First-Year Seminar: Coca and Cocaine

Catalog description

This seminar compares a set of practices that center on coca leaf production in indigenous communities, where coca cultivation has been sustained over long centuries, on the one hand, with a set of unsustainable practices linked to the “drug war” in the Americas, on the other. Participants will read scholarly work in history and anthropology, support one another through a research process, and explore what historians and other scholars might contribute to discussions about drug policy. First-year students only.