Inhabiting Cultural Worlds: Introduction to Anthropology

ECTS: 5

Anthropology addresses humans as social and cultural beings. All over the world, people organize themselves empirically—giving rise to various forms of social structure, which anthropologists study under rubrics such as kinship, age, gender, caste and class. Such structures are continually expressed, reproduced and modified in meaningful ways. Not only do people arrange themselves in various ways, they also devise a wide array of rules to regulate social interactions in the natural and supernatural (spiritual) worlds. Anthropologists study and compare how all of this is achieved—and contested—around the globe, in the present as well as in the past.

Students will be introduced to the field of cultural anthropology, as well as how it relates to other fields of anthropology—namely, linguistic anthropology, physical anthropology and anthropological archaeology. We will discuss crucial concepts and methods in the field, and students will engage with some of the key themes of anthropological research, such as Indigeneity, decolonialization and local worldviews.