ANTH 1104 - Culture & Society: Foundations of Anthropology

This course provides an introduction to fundamental areas of inquiry in social anthropology. It examines essential aspects of human social life from a cross-cultural perspective, which is one of the defining characteristics of anthropology. It provides an introduction to the historical emergence of anthropology as a distinctive social scientific discipline and takes as its central theme the interaction between human cultural action and social relations. The course is organized around the study of a number of issues in which anthropological debate and analysis has been most intensively focused, including: primary social relations, political and economic relations, religious and ideological relations, and debates about cultural creativity within the context of social structure.

The course aims to show how anthropologists came to analyse human social life in the way they did, and how we can make use of this knowledge to inform the critical analysis of contemporary society, including present-day Australia.