Browse through the database below to explore courses that will fulfill certain degree requirements in the Anthropology program.
When registering for classes on the Course Timetable website, be sure to carefully read through the "Notes/Additional Fees" section of each course you select. This section may contain important details related to delivery methods for each course during the 2024-2025 academic year.
Note: LECT, TUT, BLEN, SEMR and ONCA instructional formats will have in-person components while ONLN is the only format that is offered completely online.
If you have any questions, please contact our Undergraduate Program Administrator, Roshan Singh at lapsanth@yorku.ca.
What's On For Fall/Winter 2024-2025?
ANTH 2210 6.0 A - Advocate and Educate for Change: Applying Anthropology
This Fall 2024, examine the development of a publicly engaged anthropology that combines academic and applied anthropology. Illuminate the larger social issues and problems of our times, encourage broad public conversations about them, and ultimately, affect social change.
Other courses for Fall/Winter 2024-2025
- ANTH 2120 3.00 M - Visualizing Ourselves, Visualizing Others: Media, Representation & Culture (Winter 2025)
- ANTH 2110 6.00 - Core Concepts in Anthropology
- ANTH 3330 6.00 A - Health & Illness in Cross-Cultural Perspective: Learning and Doing Medical Anthropology
- ANTH 3350 3.00 - Culture as Performance: The Anthropology of the Arts (Fall 2024)
- ANTH 4420 3.00 - The Gendered Politics of War (Fall 2024)
Search Courses
AP/ANTH 1120 6.00 Making Sense of a Changing World: Anthropology Today
This course is an issues-based introductory course in anthropology. In this course you will use anthropological approaches to increase your understanding of global issues in diverse locales. This course challenges you to engage with other ...
AP/ANTH 1130 6.00 Anthropology of the Living and the Dead
How do the living relate to the dead? Covering topics from ancient burial rites to contemporary zombie lore, this course examines how people in cultures around the world – past and present – create, maintain, ...
AP/ANTH 1140 6.00 What does it mean to be human? Introduction to Sociocultural Anthropology
What is culture and how does it vary over time? What shapes people’s ideas and experiences of belonging and identity? How are people propelled to imagine who they are and how theybelong? In this full-year ...
AP/ANTH 2020 6.00 Race, Racism & Popular Culture
What can popular culture tell us about the world we live in? For anthropologists, it turns out that it can tell us quite a lot! This course takes an anthropological approach to how ideas of ...
AP/ANTH 2100 6.00 Global Capitalism, Culture, and Conflict
The formation and consequences of an increasingly interdependent world amidst widespread diversity of society and culture is the theme of this course. We begin with an historical overview of the creation of this interdependence, looking ...
AP/ANTH 2110 6.00 Core Concepts in Anthropology
What are the different ways that we, as anthropologists, research and analyze culture? What is ethnography and what are anthropological approaches to ethnography? This course is designed to familiarize students to key concepts in sociocultural ...
AP/ANTH 2120 3.00 Visualizing Ourselves, Visualizing Others: Media, Representation & Culture
This course interrogates the relationship between media and culture. It focuses on media representations in different cultural contexts in order to develop critical analytical skills for understanding the processes through which identities and social inequalities ...
AP/ANTH 2130 6.00 Anthropology Through the Visual: Images of Resistance/Irresistible Images
NOTE: This is a SUMMER term course. Course Director (Summer term): Z. Hirji - zhirji@yorku.ca Drawing upon images produced by anthropologists, journalists, filmmakers, photographers, artists, and activists this course asks questions about how the visual ...
AP/ANTH 2140 3.00 Introduction to Archaeology and Prehistory: Humanity's Journeys
This course explores the methods that archaeologists use to study the past, the development of human societies from our earliest hominin ancestors to preindustrial civilizations, and the social context of such endeavours to know the ...
AP/ANTH 2170 6.00 Sex, Gender and the Body: Cross-Cultural Approaches to the Body, Gender, Sexuality and Kinship
Is biology destiny? Are gender and sexual differences such as “male promiscuity”, “female monogamy”, “heterosexuality” and “homosexuality” genetically hardwired or socially constructed? How do we explain the range of sexualities people experience? Are all intimate ...
AP/ANTH 2210 6.00 Advocate and Educate for Change: Applying Anthropology
What should be the role of anthropology in the contemporary world? How can anthropology apply its methods and insights to local and global problems of inequality, injustice, and human suffering? This course looks at the ...
