Check graduate course listings; graduate seminars are often open to qualified undergraduates.
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Anthropology faculty.
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Course archives.
Introduction to Physical Anthropology, R. Jurmain, H. Nelson. L. Kilgore and W. Trevathan, 8th edition (2000); Wadsworth, Belmont, CA.
Biological Anthropology: An Introductory Reader, Michael A. Park, 2nd edition (2000), Mayfield Publishing, Mountain View, CA.
Archaeology Colin Renfrew and Paul Bahn (1996) London: Thames and Hudson.
Students taking this class for the anthropology major are required to enroll under anthropology.
One laboratory section per week is required. The times will be determined during the first week of classes. One textbook, two midterm examinations, and a final examination are required.
Prerequisites: Anthro 1 highly recommended.
Requirements: There will be two midterm exams, one five-page paper, and a final exam.
Required texts:
Understanding Human Sexuality, J. Shibley Hyde and J. D. DeLamater, 7th edition, (2000), McGraw-Hill; Boston.
Prerequisites: Anthro 2 recommended.
Required texts:
Ancient North America. Brian Fagan
When the Land was Young: Reflection on American Archaeology. Sharman Apt Russell.
Kirch, P. V. 2000. On the Road of the Winds; An Archaeological History of the Pacific Islands before European Contact. Berkeley: University of California Press.
A Course Reader is also required.
The Foraging Spectrum: Diversity in Hunter-Gatherer Lifeways (1995) by Robert L. Kelly.
A Course Reader will also be required.
This is a wide-ranging course that will consider two interconnected issues: 1) the ways in which we have come to take up "gender" as an explicit concern in archaeology; and 2) what feminist practice might mean for archaeology. The course will involve participation by all students, in both structured and more open-ended ways, and it will involve a good deal of (albeit excellent!) reading.
We will consider the recent, but vibrant, developments in gender research over the past 15 years in Anglo-American archaeology, beginning with casting a wider net -- the history of gender and feminism in anthropology and ethnography, and the development of feminist critiques of science, including issues in the philosophy and sociology of science more widely. We will need to consider the concept "gender", as a term, as a theory, as a process, and as historically and culturally-situated. We will need to place this archaeological interest in gender within the wider history of anthropological archaeology, and within the sociology of archaeology (e.g., equity issues; differential valuing of research, etc.). We will engage with recent concerns in feminist theory, especially in issues of our understandings of sex/gender and sexuality and the problematization of the concept of "gender". As well, we will discuss if there is such a thing as a feminist method (science, ethnography, epistemology, archaeology), and will explore what it might mean "to do archaeology as a feminist"; that is, what feminist practice is in and for archaeology. Lastly, we will consider the "writing" of archaeology and other ways of presenting archaeological "results", including a special session on narrativity and the use of fiction, and another on multimedia and hypertextuality.
This will be a fast moving class if you have not had any archaeology or anthropology; if you have not been exposed to any feminist theory or gender studies, you can do it, but may want some outside reading here and there.
Requirements: 1) There will be two critical mini-essays and an associated peer review; 2) In-class presentations: while there will be chances for people to present "alone", mostly you will work in at least pairs or groups of 3 or more; 3) A review of one class meeting; and 4) a "Final Exam/Practicum" in the form of take-home essays to write, which will include some possibilities that will be more "practical", in the sense that you will choose to write about/prepare something that interfaces with the public, with secondary or elementary schools or the like. The essay topics will be given out in early April and will be due on our Exam Group day. We will meet for at least one hour on that day to assess/evaluate the questions for the Final Exam and the overall course.
Required texts:
1. Gilchrist, Roberta (2000) Gender and Archaeology: Contesting the Past Routledge, London (paperback).
2. A Course Reader.
3. Hays-Gilpin, K. and D. Whitley (1998) Reader in Gender Archaeology, Routledge, London (paperback).
4. Nelson, Sarah Milledge (1997) Gender in Archaeology. AltaMira Press, Walnut Creek, CA (paperback).
The exam group for this class will change so there is not a conflict with Commencement.
Requirements: This course is essentially a practical research/service-learning course. Participation in the Roosevelt School after-school program (approx. 2-3 hrs one afternoon each week) is a required part of the course. Each student will be part of the course term project to evaluate the introduction of multimedia authoring and the archaeological experience to 6th-graders through this after-school program. You will be expected to keep a running log/diary of your observations. Instructions in making these observations and making evaluations will be given during the course. A small stipend to cover the cost of travel to the Roosevelt School will be provided.
