5 University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley is one of the world?s leading academic institutions. Widely known as "Cal," the campus is renowned for the size and quality of its libraries and laboratories, the scope of its research and publications, and the distinction of its faculty and students. National rankings consistently place Berkeley?s undergraduate and graduate programs among the very best in a variety of disciplines. Our high-acclaimed faculty currently includes: 7 Nobel Laureates, 225 members of the Academy of Arts & Sciences, 131 members of the National Academy of Science, 87 members of the National Academy of Engineering, a Poet Laureate Emeritus of the United States, and 141 Guggenheim Fellows, more than any other university in the country. It was here that two professors discovered plutonium in 1941 as well as numerous other elements, including berkelium and californium. Berkeley faculty are quoted daily in newspapers and journals throughout the world as experts in their fields. But Berkeley is also about extraordinary students! While most of our 22,800 undergraduates are Californians, every state, and more than 100 foreign countries are represented on campus. The student body can best be characterized by its talent and its diversity; in fact, there is no single...
For Anthropology Majors
Faculty Undergraduate Advisors provide general academic advising, are available to talk to students about planning for graduate school, and evaluate requests for exceptions, including credit for transfer courses. The 2015-16 Undergraduate Advisors are Professors Kent Lightfoot (Archaeology) and Stanley Brandes (Socio-Cultural).
The Undergraduate Student Affairs Officer (SAO), Frances Bright, is responsible for day-to-day advising of declared majors and students interested in Anthropology. The SAO can assist students with: declaring the major; assessing progress in the major; administrative concerns (i.e. TeleBEARS, Add/Drops); graduation matters; general info on Anthropology courses offered each term; options for independent study; Senior Honors Program; researching graduate programs and enrichment opportunities; and referral to other campus offices.
Sociocultural Anthropology
Required coursework
In the first year of the program students in social cultural anthropology are required to take a two-semester sequence, Fundamentals of Anthropological Theory, Anthropology 240A-240B. The goal of these courses is to cover classical and contemporary debates in the field and their genealogy in earlier philosophical anthropologies, in classic sociology and political economy, and in terms of intersecting frames of modernity, colonialism, nationalism, and biopolitics. Social cultural students are also required to enroll in Anthropology 290 (departmental lecture series) each semester they are registered before advancing to candidacy.
First Year Examination
At the end of the first year, a progress of each student is assessed and students may be given an oral examination by a group of faculty members. The decision about continuation within the graduate program is made on the basis of performance during this examination and on the student's academic work throughout the first year. A student may be requested to leave the graduate program, even though the oral examination was judged passing if the student's academic work was judged weak and the department's faculty is concerned that a student will not complete the program satisfactorily.
Departmental Review of Graduate Students
At the end of the fall semester, an annual mid-year review of graduate student progress is conducted by the Graduate Advisor and faculty. This is generally a review of first-year students' progress but may include reviews of advanced students as well. Each student's progress is assessed and recommendations are made as appropriate.
At the end of spring semester, a similar year-end review is conducted. This is a more general review of all graduate students in the department.
Second and Third Years
Students, in consultation with their advisors, elect other seminars, courses, or language training as appropriate to individualized plans of study. The seminars and individual research work during this period are directed toward preparing the student's three field statements and fulfilling the language requirement--both which are necessary for the preparation for the Ph.D. Oral Qualifying Examination.
Field Statements
Field statements are bibliographical essays on areas of specialization that are to address substantive areas of anthropology. Each field statement is a critical summary and analysis of issues and debates in a field of knowledge. Social cultural students will write two field statements on topics such as kinship, religion, linguistic anthropology, history of anthropology, economic anthropology, etc. The third field statement is most often on the student's chosen ethnographic or research area. Faculty sponsors will work with the student in the preparation of these fields. Sociocultural students may choose to work with a professor outside the department on one of their field statements.
Dissertation Prospectus
The dissertation prospectus is an intellectual justification and research plan for the dissertation. Sociocultural students must get their prospectus signed by all three dissertation committee members and file it at the end of their third year, either before or after the Ph.D. Oral Qualifying Examination. There is no designated length for a sociocultural dissertation prospectus.
Biological Anthropology
All the procedures and regulations of the overall Anthropology Ph.D. apply to students specializing in biological anthropology. Students can be admitted to work with archaeology or sociocultural faculty. The Head Graduate Advisor has authority over the implementation of requirements for these students. The Head Graduate Advisor for 2014-15 is Professor Saba Mahmood.
