Provides an historical overview from the 18th century to the present of race, ape-human relationships, and human nature. Emergence of an evolutionary framework and of fossil, genetic, and primate information becomes the basis for reformulating ideas about human biology within anthropology.
Instructor
Kalina Kassadjikova
General Education Code
TA
Study of human evolution covering the last five million years. Examines the fossil evidence and emphasizes the reconstruction of behavior from the paleontological and anatomical evidence.
Presents basic human osteology allowing students to identify skeletal material by element. Emphasizes the dynamic nature of bone by integrating anatomy with a discussion of bone physiology within the context of the human life cycle.
Instructor
Christina Verdugo
Covers the basic analysis of human skeletal remains for the medicolegal profession. Assessment of age, sex, ancestry, and general physical characteristics, trauma, and disease are discussed. Addresses the legal responsibilities of the anthropologist. Online lectures with in-class discussion sections, quizzes, and exams. Students cannot receive credit for this course and ANTH 103I.
Instructor
Eden Lee Washburn
This online course teaches the basic analysis of human remains for the medico-legal profession. Covers the development of forensic anthropology, creating a biological profile, evaluating skeletal trauma, estimation of interval since death, and how these assessments can be supported. Students cannot receive credit for this course and for ANTH 103.
Instructor
Christina Verdugo
Explores the major environmental factors (temperature, altitude, diet, and disease); how they are perceived by the human body; the physiological, micro- and macroanatomical responses; and how behavior and culture can modify the impact of these stresses. ANTH 1 is highly recommended as preparation. (Formerly Human Adaptability.)
Instructor
Lars Fehren-Schmitz
General Education Code
ER
Examines paleopathology beginning with ancient hominid populations and proceeding to modern populations. Uses both the skeletal evidence and historical documentation when available. Considers evolutionary, cultural, and biological factors. Topics include: osteological diagnosis of infectious disease; trauma; nutritional deficiencies; dental disease; and developmental defects.
The nature of primate social systems and social bonds is examined in the light of evolutionary and ecological concepts. We explore the evolution of primate social system behavior and culture, as well as the ecologies of primate populations.
Instructor
Victoria Oelze
Introduces the molecular analyses of anthropological questions and explores the intersection of genetics and anthropology. Covers the basic principles of molecular and population genetics as they relate to the study of humans. Prerequisite(s): ANTH 1 and ANTH 104. ANTH 102A is recommended. Enrollment by permission of instructor. (Formerly ANTH 107, Methods and Research in Molecular Anthropology.)
Instructor
Lars Fehren-Schmitz
This combination of lectures, readings, discussions, and hands-on laboratory experience provides a comprehensive overview of stable isotope research to reconstruct diet and mobility. Discover the wide application of isotopic research in biological anthropology, bioarcheology, primatology and forensics. Prerequisite(s): at least one of ANTH 101, ANTH 104, ANTH 106, ANTH 107, or ANTH 110F and by permission of the instructor. (Formerly Methods and Research in Stable Isotope Ecology.)
Instructor
Viktoria Oelze
General Education Code
PE-H
Lab class analyzing trail camera footage from chimpanzees and other wildlife, and installing our own cameras in the UCSC forest. Also includes readings and discussion of papers related to the newest findings on chimpanzee behavioral diversity and culture. Prerequisite(s): ANTH 106. Enrollment is by instructor consent.
Practical introduction to computational population genetics. Covers the basic principles of population and evolutionary genetics, and explores those with a range of computational methods for the analysis of genetic diversity, population structure, and admixture. Enrollment is by instructor consent.
Provides a physical anthropology understanding of the evolution of sex. Focuses on genetics and the altercations in allele associations that take place as a result of sexual processes.
How can cultural anthropology help us to understand current events unfolding locally, nationally, and globally? Students learn how to read newspapers differently--that is, through the lens of cultural analysis. The world of everyday politics and society, as it unfolds in debates happening right now, forms the topical substance of the course.
Instructor
Alejandra Kramer
General Education Code
IM
Addresses the meaning of archaeology as generated in television, movies, literature, newspapers, and even National Geographic. Students engage with several case-studies illustrating how archaeology is portrayed in popular culture.
General Education Code
IM
This course is structured around four critical moments--missionization, Rancho-Era, Gold Rush, and World War II--through the eyes of the ethnic and racial minorities who experienced them. Special attention is given to oral, archival, and archaeological sources which reveal California's multiethnic pasts.
Cross Listed Courses
LGST 112
Instructor
Tsim Schneider
General Education Code
ER
Explores anthropological approaches to the study of tourism, in particular themes of authenticity, othering, visual economies, development, identity politics, alternative tourisms, and material culture with reference to history, power, and location.
General Education Code
PE-H
Introduces anthropological and historical approaches to environmental change and globalization. Key themes include: capitalism and industrialization, environmental politics, global culture, and relations between humans and other species.
General Education Code
PE-E
Presents the evolution of human diet and subsistence from a biological anthropological perspective. Covers the key hypothesis and methodologies related to diet, from our early fossil ancestors up to agriculture and animal husbandry. (Formerly Biocultural Approaches to Food.)
Instructor
Viktoria Oelze
General Education Code
PE-H
From South Central to La Misión, this course explores the role of race and culture in creating the California Dream. Draws on films, music, and activism as lenses into the complex flows of power that shape our communities.
