Classes

    ANTHRO 1906 - Care in Critical Times

    Semester: 

    Spring

    Offered: 

    2024

    Prof. Andrea Wright
     

    What is care? How can and do communities mobilize care as a social intervention, political act, and tool for building intimacy, healing, and hope? Now, more than ever, it is imperative that we care for ourselves and our communities, but caring is not an apolitical or individual act and we must analyze the inherent inequalities and social dimensions of what it means to give and receive care.

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    ANTHRO 2738 - Remaking Life and Death

    Semester: 

    Spring

    Offered: 

    2024

    Prof. Anya Bernstein
    T 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM
     

    This course is a critical reading graduate seminar focusing on how defining the boundaries between life and death became a matter of profound political, cultural, and scientific debate. Guided by the concepts of bio- and necropolitics, we will explore the shifting relations between body and person, human and time, and technology and biology while attending to the changing political, biomedical and religious contexts. The course includes readings from a number of anthropological subfields, including medical anthropology...

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    GENED 1126 - Race and Caste

    Semester: 

    Spring

    Offered: 

    2022

    Prof. Ajantha Subramanian
    Tues. and Thurs. 1:30 PM - 2:45 PM
    Sever Hall 102

    Click here for a video preview of this course.

    Race and caste are two of the most enduring forms of social stratification. While their histories date well before the advent of political democracy, they have taken on new forms in the context of democratic social transformation and capitalist development. In this course, we will grapple with the meanings, uses, and politics of race and caste historically and in the contemporary moment.... Read more about GENED 1126 - Race and Caste

    GENED 1177 - Language in Culture and Society

    Semester: 

    Fall

    Offered: 

    2022

    How are language, culture, and society related?

    The relation is complicated rather than simple, problematic rather than straightforward. To begin to explore this question, we discuss key theoretical issues and illuminating examples that begin to sketch out an approach to linking language, culture, and society. Specifically, we consider the following problems:

    • How is language use a kind of social action? (It is something we do; it has social effects.)
    • How does language organize and provide access to shared concepts and beliefs...
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    ANTHRO 97Z - Sophomore Tutorial: Anthropology as Social Theory and the Social Theory of Anthropology

    Semester: 

    Spring

    Offered: 

    2024

    Prof. Gabriella Coleman
    M W 1:30 PM - 2:45 PM 

    Anthropology 97z is a course about what social theory is, how to read it and how it relates to the discipline of anthropology. The course encourages students to think expansively about the sources and boundaries of theory, guiding them through several approaches to theorizing social life.

    Required of all Social Anthropology concentrators. Weekly 2-hour sections to be arranged.

    ANTHRO 98B - Junior Tutorial for Thesis Writers in Anthropology

    Semester: 

    Spring

    Offered: 

    2024

    Prof. Damina Khaira
    By Arrangement

    This individual tutorial is for anthropology students intending to write a senior thesis, and is normally undertaken with an advanced graduate student during the second term of junior year. Students will have weekly meetings with the project advisor for the purposes of developing the appropriate background research on theoretical, thematic, regional, and methodological literature relevant to their thesis topic, and fully refining their summer research proposal. The tutorials final paper will be comprised of a research proposal representing...

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    ANTHRO 99B - Thesis Tutorial in Anthropology

    Semester: 

    Spring

    Offered: 

    2024

    Prof. Damina Khaira
    By Arrangement

    This is a full year research and writing seminar limited to senior honors candidates. The course is intended to provide students with practical guidance and advice during the thesis writing process through structured assignments and peer feedback on work-in-progress. It is intended to supplement not replace faculty thesis advising (with the requirement of consulting regularly with the advisor built into the assignments) and, most importantly, allow students to share their work and experiences with other thesis writers in a collegial and...

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    ANTHRO 1435 - Challenging Collections: Critical Reflections on Collecting Through Harvard’s History

    Semester: 

    Spring

    Offered: 

    2023

    Profs. Diana Loren
    Mon. 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM 
     

    Harvard’s museum collections have often been used to interrogate the world outside of “us”: peoples, events, places, and things. This course reverses that gaze and asks what the collections and the processes of collecting reveal about the history of Harvard and its institutional identity as “the” place of learning.... Read more about ANTHRO 1435 - Challenging Collections: Critical Reflections on Collecting Through Harvard’s History

    ANTHRO 1716 - Neoliberalism: Empire, Extraction, and the Making of the Global Social Order

    Semester: 

    Spring

    Offered: 

    2022

    Profs. Salmaan Keshavjee, Jason Silverstein, and Lindsey Zeve
    Weds. 12:00 PM - 2:45 PM
    Apthorp House Library

    This course is designed primarily for advanced undergraduates and graduate students who are interested in the relationship between neoliberalism, the global social order, and inequities in health and wellbeing.