Admissions
Students are admitted to pursue the Anthropology Ph.D. under the advising of the biological anthropology faculty in archaeology or sociocultural anthropology. It is strongly suggested that students communicate with faculty before submitting an application. Students must designate Biological Anthropology as their program, and must list two faculties with whom they intend to work.
Required coursework
In the first two years of their program, biological anthropology students are required to take one theory seminar: either Archaeology Theory (229A) or Fundamentals of Anthropological Theory (240A or 240B) as advised by their supervisor. In addition, they are required to take a total of two additional upper division courses, one of which is to be a methods course (this could include Anthropology 229B and/or courses outside of the Department as determined to be appropriate). Biological Anthropology students are required to enroll in Anthropology 290 (departmental lecture series) each semester they are registered before advancing to candidacy.
First Year Examination
At the end of the first year, the progress of each student is assessed and students may be given an oral examination by a group of faculty members. The decision about continuation within the graduate program is made on the basis of performance during this examination and on the student's academic work throughout the first year. A student may be requested to leave the graduate program, even though the oral examination was judged passing if the student's academic work was judged weak and the department's faculty is concerned that a student will not complete the program satisfactorily.
Field Statements
Biological anthropology students will write two field statements on topics such as a research method or analytical tool, or a theoretical approach. The third field statement will be in the student’s chosen topic area. Faculty sponsors will work with the student in the preparation of these fields. Biological anthropology students might choose to work with a professor outside the department on one of their field statements.
Dissertation Prospectus
The dissertation prospectus is an intellectual justification and research plan for the dissertation. Biological Anthropology students must submit their prospectus before the Ph.D. Oral Qualifying Examination and it should be no more than eight pages in length
Medical Anthropology
The Joint UCB/UCSF Ph.D. in Medical Anthropology is one of the pioneering programs in the discipline both nationally and globally. The program provides disciplinary leadership and outstanding and comprehensive training leading to the Ph.D. degree. No other program offers the Joint Program's combination of excellence in critical medical anthropology, studies of science, technology and modernity, intersections of medicine and social theory, and cutting edge scholarship.
Topics of active research include:
· violence and trauma
· genomics and ethics
· transplantation and organ and tissue commodification
· citizenship, immigration, and the body
· psychiatry, ethnopsychiatric, and psychoanalysis
· youth and child survival
· hunger, infectious disease, development, and governmentality
· traditional medicine and its modernity
· sexuality, gender, and the commodity form
· geriatrics and dementia
· death, dying, and the politics of "bare life"
The core faculty on the Berkeley side of the Joint Program form an organized research group called Critical Studies in Medicine, Science, and the Body. This group links medical anthropology, science and technology studies, postcolonial and psychoanalytic anthropology, and linguistic anthropology. There are eight faculty in the group: Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Program Director of Medical Anthropology; Paul Rabinow, Director of the Project on Genomics and Society; Lawrence Cohen, Co-director of Medical Anthropology; Stefania Pandolfo (Interim Program Director for 2011-12), Charles L. Briggs, Stanley Brandes, Cori Hayden, and Seth Holmes. Together with colleagues at Berkeley and UCSF and with graduate students and postdoctoral scholars in the Joint UCB-UCSF Medical Anthropology Program and in the Department of Anthropology, these scholars have created both the most diverse and the most contemporary program in the field.
The expansion of traditional medical anthropology at Berkeley into Critical Studies in Medicine, Science, and the Body reflects several disciplinary breakthroughs associated with our faculty. Though variants of "medical anthropology" are almost as old as the parent discipline of anthropology, the organized field emerged in post-war North America as an effort to link international public health, ethnomedicine, and allied social science in the service of the anthropology of development. The field shared both the promise and the limits of modernization theory more generally. Both the critical Marxist and symbolic/interpretive challenges of the 1970s and 1980s thickened debate, along with closer links to historical analyses of the scholarly medical traditions and to the development of qualitative methodologies concurrent with the expansion of NIH, NIMH, and other governmental programs of research support.
