The following courses are offered within the anthropology department. Please see the BU Bulletin for the most up-to-date information regarding course offerings, meeting times, and locations.
CAS AN 560 4 credits.
Explores the various ways that nation-states, cultural communities, and individuals negotiate the ethics and use of biomedical technologies, old and new. Asks what kinds of "moral registers," including religious traditions, state histories, political ideologies, and forms of market engagement shape when and why certain biotechnological developments are denounced as ethical threats or embraced as empowering forms of progress. Effective Fall 2021, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Ethical Reasoning, The Individual in Community.
CAS AN 562 4 credits.
BU Hub Learn More Philosophical Inquiry and Life's Meanings Scientific Inquiry II Writing-Intensive Course
Undergraduate Prerequisites: First-Year Writing Seminar (WR 120 or equivalent) - Did humans evolve to have war' Is war in human nature' We explore the foundations of war through reviewing studies of non-human animals and hunter- gatherers. Focus is on understanding how and why war evolved. Effective Fall 2022, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Writing-Intensive Course, Philosophical Inquiry and Life's Meanings, Scientific Inquiry II.
CAS AN 563 4 credits.
BU Hub Learn More Global Citizenship and Intercultural Literacy Social Inquiry II
Undergraduate Prerequisites: junior or senior standing; or consent of instructor. - Explores the role of religion, religious movements, and secularism in modern politics, citizenship, gender politics, and public life. Case studies draw from Muslim-majority lands, Africa and Latin America, East-Southeast Asia, and the modern West. Effective Spring 2021, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Global Citizenship and Intercultural Literacy, Social Inquiry II.
CAS AN 565 4 credits.
BU Hub Learn More Creativity/Innovation Digital/Multimedia Expression Historical Consciousness
Undergraduate Prerequisites: junior standing. - Memorials and the spaces around them are charged zones, time portals where past and present co-exist. In this course we focus on the development of memorial culture in America, along with a comparative examination of the worlds of ancient Greece and Rome. The distance afforded by stepping outside our own time and place provides perspectives on aspects of form and message, as well as on how the meanings of memorial can change. Effective Spring 2021, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Digital/Multimedia Expression, Historical Consciousness, Creativity/Innovation.
CAS AN 568 4 credits.
BU Hub Learn More Global Citizenship and Intercultural Literacy Research and Information Literacy Social Inquiry II
Historical overview of ritual behavior, the role of symbolism in the study of culture, and the narrative quality of worldview and belief. Emphasis on verbal performance and public display events in specific cultural contexts. Effective Spring 2024, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Global Citizenship and Intercultural Literacy, Social Inquiry II, Research and Information Literacy.
CAS AN 571 4 credits.
BU Hub Learn More Creativity/Innovation Global Citizenship and Intercultural Literacy Social Inquiry II
Advanced seminar on the study of emotion as culturally and historically specific experience, cognition and symbolic system. Focus on specific emotions including shame, anger, melancholy, hope, hate and love. Special attention to affect and the politics of emotion. Effective Fall 2021, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Global Citizenship and Intercultural Literacy, Social Inquiry II, Creativity/Innovation.
CAS AN 573 4 credits.
BU Hub Learn More Global Citizenship and Intercultural Literacy Social Inquiry II Writing-Intensive Course
Undergraduate Prerequisites: junior or senior standing or consent of instructor; First Year Writing Seminar (e.g., WR100 or WR120). - Reading of major ethnographies and modern histories as a basis for examining changing Taiwanese and Chinese culture and society. Attention to ethnography as a genre, as well as to the dramatic changes of the past century. (Counts towards the East Asian Studies minor.) Effective Fall 2020, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Writing-Intensive Course, Global Citizenship and Intercultural Literacy, Social Inquiry II.
CAS AN 575 4 credits.
BU Hub Learn More Global Citizenship and Intercultural Literacy Historical Consciousness Writing-Intensive Course
Undergraduate Prerequisites: First Year Writing Seminar (e.g., WR 100 or WR 120). - Using archaeology to understand the cosmopolitan world of the ancient Mediterranean and Middle East, from Alexander through the Romans. We travel to cities and sanctuaries, estates and farmsteads, to learn how people at all levels of society displayed their affiliations, ideals, and personas. Through the prism of personal identity we track cultural capital: what that meant, how it changed, and how people used it in order to assert who they were and how they mattered. Effective Fall 2021, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Writing-Intensive Course, Global Citizenship and Intercultural Literacy, Historical Consciousness.
