Key Concepts in Anthropology

Course goals

Content

This course provides a critical genealogical introduction to concepts and categories that have shaped the discipline of cultural anthropology. Combining a historical contextualization of the development of the discipline with an overview of main theories, the course examines the key concepts such as society, culture, kinship, exchange, practice, and power to show how concepts’ meanings and use have evolved with the development of the discipline. We will pay particular attention to anthropology’s theoretical, political, and disciplinary ancestry, examining the influence of figures such as Marx and Durkheim but also European colonialism and evolutionary models. We will examine the ways in which ideas become paradigmatic in particular periods and the critiques that lead to their replacement. In class discussion, we will focus both on close readings of the theories and on the relation of theory to ethnographic data and analysis in anthropology. At the end of the course, the student should have familiarity both with current trends in anthropology and with the relation of those trends to the history of the discipline.