Outline

Overview

Anthropologists want to know what makes us human. This unit introduces you to the unique perspective on human experience in cultural anthropology. Anthropologists argue that each individual is incomplete without the input of the shared patterns acquired from one's community. In this class you will learn how anthropologists define the concept of culture, how they use cultural relativism, and how they conduct research through cultural immersion and participatory fieldwork. You will examine several cases that demonstrate the human capacity for cultural diversity, and will understand several of the core topics that anthropologists investigate to capture a society's worldview and way of life.

Unit details and rules

Academic unit	Anthropology
Credit points	6
Prerequisites ?	None
Corequisites ?	None
Prohibitions ?	ANTH1003
Assumed knowledge ?	None
Available to study abroad and exchange students	Yes

Teaching staff

Coordinator	Robbie Peters, robbie.peters@sydney.edu.au
Lecturer(s)	Ryan Schram, ryan.schram@sydney.edu.au
	Robbie Peters, robbie.peters@sydney.edu.au
	Emma Young, emma.young@sydney.edu.au
	Anjalee Cohen, anjalee.cohen@sydney.edu.au
Tutor(s)	Sophie Chao, sophie.chao@sydney.edu.au
	Dominic Sidoti, dominic.sidoti@sydney.edu.au
	Paul-David Lutz, paul-david.lutz@sydney.edu.au
	Nayeli Torres-Montenegro, nayeli.torres-montenegro@sydney.edu.au
	Jay Malouf-Grice, jay.malouf-grice@sydney.edu.au

Type	Description	Weight	Due	Length
Tutorial quiz	Short answer questions and essay 4 short answer questions and 1 x 800 word essay	25%	Formal exam period Due date: 18 Jun 2021 at 00:00	1,000 words
Outcomes assessed:
Tutorial quiz	Short answer quiz Short answer revision test based on topics in module 1	15%	Week 04 Due date: 26 Mar 2021 at 00:00	1 hr
Outcomes assessed:
Assignment	First short essay Short essay based on topics in module 2	25%	Week 08 Due date: 30 Apr 2021 at 00:00	1,000 words
Outcomes assessed:
Assignment	Second short essay Short essay based on topics in module 3	25%	Week 11 Due date: 21 May 2021 at 00:00	1,000 words
Outcomes assessed:
Participation	Class participation and preparation Participation for reading responses, class discussion and lectures	10%	Weekly	500 words
Outcomes assessed:

Assessment summary

Detailed information for each assessment can be found on Canvas.

Assessment criteria

The University awards common result grades, set out in the Coursework Policy 2014 (Schedule 1).

As a general guide, a High distinction indicates work of an exceptional standard, a Distinction a very high standard, a credit a good standard, and a pass an acceptable standard.

Result name	Mark range	Description
High distinction	85 - 100
Distinction	75 - 84
Credit	65 - 74
Pass	50 - 64
Fail	0 - 49	When you don’t meet the learning outcomes of the unit to a satisfactory standard.

For more information see guide to grades.

Late submission

In accordance with University policy, these penalties apply when written work is submitted after 11:59pm on the due date:

Deduction of 5% of the maximum mark for each calendar day after the due date.
After ten calendar days late, a mark of zero will be awarded.

Academic integrity

The Current Student website provides information on academic integrity and the resources available to all students. The University expects students and staff to act ethically and honestly and will treat all allegations of academic integrity breaches seriously.

We use similarity detection software to detect potential instances of plagiarism or other forms of academic integrity breach. If such matches indicate evidence of plagiarism or other forms of academic integrity breaches, your teacher is required to report your work for further investigation.

Use of generative artificial intelligence (AI) and automated writing tools

You may only use generative AI and automated writing tools in assessment tasks if you are permitted to by your unit coordinator. If you do use these tools, you must acknowledge this in your work, either in a footnote or an acknowledgement section. The assessment instructions or unit outline will give guidance of the types of tools that are permitted and how the tools should be used.

Your final submitted work must be your own, original work. You must acknowledge any use of generative AI tools that have been used in the assessment, and any material that forms part of your submission must be appropriately referenced. For guidance on how to acknowledge the use of AI, please refer to the AI in Education Canvas site.

The unapproved use of these tools or unacknowledged use will be considered a breach of the Academic Integrity Policy and penalties may apply.

Studiosity is permitted unless otherwise indicated by the unit coordinator. The use of this service must be acknowledged in your submission as detailed on the Learning Hub’s Canvas page.

Outside assessment tasks, generative AI tools may be used to support your learning. The AI in Education Canvas site contains a number of productive ways that students are using AI to improve their learning.

Learning support

Simple extensions

If you encounter a problem submitting your work on time, you may be able to apply for an extension of five calendar days through a simple extension.  The application process will be different depending on the type of assessment and extensions cannot be granted for some assessment types like exams.

