Courses

Fall 2023

Culture, Media, and Data (CD or SA)
Subject associations
ANT 347

Students study the agency of media and data in human cultural life with an emphasis on the production of culture and inequality. We excavate assumptions beneath representations of reality in images, track the circulation of mass media across diverse cultures, explore the datafication of personal experience, and engage with projects by indigenous internet activists and native filmmakers. We consider the globalization of media as an agent of difference. And we study the indigenization of data and media as cultural practices and as vertices in wide networks in which native peoples are advancing social agendas in their own terms.

Instructors
Jeffrey D. Himpele
Indigenous Worldings (CD or SA)
Subject associations
ANT 443 / LAS 433 / ENV 443 / AMS 444

This course focuses on Indigenous world-makings in the Anthropocene. We will reflect on how the current climate crisis is actively being produced through the destruction of Indigenous worlds. Two key anthropological questions guide our seminar: How do Indigenous groups differently understand world endings? How are Indigenous peoples resisting neocolonial and extractivist violence? We will work mainly with ethnographic writings, films, journalistic reports, and artworks, with a focus on Indigenous perspectives. Starting in Amazonia, we will develop a comparative perspective of Indigenous worldings across the Americas.

Instructors
Fabio O. Zuker
Co-seminar in Anthropology (Half-Term): We were never alone: Multispecies Worlds-Theory, Practice & Critique
Subject associations
ANT 503A

This course lays out core theoretical and methodological frameworks for engaging in anthropologically centered multispecies approaches. By foregrounding anthropological and indigenous perspectives in the discourse on multispecies, we center the ethnographic and ecological and decenter assumptions about separation, "civilization" and domination that run through academic mythos and perspectives on human-other entanglements. The Anthropocene as context brings its own suite of distinctive pressures and connecting these politics and eco-realities to the understanding generated by multispecies approaches is the final component of the course.

Instructors
Agustin Fuentes
Native American History (CD or HA)
Subject associations
HIS 271 / AMS 271

This course is designed to introduce students to the historical processes and issues that have shaped the lives if Indigenous Americans over the past five centuries. We will explore the ways that the diverse peoples who lived in the Americas constructed different kinds of societies and how their goals and political decisions shaped the lives of all those who would come to inhabit the North American continent. The course requires students to read and analyze historical documents and contemporary literature, and includes a visit to the National Museum of the American Indian in New York City.

Instructors
Elizabeth Ellis
Modern Brazilian History (HA)
Subject associations
HIS 333 / LAS 373 / AAS 335

This course examines the history of modern Brazil from the late colonial period to the present. Lectures, readings, and discussions challenge prevailing narratives about modernity to highlight instead the role played by indigenous and African descendants in shaping Brazilian society. Topics include the meanings of political citizenship; slavery and abolition; race relations; indigenous rights; uneven economic development and Brazil's experiences with authoritarianism and globalization.

Instructors
Isadora M. Mota
Indigenous Expressions: Scriptures and Ethnohistory (HA)
Subject associations
REL 359 / LAS 388

This class will concentrate on some of the earliest and most extensive religious and historical texts authored by Indigenous Peoples of the Americas, specifically by the Maya, Mexica (Aztec), Hopi, and Diné (Navajo). This set will allow for a critical and comparative study of Native rhetoric, mythic motifs, notions of space and time, morals, and engagements with non-Native peoples and Christianity.

Instructors
Garry Sparks
Introduction to Latin American Cultures (CD or LA)
Subject associations
SPA 222 / LAS 222 / LAO 222

An introduction to modern Latin American cultures and artistic and literary traditions through a wide spectrum of materials. We will discuss relevant issues in Latin American cultural, political, and social history, including the legacies of colonialism, the African diaspora, national fictions, gender and racial politics. Materials include short stories by Jorge Luis Borges and Samanta Schweblin; poems by Afro-Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén and Mexican poet Sara Uribe; paintings by Mexican muralists; films by Santiago Mitre and Claudia Llosa; writings by Indigenous activist Ailton Krenak.

Instructors
Gabriela Nouzeilles
Languages of the Americas (CD or EC)
Subject associations
SPA 233 / LIN 233 / LAS 233

This course explores the vast linguistic diversity of the Americas: native languages, pidgins, creoles, mixed languages, and other languages in North, Central, and South America, including the Caribbean. We will examine historical and current issues of multilingualism to understand the relationship between language, identity, and social mobility. We will discuss how languages played a central role in colonization and nation-building processes, and how language policies contribute to linguistic loss and revitalization. This course has no prerequisites and is intended for students interested in learning more about languages in the Americas.

Instructors
Dunia Catalina Méndez Vallejo
Caribbean Currents (LA)
Subject associations
SPA 316 / LAS 376

The Caribbean has been at the center of modernity and globalization since the 15th century, when European, African, and Asian migrants joined indigenous inhabitants in a violent crucible that produced new cultures, landscapes, rhythms, and political imaginations. This course begins with classic reflections on the Caribbean before centering on recent literature and art from Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic. Recent works address issues such as debt, migration, climate change, gender, music, and the afterlives of slavery in the region.

Instructors
Rachel L. Price
Topics in Latin American Cultural Studies: Invaders as Ancestors, Gods and Vampires (LA)
Subject associations
SPA 350 / LAS 349

Familiar and unfamiliar beings, under the guise of gods, ancestors or vampire-like creatures, dominate representations of conquest and invasion. Drawing on texts by indigenous and Spanish authors alike, we examine the reception of these mythic beings and their place in historical narratives of the conquest of Mexico, the American Southwest, and the Andes.

Instructors
Nicole D. Legnani