Blending the work of cultural anthropologists and historians in order to understand cultures and societies, Festivals and Ceremonies examines these events as metaphors, mini-dramas, and sets of relationships that define broader moral and social systems. Focusing on Polynesia, Melanesia and Micronesia, Cultures of the Pacific addresses historic and contemporary issues such as peopling, colonization, and independence movements and major anthropological issues such as the ways in which Pacific people gain their livelihood, organize ideas about family and kinship, and construct their social and spiritual worlds. Gauchos and Indians in Latin America compares and contrasts the lives of the gauchos, or cowboys, of the Argentine pampas with the lives of the Indians ensconced in the high Andes. The Indians maintained much of their culture well into the 20th century, whereas the gauchos of Argentina have disappeared into legend. This course examines why these different outcomes occurred and shows the diversity and cultural richness of Latin American rural society.
Students make a film or video tape.
Chinese Culture and Society explores, in select historical periods, key trends in philosophy, religion, politics and economics and their interrelationships in Chinese society. In exploring their cultural values we make explicit our own, and in this way set up a kind of discourse across cultures. Ideas about culture play an important, often critical, role in guiding contemporary historical, anthropological, sociological, and literary investigations. The History of the Concept of Culture examines the strengths and weaknesses of the most important theories of culture in order to understand what they contribute to the study of history, society, and human nature. The Colloquium in Anthropology and History is the culminating seminar for the major.