SOAN 291 - Special Topics in Anthropology

Planned Offering: Offered when interest is expressed and departmental resources permit.
Credits: 3

Spring 2017, SOAN 291-02: Domains of The Dead: Anthropologies of Cemeteries (4). This course teaches students how to think anthropologically about cemeteries, querying them in theory-grounded, systematic, testable ways for information about past and current people’s social relations, cultural dispositions, values, beliefs, and aspirations. Assigned readings expose students to key theoretical texts from the anthropology of death and mourning as well as to historical surveys of cemeteries as they vary throughout the United States. Of special interest in the course is the recently documented proliferation of idiosyncratic forms of commemoration diverging considerably from previous centuries of more somber practice. Examples of this florescence and of its more restrained predecessors abound in the Valley of Virginia, and students investigate first-hand a range of cemeteries in Rockbridge, Augusta, and Rockingham Counties. Students record decorative motifs and epitaphs on gravestones as well as objects left on gravesites and work to read them as evidence of cultural expression and change. (SS4) Bell.

Winter 2017, SOAN 291A-01: Land in O’odham Cultural, Economic, and Historical Perspectives (3). Additional-cost field trip to O’odham reservations in Arizona required. This class focuses on the cultural, economic, and historical dimensions of the O’odham (Papago and Pima) Indians’ ties to their lands. The seminar first examines how pre-reservation O’odham expressed these ties in their oral traditions and rituals. Next, students place O’odham economics in historical perspective paying particular note to the major 19th- and 20th-century forces that eroded the O’odham’s original land base and control over their economic practices. The class also considers attempts of O’odham peoples to solve present-day economic problems in ways that are compatible with their cultural heritage. Markowitz.

Winter 2017, SOAN 291B-01: Consumer Cultures (3). “It is extraordinary to discover that no one knows why people want goods,” or so observed a famous pair of authors - one an anthropologist, the other an economist - in 1979. What, since then, have anthropology and interrelated disciplines learned about consumer desire?  This course considers human interaction with the material world in a variety of cultures, periods, and scales. From socio-cultural and political perspectives, what do consumers hope to accomplish by buying, patronizing, or using products like Barbies, bottled water, French fries, blue jeans, tattoos, and piercings? How does consumerism facilitate claims to social connection, personal identity, and meaning? And how do potentially constructive roles of buying “stuff” relate to debt, hoarding, and environmental overexploitation? Bell.