AP/ANTH 2222 6.00 From Settler Colonialism to Multiculturalism - An Anthropological Approach
NOTE: This is a SUMMER term course. Course Director (Summer 2024): L. Davidson - lmdavids@yorku.ca How do we live and interact with others in multicultural and multiracial communities in Canada? What is the relationship between ...
AP/ANTH 2280 3.00 Human Evolution and Biological Anthropology
NOTE: NOT CURRENTLY OFFERED Some of the biggest questions in biological anthropology are about how humans came to be and what defines us as a species. This course is a broad introduction to humanity’s evolutionary ...
AP/ANTH 2300 3.00 Intercultural Training Skills
The thought of experiencing immersion in another cultural context is both exciting and potentially anxiety producing. How can you develop intercultural competency skills in advance? This course is designed to help you develop those skills ...
AP/ANTH 2330 6.00 Outbreak! Contagion and Risk in Anthropological Context
NOTE: NOT CURRENTLY OFFERED We are living in a global pandemic. This moment has made the study of infectious disease, viruses, vaccines, and contagion more urgent as we grapple with COVID19 and the ways it ...
AP/ANTH 3030 3.00 Discourses Of Colonialism
NOTE: NOT CURRENTLY OFFERED This course examines the complex interplay of cultural and political forces that have created the conditions of possibility of Euro-American expansion and control on a global scale. Throughout the term, we ...
AP/ANTH 3040 6.00 The Anthropology of Digital Media and Visual Representation
This multimodal course introduces students to important theories and debates on media technologies and digital anthropology. We will engage critical texts and multimedia materials that address digital media structures, content, materialities, and communities. Students will ...
AP/ANTH 3110 6.00 Acquiring Research Skills
The purpose of this course is to introduce students to the discipline, experience, and practice of anthropological research. The task of “doing anthropology” involves a broad range of considerations, such as: defining and selecting research ...
AP/ANTH 3120 6.00 The Anthropolgy of Tourism
NOTE: NOT CURRENTLY OFFERED This course examines the cultural forces that shape the tourist experience and the social, political, and economic consequences of tourist practice. The first part of the curriculum explores various aspects of ...
AP/ANTH 3130 3.00 Archaeology and Society: Local Pasts in a Global Present
Archaeology and society are intertwined, locally and globally. This course interrogates those connections, examining the twin themes of (a) the role of archaeological heritage and archaeological investigation within society, and (b) the influence of social ...
AP/ANTH 3160 6.00 Sex, Love and Marriage: Cross-Cultural Approaches to Kinship
NOTE: NOT CURRENTLY OFFERED This course seeks to develop cross-cultural perspectives on weddings, marriage, the formation of domestic groups, extended kinship ties and social networks, the kindred and various forms of descent groups, and many ...
AP/ANTH 3190 6.00 Food, Eating, and Nutrition in Cross-cultural Perspective
This course explores the social and cultural basis of human food systems using a cross-cultural approach. Nutritional anthropology, a subfield of medical anthropology, integrates an understanding of human biology with the social and cultural basis ...
AP/ANTH 3200 3.00 The Anthropology of Global Health
This course explores the field of global health from a critical anthropological perspective. It will provide students with an understanding of the deep historical and political roots of public health and health systems challenges in ...
AP/ANTH 3220 6.00 Greed, Globalization and the Gift: The Culture of Capitalism
This course explores three main themes. First, it examines the culture(s) of capitalism historically and ethnographically. This anthropology of capitalism covers the age of capitalist empires, the formation of the corporation, and the directions and ...
AP/ANTH 3230 6.00 Women, Culture and Society
This course examines the contribution of anthropology to women's studies, including the relationship between biology and culture, the evolution and learning of sex roles, and the roles and status of women in comparative perspective. Course ...
AP/ANTH 3270 3.00 The Anthropology of Outer Space
NOTE: NOT CURRENTLY OFFERED The Anthropology of Outer Space offers an anthropological voyage of exploration to other worlds, through human culture, popular imagination, science, and technology. Outer space is full of human paradoxes. Human beings ...
AP/ANTH 3280 6.00 Anthropology and Psychiatry in Global Context
NOTE: NOT CURRENTLY OFFERED This course is concerned with furthering the dialogue and mutual engagement between Medical Anthropology and Cultural Psychiatry - in the context of localized communities, multicultural societies, and global networks alike. Applying ...
