Since the work of V. Gordon Childe, archaeologists have recognized the importance of the urban revolution in human history. Yet what happened within these cities was only one small part of this revolution. Urbanization also created the countryside and the tenuous, shifting relationships that linked cities to farmers, herders, traders, pilgrims, and other people that lived outside the city walls. In this seminar, we will examine the early relationship between city and countryside from around the world. Each week we will read 3 articles on one aspect of this relationship and then discuss the articles in class. Students will submit a reading report for 7 of these weeks. The one page single spaced report will distill the critical elements of each reading and link them to the broader themes of the course. Each student will lead discussion for one week, as well as be asked to write a 20- to 25-page research paper that examines this city/countryside dynamic in one region of the world.

This course covers both substantive and theoretical aspects of the transition from foraging to resource production. Regional case studies of primary and secondary areas of the shift to resource production throughout the world are investigated, and theoretical models to explain the transition are examined. The course will follow a seminar format, where the class will meet to discuss a particular topic. For each of these meetings, a team of students will be responsible for researching the topic in some detail and presenting a summary, while the rest of the class will be responsible for preparing questions for discussion. In addition, each student will prepare one research paper for submission. The paper will require the student to formulate a major topic for detailed investigation, write a paper on the research, and present the results to the class.

This seminar course will focus on issues of method and theory applicable to the archaeology of hunter-gatherers in all geographic regions and time periods. "Hunter-gatherers" (a.k.a. foragers, gatherer-hunters, hunter-fisher-gatherers, etc.) collectively represent a huge proportion of the human past, and a shared aspect of the ancestry of all modern people. Following a brief survey of general issues such as variability in ethnographically-described societies, and the use of analogy in archaeology, the course will focus on recent scholarship across a range of aspects of hunter-gatherer societies, including (but not limited to) social organization, interaction, world view, gender roles, and economic organization.

This course will serve as an introduction and critical examination of the diversity of archaeological approaches to landscapes, with some historical perspective from early "field archaeology" and Crawford’s aerial archaeology, through economic-geographical approaches to settlement, exchange and land-use systems, to archaeological survey, place, wayfaring, phenomenology, and Ingold's "dwelling" perspective.

Complex hunter-gatherers challenge traditional anthropological theory concerning the importance of agriculture to the emergence of cultural complexity. Complex hunter-gatherers — those societies with high population densities, sedentary settlement, developing political economies, and most importantly, pronounced social inequality — have been recorded ethnographically in a few areas of the world, particularly in the Pacific Northwest, but were otherwise thought to have been rare and anomalous. Recent archaeological studies show, however, that complex hunter-gatherers may have been much more common in the more distant past. In this course we will consider the meaning of complexity, look at the factors that are prerequisite to complexity among hunter-gatherers, and examine the ways in which complexity is maintained in hunting and gathering societies. We will also look at how archaeologists recognize evidence of complexity in the archaeological record. Finally, we will examine several case studies (in the form of student presentations) of complex hunter-gatherers from around the world.

This course offers an intensive study of archaeological approaches to ritual, religion, and ideology within a comparative historical framework. Students will examine key theoretical paradigms in the anthropology of religion while assessing the ways in which inferences on social process, identity politics, and prehistoric worldviews can be derived from ritual contexts preserved in the material record. We will critically evaluate archaeological methods employed to identify the physical traces of ritual practice and will scrutinize in turn competing theories of past ceremonialism. Other themes to be addressed in the course include: a critique of functionalist interpretations of religion popular in archaeological research; the materiality of ritual performance and the aesthetics of religious spectacles; and archaeological analyses of ritual deposits/landscapes to reconstruct past ontologies, power relations, historical change, and culturally specific structures of practice.

Since at least the Lower Paleolithic Period, interregional interaction has been fundamental to the development of cultures from around the world. The movement of ideas, people, and objects across vast areas is not confined to the modern era, and in this course we will explore the role that interregional interaction has played in many of the most important processes in human history from the dispersal of Homo Erectus, the beginnings of social inequality, the origins of agriculture, the birth of cities, and the spread of civilizations.

