Current Courses

Courses I Teach

• Anth 1010 - Culture and the Human Experience
  This course is an introduction to cultural anthropology, one of the four subfields of the broad discipline of anthropology. We will examine how culture, a distinctly human way of life, shapes human behavior across time and space. The emphasis in our overview of human experience is the description and explanation of human universals and cross-cultural variation. We will address the concept of culture as well as anthropological theory and methodology. We will discuss a range of topics: language, kinship, gender, economic behavior, political organization, religion, and culture change connecting them to ethnographic case studies.
• Anth 3126 - Mediterranean Cultures
  “Medi-terra” is the sea “in the middle of earth”. The Mediterranean Sea carried people and their cultures across its vast expanse since prehistory. We will examine how the contemporary Mediterranean world had been shaped through the exchanges of people, goods, and ideas travelling across the Mediterranean Sea. We will analyze cultural, social, political, and economic processes in the Mediterranean area today.
• Anth 3127 - Peoples of Europe
  This course is an introduction to the cultural anthropology of contemporary Europe. Informed by the past, but focused on the present, its overall theme is Europe divided and united. The theoretical framework is the concept of liminality, an analytical model in anthropology that examines the crossing of boundaries, real or imaginary. Within the last several decades Europe has seen armies, refugees, immigrant workers, and elites crossing the borders between cultures, nations, and identities. Anthropology of Europe is heavily motivated by these events. We will examine traditional topics in anthropology such as kinship, gender, religion, politics, and economy, within the context of the current hotly debated themes of war, immigration, ethnic and religious diversity, and the European unification.
• Anth 3128 - Andean Cultures
  This course is an introduction to the ethnography of the Andean region of South America. We will study the lives of its indigenous people following the continuity of their cultures from past to present. We will explore Andean prehistory, the Inka rule, the period of Spanish conquest, the republican politics in the 20th C. and the “dirty war” in Peru and its consequences for indigenous Andeans. Other topics address kinship and family, poverty, religion, ritual, the art of weaving, dancing, and the Inka khipu, the record keeping in the form of knots. We will explore the significance of the production of coca in the Andes and its consequences.
• Symbolic Anthropology - Anth 4135
  This course reviews classic theories, models, and ethnographies in symbolic anthropology as well as the recent findings on symbolic communication in anthropology, archaeology, linguistics, and cognitive studies with examples ranging from prehistory to the cotemporary Western culture including the symbolism of colors, food, animals, human body, gender, art, myth, ritual, and politics across cultures. The course material covers ethnographic examples of the native Pueblos of the American Southwest, China, India, Mexico, central and South Africa, Iceland, Jewish culture, and Polynesia.