Cross Listed Courses
CRES 110G
General Education Code
IM
General introduction to the astonishing diversity of cultures and environments in the Brazilian Amazon. Designed to provide upfront understanding of what underlies perverse (non)development and forest destruction, but also social defense of the forest and sustainable life within it.
General Education Code
PE-E
Brings together diverse forms of cultural knowledge and complexities of everyday life to illuminate longstanding concerns of sustainability and justice. Investigates multiple theories of sustainable development as well as tools, techniques, and contexts for ecological integrity, economic security, empowerment, responsibility and social well-being characteristic of sustainable communities. Case studies are drawn from around the world highlighting the work of Right Livelihood Award Laureates in tandem with UC faculty.
General Education Code
PE-E
Using an anthropological and archaeological perspective to learn about human history before AD 1500, course explores fossil remains of human ancestors and traces the more recent history of humanity from forgers/hunters to the emergence of complex societies/civilizations. Topics include human biological evolution, the development of organized human societies, the origins of food production (domestication of plants and animals), the origins of the world's earliest urban centers, and the development of social inequality.
General Education Code
CC
Examines anthropology of food and politics of eating. Cultural and social uses of food in rituals of solidarity or fasting, identities and meanings of food for individuals, and consumption in the global context are key components of study.
General Education Code
CC
From coral reefs to Arctic sea ice, this course examines how humans interact with and transform earth's oceans, and how humans are shaped by the sea. Topics include: marine conservation, migration, shipping and logistics, slavery, fisheries management, and climate change.
General Education Code
PE-E
Focuses on social institutions around the world that shape food and its meanings; how people use food to organize their worlds; and production, sharing, or consumption of food as a political or meaningful act.
General Education Code
PE-H
Transdisciplinary examination of the politics and culture of postcolonial Britain and France. Topics include: immigration from South Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean; racism and antiracism; minority difference and citizenship practices; and the emergence of Islam as a major category of identity and difference.
Cross Listed Courses
HIS 181A
Instructor
Mayanthi Fernando
General Education Code
CC
Explores several themes of relevance in contemporary India and Indian diaspora, concentrating on anthropological research and various documentary and popular Bollywood films. Through films and ethnographies, students analyze the nature of anthropological contributions to the study of Indian societies. (Formerly course 80P.)
Instructor
Annapurna Pandey
General Education Code
CC
From Janet Mock to Young M.A., queerness has become hypervisible in Black popular culture--but at what cost? Using music, television, and social media as central texts, students investigate the intersections of sexuality, gender, and race in public life.
Cross Listed Courses
CRES 110Q, FMST 110Q
Instructor
Savannah Shange-Binion
General Education Code
IM
Introduces dominant discourses about major American religions and their role in public life, with particular attention to intersecting differences, such as race, sex/gender, and disability, and to shifting religious/political boundaries. Visual and textual media, political commentary, and popular ethnographies are analyzed.
General Education Code
IM
Examines the state and its institutions from a historical, social, and cross-cultural perspective, paying attention to the varied discourses and practices that constitute what we call the state.
Instructor
Alejandra Kramer
General Education Code
PE-H
Examines the culture wars around motherhood in the United States with a focus on the political mobilization of normative ideas about the correct way to mother, from the moment of conception on. Special attention is given to the historical construction of deviant motherhood among marginalized groups.
General Education Code
ER
An interdisciplinary yet anthropologically informed approach to studying pirates and piracy across different historical eras and spaces. Explores the role of pirates in world history from ancient to present times, including piracy both at sea and online.
General Education Code
CC
Establishes anthropological interconnections of emergent worlds where environmental matters, social justice, and human survival interrelate. Focuses on anti-essential nature and waterscape ethnographies in which different pluricultures revalidate local understandings as ways of contesting increasing forms of land and water privatization.
Instructor
Guillermo Delgado-P
General Education Code
PE-E
Online course introducing students to social practices, political processes, and cultural contexts that shape food production and consumption. Considers identity, heritage, choice, power, agency, body practices, belonging, access, safety, and security. Prioritizes California case studies, with comparative examples from around the world.
General Education Code
PE-H
Reviews the environmental, physiological, behavioral, and cultural ways that humans interact with their physical surroundings. The effects of human culture on the environment and of the environment on the shape of human culture is emphasized.
Instructor
Lars Fehren-Schmitz
Examines the human life cycle using an evolutionary framework. Examines key aspects of the human life stages using findings and concepts from developmental biology, physiology, nutrition, evolutionary ecology, and life-history theory.
Trains students to tutor writing in undergraduate anthropology courses; supports and guides them during the quarter they are tutoring. Enrollment by interview only. Prerequisite(s): satisfaction of the Composition requirement.
Examines the relationship between visual cultures and indigenous peoples. First, class discusses what is visual anthropology. Second, class examines the relationship between museums and indigenous peoples. Third, class examines ethnographic photography and indigenous uses of photography. Fourth, class examines the uses of ethnographic film, and then its relationship to indigenous peoples. Finally, class examines indigenous uses of film.
Ethnography-based course that examines the social worlds of socialism, with particular focus on state socialism. Topics include: social problems that inspired socialist movements; implementation and experience of socialism in daily life; and significance of class, race, nation, science, technology, rationality.
Instructor
Melissa Caldwell
Examines the demise of socialist systems. Addresses the political, social, cultural, and economic experiences of everyday life that led to that demise, what new social inequalities have arisen since, and how citizens use the socialist past to critique the present.
An introduction to some of the central theoretical issues in psychological anthropology. Psychoanalytic, cognitive, and relativist perspectives on the link between person and society are discussed and compared.
