A critical probe of the origins, concepts, and practices of regional and international development in cultural perspective. Attention is paid to how forces of global capitalism intersect with local systems of knowledge and practice.

Examines why, when, and how gender inequality became an anthropological concern by tracing the development of feminist thought in a comparative ethnographic framework.

Explores cultural constructions of male and female in a range of societies and institutions. Also examines non-binary gender configurations.

The study of human origins in light of recent approaches surrounding human evolution. This course will examine some of these, particularly the process of speciation, with specific reference to the emergence of Homo. Fossils will be examined, but the emphasis will be on the interpretations of the process of hominisation through the thoughts and writings of major workers in the field.
Science credit

The study of human origins in light of recent approaches surrounding human evolution. New fossil finds present new approaches and theory. This course will examine some of these, particularly the process of speciation and hominisation with specific reference to the emergence of Homo. Labs permit contact with fossils in casts.
Science credit

The planet today is more urbanized than at any other moment in its history. What are the tools we need to examine urbanization in this contemporary moment? This course explores how urbanization has altered everyday life for individuals and communities across the globe. Students will trace urbanization as transformative of environmental conditions, economic activities, social relations, and political life. Students will thus engage with work on urbanization to examine how urban spaces and environments come to be differentiated along the lines of race, class, and gender. Not only does this course demonstrate how such fault lines play themselves out across contexts, but also provides the critical lenses necessary to tackle the most pressing issues related to urbanization today.

This course examines economic arrangements from an anthropological perspective. A key insight to be examined concerns the idea that by engaging in specific acts of production, people produce themselves as particular kinds of human beings. Topics covered include gifts and commodities, consumption, global capitalism and the importance of objects as cultural mediators in colonial and post-colonial encounters.

What limits exist or can be set to commoditized relations? To what extent can money be transformed into virtue, private goods into the public "Good"? We examine the anthropological literature on gift-giving, systems of exchange and value, and sacrifice. Students may conduct a short ethnographic project on money in our own society, an object at once obvious and mysterious.

What does it mean to get an education? What are the consequences of getting (or not getting) a “good education”? For whom? Who decides? Why does it matter? How are different kinds of education oriented toward different visions of the future? What might we learn about a particular cultural context if we explore education and learning as social processes and cultural products linked to specific cultural values, beliefs, and power dynamics? These are just some of the questions we will explore in this course. Overall, students will gain a familiarity with the anthropology of education through an exploration of ethnographic case studies from a variety of historical and cultural contexts.

Does schizophrenia exist all over the world? Does depression look different in China than it does in Canada? By examining how local understandings of mental illness come into contact with Western psychiatric models, this course considers the role of culture in the experience, expression, definition, and treatment of mental illness and questions the universality of Western psychiatric categories.

How are we to understand the relationship between psychological universals and diverse cultural and social forms in the constitution of human experience? Anthropology's dialogue with Freud; cultural construction and expression of emotions, personhood, and self.

Primates are an intensely social order of animals showing wide variation in group size, organization and structure. Using an evolutionary perspective, this course will focus on why primates form groups and how their relationships with different individuals are maintained, with reference to other orders of animals. The form and function of different social systems, mating systems, and behaviours will be examined.

This course engages with the diverse histories of First Nations societies in North America, from time immemorial, through over 14 thousand years of archaeology, to the period approaching European arrivals. We tack across the Arctic, Plains, Northwest Coast, Woodlands, and East Coast to chart the major cultural periods and societal advancements told by First Nations histories and the archaeological record. Along with foundational discussions of ancestral peoples, societal development, and human paleoecology, we also engage with core topical debates in North American archaeology, such as the ethics of ancient DNA, peopling processes, environmental change, response, and conservation, inequalities, decolonization, and progress in Indigenous archaeologies.

Intensive survey of a particular world region or current theme in archaeological research. Topic will change year to year.

The nature and logic of ritual. Religious practices and projects; the interface of religion, power, morality, and history in the contemporary world.