Special consideration

If exceptional circumstances mean you can’t complete an assessment, you need consideration for a longer period of time, or if you have essential commitments which impact your performance in an assessment, you may be eligible for special consideration or special arrangements.

Special consideration applications will not be affected by a simple extension application.

Using AI responsibly

Co-created with students, AI in Education includes lots of helpful examples of how students use generative AI tools to support their learning. It explains how generative AI works, the different tools available and how to use them responsibly and productively.

Weekly schedule

WK	Topic	Learning activity
Week 01	INTRODUCTION: What is anthropology?	Lecture and tutorial (3 hr)
Week 02	MODULE 1 Culture and communication: systems of symbols and classification	Lecture and tutorial (3 hr)
Week 03	MODULE 1 Culture and communication: food, relationships and kinds of people	Lecture and tutorial (3 hr)
Week 04	MODULE 1 Culture and communication: symbolic transformations, switching categories	Lecture and tutorial (3 hr)
Week 05	MODULE 2 Livelihoods: land and food	Lecture and tutorial (3 hr)
Week 06	MODULE 2 Livelihoods: work and welfare	Lecture and tutorial (3 hr)
Week 07	MODULE 2 Livelihoods: aid and development	Lecture and tutorial (3 hr)
Week 08	MODULE 3 Health and illness: the social construction of illness	Lecture and tutorial (3 hr)
Week 09	MODULE 3 Health and illness: mental health and culture	Lecture and tutorial (3 hr)
Week 10	MODULE 3 Health and Illness: women's health and medicalisation	Lecture and tutorial (3 hr)
Week 11	MODULE 4 Observer and observed: Anthropologists are professional strangers—The method of "fieldwork"	Lecture and tutorial (3 hr)
Week 12	MODULE 4 Observer and observed: anthropologists are studying people	Lecture and tutorial (3 hr)
Week 13	MODULE 4 Observer and observed: Who should control ethnographic knowledge?	Lecture and tutorial (3 hr)

Attendance and class requirements

Attendance: According to Faculty Board Resolutions, students in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences are expected to attend 90% of their classes. If you attend less than 50% of classes, regardless of the reasons, you may be referred to the Examiner’s Board. The Examiner’s Board will decide whether you should pass or fail the unit of study if your attendance falls below this threshold.
Lecture recording: Most lectures (in recording-equipped venues) will be recorded and may be made available to students on the LMS. However, you should not rely on lecture recording to substitute your classroom learning experience.
Preparation: Students should commit to spend approximately three hours’ preparation time (reading, studying, homework, essays, etc.) for every hour of scheduled instruction.

Study commitment

Typically, there is a minimum expectation of 1.5-2 hours of student effort per week per credit point for units of study offered over a full semester. For a 6 credit point unit, this equates to roughly 120-150 hours of student effort in total.

Required readings

Introduction: what is anthropology?

No readings

MODULE 1: CULTURE AND COMMUNICATION

Systems of symbols and classification

Eriksen, Thomas Hylland, 2015. “Language and Cognition.” In Small Places, Large Issues: An Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology, pp. 286-307. Pluto Press.

Supplementary reading:

Douglas, Mary, 1999. “Preface.” In Implicit Meanings: Selected Essays in Anthropology, pp. vii-x. Routledge.

Food, relationships and kinds of people

Meigs, Anna, 1988. “Food as a Cultural Construction.” Food and Foodways 2(1): 341-357.

Supplementary reading

Meigs, Anna, 1979. “A Papuan Perspective on Pollution.” Man 13: 304-18.

Symbolic transformations, switching categories

Vialle, Noelle, 1994. “Flaying the Animal” and “The Shedding of Blood.” In Animal to Edible, pp. 33-52 and pp. 73-93. Cambridge University Press.

Assessment

Short answer revision test on basic concepts, due 5pm, Friday 26 March = 15%

MODULE 2: LIVELIHOODS

Land and food

Turner, T. 1997. ‘The Kayapo Resistance’, in J. Spradley and McCurdy, D., Confirmity and Conflict: readings in cultural anthropology (Ninth edition). Longman. Pp. 365-82.

