Anthropology explores and explains cultural difference while affirming the unity of humankind. It provides accounts of cultural specificity that illuminate the world today. Lectures will address some examples of cultural difference from the present and the past. These examples will introduce modern Anthropology, the method of ethnography, and its related forms of social and cultural analysis.

Anthropology's long-term ethnographic method, within a specific cultural setting, allows for a particularly intimate understanding of people's experiences of the social worlds they inhabit. This unit shows the importance of this experiential intimacy for understanding some of the key issues associated with globalisation: the culturally diverse forms of global capitalism, the transnational communities emanating from global population movements, the transformations of colonial and post-colonial cultures, the rise of global movements and the corresponding transformation of Western nationalism.

Southeast Asia is a region of great geographic and cultural diversity, a meeting point for civilisational influences from India and China including the religions of Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism. It is also the laboratory for much anthropological inquiry, attracting the attention of prominent anthropologists and social scientists, like Geertz and Anderson. This unit will examine Southeast Asia in historical and contemporary context, and give grounded ethnographic illustration to such issues as nationalism, cities, migration, political violence, environment and agriculture.

Melanesia is both a distinctive culture area and, with over 1000 different languages, a site of intense and highly localised cultural variation. This unit will explore the nature of that variation around themes of power, status, gender, secrecy, cosmology and local organization. The unit also examines the impact of this diversity on modern projects of Christianity, State Formation and the Market Economy and the influence this has had on the wider anthropological literature on Modernity.

This unit introduces students to the diversity of cultural practice and worldviews of Aboriginal societies across Australia. It will in particular explore critically how Aboriginal people and practices have been understood, debated and represented in the discipline of anthropology since colonisation.

This is a unit on psychoanalytic anthropology. With the focus on the unconscious dimension of human cultural existence the unit critically examines the systematic topical, theoretical, ethnographic and historical aspects of this unique field of anthropological inquiry. All psychoanalytic conceptual frameworks are elucidated and assessed through ethno-psychoanalytic work done in different cultural life-worlds. Firmly grounded in detailed ethnographic evidence the unit provides a comprehensive phenomenological-existential validation of the discipline and its contribution to both anthropology and psychoanalysis.

Ethnographers from a range of disciplines have been studying Chinese society for decades. In this unit, we will read a selection of recent ethnographic works, focusing on those published within the last fifteen years. This unit will include specific case studies of major contemporary issues in China, to understand how ethnographers use different methods and theories to construct arguments.

This unit explores the social and cultural dimensions of gender and sexuality in non-western societies. The main focus is the body in two interrelated senses. Firstly, how the body is culturally constructed by giving aspects of gender and sexuality meanings that do not simply reflect biology. Secondly, how bodies are socially constructed, for example through ritual. The relations of the dimensions of the body to the articulation of power and social change are also considered.

The 1949 speech by US president, Harry Truman, declared his country's commitment to the 'development' of the Third World, and began what many consider to be development as an institutional approach to non-Western societies. Anthropology, well established in its study of non-Western societies, was able to offer a rich ethnographic insight into the developing world. Combining ethnographic detail with social science concepts, this unit covers topics such as food crisis, land, environment, cities, fair trade, migration, nation-state, NGOs, poverty and informal economy.

Medical anthropology is a comparative and ethnographic response to the global influence of biomedicine within diverse cultural worlds. This unit will examine major theoretical approaches, their respective critiques, and the methods that underpin them. Concepts such as 'health/illness', 'disease', 'well-being', 'life-death', and 'body/mind' will be located in a variety of cultural contexts and their implications for different approaches to diagnosis and treatment considered. The unit will include culturally located case studies of major contemporary health concerns, such as AIDS.

A comparative study of race and ethnic group relations. The unit will consider the history of ideas of 'race' and practices of racialising and their relationship to ethnicity. It will draw on studies from various areas including North America, the Caribbean, Japan and Australia.

Australian Aboriginal peoples have always engaged with the 'modern world' but Enlightenment ideas established a colonial context juxtaposing modernity with tradition. Indigenous difference was locked into past-oriented, static and small-scale traditions. The unit examines some key concepts of modernity, including progress, civility, change, tradition - and modernity itself - so as to shed light on Australian Indigenous people's experiences, past and present, as colonial subjects. The unit will explore Aboriginal engagement with, for instance, work, vehicles, the law, and the arts (painting, music etc) as practices through which Aboriginal people have sought 'alternative modernities'.