CAS AN 585 4 credits.
Explores enduring anthropological topics -- such as gender, sexuality, kinship, social and political organization, religion, creative expression, ecology, etc. -- through classic and contemporary Africanist ethnography. Considers shifts in theory, method, and narrative style as evidenced through exemplary Africanist ethnographic texts.
CAS AN 588 4 credits.
BU Hub Learn More Quantitative Reasoning II Scientific Inquiry II Teamwork/Collaboration
Undergraduate Prerequisites: (CASAN102 OR CASBI107 OR CASBI108 OR CASAR101) or consent of instructor. - This seminar teaches students project design and statistics using R and Rstudio. Students will become competent in coding, version control, data reports and commenting code, and implement both basic and advanced statistics to be used in student research projects. Effective Fall 2021, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Quantitative Reasoning II, Scientific Inquiry II, Teamwork/Collaboration.
CAS AN 589 4 credits.
Undergraduate Prerequisites: junior or senior standing or consent of instructor. - Explores the uncomfortable relationship between anthropology and international development. Examines anthropology's sustained and multidimensional critiques of the development enterprise; also considers whether, amidst these critiques, anthropology can imagine an alternative discourse and practice of betterment for historically disenfranchised peoples.
CAS AN 590 4 credits.
Undergraduate Prerequisites: consent of instructor. - Graduate Prerequisites: consent of instructor. - Hands-on experimentation with and theoretical implications of a variety of methods for anthropological ethnographic field research, including posing research questions, research design and ethics, data collection, analysis, and initial write-up.
CAS AN 593 4 credits.
Undergraduate Prerequisites: junior or senior standing or consent of instructor. - Selected issues and debates in current anthropology. Topic for Fall 2023, Section A1: Migration, (Im)mobilities and Precarity. Addresses the regulation of human mobility and practices of inclusive exclusion in a globalized era and given the immediacy of climate displacement. Explores the interconnections between differentiated citizenship, economic precarity, cultural marginalization and political mobilization.
CAS AN 595 4 credits.
BU Hub Learn More Quantitative Reasoning II Scientific Inquiry II Teamwork/Collaboration
Undergraduate Prerequisites: (CASAN102 OR CASBI107 OR CASBI108) or consent of instructor. - An exploration of field and laboratory methods used in biological anthropology, with students participating in hands-on exercises. Topics include health assessment, body composition, diet, energetics, morphological adaptations, reproductive status, habitat composition, spatial movements, and conservation. Professional skills are also developed. Effective Fall 2020, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Quantitative Reasoning II, Scientific Inquiry II, Teamwork/Collaboration.
CAS AN 596 4 credits.
Undergraduate Prerequisites: junior or senior standing, or consent of instructor. - Examines the use of ethnographic materials and models of alternative social or economic organization to interpret historical materials as well as the use of history to provide dynamic models of change in anthropological analysis.
CAS AN 700 4 credits.
Introduces qualitative methods used to study human-environment interactions. Stimulates critical thinking about the research process and the particular issues of human-environment relations: how we "know," matching methods and questions, ethical issues, and dissemination of results. Also offered as GRS GE 700.
CAS AN 701 4 credits.
Undergraduate Prerequisites: Graduate standing or consent of instructor. - An examination of current and historical perspectives across sub-disciplines of Anthropology: Social Anthropology, Biological Anthropology, and Archaeology. Explores how methodologies, theories and interpretations have changed as disciplines have developed.
CAS AN 703 4 credits.
An intensive introduction to the foundations of the discipline focusing on classic works from the mid-19th to mid-20th centuries. A critical analysis of the development of the discipline of anthropology, its literature, history, and contemporary research problems.
CAS AN 705 4 credits.
Examination of major contributions and debates in biological anthropology focusing on human evolution and biology. Topics include evolutionary theory, fossil and living primates, human and primate evolution, life histories, behavioral ecology, physiology and the relationship between biology and culture.
CAS AN 707 4 credits.
Explores the social and cultural diversity of the modern Middle East with particular attention to Turkey. Focus on state power, minority governance, gender, sociopolitical change and different articulations of tradition and modernity.