History of Sociocultural Anthropology

ANTHRO 2905 Subject & Catalog Number

Description

This course is designed for students beginning graduate study in social and cultural anthropology and is required for all first-year Social Anthropology graduate students. It is intended to provide critical skills for reading in and contributing to social and cultural theory. It offers a selective overview of theoretical and empirical trends in the discipline of anthropology, focusing on theoretical genealogies within the discipline at large. The course asks what has counted for anthropologists as legitimate research questions, forms of research, categories and paradigms for analyzing data, and approaches to ethnographic writing. The hope is that students will begin to re-assemble elements of the discipline’s past and present in the form of a scholarly agenda for the discipline’s future. Ultimately, the course is designed to prepare students to understand the primary historical genealogies within anthropological theorizing and to begin to position themselves within those genealogies.