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.

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 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.

A majority of the world's population live in cities and anthropologists seek to understand urban life and culture. This unit focuses on ethnographic studies of urbanism around the world, including walled cities, slums, urban migrations, environmental transformations and other recent topics in anthropology. Lectures discuss ethnography as research method in urban environments.

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.

The unit examines how Indigenous Australians have long engaged with the 'modern world', despite dominant ideas that juxtapose Western modernity with Indigenous tradition/static past. The unit uses an anthropological lens to investigate changing Indigenous lifeworlds since colonisation with a focus on state policy and Indigenous rights politics.

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 examines the dynamic relationship between humans and the plants and animals that they eat. All humans need to eat if they are to survive, but human tastes are noticeably varied across different cultural, political, historical, and ecological settings. Furthermore, the contemporary world witnesses states of plenty, sufficiency, and scarcity simultaneously. Why are such different outcomes observed in different locales, and sometimes within the one locale? This Unit investigates these issues across a variety of cultural contexts.

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 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.

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.

Interdisciplinarity is a key skill in fostering agility in life and work. This unit provides learning experiences that build students' skills, knowledge and understanding of the application of their disciplinary background to interdisciplinary contexts. In this unit, students will work in teams and develop interdisciplinarity skills through problem-based learning projects responding to 'real world problems'.

The unit provides an advanced-level introduction to the classic and contemporary theoretical and ethnographic literature in political anthropology focusing on the study of power in research on nation-states. Some major themes explored include nationalism, racism, gender and sexuality, identity, work and exploitation, poverty and religion.

The unit provides students with a basis for the understanding of anthropology in the context of current Western philosophical and scientific thought. It particularly explores the work of Claude Levi-Strauss in the light of existential phenomenological and psychoanalytic critiques. The aim is to deepen the students' critical knowledge of anthropological theory and the importance of comparative understanding in relation to the practice of ethnography.

In this unit students conduct literature research and collect empirical material for their Honours thesis. They participate in a Thesis Writing workshop that introduces them to research and writing skills, time management, reading and note taking strategies, referencing, structuring various parts of a thesis, and editing and revising chapter text. Regular meetings with a supervisor approved by the Anthropology Honours Coordinator will guide student progress.

In this unit you complete and submit your substantial, independent research project in Anthropology. Regular meetings with a supervisor approved by the Anthropology Honours Coordinator will guide your progress. You will continue to submit drafts at agreed times, and develop your expertise in relevant research methods and analytical skills as well as in the subject matter of your specialist topic.