January 2023
Class and Culture
James P. Herron PhD, Director of the Harvard Writing Project and Preceptor in Expository Writing, Harvard University
It is commonplace to note that in the United States a large portion of the population self-identifies as middle class, even though our society is marked by deep, persistent, and increasing class inequality. Such self-identification, however, can obscure the complex and often contradictory ways in which we experience social class in our everyday lives. This intensive January session course explores the cultural dimensions of social class in the US from an ethnographic perspective, focusing on the everyday lives and cultures of ordinary Americans. We consider questions such as the following: what is it like to be a working class person in a society heavily invested in ideas of individual advancement and meritocracy? How do professionals (the upper middle class) define themselves and how do they view those above and below them in the class structure? How does social class shape people's values, political views, and tastes? How are class boundaries created and maintained? The course readings are drawn mainly from anthropology and sociology. Students may not take both ANTH E-115 and SSCI E-115 (offered previously) for degree or certificate credit.
Fall 2022
Histories and Ethnographies of Capitalism
James P. Herron PhD, Director of the Harvard Writing Project and Preceptor in Expository Writing, Harvard University
Karl Marx famously wrote that with the advance of capitalist social relations, "all that is solid melts into air." Here Marx refers to the supposed power of capitalism to destroy pre-existing economic, social, and cultural orders. In the centuries since capitalism spread over the globe, it has indeed transformed the lifeways and cultures of peoples throughout the world. In more recent years, globalization understood as the widespread and accelerated movement of capital across national borders has radically altered the lives of many peoples, from peasants in China to industrial workers in Michigan. This course critically examines capitalism historically and ethnographically. In the first part of the course, we consider historical accounts of the origins, development, and transformation of American capitalism, focusing on the key themes of slavery, industrialization, and financialization. In the second part of the course, we consider ethnographic accounts of life under contemporary capitalism, focusing on the cultural responses of peoples experiencing the rapid social change, dislocation, opportunities, and hardships brought about by changing capitalist social relations. We consider questions such as how have people coped culturally with the demands of capitalist wage labor and work discipline? How have capitalist social relations transformed communities, families, and senses of ethnic and national identity? Students may not take both ANTH E-118 and SSCI E-118 (offered previously) for degree or certificate credit.
Spring 2023
Pyramid Schemes: What Can Ancient Egyptian Civilization Teach Us?
Peter Der Manuelian PhD, Barbara Bell Professor of Egyptology, Harvard University
How much of your impression of the ancient world was put there by Hollywood, music videos, or orientalist musings out of the West? How accurate are these depictions? Does it matter? This course examines the quintessential example of the "exotic, mysterious ancient world" ancient Egypt to interrogate these questions. Who has used ancient Egypt as a construct, and to what purpose? Did you know that pyramids, mummies, King Tut, and Cleopatra represent just the (overhyped) tip of a very rich civilization that holds plenty of life lessons for today? Combine the ancient Egyptians' explanations of the world's natural forces with all the social complexity of human interaction and you have a fully formed society about four millennia of accumulated experience! Can investigating the real ancient Egypt unpack our current misconceptions about the land of the pharaohs? Hardly morose, tomb-building zombies, the Egyptians embraced life in all its messy details. Piety and corruption, imperialism and isolationism, divinity and mortality all played significant roles in life along the Nile. What can we learn about the nature of politics and society in our time by seeing the parallels between the ancient past and today? We explore archaeology, modern Egyptomania, repatriation, new digital visualization technologies, and international politics. What was ancient Egyptian racism? What is archaeological racism? Who owns the past? Who needs it? We take excursions into Egyptian art, history, politics, religion, literature and language (hieroglyphs), plus examine the evolution of Egyptology as a discipline.
Fall 2022
Moctezuma's Mexico Then and Now: Aztec Empire, Race Mixture, and Finding LatinX
Davíd Carrasco PhD, Neil L. Rudenstine Professor for the Study of Latin America, Harvard University - William L. Fash PhD, Charles P. Bowditch Professor of Central American and Mexican Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University
This course provides students with the opportunity to explore how pre-Hispanic and Colonial Mexican and Latina/o cultures provide vital context for understanding today's changing world. The emphasis is on the mythical and social origins, glory days, and political collapse of the Aztec Empire and Maya civilizations as a pivot to the study of the sexual, religious, and racial interactions of the Great Encounter between Mesoamerica, Africa, Europe, and the independent nations of Mexico and the United States. The study of the archaeology, artistic media, cosmovision, capital cities, human sacrifice, and the religious devotions of ancient Mesoamerica illuminate the Day of the Dead and Virgin of Guadalupe phenomena today. Objects at the Peabody Museum are used to examine new concepts of race, nation, and the persistence of Moctezuma's Mexico in Latino identities in the Mexico-US Borderlands. This course empowers students to evaluate the ways the US is changing and struggling to define itself in relation to Latin America and especially the migration of peoples, ideas, arts, music, and food from and through Mexico.
Spring 2023
Popular Devotion: Anthropology of Images in Mexico and the Americas
Myriam Lamrani Maria PhD, Postdoctoral Fellow in Anthropology, Harvard University
Popular Catholicism is alive and well in Mexico, where devotees often talk about the supernatural beings present in their daily lives, often saints, simply as their images. This course examines devotion to and through images three-dimensional effigies, prayer cards, dreams, visions, art, and representations in popular culture. By examining what an image is and how it operates for devotees and other audiences, the students of this course are encouraged to explore visual methodologies and alternative modes of anthropological thinking to consider devotion in Mexico and Latin America. Such a focus on images grounds our examination in a framework where the image becomes an ethnographic object and a mode of anthropological inquiry. It also considers other types of images to ask how popular religion connects to other social issues, thus reflecting political dynamics. In an era of proliferation of visual content, the question becomes: what can an anthropology of images bring to our understanding of devotion in connection to other domains of social life? What can an anthropology of the visual offer to the anthropological study of popular religion? Foregrounding a scholarship that traverses visual, cultural, religious studies, and anthropology, this course explores themes such as popular religion, intimacy, nationalism, and political violence in Latin America. Readings draw mainly from anthropology and ethnographic works on popular Catholicism, nationalism, politics, visual studies, and cultural theory.
