ANTH 290-02 (Fall) - Anthropology of the Borderlands

It is a moment of social unease. You find yourself in a course on a subject you know nothing about. Fear not, anthropology is the study of humans, and we all know something about them. We will learn how ANTHROPOLOGISTS, a type of writer and cultural theorist, thinks about humans and their societies as they relate to and interact with borders and borderlands. We will begin by examining the theoretical underpinnings of borders and then move into case studies from around the world and consider how the intersections of race, class, gender, and socio-economic status impacts human experiences with borderlands. Understanding the perspectives that inform the discipline will equip you with a toolkit for making sense of social organization, and the political, economic, and cultural debates that comprise our contemporary milieu. This approach requires that we learn to understand the world from another’s vantage

3 credits