Anthropology (ANT)
ANT 100 HUMAN ORIGINS
3, 2/2; NS23
Introduction to biological anthropology and archeology. Biological anthropology: evolutionary theory and genetics, the human fossil record, and the study of non-human primates. Archeology scientifically reconstructs past cultures: the basics of archeological data and dating methods. The transformation from a hunting and gathering lifestyle to one based on food production and the consequences of this transformation that include, in some instances, the development of complex sociopolitical institutions and state societies. Offered every semester.
ANT 101 UNDERSTANDING CULTURE
3, 3/0; SS23
On human culture and society; considering structures of meaning, belief, kinship, family, marriage, sexuality, spirituality, and artistic life across time and in different environmental, economic, and political settings. Offered every semester.
ANT 189 TOPICS COURSE
1-3, 1/0
Offered occasionally.
ANT 200 EXPLORATIONS IN ANTHROPOLOGY
3, 3/0
Prerequisites: ANT 100, ANT 101, or permission of instructor. Research skills necessary to do well in upper-division Anthropology courses: finding anthropological studies in the literature, reading scientific papers and ethnographies, and conducting basic data analysis. Intended for Anthropology majors and minors early in their academic careers. Offered every spring.
ANT 220 CASE STUDIES IN BIOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
3, 3/0
Introduction to biological anthropology through detailed examination of exemplary case studies covering a broad range of topics in biological anthropology. The process of inquiry in physical anthropology, including initial conception of the research question, methodology, results, and conclusions. Ethics of biological anthropology research. Offered occasionally.
ANT 244 FOLKLORE AND LIFE
3, 3/0
Prerequisite: CWP 102. Introduction to the major genres of folklore and folk life and their function in contemporary society; including roots music, ethnic and occupational folklore, rites of passage and calendar customs, and traditional narratives. The relationship between folklore and popular culture. Offered occasionally.
ANT 250 HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY
3, 3/0
Prerequisite: ANT 100. Archaeology of the United States from 1500 through the American Civil War. Material life and diversity of sociocultural experiences in the United States during this period. Offered spring odd years.
ANT 295 RESEARCH EXPERIENCE IN ANTHROPOLOGY
1-3, 0/0
Prerequisite: Instructor permission. Scholarship or creative work conducted under the supervision of a faculty member. Offered occasionally.
ANT 300 INDIGENOUS PEOPLES OF WESTERN NORTH AMERICA
3, 3/0; DI23, GA23
Prerequisite: ANT 100 or ANT 101 or Instructor permission. Ways of life of the original peoples of Western North America, reconstructed using archaeology, historic documents, and oral tradition (i.e. Ethnohistory). Tribal nations of the Plains, Northwest Coast, Southwest, Great Basin, Plateau, and California. Effects of outside exploration/colonization and the persistence of Indigenous peoples in the modern world. Offered every other fall, even years.
ANT 301 INDIGENOUS PEOPLES OF EASTERN NORTH AMERICA
3, 3/0; DI23, GA23
Prerequisite: ANT 100 or ANT 101 or Instructor permission. Ways of life of the original peoples of Eastern North America, reconstructed using archaeology, historic documents, and oral tradition (i.e., Ethnohistory). Wendat, Haudenosaunee and Powhatan confederacies; Cherokee; Effects of European exploration and colonization; persistence of Indigenous Eastern North American peoples in the modern world. Every other fall, odd years.
ANT 303 THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF EUROPE
3, 3/0
Prerequisite: ANT 101. Introduction to the anthropology of Europe and European culture. The course discusses the traits and development of distinctive cultural features of European peoples through cultural histories of Europe in general and ethnographic case studies. It related the development and influence of Western civilization to other regions of the world. Offered occasionally.
ANT 305 MOTHER AFRICA
3, 3/0; GA23
Prerequisite: AAS 100, or ANT 101, or Instructor Permission. A survey of Africa’s contributions to the human genome, world history, and advanced civilizations, from ancient Nile Valley Civilizations to current political formations. Understands Blacks in the diaspora as part of Africa’s legacy to the making of the modern world. Emphasizes African people’s values, perspectives, and calls for Black liberation. Offered occasionally.
