UMass Boston

Course Overview

Description

This course takes an anthropological, biological, and phylogenetic approach to questions about adolescence, including: What elements of growth and maturation define adolescence, and is this life stage unique to humans? How do the body's priorities change, and what can we learn about the selective pressures that shaped human evolution when we examine those changes in the context of ecological and cultural variation? How, at the threshold of adulthood, is gender newly constructed, and what commonalities and cultural variations in the gender inculcation process exist across the glove? Texts will include literature on human growth and development; comparative data from non-human primates; anthropological literature on rites of passage viewed cross-culturally; and literary dramatizations of coming of age.