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Examination and interpretation of faunal material from archaeological sites as evidence for culture.

This course offers a comparative survey of archaeological approaches to ritual practice as it relates to identity politics, personhood, and the negotiation of power relations in past societies. An important goal of the seminar is to introduce students to social theories on the inherent materiality of ritual performance, whether orchestrated in everyday practice or in elaborate religious and political spectacles.

Current research in Palaeolithic Archaeology reflecting emerging issues.

How social complexity is manifested in the archaeological record. Origins and evolution of prehistoric complex societies, from small-scale chiefdoms to large-scale states.

How ideas about language fit into the overall views of humankind as expressed by selected anthropologists, linguists, sociologists, and philosophers.

The history and present of western concepts and images about the ‘Other’, in anthropological and other scholarship and in popular culture.

The focus of this course is on the science of primate conservation biology in an anthropological context. Topics will include primate biodiversity and biogeography, human impacts, and conservation strategies/policies. The effects of cultural and political considerations on primate conservation will also be discussed.

Through fossil labs and lectures, we look back over 30 to 5 million years ago when apes roamed from Spain to China and Germany to Southern Africa. The fossil record of these apes, our ancestors, reveals how we evolved our large brains, dexterous hands, extended growth period and incredible intelligence. We encounter many surprises along the way, such as apes living with pandas in Hungary, animals with a mix of monkey, ape and pig traits and apes the size of polar bears. Of the more than 100 species of fossil apes known, only one gave rise to us.

Advanced exploration of the life histories of past populations, through the application of palaeodietary analyses, palaeopathology and other appropriate research methods.

A detailed review of the classic and recently emerging literature on the anthropology of children, childhood, and childcare. Focus is on theories for evolution of human parenting adaptations, challenges in research methodology and implications for contemporary research, practice and policy in the area of care and nutrition of infants and children.

This course will provide an overview of the ecology and social behavior of extant nonhuman primates. Topics will include socioecology, conservation biology, biogeography, aggression and affiliation, community ecology, communication, and socio-sexual behavior. There will also be extensive discussions of methods used in collecting data on primates in the field.

Virtual anthropology is a set of new methods that allow us to digitize objects, analyze, reconstruct and share them digitally, and bring them back into the real world. After a theoretical introduction, students will use surface scanners, photogrammetric software and 3D printers to digitize and study archaeological and anthropological specimens.

Taught by an advanced PhD student or postdoctoral fellow, and based on his or her doctoral research and area of expertise, this course presents a unique opportunity to explore intensively a particular Evolutionary Anthropology topic in-depth. Topics vary from year to year.

Beginning with anthropology's early work on kinship, and ending with recent analyses of sex work and the globalization of ideologies of romantic love and companionate marriage, this course will investigate how emotional and sexual relationships are produced, used, conceptualized, and experienced both within particular societies and transnationally.

As of 2007, for the first time in human history, more than half the world’s peoples lived in cities. It is estimated that by 2030 over 60% will be urban-dwellers. This demographic shift suggests that for many (if not most) people, their primary encounter with “nature” will be urban based. This course explores the idea of “urban-nature” by 1) focusing on the ways in which various theorists have challenged traditional ways of viewing both “the city” and “nature” and 2) encouraging students to develop their own critical perspectives through ethnographic engagements with the city of Toronto.

This course explores the literature and concerns of anthropologists conducting ethnographic research in the greater Middle East and North Africa (MENA). It is designed for students with a background in social and cultural anthropology who wish to become familiar with the social and religious complexity of the MENA region, and the anthropological questions it has compelled. Islam has long been the area's principal social and historical force and thus provides the backdrop for much, but not all, of the ethnography considered in the course. Moreover, Muslim majority MENA countries exhibit considerable social and sectarian diversity. Readings and lectures attend to differences as well as resemblances, while considering issues such as gender roles, kinship, marriage, local level practices, medicine, secularism, 'public Islam,' nationalism, and the persistent problem of orientalism.

This course explores, first, how and where forms of desire and sexual practice have become sites of anthropological inquiry and exemplars of particular cultural logics. Tracing, then, the transnational turn in the anthropology of sexuality, the course engages important debates about culture, locality, and globalization. By focusing on the transnational movement of desires, practices, and pleasures through activisms, mass media, and tourism, the course asks how sex is global and how globalization is thoroughly sexed. Course material will stress, but not be limited to, forms of same-sex or otherwise queer sexualities.

The course addresses the cultural and social significance of material culture in specific cultural settings, and the role that artifacts have played in the history of anthropological thought from early typological displays to the most recent developments of material culture studies.

This course draws on anthropological and historical literatures to explore the relationship between the health of Indigenous people and Canadian settler-colonialism. In conceptualising this relationship, we focus on critical analysis of the role of biomedical health-care systems in settler-colonial governmentality, and how history is understood in discourses on Indigenous health.

This course introduces perspectives which extend anthropological inquiry beyond the solely human realm. Building on an acknowledgement of the fundamental interconnectedness of humans and other life forms, it explores the agencies of other-than-humans, including nonhuman animals, land and seascapes, plants, bacteria, “contaminants,” and others. The course involves field-site visits and fieldwork projects in Toronto (GTA region) and engages with ethnographic methodologies best suited to investigations of inter-species, inter-life form relationships.

This fourth-year seminar examines how female gender shapes health and illness. Using case studies of sexual health, fertility and its management, substance use/abuse, mental health, and occupational/labor health risks, the course investigates the material, political, and socio-cultural factors that can put women at risk for a range of illness conditions.

This course examines how anthropologists have studied the way that people hope, imagine, love, and despise. Ethnography of the intimate realms of affect raises important questions about knowledge production and methodology as well as offering insight into how people come to act upon the world and what the human consequences of such action are. The course will also examine how the intimate is socially produced and harnessed in the service of politics and culture. Topics will include grief and its lack; dreams and activism; love and social change; memory and imperialism; sexuality and care; and violence and hope.

This course examines how what we know as Japan and its culture has been constructed through global interactions. Topics include gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, social and family life, work and leisure, and Japanese identity amid changing global power relations.

Students carry out original ethnographic research projects on some aspect of life in the University of Toronto: its students, staff and faculty; its hierarchies and habits; and the everyday practices in classrooms, labs, dining halls, offices, clubs, and residence corridors. Class time is used for collective brainstorming, feedback and analysis.

This course examines HIV/AIDS globally and ethnographically focusing on how gendered political economies create HIV vulnerability; the experiences of sexual minorities; how religious institutions shape practices of social care and exclusion; and anthropological critiques of HIV awareness campaigns and counseling as sites of governmentality.

Students read several full-length ethnographies, both classical and contemporary, and debate what makes for sound ethnographic research and writing, as well as what ethnography is and "should" be as a genre of writing and representation.

This seminar class examines 'the body' as a historically and culturally contingent category, the material site and means of practice, and a foundation point for identity and self-fashioning. We consider the relevance of cultural meanings to biomedical practices, the centrality of the body to consumer techno-society, and the body’s role as a locus of experience, political inscription, and struggle.

This course addresses reading ethnography as a tool to understand compressed and complex modernity such as Korean societies, both in and outside of the Korean peninsula. In particular, this course aims to develop students’ critical thinking on class, ethnicity, gender, family, and migration in Korea and diasporic societies of Koreans in Canada, China, Japan, and US.

Unique opportunity to explore a particular anthropological topic in-depth. Topics vary from year to year.

Unique opportunity to explore in-depth a particular topic in Evolutionary Anthropology. Topics vary from year to year.