This interdisciplinary course combines ethnographic readings, representations, and interpretations of city and urban cultures with a video production component in which students create short documentaries on the city of Accra. The interpretative classes will run concurrently with production management, sights and sound, and post-production workshops. The course will have three objectives: (1) teach students the documentary tradition from Flaherty to Rouch; (2) use critical Cinema theory to define a document with a camera; and (3) create a short documentary film.
How do media representations reflect and affect communities? How do people exploit old and new forms of communication? How do technological mediation channel and reshape social relations? This course reviews ethnographic literature on a wide range of media including print, photography, film, television, radio, cell phones, and internet-based social networks. Each week, we explore how media use redefines a central anthropological concern, such as kinship, colonialism, mobility, religion, or violence. We continuously interrogate the diverse effects of technology, infrastructure, reception, sensation, and interaction. Engaging with both “live” and “virtual” communities, we revisit the methods and ethics of studying mediated relations. Students deliver an initial critical auto-ethnography of their own media consumption, a detailed assessment of a debate in the field, and a final project investigating a specific media community using original ethnographic research. Throughout the course, we collaboratively develop our own experimental virtual community based on the priorities and interests of the class participants. Innovative integrations of art and interactivity will be encouraged.
The transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture and animal husbandry is often called the Agricultural Revolution. This change in human subsistence strategies led to changes in many other aspects of human life, including settlement patterns, demography, social organization, and religious practices. It also provided the economic basis for the development of complex urban societies in many regions of the world. Examines the archaeological evidence for the transition from foraging to farming on a worldwide basis.
Examines the global prevalence of gender violence and the varied meanings of violence against women and changes in terminology over time. Examines ways of theorizing gender and violence including performative ideas of gender. The creation of gender violence as a social problem is a product of social movements in the United States, Europe, India, and many other parts of the world. It is now understood globally as an important human rights violation. Also examines the forms of intervention that have been developed in the United States and globally for diminishing violence against women, including policing, prosecution, and punishment.
This course introduces the long-standing and complex connection between religious practices and various media. We’ll analyze how human hearing, vision, and the performing body have been used historically to express and maintain religious life through music, voice, images, words, and rituals. Time will then be spent on more recent electronic media such as radio, film, television, video, and the Internet. An anthropological/ historical perspective on studying religion is pursued.
Although they are no longer the dominant form of human sociality or adaptation, hunter-gatherers continue to play a pivotal role in anthropological theory. But who are hunter-gatherers? Some argue that the problem with trying to pigeon-hole hunter-gatherers is that this taxonomic unit holds little practical or evolutionary legitimacy. Others contend that people have evidently lived off the land without agriculture or animal husbandry, so at some level, hunter-gatherer is a meaningful category. Yet, few of the qualities assigned to hunter-gatherers hold up to detailed cross-cultural investigation. For example, hunter-gatherer subsistence is not inherently linked to peaceful coexistence, affluence, small group sizes or settlement mobility. Moreover, hunter-gatherer populations commonly thought to be deeply entrenched in evolutionary time are now known to result from complex historical processes of globalization and colonial expansion. This course will explore the diversity of lifeways subsumed under the banner of the hunter-gatherer. Drawing on a wide range of cross-cultural datasets, the course will unpack hunter-gatherer behavioral variability across broad topics, not paradigms. We will examine variations in hunter-gatherer subsistence, mobility, social organization, belief systems, landscape use, and material culture. Finally, we will ask to what degree the concept of the hunter-gatherer and the study of modern hunter-gatherers can help anthropologists understand and explore human behavior in the deeper past.
This course examines the social and political life of media and how it makes a difference in the daily lives of people as a practice – in production, reception, or circulation. It is organized around the following key questions: What is media? What role do media play in producing or shaping our sense of reality? What is the relationship between media and culture? How are media implicated in social change? It provides an overview of the increasing theoretical attention paid to the mass media by anthropologists, and focuses on concrete ethnographic examples.
Only open to majors in anthropology who have the permission of the director of undergraduate studies or the instructor. This seminar explores, theoretically and methodologically, selected key current issues and problems in biological anthropology. See the department?s internal catalog.
Introduces contemporary archaeology, its theories, practices, and early societies and cultures. Examines current methodological and theoretical viewpoints of archaeological scholarship within the discipline of anthropology. Focuses on key transformations in cultural evolution, such as the origins of modern humans, the emergence of food production, and the development of complex societies, urbanism, and early states. Explores gender roles, landscapes and settlements, technologies, art, cognitive systems, urbanism, and state formation.
This course seeks to assess the degree to which variations in human biology and culture can be understood as adaptations to varying external conditions. We examine the relationship of human systems of action and the natural world in order to understand the various forms of human adaptation. Case studies of several living peoples, contemporary and past biological communities, and prehistoric cultures provide the material for interpretation and evaluation of theoretical positions.
