Prerequisite: ANTH 113 or permission of instructor. This counts as an upper-level elective for the major. By examining religion in action, we will arrive at a vivid sense of how religion is used in power struggles, helps people adapt to changed circumstances, and preserves some local control over peoples' understandings of themselves and their relations to the world in which they live. Belief systems and concepts of the sacred have been, and continue to be, at the core of many of these efforts to deny or ameliorate processes of imperial domination. We will review how these viewpoints and the varied definitions of religion they imply converge within and inform the study of indigenous resistance to colonialism. These range from perspectives that stress the adaptive functions of belief systems to those that examine how concepts of the sacred may figure in political contests or shape behavior through the power of their symbols. Given the centrality of religion to such self-understanding, it is no surprise that anthropologists have long been interested in the topic and have adopted a variety of approaches to its study. Offered every fall.įor most people in most times and most places, religion has been central to defining who they are and how they are related to other humans and supernatural entities. Prerequisite: ANTH 112, 113 or permission of the instructor. This course counts as an elective for both the anthropology major and minor. Special attention will be paid to labor practices and social identities that are intricately tied to the way humans consume and the material objects they acquire. This class will address a wide variety of processes involved in the creation, exchange and consumption of commodities in a global historical context. Throughout the course we will examine how consumption practices shape the modern world by emphasizing its impact on individual behaviors, the environment, the economy and public policy. Where do the resources come from to sustain such growth, and for whom? What are the conditions that facilitated this current social, political and economic climate? This course is an anthropological approach to the study of consumption and the processes that entangle people and objects together on a global scale. Consumer spending remains resilient, accounting for the bulk of economic activity in the world’s largest economies. In a world of rapidly changing technologies, consumers and their commodities are now central to economic growth in most parts of the world. Prerequisite: open to first-year and sophomore students only. This course does not count toward the anthropology major but will count toward minor. This course can be paired with another anthropology course to fulfill a social science distribution requirement. In the process, we will explore scientific literacy, pseudoscientific belief, anthropology's response to such pseudoscience, and its effects on our culture. This course will examine how we know about the world around us and what passes for knowledge of a particular type. Concurrently, the state of Ohio has seen a rise in Bigfoot sightings that makes us the fifth "squatchiest" state in the nation. We live in a country where some 40 percent of the population does not accept the theory of human evolution.
But when entertainment themes pose as scientific knowledge, they can be dangerous because they provide false and misleading explanations of the world around us. Indeed, these have now become common entertainment themes in popular culture.
Our television "science" and "history" channels, as well as our bookstore shelves, are riddled with works claiming the discovery of lost Atlantis, attributing monuments to the lost tribe of Israel, explaining cultural developments as the result of contact with aliens, and loosely documenting routine sightings of Yetis, Bigfoots, Skinwalkers and Swamp Apes.
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