AP/ANTH 3300 6.00 Life in Motion: The Anthropology of Transnational Human Migration
NOTE: NOT CURRENTLY OFFERED This course focuses on the anthropology of human migration. Through online modules and in-person seminars, students undertake an ethnographic investigation of various humanitarian, social, and political dimensions of human movements across ...
AP/ANTH 3320 6.00 The Anthropology of Ritual & Religion
Religion has long been a topic of interest to anthropologists, preoccupying the earliest anthropological theories of culture and society. Today, the topic of religion is seeing growing attention across the world. As religion becomes variously ...
AP/ANTH 3330 6.00 Health & Illness in Cross-Cultural Perspective: Learning and Doing Medical Anthropology
This course explores health, illness and medical systems from the viewpoint of social anthropology. It emphasizes medicine and health as culturally significant systems of knowledge and practice. The ways that medical anthropologists apply their knowledge ...
AP/ANTH 3350 3.00 Culture as Performance: The Anthropology of the Arts
This course covers expressive aspects of culture: ritual, drama, the visual arts, dance and oral literature, in the framework of contemporary anthropological theories. Course Director (Fall 2024): J. Fulton-Melanson - fultonjs@yorku.ca
AP/ANTH 3370 3.00 Power & Violence: The Making of Modernity
NOTE: NOT CURRENTLY OFFERED This course will examine the place of organized political violence in the making of the most recent widespread, large-scale dominant social system: "modernity". During its making there has been a massive ...
AP/ANTH 3380 3.00 The Everyday Politics of Rage: Anthropological Perspectives on Populism
The focus of this course is populism, a concept that has generated a great deal of discussion and debate in media, academic circles and in everyday conversation and conflates widely different political and social projects ...
AP/ANTH 3410 6.00 Race, Ethnicity and Nationalism: Us and Them
The world of the 21st century is so often thought about, if not arranged, in terms of things called “nations”. And this happens in countless different ways and different levels: the lofty rhetoric of politicians ...
AP/ANTH 3420 3.00 Indigenous Minorities and Human Rights
NOTE: NOT CURRENTLY OFFERED This course focuses on how nation states define majorities and minorities, and how such definitions are contested by populations striving for cultural, political and human rights. Questions include: How do people ...
AP/ANTH 3440 3.00 Governmentality & Development: Selected Cases
NOTE: NOT CURRENTLY OFFERED This course examines the idea of "development" in the context of European state formation, colonialism and globalization. It examines development in Indonesia or India, for example, through the lens of Michel ...
AP/ANTH 3520 3.00 The Social Lives of Places and Things: Material Culture and the Archaeology of the Contemporary Past
NOTE: NOT CURRENTLY OFFERED This course addresses the 'stuff of life' - the material things and constructed places around us. As the physical manifestations of culture, things and places both reflect and affect social relationships. ...
AP/ANTH 3560 3.00 Anthropology of the Senses
NOTE: NOT CURRENTLY OFFERED This course explores how humans make and understand the world through their senses, the history of the senses in a variety of systems of thought and experience, and the meanings and ...
AP/ANTH 3570 6.00 Anthropology, Islam & Muslim Societies
NOTE: NOT CURRENTLY OFFERED This course examines debates amongst anthropologists about the study of Islam and Muslim societies, and Muslim expressions of Islam according to anthropological themes including the body, space, ritual, knowledge, agency and ...
AP/ANTH 4010 6.00 Directed Reading
This is an independent study course granted to a limited number of Anthropology majors who wish to closely study a specialized topic not already covered by program courses. Directed reading courses involve intensive reading and ...
AP/ANTH 4110 6.00 Development of Theory in Social Anthropology
What is the use of theory in Social-Cultural Anthropology in the twenty-first century and how should we read theories imparted to us by ‘dead White men’ without fetishizing (we will unpack this in the course) ...
AP/ANTH 4130 6.00 The Professional Anthropologist: The Anthropologist as Practitioner
NOTE: NOT CURRENTLY OFFERED The Professional Anthropologist is a capstone course for the Certificate and Minor in Advocacy and Public Engagement. It is a placement course designed to offer students essential skills and experience in ...
AP/ANTH 4140 3.00 Anthropological Perspectives on Sound
This course explores the merging of sound studies and anthropology, with a focus on how social actors understand their environments through sound. We will consider how anthropologists frame their work through sound, in an effort ...
AP/ANTH 4150 3.00 Special Topics in Anthropology
How do games shape the historical interpretation and portrayal of marginalized communities in archaeology? This course explores games and play from the perspective of archaeology. It will include the evidence for play in the archaeological ...