The Chinese word for ?religion? means ?teaching.? Explores what Chinese people ?taught? themselves about the person, society, and the natural world and thus how social life was constructed and maintained. Examines in historical perspective the classic texts of the Taoist and Confucian canon and their synthesis; Buddhist, especially Ch?an (Zen). Discusses the practices of filiality in Buddhism, Confucian orthodoxy, and in folk religion.
Examines human health and disease within an ecological framework, exploring the interactions of environmental, genetic, physiological, and cultural factors in the expression and distribution of human diseases. Develops pathology profiles for nonhuman primates; prehistoric human populations; and hunting and gathering, agricultural, and industrial groups, with emphasis on the expression of infectious disease in human history and newly (re-) emerging diseases.
This course offers an introduction to some of the classical and current issues in the anthropology of Indigenous Australia. The role of anthropology in the representation and governance of Indigenous life is itself an important subject for anthropological inquiry, considering that Indigenous people of Australia have long been the objects of interest and imagination by outsiders for their cultural formulations of kinship, ritual, art, gender, and politics. These representations—in feature films about them (such as Rabbit-Proof Fence and Australia), New Age Literature (such as Mutant Message Down Under), or museum exhibitions (such as in the Museum of Sydney or the Australian Museum)—are now also in dialogue with Indigenous forms of cultural production, in genres as diverse as film, television, drama, dance, art and writing. The course will explore how Aboriginal people have struggled to reproduce themselves and their traditions on their own terms, asserting their right to forms of cultural autonomy and self-determination. Through the examination of ethnographic and historical texts, films, archives and Indigenous life-writing accounts, we will consider the ways in which Aboriginalities are being challenged and constructed in contemporary Australia. The course will consist of lectures interspersed with discussions, student presentations, and films/other media; we may also have guest presenters.
Between the end of the Ice Age and the expansion of the Roman Empire, temperate Europe witnessed a series of social and economic transformations that represented a transition from a hunting and gathering way of life to urban chiefdoms. Along the way, these hunter-gatherers became agriculturalists and stockherders, learned to use metals, and developed social structures as complex as any found in Old World civilizations. Examines changes in later prehistoric Europe from about 8000 B.C. to the arrival of the Romans.
Analyzes medical beliefs and practices in African, Asian, and Latin American societies. Studies the coexistence of different kinds of medical specialists (e.g., shamans, herbalists, bonesetters, midwives, physicians trained in indigenous and cosmopolitan medicine), with particular reference to the structures of health resources available to laymen and problems of improving health care.
Humans are the most wide-ranging of all of the species on earth. Our evolutionary history and our ability to adapt to such a broad range of environments is dependent on the results in the patterns of human variability we see today. New techniques have been developed that allow us to explore the different levels of human variation. This course focuses on new data and methodologies, including molecular genetic techniques, and the hypotheses and controversies generated by these new perspectives.
Why do some primates live in large social groups while others are solitary and yet others live in pairs or cooperatively breeding families? Why are strong social hierarchies seen in some primate taxa but not in others? How do multiple species of primates often manage to coexist in the same habitat? Why are social relationships in some primate species characterized by strong bonds among females while such bonds are absent in other primates societies? Why do some species of primates show marked geographic variability in behavior and social structure? The answers to these and other questions lie in understanding the relationships between each species and its ecological and social setting and in understanding each species? phylogenetic history. In this course, students explore the diversity of primate social systems and the evolutionary relationships among the primates, and we discuss many of the general ecological laws that have been proposed by evolutionary biologists as the keys to understanding important features of primate behavior and ecology.
In this course, New York City is our archaeological site. The archaeology of New York City extends back some 10,000 years, from Native American societies, to the colonial encounter, into the industrial era, and through to the present day. In this course we will study the archaeological investigations that have taken place throughout the five boroughs of New York City. In doing so we will see how the city became a locus of global trade, in people, goods, and ideas. We will investigate how, as a nodal point in this global system, it came to develop its own cultures and ideologies. We will also learn about the federal, state, and local laws that mandate when and how archaeology is conducted in advance of construction activities and the extent to which Native American Tribes and local communities are involved in this process.
Surveys the mutual shaping of culture and biology in diverse contexts around the world. Starts with sociocultural theories of biocultural process and ends with ethnographies of disability, drugs, food, place, pain, and biotechnology. Examines the relationship between larger political economic structures and individual subjectivities, and examines biological experience as simultaneously material and socioculturally plastic.
This course examines the social and cultural forces that shape the construction of sex, gender, and sexuality. It takes these categories as nonbinary and fluid. Using an intersectional approach, it considers how various subject positions including race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, immigration status, religion, and ability impact gender and sex roles. It traces historical trajectories of foundational feminist anthropology, while also exploring queer theories and performativity. It seeks to interrogate social hierarchies based on sex, gender, and sexuality, exploring who has been traditionally excluded from positions of power and privilege. Topics such as race and porn, BDSM, asexuality, heteronormativity, transgender identities, queer coming out narratives, down-low sexual practices, polyamory, sex work, and queer kinship will be explored in order to challenge normative frameworks of sex and gender.
