Marzia Balzani

The spring semester of the ACS Senior Capstone is composed of the student working in close consultation with a faculty member on their capstone project. It is expected that the student will meet weekly with their advisor.

Prerequisite: ACS-UH 4000

This course provides students with a broad overview of the discipline, history, research methods, and selected contemporary issues in the field. The approach taken selects key ethnographies and uses them to explore questions of a methodological, theoretical, and substantive nature. This course is designed to introduce students to anthropological investigation and to facilitate understanding of how the discipline engages with and represents the everyday realities, challenges, and concerns of the people with whom anthropologists work.

What does it mean to study the senses? One way to approach this is to recognize, as anthropologists do, that sensory perception, which is experienced by the individual as a physical and biological capacity to engage with the world around us, is also always a cultural act. This class explores how gender, sexuality, ethnicity and class are embodied in sensory perceptions and everyday social interactions. Students will examine how our physiological capacities are engaged and reproduced in social, economic and political relations of power which are the outcome of complex historical trajectories. Discussions include a broad range of scholarly debates on the senses and sensory perception drawn from the anthropology of the senses, human geography, cultural history, film, museum studies, impairment and disability studies, literature, and art. The class will focus in particular on how corporeal practices involving food, art, music and movement are perceived, mediated and expressed through the senses.

This course offers multiple approaches to India under broad the conceptual frameworks of caste, communalism and sectarianism. The geographical focus for the course is India, broadly conceived to include its diaspora and in relation to other South Asian states. The disciplinary location for the course is in Social and Cultural Anthropology and History. Caste is the lens through which a range of social and cultural issues such as gender, class, modernity and food are considered. Key historical moments are examined via the anthropological and historical study of communalism and sectarianism. Such key moments may include some of the following: Partition (1947), the State of Emergency (1975-77), the destruction of the Babri Masjid, Ayodhya (1992), the Gujarat riots (2002) and the Citizenship Amendment Bill (2019).