ANTH1002

Semester 2, 2026

Course description

This unit of study examines contemporary global issues from anthropological perspectives. Global crises affect all forms of life - both human and ‘more-than-human’ - in different and unequal ways. There are no one-size-fits-all solutions to humanity’s planetary future. The first step towards healing is to stay with the trouble, by listening to each other. Anthropologists are trained to listen so that they can disrupt takenfor-granted norms and imagine the future otherwise. Students will think with anthropological works that explore topics such as climate change, financial crisis, pandemic, and war. By doing so, we aim to explore how we can create a more just and kinder world together.

Teaching staff

Coordinator

Ryan Schram
ryan.schram@sydney.edu.au
Social Sciences Building, Room 410

Lecturer(s)

Assignments summary

Title Due date Points Weight Length Hurdle task
In-class concept and class policies quiz August 22 10 10% 10 multiple-choice questions (500 words equiv.)
In-class writing exercise: Explaining core concepts with ethnographic evidence September 18 100 15% 750 words
Essay 1: The essence of kinship October 16 100 15% 750 words
Essay 2: Advocacy anthropology November 20 100 25% 1000 words
In-class feedback exercise November 2 100 10% 500 words
Weekly writing assignments weekly 100 15% 10 x 100 words
Participation weekly 24 10%

Weekly schedule

Week Date Topic and reading(s)
1 August 4 What is anthropology and why should anyone care?
2 August 11 The concept of culture and the two anthropologies / Eriksen (2015b); Eriksen (2015a) / Pierpont (2004)
3 August 18 Culture is not biology / Baker (1998); King (2019) / Boas ([1931] 1940)
4 August 25 Culture, the natural environment, and utilitarian explanations / Århem (1989); Holtzman (2009) / Palmer (2020)
5 September 1 Gifts and commodities / West (2012) / Eriksen (2015c); Lyon (2020); Marx ([1867] 1972); Mauss ([1925] 1990)
6 September 8 Spheres of exchange / Reyes-Foster and Carter (2020) / Addo and Besnier (2008); Bohannan (1959); Bohannan (1955)
7 September 15 Global gifts / Cearns (2019) / Abranches (2014); Leinaweaver (2010)
8 September 22 Who counts as family?: Kinship as classification / Carsten (1995); Gilliland (2020) / Bouquet (1996); Kaberry (1937); Mariner (2019); Morgan (1871); Purdie et al. (2018); Schneider (1984); Wright (2020)
B September 29 Classes cancelled in honor of seasonal festivals
9 October 6 Kinship, Country and cosmology in Indigenous Australia / Graham (1999); Kearney, Bradley, and Brady (2021); Rose (1996); Rose (2013) / Durkheim ([1912] 2001); Kaberry (1938); Levi-Strauss (1963); Merlan (1982); Myers (1991)
10 October 13 Who is kin?: Translation and recognition in Australia / Povinelli (2002); Vincent (2017) / Cowlishaw (2012); Kelly and McConvell (2018); Burke (2011); Russell (2006); Sutton (2003)
11 October 20 Where anthropologists work / Rylko-Bauer, Singer, and Van Willigen (2006); Wilson, Babidge, and Hoffstaedter (2026) / Eriksen (2006); Gunn, Otto, and Smith (2020); Low and Merry (2010); MacClancy (2002); McIntyre (2007); Nolan (2003); Sunderland and Denny (2007); Tax (1975); Willigen (2002)
12 October 27 Ethnographic skills and professional practice / Bell (2011); Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw (2011) / Anderson (2009); Das (2015); Das (2007); Gupta (1995); Gupta (2012); Ho (2009); Ho (2005); Tett (2009); Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing author. (2011); Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (2015)
13 November 3 Anthropologists as activist-researchers and public intellectuals / Scheper-Hughes (1995); Tuck and Yang (2021) / Farmer (2001); Farmer (2004); Graeber (2012); Graeber (2004); Hale (2006); Mead (2016); Smith (2012); TallBear (2013); Todd (2016)

