Anthropology: Studying Self and Other

Anthropology explores the different ways people live their lives. In this subject, an introduction to foundational knowledge in the discipline, you will be exposed to a variety of social and cultural forms around the world and the methods and theories developed to understand them as diverse expressions of a shared human condition. Topical issues that will be encountered include how different peoples around the world experience and react to pleasure, suffering and death; use ritual, religion and magic to understand and change their worlds; organise their sexual and family lives and their friendship networks; create and maintain their identities; and maintain and resist the relations of power in which they are all enmeshed. Comparative ethnographic examples will illustrate a range of disciplinary concerns in anthropological research ethics and practice, the dynamic interaction between processes of order and change in social life, and its effects on how people experience the different worlds they inhabit.