Required texts:
Fieldworking: Reading and Writing Research. Chiseri-Strater and B.S. Sunstein
Other People's Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom. L. D. Delpit
At Home in the Street: Street Children of Northeast Brazil. T. Hecht
Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools. J. Kozol
The class involves the analysis of archaeological materials from prehistoric shell mounds in the greater San Francisco Bay Area. Students will be working with archival materials and archaeological samples from excavations undertaken by Nels Nelson, an early UC Berkeley archaeologist. During the period of 1906-1911, Nelson collected survey information from more than 400 sites, and did additional excavation work at nine large shell mounds, most of which are found in Marin, Contra Costa, and Alameda Counties. The materials produced by Nelson (black/white photographs, maps, field notes, journal accounts) and collected by his field crews (artifacts, soil samples) are currently housed in the Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology on the Berkeley campus. Additional field notes and photographs from the Nelson field investigations, long thought to have been lost, have recently been "discovered" in the archives of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Copies of these additional materials will be available to the class. The purposes of this class are twofold. One purpose is to introduce students to contemporary museum management practices and the use of museum collections for research purposes. The other purpose is to familiarize students with methods for analyzing historic photos, maps, field notes, journal accounts, lithic artifacts, bone artifacts, and shell artifacts. The ultimate goal is to develop a better understanding of the structure of the shell mounds and the context of the artifacts recovered. This will provide the necessary foundation to begin generating interpretations about the age, use, and significance of these very impressive shell mounds.
Prerequisites: Class reserved for declared anthropology majors. Students must also have completed Anthro 2, and at least one upper division course in archaeology.
Requirements: Two mid-term exams and a final research paper. Please note that students will probably need to spend more than three hours a week in the lab to complete their research projects.
Required texts:
Archaeological Laboratory Methods: An Introduction by Mark Q. Sutton and Brooke S. Arkush (1998) Kendall/Hull Publishing.
There will also be additional readings on shell mounds and California archaeology.
But, the main aim of this course is for students to gain experience in authoring multimedia presentations and interpretations of archaeological data in the form of interactive hypermedia modules. Teams will design modules from real-life archaeological contexts, using original images, videos, and other data they develop through research projects. Students will gain familiarity with the software and authoring techniques available for use on a Macintosh platform, including Photoshop, Dreamweaver and Bryce.
Required texts: Jeanne Sept 1997, Investigating Olduvai. Archaeology of Human Origins CD-ROM Indiana University Press.
H.J. Deacon & Janette Deacon 1999, Human Beginnings in South Africa. Uncovering the secrets of the Stone Age (paperback) Alta Mira Press.
David W. Phillipson 1993, African Archaeology 2nd edition (paperback) Cambridge University Press.
This class is a collaborative, hands-on experience in ethnographic video production. Students work together in teams to produce short video projects in the Bay Area. Projects will be chosen from proposals submitted by students of 138A. Students share equally the responsibilities of field work, directing, camera, sound recording, and editing. Please note that students will often need to meet with the instructor and/or with their teammates outside of class time.
Prerequisite: Anthro 138A in the preceeding fall semester.
This course will discuss key theoretical concepts related to power and control and examine indirect mechanisms and processes by which direct control becomes hidden, voluntary, and unconscious in industrialized societies. Readings will cover language, science and technology, law, politics, religion, medicine, sex, and gender. The manner of thinking about controlling processes emphasizes linkages rather than disciplinary boundaries in the anthropological perspectives.
Prerequisites: There are no prerequisites. Scientists and engineers welcome.
Required texts:
1984, Gaorge Orwell, Erich Fromm (1990).
America by Design: Technology and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism, David E. Noble (1979).
A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClinktock, Evelyn Fox Keller, W. H. Freeman (1993).
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley (1998).
Commodify Your Dissent: Salvos from the Baffler, Thomas Frank, Matt Weiland (1997).
Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare, Richard A. Cloward (1993).
This course is designed to examine formal education from anthropological perspectives. It deals with cultural, social, and psychological factors in education from a cross-cultural point of view. The course is divided into four major sections:
1. overview and background of the field;
2. aims, methods and analytic frameworks;
3. substantive areas of study (e.g., evolution of education; sociocultural organization of schools; institutional linkages--i.e., with the economy, polity, etc.; discontinuities in culture, language, cognition, and motivation and the relevance to educability; minority education; etc.);
4. education and social change.
