Short Course Description
The seminar will survey the origins of anthropological thinking and its influence on theory in the humanities. We will examine how anthropology set itself to deal with the nature of man, construing the ?native? and the ?primitive?. Reading classics in anthropology we will discuss the debates on the relation between environment, kinship and symbolic structures. 2 main traditions in anthropology will be in focus, the French and the British. We will compare the British approach of Malinowski and Radcliff-Brown and their students, first and foremost, Evans-Prichard and Mary Douglas, to the approach of French scholars, beginning with Durkheim and Moss and ending with Levi-Strauss and Bourdieu. The seminar will hopefully enable us to ask how anthropology can help the historian in formulating research questions.
Background requirement:
Evans-Prichard, The Nuer
Full Syllabus
