This course introduces students to Russia's astounding ethnic diversity. We will study the histories of the Sami, the Khanty, the Evenks, the Nenets, the Yakuts, the Chukchi, and others, from Ivan the Terrible's conquests in the 16th century to Vladimir Putin's policies today. The students will explore the impacts of colonialism and capitalism on the lives of the indigenous peoples; the issues of environment and sustainability; the struggle for preservation of the peoples' languages and traditions; the creative expression of culture through the traditional music, costumes, ceremonial dances, and literature.

This course introduces students to Russia's astounding ethnic diversity. We will study the histories of the Sami, the Khanty, the Evenks, the Nenets, the Yakuts, the Chukchi, and others, from Ivan the Terrible's conquests in the 16th century to Vladimir Putin's policies today. The students will explore the impacts of colonialism and capitalism on the lives of the indigenous peoples; the issues of environment and sustainability; the struggle for preservation of the peoples' languages and traditions; the creative expression of culture through the traditional music, costumes, ceremonial dances, and literature.

This course examines the apparently universal human phenomenon of religion and its place in the modern world. Scholars have generally assumed that the spread of modernity would entail the gradual retreat of religion as an active political force in the world. However, today one hears of a global “resurgence of religion”—the Pentecostalization of sub-Saharan Africa, the rise of Hindu majoritarianism in South Asia, “politicized” Islam in the Middle East and Southeast Asia and the Christian right in the United States are but a few examples. This course asks: What is religion? What is the source of its apparent power? Are the various phenomena we group under the name/sign religion indeed of a piece? Is there some common essence, in other words, justifying the assumption that the diverse beliefs and practices termed “religious” are but different expressions of the same thing? And if not, why is such an assumption so widespread? The course begins by examining some of the most influential attempts to define and explain religion comparatively, both within the discipline of anthropology and in the works that have influenced it. Thus, we will engage the writings of Freud, Weber, Durkheim, as well as anthropologists such as E.B. Tylor, Bronislaw Malinowski, Mary Douglas, and Clifford Geertz. These texts are included not simply for historical value, but as lucid expressions of ideas that are sedimented as matters of common sense and as ideas that permeate academic as well as popular accounts. In the second part of the course, we will focus on ethnographic attempts to account for the power of religion in specific social and cultural contexts, including in the modern West. These ethnographic readings will enable us to explore the important issues, approaches and debates in the anthropology of religion and to address the question of religion in the modern world in relation to its constitutive other: secularism.