Grounding in fundamentals of anthropology and integration of other coursework in field. Consult Program Head. Material drawn from traditional nonwestern societies, medieval and early modern Europe, and colonial and contemporary North America. How people make sense of their worlds symbolically through myth, ritual, metaphor, and cosmology. The structure of symbols, the natural and social elements they draw on, their social use, and the messages they convey.
Students learn to record and analyze myth and ritual.
Readings drawn from world mythologies, central texts of Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, and classics of scientific thought. Analysis of medical practice as a cultural system, focusing on the human, as opposed to the biological, side of things. Also, examines how we and people in other cultures think of disease, health, body, and mind. Subject material describes how identity and difference are inescapably linked. Subject studies legal reasoning, types of law and legal systems, and relationship of law to social class and social change.