Illustrations of major points in the course will be drawn from ethnographic studies of schooling in the United States but will not be limited to this geographical region. Note that this is not a course on "American educational problems." The overall aim of the course is to familiarize students with the development and nature of anthropology of education. Students more interested in learning how to use anthropological research to solve school problems, rather than how anthropologists go about studying and explaining the processes of education, should not take this class.
Prerequisites: Anthropology 3 is recommended.
Requirements: Two midterm essay-type examinations, each has a value of 25% of the course grade; and a 3-hour final examination of essay type. The final examination will be 50% of the course grade.
Required texts:
Education and Culture, a reader prepared specifically for this course by the instructor.
Anthropology of Education: Contemporary Perspectives, a volume in International Encyclopedia of Education, Pergamon Press, 1994. Selections edited by the instructor.
Required texts: Cinderella: A Casebook, Alan Dundes (1989).
Enchanted Maidens, James M. Taggart (1990).
Morphology of the Folktale, Vladimir Aioakovlevich (1968).
Sacred Narrative, Readings in the Theory of Myth, Alan Dundes (1984).
Speak, Bird, Speak Again: Palestinian Arab Folktales, Ibrahim Muhawi, Sharif Kanaana, Alan Dundes (1989)
The Tale of the Kind and the Unkind: Aa-Th 480 and Related Tales (Classics in Folklore), Warren E. Roberts (1994).
The Vampire: A Casebook, Alan Dundes (1998).
Two Tales of Crow and Sparrow: A Freudian Folkloristic Essay on Caste and Untouchability, Alan Dundes (1997).
Ethnographic field research has demonstrated its power to animate intellectual life in anthropology for more than a century, and is of increasing--if contested--importance across the social sciences. How do anthropologists develop insight into aspects of a social field--a community, for example, or an institution, movement, or set of practices--through their engagement in that field? In this course, we will both analyse and actively immerse ourselves in field methods, combining our discussions of ethnographic inquiry with original field projects which students will carry out during the term.
From the beginning, we will interrogate key examples of fieldwork in anthropology, probing contributions and problems in the work of ethnographers who have helped shape the discipline over the past century. If fieldwork has been "at the heart" of twentieth century ethnography, what have been the vital passions and troubles of that heart? We will critically examine insights and contradictions of works by such influential figures as Rivers, Malinowski, DuBois, Boas, Benedict, and Mead, and explore how more recent studies have refined, pluralized, and problematized field methods in increasingly diverse intellectual exchanges across difference and in relation to ethnographers' own societies and formation. Students will complete a brief critical analysis of one such ethnographic project (a bibliography of potential examples will be provided).
We will learn by doing throughout the course, through direct field practice of various techniques, and by designing and completing projects based primarily on field study. Students will write a research proposal, prepare a human subjects statement, conduct interviews and participant observation, analyze fieldnotes, and reflect creatively on their field experience to produce their own ethnographic study of a social situation which they find of compelling interest. Each student will work closely with other students, the GSI, and the professor to develop their projects over the course of the term.
Students are expected to attend lecture, to stay current with all class materials, and to come to sections prepared to discuss the readings and their ongoing fieldwork. Grades will be based on active participation in discussion, timely completion of assignments, and the quality of field research projects.
Required texts
Angrosino, Michael. Doing Cultural Anthropology. Waveland Press, September 2001.
Emerson, Robert M. et al. Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes. Chicago: Uof Chicago Press, 1995.
Powdermaker, Hortense. Stranger and Friend. W. W. Norton, 1967.
Humphreys, Laud. Tearoom Trade. Aldine de Gruyter, revised edition 1975.
Rosaldo, Renato. Culture and Truth. Beacon Press, reissue, 1993.
Wolcott, Harry. Writing Up Qualitative Research. 2nd edition. Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 2001.
Coursepack readers.
Prerequisite: None.
Required texts:
Hertz, E. 1998. The trading crowd: an ethnography of the Shanghai stock market.
Lee, C-K. 1998. Gender and the south China miracle: two worlds of factory women.
Liu, X. 2000. In one's own shadow: an ethnographic account of the condition of post-reform rural China.
Zhang, L. 2001. Strangers in the city: reconfigurations of space, power, and social networks within China's floating population.
The exam group for this class will change (to group 8) so there's not a conflict with Commencement.
