ANTH 3006 is also offered in Spring 2025
ANTH 3006 is also offered in Spring 2023
ANTH 3006 is also offered in Summer 2022
Fall 2020 | ANTH 3006 Section 001: Humans and Aliens: Learning Anthropology through Science Fiction (34795)
- Instructor(s)
- Class Component:
- Lecture
- Credits:
- 3 Credits
- Grading Basis:
- Student Option
- Instructor Consent:
- No Special Consent Required
- Instruction Mode:
- Completely Online
- Class Attributes:
- UMNTC Liberal Education RequirementOnline Course
- Meets With:
- ANTH 2006 Section 001
- Times and Locations:
- Regular Academic Session09/08/2020 - 12/16/2020Mon, Wed, Fri 09:05AM - 09:55AMOff CampusUMN REMOTE
- Enrollment Status:
- Open (7 of 10 seats filled)
- Also Offered:
- Course Catalog Description:
- Pairs anthropology texts with science fiction stories to illustrate how our future is more dependent on how humanity works anthropologically than what next technological invention has to offer.
- Class Notes:
- This course is completely online in a synchronous format. The course will meet online at the scheduled times.
- Class Description:
- Science Fiction has been one of the most popular genres of literature over the last century and a half. Despite its great popularity, however, many fans of the genre do not realize how much it has in common with the discipline of Anthropology. Anthropology is the study of what it means to be human in all times and places. Science fiction, for its part, explores human existence in equally diverse contexts, except that those imagined contexts frequently have not yet happened. Despite this similarity, anthropology is extremely poorly known compared to science fiction. This course uses the stimulating and entertaining literature of science fiction to expose students to anthropology who, having never been exposed to it in high school, are likely to leave university without learning the power of the discipline's perspective on humanity. Through individual pairings of anthropology texts and science fiction stories, the course explores the relevance of biological anthropology, social anthropology, linguistic anthropology, and archaeology to humanity's future. The course's juxtaposition of anthropological literature to science fiction stories is designed to provide students with the ability to see how our future is more dependent on how humanity works (as anthropology understands it), than merely what the next technological invention has to offer us.This course introduces students to the breadth of anthropological topics using the literature of such award-winning science fiction (SF) authors as Isaac Asimov, Octavia Butler, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein, Frank Herbert, Ursula K. Le Guin, China James Tiptree, Jr., and Kurt Vonnegut. While the course is not designed to cover the literary criticism of SF literature nor the social analysis of the SF
community of readers and authors, the choice of which SF authors to oppose to select anthropological topics was shaped by my understanding of the historical development of SF literature. Students will thus read stories written from the Golden Age of magazine SF to the most recent post-cyberpunk novelists. The selection of SF stories is of course idiosyncratic but it is designed to reflect the goal of learning something of anthropology while having a blast reading SF.The main structure of the course is the pairing of a science fiction text
(novel, novella, or short story) that touches on a specific anthropological topic (or theme) with readings from the anthropological literature on that theme. If the SF text touches on multiple anthropological themes, that one text is used as the touchstone for a suite of anthropological themes, thus keeping the SF reading list from ballooning beyond that of a three credit course. SF literature can be, after all, very long. Thus, while an emphasis was placed on the short-story medium to lessen the SF reading load and anthropological articles rather than monographs, a few SF novels could not be avoided. These novels, however, do provide the grist for many anthropological themes.(or "alien", "sentient", or "something in between") accessible to students without previous experience in a social science or biological anthropology course. ANTH3006, on the other hand, provides a venue for Anthropology majors and other social science students to experience the closer connections between the four fields of anthropological research
(biological anthropology, social anthropology, linguistic anthropology, and archaeology) than in any other course in the university's curriculum. This is one of the few four-field anthropology courses at the university. Other courses in the Anthropology department forefront one or two fields alone and, while they provide a richness in depth, these courses perforce reduce the synergy in the holistic enterprise that is the four-field anthropological perspective on humanity. This is the specific intellectual goal of ANTH3006. - Who Should Take This Class?:
- This course satisfies thehttps://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/34795/1209
- Instructor Supplied Information Last Updated:
- 11 October 2017
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