Course Listings

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Introduction to the comparative study of culture, exploring different types of social organization, their evolutionary significance, and their economic and political correlates.

Emergence of human species through the process of organic evolution, emphasizing genetics, the fossil record, and comparison with our nearestliving relatives. Carries science credit.

The purpose of this course is to explain a theory of human behavior and culture derived from evolutionary theory, and how such a theory can be evaluated. The course also assesses the extent to which the theory actually has been evaluated to date, and reviews some of the controversy surrounding this approach.

This course provides an overview of current theory and research in human population biology, focusing on the influence of ecological and social factors on various aspects of human biology (e.g. metabolism, growth, nutritional status, disease patterns). The adaptation concept is presented, discussed, and critiqued; then the way in which adaptation to different ecological stressors (e.g. temperature, solar radiation, high altitude, diet/nutrition) promotes human biological diversity is examined. Carries science credit.

Understanding warfare in human societies is a central problem of anthropological analysis. This course focuses on the cultural and social dimensions of violent conflict, including the language and cultural symbolism used to legitimate violent conflicts, and the political institutions producing and organizing such conflicts. Case studies to be used are wide-ranging, including traditional warfare in pre-industrial societies, Homer's Trojan War, contemporary civil wars (e.g., former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Darfur), the Vietnam War, etc. The instructor's own research on civil wars and military insurgencies in West Africa is incorporated into the course. The aim of the course is to consider a variety of cross-cultural cases - as well as different aspects of war, e.g., child soldiers, rape, war crimes, genocide, terrorism, violence against civilians, etc. -- as an empirical foundation for developing some general anthropological principles about the nature of war and violent conflict in human affairs.

Most human societies have some form of religion and all have moral principles. Often religion and morality are closely connected. Why to human societies always have moral rules and why to they usually call on religion to justify these rules? In recent years a number of anthropologists, psychologists, and biologists have begun suggesting answers to these questions in terms of human evolution. This course explores several of these evolutionary explanations of the foundation of morality and religion.

This course provides a broad overview of forensic anthropology - an applied subfield of biological anthropology. Forensic anthropology focuses traditional skeletal biology on problems of medicolegal significance, primarily in determining cause of death and personal identity from human remains. In this course we discuss the full range of issues associated with human skeletal identification, from trauma analysis to the identification of individuals in mass disasters. These problems serve as a model for understanding the broader aspects of applied anthropology. Carries science credit.