References

Abranches, Maria. 2014. “Remitting Wealth, Reciprocating Health? The “Travel” of the Land from Guinea-Bissau to Portugal.” American Ethnologist 41 (2): 261–75. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12074.
Addo, Ping-Ann, and Niko Besnier. 2008. “When Gifts Become Commodities: Pawnshops, Valuables, and Shame in Tonga and the Tongan Diaspora.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 14 (1): 39–59. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9655.2007.00477.x.
Anderson, Ken. 2009. “Ethnographic Research: A Key to Strategy.” Harvard Business Review 87 (3): 24–25.
Århem, Kaj. 1989. “Maasai Food Symbolism: The Cultural Connotations of Milk, Meat, and Blood in the Pastoral Maasai Diet.” Anthropos 84 (1): 1–23. https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Maasai-Food-Symbolism.-The-Cultural-Connotations-of-Arhem/e503a28f3c1ba7c63eddb0eb8957838fa0c9e10e#related-papers.
Baker, Lee D. 1998. “Rethinking Race at the Turn of the Century: W. E. B. Du Bois and Franz Boas.” In From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896-1954, 105–31. Berkeley: University of California Press. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/usyd/detail.action?docID=879033.
Bell, Genevieve. 2011. “Unpacking Cars: Doing Anthropology at INTEL.” http://hdl.handle.net/10088/22459.
Boas, Franz. (1931) 1940. “Race and Progress.” In Race, Language, and Culture, 3–17. New York: The Macmillan Company.
Bohannan, Paul. 1955. “Some Principles of Exchange and Investment Among the Tiv.” American Anthropologist, New Series, 57 (1): 60–70. https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1955.57.1.02a00080.
———. 1959. “The Impact of Money on an African Subsistence Economy.” The Journal of Economic History 19 (4): 491–503. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022050700085946.
Bouquet, Mary. 1996. “Family Trees and Their Affinities: The Visual Imperative of the Genealogical Diagram.” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 2 (1): 43–66. https://doi.org/10.2307/3034632.
Burke, Paul. 2011. “Towards an Ethnography of Anthropologyʹs Encounter with Modern Law.” In Law’s Anthropology: From Ethnography to Expert Testimony in Native Title, 1–34. ANU E Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt24hdxr.5.
Carsten, Janet. 1995. “The Substance of Kinship and the Heat of the Hearth: Feeding, Personhood, and Relatedness Among Malays in Pulau Langkawi.” American Ethnologist 22 (2): 223–41. https://doi.org/10.2307/646700.
Cearns, Jennifer. 2019. “The “Mula Ring”: Material Networks of Circulation Through the Cuban World.” The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 24 (4): 864–90. https://doi.org/10.1111/jlca.12439.
Cowlishaw, Gillian. 2012. “Culture and the Absurd: The Means and Meanings of Aboriginal Identity in the Time of Cultural Revivalism.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 18 (2): 397–417. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9655.2012.01749.x.
Das, Veena. 2007. Life and Words: Violence and the Descent Into the Ordinary. University of California Press.
———. 2015. Affliction: Health, Disease, Poverty. Fordham University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1287ft5.
Durkheim, Emile. (1912) 2001. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Translated by Carol Cosman. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Emerson, Robert M., Rachel I. Fretz, and Linda L. Shaw. 2011. “Introduction.” In Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes, Second Edition, 1–16. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Eriksen, Thomas Hylland. 2006. Engaging Anthropology: The Case for a Public Presence. 1. publ. Oxford: Berg.
———. 2015a. “A Brief History of Anthropology.” In Small Places, Large Issues: An Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology, 12–31. London: Pluto Press.
———. 2015b. “Anthropology: Comparison and Context.” In Small Places, Large Issues: An Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology, 1–11. London: Pluto Press.
———. 2015c. “Exchange and Consumption.” In Small Places, Large Issues: An Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology, 4th ed., 217–40. London: Pluto Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt183p184.16.
Farmer, Paul. 2001. Infections and Inequalities: The Modern Plagues. University of California Press.
———. 2004. Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor. University of California Press.
Gilliland, Mary Kay. 2020. “Family and Marriage.” In Perspectives: An Open Invitation to Cultural Anthropology, edited by Thomas McIlwraith, Nina Brown, and Laura T. de González, 182–203. Arlington, Va.: The American Anthropological Association. https://pressbooks.pub/perspectives/chapter/family-and-marriage/.