AP/ANTH 4200 3.00 Practicing Ethnography: Advanced Approaches to Ethnographic Methods
NOTE: NOT CURRENTLY OFFERED This course provides students with the opportunity to engage critically with and apply qualitative research methods toward the production, individually and collectively, of ethnographic analyses.
AP/ANTH 4220 6.00 The Cultures of the Web
NOTE: NOT CURRENTLY OFFERED This course focuses on the fact that ethnographers enter their “fields” and conduct research in conjunction with theoretical ideas about anthropology alongside histories of experience and practice. Cultural anthropologists do “ethnography” ...
AP/ANTH 4240 3.00 Nature, Culture, Power: The Anthropology of Environment
On the first day of COP29 – the most recent UN climate conference – the world’s richest countries finally signed on to a ‘loss and damage’ fund to compensate those most vulnerable to the climate ...
AP/ANTH 4250 6.00 Religious Movements in Global Perspective
NOTE: NOT CURRENTLY OFFERED Within a framework of the politics of identity, this course explore the tension between religious and national identities, the character and scope of transnational religious communities, and takes up fundamentalism as ...
AP/ANTH 4270 3.00 Imagined Societies: An Anthropology of Nations Without Boundaries
Utilizing a selected world wide set of examples, this course explores how minority communities within national boundaries attempt to construct their own national identities. These illustrations underwrite a full discussion of the possibility or impossibility ...
AP/ANTH 4320 3.00 Ethnographic Approaches in the Anthropology of Christianity
This course provides an in-depth examination of anthropological theories and ethnographic approaches in the Anthropology of Christianity. With a focus on ethnographic texts and films, students are challenged to think about the relationship between culture, ...
AP/ANTH 4330 3.00 Critical Issues in Medical Anthropology
Remaining engaged in providing collective care while facing the enormity of contemporary health issues from local to planetary scales is a critical issue of our times and of medical anthropology. In this course we explore ...
AP/ANTH 4340 6.00 Advocacy and Social Movements
This course examines how modern forms of communication have transformed the nature of advocacy and the social construction of knowledge in modern society. Specifically, it examines ways in which cultural norms are modified by the ...
AP/ANTH 4350 3.00 Perspectives in Visual Anthropology
Examines how humans produce, receive and use visual media (i.e., photographs, film, etc.) in different societies and cultures, how the visual is differentiated from other forms of expression, and the social and cultural apparatus that ...
AP/ANTH 4400 3.00 Speculative Futures: The Anthropology of What Might-Be
NOTE: NOT CURRENTLY OFFERED Speculative Futures explores the prospective and yet unknown condition of the might-be. In this course we engage with articulations, expressions, and representations of the (im)possible, (extra)ordinary, and (un)imaginable—or speculative—futures that diverse ...
AP/ANTH 4410 3.00 The Anthropology of Human Rights
NOTE: NOT CURRENTLY OFFERED Anthropology, a discipline grounded in the principles of cultural relativism, has been uncomfortable with the universalizing discourse of human rights since it was first codified in the United Nation's 1948 Universal ...
AP/ANTH 4420 3.00 The Gendered Politics of War
This course explores how gender relations have been deployed in sites of militarized conflict to incite, exacerbate and fuel violence; the reasons for and the ways in which war is increasingly waged on the bodies ...
AP/ANTH 4450 3.00 Anthropology of the City
This course is a study of everyday life in cities across the Americas, past and present. Using the theory and methods of urban anthropology, we will analyse how ordinary people make a living, create community, ...
AP/ANTH 4560 6.00 The Anthpology of Science and Technology
NOTE: NOT CURRENTLY OFFERED Examines anthropological studies of science and technology to explore the power of scientific facts in contemporary cultures. Considers how facts are produced and stabilized in scientific laboratories, how facts are made ...
AP/ANTH 4570 3.00 The Brain, Self and Society
NOTE: NOT CURRENTLY OFFERED This upper-year seminar course explores sociocultural perspectives on the brain, self, and society. Drawing on anthropological theories and methodologies, we will investigate how the brain and the self are understood, experienced, ...
AP/ANTH 4610 3.00 The Ethnography of Politics: Anthropological Research on Power and Resistance
NOTE: NOT CURRENTLY OFFERED This course challenges students to think anthropologically about politics and how people act and think politically in their everyday lives. We explore responses to the inequalities left by centuries of colonialism, decades of neoliberalism, the ...