Many Faces of Culture, Contemporary Meanings and Uses

Catalog description

Focusing on a key anthropological understanding, the meaning of culture, we will proceed to critically explore the multifarious uses of this concept throughout the seminar. Examining the indiscriminate uses of the concept of culture across disciplines we will endeavor to concentrate on its multiple meanings exclusive to and beyond anthropological discourse. In our effort to analyze how the idea and meaning of culture have been appropriated by other disciplines, we will probe issues of gender and identity, philosophy, literature, politics, race, and ethnicity as well as politics and representation. These are a few of the suggested themes /topics that we will attempt to cover during the semester. Our task is to comprehend the changing meaning of culture, a cornerstone of anthropology, within and outside our discipline. How central is the idea of culture today to our discipline?