Do you want to download this syllabus as a PDF?

Course Description

This course provides an introduction to the global diversity of human cultures and sociocultural processes. It examines cross-cultural patterns and variations in how people organize themselves, understand and communicate their worlds, and engage in conflict and accommodation. This course also introduces you to the discipline of sociocultural anthropology, and, given the ever-changing nature of its subject, its approaches to cultural change and contemporary social problems. It is a course rich in ethnographic case studies, and you will be exposed to a broad array of ways that cultures mediate human thought, belief, and action.

The approach we will take is problem-centered. That is, the course is organized around a number of central questions that anthropologists have been asking and trying to answer for quite some time. It is my experience that this approach encourages interactive, hands-on learning, which I believe is the most effective way to think about these weighty matters. These questions include: 1) Why should we, and how can we, know other cultures? 2) Why are some societies seemingly "more advanced" than others? 3) Why is the nation-state the dominant political form? 4) How do we explain the radical differences between people in what they believe? 5) What does it mean to be in a family? 6) How do people determine and communicate who they are? 7) Why and how do people create and maintain social hierarchies? 8) How do societies create and manage conflict? and 9) What is the future of cultural diversity, and anthropology's study of it? In answering these questions, we will examine many different cultures, but crucial to our inquiry will be the analysis of characteristic American thought patterns and behaviors.

The following required texts are available for purchase at the University Store:

1. Robbins, R. (2001) Cultural Anthropology: A Problem-Based Approach, 3rd Edition. F.E. Peacock.

2. Haviland, W., R. Gordon and L. Vivanco (2002) Talking About People: Readings in Contemporary Cultural Anthropology. 3rd Edition. McGraw-Hill.