COURSES TAUGHT
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Introduction to Cultural Anthropology
COURSE DESCRIPTION
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This course provides an introduction to cultural anthropology, one of the four fields of Anthropology. Cultural Anthropology offers a way to understand both the commonalities and diversity of human experience around the world. The course introduces key concepts to understand variation in the human experience including: culture, race, ethnicity, sex, gender, sexuality, and kinship. The course will discuss the role of religion, medicine, subsistence, the economy, and politics, language, and the media, in reflecting, enabling, and constraining, human behavior experience. This discussion will also entail a discussion of how culture enables and mitigates inequality, social power, and social in/justice. In the course, we will also discuss the key methods and dilemmas of cultural anthropology including ethnography, cultural relativism, and the ethical obligations of anthropologists. You will learn how to apply these methods and considerations in class projects. Though this course will give students skills and knowledge in this specific area of study, it will also give students analytic skills for allied fields that involve the study of human diversity.
MODALITIES
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In person
Decolonial / Ethnohistoric Perspectives on Indigenous Mesoamerica
COURSE DESCRIPTION
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This course focuses on the ethnohistory of Indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica that spans parts of Mexico and Central America, through an Indigenous perspective from native authored texts spanning pre-Columbian, colonial, and contemporary times. The course develops a decolonial perspective on Indigenous Mesoamerica – challenging accounts of Indigenous Mesoamerican cultures and histories that rely solely on perspectives from European colonizers. The course develops a decolonial perspective on these cultures and histories through discussing Indigenous Mesoamerican worldviews as expressed in Indigenous Mesoamerican cosmologies and social structures. The course also develops a decolonial perspective by examining how Indigenous Mesoamerican peoples recount time, history, and their own traditions and adapted and maintained these practices even in the face of colonial oppression. The first half of the course will discuss the Pre-Columbian period and contrast indigenous perspectives with that from researchers in anthropology, archaeology, and linguistics. The second half of the course continue to exam this contrast, but also that of European colonizers from the colonial and contemporary periods. Key assignments and activities will have students conduct their own ethnohistorical analyses of texts from specific Indigenous Mesoamerican media, time periods, and regions. Though this course will give students skills and knowledge in this specific area of study, it will also give students analytic skills for allied fields that involve the study of anthropology, culture, society, history and communication.
MODALITIES
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This course has been taught in person.
Culture and Public Health / Introduction to Cultural Medical Anthropology
COURSE DESCRIPTION
Medical anthropology analyzes the relations among health, illness, culture, and social and economic inequalities. In this class, we examine cultural ideas of sickness and well-being as well as the relationship of illness to social and economic inequality. We ask: Who thrives? Who falls ill, and from what causes? Who has, or does not have, access to health care and healing resources? How do different groups in the U.S. and globally think about the body, health, and healing? We will consider not only cross-cultural understandings of health and sickness, but also our personal and social beliefs about bodies and the causes of (and responses to) vulnerability.
We will also explore how the communication of public health issues can reinforce or challenge cultural understandings of health and illness and thus influence public health outcomes, equitable or not. We will examine communication of health issues among various health actors (government officials, practitioners, patients, and caregivers) in various settings (such as in the media, online, and in clinic settings). Relatedly, we will explore the role of social identity (i.e. race/ethnicity, gender/sexuality) and social power in the cultural framing of public health issues. We will also discuss the role of embodiment in public health outcomes, where routine patterns of human behavior, including health practices, influence cultural understandings of public health, that in turn constrain and enable future health practices and outcomes. Special topics around these themes include: the COVID-19 pandemic, disability, cancer, reproductive health, childhood nutrition, among others.
The course will give students skills to apply anthropological concepts to ameliorate public health issues and communication thereof. The course will also give students analytic skills for allied fields that involve the study of culture, society, history and communication.
MODALITIES
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This course has been taught in person.
Metaphor, Mind, Culture
COURSE DESCRIPTION
This course focuses on the study of metaphor in language, a special area of research in semantics. Semantics is the study of meaning in language, including how specific grammatical forms convey meaning, how the brain processes meaning, and what precisely meaning is. This course will discuss similar topics in regard to metaphor and other key controversies in the field.
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In this course we will explore a few main questions. First, we will discuss what exactly is a metaphor and what is its relationship to language. Is metaphor merely a special rhetorical device, or figure of speech, used to ‘dress up’ language or is metaphor related to linguistic structure in a systematic way? Relatedly, does metaphor in language structure the way we understand and reason about the world? How do speakers identify and understand metaphors? Are there universal metaphors across languages, akin to some grammatical structures? Does variation in grammar in the world’s languages result in different metaphors in these languages, and does this influence how these speakers think about the world? Correspondingly, does culture influence the kinds of metaphor a language may use? How do speakers creatively employ new, or novel metaphors?
