SOAN 260 - Conflicts in Eurasia: Globalization, New States, and Soviet Legacies

FDR: SS4
Credits: 3
Planned Offering: Not offered in 2013-2014

In this course, students learn how to apply anthropology and a wide range of other disciplinary techniques to understand and attempt to solve post-socialist problems. Students do independent research on issues relevant to their main areas of course work. We explore how ethnographic fieldwork and cultural theory provide key information about how people in Eurasia relate to daily conflicts through common past socialist experiences and new interactions with globalization, transnational movements, and the world market. Throughout the term, we discuss differences and similarities, advantages and disadvantages of various disciplinary approaches to key conflicts in the region. Topics include crime, the emerging marketplace, poverty, health, gender, and ethnic conflict. We study Eurasia via issues rather than geography, and we focus intensely on the transnational effects of wars in Chechnya and Afghanistan. The class reads material from anthropology and other disciplines and watches several documentaries. Goluboff.