Social Anthropology: Foundations and Frontiers

What can the comparative study of human societies tell us about the possibilities and limits of social life? This course explores the core concepts, methods, and debates of social anthropology. We examine how anthropologists have theorized culture, difference, and social life, as well as how those theories have been contested and revised. Topics include ethnographic methods, economic organization and exchange, race and ethnicity, language and communication, kinship and gender, political authority, religion and ritual, colonialism, and the global expansion of capitalism. Throughout, we consider how the discipline's methods and central questions have developed in response to changing historical circumstances. Readings draw on both classical ethnography and contemporary scholarship to show how foundational questions—What is a gift? How does kinship work? Why do people classify each other by race?—remain productive sites of disagreement. Students develop facility with ethnographic reasoning and with the analytical vocabulary that underpins work across the social sciences. The course is designed both for those encountering anthropology for the first time and for those seeking a rigorous grounding in anthropological thought.