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This class will also emphasize methodology and doing hands on metaphor research. We will explore not just ‘what’ metaphor researchers are doing, but ‘how’ they identify and analyze metaphor in language. This will include discussion of special topics metaphor researchers are working on including corpus linguistic methodology, psycholinguistic experiments, metaphorical creativity, metaphor in discourse, religion, politics, science, and in literature and accompanying art.
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MODALITIES
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This course has been taught in person and online synchronously.
Sociolinguistics
COURSE DESCRIPTION
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Linguistics, in general, is concerned with how language is organized into different kinds of units and with the rules that govern them and their interaction. Broadly, linguistics focuses on language as an unvarying system of abstract signs. Sociolinguistics, on the other hand, is primarily focused on variation in language, and how that variation is used to create and maintain social structures, relationships, and identities. Generally, sociolinguistics is focused on how language use relates to society at large.
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Sociolinguists are primarily interested in variation of speech that exists in and between social groups, variation of speech in different social contexts, and the social functions of language; that is how language is used to convey social meaning. Sociolinguists study a wide variety of topics, many of which we will explore in this class. For our class, we will be discussing various kinds of language varieties, how speech creates and is an expression of social identities, language and social power, language use and the media, forms of linguistic interactions and the social functions of them, and how sociolinguistics can be applied to resolve social issues. The class will also place a heavy emphasis on sociolinguistic methodology, surveying major approaches to sociolinguistic research, including quantitative/variationist approaches, interactionist approaches, corpus sociolinguistic approaches, and applied approaches. Thus, we will not just be learning about ‘what’ sociolinguists do, but ‘how’ sociolinguists analyze language.
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MODALITIES
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This course has been taught in person, and asynchronously online.
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Introduction to Linguistics and Linguistic Anthropology
COURSE DESCRIPTION
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This course is designed to introduce undergraduates to the field of linguistics and its main subfields. Linguistics differs from other disciplines that study languages by trying to examine the underlying features that all languages share and how they can vary in regard to these features. Linguists are not interested in the ‘proper’ way to speak, but in how people actually speak and how we can analyze this data as another kind of human behavior. Linguists are thus interested in what makes human language distinct from other kinds of communication systems. Linguists typically study language along two levels:
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Language as a System (of systems) of Signs: How language is organized according to different kinds of units and the rules that govern them and their interaction.
2. Language as a Means of Social Action: How language allows for communication and the formation of social structures,
identities, and relationships.
These aims are carried out through several distinctive subfields that formalize what it means to “know” a language. These subfields include the sound system of language (phonetics and phonology), the processes by which words are formed from roots and affixes (morphology), word order (syntax), how language is used in society and particular cultures (sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology), and how language changes over time (historical linguistics). We will not just be learning about ‘what’ linguists do, but ‘how’ linguists analyze language data and come up with analyses of the underlying structure of languages.
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MODALITIES
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This course was taught in person and in the hybrid modality.
Language & Culture
COURSE DESCRIPTION
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This course focuses on the major frameworks and concepts in linguistic anthropology. Linguistic anthropology examines the connections between language and culture by examining the relationships between linguistic and cultural structures and practices. This includes discussion of how language influences cultural concepts and the way humans think about the world, and how our cultural concepts are reflected in the way a given culture speaks. This also includes the role of language in social and cultural actions and processes - that is - how language enables and constricts the way we interact in all areas of society. This course explores these themes through a special focus on the relationship between language, culture, and health issues and their relationship to other social issues including: social identity (i.e. race/ethnicity, gender/sexuality), social injustice, power, ideology, language documentation, metaphor, multi-modal communication in new (social) media, language socialization, education, literacy, among others. Course assignments will be built around examining how course concepts can be applied to YouTube, TikTok, and other multi-modal social media. The class will also focus on linguistic anthropological methodology, to learn not just ‘what’ linguistic anthropologists do, but ‘how’ linguistic anthropologists analyze language.
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MODALITIES
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This course has been taught in the hybrid modality and asynchronously online.
Proseminar in Linguistics
COURSE DESCRIPTION
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This course is designed to introduce anthropology graduate students to linguistics, one of four of the traditional subfields of anthropology, and its relationship to these subfields. The first part of the course addresses the nature of human language and its structural, or grammatical, aspects. Broadly, this part of the course addresses how language can be characterized as a system of system of signs that is organized according to different kinds of units and rules that govern them and their interaction. More specifically, the course will discuss sound inventories, sound systems, the structure of words, and the organization of words into phrases. The remaining sections of the course will focus on linguistics’ relationship to the fields of cultural anthropology, archaeology, and biology. These sections will address how language allows for communication and the formation of cultural/social structures, processes identities, and relationships, its role in human history and our understanding of this history, and its role in cognitive and neurological processes.
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MODALITIES
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This course has been taught in the hybrid modality.