The ways in which people order their lives and understand themselves
as individuals who belong to communities is at the heart of social and
cultural anthropology.  As the world changes, through mass movements
of people and innovations in communication and technology, so do
people’s strategies for making their way in it. Anthropologists
understand human strategies through ethnographic field research.  We
spend extended periods of time with people whose lives we hope to
understand. As we read the ethnographic texts that tell about a
society’s way of living, we will be guided by two kinds of questions:
the first has to do with the external and internal forces
that shape individuals and societies; the second has to do with the
processes by which anthropologists understand the societies in which
they work.

Requirements include:  three short fieldwork projects (in and around
Bloomington), class participation, a midterm examination, and a final
take-home essay examination.