Supplementary reading:

Sen, A. 1999. Development as Freedom (chapter 7), Pp. 160-88
Phillips, K 2018, An Ethnography of Hunger: Politics, subsistence, and the unpredictable grace of the sun. Indiana University Press, Pp. 84-105
Taussig. M. 1980. The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America. University of North Carolina Press. Pp. 83-92
White, M. 2018. Freedom Farmers: Agricultural resistance and the black freedom movement. Indiana University Press, Pp. 28-62

Work and Welfare

Prentice, R. 2016. Thiefing a Chance: factory work, illicit labor, and neoliberal subjectivities in Trinidad. University Press of Colorado, Pp. 87-109
Ferguson. J. 2015. Give a Man a Fish: reflections on the new politics of distribution. Duke University Press. Pp. 89-117

Supplementary reading:

Bourgois, P. 1995. ‘From Jibaro to crack dealer: confronting the restructuring of capitalism in El Bario’, in J. Schneider and Rapp, R., Articulating Hidden Histories: exploring the influence of Eric R. Wolf

Aid and development

Ferguson, J. 1993. ‘The anti-politics machine’, The Ecologist, 24 (5): 176-81

Supplementary reading:

Davidson, J. 2010. ‘Cultivating knowledge: Development, dissemblance, and discursive contradictions among the Diola of Guinea-Bissau’, American Ethnologist, 37(2): 212-26.
Scott, J. 1998. Seeing Like a State: how certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. Yale University Press. Pp. 1-8.

Assessment

First short essay, 1,000 words, due 5pm Friday, 30 April = 25%

Using concepts and course readings from weeks 5-7, discuss how poor people deal with the disruptive effects of neoliberal capitalism through what James Ferguson (2015: 94) calls ‘survivalist improvisation’.

MODULE 3: HEALTH AND ILNESS

The social construction of illness

Waxler, Nancy. E. 2010. ‘Learning to be a Leper: A Case Study in the Social Construction of Illness’. In P.J. Brown and R. Barrett (Eds.), Understanding and Applying Medical Anthropology. New York: McGrawHill Higher Education.

Supplementary reading:

Conrad, Peter. and K. Barker. 2010. ‘The social construction of illness: Key insights and policy implications’. Journal of Health and Social Behaviour. 51:67-79.

Mental health and culture

Obeyeskere, Gannath. 1985. ‘Depression, Buddhism, and the Work of Culture in Sri Lanka’. In A. Kleinman and B. Good (eds) Culture and Depression: Studies in the Anthropology and Cross-Cultural Psychiatry of Affect and Disorder. California: University of California Press. Pp. l34-l52.

Supplementary reading:

Good, Bryon. 1997. “Studying mental illness in context; local, global, or universal?” Ethos 25(2): 230-248.
Waxler, Nancy. 1974. Culture and Mental Illness: A Social Labeling Perspective. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 159:379-395.

Women’s health and medicalisation

Davis-Floyd, E. 1994. The Rituals of American Hospital Birth. In David McCurdy (ed) Conformity and Conflict: Readings in Cultural Anthropology, 8th Edition. New York: Harper Collins. Pp.323-340.

Supplementary reading:

Martin, Emily. 1991. The Egg and the Sperm: How Science has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles. Signs 16 (3). Pp. 485-501.
Dykes, F. 2005. ‘Supply’ and ‘demand’: breastfeeding as labour. Social Science and Medicine. Pp.2283-2293.

Assessment

Second short essay, 1,000 words, due 5pm Friday, 21 May = 25%

MODULE 4: OBSERVER AND OBSERVED

Anthropologists are professional strangers—The method of "fieldwork"

Eriksen, Thomas Hylland. 2015. “Fieldwork and Ethnography.” In Small Places, Large Issues: An Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology, 32–51. London: Pluto Press.
Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1932. “Introduction: The Subject, Method, and Scope of This Inquiry.” In Argonauts of The Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea, 1–25. London: George Routledge and Sons, Ltd. http://archive.org/details/argonautsofthewe032976mbp.

Supplementary reading:

Gomberg-Muñoz, Ruth. 2010. “Willing to Work: Agency and Vulnerability in an Undocumented Immigrant Network.” American Anthropologist 112 (2): 295–307. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1433.2010.01227.x.

Anthropologists are people studying people

Bell, Kirsten. 2014. “Resisting Commensurability: Against Informed Consent as an Anthropological Virtue.” American Anthropologist 116 (3): 511–22. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.12122.
Pels, Peter. 1999. “Professions of Duplexity: A Prehistory of Ethical Codes in Anthropology.” Current Anthropology 40 (2): 101–36. https://doi.org/10.1086/200001.

Supplementary readings

Cronin-Furman, Kate, and Milli Lake. 2018. “Ethics Abroad: Fieldwork in Fragile and Violent Contexts.” PS: Political Science & Politics 51 (3): 607–14. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1049096518000379.
Katz, Jack. 2006. “Ethical Escape Routes for Underground Ethnographers.” American Ethnologist 33 (4): 499–506.

Who should control ethnographic knowledge?

Christen, Kimberly. 2006. “Tracking Properness: Repackaging Culture in a Remote Australian Town.” Cultural Anthropology 21 (3): 416–46. https://doi.org/10.1525/can.2006.21.3.416.
Geismar, Haidy. 2005. “Copyright in Context: Carvings, Carvers, and Commodities in Vanuatu.” American Ethnologist 32 (3): 437–59. https://doi.org/10.1525/ae.2005.32.3.437.

