"Culture, Society & People": Anthropology 104 (GenEd DGSB) Fall 2022
Students will live together in Emerson Hall in the Southwest residential area.
Read what Fall 2022 instructor Meredith Degyansky has to say about the course:
What is "culture"? What role does culture play in creating the lived conditions we find ourselves in, and how do these lived conditions impact the way we see, do, be, feel, and know the world? How might we negotiate and/or transform these conditions? Anthropology equips us with tools that can provide great insight into these fundamental questions and can help us to make sense of the broader human condition.
We will survey mixed media; film, audio pieces, performance artwork, readings both creative and scholarly, and more to employ anthropological concepts and knowledge to explore how culture is imagined and practiced. In an effort to embody what it means to be an anthropologist, we will approach our questions, content, and assignments using a research method called "ethnography". This method often requires getting out of the classroom or doing homework in unexpected places, spending less time in front of a laptop and more time out in the field, building sensory awareness of the acts of seeing, listening, being with, and documenting.
We will touch on a variety of content including but not limited to: cultural difference, power and inequality, identities and subjectivity, climate change, and alternative futures. Activities and assignments will be collaborative and creative in an effort to understand the worlds we are in and the worlds we might imagine otherwise.