Fall 2022
Archaeology of Inequality
Jess Beck PhD, College Fellow in the Department of Anthropology, Harvard University
In 2018, Oxfam reported that the 26 richest people on the planet had the same net worth as half of the global population. The rampant wealth disparities in the modern world lead us to ask whether inequality is an inescapable component of all societies. Through its unique access to the deep time of human prehistory, archaeology allows us to question myths and just-so stories about the origins and inevitability of inequality. In this course, we examine how different ways of making a living, from food procurement to economic and political organization, have worked to either amplify or diminish inequalities in human communities. This course covers topics that resonate in the past and present including how do elites justify their monopolization of power and resources? Are there alternatives to hierarchy in large-scale communities? What strategies have past people used to evade the inequitable demands of states and empires? This course explores how archaeologists draw upon multiple lines of evidence including material culture, architecture, and the remains of ancient plants, animals, and people to develop a holistic understanding of inequality in past societies.
Spring 2023
The Storyteller in Flight: Migrant Narratives, Refugee Camp Cultures, and the Arts of Displacement
Lowell A. Brower PhD, Lecturer on Folklore, University of Wisconsin, Madison
What are the effects of displacement on tradition, storytelling, and cultural belonging? How does forced migration influence narration, creative expression, and imagination? What are the powers and potentials of artistic communication after existential rupture? What is the role of the storyteller in flight? This course explores expressive cultures in motion, amid crisis, and out of place, and asks how tradition bearers and creative innovators adapt when the communities in which their preexisting cultural practices had once flourished are destroyed, uprooted, transformed, or dispersed. It also asks how researchers, aid workers, activists, and other outsiders might engage in ethical and beneficial ways with individuals and communities in exile. In examining the impacts of forced migration on cultural production, transmission, and innovation, we put classical theories of refugee and migration studies in conversation with recent ethnographies and folklore collections, as well as memoirs, novels, songs, and films by and about displaced persons. With case studies ranging from colonial Africa, to post-war Europe, to contemporary America, we explore what, if anything, holds together the refugee experience, while also interrogating our own neighborly obligations and scholarly commitments as we navigate what has famously been deemed the century of the migrant.
Spring 2023
Money and Power: Cultural Approaches to Economic Life
James P. Herron PhD, Director of the Harvard Writing Project and Preceptor in Expository Writing, Harvard University
This course considers how culture shapes the economic aspects of our lives. That is, we seek to understand the economy not as a separate realm with its own special logic and structure but instead as embedded in the social relations, identities, and cultural practices of everyday life. Our major course themes include exchange, money, debt, commodification, markets, and labor. We consider questions such as, how do the different kinds of exchanges we engage in gift exchanges versus market exchanges, for instance shape our relationships with others? We explore the social meaning of money and the role of the market in our lives. In a world where it is possible to rent a family, does money destroy love and intimacy? What aspects of our lives are governed by the logic of capitalism and what aspects escape capitalism's grip? Why does it feel shameful to be in debt, and how has this shame been manipulated for political purposes? Why in the US do we consider work to be sacred and morally purifying even though many of us have tedious jobs? The course readings include theoretical and empirical works drawn mainly from the fields of anthropology, economic sociology, and heterodox economics. Our key texts include David Graeber's Debt, Viviana Zelizer's The Social Meaning of Money, and Sidney Mintz's Sweetness and Power.
Spring 2023
Anthropology and Human Rights
Theodore Macdonald, Jr. PhD, Affiliate of the Department of Social Studies, Harvard University
This course combines an introduction to the formal, theoretical, and normative structures of human rights with analyses of contemporary case studies. It illustrates several critical human rights issues, debates, and practices that demonstrate the increasing significance of ethnographic field methods and related interpretive analysis. Accepting that agreement on and realization of human rights often require negotiation and compromise, the course illustrates why, and suggests how, realization of many broadly-defined human rights require specific contextualization.
Fall 2022
The Opioid Epidemic
Jason Bryan Silverstein PhD, Lecturer on Global Health and Social Medicine and Co-Director, Master of Science in Media, Medicine, and Health Program, Harvard Medical School
More people die every year from opioid overdoses than gunshot wounds and car accidents, and the crisis appears to be worsening and rapidly changing. Making matters worse, understanding the crisis in real time is notoriously difficult, especially since most who overdose do not go to hospitals and death certificates are often unreliable. And while everyone agrees something must be done, what that something is leads us into heated debates over health care spending and harm reduction. While most medical research focuses on the biology of disease, this course takes a biosocial approach to unmask how social factors, economic insecurity, and the availability of massive amounts of pharmaceuticals have become an overdose crisis. We read social scientists, journalists, public health scholars, and first-hand accounts in order to understand the chronic emergencies (such as de-industrialization and despair) behind this acute crisis. By investigating the opioid epidemic in this way, students are encouraged to think boldly and creatively beyond the traditional boundaries of medicine: perhaps someone's best medicine is a housing voucher, or a testing strip to detect fentanyl. By the end of the course, students understand the social roots of the opioid epidemic and how solutions may be implemented.