COURSES

Anthropology 101
The Native Americans

Anthropology 5
Archaeology: Living in the Material World

Anthropology 33
Archaeological Field Methods

Anthropology 113
Archaeology of Ancient American Civilizations

American Mythologies
(aka Storytelling)
 

Anthropology 1
Human Evolution in Philosophical Perspective

This course explores the origins of humanity as a species.  Its goals are to consider the historical development of evolutionary theory, the mechanisms of the evolutionary process, the rise of the human species, and the comparative location of humans beings in the animal world.  A particular focus will be on the relationship between nature and culture as a distinctive characteristic for understanding humanity.  The course will examine the impact of subsistence, language, kinship, and art on the development of humanity over the last 5 million years.

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This course surveys the rise of civilizations in the Pre-Columbian New World.  The focus is the formation of cultures such as the Mesoamerican Olmec, Teotihuacano, and Maya and Andean South American Chavin, Moche, and Inca.  A main theme is the productive adaptation of these cultures in diverse environmental situations such as Highland and Lowland Mesoamerica and Coastal and Mountain Andes and the interaction between these groups as a factor in the rise of the state.  Discussions of subsistence, art, religion, and political economy characterize each culture.

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The material world is more than just what’s ‘out there’.  Material culture shapes our very lives.  It is where we live, what we eat, the bodies we make, the tools we use.  Things are an inherent part of human life.  This understanding allows archaeology -- as the recovery and interpretation of material culture from the past -- to know about people and cultures that no longer exist.  This course studies material culture as both a human and an archaeological way of knowing that makes things more a part of living than we usually think.

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Offered Occassionally by the Hofstra University Honors College

What is the role of the past in society?  In many significant ways we use the past to guide our present and future.  Precedent, in fact, allows us to predict what may come as well as allowing us to know how to behave in potentially legitimate ways.  Because of this we cannot say that knowing the past can be done for its own sake, rather knowing the past has a purpose.  This course will explore what some of these purposes might be.

Using texts in anthropology, history, archaeology, and theory the discovery of the past is considered in primarily three ways.
First, the practice of history by anthropologists is reviewed.  By examining particular historical conditions of living cultures, anthropologists doing history have developed many eye-opening insights about cultural difference that break the static molds of functional and structural explanations.

Second, the anthropology of historical practice has trained a critical eye on the production of history in contemporary culture.  Studies of living history museums and other popular heritage sources, for example, have illuminated how powerful naturalizing subtexts such as nationalism, normative gender roles, and racial inequalities find accepting audience audiences who are less learning history than confirming cultural beliefs.

Third, the anthropology of historical consciousness focuses on the way living people know and relate to the histories they claim.  In this work, the focus is on the multiple ways to humanly know the past highlighting especially the variance between official archival histories and oral traditions told as stories and myths.  This research challenges the objective-subjective divide that separates history and tradition ultimately seeking to capture the significance of storytelling in cultures no matter the source.

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The concept of culture is subjected to an intensive critical overview, as the organizing idea of anthropology and as a fundamental component of the modern worldview. Themes to be addressed include: evolution of man's capacity for culture; major humanistic and scientific approaches to understanding culture and the great and ongoing transformation from so-called "primitive" to civilized ways of life. Institutional structure, symbolic texture and the feel of other cultures are conveyed through careful analysis of ethnographic classics and films. Credit given for this course or ANTH 2, not both.

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Native America once comprised one of the most diverse cultural areas in the world.  Today Native Americans are members of what is called the ‘Fourth World’, or the indigenous peoples living in/alongside modern nation-states. This course explores Native North Americans by looking at how Indian peoples traditionally lived, and how they have survived, struggled, and changed since the arrival of Europeans and others to the Americas.  We will examine three themes: cultural origins and diversity, Native American histories, and modern Indian identity.  The overarching idea for these topics is to understand how Native Americans live simultaneously within and outside modernity, and what we can learn from their marginal presence about how minorities live in the contemporary world.

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This course is an intensive hands-on introduction to the ideas