Study of the phenomenon of religion as manifested in ethnographic literature, with special attention to traditional and recent modes of analysis of religious behavior. Special topics include myth, religious healing, witchcraft and sorcery, ritual, and millenarian movements.
With a theoretical understanding of the concepts of magic, science, and religion, students draw on ethnographies of these practices to critique distinctions between them and critically analyze the understanding of these categories and their relation in the modern world
Instructor
Annapurna Pandey
General Education Code
PE-H
Course takes an interdisciplinary approach to studying contraband and smuggling. Focusing on concepts used to describe illegality we examine how "shadow economies" are central to the making of states and sovereignty, the legal and illegal being blurred.
Cross Listed Courses
LGST 126C
General Education Code
CC
Challenges approaches to capitalism that treat it as socioeconomic relations separable from culture. Readings include ethnographies demonstrating the inextricability of cultural meanings from capitalist practices. Topics include capitalism's relationship to colonialism, nationalism, socialism, gender, and the commodification of aesthetics.
Study of contemporary, American, born-again Protestant discourse using ethnographic materials and interpretive theories. Topics include biblical literalism, Christian conversion and self-fabulation, charismatic gifts, preaching, sacrificial giving, prosperity theology, apocalypticism, creationism, pro-family and pro-life rhetoric, and televangelism. (Formerly Born-Again Religion and Culture.)
The history of social and cultural interconnections at a global scale. Anthropological approaches to the study of cultural encounter are used to investigate topics such as trade, religion, and citizenship and to evaluate shifting concepts of civilization and barbarism. (Formerly Other Globalizations: Cultures and Histories of Interconnection.)
Survey of sub-Saharan societies. Analysis of principles of social organization and factors of cultural unity of selected western, eastern, central, and southern African peoples. (Formerly Peoples and Cultures of Africa)
General Education Code
CC
Examines Brazilian culture and its link to interpersonal relationships, religion, politics, and psychological experience.
General Education Code
CC
Joins substantive information about Chinese society and culture with debates in social theory and rethinks conventional wisdom about colonialism and modernity. Topics include representations of Chineseness, class revolution, Chinese diaspora, popular culture, family and kinship, nationalism, history/memory, race and gender.
General Education Code
CC
Southeast Asia includes a variety of societies exhibiting many ecological adaptations, religions, marriage systems, and experiences with colonial powers. Case studies of particular societies, chosen to reveal variety, are examined comparatively. Emphasis on religion and social organization.
General Education Code
CC
What connects Black communities in the Caribbean, the U.S., Latin America, and Canada, and what sets them apart? Examines theories of diaspora, gender and sexuality, slavery, colorism, music, U.S. hegemonies, social movements, and comparative racialization and global anti-blackness (Formerly African Diasporas in the Americas.)
Cross Listed Courses
CRES 130
Instructor
Savannah Shange-Binion
General Education Code
CC
Critically examines category of Asian Americans. Addresses historic representations of Asians and Asian Americans in ethnographic research and film. Explores contemporary issues of race, culture, and politics through ethnographic practice and cultural production.
Introduces students to the ethnography of Eurasia, with special attention to the lived experience and legacy of state socialism in this region. Topics include new ideas of personhood, changing economic practices, public health, and international development.
Instructor
Melissa Caldwell
General Education Code
CC
An examination of anthropological studies of tribal, rural, and urban cultures of India and a look at changes taking place in India.
General Education Code
ER
Introduction to ethnohistory and political anthropology of one or more Latin American countries: Typically Mexico and one other country. Students explore how contested concepts such as indigeneity, nation or state come to gain credibility and are deployed in contemporary politics.
Instructor
Andrew Mathews
General Education Code
CC
A broad introduction to issues and areas of cultural production and transformation in the Caribbean, Mexico, and Central and South America. Colonial, neocolonial, class, ethnic, gender, religious, ecological, and political relations intersect as represented in ethnographies and film.
Instructor
Guillermo Delgado-P
General Education Code
CC
Examines various communities within the Republic of Mexico as represented in ethnographic texts and other forms of cultural production, particularly music and dance. Emphasis on the interplay between the concept of regionalism and national identity. Previous course work in Mexican culture and/or history strongly recommended. Some reading in Spanish is required.
General Education Code
CC
A survey of Native American cultures and experience during the past century, with emphasis on Pueblo cultures of the American Southwest.
General Education Code
ER
Covers Native feminisms, gender, settler colonialism, and ethnography. Students read ethnographies that intervene in Native feminisms and its possibilities. Focuses on ethnographies in the U.S., including Native men and masculinities in Hawaii.
General Education Code
ER
Chile and Argentina, although both established within Spanish colonization and physically close, have dissimilar histories and culture. We explore areas of friction and overlap that shaped different peoples, institutions, cultural identities, and histories in countries that share a particular history.
Instructor
Alejandra Kramer
General Education Code
ER
This study abroad introduces the ethnography of Russia and Eastern Europe, with special attention to lived experience and legacy of state socialism. Topics: effects of socialism, changing economic practices; constructions of new identities; modernization/development; belief systems; and memory and history.
General Education Code
CC
Analyzes post-colonial forms of Islam, with particular attention to Muslim societies and cultures in the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe. Emphasizes the relationship between power, knowledge, and representation in anthropological approaches to Islam and Muslims. (Formerly Anthropological Approaches to Islam.)
