Undergraduate Academics
Anthropology
The study of anthropology traditionally covers four fields: sociocultural anthropology, linguistic anthropology, biological anthropology, and archaeology. At Sarah Lawrence College, we concentrate on sociocultural and linguistic anthropology.
Behind almost every aspect of our lives is a cultural realm, a shared construction that shapes assumptions and determines much of how we perceive and relate to the world. Sociocultural anthropology is the study of that realm—its extent and its effects. As students learn to approach with an anthropological eye what they formerly might have taken for granted, they gain insight into how social forces govern the ways in which we relate to ourselves and to each other: how we use words, how we define ourselves and others, how we make sense of our bodies, even how we feel emotions. Through examining the writings of anthropologists, viewing ethnographic films, and discussing these and other materials in seminar and conference sessions, students develop a comprehensive and multipatterned sense of the cultural dimensions of human lives. By studying the underpinnings of language, symbolic practices, race, gender, sexuality, policy and advocacy, medical systems, cities, modernity, and/or social organization across a range of Western and non-Western settings, students come to better understand how meaning is made. With seminar dynamics and content characteristic of graduate-level work, Sarah Lawrence’s anthropology courses take students in often unexpected and challenging directions.
Anthropology 2026-2027 Courses
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Open, Seminar—Fall | 5 credits
ANTH 3043
Note: Same as PSYC 3043.
In this interdisciplinary seminar, we will explore child and adolescent development through a cross-cultural lens. Focusing on case studies from diverse communities around the world, we will look at the influence of cultural processes on how children learn, play, and grow. Our core readings will analyze psychological processes related to attachment and parenting; cognition and perception; social and emotional development; language acquisition; and moral development. We will ask questions such as the following: Why are children in Sri Lanka fed by hand by their mothers until middle childhood, and how does this shape their relations to others through the course of life? How does an Inuit toddler come to learn moral lessons through scripted play with adults, and how does such learning prepare them to navigate a challenging social and geographic environment? Is it true that Maya children do not do pretend play at all? How does a unique family role influence the formation of identity for Latine youth in the United States? How are unequal childhoods shaped by social exclusion and discrimination on the basis of race, class, gender, and immigration status? Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, our course material will draw from developmental psychology, human development, cultural psychology, and psychological anthropology and will include peer-reviewed journal articles, books, as well as films that address core issues in a range of geographic and sociocultural contexts. Students will conduct conference projects related to the central topics of our course and may opt to do fieldwork at the Early Childhood Center.
Faculty
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Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Fall | 5 credits
ANTH 3127
Note: Prior coursework in the social sciences is recommended.
This course will explore issues of identity and difference, locality and community, through the lens of space and place. Engaging with recent scholarly work in the fields of sociocultural anthropology, migration studies, ethnic studies, sociology, geography, architecture, and literature, we will seek to decode sociospatial arrangements to understand structures and processes of exclusion and marginalization. At the same time, we will observe how material realities and linguistic discourse shape people’s navigations through space, and how efforts at placemaking create sites of collective identity, resistance, belonging, and recognition. We will ask questions such as: how should we understand notions of displacement, transborder identifications, or longings for homeland as they play out for Sierra Leonean Muslims in Washington, DC, Ecuadorian immigrants in Italy, or Indigenous Latin American migrants in California and Wyoming? How does “talk of crime” instantiate racial segregation in a Brazilian favela? What boundaries are created by gated communities in places like San Antonio, Texas and Mumbai, India? How does public policy police green spaces to restrict access by people who are unhoused in San Diego? What should we make of “placeless” spaces or states, such as those instantiated through technologies like social media, radio, or meditative practice? Posed in a wide range of ethnographic contexts, our efforts to puzzle through these issues will require attention to the ways in which space and place are spoken, embodied, gendered, racialized, and (il)legalized. We will likewise attend to the politics and ethics of decolonizing scholarship on space and place and to the meanings of an engaged anthropology that leans towards social justice.
Faculty
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Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Fall | 5 credits
ANTH 3113
As Empires expanded in the 18th-20th centuries, Europe witnessed a massive rise in collecting, measuring, counting, and describing myriad phenomena across the world, be they land masses, waterways, fossils, plants, animals, or human beings. And, domestically, there was deepening interest in the constitution and characteristics of different populations and the spaces they inhabited. In this seminar, we will examine a series of times and spaces in which gazes were focused, information gathered, and interpretations surmised in the context of Empire. Along the way we will see how some social sciences, primarily anthropology, geography, sociology, and selected area studies, have come to be formed in a variety of social and political contexts. The times and places we will study are diverse and will include, in no particular order: the rise of what we now know as scientific racism in France and Germany in the 19th century; the role of the Royal Engineers (the British military) in surveying and mapping vast territories of the British Empire; Charles Booth’s studies of the working class in 19th-century London, and Arthur Munby’s contemporary scopophilic obsession with working women. A century later, it was the Black population of Britain that was under the scrutiny of researchers from various institutions; and we will examine the myriad ways in which those communities resisted being studied. We will also look at the contradictory careers of several individuals including anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski, who tried to show how deploying anthropological knowledge would permit colonial officers to administer the empires more efficiently. And, on the other hand, Jomo Kenyatta, a Kenyan anti-colonial activist who taught Kiswahili to colonial officers and studied anthropology during his time in London to bolster his case for Kenyan independence. We will also explore the work of anthropologists from the Manchester School in colonized Central Africa, including their activism supporting local miners unions. And we will learn about the significant contributions of African “research assistants,” and their contributions to social science. Our texts include writings and visual imagery from a broad array of sources including, scholarly readings, biographies, history, ethnography, and maps.
