Humans and their Environments Integrated Studies 2021-22
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Humans and their Environments
Integrated Studies 2021-22
Each year the Benjamin Franklin Scholars (BFS) Program selects an extraordinary group of
incoming freshmen to pursue the liberal arts intensively, guided by some of Penn's brightest
lights. For students in the College, BFS begins with the Integrated Studies Program (ISP), an
exclusive, year-long residential learning experience in which you will survey the broad territory of
the arts and sciences while living alongside fellow students and faculty in Hill College House. The
program brings together the humanities, social sciences, and sciences into a coordinated
exploration of the great ideas that continue to drive our understanding of the world and the
human place in it. One key element of ISP is working to develop an understanding of how
methods and contents from distinct disciplines can inform one another so as to produce a deeper
understanding of a range of questions. A mix of lectures, small seminars, and guest speakers,
Integrated Studies fulfills a portion of the College's General Education requirement while building
the solid foundation needed for any major area of study you decide to pursue. By the end of their
freshman year, BFS students have not only pursued an intensive introduction to four different
disciplines, but engaged in some of the most challenging and important complex thinking which
lies at the heart of the liberal arts. We are looking for bold thinkers who become more excited by
ideas the more complex they get.
During the academic year of 2021-22, you will study two aspects of humans’ relationships with
their environment – Food, and the Anthropocene. Combining Anthropology and History, Earth
Science and History of Science, you will not only learn the rudiments of those disciplines and read
contemporary research in those fields, but also think about how each contributes to
understanding our place in the natural world – both as agents and victims, and as manipulators of
and profoundly shaped by our relationships with the earth and its products.
Admissions questions
1. Explain how enrolling in the liberal arts and sciences during your four years at Penn matters to
you. (100 words or fewer)
2. Why is integrating the humanities, natural sciences/math and social sciences important to the
liberal arts? (100 words or fewer)
3. After your year in the Integrated Studies Program, what would be the mark for you of having
achieved success in the Program? (100 words or fewer)
4. You will be studying Earth Sciences, History of Science, History and Anthropology. It will be
challenging to excel in all four areas. How do you anticipate approaching what might be a new
kind of academic challenge for you? (100 words or fewer)
5. Following these questions, you will find syllabi for the year in ISP. Please read these syllabi and
then review Week 6 of the Food semester, and Week 2 of the Anthropocene semester. Choose
either the Fall 2021 pair of courses or the Spring 2022 pair of courses (but not both) and answer
ONE of the following questions.
1Food and Society: Week 6 examines the impact of agriculture from anthropological and historical
perspectives. The data from two major subfields of anthropology, archaeology and biological
anthropology, tell us how the decision to grow crops impacted both human bodies (such as higher
fertility rates and decreasing dental health) and social structures (such as increasing urbanization and
growing gender differentiation). Recent histories have sought to trace the ways in which economic
inequality stems from agricultural regimes. Central to the historical approach is how a particular
phenomenon - inequality - results from settled agriculture, such as charting the development of
different labor regimes, or different ways of owning land. In your opinion, was the “agricultural
revolution” a good thing? How might the transition from nomadic food gathering to agricultural food
production be viewed differently from Anthropological and Historical lenses?
The Anthropocene: Week 2 of the course introduces the concept of the Anthropocene. First coined by
an atmospheric scientist about two decades ago, the term has since been heavily debated by the
Anthropocene Working Group (an interdisciplinary research group within the International Commission
on Stratigraphy, a group of geologists). At the same time, social scientists, the humanities, and artists
have all engaged with the concept and developed their own interpretations and critiques. What do you
think it is about the Anthropocene that generates so much interest from such a wide range of
disciplines? Do you think these different perspectives can be reconciled?
2INTG 001 (Fall): Food
An Anthropology of Eating: Food, Health, Identity, and Society
“Next to breathing, eating is perhaps the most essential of all human activities, and one with which
much of social life is entwined,” (Mintz and Du Bois 2002). Food is simultaneously a universal, human
necessity and a key medium through which individual and cultural identity is expressed. Evolutionarily,
food sharing may represent a large part of how humans came to be so successful. Likewise, changes in
food production systems underlies some of the most critical moments in the deep history of humanity.
Consumption has been and always will be a foundational component of society and culture and, with
the challenges facing human society today, the study of food is more pressing than ever.
