Cultural Diversity: A Global Perspective

Catalog description

ANTH 45N (Cultural Diversity: A Global Perspective) is designed to introduce students to the concepts and evidence used in understanding the cultural diversity of our planet. "Culture" can be defined as a socially transmitted system of shared conventions, beliefs, practices, and behavior. Cultural systems vary across time and space, and dynamic cultural processes are involved in how humans interact with each other, other organisms, and the environment. This class provides students with the tools to approach questions about the diversity of human cultures, how they vary across different societies, how different people experience and represent social worlds, why they change, and the importance of understanding such variability for the global challenges we face in an ever-changing world. Anthropology takes as its subject the entirety of the human experience, in all of its diversity through time and space. Anthropology thus provides a unique perspective for understanding our increasingly complex and diverse contemporary world. Specifically, ANTH 45N has three goals: 1) Introduce students to anthropological approaches for describing variability in systems of shared human thought, belief, and social practice. 2) Utilize anthropological concepts and evidence to evaluate factors that shape the diversity of cultural systems over time and space. 3) Provide students the opportunity to explore the dynamic interaction between contemporary cultural systems, histories of change, and the physical environment. ANTH 45N is designed to integrate two General Education Domain fields: the Social and Behavioral Sciences (GS) and the Humanities (GH). The course integrates different methods of inquiry and different forms of knowledge about the many factors that interact to influence patterns of convention, practice, and diverse ways of life. ANTH 45N enables students to develop competency for integrating knowledge across different domains and interpreting the human experience through multiple social, historical, and environmental perspectives. Students thus gain skills in evaluating their own values relative to the broad context of diverse ways for understanding the world. To achieve these educational objectives, ANTH 45N draws on multiple teaching formats and resources, including classroom lectures and discussions, readings from general textbooks and primary literature, critical analysis of ethnographic film, and online written materials and podcasts.