Graeber, David. 2004. Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-fragments-of-an-anarchist-anthropology.
———. 2012. Debt: The First 5000 Years. Penguin Books Limited.
Graham, Mary. 1999. “Some Thoughts about the Philosophical Underpinnings of Aboriginal Worldviews.” Worldviews: Global Religions, Culture, and Ecology 3 (2): 105–18. https://doi.org/10.1163/156853599X00090.
Gunn, Wendy, Ton Otto, and Rachel Charlotte Smith. 2020. Design Anthropology: Theory and Practice. Routledge.
Gupta, Akhil. 1995. “Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics, and the Imagined State.” American Ethnologist 22 (2): 375–402. https://doi.org/10.1525/ae.1995.22.2.02a00090.
———. 2012. Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India. A John Hope Franklin Center Book. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822394709.
Hale, Charles R. 2006. “Activist Research v. Cultural Critique: Indigenous Land Rights and the Contradictions of Politically Engaged Anthropology.” Cultural Anthropology 21 (1): 96–120. https://doi.org/10.1525/can.2006.21.1.96.
Ho, Karen. 2005. “Situating Global Capitalisms: A View from Wall Street Investment Banks.” Cultural Anthropology 20 (1): 68–96. https://doi.org/10.1525/can.2005.20.1.068.
———. 2009. Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street. Durham: Duke University Press.
Holtzman, Jon. 2009. “A Samburu Gastronomy.” In Uncertain Tastes: Memory, Ambivalence, and the Politics of Eating in Samburu, Northern Kenya, 94–121. University of California Press.
Kaberry, Phyllis M. 1937. “Subsections in the East and South Kimberley Tribes of North‐West Australia.” Oceania 7 (4): 436–58. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.1834-4461.1937.tb00397.x.
———. 1938. “Totemism in East and South Kimberley, North‐West Australia.” Oceania 8 (3): 265–88. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.1834-4461.1938.tb00422.x.
Kearney, Amanda, John Bradley, and Liam M. Brady. 2021. “Nalangkulurru, the Spirit Beings, and the Black-Nosed Python: Ontological Self-Determination and Yanyuwa Law in Northern Australia’s Gulf Country.” American Anthropologist 123 (1): 67–81. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13513.
Kelly, Piers, and Patrick McConvell. 2018. “Evolving Perspectives on Aboriginal Social Organisation: From Mutual Misrecognition to the Kinship Renaissance.” In Skin, Kin and Clan. Australia: ANU Press.
King, Charles. 2019. “The Anthropologists Who Upended the ‘Science’ of White Supremacy.” The Washington Post, August 2, 2019. https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/the-anthropologists-who-upended-the-science-of-white-supremacy/2019/08/01/da0575c6-a314-11e9-b732-41a79c2551bf_story.html.
Leinaweaver, Jessaca B. 2010. “Outsourcing Care: How Peruvian Migrants Meet Transnational Family Obligations.” Latin American Perspectives 37 (5): 67–87. https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X10380222.
Levi-Strauss, Claude. 1963. Totemism. Translated by Rodney Needham. Boston: Beacon Press.
Low, Setha M., and Sally Engle Merry. 2010. “Engaged Anthropology: Diversity and Dilemmas: An Introduction to Supplement 2.” Current Anthropology 51 (S2): S203–26. https://doi.org/10.1086/653837.
Lyon, Sarah. 2020. “Economics.” In Perspectives: An Open Invitation to Cultural Anthropology, edited by Nina Brown, Thomas McIlwraith, and Laura Tubelle de González. Arlington, Va.: The American Anthropological Association. https://pressbooks.pub/perspectives/chapter/economics/.
MacClancy, Jeremy. 2002. Exotic No More: Anthropology on the Front Lines. University of Chicago Press.
Mariner, Kathryn A. 2019. ““Who You Are in These Pieces of Paper”: Imagining Future Kinship Through Auto/Biographical Adoption Documents in the United States.” Cultural Anthropology 34 (4). https://doi.org/10.14506/ca34.4.03.
Marx, Karl. (1867) 1972. “Capital, Vol. 1.” In The Marx-Engels Reader, edited by Robert C. Tucker, 294–438. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
Mauss, Marcel. (1925) 1990. “Selections from Introduction, Chapters 1-2, and Conclusion.” In The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, translated by W. D. Halls, 1–14, 39–46, 78–83. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
McIntyre, Alice. 2007. Participatory Action Research. SAGE Publications.
Mead, Margaret. 2016. Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilisation. New York: William Morrow.
Merlan, Francesca. 1982. “A Mangarrayi Representational System: Environment and Cultural Symbolization in Northern Australia.” American Ethnologist 9 (1): 145–66. https://doi.org/10.1525/ae.1982.9.1.02a00090.
Morgan, Lewis H. 1871. Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity in the Human Family. Vol. 17. Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge. Washington, D.C.: The Smithsonian Institution.
