This is an introduction to cultural anthropology. This discipline was born as the study of a very distant “otherness” – other people, other tribes, other habits – but has now evolved into a critical knowledge of identity processes throughout the world. It questions the construction of identity/difference in a vast array of different social domains.

The course will give a brief overview of the main theoretical currents and objects of study. Its scope is to introduce the students to the fundamental categories of understanding developed within cultural anthropology.

The course also introduces the student to the methodology typical of anthropology, ethnography, and its epistemology.

Through the observation of different cultures anthropology underlines how human lives are constructed by material conditions, social relationships, different imaginary landscapes, historical contingencies and an imponderable personal agency.

Through texts and videos, the course will introduce the students to the main domains of interest in contemprary anthropology: social organization, gender and sexuality, power, violence, resources and exchange.

In the course, we will introduce some of the main anthropologists who worked in the XXth century and contributed to the development of the main interpretive paradigms in the discipline.

We shall also become familiar, through practice and discussion, with the methods of ethnographic enquiry. How to document practices and discourses, emotions, feelings and visions, trying to explicit the “emic perspective” – that is, the subjects’ point of view – and its interplay with larger social forces.