Peoples & Cultrs Central Asia

Catalog description

This course engages students with the geographical region of Central Asia from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. The course focuses particularly on anthropology and uses anthropological material on Central Asia to deepen students’ understanding of concepts central to the discipline. These concepts may include ethnography, cultural relativism, materialism (and other social theories), post-colonialism, and many more. The area covered includes the formerly Soviet states of Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan), as well as regions that are culturally and geographically nearby, such as the Xinjiang region in China (East Turkistan), Iran, and Afghanistan. Topics studied may include subsistence, history, family, gender, politics, colonialism, and current events.