Current Special Topics Courses

Spring 2008

RG ST 90AZ Special Topics - Aztec Religion presents a thematic introduction to religion in Central Mexico from the mytho-historic foundations of Tenochtitlán (c.a. 1300 CE) to contact with Europeans in 1521. One of the Americas' most fascinating civilizations, the Aztecs were profoundly religious. Using images, primary texts (pictorial codices and alphabetic ethnohistories) and secondary scholarship, students will explore topics including aesthetics and poetry, concepts of the body and gender, deities and deity impersonation, funerary rituals, blood sacrifice and war, calendrics and divination, and the role of religion. After contact with Europe the course will also look at religious themes in Mexican nationalism and contemporary Chican@/Xikan@ reinscriptions of Aztec religion.

RG ST 190WC Special Topics - Material Catholicisms is an undergraduate seminar which will explore various material cultures of Catholicism in the area around Santa Barbara, with special attention to devotional objects, their power, and the memories they embody, in homes, churches, shrines, and apparition sites.

RG ST 292WC Special Topics - Visions in Spain and the New World is a graduate seminar in which students will study selected
ethnographies and primary texts of religious visions over the past 600
years showing great continuities but also an evolving notion of the divine. Possible visitation of a ongoing vision site in Southern California.