I have specifically designed this syllabus so that most of the material (readings, videos, podcasts) is legally available online and for free. Readings that do not contain a link are available for download in Resources.

Class day	Topic	Assigned sources
Monday January 27	Introductions + What is (Cultural) Anthropology?	Marks, Jonathan. 2017. Is Science Racist? Cambridge: Polity, chaps. 1-2.
Thursday January 30	Centuries in the making	Locke, John. 1690. “Of the State of Nature” In Second Treaty of Government. Watch this video on the differences between Hobbes’, Locke’s, and Rousseau’s theories.
Monday February 3	At the Origins: A Science of Race	Fluehr-Lobban, Carolyn. 2000. “Anténor Firmin: Haitian Pioneer of Anthropology.” American Anthropologist 102(3): 449-466. Watch Episode 1 of Race: The Power of an Illusion on Kanopy
Thursday February 6	Biology and the Theory of Evolution	Spencer, Herbert. 1876. “Society: An Organism.” Popular Science Monthly, May: 1-11. Watch this video on evolution through natural selection
Monday February 10	Social Evolutionism	Morgan, Lewis Henry. 1877. “Ethnical Periods” In Ancient Society. Tylor, Edward Burnett. 1871. “The Science of Culture” In Primitive Culture.
Thursday February 13	The Sociologists	Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. 1848. “Bourgeois and Proletarians” In The Communist Manifesto.  Marx, Karl. 1849. “What Are Wages and How Are They Determined?” In Wage Labor and Capital. Durkheim, Émile. 1982 [1895]. “What is a Social Fact” in The Rules of Sociological Method. New York: The Free Press, pp. 50-59.
Tuesday February 18	Boas Against Biological Racism	Boas, Franz. 1904. “Some Traits of Primitive Culture.” Journal of American Folklore 17(67): 243-254. Boas, Franz. 1912. “Changes in Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants.” American Anthropologist 14(3): 530-62. Baker, Lee D. 2021. “The Racist Anti-Racism of American Anthropology.” Transforming Anthropology 29: 127-142.
Thursday February 20	Boas, Historical Particularism and Cultural Relativism	Boas, Franz. 1896. “The Limitations of the Comparative Method of Anthropology.” Science 4(103): 901-908. Boas, Frank. 1920. “The Methods of Ethnology.” American Anthropologist 22(4): 311-321.
Monday February 24	IN-CLASS TEST
Thursday February 27	Malinowski, Fieldwork and Functionalism	Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1922. “The Subject, Method, and Scope of This Inquiry” In Argonauts of the Western Pacific.
Monday March 3	Radcliffe-Brown and Structural Functionalism	Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. 1935. “On the Concept of Function in Social Science.” American Anthropologist 37 (3): 394–402. Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. 1940. “On Social Structure.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 70(1): 1-12.
Thursday March 6	NO CLASS
Monday March 10	Ethnolinguistics	Sapir. Edward. 1929. “The Status of Linguistics as a Science.” Language 5(4): 207-214. Watch Lera Boroditsky’s TED Talk on how language shapes our thought.
Thursday March 13	Custom, Behavior and Personality	Benedict, Ruth. 1935. “The Science of Custom” In Patterns of Culture. Mead, Margaret. 1928. “Introduction” In Coming of Age in Samoa.
Monday March 17	Gift, Exchange and Reciprocity	Mauss, Marcel. 1966 [1925]. “Conclusions” In The Gift: Forms and functions of exchange in Archaic societies. London: Cohen and West Ltd, pp. 63-81.
Thursday March 20	Lévi-Strauss and French Structuralism	Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1963. “Structural Analysis” In Structural Anthropology. New York: Basic Books. Watch this video on structuralism.
Monday March 24	Symbolic and Interpretive Anthropology	Geertz, Clifford. 1973. “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture” In The Interpretation of Cultures. New York City: Basic Books.
Thursday March 27	IN-CLASS TEST
Monday March 31	NO CLASS
Thursday April 3	Development and World-System Theory	Frank, Andre Gunder. 1966. “The Development of Underdevelopment.” Monthly Review 18(4): 17-31. Bergesen, Albert. 2015. “World-System Theory After Andre Gunder Frank.” Journal of World-Systems Research 21(1): 147–161.
Monday April 7	Bourdieu: Habitus and Cultural Reproduction	Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. “Structure and the Habitus” In Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge University Press, pp. 72-95. Watch this video on Bourdieu’s theory of capital. Watch this video on Bourdieu’s habitus theory.
Thursday April 10	Anthropology in Decolonial Times	Asad, Talal. 1973. “Introduction” In Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter, edited by Talal Asad. Humanities Press, pp. 9-19. Listen to the Writ Large podcast on Edward Said’s Orientalism.
April 12 to 20	SPRING BREAK
Monday April 21	A Crisis in Representation	Marcus, George E., and Michael M. Fischer. 1986. “Introduction” In Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences. The University of Chicago Press, pp. 1-6. Clifford, James. 1986. “Introduction: Partial Truths” In Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, edited by James Clifford and George E. Marcus. University of California Press, pp. 1-19.
Thursday April 24	The Advent of Feminist Anthropology	Behar, Ruth. 1995. “Introduction: Out of Exile” In Women Writing Culture, edited by Ruth Behar and Deborah A. Gordon. University of California Press, pp. 1-29.
Monday April 28	Anthropology’s Problem with Time and Space	Gupta, Akhil, and James Ferguson. 1992. “Beyond “Culture”: Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference.” Cultural Anthropology 7(1): 6-23. Helms, Mary W. 1978. “Time, History, and the Future of Anthropology: Observations on Some Unresolved Issues.” Ethnohistory 25(1): 1–13.
Thursday May 1st	IN-CLASS TEST (30 minutes)
Monday May 5	From the Savage to the Suffering	Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 2003. “Anthropology and the Savage Slot: the Poetics and Politics of Otherness” In Global Transformations Anthropology and the Modern World. New York Palgrave Macmillan: pp. 7-28.  Robbins, Joel. 2013. “Beyond the suffering subject: toward an anthropology of the good.” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19(3): 447-462
Thursday May 8	Is Anthropology Really Done With Race?	Abu-Lughod, Lila. 1991. “Writing Against Culture” In Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present, edited by Richard G. Fox. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press.  Mullings, Leith. 2005. “Interrogating Racism: Toward an Antiracist Anthropology.” Annual Review of Anthropology 34(1): 667-693.
Monday May 12	Rethinking the Discipline and its Methodology	Jobson, Ryan Cecil. 2020. “The Case for Letting Anthropology Burn: Sociocultural Anthropology in 2019.” American Anthropologist 122: 259-271. Günel, Gökçe, and Chika Watanabe. 2020. “A manifesto for Patchwork Ethnography.” Society for Cultural Anthropology, 9 June 2020. [online]
Thursday May 15	Writing Workshop and Final Remarks