium in the late spring, and the final grade is based primarily on successful completion of the thesis/ capstone project. Note: The senior thesis seminar is open to CC and GS majors in Anthropology only. It requires the instructor’s permission for registration. Students must have a 3.6 GPA in the major and a preliminary project concept in order to be considered. Interested students should communicate with the thesis instructor and the director of undergraduate study in the previous spring about the possibility of taking the course during the upcoming academic year. Additionally, expect to discuss with the instructor at the end of the fall term whether your project has progressed far enough to be completed in the spring term. If it has not, you will exit the seminar after one semester, with a grade based on the work completed during the fall term. Enrollment limit is 15. Requirements: Students must have completed the requirements of the first semester of the sequence and seek instructor approval to enroll in the second

Fall 2024: ANTH UN3999
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ANTH 3999 001/10188 M 4:10pm - 6:00pm
963 Ext Schermerhorn Hall
Audra Simpson 4.00 6/15
Spring 2025: ANTH UN3999
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ANTH 3999 001/10841 W 10:10am - 12:00pm
963 Ext Schermerhorn Hall
Vanessa Agard-Jones 4.00 6/10

ANTH GU4143 ACCUSATION. 3.00 points.

This course examines the politics and practices of collective accusation in comparative perspective. It treats these phenomena in their relation to processes of political and economic transition, to discourses of crisis, and to the practices of rule by which the idea of exception is made the grounds for extreme claims on and for the social body-usually, but not exclusively, enacted through forms of expulsion. We will consider the various theoretical perspectives through which forms of collective accusation have been addressed, focusing on psychoanalytic, structural functional, and poststructuralist readings. In doing so, we will also investigate the difference and possible continuities between the forms and logics of accusation that operate in totalitarian as well as liberal regimes. Course readings will include both literary and critical texts

Spring 2025: ANTH GU4143
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ANTH 4143 001/10953 M 4:10pm - 6:00pm
963 Ext Schermerhorn Hall
Rosalind Morris 3.00 20/20

ANTH GU4283 Anthropology of the Sister. 4.00 points.

Classical anthropological theory placed the muted sister at its core, in a theory of kinship originating in the traffic of women among men. Political theory placed the invisible sister at its core by coding democracy as fraternity. Psychoanalytic theory placed the forbidden sister at its core with the theory of incest taboo. Tragic theory placed the self-effacing sister at its core in the Sophoclean figures of Antigone and Ismene. Popular (Hollywood) cinematic production placed the absent sister at its core, with its relentless circulation of narratives in which a ‘band of brothers’ finds its moral purpose in the rescue of someone else’s sister. And yet, and within these traditions, the sister arose in the interstices as a phantasmatic figure of extraterritorial and insurrectionary possibility. If feminisms have, on occasion, attempted to both mobilize and contain this possibility in a discourse of sisterhood, much more remains to be thought. This course explores the figure of the sister in its muted, invisible, forbidden, self-effacing and absented forms—and moves to consider the radical possibilities that emerged therefrom in Social and Political Theory, Literary Fiction, Drama and Cinema

Spring 2025: ANTH GU4283
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ANTH 4283 001/10972 Th 12:10pm - 2:00pm
467 Ext Schermerhorn Hall
Rosalind Morris 4.00 19/20

ANTH GU4345 NEANDERTHAL ALTERITIES. 3.00 points.

Enrollment priorities: Graduate students, and 3rd & 4th year undergraduates only

Using The Neanderthals partly as a metaphorical device, this course considers the anthropological, philosophical and ethical implications of sharing the world with another human species. Beginning from a solid grounding in the archaeological, biological and genetic evidence, we will reflect critically on why Neanderthals are rarely afforded the same reflexive capacities, qualities and attributes - agency- as anatomically modern humans, and why they are often regarded as lesser or nonhuman animals despite clear evidence for both sophisticated material and social engagement with the world and its resources. Readings/materials are drawn from anthropology, philosophy, ethics, gender studies, race and genetics studies, literature and film

Spring 2025: ANTH GU4345
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ANTH 4345 001/11414 W 12:10pm - 2:00pm
951 Ext Schermerhorn Hall
Brian Boyd 3.00 20/18

Archaeology

ANTH UN1008 THE RISE OF CIVILIZATION. 3.00 points.

CC/GS/SEAS: Partial Fulfillment of Global Core Requirement
Mandatory recitation sections will be announced first week of classes. $25.00 laboratory fee.

Corequisites: ANTH V1008
Corequisites: ANTH UN1108 The rise of major civilization in prehistory and protohistory throughout the world, from the initial appearance of sedentism, agriculture, and social stratification through the emergence of the archaic empires. Description and analysis of a range of regions that were centers of significant cultural development: Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus River Valley, China, North America, and Mesoamerica. DO NOT REGISTER FOR A RECITATION SECTION IF YOU ARE NOT OFFICIALLY REGISTERED FOR THE COURSE

Spring 2025: ANTH UN1008
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ANTH 1008 001/17254 T Th 11:40am - 12:55pm
402 Chandler
Clarence Gifford 3.00 100/100

ANTH BC2012 LAB METHODS ARCHAEOLOGY. 4.00 points.