This course focuses on the anthropology of contemporary Japan. Topics will cover the changes in Japan since World War II, both at the macro-level--industry, employment, economy, immigration--and at the personal level--life-cycle, marriage, travel and morals. Historical and pre-modern Japan will only be covered as they bear on today's Japanese culture and on the anthropological interpretation of Japan. In mid-March Prof. Graburn and graduate student Kenji Tierney will be running an international conference on Kokunai kokusaika, the internationalization of today's Japan at the grass-roots level affecting tourism, multicultural education, immigration, undocumented workers, mixed marriages, and so on. Your involvement will be welcome.
Required texts:
Ruth Benedict, Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946).
Eyal Ben-Ari (ed.), Unwrapping Japan, (1990).
M. Hamabata, Crested Kimono, (1990).
Sepp Linhart (ed.), The Culture of Japan as Seen through Its Leisure (1998).
Susan Long (ed.), Lives in Motion: Composing Circles of Self and Community in Japan.
J. W. Treat (ed.), Contemporary Japan and Popular Culture (1996).
M. Weiner, Japan's Minorities (1997).
Zipangu Warawareru Nihonjin, Japan Made in USA (1998).
Optional texts:
M. Ivy, Discourses of the Vanishing (1995)
B. Moeran, Folk Art Potters of Japan, Beyond the Anthropology of Aesthetics (1997)
E. Ohnuki-Tierney, Rice as Self (1993)
There will also be a class reader with short articles and chapters.
The lectures will be supplemented by videos such as The Japanese Version, Tampopo, and Overstay (about illegal workers). We also hope to arrange for class members to visit local Buddhist temple services and a Shinto shrine matsuri (spring festival). The assignments will include essay-type midterm and final exam, and one independent research project.
Required texts:
Remotely Global: Village Modernity in West Africa, Charles Piot.
Congo-Paris: Transnational Traders in the Marings of the Law, Janet MacGaffey.
Three Kilos of Coffee: An Autobiography, Manu Dibango.
Nervous Conditions: A Novel, Tsitsi Dangarembga.
Anthropology and Africa, Sally Falk Moore (1994).
The politics of culture in contemporary South Asia: Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka
This course explores culture and cultural politics in contemporary South Asia and Afghanistan, with a focus on India, the largest and the dominant regional power.
We begin with a brief introduction to South Asian geography, history, and literature, utilizing Kulke and Rothermund's A History of India as a textbook. How and why has "India" and more recently "South Asia" been constituted as a region? What are the politics of how we understand and delimit regions and "civilizations"?
To get a sense of how 19th century nationalist movements reframed the practice of cultural criticism, we read Vasudha Dalmia's The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions. How have the politics of language and literature changed over time? We focus on Hindi butlook also at debates on Tamil nationalism in South India.
We turn to Gandhi's autobiography and think about three ways to understand the rise of Gandhi and of the non-violence movement in 20th century colonial India: as colonial hybridity, as alternative modernity, and as class formation. Our focus will be on the reception of Gandhi among rural peasants in Uttar Pradesh, among urban people in Surat, Gujarat, and among both peasants and nomadic tribesmen in Pakistan. We will look at Mukulika Banerjee's book, The Pathan Unarmed, in which she asks how the supposedly warrior-like Pathans became among the most dedicated non-violent activists.
Banerjee forces us to reconsider classic understandings of Pathan (Pashtun) "culture," and with this in mind we turn to the recent history of Afghanistan and to journalist Ahmed Rashid's book The Taliban. How did Afghan cultural politics around the nature of Islam shift with Cold War struggles between the U.S.S.R. amd the U.S.A. and with the changing geopolitics of opium, oil, and natural gas? How do so-called experts in the U.S. today redefine "Afghan culture" and its history?
In thinking about the politics of representing Islam and gender in South Asia we turn back to north India and to the cultural celebration of the courtesan, reading Mirza Rusva's famous short novel Umrao Jan Ada. In thinking through other examples of the cultural politics of gender and ethnicity today we examine briefly the politics of maternity among Sri Lankan Tamils and the politics of work among Nepali Sherpas.
We will see two Hindi films about the courtesan, Pakeeza and Umrao Jan. To think about film in India more generally, we read from Ashis Nandy's edited collection, The Secret Politics of our Desires and from the work of Ron Inden and others. We turn to the spread of inexpensive cassette tape technology to rethink questions of class, violence, and media technology, reading Peter Manuel's Cassette Culture.
Finally, we turn to the different ways social science and literature represent history and the politics of everyday and extraordinary life. We read from a series of articles on violence by social scientists (Val Daniel, Veena Das, others) and we read Rohinton Mistryıs novel, A Fine Balance.
