Professor Charlene Makley
Office: 312 Vollum
Phone: 771-1112, ext. 7461
Office Hours: Tues/Thurs 4:40-6:00 pm
Email Charlene Makley
Course Description
This course is meant to give you an introduction to the history, theory, methods, and subject matter of the field of social and cultural anthropology. Through readings, discussions, essays and other exercises, we will explore the competing conceptual frameworks and techniques of research and interpretation sociocultural anthropologists have used to study humankind. Throughout the semester, we will be exploring these issues in the context of the emergence of anthropology as a distinct academic discipline during the expansion of European and American control over colonized others around the world. In this historical context, we will consider such questions as what is the nature of "the human"? How do we account for diversity among humans worldwide? What is the relationship between the "individual" and the "social" or "cultural"? and What are the politics and possibilities of a "science" of humans?
Course Goals:
- To give you an introduction to the social theory debates and concepts that built the discipline of anthropology in the context of colonial and postcolonial modernities.
- To help you learn to read dense theoretical and ethnographic texts, and to be able to grasp, compare, and critique authors' basic premises and the potential consequences of their theories and methods, and then apply/critique them in your own written analyses.
- To inaugurate your rethinking of the nature of the human and of yourself as a particular agent and subject in the world.
Distribution Requirements:
This course can be used to fulfill one of your Group II "History and Social Science" distribution requirements. It accomplishes the following learning outcomes for the group:
- Evaluate data and/or sources
- Analyze institutions, formations, languages, structures, or processes, whether social, political, religious, economic, cultural, intellectual or other
- Think in sophisticated ways about causation, social and/or historical change, human cognition, or the relationship between individuals and society, or engage with social, political, religious or economic theory in other areas.
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