This stream is designed to survey the complex ways that food and food-related activities are woven into
human behavior. As a discipline dedicated to the study of human physical and cultural diversity in all
times and places, anthropology is a fitting lens through which to examine the multi-faceted nature of
human foodways. We will examine foodways from a holistic anthropological perspective by applying a
four-field approach, integrating discussions of the biological, cultural, linguistic, and archaeological
contexts of food production, preparation, presentation, consumption, and disposal. We will consider the
role of food in critical junctions of human history and learn how evolution, history, and culture have
shaped food into both a dietary need and a cultural construction. We will address contemporary issues
related to food, health, identity, and society such as food insecurity, geo-politics, and consumerism. In
doing so, we will think critically about our own personal food histories and about Philadelphia’s food
culture.
Food in History and History through Food
Food seems like an unchanging fact of life: we need it, it needs to be healthy, it would be nice if it tasted
good, and we shouldn’t eat too much of it. Almost all of those “facts” turn out to be historically
contingent: different historical populations have required much more, and much less, food than our
2000 calories; what constituted “healthy” food has varied from lard to vegetables; and the cultural
definition of “overeating” has varied from meat once per month to enough to induce vomiting. Because
many aspects of food culture seem unchanging, but are subject to radical change over time, food is a
perfect vehicle to interrogate the importance and meaning of history. A history of food also requires
multiple branches of history - economic, political, social and cultural history - and demands that the
historian juggle all these kinds of history at once, while asking what different pasts, different kinds of
history reveal. Food history, then, is advanced history.
This stream provides both a historical lens on food - its production, consumption and movement - and a
lens on history, providing an introduction to different subfields of history and how they interact and
operate. Our trajectory will thus deliberately eschew chronological order in favor of thematic problems,
problems which allow us an opportunity to explore both a different branch of history, as well as a
different historical problem. We’ll ask how food and food production has been used to dice up history
and value different periods over others; how the notion of “health” and its measurement has changed
over time; the role that food has played in the construction of national identity and the definitions of
capitalism; and the role of food in religious and political histories. The problems of inequality,
oppression and scarcity will run through all our discussions, and the role that food, or its lack, plays in
the lives and histories of working, enslaved and marginalized people.
3Both streams of the course will make use of frequent experiential exercises, from food shopping and
cooking exercises, to food budgeting and visits to excavations, gardens, and archives. The idea will be to
use your everyday experiences to denaturalize food, to force you to rethink a “normal” activity through
anthropological and historical lenses.
WEEK Anthropology History
Setting the Anthropological Table: Writing Histor(ies) with Food: What
Week 1 An introduction to anthropology, its key does a history of Europe and America
methods and concepts, and the look like when told through food?
relationship between its various What it means to do economic, social,
subdisciplines. How does one think about and cultural history - all at the same
food anthropologically? time.
Experiential Exercise: Smartphone Food Record: What do you eat in a day? What’s the
last food you photographed? How have your answers to these questions been
influenced by your own personal food history?
Our Heritage as Omnivores, Primates, Food and the Idea of Progress: How
Week 2 and Hominids: has food been used as a proxy for
What is the relationship between food human progress - or its opposite? An
and human evolution? Discuss how diet introduction to social history, using
affected the evolution of our physical, food as a proxy for historical change
behavioral, and cultural characteristics. and our valuation of it.
Experiential Exercise: Fieldtrip: Visit to the Penn Museum’s physical anthropology
collection.
Good Foods / Bad Foods: Nutritionism Beer, bacon and beans: Defining
Week 3 and Anthropology: “Healthy Diets” in the Historical Past:
Explore the changing nature of the Biological “health” would seem to be a
Omnivore’s Dilemma. Are there “good historical constant, but what people
foods” and “bad foods”? How have have thought was “healthy” has
concepts of nutrition changed through changed radically over time, reflecting
time and what defines good nutrition social, cultural and economic values.
today?
Experiential Exercise: Food Labels In Your Kitchen: What foods do you have in your
kitchen? How are they labelled? How are these products made meaningful – socially,
economically, nutritionally – by their packaging?
Our Bodies, Metabolism, and Health: The Historical Body and Human
Week 4 Explore the history and application of Health:
nutritional science in anthropology. Are How have historians used, and
we what we eat? How do social and misused, biometric measurements like
economic inequalities get under the skin? height and weight to assess the
“health” of a population.