Instructor
Mayanthi Fernando
General Education Code
ER
Draws on political, economic, and anthropological perspectives to analyze the key role of transnationalism and neoliberalism in contemporary Central America. Key topics include: the aftermath of revolutions; labor and gender; indigenous movements and multiculturalism; and transnational migration and governance.
Examines daily life in Russia and affiliated formerly Soviet Republics through historical and cultural comparison. Topics include: socialist and postsocialist daily life; 20th- and 21st-century Russian empire building; cultural politics; economic systems; state-citizen relations; citizenship regimes; labor and leisure; and religion.
Instructor
Melissa Caldwell
Examines daily life in Eastern Europe, especially how residents in this region have navigated the transition from state socialism to accession to the European Union. Topics include: the legacies of state socialism; cultural politics; new economies; consumption; the European Union; new forms of governance; and political activism.
Instructor
Melissa Caldwell
This course on special topics in ethnography will be taught on a rotating basis by various faculty members. Precise focus of each year's courses will vary according to the instructor and will be announced by the department.
Examines the diversity of women's as well as men's roles, experiences, and self-conceptions in a number of societies to explore how women and men shape, and are shaped by, particular forms of social life.
Contemporary topics and readings in anthropology of Russia and the former Soviet Union. All readings, films, and other materials are in Russian. Discussions are in English. Accompanies ANTH 130H, Ethnography of Russia and Eastern Europe. Prerequisite(s): ANTH 130H and proof of Russian proficiency in reading and writing. Enrollment by permission of instructor.
Instructor
Melissa Caldwell
Addresses the increasing importance of popular culture as the terrain upon which to address issues of culture and power. Emphasizes an ethnographic approach to popular culture as sociocultural phenomena. Students learn about a variety of activities including television and film viewing, music, fashion, photography, postcards, comic books, and urban spatial relations and architecture.
Cross-cultural study of health, disease, and illness behavior from ecological and ethnomedical perspectives. Implications for biomedical health care policy. Students cannot receive credit for this course and ANTH 254.
Examines cities from an anthropological perspective. Reviews pertinent social scientific literature of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Surveys the concepts and methods used by contemporary anthropologists to investigate urban phenomena.
Addresses cross-cultural attitudes to the human body and its everyday biological concerns: sleeping, eating, breathing, sex, and defecation.
Explores consumption as a cultural form. Beginning with theories of capitalism and exchange, it then focuses on sites and modes of consumption and display such as department stores, museums and zoos, advertisements and photography, cultural tourism.
Instructor
Melissa Caldwell
The ideas, in selected non-Western societies, about the nature of power, order, social cohesion, and the political organization of these societies.
Cross Listed Courses
LGST 138
Examination of language system and language use in relationship to cultural contexts of communication in Western and non-Western societies. Topics include the Sapir-Whorf linguistic relativity hypothesis; linguistic constructions of gender; speech variation in relation to class, ethnicity, and national identity; and the emergence of self in communicative acts.
Explores medical and environmental anthropologies, including how bodies-human and other-are implicated in processes often figured as environmental. Explores how the body and the environment combine and interact to form nexus of political, cultural, and material forces.
Cross Listed Courses
CRES 140
General Education Code
PE-E
An ethnographically informed consideration of law, dispute management, and social control in a range of societies including the contemporary U.S. Topics include conflict management processes, theories of justice, legal discourse, and relations among local, national, and transnational legal systems.
Cross Listed Courses
LGST 142
Explores relationships between power and performance forms and media, both traditional and emergent. Links aesthetics with politics, and recent transcultural exchanges with local circumstances and consequences.
Examines phenomena of poverty and welfare in cross-cultural perspective with an emphasis on critical ethnographies and social analyses of social pathologies, economic systems, and community. Topics include informal economies, labor, household systems, social-support networks, and public policies.
Instructor
Melissa Caldwell
Taught annually on a rotating basis by faculty members. Each year's topic varies by instructor and is announced by the department.
Examines recent approaches to study of nature and the environment. Considers historical relationship between nature, science, and colonial expansion as well as key issues of contemporary environmental concern: conservation, environmental justice, and social movements. Students cannot receive credit for this course and ANTH 246.
Instructor
Andrew Mathews
General Education Code
PE-E
Looks at how humans have lived with their environments in other times and places; the long-distance transfers of humans and other animals, as well as plants and microorganisms; and how we can best live in the Anthropocene.
General Education Code
PE-E
Uses the critical tools of feminist theory and cultural anthropology to look at how global development discourses and institutions mobilize, reinforce, and challenge systems of gender-based inequality. Topics include non-governmental organizations (NGOs), development practice, microcredit, and technocrat cultures. (Formerly Gender and Development.)
Cross Listed Courses
FMST 148
Examining activism from an anthropological perspective, students look at beliefs, ideals, and practices of social movements and those involved in them. Taking a procedural approach, course focuses on how things happen in unexpected ways, and examines activism as a collective matter.
General Education Code
ER
Encourages anthropology majors to explore different means of communicating anthropology with much attention to individual writing and presentation skills. Intensive work on library research; recognizing, comparing, and making arguments; and analyzing ethnographies, articles, reviews, and films.
Through demonstration, practice, and participation, acquire skills in collecting and analyzing cultural data. Work with members of other cultures and with each other to learn to identify significant cultural patterns. Lectures and readings provide added perspective and a theoretical base.
Instructor
Alejandra Kramer
Major figures, ideas, and writings in 19th- and 20th-century cultural anthropology surveyed. Students cannot receive credit for this course and ANTH 252.
