Reading Homer as an anthropologist

What happens when you stop thinking of the Iliad as a work of fiction but instead see it as a primary text to help explain an ancient society?
That’s what archaeologist Tara Carter does in lecture 21 and lecture 22 of her great UC San Diego course Prehistory and the Birth of Civilization (feed).
She presents the [...]

Unwanted side effects of democracy

Maybe it’s the legacy of the Cold War — all of those years of being the bastion of freedom and democracy — but somehow Americans got in the habit of viewing democracy as something completely good, something that everyone in his or her right mind must want, like a chocolate sundae with no calories.
But democracy, [...]

Doubt and the New Testament

Yale University religion professor Dale Martin has some words of warning for the students in his course Introduction to New Testament History and Literature (website, iTunes):
“De omnibus dubitandum.”
Say it loud, he tells his students. Say it with feeling. “Say it tonight, before you go to sleep. Say it in the morning, when you [...]

How to find the good stuff on iTunes U

Some of you have asked how I find the good stuff on iTunes U. After all, a lot of colleges offer mainly PR fluff, like virtual campus tours and welcoming speeches by the dean of students.
So, here are my secrets. Every few days I do some of the following.
1. Survey the main iTunes U [...]

Why we stopped foraging and started farming

The invention of agriculture was probably the most important change in human history but scholars argue about why it happened, and propose three main conflicting theories.
These theories, and the difficulties in domesticating plants and animals are the subjects of lectures 14 and 15 in UCSD anthropologist Tara Carter’s great course, Prehistory and the Birth of [...]

Archaeologist Isabelle Pafford teaches new course

University of Santa Clara archaeologist Isabelle Pafford is back with a new course about heroic narratives, Heroes & Heroism (iTunes). The course covers heroic figures in ancient works like the Iliad, the Gilgamesh epic, and the Bhagavad Gita, and explores the historical background behind these tales.
Pafford has many fans among my readers who have praised [...]

Why Americans hate government

When Ronald Reagan said in 1981 “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” he was tapping into a long history of American suspicion of government.
UCLA political science professor Brian Walker has a theory about where that suspicion came from. He lays out his ideas in the Oct. 10 lecture (download [...]

10 new free courses at Yale

Yale’s excellent Open Yale Courses website just got even better. Ten new free courses are now available for your viewing/listening pleasure. The offerings now total 25, with 21 cross-listed on Apple’s iTunes U.
Some of the new courses:

Introduction to New Testament History and Literature, Spring 2009
The Psychology, Biology and Politics of Food, Fall 2008
Global Problems of [...]

Two great new anthropology classes

MMW1 Prehistory and the Birth of Civilization (feed), Tara Carter, UC San Diego.
UCSD is presenting three different versions of this course, but Carter’s is my hands-down favorite. She relates the story of hominid evolution and the birth of social organization with infectious enthusiasm. So far the course has brought us up to the [...]

Are we a ‘touch-starved’ culture?

UC Berkeley psychologist Dacher Keltner thinks we Americans are definitely touch-deprived.  In lecture 8 of his excellent course Human Happiness (feed),  Keltner presents evidence that when we touch each other, we feel less stressed, more altruistic and well — happier. He’s talking here about casual everyday touches, everything from a bear hug to [...]