Equivalent Course: AAS 305
ANT 306 PEOPLES OF ASIA
3, 3/0
Prerequisite: ANT 101. Cross-cultural comparisons of indigenous and modern nations of Asia. Emphasis on regional, linguistic, social, political, religious, economic, and aesthetic characteristics as well as historic and recent population migrations on the Asian continent and surrounding islands. Offered occasionally.
ANT 307 URBAN ANTHROPOLOGY
3, 3/0
Prerequisite: ANT 101. Study of the origins and evolution of cities around the world; their impact upon the human family and other social relationships, and the physical environment. Early and recent viewpoints on life in cities, suburbs and rural communities. Offered occasionally.
ANT 308 ARCHAEOLOGICAL METHOD
6, 0/0
Prerequisite: ANT 100. Laboratory and field methods in archaeology. Opportunity for practical experience with various archaeological techniques. Offered summer only.
ANT 310 MESOAMERICAN ARCHAEOLOGY
3, 3/0; GA23
Prerequisite: ANT100, or Instructor Permission. Overview of ancient civilizations of Mesoamerica, including Olmecs, Maya, Teotihuacan, and Aztecs, using archaeological evidence, hieroglyphic texts, iconography, and ethnohistorical sources. Comparative analysis of art, architecture, religion, politics, economics, and social organization of Mesoamerica societies from archaic foragers through Spanish contact. Offered every other year.
ANT 312 ARCHAEOLOGY OF NORTH AMERICA
3, 3/0; DI23, GA23
Prerequisite: ANT 100 or Instructor permission. Archaeological record of Indigenous Peoples in Ancient North America beginning with the earliest human presence. Paleo-Indian, Archaic, Woodland, and Mississippian archaeological periods. Theoretical frameworks, methods, and ethical issues. Pseudoscientific and political uses of archaeology. Every other spring, even years.
ANT 315 RESEARCH METHODS IN CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
3, 3/0
Prerequisite: ANT 101. Research methods in cultural anthropology covering fieldwork, participant-observation, sampling, measurements, documentation, statistical and cross-cultural methods. Offered fall even years.
ANT 321 PRIMATOLOGY ECOLOGY AND CONSERVATION
3, 3/0; NS23
Prerequisite: ANT 100. Study of living prosimians, monkeys, and apes, including taxonomy, social organization, feeding ecology and ranging, community ecology, and conservation; field studies of natural populations. Offered in spring odd years.
ANT 322 RESEARCH METHODS IN PRIMATOLOGY
3, 1/4
Prerequisite: ANT 321. Study and practice of behavioral observation techniques used in primatology. Independent research project on the primates at the Buffalo Zoo. Presentation of research results to the campus community (e.g., the Student Research and Creativity Celebration) and at the Buffalo Zoo.
ANT 323 DISEASE AND GLOBAL HEALTH
3, 3/0; NS23
Prerequisites: ANT 100 or Instructor permission. The global burden of disease on morbidity, mortality, and development. How the diseases that afflict humans have changed over our cultural evolution and have impacted our biological evolution. The relationship between cultural & personal activities and disease. Understanding epidemiological concepts through recent events. Racism as a public health crisis. Offered in spring, even years.
ANT 324 THE HUMAN SKELETON
3, 3/0
Prerequisite: ANT 100. Hands-on experience with natural human skeletons to learn all bones, landmarks, and features of the bones; how to determine the side of the body the bone came from, determine if a bone is from a male or female, estimate age at death, and estimate stature of the individual. Offered fall only.
ANT 325 FORENSIC ANTHROPOLOGY
3, 3/0
Prerequisite: ANT 324. Forensic applications of the recovery and identification of human skeletal remains. Determination of age, sex, and ancestry. Also taphonomy, differentiating human from animal remains, analysis and significance of traumas, and search and recovery techniques. Offered spring only.
