Zakazoo13's List: Cultural Anthropology

"Feces fossils yield new insights into ancient diets and 'thrifty genes'"

"This Southern Nazarene University course deals with the beliefs and practices of the religions (other than Christianity) of our world. It is similar to those courses sometimes titled Comparative Religions. This course will give students an understanding of religions such as Animism (including Wiccan), Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, and others."

"languages change. For more than two hundred years, historical linguists have documented the similar ways in which sounds, grammar, and even word-meanings change over time. By projecting such changes back into the past, historical linguists have been able to recover numerous lost languages—such as Proto-Indo-European, Proto-Mayan, Uto-Aztecan and others. In some cases, it can even be determined where and when these languages were spoken, and significant segments of their speakers' beliefs and ideas can also be reconstructed. Not infrequently, ancient inscriptions and other archaeological evidence have confirmed these intriguing reconstructions."

"At the dawn of the twenty-first century, globalization is a pervasive feature of social life. The clichéd examples – from McDonald’s to reggae music – form just the tip of the globalization iceberg. A world economy, a world polity, and a world culture are all undergoing rapid expansion. In this course, we will consider globalization’s aspects and impacts, in an effort to develop some understandings of its causes, effects, and implications for your own life."

"This course is an anthropological exploration of religions in diverse cultural and historical contexts. Our focus will be on relations of power, social order, social change, gender, and the role that religion plays in modernity, transnationalism, and globalization. We will investigate the performance of rites and rituals, and the cultural expressions of religious beliefs and practices. Through comparative and critical strategies, we will look at how religion interacts with, and is embedded in other aspects of society. In doing so, we will find religious elements in unexpected places. We will study anthropological theories of culture and religion from the classical canon, in addition to contemporary approaches, and apply them to a variety of topics. While respecting the efficacy of all systems of belief, we will think about how religions orient people to their social worlds in ways that are systematically related to historical and cultural change."

"The concept of "attitude" has been called the single most important concept in social psychology, i.e., "the keystone upon which the edifice of social psychology is built."  Public opinion is an extremely important concept in political theory and is discussed in a variety of political science courses.  An examination of the definitions for the concepts of "attitude" and "opinion" finds that they are generally overlapping and difficult to distinguish, but research integrating the two concepts in largely lacking.  This course will examine research on social and political attitudes, public opinion, and the mass media with the aim of integrating theory and research from the areas of social psychology and political science."

"List of Free Online Public Health Courses and Classes"

"Course: Urban Health in Developing Countries"

"PRINCIPLES OF EVOLUTION, ECOLOGY AND BEHAVIOR"

"This course explores the social lives of the nonhuman primates.  It begins with an introduction to primate evolution and taxonomy and behavioral ecology.  It further examines select groups of living primates through topics such as conservation, social behavior, cooperation/competition, reproduction, ethnoprimatology, and evolution of social organization."

"RELIGION & SOCIETY"

As a culture, Americans need to move beyond narrow and limited interpretations of parenting practices. Our attempts to force a single model of parenting, from cultural beliefs to biomedicine, places unnecessary stress on parents who already have enough to worry about

People are wired to run, according to a new study that looked at the roots of the pleasurable sensation known as runner's high.

Linguistic stuff: use of pronouns to predict couples and how language shifts based on the power relationship of the speakers.

Interesting read about social out-casting. 

The Yanomamo

Kinship and Social Organization