Myers, Fred R. 1991. “Kinship: Models of the Pintupi Social Universe.” In Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self: Sentiment, Place, and Politics Among Western Desert Aborigines, 180–218. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Nolan, Riall W. 2003. Anthropology in Practice: Building a Career Outside the Academy. Lynne Rienner Publishers.
Palmer, Christian T. 2020. “Culture and Sustainability: Environmental Anthropology in the Anthropocene.” In Perspectives: An Open Invitation to Cultural Anthropology, edited by Thomas McIlwraith, Nina Brown, and Laura T. de González, 357–81. Arlington, Va.: The American Anthropological Association. https://pressbooks.pub/perspectives/chapter/culture-and-sustainability-environmental-anthropology-in-the-anthropocene/.
Pierpont, Claudia Roth. 2004. “The Measure of America.” The New Yorker, March, 48–63.
Povinelli, Elizabeth A. 2002. “Shamed States.” In The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism, 153–85. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.
Purdie, Shirley, Glenn Wightman, Peggy Patrick, Lena Nyadbi, Phyllis Thomas, Doris Fletcher, Goody Barrett, et al. 2018. Gija Plants and Animals: Aboriginal Flora and Fauna Knowledge from the East Kimberley, North Australia. Batchelor, N.T.: Batchelor Press.
Reyes-Foster, Beatriz M., and Shannon K. Carter, eds. 2020. “Milk-Sharing Practices.” In Sharing Milk: Intimacy, Materiality and Bio-Communities of Practice, 97–134. Bristol University Press. https://doi.org/10.46692/9781529202090.005.
Rose, Deborah Bird. 1996. “Caring for Country.” In Nourishing Terrains: Australian Aboriginal Views of Landscape and Wilderness, edited by Peter Larmour, 63–68. Australian Heritage Commission.
———. 2013. “Common Property Regimes in Aboriginal Australia: Totemism Revisited.” In The Governance of Common Property in the Pacific Region, edited by Peter Larmour, 127–44. ANU E Press.
Russell, Peter H. 2006. Recognising Aboriginal Title: The Mabo Case and Indigenous Resistance to English-Settler Colonialism. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press.
Rylko-Bauer, Barbara, Merrill Singer, and John Van Willigen. 2006. “Reclaiming Applied Anthropology: Its Past, Present, and Future.” American Anthropologist 108 (1): 178–90. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3804743.
Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 1995. “The Primacy of the Ethical: Propositions for a Militant Anthropology.” Current Anthropology 36 (3): 409–40. https://doi.org/10.1086/204378.
Schneider, David M. 1984. A Critique of the Study of Kinship. Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press.
Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. 2012. Decolonizing Methodologies. London: Zed Books.
Sunderland, Patricia L., and Rita Mary Denny. 2007. Doing Anthropology in Consumer Research. Walnut Creek (Calif.): Left Coast press.
Sutton, Peter. 2003. Native Title in Australia: An Ethnographic Perspective. 1st ed. Cambridge: University Press.
TallBear, Kim. 2013. Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/usyd/detail.action?docID=1362022.
Tax, Sol. 1975. “Action Anthropology.” Current Anthropology 16 (4): 514–17. https://doi.org/10.1086/201616.
Tett, Gillian. 2009. Fool’s Gold: How Unrestrained Greed Corrupted a Dream, Shattered Global Markets and Unleashed a Catastrophe. London: Little, Brown.
Todd, Zoe. 2016. “An Indigenous Feminist’s Take On The Ontological Turn: ‘Ontology’ Is Just Another Word For Colonialism.” Journal of Historical Sociology 29 (1): 4–22. https://doi.org/10.1111/johs.12124.
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt, author. 2011. Friction : An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400830596.
Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. 2021. “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” Tabula Rasa, no. 38 (June): 61–111. https://doi.org/10.25058/20112742.n38.04.
Vincent, Eve. 2017. “‘We Know Who We Are’: The Impact of Native Title on Local Identities.” In “Against Native Title”: Conflict and Creativity in Outback Australia, 89–106. Canberra, Australia: Aboriginal Studies Press.
West, Paige. 2012. “Village Coffee.” In From Modern Production to Imagined Primitive: The Social World of Coffee from Papua New Guinea, 101–29. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.
Willigen, John van. 2002. Applied Anthropology: An Introduction. Bloomsbury Publishing USA.
Wilson, Lee, Sally Babidge, and Gerhard Hoffstaedter. 2026. “Introduction.” In Anthropology as a Vocation: A Discipline for a Changing World. Brisbane: The University of Queensland. https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:5f634cc.
Wright, Andrea. 2020. “Making Kin from Gold: Dowry, Gender, and Indian Labor Migration to the Gulf.” Cultural Anthropology 35 (3): 435–61. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca35.3.04.