Anthropologists want to know what makes us human. This unit introduces you to the unique perspective on human experience in cultural anthropology. Anthropologists argue that each individual is incomplete without the input of the shared patterns acquired from one's community. In this class you will learn how anthropologists define the concept of culture, how they use cultural relativism, and how they conduct research through cultural immersion and participatory fieldwork. You will examine several cases that demonstrate the human capacity for cultural diversity, and will understand several of the core topics that anthropologists investigate to capture a society's worldview and way of life.

As humans, culture completes us, but we also create culture through our words and deeds. Social and cultural anthropologists are engaged in both cultural description and cultural criticism: their work contributes to understanding the world and changing it. Anthropologists challenge many dominant beliefs about how the world works. In this class, you will be introduced to the unique perspective of cultural anthropology on human experience through a study of how anthropologists have contributed to debates on contemporary issues of global importance. You will learn how anthropological understandings of culture and society help us to rethink the way we live and the world we inhabit.

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.

This unit explores anthropological approaches to genders, gender relations and sexualities in different cultural settings across the world. Students will gain insights into ethnographically informed analysis of local
and global practices and ideas that reproduce, but can also challenge, dominant views of genders and forms of sexuality, and how such views are implicated in structures of inequality that fundamentally shape people's everyday lives and experiences.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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, including Clifford Geertz and Benedict Anderson. This unit will examine Southeast Asia in historical and contemporary context, and draw on ethnographies dealing with issues such as nationalism, ethnic minorities and the nation state, gender and modernity, drugs and development, and the rural-urban divide.

The unit uses an anthropological lens to examine how Indigenous Australians have long engaged with a diversity of non-Indigenous practices, ideas and values as they continue to articulate distinct Indigenous lives. It investigates ethnographically changing Indigenous lifeworlds since colonisation with a focus on state policy and rights politics.

In this unit we explore how to view films as anthropologists. We examine changing strategies of ethnographic filming and the increasing role people play in filming and representing their own lives. Issues include the richness of the visual, the subjectivity of the filmmaker, ethnographic observation and fiction, and the politics of representation.

The body as a site of culture has been of interest to anthropologists from the inception of the discipline. This unit focuses on anthropological approaches to and ethnographic explorations of the body. The key question will be to explore different theories that attempt to explain the relationship between the body and society. We will study important theoretical approaches including Marx, Mauss, Bourdieu and Foucault. Along with each theorists' primary work(s) on the body, we will read associated ethnographic texts, to understand how anthropologist base ethnographies on social theory.

This course approaches the study of Latin American societies through an interdisciplinary approach to studying indigenous movements. These movements have been pivotal actors in the shaping of contemporary conceptions of democracy, citizenship and statecraft in the continent, and have also drawn attention globally. Students will gain 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.

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'.

This unit is designed for third year students to undertake a project that allows them to work with one of the University's industry and community partners. Students will work in teams on a real-world problem provided by the partner. This experience will allow students to apply their academic skills and disciplinary knowledge to a real-world issue in an authentic and meaningful way.