Instructor
Andrew Mathews
General Education Code
TA
Addresses the overlapping relationship between medicine and colonialism in the 19th century, with attention to post-colonial theory and contemporary studies of post-colonial medical pluralism in the 20th century.
Beginning with the conquest of the Americas, considers how Western thinkers have explained seemingly irrational ways of being and thinking (like witchcraft, human sacrifice, and bodily mutilation), and asks how we interpret beliefs and practices radically different from our own.
Instructor
Mayanthi Fernando
Considers the relationship between anthropology and feminism. Provides historical perspective on gender inequalities in the discipline as well as the emergence of feminist anthropology. Students read and engage with examples of feminist ethnography form a variety of regions and subfields.
Instructor
Alejandra Kramer
Examines concept of race in anthropology. Begins with histories of race in anthropology; turns to contemporary analysis of racism, identity formation, and diaspora; and concludes with current debates on the validity of race as an object of analysis.
General Education Code
ER
Examines reproductive and population politics across the globe, with a focus on feminist and ethnographic analyses of the stakes of various actors, from states to religious bodies to non-governmental organizations, in questions of who reproduces and in what circumstances.
Critically examines food as a fundamental aspect of social and cultural life and key concept in the development of anthropological theory and methods. Topics include: power relationships; community building; exchange and reciprocity; symbolism; cultural rules and rituals; globalization; and memory.
Instructor
Melissa Caldwell
General Education Code
PE-H
Food as a fundamental aspect of social/cultural life and key concept in development of anthropological theory and methods. Studying abroad, investigations are grounded in local ethnographic context to learn how anthropologists study food, practice methods, and understand food's local importance.
General Education Code
PE-H
Examines the causes, consequences, forms, and experiences of human movement, displacement, and abandonment. Topics include: migration, refugees, forced displacement, environmental displacement, tourism, transnational communities, and other displaced populations.
Instructor
Melissa Caldwell
Provides a critical survey of debates, old and new, in the study of kinship. Readings range from classical treatments to recent reformulations that use kinship as a lens for exploring intimacy, memory, futurity, embodiment, commodification, and power. Students cannot receive credit for this course and ANTH 263.
Instructor
Danilyn Rutherford
An intense reading seminar which critically reviews anthropological works in dance ethnography and dance theory. Recommended for anthropology majors.
Instructor
Olga Najera Ramirez
Investigates the cosmologies of states and bureaucracies and the practices through which officials or rulers seek to produce order, knowledge, or stability. Looks at paperwork, nationalist and court rituals, practices of mapping and classification, forms of citizenship.
Instructor
Andrew Mathews
Historical review of prehistoric archaeology from antiquarianism to the present. Emphasis on development of archaeological theory and its relation to evolutionary and anthropological theory. Students cannot receive credit for this course and ANTH 270.
Instructor
Tsim Schneider
General Education Code
TA
In this intensive, hands-on course, students learn the step-by-step processes involved in conducting laboratory research on historic artifacts. Students study the ins and outs of analyzing, cataloging, and dating historic artifacts.
Develops practical skills for connecting archaeological theory and methods to grant writing, final reports and presentations. Examines elements of good research design, including the logic of scientific inquiry, ethics, project conceptualization, measurement, sampling, data analysis, and effective writing.
Instructor
Judith Habicht Mauche
General Education Code
PR-E
Survey of the ecological and archaeological evidence for the origins of plant and animal domestication in Africa, Eurasia, and the Americas. Discussion will center on the preconditions of this drastic alteration in human ecology and its consequences in transforming human societies. Open to nonmajors. Students cannot receive credit for this course and ANTH 273.
Deals with evidence and theories concerning the origins of complex society; the transition from egalitarian, foraging societies to the hierarchical, economically specialized societies often referred to as civilizations. Focuses on both Old World and New World cultures. Students cannot receive credit for this course and ANTH 174.
Introduces the evolution of African kingdoms and states from the emergence of farming communities to initial contact with Europe. Particular attention paid to the origins of social inequality and the evolution of centralized polities. Students cannot receive credit for this course and ANTH 275. (Formerly African Complex Societies.)
Development of Native cultures in North America. Topics include peopling of the New World, early foragers, spread of agriculture and complex societies in the Southwest and Eastern Woodlands, and review of cultural developments in the West and Far North.
Review of the archaeological and ethnohistorical evidence for the origins and development of pre-Columbian civilizations in Meso-America including the Olmec, Maya, Zapotec, Mixtec Teotihuacan, Toltec, Tarascan, and Aztec. Students cannot receive credit for this course and ANTH 276B.
Outlines the development of native cultures in the American Southwest from Paleo-Indian times (Ca. 11,5000 B.C.) through early European contact (ca. A.D. 1600). Topics include the greater environment; early foraging culture; the development of agriculture and village life; the emergence and decline of regional alliances; abandonment and reorganization; and changes in social organization, external relations, and trade.
Uses archaeological case studies to explore processes of cultural confrontation, resistance, and transformation among Native American groups in the wake of European colonial expansion in the Western Hemisphere during the late 15th through mid-19th centuries.
Instructor
Judith Habicht Mauche
General Education Code
ER
Explores some of the important issues surrounding the anthropological and archaeological study of the Pacific Northwest Coast--a roughly 1,800-kilometer-long shoreline that stretches from Yakutat Bay in Alaska to Cape Mendocino in California.