ANT 326 THE HUMAN FOSSIL RECORD
3, 3/0
Prerequisite: ANT 100. Human evolution as derived from the fossil record examination of major fossil hominid discoveries, their interpretation, and their place in the development of the human species. Offered spring even years.
ANT 327 INTRODUCTION TO MEDICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
3, 3/0
Prerequisite: ANT 101. An overview of the history and development of concepts and practices of medicine worldwide. Theories and procedures in illness, sickness, health and well-being in and from a variety of cultural perspectives, historical and contemporary, East and West. Stone Age, folk, shaman, traditional Western and herbal medicine, including healing and religion, homeopathy, and anthropological study of health-care institutions. Offered occasionally.
Equivalent Course: HEW 327
ANT 329 WORLD ARCHAEOLOGY
3, 3/0; GA23
Prerequisite: ANT 100 or Instructor permission.A broad outline of global hominin/human material culture through space and time from the origins of stone tools (2.5 million years ago) through to the rise of complex societies with monumental architecture approximately 1550 CE/AD as inferred from the archaeological record. Past cultures of hunter-gatherers-fishers, the first farmers, and early civilizations. Methods and theories that archaeologists use to interpret recovered archaeological data in a wide variety of forms. Offered every other spring semester, odd years.
ANT 330 INDIGENOUS HAWAIIANS
3, 3/0; DI23, GA23
Prerequisites: ANT 100 or ANT 101 or Instructor permission. Lifeways of the original inhabitants of the Islands of Oceania/Polynesia, especially the Hawaiian archipelago. Origins, geography/ecology, cultural identity and agency, political struggles from the 10th century to today of Indigenous Hawaiian peoples using archaeological/anthropological, historical documents, and oral tradition evidence (Ethnohistory). Representations of Indigenous Hawaiians originating inside and outside the region. Offered every other spring.
ANT 332 GENDER AND ARCHAEOLOGY
3, 3/0
Prerequisites: ANT 100 or instructor permission. Gender, sex, cultural construction of gender roles, alternative genders, impact of gender roles on social structure, and reflection of gender and gender roles on the material culture of past human societies. Archaeological evidence of gender including art, iconography, burial patterns, human remains, settlement patterns, architecture, and craft production.
ANT 335 ETHNOPRIMATOLOGY
3, 3/0
Prerequisites: ANT 100 or instructor permission. The study of interactions between humans and nonhuman primates. Focus on the hunting of nonhuman primates for food; the keeping of nonhuman primates as pets; the inclusion of nonhuman primates into myths, oral histories, and religion; and the competition between humans and nonhuman primates for habitat and food. Offered every other year.
ANT 340 WOMEN IN ANTHROPOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE
3, 3/0
Prerequisite: ANT 101. The study of women's position with attention to political, social, and cultural influences on female status in a cross-cultural perspective. Offered occasionally.
ANT 341 INDIGENOUS ART OF NORTH AMERICA
3, 3/0; DI23, GA23
Prerequisites: ANT 100 or instructor permission. Examination of art and material culture within Indigenous communities. How material culture and art can be used as evidence for human behavior, especially ritual behavior. Historical factors affecting the production and use of material culture and art will be investigated. Continuity and change within material culture/artistic repertoires. Offered every other spring, even years.
ANT 344 FOLKLORE & FANTASY IN POPULAR CULTURE: FROM MIDDLE-EARTH TO HOGWARTS
3, 3/0
Prerequisites: CWP 102 or equivalent, upper class standing. How J. R. R. Tolkien, the creator of modern fantasy writing, based his mythology for England on the work of 18th and 19th century folklorists. Influence of the work of myth scholars, primarily Joseph Campbell, on George Lucas and other film makers in the Star Wars trilogies and similar films and television series. Creation of folk groups (fandoms) based on fantasy novels and films, especially since the rise of the Internet. Offered occasionally.
ANT 350 GLOBAL MARRIAGE PRACTICES
3, 3/0; SS23
Prerequisites: Upper division status. Ethnography of marriage, kinship, household, and family. Analysis from premodern to modern family types, transformation in gender roles, empowerment of women, and dissolution of traditional kinship structures and emergence of new family forms. Consideration of legal and religious frameworks and their transformation from comparative perspectives. Offered every other year.
