The Background of Contemporary Anthropology (SA0092)

? Credit Points : 20 ? SCQF Level : 10 ? Acronym : SPS-3-SABCA

One day in a bookshop in 1844, a 16-year old Iroquois bumped into a young lawyer. There began the friendship which led to anthropology as we know it. The former went on to pen the surrender document which ended the American Civil War. The latter wrote a big book about kinship, and gave a copy to the Liberal MP who invented ‘bank holidays’. They all had one kind of anthropology. The other kind began with a young physicist wrote his thesis on the colour of water and then went off to ask Inuit how they perceived it. He gave us ‘culture’ and took away ‘society’. He saw the particular, where others aimed for the general. Why do we call ourselves ‘social’ instead of ‘cultural anthropologists’? Why did Mrs Darwin offer us £500 if we would call ourselves ‘ethnologists’ instead? Why do anthropologists read seminar ‘papers’ word-for-word, whereas archaeologists, linguists, etc. don’t? If you want to know, then do this course. The basic text is History and Theory in Anthropology, but the course will go beyond that. The goal is to learn the real history behind the ‘history of anthropology’: events, personalities, big ideas.