This course will focus on zooarchaeological interpretation: how do archaeologists reconstruct past human behaviour on the basis of animal bones recovered from archaeological sites? As has become increasingly clear over the past decades, in order to interpret archaeofaunas the zooarchaeologist must understand factors ranging from the natural (e.g., fluvial processes, carnivore activity, and differential bone density) to the cultural (e.g., ritual disposal of bone, and status differences in access to meat of different species), and everything in between (e.g., methods of quantification, patterns of bone transport, isotope analyses, and butchery methods). This course will cover seminal and recent papers on the theory and methods used to develop robust and complex pictures of ancient human lifeways.

Evidence from the natural sciences for past and present climate change is overwhelming. However, its deployment as an explanatory framework in archaeology is inconsistent — on the one hand, climate change must have had profound impacts on many past human societies; but on the other, archaeologists are justifiably wary of automatically pinning changes in past lifeways on external environmental forces, rather than seeking "internal" political, social, and ideological explanations. Currently, archaeological investigations of climate change impacts are experiencing a surge of interest, at least in part because of the prominence of modern climate change in public political, social, and economic discourse. As a global community, we are worried about it! Many major past phenomena, from hunter-gatherer migrations through agricultural origins to the rise and demise of state-level societies have been hypothesized to result, often quite directly, from changing climates (though of course other explanations also exist). At the same time, climate change archaeology is becoming increasingly sophisticated, particularly in terms of understanding the mechanisms through which aspects of climate/weather and human lifeways are entangled. To begin to come to grips with these issues, this survey course will cover: 1) general approaches to studying climate change in relation to past human lifeways; 2) case studies in which climate change is hypothesized to have had direct impacts on past societies; 3) the impacts of modern climate change on the archaeological record; and 4) the relationship of archaeology as a discipline to broader considerations of current and future climate change.

Cultural transmission (CT) is the reproduction of information and practices in the forms of ideas, behaviours, and/or materials through social learning among intra-generational individuals, between societies, and from one generation to the next. Therefore, CT is fundamental to human experience. The topic of CT has received increasing interest in many disciplines, such as biology, anthropology, sociology, psychology, and education. Anthropologists in all subfields are well-equipped with rich data to contribute to methodological and theoretical building in this field.

Seminar courses are subject to selected topics. See departmental website for annual offering details.

Seminar courses are subject to selected topics. See departmental website for annual offering details.

Household archaeology, as the name implies, takes the household as the fundamental unit of study, and considers issues that are primary to households such as production, consumption, and social organization. Gordon Willey once called the household the most important unit of study in archaeology because in most pre-industrial societies the household was at the core of socioeconomic organization.

In this course, participants will learn to examine technologies both from the perspective of the modern scholar and (as best we can) from the perspective of the ancient craftsperson. Final hands-on projects for the course will employ these perspectives to carry out experimental or replicative studies. Many past students have been able to use their projects as portions of their PhD or master's research, or as the basis for publications unrelated to their main focus of research.

We will explore various themes and approaches in the archaeological study of technology, such as organization and control of production and consumption, material culture, style of technology, the value of objects, and reasons for the development and adoption of new technologies, as well as techniques that archaeologists and others have used to study ancient technology. The course is designed to allow discussion of additional themes of interest to participants related to their research foci, and to be flexible in the particular crafts examined by the class as a whole. (Resign yourselves to stone tools and pottery, but additional craft or technology groups covered are usually quite varied: food, metals, textiles, transportation, etc.) Typical sources of information for these explorations include archaeological and other papers on major theoretical topics; ethnographic readings, videos and interviews with experts; analysis of archaeological data; and hands-on reconstruction, experimentation and analysis by participants.

This course examines the craft of writing for archaeologists and addresses a wide range of issues including basic mechanics, productivity, and some of the deeper theoretical challenges of writing archaeological narratives. Heavy emphasis is placed on methods for improving the clarity, quality, and quantity of our writing. We explore specific archaeological “genres,” including reports, abstracts, conference papers, grants, peer-reviews, articles, chapters, and job applications. Through course readings, guest lectures, group work, and course assignments, students critically rethink their approach to writing while gaining new practical experience with writing groups, writing schedules, and the art of revision.

