Fall 2024
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.
Fall 2024
Culture in Play: Toys, Games, and Sports
Richard Joseph Martin PhD, Lecturer in Extension, Harvard University
Common phrases like "it's only a game" suggest that play is less than serious. But for players and spectators alike, play often entails considerable commitments, including substantial expenditures of time and money. Thus, despite common assumptions about its frivolity, play is in many senses serious, with social, economic, and political consequences as well as symbolic and experiential import. In this course, we explore what activities labeled play reveal about the cultures and peoples who take part in them, analyzing how everyday practices involving toys, games, and sports might illuminate broader social realities. Our discussions move us through a range of the anthropology's subfields, from ritual studies to globalization, and from political and economic anthropology to studies of the body, gender, and sexuality. Some of our discussion topics include Olympic games and nationalism, dolls and the gendering of bodies, internet avatars and social constructions of the self, individualist ideology, and team spirit.
Spring 2025
We Are One: An Anthropological Introduction to Contemporary Spiritualities
Giovanna Parmigiani PhD, Lecturer on Religion and Cultural Anthropology and Research Associate in Transcendence and Transformation, Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard Divinity School
What is spirituality? How is it different from religion? How is spirituality linked to well-being? In this course, we address some of the most widespread ideas and practices within contemporary spiritualities with an anthropological lens. We read scholarly work, for example, on astrology, Tarot, and divination; Reiki and energy healing; mediumship and near-death experiences; unidentified flying objects; and conspirituality. We discuss their relation to neoliberalism and material culture; their role in healing and in popular culture; and their connections with politics, time, environmentalism, the senses, and non-rational ways of knowing. We do so through ethnographic readings, films, music, arts, discussions, and independent research. By engaging with ethnographic works, students become acquainted with or deepen their knowledge of the main issues, traditions, debates, and research in the field of the anthropology of religion and spirituality.
Spring 2025
Pyramid Schemes: What Can Ancient Egyptian Civilization Teach Us?
Peter 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 2024
Moctezuma's Mexico Then and Now: Ancient 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.
Fall 2024
Archaeology of the African Holocene
Shayla Monroe PhD, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Harvard University
This course is an overview of archaeological studies on African sites dating from around 12,000 BCE to 1,500 CE. We cover major societal transitions and migrations, including food production, the desertification of the Sahara, the development of states and urbanism, the Iron Age, the Bantu migrations, and the trans-Saharan gold trade.
Spring 2025
The Anthropology of Crisis
Lowell A. Brower PhD, Lecturer in Extension, Harvard University
This course tracks the maneuvers of expressive culture through crises, conflict zones, and emergency situations. By examining the creative interventions of storytellers, performers, and artists in response to a wide range of ruptures and transformations from political upheaval to genocidal violence, forced migration, social revolution, ecological disaster, and everyday rites of passage, the course illuminates and interrogates the powers, potentials, politics, and poetics of cultural performance, communal storytelling, ritual praxis, and folkloric tradition in the face of destabilizing change and unprecedented emergencies. We ask how storytellers revive and revise old stories to confront new challenges; how preexisting expressive forms weather unprecedented socio-cultural storms; and how individuals and communities attempt to re-narrate themselves after calamity. What role can storytelling play in imagining communities, navigating rites of passage, and confronting existential and ethical dilemmas? How do people turn their afflictions into art? What roles can folklore play in reimagining communities, rehabilitating selves, and remaking worlds? Beginning with a critical re-examination of popular discourses of crisis and emergency, we explore the potentials and limitations of these categories as they relate to everyday life and inter-subjective exchange in places as diverse as the refugee camps of Rwanda, the bayous of Louisiana, the pubs of Ireland, the alleyways of Cairo, and the message boards of 4-Chan. Along with troubling the lines between the everyday and the emergency, in the manner of Walter Benjamin, we also investigate Martin Heidegger's distinction between artistic performances that rescue us from the emergency and those that rescue us into the emergency. Through critical engagement with a diverse array of texts, artistic creations, cultural practices, and folkloric performances, this course calls attention to the ways in which scholarly production, humanitarian intervention, political activism, and artistic performance are implicated and imbricated in the production of crisis, for better and for worse. In treating crisis as both experiential reality for those who live through it, and as what Janet Roitman calls a "narrative construction," the course ultimately seeks to interrogate its own premise, illuminating the ways in which the invocation of emergency itself might be considered a form of artistic, imaginative, and transformative interventions.
