Courses

Common Objectives for Fundamental Courses

Approved January 2005

Our courses seek to:

  1. De-exoticize and familiarize the other across space and time
  2. Make the familiar strange and overcoming our common sense
  3. Challenge simplistic paradigms
  4. Appreciate strengths and weaknesses of diverse research methods and approaches
  5. Strive towards a holistic understanding of being human
  6. Recognize the emergent nature of explanation
  7. Reflect how anthropology engages contemporary problems
  8. Explore human diversity
  9. Consider the ethical implications of anthropological knowledge and practice

Core outcomes:

Fundamentals of Archaeology:

1. Knowledge and understanding

Convey the following:

  • how archeologists think about time
  • the relations between material culture and ways of being human
  • the absence of personal memory in human past
  • the role of integrating disparate elements in investigations
  • challenge popular myths about the human lineage/evolution
  • explain the ups and downs of human organization
  • who has ownership of the past and present?
  •  the relevance of archeology to our lives

2. Methods

  • understand diverse sources of evidence
  • examine patterns of material remains through time
  • examine patterns of material remains across space

3. Applications

  • in looking at patterns
  • in making processual explanations
  • in understanding the process of knowledge production

Fundamentals of Biological Anthropology (currently “Fund. of Human Evol.”)

  1. Illustrate human interconnections with life on this planet
  2. Illuminate the transaction/integration between culture and biology
  3. Provide a critical perspective on science and the scientific method
  4. Understand the fossil history of humanity and the role of biocultural adaptation
  5. Elaborate on primate wide trends and human patterns
  6. Gain an understanding of the history and mechanisms of evolution
  7. Recognize the role of synthesis and model building in human evolution
  8. Understand methodologies used in the construction of models for human evolution

Fundamentals of Socio-Cultural Anthropology

1. Understand what ethnography is

2. De-exoticize other ways of life & make students aware of cultural diversity.

  • respect for diversity
  • focus on marginalized and indigenous

3. De-familiarize the familiar

  • comparative and local
  • combat deep-seated ethnocentricity underlying facile multiculturalism

4. Emphasize certain key conceptual tools

  • race/ethnicity/biology & culture
  • gender; symbol, kinship, class, pattern, state/power, structure, economics
  • behavior as well as belief, the notion of “arbitrary”

5. Apply anthropology to contemporary problems

  • code of ethics

6. Convey a general anthropological mood.

  • Engagement, open-endedness, style of thought and writing,
  • Best questions have no “right” answer
  • Non-judgmental.
  • Non-linear “evolutionary” with Western Christian Euro-American culture as crowning achievement of civilization.

Fundamentals of Linguistic Anthropology

  1. Understand that linguistic anthropology is not linguistics but is using language to get at anthropological questions
  2. Examine analysis of language as social phenomena
  3. Recognize diversity of language within a society.
  4. Convey the notion of relativism — no irrational dialects, no primitive languages, just “standard” and “non-standard”
  5. Examine different ways that languages function; nitty gritty of how particular languages might work.
  6. Understand the relation of language and culture; Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
  7. Examine the nature of language and origin of language; inter-species, relation to call systems and communication.
  8. Examine the role of language in matters of power, gender, ethnicity, class, institutions, and social interactions
  9. Introduce an array of methods for analysis of language and the appropriate use, benefits, and limits of each method
  10. Unseat comfortable and familiar myths about language