This seminar offers a critical review of archaeological approaches to place, space, landscapes, cities, and infrastructures in comparative perspective. In our post-industrial world, the second circuit of capital (real-estate speculation and public works) increasingly dominates political discourse. Archaeological research demonstrates that political economies grounded in the construction of place is not a modern phenomenon but has defined hierarchical polities ever since their inception. In this course, students will examine the emergence and organization of ancient cities and pre-industrial infrastructure projects through a detailed investigation of social theory on space and the urban condition. We will explore competing interpretations of urban process and examine how physical infrastructures shaped the political institutions, economies, and ideologies of cities past and present. Students will have the opportunity to consider a broad range of subjects, including mechanisms of city genesis; urban-rural relations; the intersections of city and state; infrastructures and the politics of place-making; and historical variation in urban landscapes, worldviews, and political economies. Discussion will focus in part on the spatial practices, social inequalities, and political institutions linking ancient urbanism with industrial and post-industrial cities. In turn, an examination of competing theories on capitalist and "postmodern" urbanism is intended to advance our understanding of the distinctive socioeconomic characteristics of pre-modern complex polities.

This course offers an introduction to contemporary linguistic anthropology by means of a survey of some dissertations and ethnographic monographs. This year the focus will be on Southeast Asia. In our reading of each book or dissertation we will consider their theoretical foundations, analytic goals, and methodological orientations, thereby tracking alternative approaches to foundational questions and, at the same time, mapping some key intellectual genealogies of the field. The idea is to provide a survey of contemporary work and an overview of disciplinary foundations while at the same time providing an opportunity to read some dissertations and ethnographies that might inspire students in their own PhD research.

This course will offer a linguistic anthropological approach to understanding ideologies and practices of language, identity, nation, and state in francophone Canada, and more broadly in francophone North America, with attention to imperialism, colonialism, modernity and globalization. It will cover the period from French colonization (New France) to the present, covering language ideological debates and discursive struggles for power, as well as the boundaries, erasures, and exclusions they produce. There will be opportunities for empirical investigation, whether historical or contemporary.

Ethnography is at once a (relatively disciplined) practice of interpersonal engagement, a way of thinking about the world, and the results of such practices conveyed and transformed through writing. In this reading intensive course we examine books published over the past few decades (skewed towards more recent years) that are all variously understood as ‘ethnography’ in an effort to become more familiar with the scope and elasticity of the genre. The selected texts are diverse but thematically linked by concerns for place, time, subject/person, power, and subordination. Each provides a point of departure for exploring a range of research methods and theoretical models. We examine issues such as research design, collaboration and sole-authorship, authorial positioning and voice, narrative style, use of 'plot,' characterization, and representation, all the while attending to how each ethnography was produced within its historical and intellectual context.

This course is offered to students in anthropology as a not-for-credit supplement to the curriculum in socio-cultural and linguistic anthropology (as well as to interested students from other departments). Each week will feature a presentation by a current faculty member focusing on a method that they have used in their own research or on, a broadly speaking, set of methodological problems they have encountered. Some of the topics covered during the course of the term might include: interviews; fieldnotes; participant observation; performance ethnography; land defense; community advocacy; community partnership; confidentiality and secrecy; photography, film, and video; archives and historical records; reading fiction; digital ethnography. Each week, students will be expected to complete a short exercise relating to the presentation. A student who attends and completes the exercises for eight of the ten seminars will receive an annotation of course completion in their transcript.

This course introduces graduate students to some of the major thinkers and traditions in, and for, the discipline of anthropology. While this course establishes strong familiarity with canonical texts, it also demands a critical reflexivity about discipline formation itself and the normalization of ideas. As such, this course aims to situate contemporary anthropological thought within past and ongoing debates among a range of social and political theorists.

