Anthropology: Studying Human Diversity

This subject has the following teaching availabilities in 2008:

For the purposes of considering request for Reasonable Adjustments under the Disability Standards for Education (Cwth 2005), and Student Support and Engagement Policy, academic requirements for this subject are articulated in the Subject Overview, Learning Outcomes, Assessment and Generic Skills sections of this entry.

It is University policy to take all reasonable steps to minimise the impact of disability upon academic study, and reasonable adjustments will be made to enhance a student's participation in the University's programs. Students who feel their disability may impact on meeting the requirements of this subject are encouraged to discuss this matter with a Faculty Student Adviser and Student Equity and Disability Support: http://services.unimelb.edu.au/disability

Anthropology explores the different ways people live their lives. In this subject, an introduction to foundational knowledge in the discipline, students will be exposed to a variety of social and cultural forms around the world and the methods and theories developed to understand them as diverse expressions of a shared human condition. Topical issues that will be encountered include how different people around the world experience and react to pleasure, suffering and death; use ritual, religion and magic to understand and change their worlds; organise their sexual and family lives and their friendship networks; create and maintain their identities: individual, gendered, ethnic and youth sub-cultural; and maintain and resist the relations of power in which they are all enmeshed. On completion students; will have developed a foundational knowledge of the discipline of anthropology. They will also have developed an appreciation of both anthropology's distinctiveness and its complementarity with other social science disciplines such as sociology, criminology, geography, political science, history, philosophy and gender studies. Finally, and most importantly, they will, through cross cultural comparison, understand the peculiarity of their own taken-for-granted ways of being.

This subject potentially can be taken as a breadth subject component for the following courses:

• Bachelor of Biomedicine
• Bachelor of Commerce
• Bachelor of Environments
• Bachelor of Music
• Bachelor of Science
• Bachelor of Engineering

You should visit learn more about breadth subjects and read the breadth requirements for your degree, and should discuss your choice with your student adviser, before deciding on your subjects.

• have practice in conducting research, speaking and writing clearly and reading carefully;

• have experience of methods of critical inquiry and argument leading to improved analytical skills;

• have acquired awareness of issues relating to cross-cultural communication.

• have practice working cooperatively in small groups.

Students who have completed 121-107 Social Order Social Change or 121-107 Consuming Culture and Society are not eligible to enrol in this subject.