Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology

Course goals

Content

How can we explain the great cultural variation among human societies when humankind constitutes a biological unity? Why do these cultural differences continue to persist, despite people’s growing integration in the encompassing world system? This course provides an anthropological perspective on these central questions by examining the history, foundations, and some key cases of the discipline.
The course consists of two parts. Part I introduces the history and development of some of the basic concepts, approaches, and research methods of social and cultural anthropology. Selected readings from Nanda and Warms’ textbook, Cultural Anthropology, establish the principal areas of anthropological inquiry. Students gain insight into ethnographic methodology through a field visit involving preparation, observation description. Part II develops the conceptual and ethnographic insights acquired in Part I through the study of globalization and Brazilian urban culture. Donna Goldstein’s ethnography of a Rio de Janeiro shantytown demonstrates the continuing relevance of cultural anthropology for the study of contemporary post-industrial society. Goldstein portrays the lives of the poor in a Brazilian favela, conveying the most intimate and hidden details of their lives: from crime and sexual to responsibilities of kinship and friendship, to childhood dreams of riches and the search for dignity. This focus on problems of the inner city shows the consequences of polarized race, class and gender relations, the relationship between culture and the economy, and between individual responsibilities, agency structural constraints. Relevant chapters of  Nanda and Warms’ textbook and a number of articles provide a conceptual framework for Goldstein's ethnography. Students gain further insight into ethnographic methodology and questions of representation through a field visit to an ethnographic museum.