Experiential Exercise: Biometrics Through Time: We’ll ask you to use different
biometric measurements, popular at different moments in time, to “evaluate” your
body.
4How Humans Get Their Food: Studying Herding and Hoeing: Pastoralism and
Week 5 Foodways in the Past: Sedentary Agriculture in History:
How do we classify the ways that people The modes of food production have
get their food? What influences these been one of the major categories
different subsistence practices? How do historians have used to slice up history
they promote relationships between - and peoples.
people and structure daily life?
Experiential Exercise: Urban Foraging: Edible plants are found from the Quad to Van
Pelt library and include species like juneberries, hickory nuts, and spicebushes.
The Origins and Impact of Agriculture: Agriculture and the Origins of
Week 6 The relationship between plants, animals, Inequality:
and people is complex. What were the Some historians have argued that
push and pull processes that led to the human economic inequality only really
early domestication of plants and animals? begins with sedentary agriculture.
What happened as humans exerted more They point to the ability to store - and
control and started to produce their own thus accumulate - food reserves, and
food? How do these trends continue to the need to control, and eventually
impact the contemporary world? We’ll own, land. We’ll examine historians’
examine archaeological, biological, and analysis of Roman, medieval and early
cultural anthropological data to answer modern agricultural regimes as
these questions from the perspectives of productive of specific systems of
both nutritional and social “health.” inequality - slavery, serfdom and
tenancy.
Experiential Exercise: Fieldtrip: Food tour of the Penn Museum’s galleries.
How Food Moves: Colonialism and Columbian Exchange and the
Week 7 Industrialism: Invention of “National” Cuisine: How
Connecting the Old and New Worlds imported foods have been used in the
changed everything. Today’s foodways creation of modern nationalism. The
and identities are the product of a long case of Italy.
history of colonial encounters and
changing technology.
Experiential Exercise: Life History of a Dish: Pick a dish. Where do the ingredients
come from? When and how did they converge? Did the dish grow out of similar
dishes? Did it change through time? How has its popularity spread or changed?
Eating Together: Food, Identity, and Cooking and Labor: Stories of African
Week 8 Social Relations: American Cooks in Philadelphia:
Feasting has long been a feature of We’ll discuss the case of George
human sociality, but so has everyday Washington’s chef Hercules (and visit
consumption. How has eating together his kitchen) and the Dutrieuille family
shaped identity and social relations caterers (and see their archive)
through time?
Experiential Exercise: Fieldtrip: Visit to Hercules’ kitchen at the first President’s house.
5What Words Bring to the Table: The Loaded Table: Marie Antoinette,
Week 9 How are food classifications and rules and Nero:
embedded in the social order? We’ll Descriptions of super-abundance as
explore the concept of the recipe and the political history
differences between oral and textual
cooking traditions.
Experiential Exercise: Recipe Chaîne Opératoire: Choose a recipe to make with a friend.
Record through a variety of media, such as writing, photographs, film, or sound, the
series of steps to make the dish. Share the food you’ve cooked together, as part of the
living transmission of culinary knowledge.
Deciphering a Meal: Words and the Empty Table:
Week 10 What gives someone or something How historians versus literary writers
culinary authenticity? By watching cooking have parsed the absence of food. The
shows, we’ll examine how the language case of the Irish Famine
used tells us about the values of the time
and of the intended audience.
Experiential Exercise: Talking about Food: We’ll watch selections from Diners, Drive-
Ins, and Dives and Arracht (2019), a film in Irish about the Irish famine.
Food and the Body: Interrogating our Religion, Denial and the Female
Week 11 Personal Relationships with Food: Body:
How are advertising firms, mass media, How Medieval Christian traditions of
and the beauty, fashion, and cosmetic fasting shaped female identity.
surgery industries changing the way
people define beauty? How does this
affect our relationship with food?
Experiential Exercise: Reflecting on Daily Consumption: Keep a food diary while
reading one of a selection of readings, from Cosmopolitan magazine to Lives of the
Desert Fathers.
The Globalization of Taste: Olive Oil and Bananas: Two Stories
Week 12 How global is your taste? When and about Global Food:
where did those tastes develop? We’ll An introduction to histories of
explore the localization of global foods capitalism via large-scale food export.
using sushi, hamburgers, and coffee.
