After participating in this course, students will have an appreciation of key theoretical and methodological issues in this anthropological subdiscipline, and will be prepared to enter upper-level courses in biological anthropology. This course is a required core course for all students who declare a major in anthropology beginning in fall, 2000. From Columbus s initial misnomer, to centuries of academic conjecture, and the homogenized images portrayed on the big screen, we will examine how such portrayals become virtually unrecognizable to many indigenous peoples. Seminar lectures, discussion groups, and readings will challenge students to understand how knowledge is created. The course is taught from the indigenous perspective.
All primates live in communities with other species.
They are thus always part of a borader ecological system, which includes other primates as well as other animal and plant species. In this course, we will explore the various interactions that primates have with these other species and the various roles that they play in the larger ecological community. We will also consider the broad ecological and evolutionary differences among Old World and New World primate communities and evaluate the circumstances that may have led to the differences that we observe in various primate communities around the world. We will briefly cover the Caribbean region, the Atlantic region of Central America, and the Pacific, Atlantic and Andean regions of South America. Presently it is divided between Irian Jaya, which is under Indonesian control, and the independent state of Papua New Guinea.