Introduces the Native peoples of California from an archaeological perspective. Covering the past 13,000 years, a variety of geographic and temporal settings are examined as well as current research in California archaeology.
Instructor
Tsim Schneider
Introduces the archaeology of European colonialism and the early-modern world. Topics include historical archaeological methods; the nature of European colonial expansion in New and Old Worlds; culture contact and change; and power and resistance in colonial societies. Students cannot receive credit for this course and ANTH 278.
Focuses on theories and techniques used by archaeologists to bridge the gap between the recovery of ceramic materials and their interpretation within cultural contexts. Topics include the origins of pottery, production methods, classification and typology, seriation, functional analysis, materials analysis and description, organization of production, trade, and the analysis of style. Students are billed a course materials fee. Students cannot receive credit for this course and ANTH 280.
Instructor
Judith Habicht Mauche
Practicum in ceramic materials analysis and description. Students perform material experiments in materials selection and processing, hand-building techniques, and open-pit firing. Demonstrations of standard techniques of attribute analysis and the mineralogical and chemical characterization of ceramic materials are presented. Students cannot receive credit for this course and ANTH 280L.
Instructor
Judith Habicht Mauche
Taught annually on a rotating basis by various faculty members. Precise focus of each year's course varies according to the instructor and is announced by the department.
Instructor
Judith Habicht Mauche
Introduction to lithic and ceramic analysis in archaeology. Includes lab analysis, discussions of classification and typology, and exploration of the concept of style as it relates to ceramics and lithics in archaeology.
Lectures and seminar on archaeological faunal analysis. Topics include mammalian evolution and osteology, vertebrate taphonomy, reconstruction of human diet from faunal remains, foraging strategy theory, data collection and management, and methods of quantitative analysis. Students cannot receive credit for this course and ANTH 284.
Instructor
Erendira Quintana Morales
Practical laboratory in archaeological analysis, with demonstrations and exercises on human-caused modifications to animal bones and non-human modifications to animal bones.
Instructor
Erendira Quintana Morales
Practicum in archaeological faunal analysis. Students learn to identify bones of all larger mammal species of central California plus selected bird and fish species. Students cannot receive credit for this course and ANTH 285. Prerequisite(s): ANTH 184 or ANTH 102 or BIOL 138 & BIOL 138L or EART 100 or ENVS 105 & ENVS 105L, and permission of instructor.
Critical examination of the definitions of cultural heritage, its development as a concept, and the various laws, charters, and conventions that shape our management of the past in the present. The focus is on heritage in comparative colonial contexts.
Explores how the past is managed or cared for in the present, especially in the context of the United States.
Introduces practical skills in archaeological materials identification of stone, shell, bone, and other materials, curation, and database management. Students receive entry-level training with once-weekly class meetings and five hours per week of hands-on work. Prerequisite(s): ANTH 1, ANTH 2, and ANTH 3, and instructor consent. All three courses in sequence (ANTH 188A, ANTH 188B, ANTH 188C) required to count for the anthropology major or minor.
General Education Code
PR-S
Introduces practical skills in archaeological materials identification of stone, shell, bone, and other materials, curation, and database management. Students receive entry-level training with once-weekly class meetings and five hours per week of hands-on work. Prerequisite(s): ANTH 1, ANTH 2, and ANTH 3, and instructor consent. All three courses in sequence (ANTH 188A, ANTH 188B, ANTH 188C) required to count for the anthropology major or minor.
General Education Code
PR-S
Two-credit course introducing practical skills in archaeological materials identification of stone, shell, bone, and other materials; curation; and database management. Students receive entry-level training with once-weekly class meetings and five hours per week of hands-on work. Prerequisite(s): ANTH 1, ANTH 2, and ANTH 3. All three courses in sequence (ANTH 188A, ANTH 188B, ANTH 188C) required to count for the anthropology major or minor.
General Education Code
PR-S
Lecture, laboratory, and fieldwork sessions on archaeological field methods including survey, mapping, excavation, record and database maintenance, artifact accessioning, curation, and analysis on the UCSC campus. Students attend lectures/laboratories two evenings each week and do fieldwork all day on Saturdays. Enrollment by instructor consent. Prerequisite(s): course 3 and application letter. Students who have done no previous fieldwork in archaeology have priority. Students are billed a materials fee.
General Education Code
PR-E
Taught annually on a rotating basis by various faculty members. Precise focus of each year's course varies according to the instructor and is announced by the department. (Formerly Special topics in Archaeology-Physical Anthropology.)
Explores the cultural meanings of dead bodies and dead persons, including memorialization; the body in the United States legal system; cadavers in education and research; dead persons in mass disasters and human-rights cases; and repatriation of the dead. Prerequisite(s): Satisfaction of the Entry Level Writing and Composition requirements, and ANTH 1, ANTH 2, and ANTH 3. Enrollment restricted to senior anthropology and Earth sciences/Anthropology combined majors. Enrollment by permission of instructor.
Explores studies on wild and captive chimpanzees with reference to other apes and humans. Topics include sociality, tool using, locomotion, traditions, and life history; social and physical dimensions of growth and development; language studies, genetics, and applications to human evolution.
Considers feminist perspectives on the human past, archaeologists' perspectives on feminist theory, and the impact of gender, feminist, and critical social theory on archaeology as a profession. Students cannot receive credit for this course and ANTH 279.
Examines historical constructions and contemporary deployments of the categories that have structured popular and anthropological understandings of social life in South Asia, particularly those of tribe, caste, and women. Students gain familiarity with the mobilization of these categories in contemporary political movements across India.