Faculty
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Open, Seminar—Year | 10 credits
ANTH 3016
Note: Closed to students who have taken First-Year Studies: Global Kinships: An Anthropological Exploration of Connectedness (ANTH 1016).
A common feature of human societies is the enforcement of rules that determine social relations, particularly regarding kinship. With whom may one be sexual? Who can a person marry? Which children are ‘legitimate’? To marry a close relative, or someone of the same gender, may be deemed unnaturally close in some societies, but marriage across great difference such as age, race, nation, culture, or class can also be problematic. Social rules govern the acceptance or rejection of children in particular social groups depending on factors such as the marital status of their parents or the enactment of appropriate rituals. And configurations of gender are always key to family arrangements. Kinship has always been plastic, but the range and speed of transformations in gender and kinship are accelerating due to globalization and to new medical and digital technologies. New medical technologies create multiple routes to conceiving a child, both within and without the “mother’s” womb. New understandings of the varieties of gender and new techniques in surgery permit sex/gender confirmations and changes. Digital media permit searches for babies to adopt, surrogates to carry an embryo, blood kin separated through adoption, and siblings sharing the same sperm donor father. The digitization of myriad archived databases has also led to the renewed possibility of doing in depth family history research from any location. And “recreational” DNA testing has led to kin connections (and disconnections) that might otherwise never have been known. This seminar will look at many sites of gender and kinship through a variety of conceptual approaches including theories of race, gender, queerness, the postcolonial, and anthropological kinship studies. Questions to explore will include: who are “real” kin? Why do we hear so little about birth mothers? Why were intelligence tests administered to young babies in 1930s adoption proceedings? What is the experience of families with transgender parents or children? What is the compulsion to find genetically-connected kin? How many mothers can a person have? How is marriage connected to labor migration? Why are the people who care for children in foster care called “parents”? How is kinship negotiated and narrated in interracial families? Our topics will include transnational adoption between Sweden and Chile, the return of adoptees from China and Korea to their countries of birth, commercial surrogacy in India, polygamy in East and West Africa, cross-class marriage in Victorian England, incest regulation cross-culturally, African migrations to Europe, and same sex marriage. For conference work, students are invited to learn more about their own family histories through oral and archival research.
Faculty
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Open, Seminar—Spring | 5 credits
ANTH 3207
This course will ask how words do things in the world, exploring the complex linkages between language, politics, and identity in both past and present contexts. We will pose a range of questions, such as: How does language enable powerful regimes to take force, and how do linguistic innovations constitute a creative means to challenge oppression? What role does the politics and poetics of language play in broader social movements and cultural revitalization efforts? How do particular political configurations produce language shift or constrain the possibilities for verbal expression in specific social groups? How does language take shape through specific narrative forms like testimonio, and how do such forms constitute or enable acts of political resistance? We will look at such topics in a range of ethnographic contexts, with a special focus on the Americas. Our readings will address case studies including: the emergent Indigenous Zapotec language and music revival in the highlands of Oaxaca, Mexico; the lexicon of terror that shaped the political kidnappings and murders of Argentina’s Dirty Wars; the legacies of secrecy, silence, and creative resistance among Native American nations in the United States Southwest; the challenges and joys of bilingualism among transnational migrants; and the acts of narrative witnessing employed by a range of people including political prisoners, Indigenous rights leaders, and undocumented youth. Students will be invited to draw upon original linguistic research as a central part of their conference work.
Faculty
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Open, Lecture—Spring | 5 credits
ANTH 2201
Note: Same as FILM 2201 and LITR 2201.