This reading-intensive seminar focuses on anthropological approaches to the process of mass mediation, with specific reference to critical theories of technology and semiotics. The course combines "classic" theoretical texts drawn from a range of disciplines with more empirical accounts of how communicative processes are integral to large-scale social formations, and how such processes influence our current understanding of mass politics, publicity, "big data," racialization, militarization, digitalization. This year, the course will focus in particular on considering the information regime of imperial and colonial formations. Placing our understanding of media technologies within the more encompassing concept of mediation, this course asks what ethnographic or cultural accounts can offer to the interdisciplinary field of media studies.

This seminar explores the politics of cultural translation by intersecting Science and Technology Studies (STS) and anthropology. Cultural translation among different worldviews and practices has been foundational to the production of anthropological knowledge, and anthropological inquiries have increasingly been concerned with encounters between technoscience and other knowledge making practices. STS has examined technoscience as a series of processes of "translation" of specific practices and knowledge among various actors and actants, and elucidated how these translation practices generate various — often competing and conflicting — material-semiotic worlds. Recently, the necessity of the postcolonial and decolonial approaches to science has been advocated. We will explore how we might theorize "translation" by reading critical theory and concrete cases, and how anthropological attention to the politics of translation might contribute to responding to this call.

This course adopts the nature-society distinction as a central problematic and explores some of the ways in which this dualism has been critiqued, contested, rejected and re-fashioned in social theory. Through readings that encompass often quite substantially different approaches to "nature," this course seeks to engender discussion and debate about "nature" and its relation to social theory. Although the course adopts a roughly chronological and thematic framework, the readings have been specifically selected to draw out and investigate the contributions and limitations of different theorists, and, consequently, to draw students into substantive conversations about them. The analytical emphasis of the course builds on the notion of interfaces — points of interconnection and/or disjuncture among the various agendas and "natured" projects being developed by different authors.

This seminar course explores conceptual worlds of Marx and Mauss by reading a few original texts and some secondary texts. It will juxtapose key notions that these thinkers articulated in debates with their contemporary mainstream thoughts. Those notions include exchange (of gift, commodity), accumulation (of wealth, capital), and totality (social and natural, production-consumption-distribution). Engaging in those texts and notions, the course aims training academic skills of close reading, articulation of conceptual thoughts, short responses, peer review, and revision of research papers.

This course examines anthropological approaches to the study of violence. Violence has long been a central focus for anthropological research. One of the overarching ambitions in much of this research has been to make violence meaningful in some respect. Violence can be given meaning in any number of ways. For example, it can be analyzed as being part of a system of exchange, a system of sacrifice, a system of debt, a system of law-making, or a system of signs. More recently, however, studies of violence have started to emphasize the importance of failures in meaning. In this regard, it could be argued that violence describes the limits of the human capacity to give meaning to events. This course provides an overview of anthropological and related theories of violence. Some of the central theorists considered in the course are Benjamin, Arendt, Derrida, Foucault, and Agamben. The course then situates these theories within the context of ethnographic cases. The varieties of violence considered in these ethnographies range from forms of violence normally associated with small-scale societies (circumcision, tribal warfare, headhunting, witchcraft killings, etc.) to the forms of violence perpetrated by modern states and their citizens (modern warfare, torture, incarceration, rape, police violence, vigilantism, etc.)

The course examines capitalism as unevenly formed clusters of cultural practices and belief systems. In this seminar, we will analyze the social and cultural aspects of value and exchange, and compare various forms of capitalism. Some of the fundamental principles and practices of the capitalist system entail contradictions, tensions and enigmatic conventions. While these tensions generate debates as well as many social problems, in everyday life these foundational ideas and practices are often left unquestioned. For instance: How is the equivalence of exchange assumed in a market? How does money work? How does a thing become a commodity? How is "value" produced? We will bring in anthropological modes of inquiry in order to analyze the social and cultural specificities of ideas and practices that support capitalism, and to examine how people engage and disengage with these ideas and practices. We will investigate how capitalist and other forms of social interaction co-exist, compete with, and transform one another. Specific attention will be paid to the social and historical context in which particular forms of capitalism have emerged.

Seminar courses are subject to selected topics. See departmental website for annual offering details.

Seminar courses are subject to selected topics. See departmental website for annual offering details.

Seminar courses are subject to selected topics. See departmental website for annual offering details.