Focuses on problems and opportunities raised by the concept of belief. Students work to develop an anthropological understanding of belief as practiced, then put it to use in analyzing episodes from the NPR series This I Believe.
Instructor
Danilyn Rutherford
Intensive and fast-paced seminar focusing on theoretical and ethnographic studies of memory as a means for dealing with the past. Examines how ordinary people and societies have coped with the past through acts of selective remembering and forgetting.
Instructor
Melissa Caldwell
Examines secularism as political doctrine and practice of government. Topics include: transformation of religion by secularization; forms of inclusion/exclusion enacted by secularism; relationship between secularism and colonial rule. Case studies drawn from Europe, South Asia, United States, and the Middle East.
Instructor
Mayanthi Fernando
Detailed overview of the evidence for the origin and evolution of humans with emphasis on reconstructing the paleobiology of extinct hominids. Discussion of individual groups of ancient hominids from the Miocene apes to anatomically modern humans.
Investigates cultural analysis of consumer society, commodities, and consumer practices. Students develop their own research projects. Themes include: critiques of consumer society; symbolic analysis of goods, consumption as resistance, anthropologies of marketing, culture jamming; consumption and (post) colonialism.
Wild Nature has a history. This class offers tools for understanding the social and natural construction of wild nature. We will learn to read rural landscapes--ethnographically, biologically, historically, creatively, and politically.
Explores issues in the representation of culture through reading and discussing ethnographies. Recent experimental ethnographies open topics including the relation between fieldwork and writing, textual strategies, and the politics of ethnographic writing and research.
Senior seminar on African diaspora archaeology. Draws on archaeological, historical, and anthropological perspectives to examine the cultural, social, economic, and political lives of Africans and their descendants in the New World and West Africa from the 15th through 19th centuries.
Focuses on critical issues in the social sciences of health and healing. Designed for students pursuing graduate work in medical anthropology and/or public health.
Seminar for upper-division students interested in theories and methodology of social and cultural anthropology. Devoted to critical discussion of different methods of comparison practiced in anthropology.
Instructor
Triloki Pandey
Considers the social construction of men and masculinities in a variety of ethnohistorical contexts as well as the unique contribution enabled by anthropological methods, particularly ethnographic fieldwork, to the study of gender and power.
Examines ways anthropologists have studied relationship between space, place, and culture. Covers early formulations acknowledging people in different cultural contexts ascribe particular meanings to places and to the concept of space and then traces the ways these questions have come to the fore in more recent scholarship.
Provides students with theoretical and methodological approaches to studying the relationships between race, ethnicity, and nation, with a comparative focus on the United States, Latin America, and Europe. Students use ethnographic methods and/or discourse analysis to develop individual research projects.
Examines religion in relation to gender and sexuality. Examines how gender, sexuality, and religion intersect in notions of civilization, progress, and modernity in the contemporary and colonial periods. Particular attention paid to Islam, Christianity, and Hinduism.
Instructor
Mayanthi Fernando
Explores relationships between culture and acoustic worlds--environmental, verbal, and musical--within which we live. How sound is shaped by human belief and practice and the role sound plays in cultural and social life, both past and present.
Through ethnographies about homelessness, food deprivation, and unemployment, examines the institutions through which poverty is recognized, the systems of morality shaping debates about need and appropriate behavior, and the effects of community responses to poverty.
Instructor
Melissa Caldwell
Presents key readings in environmental anthropology focusing on environmental conflicts. Students guided in developing research paper on a society environment topic of their choice. Class is writing intensive with in-class discussion and final presentations.
Instructor
Andrew Mathews
Focuses on the anthropology of social movements, especially the impact that global capital provokes on peripheral Latin American societies and the ways these respond through the organizing of social movements validating alternative worldviews that coalesce around issues pertaining to indigeneity, the environment, gender, and concepts of human dignity.
Instructor
Guillermo Delgado-P
Focuses cross-culturally on the status of women in the Third World and their formal and informal participation in politics. Also discussed are organized efforts, through participation in both national and autonomous movements, for women's rights.
Instructor
Annapurna Pandey
Examines contemporary archaeological perspectives on space and landscape. Focuses on how archaeology can contribute to an appreciation of the economic, cultural, and political factors that shape human perception, use, and construction of the physical world.
Addresses encounters and contact zones between cultures that give rise to emerging worlds. Emerging worlds refers to the cultural heterogeneity and diversity created within world-making networks, geographies, innovations, and meanings, moving us beyond ideas about vanishing, autonomous cultures.
Covers the basics like the planning and organization of research; writing research proposals; the publication and presentation of scientific research results; the recapitulation of laboratory methods; and intensification of specific recent research discussions in anthropology. Prerequisite(s): ANTH 1 and ANTH 107, and either ANTH 101, or ANTH 104, or ANTH 105. Enrollment is restricted to senior anthropology majors and by permission of the instructor. Students cannot receive credit for this course and ANTH 295A.
Instructor
Lars Fehren-Schmitz
Students conduct the research projects they proposed in ANTH 195A. Students have weekly group meetings with the research supervisor.
Instructor
Lars Fehren-Schmitz
Students finalize their research projects and write their thesis in the form of a research paper that is in publishable form so it can be submitted to a relevant journal or conference.
Instructor
Lars Fehren-Schmitz
Produce a quality research paper focusing on an anthropological topic of interest to you and that builds upon your experience in the major. Develop effective writing strategies and research skills to assist in professional development.
