ANTH 4019 is also offered in Spring 2025
ANTH 4019 is also offered in Spring 2023
ANTH 4019 is also offered in Spring 2022
Spring 2022 | ANTH 4019 Section 001: Symbolic Anthropology (66198)
- Instructor(s)
- Class Component:
- Lecture
- Credits:
- 3 Credits
- Grading Basis:
- Student Option
- Instructor Consent:
- No Special Consent Required
- Instruction Mode:
- Completely Online
- Class Attributes:
Delivery Mode
- Times and Locations:
Regular Academic Session
Tue,
Thu 02:30PM - 03:45PM
Off Campus
UMN REMOTE
- Enrollment Status:
Open (22 of 25 seats filled)
- Also Offered:
- Course Catalog Description:
- Pragmatic/structural aspects of social symbolism cross-culturally. Focuses on power, exchange, social boundaries, gender, and rituals of transition/reversal. prereq: 1003 or 1005 or grad student or instr consent
- Class Description:
- Why sociocultural anthropology (of all the attempts at understanding the human)? What is different about it (other than its apparent association with geographical diversity)? This course attempts to boldly spell out the discipline's signature impulses, if not the creed, through the loose notion 'symbol' as one of its central watershed theoretical ideas. Broadly conceived, symbols make the absent present and the present absent, and thereby allow us to stand at the threshold between the world of objects and that of the spirit, between the body and mind, and between the outer and the inner. At the collective level, cultural meanings are made accessible to public negotiation through the materialization in symbols. Such 'materialization' includes explicit forms of performance such as ritual, theater, and implicit inscriptions on the face, tattoos, gifts, fashion, etc. By so situating itself at the thresholds of sanctified boundaries of modern rationality (e.g., mind/body), the discipline has gained itself a unique place among the social scientific pursuits: its attention to the degrees of an inherent openness or instability in the 'materialized' meanings has made it the most 'humanistic' of social sciences, which does not shy away from the most fundamental questions on human existence (such as God), even as it stays conversant in the more 'scientific' pursuits. The course attempts to show the possibilities of thinking opened up by such a versatile impulse of the discipline.
- Textbooks:
- https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/66198/1223
- Instructor Supplied Information Last Updated:
- 23 March 2012
ClassInfo Links - Spring 2022 Anthropology Classes