ANT 357 BLACKS IN TECHNOLOGY: INNOVATING THE FUTURE
3, 3/0
Prerequisite: AAS 100. Equips students with technical competency in ground-breaking tech and critical understanding of tech segregation that disproportionately affects Black people. Offered fall semester.
ANT 361 ANTHROPOLOGY OF FOOD
3, 3/0; GA23
Prerequisite: ANT 101 or instructor permission. Anthropology of food; production, distribution, and consumption of food in a range of cultures and contexts; food as cultural heritage; Organization of labor, Scales of production from local gardens through industrialization; Memory and politics of food and its distribution from a global standpoint. Offered occasionally.
ANT 362 URBAN FOLKLORE
3, 3/0
Folklore in the urban environment. The role of folklore in the creation and preservation of ethnic, occupational and community identity. Folklore in the media and popular culture. Offered occasionally.
ANT 365 PRACTICING ANTHROPOLOGY
3, 3/0
Prerequisite: ANT 101. The application of anthropology and anthropological perspectives to contemporary community and world issues and problems. Focus on the practice of anthropology as a career outside academia, in social services, international relations, government positions, community organizing, etc. The relevance of anthropological principles in day-to-day life. Offered occasionally.
ANT 367 CULTURE AND ECOLOGY
3, 3/0
Prerequisite: ANT 101. Overview of the anthropological study of culture and ecology-environmental anthropology-the evolutionary and comparative study of various cultures' relations, both biological and cultural, to their environments. Industrial and nonindustrial adaptations to and understandings of the environment. Human-to-nature relations, the study of place, and environmentalism. Offered occasionally.
ANT 370 THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF CONTEMPORARY ISSUES
3, 3/0
Prerequisite: ANT 101. An anthropological perspective of some of the principal dilemmas of the contemporary world, including technological, demographic, ideological, and cultural problems, which provide much of the content of our daily news and have implications for the survival of our species. Offered occasionally.
ANT 373 "SAVING" AFRICA
3, 3/0
Prerequisite: AAS 100, or upper division standing, or permission of instructor. Examines what Western efforts at foreign development, including contemporary globalization, look like from an African vantage. Incorporates ethnographic case studies, theoretical lenses, and practical implications for doing development work into the examination. Offered every fall semester.
ANT 377 POWER AND INEQUALITY: CIVILIZATION IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
3, 3/0; GA23
Prerequisite: ANT 100. Examination of the nature of early civilizations; possible factors involved in both their rise and fall. Old World civilizations studied: Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus Valley, China, the Aegean Islands, and Europe (Greece and Italy). New World civilizations examined: Mesoamerica and the Andes region of South America. Similarities and differences considered. Offered fall, even years.
ANT 380 LANGUAGE AND CULTURE
3, 3/0
Prerequisite: ANT 101. Concepts of language and culture as symbolic systems. Introduction to phonetics, phonemics, morphemics, syntax, and semantics from a cross-cultural and cross-lingual perspective. Exploration of the relationship between grammatical structure and modes of perception and cognition as related to world views and systems of values, with special emphasis on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and the work of Chomsky. Offered occasionally.
ANT 381 RELIGION, MAGIC, AND CULTURE
3, 3/0
Prerequisite: ANT 101. Descriptions and analysis of world religious beliefs and practices, universal phenomena with many manifestations. Examination of the place of religion and spirituality in widely diverse cultures, including discussion of magic, trance, altered states, cults, Wicca, Santeria, voodoo, and late-twentieth-century religions. Offered occasionally.
ANT 383 ETHNOGRAPHY OF TURKEY
3, 3/0
Prerequisites: Junior or senior standing. The transition to the Republic through the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the nationalist movement which fought the War of Independence. Modernization, secularization, and westernization policies and the creation of a secular and laicist state. Mass rural-urban migration, struggles over Islamist movements, and nationalism through ethnographies.
