ANTHRO 130W: Low-Tech: Indigeneous Technologies for Sustainable Futures

Course Description

From backyard solar panels and water wells to DIY filters and cookware, what can small-scale, locally crafted technologies teach us about survival, adaptation, and creativity in the Anthropocene that high-tech solutions often overlook? This course traces the life-worlds of indigenous technologies across mountains, forests, deserts, and coastal regions. Through case studies such as wildfire management, water harvesting aqueducts, and floating reed islands, students explore how seemingly vernacular technologies meet the functional, economic, socio-political, and aesthetic needs of indigenous communities that create and sustain them. Drawing on anthropology, archaeology, and ecological philosophy, this course further examines the sustainability, resilience, accessibility offered by these low-tech technical solutions in the contemporary world. Students will engage with theoretical frameworks from social ecologies, Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), appropriate technology, and Anthropocene studies.