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As a science that incorporates many disciplines, including psychology, biology and genetics, politics, economics, and religion, anthropology probes human behavior from nearly every possible perspective.

This course gives you an opportunity to survey the full scope of the field of cultural anthropology. Professor Fischer examines the contributions of the profession’s most noted scholars, from founders and early popularizers Franz Boas, Bronislaw Malinowski, and Margaret Mead to more contemporary researchers, including Napoleon Chagnon, Marvin Harris, Marshall Sahlins, and Nancy Scheper-Hughes.

These lectures will immerse you in the world of the Trobriand Islanders of Melanesia,the Yanomamö of the Brazilian Amazon; the Dobe Ju/’hoansi, or !Kung Bushmen, of Botswana and Namibia; and other indigenous peoples. In addition, they offer a glimpse into the lives of cultural anthropologists themselves—the theories and methodologies they use and the experiences of fieldwork—living for extended periods of time within the cultures they study.

By the end of this course, you will appreciate how valuable an understanding of cultural anthropology is in a world of ever-increasing globalization, in which members of even the most remote cultures come into more frequent and more influential contact through international travel, migration, business, and the Internet.

“Dr. Fischer provides a very engaging discussion of various world cultures. I particularly appreciated the broad overview of anthropology at the beginning of the lectures as well as the discourse regarding the need to understand cultures within their own time and context, especially when they differ greatly from that which we are familiar with.”

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