Concepts and Methods in Cultural Anthropology

Course Description

What is cultural anthropology? What kinds of questions do cultural anthropologists ask and how do they go about answering them? How do anthropologists make sense of lived experiences, and what contributions have they made to understanding the diversity of social, political, and economic worlds and to tracing the myriad connections between them? This course explores key concepts, methods, debates, and trajectories in cultural anthropology through our close reading and engagement with anthropological texts, fiction, film (documentary, ethnographic, and feature), podcasts, and other documentary texts.

We will engage critically with the history of anthropology to explore ongoing questions about power, subjectivity, identity, and epistemology in anthropological research. Through intensive reading, active participation in class discussions, and weekly written responses, students will analyze anthropological approaches to understanding key concepts such as culture, ethnography, race, ethnicity, gender, environment, health, well-being, migration, violence, and social suffering. Students will gain skills in conducting anthropological fieldwork, including research design, participant-observation, and interviewing.

Learning Outcomes

At the end of this course, students should be able to:

• Outline key scholarly concerns and approaches of cultural anthropologists.
• Identify how the discipline has changed over time.
• Understand and apply a basic vocabulary for discussing key issues within cultural anthropology and adjacent social sciences, including: culture, race, gender, sexuality, kinship and relatedness, inequality, migration, material culture, health and healing, symbolism, and ritual.
• Understand ethnography as 1) a social scientific research method and 2) a genre of analytic writing. Students will learn strategies for reading contemporary ethnographies and connect ethnographic research with anthropological theories.
• Practice analytic reading, writing, and discussion skills that are broadly useful in the humanities, social sciences, and professional contexts.