Biological anthropology examines the evolutionary history and adaptability of humans and our ancestors. Forensic anthropology is an applied subfield of biological anthropology that provides expert analysis of the skeleton in a medicolegal setting by utilizing methods developed in skeletal biology, archaeology, and the forensic sciences. Forensic anthropologists play critical roles in identifying victims of mass fatalities (such as World Trade Center and Oklahoma City bombings), in investigating homicides (such as identifying the Russian tsar?s family), and in distinguishing cause of death. We examine how forensic anthropologists approach modern and historic crimes in the laboratory and the field. Students are introduced to the underlying theory and the applied techniques that forensic anthropologists use to recover and identify individuals and assess cause of death.
This course offers an overview of the human rights system, looking at its basic elements and studying how it works. It focuses on the relationships between human rights and culture and between global ideas and practices and local ones. Human rights campaigns frequently encounter resistance in the name of protecting cultural differences. This is particularly common with issues concerning women, children, and the family. The course explores several issues that raise questions of human rights and culture, such as female genital cutting, trafficking of persons, food justice, and indigenous peoples’ rights to culture. Using these examples, the course considers how the human rights system deals with tensions between global standards and local ways of life. It examines the meanings of rights and of culture in these debates and shows the implications of adopting an anthropological analysis of these situations. The goal of the course is developing an understanding of human rights in practice.
Analyzes fossil evidence for human evolution and the paleoanthropological inferences derived from such evidence. Emphasizes methods of phylogenetic reconstruction, taxonomy, functional anatomy, and paleoecology.
Examines how primates communicate and why their communication takes the forms it does. Discusses general issues associated with the study of animal communication: potential functions of communication, different modalities by which communicative signals can be transmitted, types of information that can be conveyed via each of these modalities, and ways in which researchers go about studying animal communication systems. Examines ways environmental and sociological factors influence the evolution of forms of communication.
Integrates evolutionary biology, genetics, immunology, ecology, and behavioral ecology, along with sociocultural anthropology, politics, and economics, to better understand newly emerging and reemerging diseases as they affect human health. General evolutionary theory and an introduction to Darwinian medicine are provided before the course examines viral, bacterial, parasitic, and prion-based diseases along with their hosts, vectors, and other organisms. Particular attention is paid to how humans have purposely and inadvertently created both biological and cultural environments for the transmission of different diseases. Media representations and misrepresentations are examined throughout the course.
Explores how identity is a process of “becoming” rather than a mode of “being” by examining how speakers enact their gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, and socioeconomic class through everyday conversations, narratives, performances, literacy activities, and public debates. Also explores the moral and political consequences of people’s identification strategies by examining how their beliefs about language reinforce or contest normative power structures. Readings on the relationship between bilingual education and accent discrimination, multilingualism and youth counterculture, migration and code-switching, media and religious publics, linguistic nationalism and xenophobia, and literacy and neo/liberalism in different areas of the world.
What does it mean to think anthropologically? This course considers historically foundational practices of anthropological thought, its core method, fieldwork, and its most influential product, the ethnography, in order to think practically and creatively along the lines of what constitutes cultures, societies, translation, and difference. A central goal is to advance the concept of culture, with its attendant solidarities, hierarchies, and exclusions, in order to better understand continually changing systems of collective identifications.
This course examines the social and political life of media and how it makes a difference in the daily lives of people as a practice – in production, reception, or circulation. It is organized around the following key questions: What is media? What role do media play in producing or shaping our sense of reality? What is the relationship between media and culture? How are media implicated in social change? It provides an overview of the increasing theoretical attention paid to the mass media by anthropologists, and focuses on concrete ethnographic examples.
Climate change is one of the greatest challenges facing humankind today and most of the public discourse on this topic focuses on the future. And yet, all of our experience with the natural world lies in the past. This course will delve into some of the issues that arise from contemplating climate change in a historical and human evolutionary perspective: what is humans’ natural environment? How many times did the climate change significantly during human history? Did climate determine the course of human evolution and/or social change? When did humans first begin to tinker with the environment? And finally: what solutions for the future can we glean from our collective historical experience? The course will use primary literature from the fields of archaeology, paleoanthropology, and paleoclimatology to guide students toward a better understanding of climate change at the human scale.
Investigates the evolutionary origins of humans. The study of human evolution is a multidisciplinary endeavor involving a synthesis of concepts, techniques, and research findings from a variety of different scientific fields, including evolutionary biology, paleontology, primatology, comparative anatomy, genetics, molecular biology, geology, and archaeology. Explores the different contributions that scientists have made toward understanding human origins and provides a detailed survey of the evidence used to reconstruct the evolutionary history of our own species.
A site for IMA NY Students to find equivalent courses outside of IMA NY
For most students joining IMA in Fall 2022 and beyond, there is a new program structure that affects the categorization of courses on this site:
Any class in any IMA major elective category (ie "Art & Design") refers to the IMA program structure previous to those entering in Fall 2022. If you are in the class of 2026 (most entering Fall 2022 or later), any course in an IMA elective category are generic IMA electives in the new structure.