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
Considers why traveling cultures have posed a threat, often met with violence, to regimes of rule, particularly modern nation-states. Also explores the unique problems that conducting research with mobile communities poses for the ethnographer.
Examines the intersections of food, medicine, and culture with special focus on nutrition, cultural knowledge, industrial foodways, genetically modified organisms (GMOs), ethnopharmacology, food safety, and biosecurity.
Senior seminar treating the history and modern situation of the world's herding peoples. Readings draw on ethnographic, historical, archaeological, and ecological literatures. Students are coached in writing a 25-page research paper on a topic related to this theme.
Examines some approaches used by anthropologists and other thinkers to bring things into focus: as gifts, signs, commodities, and tools. Explores whether, by taking things seriously, anthropologists might learn to be empirical in new ways. Students cannot receive credit for this course and ANTH 225.
Instructor
Danilyn Rutherford
How do we read, write, and recognize the queer body? How is it marked in politics, in intimate spaces, and in the ethnographic text? Drawing on ethnic studies and black queer studies, this seminar engages contemporary anthropological approaches to sexuality.
Cross Listed Courses
CRES 190G
Instructor
Savannah Shange-Binion
Emerging anthropological approaches to global history, with an eye to historical frameworks of 500 years or more. Course requires engagement with advanced theoretical concepts and challenging historical texts. Intensive seminar format. Students cannot receive credit for this course and ANTH 269.
Explores interrelated, long-standing, difficult problems in human theory. Considers why these problems are so forbidding; what makes them significant; why they are hard; and whether hard problems come in different varieties or strengths.
Explores sites of heritage and the politics of cultural memory in the American context. Focuses on public representation and interpretation at places where multiple views of history come into conflict.
Provides seniors in anthropology a capstone experience. Settler colonialism is an all-encompassing, land-centered project that revolves around the elimination of the Native. This course revolves around a series of ethnographies and histories about settler colonialism.
Outlines the development of native cultures in the American Southwest from Paleo-Indian times (ca. 11,500 B.C.) through early European Contact (ca. A.D. 1600).
Instructor
Judith Habicht Mauche
Examines how Western modernity has interpreted various forms of radical difference, beginning with the 15th-century conquest of the New World. Considers historical and contemporary examples of how Western thinkers have explained irrational beliefs and practices (e.g., witchcraft, human sacrifice, devil-worship).
Instructor
Mayanthi Fernando
Seminar proposing that arts, such as dance, weaving, and creative writing, and the cultivation of more traditional scholarly works can and should be pursued together. The pursuit of such research-creation is a social justice practice that values many ways of knowing and can lead to emotionally compelling and politically effective communication. Students are introduced to concepts and debates from crip theory, feminist, queer, and critical race studies, performance studies, and narrative theory. They also participate in workshops using body-centered writing, moment work, visual arts, and embodied listening to produce creation-scholarship in a medium of their choice. Taught in conjunction with ANTH 296N; students cannot receive credit for this course and ANTH 296N. Prerequisite(s): Satisfaction of the Entry Level Writing and Composition requirements; and ANTH 1, ANTH 2, and ANTH 3. Enrollment is restricted to senior anthropology majors and by permission of instructor.
Challenges limiting conceptions of what it means to be human in a range of arenas, from our understandings of culture to our conceptions of built space to our assumptions about citizenship, asking why disability makes people nervous.
Instructor
Danilyn Rutherford
Senior seminar introduces students to principles, approaches, methods, and professional dimensions of design anthropology. Emphasizes collaborative methods and development of new methods for ethnographic research, analysis, and communication. Through a quarter-long research project, students develop professional skills and portfolio materials. Prerequisite(s): satisfaction of the Entry Level Writing and Composition requirements. Enrollment restricted to senior anthropology majors and is by permission. Students cannot receive credit for this course and ANTH 208C.
Instructor
Melissa Caldwell
Examines approaches mobilized by archaeologists to reconstruct ancient technologies and to explore how technological practices are implicated in processes of social formation and change. Approaches that engage technology as embodied technique and situated cultural practice are emphasized.
Instructor
Judith Habicht Mauche
Provides seniors in anthropology a capstone experience. Involves critical engagement with archaeological, ethnohistorical, ethnographic, and oral line of evidence to evaluate the outcomes of indigenous people's interactions with different forms of missionary, settler, and mercantile colonialism.
Instructor
Tsim Schneider
Examines how making and artisanship can be harnessed to solve challenging social, political, and environmental issues. Examines anthropology's historical role in creating a dichotomy between "art" and "craft," as well as contemporary ethnographic work that examines craft practices from weaving to pottery to the creation of mask trees for mutual aid during a time of global pandemic. Weekly topics include research-creation, "craftivism," speculative design, Indigenous art worlds, and responses to the environmental and social ravages of fast fashion. Students select a pressing social problem and then complete a hands-on, craft-based project of their choice; no prior skills or talents are required.
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
Students discuss how differing approaches to weather and exposure generate different approaches to culture, science, and politics; identify key moments in cultural anthropology's engagement with environmental and climactic questions; and delineate new areas of research.
Independent laboratory research on selected topics in archeology and physical anthropology. Interview with appropriate instructor required.
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
Independent laboratory research on selected topics in archaeology and physical anthropology. Interview with appropriate instructor required. Enrollment restricted to anthropology majors.
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
Off-campus field study. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
Ind Field Study
Off-campus field study. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring, Summer
Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
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