Considers Western economic theories and their relevance to non-Western societies. Includes a comparative analysis of different forms of production, consumption, and circulation.

This course is an introduction to legal anthropology for graduate students or advanced undergraduates. This course investigates law systems, legal argumentation, and people's interactions with these thoughts and forms. Rather than taking as given the hegemonic power that legal structures might hold over people's lives and thought, this course questions how people use, abuse, subvert, and leverage legal structures in which they find themselves.

In this seminar, we will examine how we can use our training in the social sciences and humanities to further the goals of a collaborating community, as well as to engage with different publics. The focus of this course will be on anthropology and its subdisciplines. Our discussions on how to engage with non-academic communities and publics will be applicable to a broad range of disciplines.

This seminar will explore the norms, embodied practices, material artifacts, and forms of reasoning which shape processes of care and abandonment across a range of contemporary cases. We will explore Foucault's writings on bio-power, how a focus on abandonment and abjection has altered the field of anthropology, and how care might relate to other concepts like kinship.

Considers how languages change as part of social systems and affected by historical processes. We will contrast language change through internal processes of drift and regular sound change with contact-induced language change involving multilingualism and code switching, language shift and lexical borrowing, the emergence of pidgin, creole, and intertwined languages, language endangerment, and computational tools for historical linguistics.

This course explores the theoretical, practical, and ethical foundations of language documentation and linguistic fieldwork, forms of research that can hardly be separated in this era of global language loss.

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.

This course surveys ethnographic and linguistic literature on literacy, focusing on the social meanings of speaking vs. writing (and hearing vs. reading) as opposed communicative practices, looking especially at traditionally oral societies.

Discourse analysis looks at the patterns in language and language-use above the level of sentence grammar and seeks to apply the micro-level analysis of communicative interactions to understanding the macro-level processes of social and cultural reproduction. Topics include: symbolic interactionism, conversation analysis, critical discourse analysis, interactional sociolinguistics, discourse prosody, and digital analysis techniques.