261 - 270 of 430 results for: ANTHRO

What does it mean to want to help, to organize humanitarian aid, in times of crisis? At first glance, the impulse to help issue generis a good one. Helping is surely preferable to indifference and inaction. This does not mean that humanitarian interventions entail no ethical or political stakes ¿ or that they are beyond engaged critique. We need to critique precisely that which we value, and to ask some hard questions, among them these: What are the differences among humanitarianism, charity, and philanthropy? What of social obligations and solidarities? How does the neoliberal world order currently create structural inequalities that ensure the reproduction of poverty and violence? How does the current order of things resemble or differ from the colonial world order? This course examines the history of humanitarian sensibilities and the emergence of organized action in the ¿cause of humanity¿. In the early years of humanitarian intervention, political neutrality was a key principle; it has now come under ever greater analytical and political scrutiny. We will examine the reasons for the politicization and militarization of aid -- be it humanitarian aid in natural disasters or political crises; development programs in the impoverished south (¿the Third World¿), or peace-keeping. We will end with a critical exploration of the concept of human rights, humanity, and personhood. The overall methodological aim of the course is to demonstrate what insights an ethnographic approach to the politics, ethics, and aesthetics of humanitarianism can offer.

This course will explore historical as well as current market transformations of medical ethics in different global contexts. We will examine various aspects of the research enterprise, its knowledge-generating and life-saving goals, as well as the societal, cultural, and political influences that make medical research a site of brokering in need of oversight and emergent ethics.nThis seminar will provide students with tools to explore and critically assess the various technical, social, and ethical positions of researchers, as well as the role of the state, the media, and certain publics in shaping scientific research agendas. We will also examine how structural violence, poverty, global standing, and issues of citizenship also influence issues of consent and just science and medicine.

This course will explore recent debates on the causes and structural terms of large-scale violence in Africa in the context of key contemporary models for reconciliation and transitional justice. Discussions will emphasize the broader international legal and political order each presupposes, and specifically whether their underlying reconstitution of rights and subjectivities are compatible with cultural, political or legal diversity. A historical assessment of the predominating Nuremberg paradigm of transitional justice¿structured around international military intervention and criminal trials based on international criminal courts¿will be contrasted with other regional models that engage with the challenges of the political reconciliation of formerly divided political communities. The necessity of understanding the specificities of both global and local historical and structural contexts will be examined with respect to various proposals for how to balance of balance concerns for both justice and peace. Readings will cover case studies from South Africa, Rwanda, DRC, northern Uganda, Sudan (including Darfur and South Sudan), Libya, Mali, and CAR.

The politics of producing knowledge in and about Africa through the genre of ethnography, from the colonial era to the present. The politics of writing and the ethics of social imagination. Sources include novels juxtaposed to ethnographies.

How have ethnographic and archaeological methods been combined in anthropological research? What methodological and theoretical implications do these kinds of projects generate? Seminar topics will include ethnoarchaeology, ethnographies of archaeological practice, public archaeology and heritage ethics. Lecture and discussion.

Postcolonial African states in historical and ethnographic context. Focus is on contemporary African states not as failures, but as the products of distinctive regional histories and political rationalities.

Over the last twenty years, residents of the People¿s Republic of China have experienced dramatic changes in nearly every facet of life. This undergraduate seminar introduces students to contemporary China through an examination of various types of social transformation. We will analyze how PRC residents of different backgrounds are confronting such processes as economic liberalization, migration, kinship transformation, sexual commodification, media proliferation, industrialization, and transnationalism? Priority is placed on reading, discussing and assessing research that uses qualitative methods and that situates political economy in dialogue with lived experience.

This course introduces Buddhist practices and texts of embodiment as a subject of the anthropology of the body. We draw on research in social/cultural anthropology, history, and religious studies, and examine a selection of approaches to the Buddhist body: the body of power in Buddhist charisma, the gender of the bodhisattva¿s and monastic body, the techniques of the body in meditation and martial arts, healing and cultivation, and the gift of the body in bioethics and medical education. We draw on examples in different traditions of Buddhism in a range of societies with a special focus on Chinese Buddhism.

This course examines how race is made. We will pay close attention to how people engage with material, economic, scientific, and cultural forces to articulate human group difference as a given, and even natural. In this seminar, we will look at the construction of race as a literally made phenomenon, where historical, colonial, bodily, market, and humanitarian constituent elements both circulate and sediment racial understandings. To focus our readings and discussions we will divide this vast terrain into three units: race and the colonial encounter, race and biopower, and race and capital.