SOCI 202

SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY
FALL 2015
Instructor: Baak Can
Course: Tue-Thu 13:00 - 14:15 ENG B18
Office Hours: Wed 16:00-17:00 or by appointment

Office: SOS 267

Email: [email protected]
Phone: +90 212 338 1046

Course description
Socio-cultural anthropology is a discipline that tries to understand the unity and diversity of
human thought and action across cultures, past and present. Sociocultural anthropologists use
various and competing analytics and methods of research and interpretation to study humankind.
This course is an introduction to the history, theory, methods, and subject matter of the field of
social and cultural anthropology. We will first explore the emergence of anthropology as a
distinct academic discipline in the late 19th century along with European and American expansion
over the colonized people around the world. It is within this context that sociocultural
anthropologists studied human diversity across cultures and the relationship between the
individual and the social or cultural. Thoughtout the semester we will thus be looking at
the politics and ethics of anthropological knowledge production, and how it changed over time.
We will also try to understand how the historical unfolding of key theoretical and methodological
debates in anthropology still inform anthropologists. The broader goal is to help you learn to read
dense theoretical and ethnographic texts, and to be able to grasp, compare, and critique authors'
basic premises and the potential consequences of their theories and methods, and then
apply/critique them in your own analyses.
Course Requirements
1. Attendance and Participation (10%): Each student is expected to come to class having
read the assigned readings and be able to discuss them.
2. Mid-term exam (40%)

3. Final exam (50%)

Course Schedule:
Week 1- Introduction
Sept 15
Introductions and goals of the course
Sept 17
What is anthropology?
Week 2 - Critical Anthropology: Portraits of White Men
Sept 22
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 1991. "Anthropology and the Savage Slot," in Troillot, Global
Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World. Santa Fe: SAR press. 7-28 (21
pp)
Basso, Keith. 1979. Portraits of the Whiteman. Foreward by Dell Hymes, (pp. ix-xvi),
Ch.s 1-2 (33 pp)
Sept 24 (no class)
Week 3 - Anthropological Precedents: Evolutionism and New Anthropological Methods at
the Turn of the 20th Century

Sept 29
Fabian, Johannes. 1983. "Time and the Emerging Other," Time and The Other: How
Anthropology Makes its Object. New York: Columbia University Press. (35 pp).
Optional: Lewis Henry Morgan. 1877. "Ancient Society" in High Points in
Anthropology. (23 pp.)
Oct 1
Malinowski, Bronislaw 1922. "Introduction: Subject, Method, and Scope of This
Enquiry" in his Argonauts of the Western Pacific. (25 pp).
Optional: Boas, Franz. 1896. "The Limitations of the Comparative Method of
Anthropology," Race, Language and Culture, also in High Points. (15 pp).
Weeks 4 - Boasian approaches and Historical Particularism (1st Decades of the 20th
Century)
Oct 6
Boas, Franz. 1932. "The Aims of Anthropological Research," in Race, Language and
Culture, 1948 (1932). (16pp.)
Boas, Franz. 1931. "Race and Progress," in Race, Language and Culture, 1948 (1931) (14
pp.)
Oct 8
Sapir, Edward. 1927. "The Unconscious Patterning of Behavior in Society," (15 pp.) In:
Edward Sapir: Selected Writings in Language, Culture, and Personality.
Week 5 - Durkheim's Science of Society and Religion (First Decades 20th Century)
Oct 13
Durkheim, Emile 1912. Elementary Forms of Religious Life,New York: the Free Press,
1995 (1912). Fields. pp. 1-18 (Intro.).

