Not offering in Fall/Winter 2025-26: This course examines the idea of "development" in the context of European state formation, colonialism and globalization. It examines development in Indonesia or India, for example, through the lens of Michel Foucault's concepts of "biopower" and "governmentality" with an eye to explaining the "development of underdevelopment." Governmentality refers to "governmental […]
Not offering in Fall/Winter 2025-26: This course focuses on how nation states define majorities and minorities, and how such definitions are contested by populations striving for cultural, political and human rights. Questions include: How do people get classified as indigenous or aboriginal? How has globalization enhanced awareness of human rights?
Not offering in Fall/Winter 2025-26: The world of the 21st century is so often thought about, if not arranged, in terms of things called “nations”. And this happens in countless different ways and different levels: the lofty rhetoric of politicians “addressing the nation”, the daily map showing us a “national” weather forecast, the demand that […]
Not offering in Fall/Winter 2025-26: This course will examine the place of organized political violence in the making of the most recent widespread, large-scale dominant social system: "modernity". During its making there has been a massive and unprecedented proliferation of organized violence within and between different groups, peoples, and states. But, even as this pattern […]
Not offering in Fall/Winter 2025-26: This course focuses on the anthropology of performance. In this course, we will analyze performance theory, methods, and ethnographic examples of performance in various geographic locations and cultural situations. In this course, we will respond to the question of how people perform their worlds.
Not offering in Fall/Winter 2025-26: This course explores health, illness and medical systems from the viewpoint of social anthropology. It emphasizes medicine and health as culturally significant systems of knowledge and practice. The ways that medical anthropologists apply their knowledge and methods to improve health and social inequalities is a central theme. Using critical and […]
Course Offering Fall 2025: Religion has long been a topic of interest to anthropologists, preoccupying the earliest anthropological theories of culture and society. Today, the topic of religion is seeing growing attention across the world. As religion becomes variously encountered with fascination and devotion by some, or fear and hostility by others, questions about the […]
Not offering in Fall/Winter 2025-26: This course is concerned with furthering the dialogue and mutual engagement between Medical Anthropology and Cultural Psychiatry - in the context of localized communities, multicultural societies, and global networks alike. Applying a pluralized concept of psychiatry, the course will investigate prevalent practices in clinical psychiatry alongside other culturally and historically […]
Not offering in Fall/Winter 2025-26: The Anthropology of Outer Space offers an anthropological voyage of exploration to other worlds, through human culture, popular imagination, science, and technology. Outer space is full of human paradoxes. Human beings have so far physically travelled only as far as our Moon, and the most distant human artifact, the interstellar […]
Course Director (Fall/Winter 2025-26): M. MacDonald - maggie@yorku.ca This course examines a variety of theoretical and ethnographic approaches to the intersectionality of womanism, class, sexuality, and race that developed out of and/or intensified by settler, colonial, scientific, political, religious, and (trans)national developments. We will begin with the nature vs culture debate, questioning and critically assessing […]