Cross-Cultural Perspectives
ANTH 20100
Stuart Wright
Department of Anthropology, Gender Studies, and International Studies, City College of New York (CCNY), City University of New York (CUNY).
Fall 2020, Spring 2021, Fall 2021.
Course description: This course provides a general overview of the field of socio-cultural anthropology – a discipline that seeks to “make the strange familiar and the familiar strange”. The course will expose students to a diverse range of concepts and theories that are central to socio-cultural anthropology, with a focus on understanding, complicating, and theorizing “culture.” Students will gain a fuller understanding of socio-cultural anthropology, ethnographic methodologies, the “culture” concept, and the complexities of socio-cultural life. Our primary questions will be: What is culture? How do cultural practices vary across social contexts? How can culture be multiple and contradictory? What are the ethnographic methods that allow us to study culture?
1. Introductions: “Large Issues Explored in Small Places”
2. The Story of Anthropology: The “New” World
3. History in Context
4. Culture Shock: Fieldwork
5. Economy, Obligation, and Reciprocity
6. The Ties That Bind: Kinship and the Social Order
7. Culture, Symbol, Myth, and Meaning
8. Health, Medicine, and Society
9. Gender and International Development
10. Race, Science, and Human Diversity
11. The Politics of Culture
12. “Development”, Sociocultural Change, and Globalization
13. Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal
14. Decolonizing Anthropology