Christine M Malcom

Adolescents feature prominently as saviors and remakes of the world in culture stories and myths from around the globe, as well as in contemporary young adult fantasy. Anthropologically, adolescents are potentially powerful agents of change because they are imperfectly socialized and not yet tied to conservative adult roles and norms. In this course students will develop their skills in writing at the college level as well as critical reading and analysis of Young Adult Fantasy novels and scholarly works on the genre and the phenomenon of adolescence. Students will read three novels in totals by authors such as Terry Pratchett, Diana Wynne Jones, Nnedi Okorafor, and Garth Nix. They will also read a small number of scholarly work by anthropologists and scholars in the genre of Young Adult Literature as a point of deeper entry into a body of literature that is often dismissed as simplistic, and a phase of the life cycle that is underscrutinized. Through scaffolding of short writing assignments, including peer review, students will produce three essays, resulting in approximately 15?20 pages, total, of formal, revisable writing.

Identity is a contested social field where internal notions war with external labels. In this class, we examine identity from a four-field anthropological perspective We explore the social nature of the human species, examine how the performance of language unites individuals and distinguishes groups, and discuss the problematic notion of bounded cultures and their reification in classic and contemporary ethnography and in archaeological writings.

The scientific story of what a human is and how we ?became? human covers 6 million years of biological and cultural evolution. In this course, we look to the fossil record and living nonhuman primates to examine selective forces that influenced the human biological form as well as technology/culture as a factor that complicates the study of humans from a biological perspective. Topics include the origins of language, art, self expression, and spirituality.

In this course, we examine health and disease in cultural context. This requires challenging narrow Western views of health and the claim that biomedicine is objective and culture free. Topics include the overlapping, but non-identical, concepts of disease, illness, and sickness; the mind-body divide (or lack thereof); a historical overview of human health and cultural change; culture-specific medical practices, practitioners, and syncretism; population-specific health issues and health disparities; medicine under global, late-stage capitalism; and using anthropological knowledge to solve contemporary/emerging health problems. Readings vary but typically include historical works in the discipline by James Roney, George Foster, and Arthur Kleinman, as well as contemporary critical medical anthropology scholars, such as Paul Farmer, Marion Nestle, Marcia Inhorn, and Richard Sapolsky. We will approach these texts as a community, and each class meeting will foreground both small group and class-wide discussion grounded in readings. Students will complete weekly open-note quizzes and two open-note exams. In addition, students will give one presentation and complete three writing assignments.

Ritual treatment of the dead is both unique to humans and a human universal. This course is a global exploration of mortuary archaeology, extending from evidence through the first ritual burials (perhaps 300,000 years ago or more), through historic slave cemeteries. Using a biocultural approach, we will examine the information that archaeologists and bioarchaeologists glean from human remains, grave and cemetery architecture, and portable material culture, including ceramics, textiles, metalwork, and so on.