Assessment

Short answer test and essay, 1,000 words, due 5pm, Friday 18 June = 25%

Learning outcomes

Learning outcomes are what students know, understand and are able to do on completion of a unit of study. They are aligned with the University's graduate qualities and are assessed as part of the curriculum.

Outcomes
Graduate qualities

At the completion of this unit, you should be able to:

LO1. understand the aims and scope of cultural anthropology
LO2. demonstrate an appreciation of the ethical importance of understanding other cultures
LO3. demonstrate an understanding of participant observation as a fieldwork based research method
LO4. demonstrate an understanding of the symbolic foundations of social relationships
LO5. demonstrate critical reading skills
LO6. demonstrate skills reading empirically-based analyses of different cultures
LO7. use empirical accounts of different cultures to make arguments
LO8. demonstrate an understanding of social science concepts and how they are used and debated in making arguments
LO9. demonstrate an understanding of the background and key conceptual frameworks of the field of cultural anthropology
LO10. Demonstrate an understanding of the livelihoods that different peoples must pursue to survive

Graduate qualities

The graduate qualities are the qualities and skills that all University of Sydney graduates must demonstrate on successful completion of an award course. As a future Sydney graduate, the set of qualities have been designed to equip you for the contemporary world.

GQ1	Depth of disciplinary expertise Deep disciplinary expertise is the ability to integrate and rigorously apply knowledge, understanding and skills of a recognised discipline defined by scholarly activity, as well as familiarity with evolving practice of the discipline.
GQ2	Critical thinking and problem solving Critical thinking and problem solving are the questioning of ideas, evidence and assumptions in order to propose and evaluate hypotheses or alternative arguments before formulating a conclusion or a solution to an identified problem.
GQ3	Oral and written communication Effective communication, in both oral and written form, is the clear exchange of meaning in a manner that is appropriate to audience and context.
GQ4	Information and digital literacy Information and digital literacy is the ability to locate, interpret, evaluate, manage, adapt, integrate, create and convey information using appropriate resources, tools and strategies.
GQ5	Inventiveness Generating novel ideas and solutions.
GQ6	Cultural competence Cultural Competence is the ability to actively, ethically, respectfully, and successfully engage across and between cultures. In the Australian context, this includes and celebrates Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures, knowledge systems, and a mature understanding of contemporary issues.
GQ7	Interdisciplinary effectiveness Interdisciplinary effectiveness is the integration and synthesis of multiple viewpoints and practices, working effectively across disciplinary boundaries.
GQ8	Integrated professional, ethical, and personal identity An integrated professional, ethical and personal identity is understanding the interaction between one’s personal and professional selves in an ethical context.
GQ9	Influence Engaging others in a process, idea or vision.

Outcome map

Learning outcomes	Graduate qualities
Learning outcomes

Responding to student feedback

This section outlines changes made to this unit following staff and student reviews.

This unit has been completely redesigned based on student feedback, staff strengths and new trends in the discipline and teaching more generally.

Additional information

Complete, detailed information about the topics, weekly readings, lectures, tutorials, and assignments is presented on the class Canvas site. Students should consult this unit outline in conjunction with the Canvas site for full information on what we will be doing.

Disclaimer

The University reserves the right to amend units of study or no longer offer certain units, including where there are low enrolment numbers.

To help you understand common terms that we use at the University, we offer an online glossary.

Current students

Overview

Overview

Unit details and rules

Teaching staff

Assessment

Assessment

Assessment summary

Assessment criteria

Late submission

Academic integrity

Learning support

Learning support

Simple extensions

Special consideration

Using AI responsibly

Weekly schedule

Weekly schedule

Attendance and class requirements

Study commitment

Required readings

Learning outcomes

Learning outcomes

Graduate qualities

Outcome map

Responding to student feedback

Responding to student feedback

Additional information

Additional information

Disclaimer

On this page

Useful links

Media

Student links

About us

Connect

Current students

ANTH1001: Introduction to Anthropology

Semester 1, 2021 [Normal day] - Remote

Overview

Overview

Unit details and rules

Teaching staff

Assessment

Assessment

Assessment summary

Assessment criteria

Late submission

Academic integrity

Learning support

Learning support

Simple extensions

Special consideration

Using AI responsibly

Weekly schedule

Weekly schedule

Attendance and class requirements

Study commitment

Required readings

Learning outcomes

Learning outcomes

Graduate qualities

Outcome map

Responding to student feedback

Responding to student feedback

Additional information

Additional information

Disclaimer

On this page

Useful links

Media

Student links

About us

Connect