AP/ANTH 1120 6.00 Making Sense of a Changing World: Anthropology Today
Course Offering Fall/Winter 2025-26:
This course will explore how Anthropology approaches social, economic, political, and belief systems, and survey contemporary issues of selected peoples and cultures by considering several real-world cases.
The aim of this course is to convey an understanding of how anthropology can help us understand the human condition, and thereby assist us in coming to terms with pressing sociocultural issues that are of great public interest in the twenty-first century. As such, we will attempt to gain some insight into several questions, such as:
- What are the causes of economic, political, and gender inequality?
- Are humans inherently violent or peaceful?
- How do we make a living?
- What is the nature of belief?
- How is power distributed within society in different times and places?
- What is cultural difference and how do we make sense of it?
- What are the forms of collective identity and how do they condition behaviour?
- Finally, in attempting to answer these and other questions, we will ask: How do anthropologists come to know the things that they do, and what are the contributions and limits of their knowledge?
Course Director (Winter 2026): D. Winland - winland@yorku.ca
In this course, we will use the lens of anthropology to examine a variety of contemporary questions and problems. We will explore these through active engagement, discussion, and debates while learning about the academic discipline of anthropology. Through each of the four modules in the course, we will challenge how we think about the world and about the different ways in which people live in and make sense of their worlds. In particular, the course will allow you to develop a critical sensibility for issues of inequality and injustice and gain insights into how people in different social and cultural contexts know, reproduce, change and represent themselves and the world around them.