Syllabus
* Schedule of topics and readings
The course requires individual reading. Required readings will be sent at the beginning of the semester.
* Week 1: Kinship and family
Required readings:
Keith H. Basso, To Give up on Words: Silence in Western Apache Culture, Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 26(3), 1970, 213−230.
* Week 2: Ritual and religion
Required readings:
Richard Sosis, The Adaptive Value of Religious Ritual, American Scientist 92(2), 2004, 166−172.
* Week 3: Food and agriculture
Required readings:
Eugene Cooper, Chinese Table Manners: You Are How You Eat, Human Organization 45(2), 1986, 179−184.
* Week 4: Gender and sexuality
Required readings:
Lila Abu-Lughod, Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others, American Anthropologist 104(3), 2002, 783−790.
* Week 5: Health care
Required readings:
Peter J. Brown, Culture and the Evolution of Obesity, Human Nature 2(1), 1991, 31−57.
* Week 6: Business and money
Required readings:
Robert J. Morais, Conflict and Confluence in Advertising Meetings, Human Organization 66(2), 2007, 150−159.
* Week 7: Law and conflict
Required readings:
Catherine Lutz, Making War at Home in the United States: Militarization and the Current Crisis, American Anthropologist 104(3), 2002, 723−735
* Week 8: Environment and community development
Required readings:
Teresa Connor, Auditing poverty? Applied anthropologists and the discourse of development in post-apartheid South Africa, Anthropology Southern Africa 38(1−2), 2015, 88−102.
* Week 9: Culture change
Required readings:
Julia Smith, The Search for Sustainable Markets: The Promise and Failures of Fair Trade, Culture & Agriculture 29(2), 2007, 89-99.
* Week 10: Fieldwork and ethics
Required readings:
Charles Pearson, Philippe Bourgois, Hope to Die a Dope Fiend, Cultural Anthropology 10(4), 1995, 587-593.
* Week 11: Anthropology to what end?
Required readings:
Roy D’Andrade, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Objectivity and Militancy: A Debate I. Current Anthropology 3(6), 1995, 399-440.
Annotation
Course Description
This course reviews basic concepts, perspectives, theories, and methods of applied anthropology. This course explores applied anthropology as the subfield of anthropology, but also as an aspiration, necessity and reality for most contemporary anthropologists. The course discusses the relevance of anthropology to practical concerns such as kinship and family, ritual and religion, food and agriculture, gender and sexuality, health care, business and money, law and conflict, environment and community development, culture change, fieldwork and ethics, among other topics. This course introduces the major areas of applied anthropology combining theoretical issues with concrete ethnographic examples.
Open to all students interested in exploring the use of anthropology for practical purposes.