Course Offering Fall/Winter 2026-27:The Professional Anthropologist is a capstone course for the Certificate and Minor in Advocacy and Public Engagement. It is a placement course designed to offer students essential skills and experience in implementing anthropological knowledge and training in a workplace. Students will work as an anthropologist with an approved host organization. Each student […]
Course Offering Fall/Winter 2026-27: Course Director- R. Coombe - rcoombe@yorku.ca What is the use of theory today? The purpose of this course is to explore and understand the possibilities of theory by acquiring a grounded and broad knowledge of different theoretical developments through the decades. In the first term our approach moves away from the […]
Not offering in Fall/Winter 2026-27: This course examines debates amongst anthropologists about the study of Islam and Muslim societies, and Muslim expressions of Islam according to anthropological themes including the body, space, ritual, knowledge, agency and representation. Students design and undertake a field-based research project.
Not offering in Fall/Winter 2026-27: This course explores how humans make and understand the world through their senses, the history of the senses in a variety of systems of thought and experience, and the meanings and uses of the senses in a range of contexts. Students critically examine and evaluate particular aspects of the senses […]
Not offering in Fall/Winter 2026-27: 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 2026-27: 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 2026-27: 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 2026-27: 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 2026-27: 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.
Course Offering Fall/Winter 2026-27: 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 cross-cultural […]