What is ANTH 103 all about?
This course will introduce you to sociocultural anthropology through a series of stories, situations and case studies. During the semester you will discover the enormous range of this field of study, from long-term links across the globe to close contacts among friends and family members. You’ll learn about diverse people and their ways of engaging with the particular worlds around them (and helping to create the worlds around them through their ideas and actions). The thrust of the class is globalization of those worlds, as part of the Global Studies Initiative (GSI). In an increasingly globalized, multicultural world, anthropology is a good base on which to build careers in law, medicine, business, journalism, public policy, politics, public health, social work, international development, education, activism, adventure travel, novel writing, theater, art … almost anything!
Sociocultural anthropology’s main method is ethnographic fieldwork, or long-term participant- observation. This approach contributes a crucial perspective to discussions of globalization. It pays close attention to local, often personal, relationships within and among groups of people. In their analyses, anthropologists consider how actions, interactions and senses of identity are formed by and help form broader structures, whether economic, religious, political or cultural.
As part of the GSI, Anthropology 103 has an unconventional set-up. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, we survey anthropological themes. On five Wednesdays, we attend afternoon lectures. These talks, all about globalization from different perspectives, punctuate the course like blue hyperlinks. They connect to class material, but in unexpected and not always immediately apparent ways. They show us possibilities for broadening ideas about the world.
Class readings will make your own worlds a little, perhaps even a lot, bigger. They move from Thailand to Spanish Harlem, Namibia to Mexico, Mozambique to Silicon Valley and beyond. They ask how gender varies in different places and reflect on how witchcraft helps explain the world for some people; they delve into the debate over gay marriage and ponder the role of ideas about culture in the war on terror. The major case studies we will look at this fall include an investigation of the controversy over how the Yanomami people of the Amazon have been treated by scientists and other outsiders, as well as a long-term study of migration to and from the Polynesian island-nation of Tonga and suburbs in California.
As the weeks pass, we will return again and again to think about the ways global and local contexts—which aren’t actually so distinct—merge and move, often resisting change but also compelling transformations. As we exchange our ideas and compare experiences, the class will undoubtedly compel some transformations in all of our ways of thinking about the world.