We close by thinking about the South Asian diaspora and its relevance to the politics of culture in South Asia today.
There are no exams. Students are required to turn in a very short (2-4 page) paper most weeks, discussing a question from that week's reading: there will be 10 such mini-essays. In addition, students are expected to take up in a non-academic way the study of a particular knowledge or art from South Asia that they have not done before and to prepare a short presentation for class. In past years students have tried learning things ranging from Indian wrestling to Vedic mathematics to kuchipudi dance to yoga to rose perfume making to Mughlai cooking to vipassana meditation to Unani or Ayurvedic medicine. Along with your presentation you will be asked to submit a short narrative paper discussing how you learned what you did and how "culture" is made and remade through exercises like this one.
What is the role of Art and Artistic ethos in society and culture? Is the Artist free from different forms of Power and Control? Is he/she manipulated by them? How is Art related to Aesthetics, Creativity, Identity, the State, Ideology, Nationalism, Popular Culture? How are Artistic and Popular Cultural forms involved in the productions of domination, resistance, division, unification, continuity, change, cultural globalization, local responses to it, etc.? We will examine all these issues by focusing on several important moments in the interactions of Art and Society in the 20th century: the rise of industrialized Nation States, Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, Cold War World, U.S. Pop Art, Eastern European and Soviet non-conformist art, Graffiti, the Art of the Global Mediated society. The course is taught under the angle of social and critical theory, rather than art history. Each section in the course will be based on theoretical readings (Marx, Weber, Adorno, Benjamin, Foucault, Barthes, Stuart Hall, Hebdige, Baudrillard), and will incorporate analyses of concrete artistic visual and audio materials.
Anthropology has been underrepresented in the development of interdisciplinary disability studies. Medical anthropology has traditionally chosen to focus its primary analytic lens on the meaning of illness and its amelioration. Anthropology has minimally addressed variations in cross-cultural concepts of impairment, disability, and accommodation, let alone done so using theoretically grounded consistent definitions of these phenomena. This course will demonstrate the important contributions to be gained from a mutual engagement between anthropology and disability studies. We will present the anthropology of disability by engaging multiple perspectives on the sociocultural construction of disability and impairment. The disablement experience brings up important issues at the interface of identity, society, and culture. These issues are not always necessarily tied to the narratives of cause and cure with which medical anthropologists are familiar, but in some cultural contexts can clearly be viewed as social exclusions and their impact. The distinction between disability meanings and illness meanings and their sometimes intersection and interaction requires theoretical elaboration and this course will address this distinction as well as engage other unique perspectives in discourse on anthropology and disability.
Goals: The general goals of this course are to: 1) present a comprehensive overview of work by anthropologists on disability; 2) critically evaluate anthropological methods and theoretical approaches to the study of disability; 3) to critically evaluate current theory and discourse within disability studies as an important standpoint perspective that can advance anthropological understanding of disability.
Requirements: This class is designed for upper-division undergraduates with some background in anthropology and in disability studies. It will be a lecture/discussion class with a significant amount of reading. Class will meet twice a week, 90 minutes for each class session. Each week we will engage a different topic. Active class participation is expected. Grading will be on the basis of reaction papers, a midterm exam and a final project.
Birth and death, marriage and migration, these are the "vital events" that constitute a life in society--as well as the basis of demographic analysis. Although demography and anthropology have very different histories, modes of evidence and argumentation, and institutional forms, they share much of their empirical object. At one level, the two disciplines provide different lenses through which to view the same landscape. This fact is one of the impetuses for this course, and one of our goals will be to explore the different ways that social anthropologists and demographers have approached vital events, looking backward at the empirical findings and theoretical frameworks.
A second impetus for this course is that recent years have seen a dramatic increase of interest in the possibility for an "interdiscipline" of demographic anthropology or anthropological demography. Three edited volumes, a half-dozen monographs, and at least as many conferences have proclaimed the emergence of a new field. To some degree, this field has existed for the better part of a century, but what is currently being proposed is new in scope and scale. A second goal of this course will therefore be to look critically at recent research that positions itself at the interstices of the two disciplines, looking forward to the possible futures of this may-be interdiscipline.
Finally, the interface between anthropology and demography evokes a whole set of theoretical issues regarding the relationships between social structures and population rates, between cultural and demographic patterns, and between social action and population change. Essential to all of these relationships is the question of causation at the level of population or society. The third goal of this course will be to think broadly about these underlying relationships, looking outward to the philosophy of science and related disciplines to grapple with what it means to claim causal links between culture, population and society.