Despite the rapid growth of the field at this time, most research remained auxiliary to the categorical if not the political and economic imperatives of biomedicine. With the arrival of Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Berkeley became a leader in defining what she famously termed a "critically applied medical anthropology." Critically applied medical anthropology refused the theory/applied divide that characterized so many departments and programs, arguing the impossibility of separating "theoretical" debate in cultural anthropology and the human sciences on the one hand and more "applied" commitment to the health and survival of communities and groups, on the other. Scheper-Hughes's articulation of a critical anthropology of hunger offers a powerful example of the change in the field she was instrumental in creating.
The rise of this movement at Berkeley led to a period in the late 1980s and early 1990s with two dominant programs in graduate training, critical medical anthropology in the Joint Program at Berkeley and UCSF and interpretive medical anthropology at Harvard. Lawrence Cohen came from Harvard in 1992 to join Scheper-Hughes, and the teaching and joint research that has resulted from their collaboration represent a critical and ongoing conversation bringing together the leading formations in the field. Cohen has worked to link debates between critical, interpretive, and biocultural medical anthropologies to broader theoretical questions of materialization that have emerged in feminist and queer scholarship.
The rapid growth of science studies and the increasing centrality of both science and the body to contemporary debate in the academy posed new challenges to medical anthropology. Paul Rabinow has studied the new genomics intensively, work leading to three books and to the development of what he has termed an anthropology of reason. Against too-easy criticism of scientific and medical practice that did not question what Michel Foucault called the "speaker's benefit" of the critic, Rabinow offered a method and a form of analysis that offered a way out of the endless battles of the "Culture Wars." Berkeley anthropology emerged as the most powerful alternative to the dominant approaches to the sociology of science and science studies.
From the mid-1990s and on, these two streams of medical anthropology and the anthropology of reason have been in closer and sharper interaction. Scheper-Hughes wrote a famous article calling for a "Barefoot Anthropology"; Rabinow offered his own vision of a "Well-Heeled Anthropology," and Medical Anthropology Program affiliates Professors Laura Nader and Aihwa Ong both authored important responses to this debate. Far from pushing students towards either pole, the debate constituted a space for encouraging students to link critical, interpretive, and genealogic analysis. Charles L. Briggs and Clara Mantini-Briggs are studying challenges to neoliberal health policies and new understandings of health, citizenship, and the state emerging from revolutionary healthcare in Venezuela. Seth Holmes studies labor, health, and health care in the context of transnational in/migration and agricultural systems, particularly in the U.S. and Mexico. Against this background, he has explored the ways in which perceptions of race, class and citizenship play into (and, at times, challenge) the naturalization and normalization of social and health inequalities. In addition, Holmes studies the ways in which medical students and physicians come to perceive and respond to social difference.
In a world of linking new genomics, bioinformatics, and pharmacotherapy to corporate medicine and public-private hybrid structures internationally, "bioethics" has become ever more ubiquitous and empty a critical practice. The question of ethics and more generally of human futures links the current work of Cohen, Rabinow, and Scheper-Hughes. To this question and to the related investigation of trauma, loss, and healing, Stefania Pandolfo brings a rigorous anthropological conversation incorporating contemporary philosophy and psychoanalysis and her research in a Moroccan psychiatric hospital.
Pandolfo's work provides a bridge allowing for analysis linking medical anthropology and recent social theories of language, melancholy, and the body. Pandolfo has offered extensive training to graduate students in the anthropology of medicine, science, and psychiatry, linking a reexamination of existential psychiatry and a close engagement with the work of scholars from Benjamin and Blanchot to Freud, Lacan, and Binswanger to both Maghreb and European clinical and theoretical work.
By tracing genealogies of the unexamined imbrication of theories of language, knowledge, performativity, and representation with research on biomedicine, public health, and traditional medicine, the Joint UCB-UCSF Medical Anthropology Program enables students to critically synthesize linguistic and critical medical anthropology in such a way as to transform both realms of anthropological inquiry. Charles L. Briggs has explored these connections through research on narrative and statistic representations of epidemic disease Latin America; urban violence and its problematic representations; and a five-country study of how understandings of health, disease, citizenship and the state are profoundly shaped by news coverage of health, all in collaboration with Clara Mantini-Briggs.
Other Berkeley anthropology faculty affiliated with the Medical Anthropology Program bring important resources to graduate student training in the critical analysis of medicine, science, and psychiatry. Laura Nader was instrumental in helping to define the field and remains a leading scholar of medicine and the state. Stanley Brandes has studied many topics of relevance to the field, including alcohol and culture and questions of death and the body.
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