ClassInfo

This course is an introduction into culture and the making of humanity, past and present. What is culture, and what are the everyday practices, values, beliefs, and resources that go into the making of the human? We will ask questions such as the following: What makes jokes funny? How do identities and unequal social orders get made and reproduced? How can we understand human cultural variation and diversity? Why is there so much socio-economic inequality in the contemporary world, and how can we make sense of it to help address massive social problems and challenges?

This course is also an introduction to what it means to "to think like an anthropologist" - which entails challenging our own assumptions and cultural preconceptions about ourselves, other peoples, and the world around us. What does it mean to understand "the natives' points of views"? What if the exotic "others" are actually "us"? What is "us," anyway? In addition to making the "strange familiar" and the "familiar strange," we also investigate what is at stake in doing cultural analysis that is both grounded and responsive to people's lived experiences, and makes claims about the larger world. Key topics to be explored are power and inequality, race and ethnicity, colonialism, globalization, economy and economics, suffering and violence, gender and sexuality, kinship and family.

Weekly readings will pair introductory materials from our textbook with advanced theoretical articles and parts of ethnographies, through which we will discover a variety of cultural practices in settings from suburban high schools in California to the one-child policy in China to performances of modernity in Côte d'Ivoire. Instead of memorizing discrete cultural facts, students will be asked to acquire and use critical thinking skills to understand and analyze some of the central social issues of our time.

This course is an introduction into culture and the making of humanity, past and present. What is culture, and what are the everyday practices, values, beliefs, and resources that go into the making of the human? We will ask questions such as the following: What makes jokes funny? How do identities and unequal social orders get made and reproduced? How can we understand human cultural variation and diversity? Why is there so much socio-economic inequality in the contemporary world, and how can we make sense of it to help address massive social problems and challenges?

This course is also an introduction to what it means to "to think like an anthropologist" - which entails challenging our own assumptions and cultural preconceptions about ourselves, other peoples, and the world around us. What does it mean to understand "the natives' points of views"? What if the exotic "others" are actually "us"? What is "us," anyway? In addition to making the "strange familiar" and the "familiar strange," we also investigate what is at stake in doing cultural analysis that is both grounded and responsive to people's lived experiences, and makes claims about the larger world. Key topics to be explored are power and inequality, race and ethnicity, colonialism, globalization, economy and economics, suffering and violence, gender and sexuality, kinship and family.

Weekly readings will pair introductory materials from our textbook with advanced theoretical articles and parts of ethnographies, through which we will discover a variety of cultural practices in settings from suburban high schools in California to the one-child policy in China to performances of modernity in Côte d'Ivoire. Instead of memorizing discrete cultural facts, students will be asked to acquire and use critical thinking skills to understand and analyze some of the central social issues of our time.