Explores the diversity of human cultural practices in terms of kinship, gender, religion, subsistence, and politics.
Language is emphasized as the means by which culture is transmitted from one generation to the next.
This course provides an ethnographic and historical survey of Latin American cultures from the eve of the Spanish Conquest to the present. Beginning with the region s Precolumbian civilizations, we will examine how colonial practices of land tenure and labor control transformed indigenous cultures. Contemporary patterns of race, ethnicity, gender and class will be examined in terms of these earlier antecedents and with an array of ethnographic examples. Finally, we will address the issues of development that confront Latin America in the contemporary global economy. This course will focus on the study of gender in anthropology, assessing how anthropologists have approached gender cross-culturally.