In this introduction to American politics we will explore the foundations of government in the US, the political institutions that govern our society, and the ways in which people interact with the governmen

This course provides a social science perspective on the American presidency. Our objective is to cut through common narratives provided by pundits, politicians, journalists, and the typical voter to understand when presidents are more (or less) likely to influence public policy. Put simply, when (and how) do presidents exercise power? Answers to this question are both complicated and difficult to evaluate.

This introductory course to cultural anthropology seeks to expand students’ understanding about the diversity of the human condition. Cultural anthropologists are united in their commitment to three poles of research: fieldwork, a method based on long-term immersion in a life-world; ethnography, the written representation of peoples, places, and fieldwork experiences; and theory, evolving concepts that anthropologists try to build through their ethnographies to address “big questions” about constantly changing human societies. In this class, we will use these three poles to challenge taken-for-granted assumptions about culture, race, gender, sexuality, kinship, magic, environment, science, and modernity. Using ethnographic accounts from around the world, we will come to understand these categories not as “natural truths” but rather as “social facts” – that is, the result of cultural contexts and historical particularities. We will cover key theoretical thinkers and central themes in anthropological scholarship.

When people say “global health,” they usually mean delivering Western medicine in low-resource settings. This assumes that medicine is a universal good. Is it? Or is biomedicine also a “culture” – with values, practices, and understandings built in a particular place and time? What are medicine’s ethics, symbols, economies, experiences of the body, and politics? What happens when these things run up against other ways of viewing the world? In this course, through scholarship and popular media, and through the instructor’s experiences as a practicing physician and anthropologist, we will explore mind-bending paradoxes about what we assume to be true, explore aspects of medical practice, and describe why those practices often have unexpected results when they travel.

Do you eat to live, or live to eat? If the latter, this course may be for you. As anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss wrote, the plants and animals around us are not just good to eat, they are good to think with and through. Anthropologists study the human condition in all its forms, including how we evolved as a species, how we communicate, how we lived in the historic and prehistoric past, and how we organize our lives in different parts of the world today. In the realm of food, we thus pay close attention to the ways in which humans hunt, fish, gather, and grow food, how we get enough calories to survive in differing environments, how food helps us to constitute families, religious identities, and other social networks, and even how food comes to be a source and a symptom of social inequality.

This course explores the interlinked categories of rebel, bandit, and freedom fighter to understand insurgency from an anthropological viewpoint. Privileging sociological and micropolitical analysis, the course approaches specific instances of illegal use of force in their socio-cultural and historic settings, and builds toward a consideration of insurgency from “the actors’ points of view”. Through the categories of the rebel, bandit, and insurgent, the course considers broader issues of structure and agency, state power and sovereignty, and definitions of legal and illegal uses of force from the oblique angle of those whose violence is classified as illegitimate.

The long-standing belief that the United States is in some sense a chosen nation has multiple sources. The Puritans hailed the New World as the last refuge of righteousness in a corrupt world, the Framers of the US Constitution thought that their experiment in democracy turned a new page in world history, and later propagandists proclaimed America the land of opportunity open to all races and creeds. The best and most enduring prose fiction written in this country neither accepts nor rejects these native myths but fuses them into one complex response. Bitter denunciations of the American Dream tend to be fueled by a hidden idealism; overt celebrations of the same idea can betray awareness of its tragic costs. In this course we shall trace this ambivalence about an idealized “America” in writing over the past two centuries. Authors to be considered include, among others, Herman Melville, Rebecca Harding Davis, Stephen Crane, Zora Neale Hurston, Don DeLillo, and Louise Erdrich.

This course examines environmental issues as they engage, relate to, ally and contradict with indigenous belongings to land and place in the Pacific Islands, continental U.S., and beyond. We will examine the histories of colonialism and imperialism that set the stage for contemporary formations militarization, tourism, national parks, and genetically modified organisms, issues that engage both questions of sustainability and indigenous political sovereignty.

We will survey in this course the representations of and by Asian American subjects in U.S. cultural production since the late nineteenth century. This course explores the ways in which the cultural and literary production that arises out of the contradictions of U.S. democracy “displace,” in the words of cultural studies scholar Lisa Lowe, “the fiction of reconciliation”—the ways in which the cultural forms of Asian America “disrupt the myth of national identity by revealing its gaps and fissures.”