Anthropology

Course Description

Description
Anthropology as a scientific discipline has been collecting an impressive array of knowledge about human diversity both in present and past societies. This knowledge helps to understand and interact with others in societies that are every day more interconnected and diverse.

This course is an introduction to social anthropology, and tries to explain and apply what is cultural diversity and how it is studied. The study of the analysis of variability and cultural evolution in the fields of kinship, economics, politics, religion, and symbolic representations teaches how to perceive, think and live the cultural differences and similarities.

The course allows students to understand the meaning of diversity in human relationships and its different expressions today by practicing anthropological thinking and reasoning.

Prerequisites
None.

Contents
Unit 0.- Anthropology in contemporary world.

Unit I.- The construction of Anthropology as discipline. Description: Observing and thinking diversity. The Western world and the conscience of social otherness. The process of formation of anthropology and a scientific discipline. Description of the main schools of thought. Instruction on the vocabulary used in anthropology.

Concepts: Spontaneous anthropology. The enlightened thinking. Evolutionism. Particularism. Diffusion of cultures. Function and structure in cultures. Cultural materialism. Postmodernity and otherness.

Unit II.- Social bonds. Description: Analysis of the main models of social structure, through the study of the existing human relations and interactions, production, space and demography through the observation of cultural configuration

Concepts: Males and females. Family: Marriage and kinship. The environment and its mediation in the formation of cultures: human ecosystems. Producing and working. Giving, receiving, exchange and market. Circulation and consumption of economic goods: reciprocity, redistribution and market. Economy of cultures and productive systems: differences and relations between material and non-material goods. Order in human relations: politics or culture?

Unit III.- Forms of thinking and representing social reality. Description: Analysis and study of the existing implications between the ways of thinking and mechanisms which articulate production and reproduction of conditions for socially living together.

Concepts: Formation and socialization of ideas culturally established. Acculturation and Endoculturation. Individual, community, personality and culture. Representation, identity and social coexistence. Normative systems and social values: ideology, identities, myth and magic.

Methodology
Class hours will be coordinated by the professor in lectures on basic concepts and topics. Students will need to prepare the topics, individually or working in group, in order to follow each of the classes.

Individual assignments will ask students to describe, compare and reflect about important social institutions. Deadlines will be set during the first week of the semester.

Group project. Students will work on a group project in order to apply knowledge and skills to a specific case. The goal is to apply anthropological theory and analytic skills to real information in order to understand and undertake qualitative analysis on cultural realities.

Assessment
The course will be assessed through:
1.- Written exam on several questions about the course contents. 40% of the final grade.
2- Two response papers on topics assigned by the professor. 30% of the final grade.
3 - Group project. 30% of the final grade.