Experiential Exercise: Tracking Your Food: All of the food in your kitchen will have been
grown somewhere—where? These foodstuffs are no longer living and have been
processed in some manner for distribution and storage—how? How easy is it for you to
(re)connect with the steps involved in producing this food?
The New Face of Hunger: Eating on less than $2 a day: Food and
Week 13 What is food security? What is food Development:
sovereignty? Why are so many people An introduction to modern
malnourished in the richest country on development economics and
earth? household budgets
Experiential Exercise: The Cost of Consumption: Keep a food budget for three days.
6Eating Locally: Philly Phoods: Not Eating Locally: Food Scarcity in
Week 14 Looking at Philly farmers’ markets and the Philadelphia:
local food scene, what defines a Philly A discussion with local policy makers on
food? What does it mean to be a food scarcity in the local community
locavore?
7INTG 002 (Spring): The Anthropocene
The concept of the Anthropocene — the age of humanity — is widely and seriously debated by Earth
scientists, social scientists, humanities scholars, activists, and artists. It provides a controversial but
compelling new lens through which to examine human-environment relationships.
Earth Science: Earth system science (ESS) endeavours to understand the structure and functioning of the
Earth as a complex, adaptive system. As an integrative natural science discipline, ESS combines evidence
from geology, biology (especially ecosystem ecology), and various environmental sciences to create a
relatively new view of our environment. While ESS recognizes that life exerts a strong influence on the
Earth’s chemical and physical environment, humans have not been historically integrated in the
conceptualization of the Earth system except as a minor external factor. There is now unequivocal
evidence for the various ways that humans have altered the “natural” functioning of Earth systems, and
out of these observations was born the term “Anthropocene”. We’ll use the tools of EES to explore: 1)
the beginnings of the Anthropocene and whether it should be formalized as a geological time period, 2)
how and to what degree humans have altered Earth systems, and 3) what the Earth may look like in the
future - with or without humans.
History: Historical scholarship seeks to develop nuanced understandings of the complexities of the
human past, but until recently has taken a fairly simplistic view of the nonhuman entities and forces that
make human life possible and which, in turn, are affected by human activities. In recent years, historians
have begun to develop more sophisticated ways of understanding the entanglement of human and
nonhuman histories through time - a project for which the concept of the Anthropocene has served as
an inspiration, as well as a bridge to parallel developments in the natural sciences. Historians are
increasingly crafting narratives that acknowledge the role of humans in shaping the Earth and the role of
the Earth in shaping human history. We’ll examine some of those narratives and the kinds of evidence
used to support them, while also exploring the history of scientific, artistic, and literary representations
of the Earth and humanity’s place on it.
Professor Alain Plante Professor Etienne Benson
WEEK (Earth Science) (History)
What is Earth system science (ESS)? We will introduce ourselves, describe
Week 1: We will introduce ourselves, describe the basic questions and themes of the
Introductions the basic questions and themes of the course, and review aims, expectations,
course, and review aims, and requirements.
expectations, and requirements.
What is the Anthropocene? Until How does the idea of the
Week 2: recently, humans had been Anthropocene challenge the
The Human Age considered too small and the Earth distinction between “nature” and
too large for human activities to have “culture”? Historians and other
any pervasive and enduring impact scholars in the humanities and social
on the natural function of the Earth’s sciences have traditionally seen the
systems (ie, atmosphere, nonhuman world as beyond their
hydrosphere, biosphere, lithosphere) scope — certainly a necessary
at the global scale. But in 2000, Paul foundation for what they study (you
Crutzen, an atmospheric scientist can’t have politics or novels without
and Nobel laureate, declared that we air, water, and soil), but not itself the
8had “left the Holocene” and entered object of their study. By asserting that
a new human-dominated geologic human activities have fundamentally
age. In the intervening 20 years, the reshaped the Earth’s systems (i.e.,
scientific evidence for human that politics and novels can transform
induced changes to the functioning air, water, soil, etc.), the
of Earth systems (climate, Anthropocene idea has challenged
biodiversity, biogeochemical cycling, humanities scholars to expand their
etc.) is unequivocal. We will examine scope to include the nonhuman
this evidence and how it amounts to world. At the same time, humanities
a new geological age - the scholars have brought their own
Anthropocene. critical perspectives to the
Anthropocene debate, seeking to
show how the idea builds on existing
— and sometimes problematic
— ways of envisioning humanity and
its place on the Earth.
