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Dec 11, 2024
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2024-2025 Undergraduate Catalog
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AN 370 Anthropological Theory
(4 Credits)
This seminar explores the historic and contemporary ways that anthropologists have used key theoretical ideas and explored complex conceptual debates in their research and writing as attempts to understand humankind. These ideas and debates are explored both as historically changing, often confrontational, clashes between different schools of anthropological thought around central disciplinary questions like the definition of culture, the relationship of structure to agency, the question and place of relativity, the relationship between power and knowledge, and the contemporary ethnographic location of culture and identity in a world marked by scalar processes of neoliberal globalization. While these ideas and debates express central disciplinary concerns, the course also contextualizes how these debates are often marked by and directly address broader social and historical contexts of which they are a part. A thematic emphasis of the course is on how anthropological writing is a practice of knowledge making, as well as knowledge dissemination. Through both textual analysis and their own written production, students investigate how subtle shifts in the anthropological style and voice results in different forms of anthropological knowledge.
Prerequisite: AN 120 or AN 150
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