Teaching

Introductory cultural anthropology is a course where you will learn about “exotic” peoples living around the world and about your own cultural assumptions. From hallucinogen-snuffing South American Indians to Melanesian fisher people to impoverished Bangladeshi peasants to suburban San Diegans, this class will introduce you to different ways of life. It will familiarize you with other societies while also making aspects of our society seem strange.

From this course you will be able to more fully understand and explain differences in the ways that various groups of people organize and give meaning to their experience of a common world. To understand human diversity we will go deeper and further than the superficial depictions we see in popular media by thoroughly comparing our own lives with others of the past and present. In the process you will come to see that our lives may be just as strange and exotic as the lives of people in far-away places. Our way of life is just one among innumerable ways human beings have created a life-world.

This course examines current global trends such as climate change, biodiversity loss, rising inequality, and increasing urbanization through the lens of cultural anthropology. Students explore how different societies across history and around the world organize around resource use and environmental stewardship at local and global scales.

Drawing on historical and cross-cultural perspectives, the course investigates how communities develop and enhance human well-being in ways that sustain their ecosystems. Students engage with real-world case studies spanning Latin America, the Pacific, and Southeast Asia to understand the cultural dimensions of sustainability challenges and solutions.

This course provides an overview of the peoples and societies of South America: their environments, histories, economies, and political systems. Emphasis is placed on lowland Amazonian indigenous peoples and their relationships with the natural environment.

Using ethnographic case studies, the course deconstructs stereotypes and explores how indigenous South Americans have been affected by historical contact, colonialism, and contemporary development pressures. Students examine the intersection of ecology, culture, and politics across one of the world’s most biodiverse regions.

This course investigates the history of ecological thinking in anthropology and theoretical approaches to human-environment interaction, including complex adaptive systems, resilience theory, and actor-network theory. Students examine diverse lifeworlds through global case studies exploring societal perspectives on nature and environmental change.

The course culminates in a discussion of the Anthropocene epoch and humanity’s emergence as a geological force of nature, examining what this means for anthropological theory and practice.

This seminar examines development and conservation initiatives globally, analyzing what “development” and “conservation” are about, how they have been organized in different countries, and to what effect. The course focuses on balancing economic progress, social welfare, and conservation of nature in developing regions of Latin America, Africa, and the Pacific.

Students engage with the technical, political, and moral dilemmas arising from these projects and interrogate the assumptions built into dominant development and conservation frameworks.

This seminar covers contemporary theory in sociocultural anthropology, concentrating primarily on key themes and theoretical developments since the 1970s. Students survey the major schools of thought that have shaped the discipline and engage critically with foundational and emerging debates.

The course prepares graduate students for comprehensive examinations and provides the theoretical grounding necessary for original ethnographic and analytical research.

A survey of diverse anthropological approaches to the human experience from biological anthropology, archaeology, and sociocultural anthropology perspectives. Enduring and emerging questions in anthropology. Students develop an individualized approach to the study of complex aspects of the human experience.