What is geologic time and how have How and why do historians distinguish
Week 3: scientists ascertained Earth’s history? between different historical periods?
Time We will examine how geologic We will consider the possibilities and
periods are defined and how the limits of efforts to expand the
Anthropocene fits in or not. timescales of historical scholarship.
How do we measure Earth as a Can we have direct experience of the
Week 4: whole? We’ll explore the various global environment? We will consider
Space developments in Earth science that the history of viewing the Earth as an
have allowed us to increasingly enclosed sphere in which we dwell,
measure natural phenomena at this but also as a globe that we can survey
largest scale, and the implications for from the outside — or even hold in
how the Earth is now seen as a finite, our hands.
interconnected, system.
When did the Anthropocene start? Why did the Anthropocene start? We
Week 5: We will consider various proposals will consider challenges to the idea
Origin Stories for the origins of the Anthropocene, that certain technological advances,
focusing specifically on the relevance such as the development of an
of stratigraphic evidence. efficient steam engine at the end of
the 18th century, are responsible for
the Anthropocene.
How have humans altered the What kind of knowledge can we have
Week 6: climate? We’ll contrast periods of of the future? We will situate today’s
Climate climate change from the Earth’s past climate models in the longer history of
with current climate change in terms forecasting, prediction, and projection.
of both magnitudes and causes.
While rivers represent a tiny fraction How have rivers shaped human
Week 7: of the water on Earth, they are societies, and vice versa? By studying
Rivers essential to ecosystem function and the history of rivers, we will consider
human wellbeing. How have humans the confluence of human and
changed the quantity and quality of nonhuman forms of historical agency.
water in rivers?
9The history of agriculture and the How did agriculture become
Week 8: growth of food production is industrialized? We will consider the
Nutrients intimately linked with the increased history of agricultural “improvement”
reliance of fertilizer. How has the and industrialization over the longue
increased production and use of durée.
fertilizers changed the global cycling
of nutrient elements such as nitrogen
and phosphorus?
How have humans changed Earth’s How do we narrate loss and mourn
Week 9: biodiversity? We’ll explore the the passing of ways of life? In this
Biodiversity degree to which the Anthropocene session we will consider the loss of
may be engendering a sixth mass biodiversity in this broader sense.
extinction.
Maps of the Earth’s surface typically What’s the value of wilderness? And
Week 10: illustrate the natural biological does wilderness even exist? We will
Land ecosystems and rarely account for consider the troubled history of
the presence or impacts of humans valuing “pristine nature” and
on those spaces. We’ll explore new wilderness in Western cultures.
ways of “putting humans on the
map”.
Humans have constructed objects and Who enjoys the benefits and who
Week 11: created materials never before seen suffers the harms of our era of
Stuff on Earth. A major unintended material abundance? We’ll examine
consequence of the built environment the historical origins of mass
is pollution. While global, these production and the consumer society.
objects and materials are not evenly
distributed.
Earth system science is the product of How have artists envisioned the
Week 12: our increased capacity to generate Anthropocene? We will survey
Visualization observational data at unprecedented contemporary artistic experiments
rates. How are these data generated, and situate them in relation to the
managed, manipulated, and finally, long history of picturing humanity’s
communicated in an understandable relationship to its environment.
way?
How long will the human traces on Why and how have people imagined
Week 13: the Earth last? We’ll examine the the disappearance of humanity from
The Earth After concept of ecosystem resilience and the face of the Earth? We will consider
Us attempt to project what the the history of predictions of human
stratigraphic record might look like extinction, asking what such
after humans. predictions can tell us about the
worlds and values of the people who
made them.
What reasons do we have for What reasons do we have for hope?
Week 14: resignation? Despite a few bright Some people have argued that the
Resignation and spots, the news about environmental Anthropocene offers an opportunity to
Hope in the change is mostly bad. In this session rethink humanity’s place on Earth in a
Anthropocene we will consider reasons to resign way that might lead to a better world
ourselves to the inevitable, as well as than the one we’re leaving behind. In
10some of the possible benefits of this session, we’ll assess the argument
accepting that our world has changed for a “good Anthropocene.”
for the worse.
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