This is a broad introductory course covering race, language, and culture, both as intellectual concepts and as political realities. Topics include race and culture as explanations of human affairs, the relationship of language to thought, cultural diversity and cultural relativity, and cultural approaches to current crises.

This course explores anthropological understandings of culture and the environment, particularly with respect to the ecology of human perception, histories of colonialism and related inequalities, food production, consumerism, nature conservation, the Anthropocene concept, and pervasive environmental logics of globalizing capitalism.

Explores the social and cultural dimensions of biomedical practice and experience in the United States. Focuses on practitioner and patient, asking about the ways in which race, gender, and socio-economic status contour professional identity and socialization, how such factors influence the experience, and course of, illness, and how they have shaped the structures and institutions of biomedicine over time.

The course introduces medical anthropology, and contextualizes bodies, suffering, healing and health. It is organized thematically around a critical humanist approach, along with perspectives from political economy and social constructionism. The aim of the course is to provide a broad understanding of the relationship between culture, healing (including and especially the Western form of healing known as biomedicine), health and political power.

This course explores anthropological writings on development and humanitarianism to better understand the historical context and contemporary practice of these distinct modes of world saving. We will attend to critiques of development and humanitarianism, and will also consider writings by anthropologists who champion the humanitarian project

Introduces the interrelationships of linguistic, cultural, and social phenomena with emphasis on the importance of these interrelationships in interpreting human behavior. No prior knowledge of linguistics is required.

Reviews key findings in the study of language variation. Explores the use of language to express identity and social difference.

New course in the subject of anthropology.

Topics include alternative theories of prehistoric culture change, dating methods, excavation and survey techniques, and the reconstruction of the economy, social organization, and religion of prehistoric societies.

Overview of the major theoretical positions which have structured anthropological thought over the past century.

Ethnographies of Amazonian Peoples and the new anthropological theories about their way of life.

Biopolitical analysis has become one of the prominent critical approaches across the social sciences and humanities. This course will consider various biopolitical theories and the ways in which they help us understand diverse phenomena of our contemporary condition, which will be examined through various case studies.

This course introduces students to one of the key frameworks in anthropology's "ethical turn": moral experience. The investigation of moral experience explores questions of ethics from a phenomenological-hermeneutic perspective and attends closely to subjectivity, affect, and embodiment. We will explore moral experiences such as ethical self-cultivation, empathy, love, hope, breakdown, mood, and moral transformation.

This course will examine the cultural politics of body size norms drawing on a range of perspectives within anthropology and related fields and from the lived experiences of diverse African American women.

Introduces the native languages of North America and the methods that linguists and anthropologists use to record and analyze them. Examines the use of grammars, texts and dictionaries of individual languages and affords insight into the diversity among the languages.

Language and Thought

Topics to be announced prior to each semester, dealing with linguistics.

New course in the subject of Anthropology.

Topics to be announced prior to each semester, dealing with archaeology.

This course teaches the importance of understanding cultural meanings when curating items, whether material or intangible, drawn from social worlds other than one's own. It provides a general introduction to collection, preservation, and display through study of a specific collection held by the instructor or by a local institution such as the Fralin Museum of Art.

The majors seminars in anthropology offer majors and minors an opportunity to engage deeply with a topic of anthropological concern. Through these courses anthropology students gain experience in doing an independent research project on a topic they care about and produce a significant paper or other major work. Enrollment for majors and minors is preferred.

Independent study conducted by the student under the supervision of an instructor of his or her choice.

Independent research, under the supervision of the faculty DMP thesis readers, toward the DMP thesis. Prerequisite: Admission to the Distinguished Majors Program in Anthropology.

In anthropology, where identity has become a central concern, language is seen as an important site for the construction of, and negotiation over social identities. In linguistics, reference to categories of social identity helps to explain language structure and change. This seminar explores the overlap between these converging trends by focusing on the notion of discourse as a nexus of cultural and linguistic processes.

Students build knowledge and practice of analysis of peoples' joint-engagement in embodied interactions. How does action weave together multiple sensory modalities into semiotic webs linking interactions with more durative institutions of social life? Course includes workshops on video recording, and the transcription and coding of verbal and non-verbal actions. Prior coursework in Linguistics, Anthropology or instructor permission recommended.

New course in the subject of anthropology.

Investigates current theory, models, and research methods in anthropological archaeology.

The focus of this class is the nature of sociopolitical interaction across boundaries and imperial frontier regions, using multidisciplinary research and different scales of analysis. Among other disciplines, this includes archaeology, ethnohistory and history. Some of the case studies comprise the ancient frontiers of imperial formations in the ancient World, the pre-Columbian Americas, and those in the US and beyond.

Introduces major historical figures, approaches, and debates in anthropology (sociocultural, linguistic, archaeological), with a focus on understanding the discipline's diverse intellectual history, and its complex involvement with dominant social and intellectual currents in western society.

A workshop for graduates preparing dissertation proposals and writing grant applications. Each student prepares several drafts of a proposal, revising it at each stage in response to the criticisms of classmates and the instructor.

Analyzes the ways in which a spirit of national or ethic solidarity is mobilized and utilized.

An advanced introduction to the study of language from an anthropological point of view. No prior coursework in linguistics is expected, but the course is aimed at graduate students who will use what they learn in their own anthropologically-oriented research. Topics include an introduction to such basic concepts in linguistic anthropology as language in world-view, the nature of symbolic meaning, language and nationalism, universals and particulars in language, language in history and prehistory, the ethnography of speaking, the nature of everyday conversation, and the study of poetic language. The course is required for all Anthropology graduate students. It also counts toward the Theory requirement for the M.A. in Linguistics.

Surveys the classification and typological characteristics of Native American languages and the history of their study, with intensive work on one language by each student. Some linguistics background is helpful.

Analyzes particular aspects of the social use of language. Topics vary from year to year.

New course in the subject of anthropology.

For master's research, taken before a thesis director has been selected.

For master's thesis, taken under the supervision of a thesis director.

Directed Readings

Directed Readings

Research Practicum

For doctoral research, taken before a dissertation director has been selected.

For doctoral dissertation, taken under the supervision of a dissertation director.