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Social-Cultural Anthropology
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Anthropology began as a discipline devoted to the study of "primitive" or "tribal" societies, but that period lies in the past. Today sociocultural anthropology takes as its field the ways of life of all cultural groups, including our own. Anthropology also increasingly recognizes how globalization has changed older ways of thinking and erased old boundaries. The range of human behaviour and belief is extraordinarily wide. Anthropology gives us the perspective with which to see our own culture and institutions against the background of the rest of the human species, whose beliefs and ways of doing things are often very different from our own. |
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Social and cultural anthropologists generally use ethnography as their major research method. Many anthropologists spend one or two years, or even more, living among the people they are studying and sharing their daily lives. In the course of this work they gather a wide range of information (on everything from the ways in which people obtain their food to their religious rituals and kinship organization). This tradition of field-work with its holistic interests and its dependence on face-to-face relations with real people, rather than on written documents and archives alone, is one of the distinctive features of cultural anthropology, and has been one of its most important contributions to scholarship. However, many anthropologists carry out more focused research, for example on important contemporary issues in our own society.
The 1st-year course is:
- 1A03-Introduction to Culture and Society, provides an introduction to the study of existing peoples, their ways of life, and the ways in which they interpret and experience the world.
2nd-year courses include:
- 2B3-Indigenous Peoples of North America, which is a comparative study of selected cultures of this continent;
- 2R3-Religion, Magic and Witchcraft, which studies selected issues related to witchcraft, science and the supernatural.
3rd-year courses include:
- 3RR3-Sex, Gender, and Inequality, which is a study of topics related to the construction and practice of gender in various cultures; and
- 3HI3-Anthropology of Health, Illness and Healing, which is an interdisciplinary approach to medical anthropology.
4th-year courses include:
- 4AE3-Anthropology and Environment, which is an examination of the ways in which humans interact with their environment; and
- 4I3-Contemporary Anthropological Theory, which examines selected recent developments in anthropological theory .
