Anthropology: People & Cultures of the World

ANT 121: People and Cultures of the World is a regularized undergraduate course delivered through classroom-based instruction and homework. The class may consist of both Summer College and undergraduate students. The main goal of this class is to introduce students to the relationship between culture, power, and identities and to examine how anthropologists have been grasping, understanding, and writing about these issues in diverse social and cultural settings. In order to critically approach and study peoples and cultures around the world, we will especially focus on the processes that have been conceptually grouped under the rubric of social inequality and violence. This class is divided into two main parts. In the first part, titled “Culture/Power/Identities” we will draw on a number of ethnographic writings and films that focus on the basis of social inequality and relationships shaped by differences of race, class, ethnicity, generation and gender. The second half of class, broadly titled “Global Assemblages,” will address numerous effects that global process have had on peoples and cultures of the world. Here we will investigate the phenomena such as neoliberalism, tourism, organ trafficking, commercial surrogacy, and war and peace, and we will critically examine the emerging forms of social inequality that these global processes generate. ANT 121 satisfies the Social Sciences Division requirements for Syracuse University undergraduates.