Oct 15
Durkheim, Emile 1912.Elementary Forms of Religious Life,New York: the Free Press,
1995 (1912). Fields translation pp. 418-448 (Conclusion)
Week 6 - The Anthropology of Exchange and Value (1920s)
Oct 20
Mauss, Marcel. 1925. The Gift. Foreward (by Mary Douglas), Introduction, ch.1 pp.1-23.
Oct 22
Malinowski, Bronislaw. (1922) The Essentials of Kula in Argonauts of the Western
Pacific.
Week 7 - Moral Economy
Oct. 27
Bourgois et al. (2014) The Moral Economy of Violence in the US Inner City. in Current
Anthropology, Vol. 55, No. 1 (February 2014), pp. 1-22.
Oct. 29 (No class)
Week 8 - Structure and Function: British Social Anthropology (1930s-40s)
Nov 3
Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. 1965[1952]. "On the Concept of Function in Social Science,"

In: Structure and Function in Primitive Society, Essays and Addresses. New York, Free
Press: 178-187.
Nov 5
Evans-Pritchard, E. E. 1940. Time and Space. In: The Nuer, a Description of the Modes
of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People. Oxford, Clarendon Press: 94110.
Evans-Pritchard, E.E. 1970 [1940]. "The Nuer of the Southern Sudan," In: African
Political Systems, ed. Myer Fortes and E.E. Evans-Pritchard, Oxford: Oxford UP. (24
pp.).
Week 9 - Primary Categories? Structuralist Approaches (1960s)
Nov 10
Levi-Strauss, Claude. 1966. "The Structural Study of Myth," in Structural Anthropology,
(pp. 206-231).
Nov 12
Lvi-Strauss, Claude. 1969. "The Principles of Kinship" (Ch.29). In: The Elementary
Structures of Kinship. Boston, Beacon Press.
**** Nov 17 Mid-term ****
Week 10- The Symbolic Turn: Symbols, Meaning and Power (1960s and 70s)
Nov 19 Thurs
Turner, Victor. 1967. "Symbols in Ndembu Ritual," from The Forest of Symbols: Aspects
of Ndembu Ritual, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, (30 pp).

Week 11 - The Interpretive Turn

Nov 24
Geertz, Clifford. 1973. "Deep Play: Notes on a Balinese Cockfight" in The Interpretation
of Cultures.
Optional: Recommended: Roseberry, William. 1989. Balinese Cockfights and the
Seduction of Anthropology. In Anthropologies and Histories. New Brunswick and
London: Rutgers University Press. Pp: 17-29
Nov 26
Geertz, Clifford. 1973. Thick Description. In The Interpretation of Cultures. New York:
Basic Books. Pp: 3-30.
Week 12 - Political Economies (1980s)
Dec1, 3

Marx, Karl. 1849. "Wage Labour and Capital," in Robert Tucker, Ed. The Marx-Engels
Reader. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1978. (14 pp.)
Wolf, Eric. 1982. Introduction and "the Movement of Commodities" in Europe and the
People Without History, Berkeley: University of California Press. (60 pp).
Optional: Sidney Mintz. 1988. Sweetness and Power. The Place of Sugar in Modern
History. Chapter 1: Food, Sociality and Sugar, Chapter 4: Power

Week 13 - Rethinking Gender and Sexuality (1980s-1990s)

Dec 8
Ortner, Sherry B. 1974. Is female to male as nature is to culture? In M. Z. Rosaldo and L.
Lamphere (eds), Woman, culture, and society. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
pp. 68-87.

Dec 10
Das, Veena. 2007. The Act of Witnessing Violence, Gender, and Subjectivity. In: Life
and Words: violence and the descent into the ordinary. University of California Press. Pp.
59-78.
Week 14 Suffering Slot?
Dec 15
Farmer, Paul. 2009. On Suffering and Structural Violence: A View from Below.
Race/Ethnicity: Multidisciplinary Global Contexts, Vol. 3, No. 1, Race and the Global
Politics of Health Inequity. pp. 11-28.
Dec 17
Garcia, Angela. 2008. The Elegiac Addict: History, Chronicity and the Melancholic
Subject. Cultural Anthropology, 23(4):718-745, 2008.
Week 15
Dec 22
Robbins, J. (2013), Beyond the suffering subject: toward an anthropology of the good.
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 19: 447462.
Dec 25
Wrap up and review