Only the most recent chapters of the past are able to be studied using traditional historiographical methods focused on archives of textual documents. How, then, are we to analyze the deep history of human experiences prior to the written word? And even when textual archives do survive from a given historical period, these archives are typically biased toward the perspectives of those in power. How, then, are we to undertake analyses of the past that take into account the lives and experiences of all of society’s members, including the poor, the working class, the colonized, and others whose voices appear far less frequently in historical documents? From its disciplinary origins in nineteenth century antiquarianism, archaeology has grown to become a rigorous science of the past, dedicated to the exploration of long-term and inclusive social histories. “Laboratory Methods in Archaeology” is an intensive introduction to the analysis of archaeological artifacts and samples in which we explore how the organic and inorganic remains from archaeological sites can be used to build rigorous claims about the human past. The 2022 iteration of the course centers on assemblages from two sites, both excavated by Barnard’s archaeological field program in the Taos region of northern New Mexico: (1) the Spanish colonial site of San Antonio del Embudo founded in 1725 and (2) the hippie commune known as New Buffalo, founded in 1967. Participants in ANTH BC2012 will be introduced to the history, geology, and ecology of the Taos region, as well as to the excavation histories of the two sites. Specialized laboratory modules focus on the analysis of chipped stone artifacts ceramics, animal bone, glass, and industrial artifacts. The course only demands participation in the seminars and laboratory modules and successful completion of the written assignments, but all students are encouraged to develop specialized research projects to be subsequently expanded into either (1) a senior thesis project or (2) a conference presentation at the Society for American Archaeology, Society for Historical Archaeology, or Theoretical Archaeology Group meeting

Spring 2025: ANTH BC2012
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ANTH 2012 001/00637 T Th 4:10pm - 6:00pm
954 Ext Schermerhorn Hall
Severin Fowles 4.00 9/8

ANTH UN2028 THINK LIKE AN ARCHAEOLOGIST. 4.00 points.

$25 mandatory lab fee.

This course provides a comprehensive introduction to methods and theory in archaeology – by exploring how archaeologists work to create narratives about the past (and the present) on the basis on the material remains of the past. The course begins with a consideration of how archaeologists deal with the remains of the past in the present: What are archaeological sites and how do we ‘discover’ them? How do archaeologists ‘read’ or analyze sites and artifacts? From there, we will turn to the question of how archaeologists interpret these materials traces, in order to create narratives about life in the past. After a review of the historical development of theoretical approaches in archaeological interpretation, the course will consider contemporary approaches to interpreting the past

Fall 2024: ANTH UN2028
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ANTH 2028 001/10347 M W 10:10am - 11:25am
310 Fayerweather
Hannah Chazin 4.00 43/90

ANTH BC3223 Gender Archaeolxgy. 4.00 points.

This seminar critically reexamines the ancient world from the perspective of gender archaeology. Though the seedlings of gender archaeology were first sown by of feminist archaeologists during the 70’s and 80’s, this approach involves far more than simply ‘womanizing’ androcentric narratives of past. Rather, gender archaeology criticizes interpretations of the past that transplant contemporary social roles onto the archaeological past, casting the divisions and inequalities of today as both timeless and natural. This class challenges the idea of a singular past, instead championing a turn towards multiple, rich, messy, intersectional pasts. The ‘x’ in ‘archaeolxgy’ is an explicit signal of our focus on this diversity of pasts and a call for a more inclusive field of practice today

Spring 2025: ANTH BC3223
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ANTH 3223 001/00646 W 10:10am - 12:00pm
111 Milstein Center
Camilla Sturm 4.00 10/16

ANTH GU4346 LAB TECHNIQUES IN ARCHAEOLOGY. 3.00 points.

“Laboratory Methods in Archaeology” is an intensive introduction to the analysis of archaeological artifacts and samples in which we explore how the organic and inorganic remains from archaeological sites can be used to build rigorous claims about the human past. In 2023, this course will focus on pre-contact and post-contact assemblages from the New York-metro area, including materials from the legacy collections of Ralph Solecki. Participants will be introduced to the history, geology, and ecology of the New York area and specialized laboratory modules focus on the analysis of chipped stone artifacts, ceramics, animal bone, glass, and a range of post-contact artifacts. The course only demands participation in the seminars and laboratory modules and successful completion of the written assignments, but all students are encouraged to develop specialized research projects to be subsequently expanded into either (1) a thesis project or (2) a conference presentation at the Society for American Archaeology, Society for Historical Archaeology, or Theoretical Archaeology Group meeting

Physical Anthropology

ANTH GU4148 HUMAN SKELETAL BIOLOGY II. 3.00 points.

Enrollment limit is 12 and Intructor's permission required.

Recommended for archaeology and physical anthropology students, pre-meds, and biology majors interested in the human skeletal system. Intensive study of human skeletal materials using anatomical and anthropological landmarks to assess sex, age, and ethnicity of bones. Other primate skeletal materials and fossil casts used for comparative study

Of Related Interest

Anthropology (Barnard)
ANTH BC3868ETHNOGRAPHIC FIELD RESEARCH IN NYC
Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race
CSER UN3904Rumor and Racial Conflict
CSER UN3924Latin American and Latina/o Social Movements
CSER UN3990SENIOR PROJECT SEMINAR
Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Biology
EEEB GU4700RACE:TANGLED HIST-BIOL CONCEPT
Women's and Gender Studies
WMST UN1001INTRO-WOMEN & GENDER STUDIES