Advanced Topics in Anthropology

This curriculum provides advanced specialization pathways for self-directed learners who have completed the core undergraduate sequence. Rather than attempting to complete all tracks, learners should select one or two pathways aligned with their research goals or professional interests.

Medical Anthropology & Global Health

Examines how health, sickness, and clinical practice are shaped by political systems, global inequities, phenomenological experiences, and cultural understandings of the body.

Critical Medical Anthropology & Structural Violence: Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor (Paul Farmer) - A landmark text demonstrating how global political economies and institutional violence directly generate disease distribution and human suffering.

Illness Narratives & Phenomenological Anthropology: The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing, and the Human Condition (Arthur Kleinman) - A foundational study establishing the distinction between biological disease and the lived, cultural experience of chronic illness and social suffering.

Biomedicine as a Cultural System: Disease and Health: Culture, Society, and Ethics (MIT OpenCourseWare / Jean Jackson) - A structured open curriculum that treats modern Western biomedicine as a cultural institution with its own moral premises, ritual structures, and institutional hierarchies.

Biopolitics, Clinical Regimes & Global Health: Global Health: An Interdisciplinary Overview (Coursera / University of Geneva) - An advanced interdisciplinary course exploring global health governance, the political economy of epidemics, and international pharmaceutical regulation.

Investigates statecraft, bureaucratic power, capitalist financial structures, and legal pluralism to understand how governance and authority operate in everyday life.

Anthropology of the State & Legibility: Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (James C. Scott) - A seminal treatise analyzing how modern states enforce administrative legibility through simplification and standardization, frequently overriding vital local knowledge.

Power, Rhetoric & Everyday Governance: The Anthropology of Politics: Persuasion and Power (MIT OpenCourseWare / Xenia Cherkaev) - An advanced syllabus examining political discourse, sovereignty, bureaucratic rituals, and grassroots resistance through ethnographic case studies.

Financialization & Wall Street Culture: Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street (Karen Ho) - An insider ethnography of elite investment banks showing how corporate downsizing and shareholder value ideology cultivate systemic financial precariousness.

Legal Anthropology & Dispute Processing: Law and Society (MIT OpenCourseWare / Susan S. Silbey) - An open university course investigating legal consciousness, the social production of legality, and how formal legal mechanisms interact with informal dispute resolution.

Environmental, Ecological & Multispecies Anthropology

Explores human-environment interactions, political ecology, more-than-human sociality, and Indigenous cosmologies in the context of the Anthropocene.

Political Ecology & Environmental Conflict: Environmental Conflict (MIT OpenCourseWare / Christine Walley) - A graduate-level open curriculum examining environmental justice, conservation disputes, and the political dimensions of resource struggles.

Multispecies Ethnography & Fungal Ecologies: The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing) - A foundational multispecies ethnography that follows matsutake commodity chains to theorize cross-species interdependence and survival in degraded environments.

The Anthropology of Biology & Interspecies Life: The Anthropology of Biology (MIT OpenCourseWare / Stefan Helmreich) - An advanced course probing the boundary between nature and culture, focusing on microbiomes, marine organisms, biosecurity, and synthetic genomics.

The Ontological Turn & Amerindian Perspectivism: Cannibal Metaphysics (Eduardo Viveiros de Castro) - A radical theoretical work developing Amazonian Indigenous multinaturalism to dismantle Western Cartesian divides between nature and culture.

Digital Anthropology & Computational Methods

Investigates virtual worlds, platform culture, the political economy of algorithms, and methodological adaptations for studying digitally mediated lives.

Online Sociality & Global Platform Cultures: The Anthropology of Social Media: Why We Post (FutureLearn / University College London) - A free comparative online course based on 15 months of global ethnographic fieldwork analyzing how societies across nine nations adapt and redefine social media platforms.

Virtual Worlds & Avatar Personhood: Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human (Tom Boellstorff) - A pioneering digital ethnography demonstrating how culture, desire, and identity are authentically constructed and lived within virtual spaces.

Algorithmic Labor & Artificial Intelligence: Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass (Mary L. Gray & Siddharth Suri) - An ethnographic expose of the invisible global contingent workforce performing human-in-the-loop content moderation and data labeling to power automated systems.

Digital Ethnographic Research Design: Digital Ethnography: Principles and Practice (Sarah Pink et al.) - An authoritative methodological guide setting out key principles for conducting qualitative research across mobile devices, digital environments, and networked communities.

Advanced Archaeological Science & Bioarchaeology

Applies biomolecular techniques, skeletal osteology, stable isotope geochemistry, and spatial analytics to reconstruct past human diet, health, mobility, and landscape modification.

Paleogenomics & Ancient DNA (aDNA): Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past (David Reich) - A comprehensive synthesis of the archaeogenetic revolution by a pioneering population geneticist, showing how ancient whole-genome sequencing rewrites human prehistory.

Human Osteology & Bioarchaeological Analysis: Bioarchaeology: Interpreting Behavior from the Human Skeleton (Clark Spencer Larsen) - The authoritative treatise on paleopathology, biomechanics, stress markers, and paleodemography reconstructed directly from archaeological human remains.

Stable Isotope Ecology & Paleodiet: Stable Isotope Ecology (Brian Fry) - The foundational textbook detailing the principles of carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen isotope fractionation across trophic webs, crucial for reconstructing prehistoric diets and migration.

Spatial Archaeology & Landscape GIS: Geographical Information Systems in Archaeology (James Conolly & Mark Lake) - A standard Cambridge manual providing practical and theoretical training in archaeological database construction, predictive site modeling, and spatial analysis.