ANTH2170
ANTH2170 6.0 Sex, Gender and the Body: Cross-Cultural Approaches to the Body, Gender, Sexuality and Kinship
Are we defined by our biological setup? Are gender differences such as “male promiscuity” or “female monogamy” genetically hardwired? Is the “love match” found equally across cultures? Is the nuclear family the universal building block of society? How do we explain alternative sexualities?
This course introduces you to what anthropologists know about sex, love, gender and the body cross-culturally, and it critically examines prevalent explanations of what is (and what is not) supposed to be “natural” about these categories. What we consider “natural” in sex, gender and the body has profound implications for how we organize society – including social norms concerning sexuality, marriage, the family, reproduction, or health. Through the media, we are, at the same time, increasingly subject to ideological discourses on human biology, many of which make claims about how human societies ought to be organized and interpreted.
Human nature is most often understood as rooted in biology – represented in the human genome which has become the dominant metaphor used to justify widely divergent political positions. Arguments of “nature” are used to explain both male domination and also the extension of LGBT rights likewise. Anthropologists, however, take a cultural approach to understanding human nature. In this course, students will learn how socially constructed our ideas about nature actually are and explore the implications of these ideas for individuals and societies.
ANTH3200
ANTH3200 3.0 The Anthropology of International Health
In a globalized world, the need for studying and addressing issues of health in an international context is of very obvious importance. When viewed from an anthropological perspective, the social aspects of human suffering, care, and healing become visible as crucial components in both our theoretical conceptualization of human health and in practical efforts of maintaining and restoring it.
This course engages with the wide field of international health on the levels of personal experience, social construction, and institutional responses in different present-day societies. Bringing together approaches from both medical anthropology and public health, it enables students to develop a deeper understanding by investigating social - and, accordingly, medical - pluralism and diversity not as unwelcome inhibitor to advancing global health but as its ultimate prerequisite. Through engaging with theoretical debates as well as ethnographic data, it moreover challenges prevalent dichotomies of a modern, western medicine versus an allegedly non-modern and irrational other.
ANTH3280
ANTH3280 6.0 Anthropology and Psychiatry in Global Context
This course is concerned with furthering the dialogue and mutual engagement between Medical Anthropology and Cultural Psychiatry – in the context of localized communities, multicultural societies, and global networks alike. Applying a pluralized concept of psychiatry, the course will investigate prevalent practices in clinical psychiatry alongside other culturally and historically formulated strategies of coming to terms with locally defined states of mental disorder. It will explore a diversity of modes of experiencing, expressing, recognizing, interpreting, and addressing mental distress, providing participants with a solid theoretical and conceptual basis while, at the same time, exploring a large body of specific empirical case studies. In so doing, the course offers well-contextualized insights into a number of current issues including the pharmaceutical commodification of mental health, the medicalization of difference, personhood and notions of a 'normal' human condition, stigma and idioms of distress, migration and trauma, psychiatric epidemiology and global mental health policy, and symbolic forms of healing. Engaging with ongoing controversies and debates, it encourages new and critical views onto the practical realities and structural challenges of mental disorder and suffering in Canada and beyond.
ANTH4250
ANTH4250 6.0 Religious Movements in Global Perspective
Within a framework of the politics of identity, this course explores the tension between religious and national identities, the character and scope of transnational religious communities, and takes up fundamentalism as one response to developments in cosmopolitan modern societies. Over the course of the semester, we will examine varieties of contemporary religious movements, as well as a range of pertinent theoretical interpretations, beginning with classic accounts provided by Durkheim, Marx, and Weber that continue to inform contemporary scholarly understandings of the sociocultural dynamics of religious belief and group membership.
The course counterpoises varieties of religious movements that range along the continuum from secular to sacred, conceiving of secular political beliefs as a brand of religious ideology, and belief in the sacred as necessarily imbued with political force. Themes falling within the purview of this course include the phenomenon of secularism and secularization, the rise of religious militancy, violence, terrorism, millennialism and messianism, charismatic leadership, political manipulation, the sacralization of power, and forms of politico-religious identification from a globally comparative perspective. In an era in which an apparent rise in forms of religious identification and an increase in the intensity of religious conviction the world over are alleged by some commentators to be laying the grounds for unprecedented levels of conflict within and among societies, we take a wider historical view that addresses the trajectory and genealogy of sacred and secular forms of identification and their political dimensions. Lastly, we proceed on the basis of the axiomatic notion that the logics of modernity and post-modernity have together generated a widespread probing contemplation of the value of secularism and individualism, but also of the desirability of exclusionary forms of religious belonging, and that this requires thoughtful reflection on our behalf.
ANTH4350
ANTH4350 3.0 Perspectives on Visual Anthropology
Throughout the history of their discipline, anthropologists have used visual means - mostly in the form of photographs and film - to document the societies they are researching. Also, they have given attention to the production, the use, and the meanings attributed to images in different global settings.
This course will investigate anthropological engagement with the visual, covering early examples of visual media in anthropological theory and practice as well as the anthropological implications of social media and digital technology. It will address topics such as exoticism, othering, representation, and reflexivity through a series of concrete works in visual anthropology, and it will be organized as part lecture, part tutorial, and part student-guided screening and discussion of visual media. The objective of the course is to enable students to form their own well-informed and critical perspectives on the visual representation of societies both past and present.
ANTH4440
ANTH4440 3.0 Toward an Anthropology of Masculinities
“Be a man.” Young boys are often disciplined with this line in reaction to particular behaviours. Gender training starts at an early age in North American society, but is this the case in every society? What about masculinity more generally? Is masculinity a universal category, are there similar features or characteristics of masculinity across cultures, or is ‘the making of men’ entirely culturally and historically specific? Are the ‘norms’ of masculinities changing here in Canada and in other societies, and if so, how and why? Is masculinity necessarily opposed to femininity in its meaning and practice, or are there other ways of envisioning this relationship? Is this a relationship of universal inequality – is masculinity inherently tied to patriarchy or are there alternative formations which stress more egalitarian (or other) qualities?
Taking its lead from feminist anthropology, an anthropology of masculinities is dedicated to analyzing formations of and relationships between gender, power and culture in order to destabilize what is often taken for granted as a ‘natural’ category of being (which obfuscates a privileged positionality). This course will engage students in discussions of three primary themes: a) the complex relationships between masculinity, femininity, sex and sexuality in different cultural contexts, b) the links between the performance of masculinity in everyday life, political, institutional and economic structures, representations and practices, and c) the relationships of multiple masculinities (hegemonic, subordinate, resistant) located in local, national and transnational contexts.
