SOAN

This course examines the sociological dimensions of health, illness and the profession of medicine.

Islam has significant influence on a broad array of nations, ethnic groups, and local expressions of culture, and plays a role in shaping societies' politics, economics, and law. Taking a practice-focused, anthropological perspective on the study of religion, this course examines the many ways in which culture and society have been co-influenced by Islam in different parts of the world, including here in the Pacific Northwest.

In the contemporary world, tourism is often the foremost process that brings together people from different parts of the world, allowing those from vastly different societies to interact on a face-to-face basis under peaceful, if not always equal, circumstances. As such, tourism as a phenomenon and as a process raises questions about global interconnections and global movements of finance, cultural and material artifacts, ideas, and people across national and cultural boundaries.

This course provides an anthropological overview of Southeast Asia, one of the most diverse and fascinating regions of the world, with a focus and required field component in Indonesia. Because of the Indonesia trip, the course requires an application and students are responsible for some expenses, including airfare. As a survey of Southeast Asian cultural groups and histories from an ethnographic perspective, the course begins on campus, but finishes in Yogyakarta, Central Java'a city often described as the cultural heart of Indonesia, and the country's center of higher education.

This course explores lived culture in Southeast Asia with a focus on the themes of power and inequality, gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, humans and the environment, as well as religion and syncretism. Described as the crossroads of influences from East and South Asia to Europe and beyond, Southeast Asia is one of the most diverse and fascinating regions of the world. The course includes case studies from throughout the region, with a focus on Indonesia.

This course aims to engage students in an informed and critical study of contemporary China. Focusing on the historical continuity of Chinese society as well as its breaking away from tradition in the post-1949 era, the course encourages students to reflect on China's social transformations over the past seven decades from an anthropological perspective.

This course uses a sociological framework to examine gender and sexuality in contemporary Japan. Students are introduced to theoretical frameworks that underpin the study of gender and sexuality and apply those frameworks to the case of Japanese society.

This course aims to enable students to acquire a critical understanding of the theories and practices of heritage by scrutinizing the ideas of "heritage" and its formation in recent decades. We will critically engage the definition of heritage with reference to policies and treaties set up by international organizations like UNESCO and state governments. Addressing heritage both as an academic discipline and as a professional field, the course examines how the ideas of heritage -- oftentimes Eurocentric -- are interpreted, contested, and put into practice in various Asian countries.

This course is designed to explore diverse and changing forms of transnational migration across a global landscape, with a focus on the dynamic relationships that define migrants' relationships to both home and host communities. The course draws upon anthropological and sociological contributions to migration studies, transnationalism and diaspora studies in order to examine the articulation of culture and identity amidst the complexities of the contemporary world.

Anthropological linguistics asks questions central to both disciplines: What is human language? Why is a person's or an ethnic group's particular language or language variety often such an important part of their identity? When a particular language becomes "lost" or "threatened," what happens to the semantic worlds (not just the words, but the linked insights and wisdom) that used to be encoded in those now no longer heard or spoken phrases and styles of discourse?