Course description
The course explores anthropological approaches to society, culture, history, and current events. Themes include social organization, ideology, religion, exchange, subsistence, gender, land use, ethnicity, ethnic conflict, and local/global interrelations. Students explore these themes through detailed studies of women in North Africa, ethnicity in Bosnia, ritual exchange in the South Pacific, and political organization in Southeast Asia. The instructor also reviews his current applied research on contemporary indigenous responses to political, economic, and ecological changes in Latin America, with special emphasis on the Amazon Basin. Students grapple with the intellectual and ethical challenges, both past and present, of anthropologists.
