ANTH.F21

This course will introduce students to the discipline of anthropology and the study of human culture. Students will learn the major concepts, theoretical perspectives and historical trends in anthropology and they will apply these concepts to anthropological case studies that investigate complex conflicts over culture, identity, nation, economic inequality, race, ethnicity, and natural resources management. Finally, the course will introduce students to “ethnography” a methodology originally designed to observe and document the cultural practices of small-scale societies around the world, now used to study global problems through the local case studies. Through independent projects, students will identify cultural “field sites,” and practice “participant observation,” interviewing skills, methods of mapping kinship. This course will challenge students to use critical thinking skills to critique their own and others’ perspectives and biases, by presenting urgent, complex, contemporary problems, exploring the usefulness of limits of Anthropology to better understand these issues.

What makes humans human? One of the hallmarks of our species is our pattern of growth and development (i.e., ontogeny) and life history. In this seminar we will examine various aspects of the human ontogenetic and life history pattern, highly unusual among mammals, from a comparative evolutionary perspective. First, we will survey the fundamentals of life history theory, with an emphasis on primate life histories and socioecological pressures that influence them. Secondly, we will focus on unique aspects of human life history, including secondary altriciality of human infants, the inclusion of childhood and pubertal life stages in our pattern of growth and development, and the presence of a post-reproductive life span. Finally, we will examine fossil evidence from the hominin lineage used in reconstructing the evolution of the modern human ontogenetic pattern.