In this course, students explore how new discoveries in human origins research influence our current understandings of hominin evolution over the past 7 million years. In this lab-based course, students develop their practical skills in identifying, describing, and interpreting primate skeletal and dental anatomy as a foundation for understanding the hominin fossil record. Next, students evaluate and interpret new research on the biology, diversity, dispersals, and evolutionary relationships of fossil hominins. We examine how new research is progressing the field of paleoanthropology and attempting to clarify the origins of modern human biology and behaviour.

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.

Do we need prisons? Do all societies have them? Are there different forms of incarceration around the world? What are the alternatives? This course situates the current expansion of punitive imprisonment in an examination of the diverse ways societies around the world and through time have sought to address the breach of law and sanction intolerable behaviour. It assesses how the growth of prisons intersects with capitalism, racial terror, and social inequality. Its anthropological approach brings the experiences of incarcerated people and communities to the fore and engages local community responses from prison abolition groups.

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. In particular, this course examines how different forms of cooperation evolve when natural selection is often thought to maintain only selfish behaviours. The form and function of different social systems, mating systems, and behaviours will be examined.

We are living through the Anthropocene, a time in which humans have broadly transformed Earth’s composition and environmental processes. Did this period begin in 1950? Applying Indigenous and archaeological knowledges, we will contribute to debates concerning the deeper histories of a multi-sited, patchy Anthropocene. Past societies have lived through their own “Anthropocenes”, and their diverse stories are needed to shape contemporary environmental conservation initiatives. Critical plot points come from Indigenous Knowledge, archaeological materials, and paleoenvironmental evidence recorded in sediment cores. We will learn to integrate these lines of evidence through investigations of Indigenous environmental stewardship and lake sediment cores in Ontario.

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.

This course examines variability in biological growth and development in the genus Homo from both evolutionary and non-evolutionary perspectives. Emphasis is placed on exploring the adaptive and cultural contributors to variability in human growth patterns. Case studies from the Evolutionary Anthropology, Bioarchaeology, and Human Biology literature are used.

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 human skeletal anatomy and biology. The course will cover the gross anatomy of the skeleton and dentition, as well as basic histology and the composition and microstructure of bone and teeth.

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

This course will survey and assess the evolution of different animal sensory systems and their ecological underpinnings. The concept of sentience, and the question of when an animal can be said to be sentient, will be critically examined. The cognitive abilities of our extant primate relatives and other animals will be discussed to examine how human cognition is, or is not, unique. The evolutionary forces that may have selected for human cognitive abilities will be considered.

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 does journalism engage and feed into broader public debates? And how does journalism from around the world impact such debates differently? This course considers the topic of journalism and public sphere theory, and discusses the relationship between the press and politics, government, and democracy. The course takes a comparative lens to journalism, and will also draw on ethnographic readings and approaches.
Same as MDSC36H3/(MDSC53H3)

This course introduces students to anthropological perspectives on what is usually referred to as the environment. We will explore ethnographic descriptions of different ways that humans and non-humans live together. Topics include: how do hunting-based collectives see their relation to animals and the forest? What is environmental racism and what does it reveal about race and segregation? What is the relation between Indigeneity and conservation? What is the relation between the human mind and ecology?

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.

This course examines health and disease in the genus Homo from biological and population perspectives. Emphasis is placed on exploring the variability of populations in disease susceptibility, resistance, and outcomes. In addition, this course will introduce students to the basic concepts, principles and methods of medical anthropology and epidemiology.
Science credit

This course is an enquiry into the social construction of science and scientific expertise, with a particular focus on medicine and health. The interdisciplinary field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) opens up a very different perspective from what gets taught in biology classes about how medical knowledge is created, disseminated, becomes authoritative (or not), and is taken up by different groups of people. In our current era of increasing anti-science attitudes and “alternative facts,” this course will offer students an important new awareness of the politics of knowledge production.

This course explores the global cultural phenomenon of tourism. Using case studies and historical perspectives, we investigate the complex motivations and consequences of travel, the dimensions of tourism as development, the ways tourism commodifies daily life, the politics of tourism representation, and the intersection of travel, authenticity and modernity.