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    ANTHRO 1836AR - Sensory Ethnography 1

    Semester: 

    Spring

    Offered: 

    2024

    Profs. Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel
    T 12:00 PM - 4:15 PM

    An introduction to “sensory ethnography,” a media practice that seeks to rejuvenate and innovate in visual anthropology, cinema, and art.  Students will learn to record and edit video and audio to produce original media works about embodied experience, culture, ecology, political-economy, and history. This is a year-long course that supports students' independent projects through the summer and the following semester.

    This course is also offered as AFVS 158AR. Students are strongly...

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    ANTHRO 1826 - Medical Anthropology: Advanced Topics

    Semester: 

    Spring

    Offered: 

    2023

    Prof. Arthur Kleinman
    Weds. 3:00 PM - 5:45 PM
     

     

    A review of the latest and most advanced contributions to theory, methods, especially ethnography, findings, as well as policy contributions in medical anthropology.

    Open to advanced undergraduates with some background in social sciences or humanities (regardless of concentration), and to graduate and professional students. Because of the extent of the readings and the intensity of the analysis, the course will be limited to 25 students.

    Spring 2023: Paul Farmer's...

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    ANTHRO 1883 - Where Science Meets Society: Introduction to STS

    Semester: 

    Spring

    Offered: 

    2023

    Prof. Anna Jabloner
    Weds. 9:45 AM - 11:45 AM
     

    The German word for science literally means “knowledge made.” In line with this meaning, STS approaches science as practice. The interdisciplinary field asks empirically and methodologically how knowledge is made, how truths become truths, and how matters come to matter and to be matters of fact.

    This course serves as basic introduction to STS, highlighting key political interventions, theoretical contributions, and the field’s recent ascent into a burgeoning academic inter-discipline.

    ANTHRO 3628 - Anthropological Research Methods

    Semester: 

    Spring

    Offered: 

    2024

    TBA
     

    This course offers a conceptual overview of research methods used by anthropologists. We will hear from faculty members their experience of doing fieldwork—from formulating a research question, choosing a site, entering the field to ethical issues they face in the field. Students will not only learn about but also practice these various methods and reflect on their projects in lights of the discussion about methods. To that end, students will complete several exercises and craft a method paper for their own project.

    This course is...

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    ANTHRO 3636 - Pedagogy in Anthropology

    Semester: 

    Spring

    Offered: 

    2024

    Department Chair
    TBA

    This course has two aims: 1) to provide graduate students with the necessary training to be effective Teaching Fellows at Harvard, and 2) to give you the tools to develop your own approach to critical pedagogy in the field of Anthropology. Required for graduate students in the Spring of their second year. Classes will also be advertised to all Anthropology graduate students as optional Pedagogy Workshops for professional development. While discussions will be tailored to the unique challenges of teaching in Anthropology (across Archaeology and Social...

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    GENED 1128 - The Conduct of Life in Western and Eastern Philosophy

    Semester: 

    Spring

    Offered: 

    2022

    Prof. Michael Puett
    Thurs. 9:30 AM - 11:30 AM

    A study of approaches in the philosophical traditions of the West and the East to the conduct of life. Philosophical ethics has often been understood as meta-ethics: the development of a method of moral inquiry or justification. Here we focus instead on what philosophy has to tell us about the first-order question: How should we live our lives?

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    ANTHRO 1617 - The Price of Solidarity: Value, Sacrifice, Capital

    Semester: 

    Spring

    Offered: 

    2024

    Prof. Julia Fierman
    Weds. 3:00 PM - 5:45 PM
     

    This seminar in social anthropology presents value and the exchange of value as the foundations of economic, social, moral, and political life. The authors we read will argue that the exchange of value(s) between humans creates social solidarity. We are tied to our communities and friends through relationships of debt and expenditure; we give a gift with the expectation of receiving something in return, binding the gift giver and receiver in a social relationship that extends over space and time. For sociologist Marcel...

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    ANTHRO 1709 - The Anthropology of Power: Sovereignty, Hegemony, and Resistance

    Semester: 

    Spring

    Offered: 

    2024

    Prof. Julia Fierman
    T 12:00 PM - 2:45 PM
     

    What does it mean when we speak of “political power”? We know, from the work of many anthropologists, that power is not a question of the state. The political anthropologist Pierre Clastres wrote about non-state societies with a deep sense of law, tradition, and propriety that actively combat the emergence of a state system. In an age where we feel constantly surveilled, it is clear that power can be invisible, yet palpable; physical force is not necessary to encourage obedience among a population. In other words, power,...

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