ANT 385 VISUAL ANTHROPOLOGY
3, 3/0; SS23
Prerequisites: ANT 101 or SOC 100. How technology of the still camera transformed relationship to imagery, perception of time and movement through splitting and flattening of representations into "realistic" images. Basics of still cameras as a research tool; how to collect informants' images as data. Meaning, use of images, representations, and power of visual data. Offered fall odd years.
ANT 388 FOLKLORE & AMERICAN ROOTS MUSIC
3, 3/0
Prerequisites: CWP 102 and upper class standing. The richness and diversity of American roots music, with emphasis on the relationship of roots music to folklore and popular culture. Ways in which mediated a transmission and technology have contributed to the development of and dissemination of roots music. Offered occasionally.
ANT 389 TOPICS IN ANTHROPOLOGY
3, 3/0
Analysis of current areas of research interest in anthropology. Emphasis on using concepts and methods from the subfields of anthropology to study a specific problem or series of problems. Offered every semester.
ANT 400 ANCIENT MATERIALS
3, 3/0
Prerequisite: ANT 329 or ANT 312. The study of technology and production in its broadest sense. Raw materials used to create material culture as defined archaeologically, such as stone, bone, wood, clay, and metal. Datasets from ethnographic and archaeological films and reports; hands-on experimental archaeology projects. How archaeologists use material culture as evidence for past human behavior, e.g., measurement of lithic flakes, creating typologies of ceramic shards. Offered spring even years.
ANT 405 HISTORY OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL THOUGHT
3, 3/0
Prerequisite: ANT 101. Important contributions in the development of anthropological theory to the present. Includes theories of Boas, Kroeber, Lévi-Strauss, Malinowski, and Tylor. Offered occasionally.
ANT 412 SEMINAR IN CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
3, 3/0
Prerequisite: ANT 101. The concept of culture and ethnographic research. Value of cultural anthropology and ethnographic research and their relevance to problems faced by people today. Intellectual, social, and political trends that have shaped the development of the field of cultural anthropology. Cultural anthropological theory, research design, research practice. Offered fall only.
ANT 415 SEMINAR IN ARCHAEOLOGY
3, 3/0; IN23, RE23
Prerequisites: ANT 329 or ANT 312. Value of archaeology and its relevance to the problems faced by people today. Benefits from archaeology and how they are achieved. Intellectual, social, and political trends that have shaped the development of the field of archaeology. Archaeological theory and research design in depth. Negotiating between the different stakeholders in archaeological projects. Oral and written communication of archaeological findings. Offered spring only.
ANT 418 SEMINAR IN BIOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
3, 3/0; IN23, RE23
Prerequisites: CWP 102, ANT 100; ANT 321 or ANT 323 or ANT 326. Value of biological anthropology and its relevance to the problems faced by people today. Benefits from biological anthropology and how they are achieved. Intellectual, social, and political trends that have shaped the development of the field of biological anthropology. Biological anthropology theory and research design in depth. Negotiating between the different stakeholders in biological anthropology projects. Written communication of biological anthropological findings. Offered fall only.
ANT 488 INTERNSHIP IN ANTHROPOLOGY
1-12, 0/0
Supervised fieldwork in community agencies, organizations, and milieus where students develop and apply practical and anthropological knowledge and skills. Students interact in diverse cultural settings, and experience and establish connections of potential use in the job market. Preparatory conferences, ongoing seminars with the faculty supervisor, a log/journal of the field experience, and a final report. Offered spring only.
ANT 495 SPECIAL PROJECT
1-3, 0/0
Special project in Anthropology.
ANT 498 HONORS RESEARCH
3, 0/0
Prerequisites: 3.5 Cumulative GPA, Majors/Minors Only. Offered every semester.
ANT 499 INDEPENDENT STUDY
3-9, 0/0
Offered every semester.
ANT 587 TOPICS COURSE
3, 3/0
In-depth examination of rapidly and significantly changing disciplinary issues, topics, or practices; offered occasionally.