Office hours for Fall semester:

Monday and Wednesday 1:00-3:00, Thursday 3:00-5:00 (since these are extensive hours, there will be times when I will need to be elsewhere.  I will leave a notification of this on my door.)

How to get ahold of me:

                      By phone:  #2219

What this course is about: 

    Anthropology is unique among the social sciences in that it studies the human experience from a comparative perspective.  What this means is that it asks:  why do other people (whoever they may be) do things differently from the way we do them?  Does this mean that the way we do things, live in society, believe, may not be the only way; what does this tell us about ourselves?  Where did we gain the conviction that our way of doing things is the only and correct way?  Why is it that human have the ability to create for themselves very different kinds of life in groups and very different ways of perceiving the world?  As a discipline, anthropology believes that asking these questions about human society can lead to insights into who we are as humans, and how society works.

    I have five main objectives in this course.  My first aim is to provide you with an overview of the discipline of cultural anthropology.  We will explore the breadth of the discipline, some of the major areas of work of different sub-disciplines of anthropology, and how anthropology relates to the other social sciences.  We will examine some of the fundamental concepts, such as culture and society, which form the pillars of the discipline.  We will also examine briefly some of  the theoretical approaches that anthropologists take and have taken in studying culture, the methods they use to gather their data and to make sense of what they have observed and recorded, and the range of subjects which most anthropologists deal with in the course of their studies.

    My second aim of the course is to explore the diversity of human cultures (human communities) on the planet.  How truly different are human cultures? Where did this diversity come from?  In what ways are people from different cultures similar to each other?  While exploring cultural diversity we will also take an intimate look into a varied number of human communities in order to understand how they work, how they are different from us, the forces that shape their view of themselves.  We will do this by reading a number of ethnographies, which anthropologists define as intimate and comprehensive depictions of the ways of life and thinking of a community and its members.  Anthropologists base their ethnographies on the extended period of time they live in a community.  I will also be asking you to explore other human groups in class projects and discussions.

    Third, I want you to gain an appreciation of the anthropological perspective, a perspective that is arrived at through the comparison of different cultures, what is known in anthropology as ethnology.  Anthropologists claim that anthropology is a way of both understanding others around the world who live within the contexts of their different cultures, and a particular way to understanding ourselves and our own society.  Paul Rabinow, author of Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco, says anthropology’s fundamental task is "...the comprehension of the self by the detour of the comprehension of the other."  Can we understand ourselves better by attempting to understand others who are very different from ourselves?  We want to explore this question, and ask what exactly it is we learn about ourselves when we realize that our way of life and our perspective on the world is only one among many, who, by the way, think about themselves as we do.

    Fourth, we want to explore what anthropologists do, how anthropology is practiced.  The question anthropologists ask is how one might understand the world from the perspective of someone who is from another culture.  We will examine the ethnographic methods that anthropologists use to gain this perspective, and attempt to evaluate the success of these methods.  We will also do some anthropological research ourselves.

    Finally, I want to give you some tools to apply an anthropological perspective and ethnographic methods to study contemporary problems and issues not only among indigenous peoples and people in underdeveloped countries, but our own society as well.  It is my belief that anthropology has value not only for understanding societies radically different from our own, but offers a perspective that is valuable for understanding issues that confront us in our own social context.  We will explore the experience and causes of hunger, violence and powerlessness, the human causes of environmental crises, the response of people who are caught in the clutches of intimate webs of power over their lives.

    These five aims will be interwoven throughout the course of the semester.

Students will be evaluated on the basis of five criteria:  six quizzes, four small projects, and organized forms of class participation.

All assignments are due on the dates specified. In an effort to give some weight to these dates, and to ensure fair and equal demands on everyone in the class, I will subtract two points from your assignments for each day that any of these assignments are turned in late.

As you can see, the total of all of the class requirements adds up to 1000 points.  Grading is based on the following percentages:

I intend for your work in this class to receive every bit of the recognition it merits; in other words, I believe it is your right to receive credit for the products of your efforts and your work in this class.  Cheating (by anyone in the class) puts in doubt the validity of that recognition, even when you aren't the person who cheated.  Cheating of any kind (plagiarism and copying, particularly) harms everyone in the class, not just the cheater.  I want to foster a cooperative environment in the class; cheating destroys the trust necessary for such cooperation to take place.  While few ideas (if any) are truly original (and thus most ideas are borrowed, and should be acknowledged as such... in many cases an impossible task), where possible you want to attribute the ideas of others that you use in formulating your own ideas and writing to them.  The notion of integrity underlies the scholarly enterprise, which really is simply an interchange or conversation among scholars examining topics of common interest.  We are all privileged to be taking part in this conversation. 

Note that while a syllabus is a guide which allows all of us in the class to be on the same track, it is not written in stone.  There may be times when we need to spend more (or less) time on a subject or issue than is called for, and we may need alter our schedule for other reasons as well.  When this happens I will be sure to let you know where we are on the syllabus.  However, the reading schedule will probably be followed pretty tightly, so you want to pay attention to that.