Spring 2025
Language and Culture
James P. Herron PhD, Director of the Harvard Writing Project and Preceptor in Expository Writing, Harvard University
This course offers students an introduction to linguistic anthropology, the study of language in social and cultural context. Linguistic anthropology begins with the fundamental assumption that language structure and language use are integral parts of human culture. We begin by exploring language as a medium that does not simply communicate ideas but that constructs our identities, sense of reality, and social worlds. Our approach in the course emphasizes the role of language in understanding all aspects of human social relations. We consider these basic questions: what is language? How are we to understand linguistic diversity and language change? Does speaking a particular language affect our understanding of the world? How does language variation mark and reproduce hierarchical social divisions such as class, race, ethnic, and gender differences? What are the social effects of language standardization and whose interest does it serve? How are power differences between speakers manifest in their use of language? How are social identities and relations enacted in face-to-face conversations? In answering these questions we view language both as a formal symbolic system and as an open, flexible, and strategic cultural resource. Our approach involves both theoretical arguments and the consideration of particular case studies.
January 2025
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.
Fall 2024
The Supernatural in the Modern World
Lowell A. Brower PhD, Lecturer in Extension, Harvard University
What do our ghost stories say about us, what do our beasts betray about us? Which witches bewitch us, which rumors consume us, and what sense can be made of what haunts us? Restless spirits, alien invaders, wicked witches, bloodthirsty vampires, legendary cryptids, murderous ogres, illuminati satanists, deep-state conspirators, memetic online menaces: our contemporary bestiary is overflowing with meaningful monsters. Our spine-tingling intellectual task in this course is to analyze the roles that these malevolent entities and the supernatural narratives we tell about them play in our everyday lives, collective psyches, communities, and politics, and in the crises we confront as individuals and groups. Are our occult stories allegories of our modern discontents or simply holdovers from our childhood nightmares? Are they symptoms of specific societal crises or representations of timeless pan-human fears? How has the witch hunt, the rumor panic, the standardized nightmare of the group transformed in this meme-ified age of online participatory culture, global interconnection, ecological catastrophe, and fake-news-driven conspiracy thinking? What can we learn about ourselves, our pasts, and our futures by thinking deeply about what scares us the most? And how frightened should we be of what we might find if we dig too deeply into that question? We analyze the supernatural in relationship historical memories, cultural anxieties, folk traditions, spiritual beliefs, physiological sensations, political conflicts, environmental disasters, and existential imperatives. Because nowhere is safe from the things that go bump in the night, our interdisciplinary journey takes us across time and space into the bellies of various beasts, from the gates of Harvard Yard, to the hills of Rwanda, the message boards of 4chan, the proms of rural Pennsylvania, the ships of the Middle Passage, the villages of medieval Europe, the halls of the White House, your creepy neighbor's basement, and the deep dark woods. Our abominable assignments include creative reading responses, the documentation and analysis of frightful folklore, a fearsome final project, and a co-created haunted Harvard virtual tour. Course activities may include local excursions, storytelling sessions, and paranormal experimentation.
Fall 2024
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.
Fall 2024
Magic Today: An Introduction to the Anthropology of Magic
Giovanna Parmigiani PhD, Lecturer on Religion and Cultural Anthropology and Research Associate in Transcendence and Transformation, Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard Divinity School
What is magic? Is it different from religion? Is magic a way of knowing? In this course, we look at magic from an anthropological perspective. We focus, in particular, on contemporary magic in Europe and North America, addressing for example contemporary paganisms, Wicca, chaos magic, new age spirituality, and contemporary esotericism. By engaging with ethnographic works, students become acquainted with or deepen their knowledge of the main issues, traditions, debates, and research in the field of the anthropology of religion and of magic. Students analyze contemporary magic vis- -vis popular culture, feminism, globalization, medicine, social media, history, and well-being. They do so through ethnographic readings, films, music, arts, discussions, and independent research.