Honors Classes
Spring 2009
103 Anthropology in a Changing World, Honors (3 hrs)
Professor Alma Gottlieb
Office: 386C Davenport Hall
Phone: 244-3515
ajgottli@illinois.edu
- When did coffee become yuppified, and what does that say about class in America?
- Why do we wear watches, and what happens when we don't?
- What can an anthropological approach teach us about drug culture in inner cities?
- Why do so many girls (still) want to look like Barbie?
- How do people in the Ukraine understand contamination after Chernobyl?
This course introduces an anthropological perspective on life. As we will discover, there's nothing anthropologists can't study as long as humans have something to do with it, from environmental degradation to Mickey Mouse. Taking a series of compelling readings about places from New York to Bali, this course will teach students "how to think like an anthropologist." Along the way, we’ll see unexpected connections between the local and the remote. If most of the clothes we wear and the foods we eat are, in one way or another, produced halfway around the world, can we afford not to understand the daily practices of people whose lives inextricably link to ours? In this special honors section of ANTH 103, a small seminar format will allow an individualized and project-based approach to understanding the human condition in all its joys and complications.
This course for Chancellor's Scholars only. Others may only enroll with the consent of the instructor and the Chancellor's Honors Program.
This course fulfills the Social and Behavioral Sciences, Western and Non-Western Gen. Ed. Req.