This is a collaborative lecture course taught by faculty in anthropology, filmmaking, and literature. Bringing these three disciplinary lenses to the cinematic image, the course will ask how films can think—how, that is, cinema gives form to ideas about temporality, perception, memory, history, and life itself, not only through story, but through cinematic design including: rhythm, duration, framing, voice, and the relation between image and sound. Working primarily with ethnography, documentary, the essay film, and the film-journal, we will study cinema's engagement with lived reality. Rather than understanding film solely as representation, the course will treat it as a mode of inquiry: a means of engaging social and environmental worlds and reflecting on lived experience, political conditions, and moments of transformation. We will examine how concepts of culture and the natural world take shape in film form, and how diary and essay practices are transformed when translated into a time-based medium. Across screenings, lectures, and group discussions, students will develop a vocabulary for describing how films make meaning through temporal design and patterning. Attention to sequence and suspension, and to bodily gesture and camera motion, will open larger questions of ethics, representation, and mediation. Throughout the semester, we will ask how experimental documentary, hybrid essay film, animated, and mixed-media work respond to pressing political and existential concerns while also reflecting on their own conditions of mediation. Filmmakers whose work will be considered closely include Trinh T. Minh-ha, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Chris Marker, Agnès Varda, Jean-Luc Godard, Signe Baumane, Hayao Miyazaki, Su Friedrich, and the Karrabing Film Collective, among others. In addition to class time and screenings, students will attend group conferences, meeting with each faculty member in rotation.
Faculty
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Open, Small Lecture—Spring | 5 credits
ANTH 2210
Note: Closed to students who have taken Black England: From Tudors to Two-Tone (ANTH 3210).
In 1596, Elizabeth Tudor wrote to lord mayors of major English cities that there were “of late divers blackamoores brought into this realm, of which kind of people there are already here to manie ... those kinde of people should be sente forth of the land.” A common myth about Great Britain is that it was a homogeneously white nation until Jamaicans and South Asians arrived in Britain after World War II. Another myth is that there were no slaves held in Britain. As the above quotation indicates, free Black people were already settled there in the 16th century; and they were already the object of scapegoating for increasing poverty in the land at that time. The 17th century brought African slaves to Britain and, by the 19th century, the great ports of London, Bristol, Cardiff, and Liverpool were populated by West Africans (free and unfree); Lascars (Muslim sailors from east of the Cape of Good Hope); and seamen from Shanghai and Guangzhou, who created the first European Chinatown in the London Docks. In this course, we will investigate the multiracial nature of Great Britain from the Tudor era to the late 20th century. We will consider temporal moves between free and unfree lives and the role of free Africans in the abolition movement. Articulations of race, class, gender, and sexuality will be central, particularly as they play out in family formations and economic activities, including the rise of labor unions. We will wrestle with the absence of people of color in discourses about the British past and with constructions of racist stereotypes, particularly in the 19th century, such as scientific racism and the trope of the Chinese opium den. Finally, we will engage with cultural explosions in music (reggae, ska, two-tone, raga, punk), film (Bend It Like Beckham, My Beautiful Laundrette, Young Soul Rebels), scholarly writing (Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall, Hazel Carby, Catherine Hall), and creative writing (Lemn Sissay, Jackie Kay, Linton Kwesi Johnson)—to name but a few—created by second-, and third-, generation children of Commonwealth immigrants particularly as they articulate with antiracism movements. Our class materials will be multidisciplinary (anthropology, history, literature) and multimedia.
Faculty
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Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Spring | 5 credits
ANTH 3237
Note: Same as PSYC 3237.
This course asks how contemporary immigration shapes individual and collective identity across the life course. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach that bridges cross-cultural psychology, human development, and psychological anthropology, we will ask how people’s movement across borders and boundaries transforms their senses of self, as well as their interpersonal relations and connections to community. We will analyze how the experience of immigration is affected by the particular intersections of racial, ethnic, class, gender, generational, and other boundaries that immigrants cross. For example, how do undocumented youth navigate the constraints imposed by “illegalized” identities, and how do they come to construct new self-perceptions? How might immigrants acculturate or adapt to new environments, and how does the process of moving from home or living “in-between” two or more places impact mental health? Through our close readings and seminar discussions on this topic, we seek to understand how different forms of power—implemented across realms including state-sponsored surveillance and immigration enforcement, language and educational policy, health and social services—shape and constrain immigrants’ understanding of their place in the world and their experience of exclusion and belonging. In our exploration of identity, we will attend to the ways in which immigrants are left out of national narratives, as well as the ways in which people who move across borders draw on cultural resources to create spaces and practices of connection, protection, and continuity despite the disruptive effects of immigration.
Faculty
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Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Spring | 5 credits
ANTH 3627
How does a chronic illness affect a person’s orientation to the everyday? What are the social and political forces that underpin life in a homeless shelter? What is the experiential world of a blind person, a musician, a refugee, or a child at play? In an effort to answer these and likeminded questions, anthropologists have become increasingly interested in developing phenomenological accounts of particular lived realities in order to understand—and convey to others—the nuances and underpinnings of such realities in terms that more general social or symbolic analyses cannot achieve. In this context, phenomenology offers an analytic method that works to understand and describe in words phenomena as they appear to the consciousnesses of certain peoples. The phenomena most often in question for anthropologists include the workings of time, perception, selfhood, language, bodies, suffering, and morality as they take form in particular lives within the context of any number of social, linguistic, and political forces. In this course, we will explore phenomenological approaches in anthropology by reading and discussing some of the most significant efforts along these lines. Each student will also try their hand at developing a phenomenological account of a specific social or subjective reality through a combination of ethnographic research, participant observation, and ethnographic writing.
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