Can ethnographic research help us make sense of various political situations and conflicts around the world? In this course we will review different approaches to power and politics in classical and current anthropology. We will consider notions of the state, political agency and power, civil society, authoritarianism and democracy.

Anthropological approaches to the origin and function of religion, and the nature of symbolism, myth, ritual, sorcery, spirit possession, and cosmology, with primary reference to the religious worlds of small-scale societies.

This course considers dimensions of transnationalism as a mode of human sociality and site for cultural production. Topics covered include transnational labour migration and labour circuits, return migration, the transnational dissemination of electronic imagery, the emergence of transnational consumer publics, and the transnational movements of refugees, kinship networks, informal traders and religions.

A consideration of quantitative data and analytical goals, especially in archaeology and biological anthropology. Some elementary computer programming, and a review of program packages suitable for anthropological analyses will be included.
Science credit

An examination of the biological, demographic, ecological and socio-cultural determinants of human and non-human population structure and the interrelationships among them. Emphasis is given to constructing various demographic measures of mortality, fertility and immigration and their interpretation.
Science credit

Human adaptability refers to the human capacity to cope with a wide range of environmental conditions, including aspects of the physical environment like climate (extreme cold and heat), high altitude, geology, as well as aspects of the socio-cultural milieu, such as pathogens (disease), nutrition and malnutrition, migration, technology, and social change.
Science credit

Human adaptability refers to the human capacity to cope with a wide range of environmental conditions. Emphasis is placed on human growth and development in stressed and non-stressed environments. Case studies are used extensively.
Science credit

This seminar explores anthropological insights and historical/archeological debates emerging from Amazonia, a hotspot of social and biodiversity currently under grave threat. We will look at current trends in the region, the cultural logic behind deforestation and land-grabbing, and the cultural and intellectual production of indigenous, ribeirinho, and quilombola inhabitants of the region.

A "hands-on" Laboratory course which introduces students to analyzing human and nonhuman primate skeletal remains using a comparative framework. The course will cover the gross anatomy of the skeleton and dentition, as well as the composition and microstructure of bone and teeth. The evolutionary history and processes associated with observed differences in human and primate anatomy will be discussed.
Science credit

A "hands-on" laboratory course which introduces students to the methods of analyzing human skeletal remains. Topics and analytic methods include: (1) the recovery and treatment of skeletal remains from archaeological sites; (2) odontological description, including dental pathology; (3) osteometric description; (4) nonmetric trait description; (5) methods of estimating age at death and sex; (6) quantitative analysis of metric and nonmetric data; and (7) paleopathology.
Science credit

Language and ways of speaking are foundational to political cultures. This course covers the politics of language in the age of globalization, including multiculturalism and immigration, citizenship, race and ethnicity, post-colonialism, and indigeneity. Ethnographic examples are drawn from a variety of contexts, including Canadian official bilingualism and First Nations.

How do media work to circulate texts, images, and stories? Do media create unified publics? How is the communicative process of media culturally-distinct? This course examines how anthropologists have studied communication that occurs through traditional and new media. Ethnographic examples drawn from several contexts.
Same as MDSC53H3

This course reflects on the concept of Orientalism and how it informs the fields of Classical Studies and Anthropology. Topics to be discussed include the Orientalization of the past and the origin, role, and significance of ancient representations of the "Other" in contemporary discourses.
Same as CLAC68H3 and HISC68H3

Anthropology studies language and media in ways that show the impact of cultural context. This course introduces this approach and also considers the role of language and media with respect to intersecting themes: ritual, religion, gender, race/ethnicity, power, nationalism, and globalization. Class assignments deal with lecturers, readings, and students' examples.
Same as MDSC21H3

Social and symbolic aspects of the body, the life-cycle, the representation and popular explanation of illness, the logic of traditional healing systems, the culture of North American illness and biomedicine, mental illness, social roots of disease, innovations in health care delivery systems.