This class should be called Anthropology of Islam. As much as I found it interesting, his lectures are not clear at all and he scribbles incoherent things on the board. His expectations are sometimes unrealistic and he purposefully tricked half of our class when it came to a midterm makeup exam. Take this class at your own risk.

Great class and great professor! Highly recommend!

Great class, highly recommend!

This course has a HUGE focus on Islam and is not a general anthropology of religion class. He is a very disorganised lecturer and the exams are tough, he offered a makeup for the midterm but was very misleading about its format and content. He also said there would be two short answers in the final - turns out this was actually 2 22 mark essays worth half your grade. The final was full of mistakes. He takes a long time to post slides online and they often miss out key information and terms. Interesting content and readings but would not recommend due to the poor organisation and standard of the exams.

Terrible. Messed up the entire class' midterm grade and made us go to office hours one by one to fix the mistake-- my grade would be a whole letter lower if a kid didn't notice his mistake.
Lecture is scattered, but all that matters is the study guides. Not a hard class, but very frustrating.

Professor Boum is a really nice, approachable guy, and though boring and long sometimes his lectures could also be intersting. If you need an easy A this is an okay class. His biggest downfall is his disorgaization and lack of clarity. He has the most confusing powerpoint slides and though he puts them online, not everything on them matters and he lectures a lot of important details that arent on the slides. He claims to have required readings but I never read them, I just studied the study guide and googled most of the terms, (though one the first midterm, when he said study which countries the different groups reside, everyone though he meant the main ones we focused on, but then he tested us on a bunch of sub-groups that I doubt anyone knew). I got an A in the class probably because he has like 25% of free points and the exams aren't that difficult if you memorize the study guide. But there is a group essay as a final, and I think I just got lucky with group members that actually did their part, so be careful.

The content of this class was ok. However, what I really did not enjoy was how hard it was to access the professor. Although the professor was a nice person, he was often erratic in answering emails/having office hour sessions. Also, his instructions for the various assignments we did were pretty vague, which for me was hard to come by. Nevertheless, he is still OK and the class material is intriguing if you have never taken a course on Africa.

Taken during covid online. He gave me an A in the class and on my final paper. The final was a 9 page policy proposal for one of the countries in north africa. There was some lack of clarity, Yet I feel like he deserves some slack in his transition to online. Take him. If you put in a reasonable amount of effort its an
A

This class was "study of culture" but he essentially treated it like those classes ending in 9, so it was really "anthropology of sport." There were usually 2-4 readings per week about mid-long length. Each week we had to submit questions to our TA as proof of having read the papers, but this wasn't a huge percentage of our grade.

There were 3 assignments: 1 to observe a sports game, 1 to interview/analyze an interview of an athlete, and 1 to write a biography on an athlete. Each of these assignments required us to apply core concepts. These were the bulk of the grade. They weren't too bad, but it depends on the TA that grades it. They were all also group assignments, so individually not that much work.

Aomar Boum was a pretty decent lecturer. He didn't record the lectures, but he did upload slides. The slides didn't have a lot of information either so if you wanted to learn the material you had to go to lecture.

I'm not sure how often this class is taught, but it wasn't very high stakes. It was easy and the topic was interesting. I would take it again.