What Is Anthropology Today?

Fall 2012 – Eugene Lang College, New York

LANT 3011A – Tue/Thu, 11:55–1:35pm

Course description

What Is Anthropology Today?

This course provides an introduction into contemporary anthropology through a selection of problems preoccupying the field today. Students will get glimpses of the discipline's past and will have opportunity to imagine its futures. But the focus will be on current questions such as the following: Does a reflection on different ethnic groups still present a royal road to our understanding of humankind? What role does cultural difference play in an increasingly globalized world? Can the descriptive practice of ethnography serve as a basis for the prescriptive project of cultural critique? Or has critique run out of steam? How does anthropology relate history to human possibilities? What happens to the separation of cultural and biological anthropology at a time when the nature/culture dichotomy is constantly called into question? Working through these and many other questions on the basis of both ethnographic and more theoretical texts will enable students to rethink the role of anthropology in the twenty-first century—as a discipline that has always been responsive to the historical moment while aiming at knowledge of the human, tout court.