Anthropology's distinctive method, termed ethnography, requires the researcher's involvement as a 'participant observer' with the group of people being studied. This unit takes a practical approach to the study of ethnography, developing students' understanding of the foundational role of field research in the creation of new knowledge in the discipline. Topics covered include: history of the method; diversity of research topics and settings; research ethics, design, techniques, and analysis. Students will devise and report on their own project.

The body as a site of culture has been of interest to anthropologists from the inception of the discipline. This unit focuses on the theory and history of developments in anthropological approaches to the body through the study of key texts in a range of theoretical approaches, including Mauss, Marx, Bourdieu, phenomenology and post-structuralism. Each theoretical approach will be matched with classic and contemporary ethnographic readings.

Economic anthropology teaches that there are different kinds of economy, grounded in different forms of value (gift, commodity) and on different rationalities (kinship, chiefly, market). The nature of these differences is explored through ethnographic studies, as are the conflicts that arise from their articulation within a global system. Characterisations of economic practice are as corrupt, irrational, informal, black, profit as the work of the devil, money as bitter are treated as signs of such systemic conflict.

Where does nature stop and culture begin? This is why anthropologists study kinship. In this unit we will survey the development of this field from its origins to its contemporary form as a critical investigation of how culture shapes the way we think about personhood, relationships, sex, gender and the body. We will compare various types of kinship systems and discuss controversies over kinship - same-sex marriage, single-parent households, cloning, in-vitro fertilization, and alternative forms of family - from a cross-cultural perspective.

Space/place appears in anthropology as both a product of historically specific social practice and as an irreducible dimension of any social formation. This theoretical tension will be explored through examination of such themes as: the contradiction between the global as abstract space and the local as qualitatively distinct place; struggles over the definition and control of space; space/time as an aspect of any world; centre/periphery and inside/outside as pervasive tropes of social analysis.

This unit surveys the key thinkers, theories and ethnographic researches that have shaped the historical development of anthropological thought. The central focus is on the interrelationships and differences between the Continental, British and American thinkers and lineages set against the backdrop of general ideas that defined the Western world-views of the last two centuries. This historical trajectory is systematically referred to its much longer tradition of critical thought and coordinated with the topics and debates in contemporary anthropological discourses.

This Unit will examine various ways anthropologists have theorised religious belief and practice, and we will challenge these ideas by looking at the vast diversity of religious forms. Starting with the major theories of Durkheim, Weber and others, the Unit will focus on what anthropologists have identified as the key elements of religious forms cross-culturally. It will also look at debates around these ideas. Special emphasis will be put on the continuing salience of religious ideas and identities in modernity.

This unit examines the articulation of the self and the world as a totality through the comparative study of selected individual cosmologies. A key theme will be the dialectics of the infinite in human existence. This will enable an appreciation of human engagement with specifically Western cosmological theories grounded in astronomy astrophysics and mathematics.

This unit consolidates students' understanding of anthropology as a discipline through: 1) exploring key concepts of anthropological analysis and critique; 2) enhancing knowledge of the ethnographic method and its contemporary challenges; 3) strengthening research skills and experience in formulating a research project.

Ethnography as method is grounded in the 'participant observation' of social practice and the self-understanding of social actors in particular cultural contexts. Ethnography as analysis raises issues of representation and comparison. This unit explores these relationships in regionally and thematically specific debates.

Honours is an intensive year-long program of advanced study based around research. Honours is undertaken after successful completion of a Bachelor degree and where the overall mark is a minimum credit average (70%). Entry into Honours is selective and work at this level is challenging. Honours is available in most subjects areas taught in the Faculty, and which are listed under Tables A and B in the Handbook. Students will complete a thesis and coursework seminars throughout the year. For further information contact the Honours Coordinator in the department or consult the Handbook entry for the relevant subject area.

refer to ANTH4011

refer to ANTH4011

refer to ANTH4011

This course provides an introduction to Latin American politics through an interdisciplinary approach to studying indigenous movements, pivotal actors in the shaping of contemporary conceptions of democracy, citizenship and statecraft in the continent. Students will examine these social movements from anthropological, historical and political science perspectives. They will gain an insight into cultural diversity of Latin American societies and acquire analytical tools for studying and understanding a wide variety of topics associated with political structure and agency in the continent.