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.

This course explores variation in reproductive lives from a biocultural and evolutionary perspective. Focusing on social-ecological, physiological, and biobehavioral variation in processes such as puberty, pregnancy, birth, lactation, menopause, and aging. The course also engages students in critical evaluation of nuanced biocultural research on sex and gender in context, women’s and LGBTQ+ health.

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.

Autism is simultaneously celebrated by autists as a core identity and pathologized in public and clinical discourses as a disease to be cured. This course spans anthropology of autism and critical autism studies, examining autism as both lived experience and rubric for a complex set of biosocial and cultural phenomena. Engaging with academic and popular texts and multi-media sources, we explore how knowledge of autism is socially produced in historical, political and cultural contexts; autobiographies and ethnographies of autistic lives; histories of autistic organising; and autism and intersectionality, attending particularly to race and gender.

Introduces anthropological perspectives on the life course and aging, with particular attention to health challenges and care needs, the social and cultural arrangements around these, and the impacts of population aging, global migration, technological change and other broad scale transformations. Emphasizes questions, concepts, and insights from sociocultural medical anthropology. Readings present ethnographic research based in many different parts of the world. Course assignments include an ethnographic interview and analysis; students will be provided guidance on all stages of designing and carrying out this project.

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.

What can Anthropology, as both an academic discipline and a way of knowing, bring to our understanding of the Middle East, a region deeply entangled in global geopolitics? What kinds of questions have social and cultural anthropologists asked when faced with the diversity of a region that stretches from North Africa to West Asia? This course explores the cultural, historical, and political complexity of the region from an ethnographic perspective, while also attending critically to the way “The Middle East” has been constructed in the first place. Rather than attempting an overview of the entire region, it focuses on themes that have compelled anthropological research in the area in recent decades, including but not limited to war, migration, labour, “terrorism”, gender, racialization, and religion. We will draw from key academic texts in conversation with other genres of knowledge production including film, journalism, and literature. No previous familiarity with the region is required.

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.

We focus on the relationship between the health and well-being of Indigenous people/s and Canadian settler colonialism, drawing on scholarship from medical anthropology, history, Indigenous studies and settler colonial studies. The course is centrally concerned with how Indigenous social and political actors have engaged with health, illness, social suffering and healing throughout the 20th century, and informed by anthropological and historical understandings of healthcare systems as permeated by dynamic relations of power.

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 considers racial capitalism from an anthropological perspective through ethnographies and films which examine the role race, colonialism and white supremacy play in shaping and enabling contemporary forms of capitalist accumulation by dispossession in everyday life. Considering dispossession broadly, we will explore not only processes that dispossess people of property and land, but also of rights, modes of belonging, health, citizenship and life. We will also look at the ways people are organizing to reclaim what they have been dispossessed of or denied, from anti-eviction movements and abolitionist organizing to struggles for reproductive rights, food sovereignty and climate justice.

Black populations in the African Diaspora defy simple characterizations. In this course, we will examine the experiences of Black people through an ethnographic exploration of their lives. The close analysis of ethnographic monographs and articles will illuminate the ways in which race, gender, ethnicity, class, sexuality, ability, nationality, and other factors, shape the everyday for Black people in different cultural contexts. An additional focus will be a consideration of the experiences of Black anthropologists as ethnographers and scholars who are broadening anthropological discourses.

This course provides students with a partnered field experience by conducting ethnographic research on visitor tours in partner organizations in Toronto with faculty’s supervision. The project will be developed in collaboration with the partner organizations to offer students partnership-based experiential learning opportunities. Students will produce detailed ethnographic descriptions of tourist experiences, analyze how media representations and tourism infrastructure shape diverse visitor experiences, explore how existing infrastructure can be potentially repurposed for a decolonial or inclusive tour, and develop skills to communicate their findings to the broader audience.

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.

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 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 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.