Syllabus | Introduction to Anthropology | Anthropology | MIT OpenCourseWare

Seminars: 2 sessions / week, 1.5 hours / session
There are no prerequisites for this course.
Through the comparative study of different cultures, anthropology explores fundamental questions about what it means to be human. It seeks to understand how culture both shapes societies, from the smallest island in the South Pacific to the largest Asian metropolis, and affects the way institutions work, from scientific laboratories to Christian megachurches. This course will provide a framework for analyzing diverse facets of human experience such as gender, ethnicity, language, politics, economics, and art.
Graeber, David, and David Wengrow. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021. ISBN: ‎9780374157357. [Preview with Google Books]
Students are expected to read approximately 40–50 pages a week as the basis for class discussion. Length of readings is indicated for each session/week. For more detail, see the Readings section.
Students will complete 4 commentary papers as well as 2 research papers. For more detail, see the Assignments section.
Your grade for class participation is not calculated by how much you speak, but rather how you participate in enabling a lively and useful discussion both inside and out of class. At times this means bouncing an idea off the group or bringing up something that’s puzzling you. At other times this involves asking one of your peers to elaborate more fully on a thought that they are sharing. And sometimes this entails sitting quietly and holding onto an idea that can best be entertained at a later point in the discussion.