ENROLL

Daniel Hernandez, Constanza Ocampo-Raeder

A field-based investigation of socio-ecological systems in Oaxaca, Mexico that will allow students to draw compaisons with similar systems in Minnesota. During winter break, we will visit the city of Oaxaca and neighboring villages to document and research systems of agriculture, sustainable forestry, and ecotourism, emphasizing the integration of methodologies in anthropology and ecology. Following the winter break trip, students will complete and present their research projects. This course is the second part of a two term sequence beginning with Environmental Studies 250.

Prerequisite: Prior term registration in Environmental Studies 250. At least one term of introductory Spanish (or equivalent proficiency) is required

Winter Break Program in Oaxaca Mexico

Constanza Ocampo-Raeder

Food is the way to a person's heart but perhaps even more interesting, the window into a society's soul. Simply speaking understating a society's foodways is the best way to comprehend the complexity between people, culture and nature. This course explores how anthropologists use food to understand different aspects of human behavior, from food procurement and consumption practices to the politics of nutrition and diets. In doing so we hope to elucidate how food is more than mere sustenance and that often the act of eating is a manifestation of power, resistance, identity, and community.

Sophomore priority

Waitlist for Juniors and Seniors: SOAN 233.WL0 (Synonym 64857)

Constanza Ocampo-Raeder

Our ways of perceiving and acting in the world emerge simultaneously from learned and shared orientations of long duration, and from specific contexts and contingencies of the moment. This applies to the production of anthropological ideas and of anthropology as an academic discipline. This course examines anthropological theory by placing the observers and the observed in the same comparative historical framework, subject to the ethnographic process and to historical conditions in and out of academe. We seek to understand genealogies of ideas, building on and/or reacting to previous anthropological approaches. We highlight the diversity of voices who thought up these ideas, and have influenced anthropological thought through time. We attend to the intellectual and political context in which anthropologists conducted research, wrote, and published their works, as well as which voices did/did not reach academic audiences. The course thus traces the development of the core issues, central debates, internecine battles, and diversity of anthropological thought and of anthropologists that have animated anthropology since it first emerged as a distinct field of inquiry to present-day efforts at intellectual decolonization. 

Prerequisite: Socilogy/Anthropology 110 or 111, and at least one 200- or 300-level SOAN course, or permission of instructor.

Constanza Ocampo-Raeder